Reading Rick: Getting Started

In a number of posts I will be reporting on what I have read in Rick Santorum's It Takes a Family: Conservatism and the Common Good (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2005).

The book's table of contents is broken down into a preface, forty chapters in six parts, conclusion, bibliographical note, and index. As I report on a section I will create a link to it here to tie all of the posts together.

To begin with I should say that as an analytic reader I find an eight page bibliographic note for 428 pages of text a little alarming. There is not a bibliography or footnotes or endnotes, just the brief bibliographic note. I fear this will prove troublesome to me in my reading. It has been my habit since college to copy the bibliography and title page of books I found interesting so I could later investigate further. Bibliographic notes tend to make it impossible to follow up directly on information in the text.

Here are links to the other entries in this series:

Reading Rick: The Preface

Reading Rick: Part I (It Takes a Family)

Reading Rick: Part 2 (Social Capital and the Ties That Bind)

Reading Rick: Part 3 (The Roots of Prosperity)

Reading Rick: Part 4 (Moral Ecology)

Reading Rick: Part 5 (Culture Matters)

Reading Rick: Part 6 (Educational Excellence)

Reading Rick: Conclusion