The reason of things

The Reason of Things: Living with Philosophy is a collection of 60 short essays by A.C. Grayling, most of which were initially written for his column in the Guardian

The book is in seven parts. The first, Moral Matters has essays on topics such as eating meat, and sex and marriage. Public Culture includes the role of teachers and conservation of historic buildings. Politics, justice and pluralism are among the topics in Community and Society and then Anger and War is a long section including essays on slavery, guns and bystanders. Then come two short sections Grief and Rememberance and Nature and Naturalness and the final section is Reading and Thinking which includes some autobigraphical material on how Grayling came to study philosophy.

The essays are interesting enough, and tell of Grayling's position on a large number of topics, but they are really too short to look at any of them properly, and the book doesn't have an index or any notes for the reader to follow up. So I wouldn't recommend it if you are looking for convincing arguments, but it's fine if you want to dip into short, easy to read, pieces on important topics.