"It surprised me that several conservative and/or right-wing books are in the top 10"

I've noticed that a lot over the years. It seems the mainstream right does buy books and read, so they're not illiterate like the left often paints them. On the other hand, by and large they read stuff that is inflammatory, confirms (in spades) their own prejudices, or both.

I think this is probably true of the mainstream left as well, but their bookbuying habits do not seem to affect the bestseller lists as much.

Independent of his politics, there's something about Al Franken that kind of makes you want to punch him. And I'm not the kind of guy who thinks that very often. He just seems like a guy who would have been a real jerk in high school. Maybe he reminds me of somebody I've forgotten, but apparently I'm not the only one who feels that way. Some time back he challenged Rich Lowry, the editor of National Review, to a fist fight, and in the online discussion of it a number of people were eager to accept on Lowry's behalf.

I find it kind of hard to imagine a book by Michael Savage being very good, or not being inflammatory.

Craig, three years is not very long for a picture to remain unhung when you're raising children. I've had a couple sitting on a bookshelf here for at least two and I have no excuse. If you ever see the film of The Loved One I'll be interested in hearing what you think of it.

On the other hand, J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Legacy is #2, and my impression is that it's pretty good.

I meant to include a link to the list. Here:

https://www.nytimes.com/books/best-sellers/hardcover-nonfiction/

I have been meaning to ask if anyone had an opinion about that book
AMDG

The comments on the post seem to be all very positive (I just skimmed). Obviously everybody does not react as I did. It certainly is a touching story, and there's a lot of truth in it.

"But then at the end he puts in a plug for one of his books. That really kind of jarred."

I found that rather jarring myself -- I wish he would have phrased the plug differently. In the comments someone brought that plug up and he responded:

"There is almost no way that the Dante book will become a bestseller now. Absent some kind of miracle, I’ve made the money I’m going to make out of the book. At this point, I see it as a kind of missionary outreach to people who are suffering. Lent is a time in which we who are part of liturgical Christian traditions typically search our own hearts for sin, and repent of it. That is the core of the Dante book. If people are thinking about this kind of thing now, my book may help them."

But then (re Dreher) this post says some interesting things about the book I dismissed above, Homo Deus.

I think the only negative commentary I've read about Hillbilly Elegy was from Kevin Williamson, who comes from a similar background and is less sympathetic to it.

I agree. Or he simply could have said something along the lines of "you may find the Dante book helpful."

The Dante book is not the kind of book that everyone would find appealing. It's basically a spiritual memoir in which Rod describes how reading and internalizing The Divine Comedy helped him through a crisis-period in his life. I liked it, but it requires an interest in that sort of writing, or Dante, or both.

I see This is Spinal Tap is streaming on Netflix. I might have to find a time to watch it.

AMDG

Here's Dreher defending himself from similar charges:

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/benedict-option-upper-middle-class-whites-lupfer/

How will I know you are telling the truth?

I have to wait until Bill isn't here or he is asleep because he won't want to watch it. That means I have to wait until a week from Friday or stay up to eleven or later.

AMDG

"The discussers were mostly Catholic academics and pundits, including a couple of names you'd probably recognize. Most unedifying."

I heard a while back through the (Catholic) grapevine, quite a few months before the book came out, that there was a sort of cadre of Catholic writers who wanted to "get the Benedict Option away from Rod Dreher." Wonder if it's the same crew -- since they couldn't do that, they're doing the next best thing -- either trashing it or ignoring it altogether.

In my group of friends, which includes several "connected" Catholics whose names you'd probably know, the subject hasn't once come up. What's odd about that is that there was considerable discussion about the BenOp, much of it negative, before the book came out.

It's almost as if the book's success has shut them up, or at least made them not want to talk about it. I've been waiting for an opportunity to bring it up just to stir the pot a little bit.

I've sometimes been puzzled as to why some people despise him with such intensity (Art Deco is far from the only one).

I have flashes of disgust at the man for a half-dozen different reasons. At my age, intensity is no longer in stock. (Your chum Daniel Nichols on Dreher is a different story).

I think I've offered an inventory of what I consider his problems in other venues. (The exhibitionism is just one).

And RD never became Buddhist.

AMDG

If I remember correctly there was (is?) a blog devoted to denouncing him, maybe around the time Crunchy Cons came out

They closed up shop after a while. Some of the same people founded a new one when the Ruthie book appeared. A man with the handle 'Pauli' participated in both. One of the original bloggers I'd call not 'intense' but 'derisive'. The latter set I would describe more as 'persistent' and 'faultfinding'. I wouldn't describe either as 'intense'. Jonathan Carpenter's pursuit of Dreher a decade ago might be described as 'intense'.

Your friend Daniel was infuriated with RD because RD does not loathe the State of Israel and issue anathemas against it. There might be some superordinate principle at work there with multiple applications, but if so I've certainly forgotten what it was. He also thought the Ruthie book was a crass exercise.

That statement about DN's reason for disliking RD is false and even slanderous, because of the suggestion of anti-semitism. I can't allow you to repeat it or anything close to it. You can email me if you want to discuss it further. If I have time later I can probably find you chapter and verse.

That statement is derived from remarks made in cold print on the blog you two maintained. What's more, you know bloody well I'm defaming no one. Your remarks are false and dishonorable.

Not to change the subject, but this is where I mentioned This is Spinal Tap.

I watched maybe 15 minutes--okay, I see it's 13.5 minutes. It was so extremely clever--hilarious. I thought the one song I heard was almost as brilliant as it was vulgar. However, I think it is a much too guilty pleasure for me, and so I'm not going to finish it.

AMDG

I might not like it if I had watched 20 minutes, in fact like might not be the right word. I just didn't expect to find it funny at all.

AMDG

I don't think Dreher is advocating actual Benedictine monastic-like communities for lay people.

There are certainly threats to the Church now, serious ones. I certainly wouldn't minimized them. But I like to remind myself that John Paul II started his pontificate with "Be not afraid."

Here's a critique of the book that may be interesting. I haven't read it yet, just the first few paragraphs, where he describes his background in just the sort of milieu I've mentioned as having been around for 30 years or more. It may end up "tl;dr" for me, given that I don't plan to read the book.

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/samrocha/2017/04/benedict-option-critical-review/

It's over twenty years since I saw This is Spinal Tap, which I also thought was brilliant and hilarious. After Easter I ought to see if I can find it again somewhere (it's not on our version of Netflix)..

Rocha's review makes some good points but is a little odd, in that he seems to be unwarrantedly applying academic-level standards to a popular book.

In short, any academic of Rocha's persuasion could critically review in this way almost any popular level book on this subject -- Chaput's, Esolen's, R.R. Reno's, etc. I guess I don't see the point.

Sorry, I missed it. I see it now.

Maybe I'll read Rocha's piece this afternoon. I've seen similar criticisms from others: that he should have read this or that theologian or philosopher. But it's not a primarily theological or philosophical problem.

Well, I read Rocha's piece. Not having read the book, I can't really evaluate it. But some of his broader criticisms made me think of my similar reservations about Crunchy Cons. For instance, I realized that I've all along been bugged by the idea that Benedict did what he did in response to the decline of Rome. It's one thing to note the association of the two events, another to suggest that Benedict was basically reacting to it. And there was something confused and confusing about CC, so I'm not surprised to hear the same criticism of TBO.

The condescension is annoying, I agree.

Not having read the book or planning to do so, but having read a certain number of Dreher's blog posts on the subject, the criticism that has seemed most telling to me was voiced by someone on Facebook: does this really add up to anything more than a counsel for us to live like Christians? That, and maybe a useful sort of wake-up about the anti-Christian way the culture is going. Useful to some people, anyway. Personally I didn't need it.

Yeah, saw that. I think if Rod could've responded just as humorously but without the spleen it would have been more effective.

I've just seen another Facebook conversation like the one I was describing a few days ago. And now I'm back to wondering why some people seem to despise Dreher so much.

:-)

The controversy is definitely taking up a lot of the oxygen, as they say.

It's beginning to seem like Jets vs Sharks or Crips vs Bloods or something.

I very much admired Sam Rocha's review. One line from it in particular gets at the heart of Dreher's shtick: Rocha calls it an "emotivist critique of emotivism." This is exactly right. The problem is not that The Benedict Option isn't an academic book: it's that Dreher has always avoided contact with any mental discipline that a scholarly approach would require, any occasion to slow down for a moment and work through the logical steps in his argument. His method is all anecdote, broad narrative, or assertion, in a tone of panic.

Also, does no one think it at least a little odd that Dreher refers throughout to "Professor Doctor Rocha," though Rocha never once called himself anything like that? Both here and in his response to Anthony Bradley, a black professor at King's College, you'd have to be blind not to see that Dreher has a special animus toward non-white members of the academy.

I'm pretty much at a plague-on-both-their-houses point. As I said earlier, I thought a lot of Rocha's points were valid. On the other hand, his review itself struck me as somewhat confused on the whole. Also on the pompous side. And Dreher's complaint that Rocha is taking him to task for not having written an academic book has some validity. I considered reading Rocha's review again but I find reading anything on Patheos unpleasant, and rarely do it, so I'll skip it.

"His method is all anecdote, broad narrative, or assertion, in a tone of panic."

I think that's fairly accurate, unfortunately. That's a pretty good one-line summary of what bothered me about Crunchy Cons. The tone of panic is part of the reason that I quit reading his blog on a regular basis some years ago (similarly Mark Shea's).

But as for the racial angle...[eye roll]. Given Dreher's general tendency to slam those who slam him, I can't see any reason whatever to think that race has anything to do with it. I don't know if you, Nathan, are an academic or not, but that charge strikes me as itself something most likely to be a product of the overheated racial atmosphere of the contemporary academy.

It never once even crossed my mind to think of Rocha as "non-white." It registered on me that he appeared to be of some sort of Latin ancestry, but that alone does not in my mind make one "non-white," which has a cultural component when applied to Hispanics--that is, a Spaniard or an Argentinian is not necessarily "non-white" in my book--actually I guess it suggests an Indian/ Native American component.

Anywat, I don't recall anything in Dreher's nasty response that indicated any consciousness of Rocha's ethnicity. The "Professor Doctor" stuff is obnoxious, but I can't see anything racial in it. Obviously he's making fun of Rocha's academic status and implying that he's a pompous know-it-all. Perhaps if Dreher had called him "Senor Professor" or something you'd have a case.

I understand that Dreher's tone of panic can be off-putting (I have Catholic friends that say the same thing about Esolen). But usually (not always) there is something of substance that they're rightly concerned about under the alarmism, and that tends to be where my interest lies. I just take the "panic" in stride. But I get why some folks would prefer to avoid the stuff altogether.

I should have been more specific, and said something like, "This recent post is one instance of a fairly consistent pattern, in which Dreher makes fun of black (or other non-white) scholars for their advanced credentials, implying that they are somehow unearned." I hope this way of putting it is fairly objective, and avoids the all-too-fraught talk of racism that you do admittedly hear in the academy.

But besides the incidents with Bradley and Rocha, this pattern is evident in the many, many posts about the "SJWs"in higher education. I'd find a few and link to them, but I find The American Conservative's website visually unpleasant and hard to use in the same way as Patheos.

Well, I'm skeptical. I'd have to see some definite evidence. As it happens one of the fairly few blog posts of Dreher's that I'd seen over the past year or two until this TBO talk got going was one in which he described his conversations with Wendell Pierce, and it indicated a very heartfelt desire to reach across the racial divide. And that one--the black-white one--is the big one.

In a circumstance like Dreher's slams against Rocha (and thinking of Rocha as "non-white"), I ask myself "Would this be any different if the person being attacked were white?" I don't see any reason to think so.

AmCon's web site seems ok to me, btw. Patheos for a long time would frequently come near to locking up my browser with its busy ads. At least it doesn't seem to do that anymore.

I didn't know Dreher and Pierce had written a book btw. That one I might like to read. It's a subject close to my heart.

Because of Holy Week I'm busy.

AMDG

You'd have to record it for me.

AMDG

Sometimes when commenting here I miss the ability to choose from a set of emoticons expressing subtle gradations of amusement, annoyance, etc. Like now.

:-)

Well, I think we can agree that (a) this sort of reply to the book's critics is at best highly unseemly, and that (b) the hope for an alternative Christian politics should not be so closely wrapped around this one annoying guy's personality. What makes so many of us balk is Dreher's seeming insistence that we accept the whole "package deal," as it were.

"but is that even what the book is about?"

No.

"What makes so many of us balk is Dreher's seeming insistence that we accept the whole 'package deal,' as it were."

I think you're confusing the insistence of the alarm (which are supposed to be insistent) with the advice of the "option." Have you actually read the book?

"it's the sense of it packaging in the first place that kind of rubs me wrong."

I guess because I've followed the thing all along I don't really see it. It seems to me that the 'packaging' aspect has sort of attached itself to the project in its later stages. I don't think Rod intended it that way (although maybe the publisher did).

Here's an interesting response, from Rebecca Bratten Weiss--unfortunately also at Patheos. I think it's interesting for what it says, but I suspect it may also be interesting as another instance of an argument against something Dreher doesn't say. At least I saw that objection made by someone on Facebook.

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/suspendedinherjar/2017/04/family-benedict-option-cool-heres-doesnt-work/

The relevance to Dreher aside, it confirms what I always suspected would be the case, that "intentional communities" for the most part don't work very well for very long.

I suspect she hasn't.

Possibly the single most useful comment I've seen on the book is from the guy I linked to somewhere who calculated the difference between the amount of attention Dreher gives to a topic and the amount his critics give to what he says about it.

That's an excellent piece, by someone who has read and understood the book, sympathizes with it, and has some experience to offer. Her experience is a good instance of what I was griping about when I first posted about TBO: that people have been doing what he seems to be advocating for a generation now. And there's something irksome about him talking as if it's something new.

I do suspect that there is a certain amount of confusion at the heart of the book. Is it just being Christian? If so what's the big deal (about the book I mean)? Is it something more? The answer seems to be yes and no.

Maybe he'd be getting less opposition if he'd just sort of surveyed the landscape, the situation facing Christians and what people are doing in response, without packaging it as if it were a program (but not a program!).

A good comment I saw on Facebook: the communities Dreher is talking about already exist--they're called parishes. The reaction of many (including me) to that is to gripe about the parish, the indifferentism, etc. But that's just the way life is.

On the other hand, I think the simultaneously dumbest and most hostile comment I've seen was also on Facebook, maybe from the same conversation: it's the Benedict Arnold Option, calling for a retreat into an Ayn Rand fortress. I think that deserves to be called mindless.

That's true about the parish, but how many of us are really involved in what goes on in the parish. When I was growing up, our parish was the center of our lives. We went to school there, our friends--both our parents' friends and ours--were in the parish.

Now, we just live too far away from our parish to be able to do much there. We don't have any close friends there. If we go back to our parish in Mississippi, which is almost half an hour away, we will have friends, but probably leave Mass annoyed every week. Ugh. Anyway, there's nothing that's going to get my husband back there.

AMDG

Here's a good review of the three books (Dreher, Esolen, Chaput) at First Things by Patrick Deneen.

https://www.firstthings.com/article/2017/04/moral-minority

He doesn't really pass judgment on the books, just discusses the issues. I have to point out that I said the same thing here some time ago about Jerry Falwell's basic mistake.

It's good that although RB Weiss is cynical about the intentional community thing she stayed Catholic. Someone said it's just as bad to see them become Trump zealots. That strikes me as a different thing though. Misguided but not the same as rejecting the faith altogether.

I guess it would be too much to hope that his name would be Nigel.

Please do.

AMDG