A Small Book About Real Life

A Small Book About Real Life
by Jeffrey A. Tucker at Brownstone Institute

I’ve never been as excited and nervous about a new book of mine. The reason is that I know for certain it will be read. It is 132 pages with gorgeous illustrations at each chapter that capture the theme. The prose is about communication first. Each chapter covers an animating spirit of the historical American ethos: respect, hard work, pioneering, gratitude, patience, faith, independence, forbearance, and so on. 

It’s not preachy. It’s illustrative with a distinct purpose of celebrating the 250th anniversary of the Founding. The ethos is about coming to terms with the physical world around us, its opportunities, limits, and implied obligations. 

This small book follows two previous books written in full rage against the lockdowns that wrecked life and liberty in 2020 and following. The battles are not over but it seems time to reflect more deeply on larger themes. 

An angry life is not a good life. We need to rally around that which we love. These years have tempted us all to forget this. 

This project began when a friend pressed a monograph in my hands by Eric Sloane, an American legend in historiography and illustration, the voice that nearly invented what is called “Americana.” The title is The Spirits of ‘76, published in 1973. It is not in print and likely won’t be again. 

As it turns out, this is Sloane’s least-celebrated book. I suspect I know why: it is dark and truth-telling in ways that upset today’s professional-class sensibilities. 

In particular, his emphasis on hard work as the basis of the good life and society cuts against all digital-age aspirations, in which the goal is to do as little as possible. Sloane’s view is different. This attitude and aspiration will wreck individual lives and whole societies. Regretting work is like regretting life: it is hard to contain once it begins and invades all things. It results in spiritual despair. 

For me, the book came at exactly the right moment. Disabused of my past techno-utopianism, demoralized by the spectacular failure of ideological systems to resist lockdowns, and shattered by the triangulating schemes of party politics, I realized that I too had lost touch with normal life in all its authenticity, simplicity, and beauty. More than that, the values that undergird such a life, a life of genuine freedom, needed refurbishment and restoration. 

Here is my personal attempt to recapture some of what we lost in these years. It is a commentary following Sloane’s themes with the addition of some of my own. Some versions of these thoughts previously appeared in the Epoch Times, which provides me with the implausible generosity of printing my articles six times per week, and Brownstone Institute, our beloved project to rekindle an honest intellectual culture in times of corruption and censorship. 

My appreciation for all my colleagues, friends, and loved ones is incalculable; a list of them all would be impossibly long. My thoughts are a product of my engagements in these years in which our legacy communities were smashed by force. I think of all today who have the strength to write, read, and hope as survivors. 

The question this book seeks to answer is, why have we the living been blessed with another day and what are we to do with our lives? As we approach the 250th anniversary of America’s birth, these are questions that bear careful reflection. The book is dedicated to my mother. 

Here are some images from the book.

A Small Book About Real Life
by Jeffrey A. Tucker at Brownstone Institute – Daily Economics, Policy, Public Health, Society