The City of Man by Pierre Manent

This was a re-read of a book that is among the most profound philosophical reflections I have read. I was impressed the first time I read it, and found myself regularly returning to it. Some books almost take on a living presence in your life; you don't just read them, but you have a dialogue with them over years as you explore their depths. Chesterton's Orthodoxy, Kierkegaard's Concluding Unscientific Postscript, and Plato's Dialogs are in this category for me. The City of Man, I am discovering, is entering it as well.

The Social Animal by David Brooks

David Brooks explains that human behavior is driven by emotion more than reason. Duh. An irritating feature of the book is Brooks commitment to appear politically even-handed; when he criticizes the left for something, he must follow it immediately by a criticism of the right, with himself positioned as some sort of Aristotelian mean between the two. Is it never the case that either the left or right is simply correct on some policy position? Is the wise position always a splitting of the difference between the two?