Curiosity: And Its Twelve Rules for Life Buckley F.H. 9781641771849

Curiosity is the instinct that prompts us to act, and a book about curiosity should tell us how to live. This is the first to do so, with its twelve rules for life.

While a fatal sin in Eden, curiosity is a necessary virtue in our world. It asks us to search for new experiences, to create, to invent. It tells us to look inward, to be curious about the needs of other people and about our own motives. It tells us not to be a stick in the mud or a bore. In particular, curiosity asks us to examine the most fundamental questions of our existence. When you put all this together, curiosity tells you how to live a life in full.

While there's a natural desire to explore, there's also a natural desire to stay home. We have a dark side that wants to hide from the world. We've also been made incurious by the rise of bitter partisanships and narrow ideologies that have sent things and people we should care about to our mental trash folders. That's why this book is needed today.

F.H. Buckley is a Foundation Professor at George Mason University's Scalia School of Law. He is a frequent media guest and has appeared on Morning Joe, CNN, The Rush Limbaugh Show, C-SPAN, NPR and numerous other outlets. He is a senior editor at the American Spectator, a columnist for the New York Post, and has written for the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post and many other newspapers.

His most recent books are The Republican Workers Party (2018); The Republic of Virtue (2017); The Way Back: Restoring the Promise of America (2016); The Once and Future King (2015); and American Secession: The Looming Threat of a National Breakup (2020).

"This book is so wittily presented and frequently entertaining, it is only gradually that the reader comes to appreciate fully Frank Buckley's startling erudition and the perceptiveness of his main points. This is a delightful, as well as provocative, and ultimately engrossing read." -Conrad Black, author of A President Like No Other

"Frank Buckley takes us on a wonderful tour around a well-read mind and a cultivated imagination always heading for the next experience around the corner. His voyage of curiosity rambles through literature, art, science, and history so entertainingly that by the time he glimpses harbor . . . you may have circumnavigated the globe, but your curiosity is never exhausted." -John O'Sullivan, president of the Danube Institute in Budapest and senior fellow at the National Review Institute

"This is an eloquent paean to a life that embraces uncertainty. Buckley tells it like it is and inspires us to adopt a risk-taking and experimentative orientation toward the future. A must-read for those prepared to embark on a voyage of discovery."-Frank Furedi, author of How Fear Works: The Culture of Fear in the 21st Century

"In a world of cruelly imposed meaninglessness and technological detachment, Curiosity awakens the soul to mortality, joy, and imagination and invites us to see that although man is a finite being, he has a great capacity to move toward the infinite." -Emina Melonic, contributor and critic

"Don't let the title fool you. This is not a conventional self-help book outlining a path to a fitter, thinner, and richer you but rather a paean to traditional virtues now fallen into desuetude by the soul-corroding power of media and the popular culture - which is no culture at all. Buckley combines an intellectual's probity and a scholar's vast referential reach with a compassionate humanism in the service of one overarching goal: to make you a better person. His first rule - don't make rules - sets the reader on a path to risk-taking, moral courage, steadfastness, originality, and creativity. Which is, after all, the essence of humanity itself."-Michael Walsh, author of The Devil's Pleasure Palace, The Fiery Angel, and Last Stands