Missive #751 Published 8 Jul 2026

A consistent theme in positive reviews is the appreciation for Schumacher’s focus on people over goods. Reviewers resonate with the argument that economies should prioritize meaningful work and psychological stability over endless GDP growth. The concept of "intermediate technology"—tools that are efficient yet accessible to small communities—is frequently cited as a standout idea.

Reviewers often discuss Schumacher’s definition of wisdom as the ability to project permanence. The critique that modern economics treats irreplaceable natural capital (like fossil fuels) as income is widely praised as a fundamental truth that mainstream economics still ignores. This section of the book is often described as a "call to restraint" that contrasts sharply with consumerist culture.

Missive #750 Published 7 Jul 2026

This is the first of the authors freestanding books that I have read. It has a legal base for the plot but her Caper Court series was based on her shipping lawyer background. That knowledge does not carry over as well into other sectors of the law. Not a spoiler but the book ends as if the author was going to start another series.

Missive #748 Published 4 Jul 2026

In Regeneration Through Violence , the first of his trilogy on the mythology of the American West, Richard Slotkin shows how the attitudes and traditions that shape American culture evolved from the social and psychological anxieties of European settlers struggling in a strange new world to claim the land and displace the Native Americans. Using the popular literature of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries-including captivity narratives, the Daniel Boone tales, and the writings of Hawthorne, Thoreau, and Melville-Slotkin traces the full development of this myth.

Missive #746 Published 30 Jun 2026

Imagine it is 2025. Years earlier, in the wake of the financial crisis of 2008, a global hi-tech uprising has birthed a post-capitalist world in which work, money, land, digital networks and politics have been truly democratised.

In a thought-experiment of startling originality, world-famous economist Yanis Varoufakis offers a glimpse of this alternative reality. Through the eyes of three characters - a libertarian ex-banker, a Marxist-feminist and a maverick technologist - we see the genesis of a world without commercial banks or stock markets, where companies are owned equally by all staff, basic income is guaranteed, global imbalances and climate change cancel each other out, and housing is socialised.

Missive #744 Published 27 Jun 2026

Up to one hundred and twenty-five years ago, Niagara Country was, so far as we know, almost constantly the scene of conflict. Strife and violence seem to have been characteristic of the area and as much a part of it as the famous cataracts. This irrevocable fact dominates consideration of the region even when the scene is obscured by the rolling fogs of time. The glimpses of the earliest days, that we are able to see, are of violence and death. Niagara Country may well deserve to be called a dark and bloody land. There were times when the Niagara was stained red from the wounds of men, times when it became the battleground, and other times when it served as the broad highway over which fighters rode to combat and later limped home, nursing their wounds and carrying their dead. The physical character of Niagara seems to have made that inevitable.

Missive #742 Published 23 Jun 2026

In The Future of British Politics, comedian Frankie Boyle takes a characteristically acerbic look at some of the forces that will be key in coming years, from Scottish independence and post-colonial entitlement to big tech surveillance and the looming climate catastrophe. Despite his fears that 'soon the only red tape in this country will be across the finish line of the compulsory Food Bank Olympics', he manages to locate some hopeful signs amid the gloom, reminding us that 'despair is a moment that pretends to be permanent'.