All My Books
Eight books, with another on the way. Different subjects, different tones — but the same underlying preoccupations: clarity, proportion, and the work of living well. Browse below, and if something catches your attention, the cover image will take you to Amazon. Unstuck Unstuck is not a gentle book. It is a direct challenge to the habits of delay, justification, and self-deception that keep capable people from moving forward. Drawing on Stoic discipline and decades of lived experience, it argues that most obstacles are not external — they are internal negotiations we have learned to accept. The chapters move through the mechanics of action: how to stop waiting for the right mood, how to treat discomfort as data rather than warning, and how to build momentum through small, deliberate wins rather than dramatic resolutions. There is no comfort here, and no transformation promised — only clarity. For people who already know what they should do and need something firmer than encouragement, Unstuck treats self-improvement as a discipline of judgment under uncertainty — not a product to consume, but a position to play. Buy on Amazon A Life Made Whole A Life Made Whole examines the long process of integration — not the dramatic breakthroughs, but the daily work of holding together what experience threatens to fragment. The essays trace the Stoic virtues not as ideals to achieve, but as practices to maintain under pressure, loss, and the slow erosion of circumstance. Each chapter treats a single virtue — courage, hope, justice, discipline, wisdom, integrity, meaning, endurance, temperance — as a response to a specific kind of fracture. The writing draws on lived experience and hard-won reflection, treating resilience not as optimism but as the capacity to remain coherent when coherence costs something. This is a book for people who do not need persuading that life is difficult, but who want a framework for meeting difficulty without collapse or performance. It argues that wholeness is not a state to reach but a direction to hold, maintained by small, repeated choices in the face of what cannot be controlled. Buy on Amazon The Stoic Citizen The Stoic Citizen applies ancient philosophy to the actual conditions of modern civic life: polarization, institutional distrust, and the erosion of shared reality. It argues that Stoicism is not a private consolation but a public discipline — a way of maintaining integrity under systems that reward fragmentation and outrage. The book examines citizenship as a practice of virtue rather than a legal status: how to engage with difference without capitulation, how to sustain hope without naivety, and how to act with proportion when provocation is profitable. The chapters move from foundational principles through practical applications, concluding with a series of letters that extend the argument to future citizens. For anyone exhausted by performative politics but not willing to retreat, The Stoic Citizen offers a framework for durable engagement: neither surrender nor combat, but the steady maintenance of judgment under pressure. Buy on Amazon The Stoic CGM The Stoic CGM turns continuous glucose monitoring into a discipline of self-knowledge — not merely a medical intervention, but a practice of attention applied to the body’s own rhythms. The book examines what happens when Stoic principles meet metabolic data: how to respond to information without being ruled by it, and how to govern the self when the self is constantly in motion. The chapters trace the Republic of Glucose — the internal ecosystem of hormones, timing, and consequence — through the Disciplines of Action and Will. They examine how data becomes meaningful only when paired with judgment, and how the habit of measurement can either deepen autonomy or become its own compulsion. The writing moves between clinical precision and lived experience, treating health as a domain where philosophy and science converge. For anyone managing a chronic condition, an aging metabolism, or the simple desire to understand what their body is doing, The Stoic CGM offers a framework for using technology without surrendering to it. The body is not an enemy to defeat but a system to comprehend — and comprehension, sustained over time, is the beginning of genuine self-governance. Buy on Amazon Misaligned Misaligned begins with a personal diagnosis received late in life and follows its implications outward: through a first marriage that ended in miscommunication rather than malice, through a career built on containment, and through the slow recognition that many strengths become liabilities when context changes. The book treats the gap between internal experience and external expectation as a structural problem, not a personal failure. The chapters examine what happens when the wrong map is applied with discipline: a Stoic temperament that preserves stability at the cost of intimacy; an executive function that succeeds professionally while eroding relationally; a pattern of self-management that outlasts its usefulness. The analysis is unsentimental. It does not blame the map or the mapper. It examines the collision. If you’ve performed well and still found yourself at a loss, Misaligned offers a framework for recognizing when alignment itself becomes the problem — and for rebuilding with different assumptions. The final argument is not repair but agency: the capacity to choose what to preserve, what to release, and what to construct differently. Buy on Amazon Letters Letters collects correspondence on the difficult topics that most public discourse avoids: what it means to speak the truth when outcomes are uncertain, how conscience functions under pressure, and whether interior strength has any public value. The essays are written as letters — direct, addressed, unguarded — because the subject matter demands intimacy rather than performance. Each section examines a tension: witness against voice, conscience against thought, science against scale, leadership against power, art against survival. The writing does not resolve these tensions. It inhabits them, tracing what it costs to hold a position and what it costs to abandon one. For anyone who has grown skeptical of certainty and still needs to communicate, Letters argues that honest speech is not a strategy for winning but a practice of remaining present. The final question is not whether truth changes outcomes, but whether silence changes the speaker. Buy on Amazon Stoic Backgammon Stoic Backgammon treats the ancient game as a practice of philosophy — not metaphorically, but literally. Each chapter pairs a phase of play with a Stoic principle, demonstrating that the board enforces what the Enchiridion describes: some things are up to us, others are not. The dice are not; the move is. The book moves from the opening roll through the anchor, the blitz, the prime, the back game, and the bear-off, examining how acceptance, attention, and proportion operate under uncertainty. Interludes deepen the argument: on indifference, the inner citadel, the reserve clause, and the discipline of assent. The foreword, written by Betty — the author’s AI collaborator — frames the project as a partnership between human experience and artificial intelligence, neither claiming to be the other. You don’t need to know backgammon or Stoicism to begin — the book teaches both as it proceeds. The central claim is that every roll is a small encounter with fate, and every move is a decision made with incomplete information. The right response to uncertainty is not prediction but character — and the board, played repeatedly, is one way to build it. Buy on Amazon On Proportion Now available. On Proportion examines the lost discipline of matching response to scale: knowing when a situation demands attention and when it demands inattention, when intervention is warranted and when silence is the better instrument. It is a discipline Philip Huffman learned growing up in the shadow of the Cold War, an era that specialized in treating every tremor as the end of the world. The book treats proportion not as moderation but as judgment — the capacity to sense the true size of an event and to resist the distortions of urgency, outrage, and habit. Against the backdrop of a superpower’s machinery of overreaction, it traces how a generation was trained to respond to everything, and how that training outlived the era that produced it. Written for anyone who has felt the pull to answer everything and the cost of doing so, On Proportion offers a way to tell the urgent from the important — and to choose silence when silence is the better instrument. Buy on Amazon Raise 'Em Right Forthcoming Expected: November 2026. Raise ‘Em Right follows a child from birth to eighteen, one chapter for every year — because the child at eight months and the child at eight years need entirely different things from the adults raising them. Each chapter braids a Montessori principle for what the child needs from the world around them with a Stoic reflection for what steadies the parent supplying it, and closes with a short list of things to try that same week. There’s no formula here, only ideas to sit with, borrow from, and argue with as your child — and your life — keep changing shape. Written for parents whose children don’t fit the mold the advice books quietly assume, and for parents simply tired of pretending they do, Raise ‘Em Right weaves in callouts to Misaligned, Philip’s memoir of growing up with an undiagnosed neurodivergent mind, as one example of the child the map so often leaves out. Beneath the daily work runs a quieter thread: a child who learns to observe carefully, reason honestly, and take responsibility for their own actions is being prepared not just for adulthood, but for the kind of citizenship a family, a neighborhood, and a country depend on. Wherever you are in the work, however long you’ve been at it, this book starts where you are. Profiles in Compliance Forthcoming Expected: late November 2026. John F. Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage named the only two directions a person can move when pressure arrives: courage, or compliance. He set the words against each other and left them there, because there is no third one. This book is about the second, and about what happened to the price. It is not a book about a bad man. Thousands of people, most of them decent and most of them competent, have been asked a version of Kennedy’s question and answered the other way. They kept their seats and their salaries, and that is the point. The apparatus is the subject, taken one institution at a time: the law firms, the universities, the press, the civil service, the military, the corporations, the courts, the election machinery, and the cabinet, where the standard meets its smallest unit. The finding was not the expected one. Where the country had structure, it held, and it held without requiring anybody to be brave: sixty courts slowed or blocked initiatives, thirty-eight states refused a request for voter data, a press corps walked out rather than become an outlet for approved information, eight prosecutors resigned rather than file a motion they believed was corrupt. Where the country had a single point of decision, it did not hold. Refusing costs the career and complying costs nothing, so the bill is handed to someone with less standing, less access, and less voice. The remedy is not better people. It is a structure in which decency is affordable. By What Standard? Forthcoming Expected: late November 2026. The question in the title is asked of every office: by what standard does the person holding it act, and who can hold them to that standard? A standard, in the sense this book uses the word, is a public claim about the limits of one’s own power. It has to be stated so that it can be found, general so that it applies to allies as well as opponents, and binding on the person who stated it. Without those three properties it is a preference dressed as a principle. The argument is institutional rather than electoral. The republic is failing less from villainy than from the collapse of the standards applied to office: villainy is the smaller part, and the machinery that once made it costly no longer works. A president can abuse an office only if the other branches let the abuse stand, which is why the first branch comes first here. Congress holds the powers that check a president, and those powers are exercised only when members choose to exercise them. The method is documentary. An inaugural address, an executive order, a proclamation, an opinion of the Office of Legal Counsel, a roll-call vote, a filing with the Supreme Court: each one fixes a claim at a moment, and each one can be set beside the claim that came before it. The language is quoted exactly, the judgment is the author’s, and the notes are grouped by chapter at the back so that a reader can check the argument in order. ...