And more books for your study

 George Scialabba is one of America’s greatest writers – despite being a retired building manager at Harvard University. Two of his most recent books were picked up on the internet by yours truly and can be found here -

• The Sealed Envelope – toward an intelligent utopia George Scialabba (2026) His thoughts on such writers as John Gray, Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, Barbara Ehrenreich, William Bucley and Jonathan Haidt

• Only a Voice - essays George Scialabba (2023) The contents sheet read thus - 

Introduction: What Are Intellectuals Good For?

PART I. THE PROBLEM WITH PROGRESS

1 Progress and Prejudice

2 The Workingman’s Friend: Adam Smith

3 Are We All Liberals Now? Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine

4 Shipwrecked: D. H. Lawrence

5 The Radicalism of Tradition: T. S. Eliot

6 Agonizing: Isaiah Berlin

7 Still Enlightening after All These Years: Leo Strauss and Eric Voegelin

8 A Whole World of Heroes: Christopher Lasch

9 The Wages of Original Sin: Philip Rieff

10 Against Everything: Ivan Illich

11 Back to the Land? Wendell Berry

12 Preserving the Self: Matthew Crawford

13 Last Men and Women

PART II. THE LEFT

14 South of Eden: Leonardo Sciascia

15 A Critical Life: Irving Howe

16 The Common Fate: Victor Serge

17 A Conservative-Liberal Socialist: Leszek Kołakowski

18 Yes to Sex: Ellen Willis

19 How (and How Not) to Change the World

PART III. THE ROLE OF THE CRITIC

20 The Promise of an American Life: Randolph Bourne

21 An Exemplary Amateur: Dwight Macdonald

22 The Liberal Intelligence: Lionel Trilling

23 Just a Journalist: Edmund Wilson

24 An Enemy of the State: I. F. Stone

25 People Who Influence Influential People Are the Most Influential

People in the World: New Republic

26 Living by Ideas: Hilton Kramer and Roger Kimball

27 Fearless: Pier Paolo Pasolini

28 The Price of Selfhood: Vivian Gornick

Shared Prosperity for a Fractured World – a new economics for the middle
 class, the global poor and our climate Dani Rodrik (2025)

We want to live in societies that are free, a world without poverty, and a climate that is hospitable. We want, in brief, democracy, prosperity, and sustainability. How can we achieve all three, in a global economy that has become more conflictual, is rapidly moving away from its previously established norms and arrangements, and faces a fragile geopolitical context marked by US-China rivalry?

How can we render them compatible, when so many policy currents are at cross-purposes, moving us away from the other goals even when they appear to advance one of them? These are the questions that lie at the heart of this book.

Poverty – by America Matthew Desmond (2023)

Why is there so much poverty in America? I wrote this book because I needed an answer to that question. For most of my adult life, I have researched and reported on poverty. I have lived in very poor neighborhoods, spent time with people living in poverty around the country, pored over statistical studies and government reports, listened to and learned from community organizers and union reps, drafted public policy, read up on the history of the welfare state and city planning and American racism, and taught courses on inequality at two universities. But even after all that, I still felt that I lacked a fundamental theory of the problem, a clear and convincing case as to why there is so much hardship in this land of abundance.

Putting Civil Society in its Place Bob Jessop (2022) Jessop is not the easiest of reads and this is his latest

A Scotsman Abroad  Ronald Mackay (2016) 
A fascinating account of a philolog’s stay in Romania in the late 1960s
Non-Violence – a history beyond the myth Domenico Losurdo (2015) 

Introduction: From the Broken Promises of Perpetual Peace to Non-Violence.

1 Christian Abolitionism and Pacifism in the United States 7

2 From Pacifist Abolitionism to Gandhi and Tolstoy 21

3 Gandhi and the Socialist Movement: Violence as Discrimination? 47

4 The Anti-Colonialist Movement, Lenin’s Party, and Gandhi’s Party 77

5 Non-Violence in the Face of Fascism and the Second World War 93

6 Martin Luther King as the “Black Gandhi” and Afro-American Radicalism 111

7 Gandhi’s Global Reputation and the Construction of the Non-Violent Pantheon 147

8 From Gandhi to the Dalai Lama? 159

9 “Non-Violence,” “Color Revolutions,” and the Great Game 191

10 A Realistic Non-Violence in a World Prey to Nuclear Catastrophe 205

Contention and Democracy in Europe 1650-2000 Charles Tilly (2004)

Censorship in Romania Lidia Vianu (1998) 
Lidia Vianu is a University Professor here in Bucharest who has established a 
strong reputation as a translator of English and sponsor of many publications 
of which this is one. It deals with a range of writers who suffered from censorship 
during the communist regime – such as Nina Cassian, Mircea Dinescu, Ana 
Blandiana and Marin Sorescu.