The plot – which is laughable, in my opinion – is convoluted: Judge Temple, the founder of Templeton and owner of something like 10,000 acres, acquired about half of his land when it was confiscated from his dear friend Edward Effingham (who sided with the British during the War, serving as a Colonel) and sold at auction. This Effingham’s son, Edward Oliver Effingham, returns to the States (shortly before the novel opens) to care for his senile grandfather, Major Oliver Effingham, and to reclaim the property he believes Judge Temple wrongly acquired from the middle Effingham. Despite the obvious pseudonym he assumes – Oliver Edwards – and his “inexplicable” hostility toward the Judge, his true identity isn’t revealed until the novel is almost over – when it is also revealed that Judge Temple was really a good guy, who tried repeatedly to restore lands and fortune to his friend, until his letters began coming back unopened, and he heard that the two younger Effinghams had perished (and, conveniently, the old senile Major had long been “lost”). At that point, everyone’s happy, Edward Oliver Effingham marries the Judge’s daughter, Elizabeth (the whole romance subplot is heavily influenced by Pride and Prejudice, published about a decade earlier), and the American aristocracy is stabilized and justified.

Fortunately, this part of the novel is secondary (in practice, if not by Cooper’s intent) to the primary conflict driving the novel: that between the frontiersman Natty Bumppo and the settler & bringer-of-civilization Judge Temple. This conflict plays out in numerous incidents, some of which contrast the “wasty ways” of the settlers (as in their indiscriminate slaughter of the pigeons migrating in great swarms over the settlement, many of which are left to rot on the ground where they fall) and the kill-only-enough-to-eat practices of Natty and Chingachgook; other incidents center on the conflict between the “law of the wilderness” and the “law of civilization” (as when Natty is fined for killing a deer “out of season,” deer season being something he views as an utterly arbitrary construct).

These conflicts are often complicated, however. The young Effingham, who will eventually inherit all of Temple’s lands and fortune, and thereby continue the conversion of wilderness into cultivated land, dotted with towns, is, for most of the novel, a companion of Natty and Chingachgook, and appears to espouse their ideals. Judge Temple himself is often portrayed as wishing to find a middle ground between Natty’s absolute rejection of cultivation and “civilization” and the rampant, wasteful consumption of natural resources practiced by most of the settlers and endorsed by his verbose and outspoken cousin, Richard Temple. The Judge, however, is also generally portrayed as weak-willed and ineffective as a responsible cultivator of the wilderness, alternately giving in to the “excitement” of his cousin’s activities (the trawling of the lake, for instance, which produces a harvest of as many inedible fish as edible ones) and quietly disapproving from the comfort of his manor-house. Cooper seems incapable of or unwilling to consider the middle way the Judge (usually) espouses; there is no room in the novel for a westward expansion of civilization that also preserves areas of wilderness.

Though Cooper often seems to side with Natty, the cruelly ironic final line of the novel – “He [Natty] had gone far toward the setting sun, the foremost in that band of pioneers who are opening the way for the march of the nation across the continent” – betrays, in my opinion, a belief that the time has come for Americans to dominate and utterly transform the landscape as they move West to the Pacific – and that such domination and transformation is inevitable, if not also divinely ordained.

It’s worth reading because it’s not really about zombies — or, rather, it uses zombies to talk about one possible way a lethal and easily-spread virus might spread and disrupt global society in a spectacularly clusterfucky manner. Zombies are more fun than ebola (well, in a manner of speaking), but the principle is the same.

World War Z was published in 2006, and the zombie pandemic with which the novel deals seems to begin (in China, of course) sometime around then. The novel is composed of a series of interviews (or excerpts therefrom) conducted toward the end of the decade of “peace” which followed humanity’s decade-long struggle for survival; the interviews are arranged chronologically according to which part of WWZ they address, from the initial outbreaks, through the “Great Panic” and humanity’s return from the brink of extinction, to the decade of rebuilding after “victory” is officially declared.

Though Brooks acknowledges his debt to George Romero, the novel is far different from Romero’s films in that it posits humanity’s survival; the humans win, and the zombies are contained, though not eradicated (some spend their winters frozen and thaw out in the spring, millions and millions wander around on the oceans’ floors, and, hilariously, Iceland is still completely overrun). Humanity survives, but the cost is high: not only are there significant (catastrophic, even) ecological consequences – the extinction of the whales, for example – but the survival of some humans means the sacrifice of many more. Israel totally isolates itself for the duration; South Africa adopts the Redeker Plan, which calls for the establishment of safe zones by simultaneously establishing “live bait” zones (and guess where most people end up?); and there are plenty of smaller instances of military units abandoning civilians, or civilians abandoning each other, or resorting to theft, rape, murder, cannibalism, &c. Good times.

The fact that this is a novel about zombies will, I think, keep it from being widely read, which is a shame; it deals intelligently with the issues that arise during and after a catastrophic disruption of society, and such things happen on a local (and not-so-local) level all the time. Reading the novel (or anything else, fiction or otherwise) won’t prevent such disasters, obviously, but being forced to think about the ways our choices and behaviors can exacerbate or alleviate the suffering of those affected by such disasters is a good thing – or, at least, a thing that’s good for us.

Not only has the United States been overthrown by fundies (who are purging not only Catholics but Baptists – the novel has its darkly funny moments), but the birthrate has also plummeted, for a variety of reasons, including severe environmental degradation (nuclear and toxic wastes everywhere, pollution, etc). This leads to the establishment of “Rachel and Leah Centers” where fertile but not exactly moral (but not really really immoral) woman are indoctrinated and then assigned to high-ranking officials with infertile wives (because, really, it’s always the woman’s fault, right?) to have babies for them – like Bilhah and Zilpah did for Rachel and Leah.

The novel is narrated (”reconstructed”) by one of the handmaids, given the name “Offred” – which is both a patronymic (”Of Fred”) and a pun (”off red”), as the handmaids are dressed totally in red. Before the shit hit the fan, she was married and had a daughter; their attempt to escape to Canada (where else?) failed, and Offred ended up a handmaid, her daughter was given to someone more worthy, and her husband’s fate is unknown.

There are, as are required in dystopian novels, a secretive and potentially omnipresent police organization, an underground resistance, double agents, an escape attempt – but these are secondary elements: the novel is primarily concerned with exploring the role and psychology of a woman living under an oppressive patriarchy, and it does this quite well. The epilogue (a transcription of an academic talk titled “Problems of Authentication in Reference to The Handmaid’s Tale” and delivered in 2159) adds, well, problems of authentication – it draws the reader’s attention to the “reconstructed” nature of narratives that appear to be offering a running account of events, among other things.

Though I may not have made this novel sound interesting, it actually was; I finished it in two days because I couldn’t put it down. Certainly I would recommend reading a little of it before deciding that my taste in novels is not to be trusted.

Invisible Cities (or Le città invisibili) was published in 1972, and translated into English by William Weaver in 1974. Italo Calvino was born in Cuba to Italian parents; the family returned to Italy shortly after his birth in 1923.

It’s an intricately structured novel, but the short version is that its made up of nine sections, each itself made up of short (1-3 pages) descriptions of cities ostensibly visited by Marco Polo during his travels through Kublai Khan’s empire. Each of the larger sections both begins and ends with a dialogue between Marco and Kublai narrated by a third-person narrator; the descriptions of the cities are (apparently) narrated by Marco Polo himself. Some of them, though, are blatantly anachronistic, and I think a few more are subtly so, though I don’t know enough to know.

The headings of the descriptions recur – “Cities and Names,” “Cities and Desire,” “Thin Cities,” “Continuous Cities,” etc – and are incrementally numbered, which is important to one of the novel’s patterns. Several major themes run through the novel: on the dual (or tripartite) nature of cities; on what distinguishes one city from another, and what doesn’t; on how a city is different for an inhabitant and a visitor; on how cities endure and change through time. The dialogues between Polo and Khan deal with, among other things, memory, desire, facing one’s mortality, and the futility of attempting to know or understand everything, or even much of anything.

It’s a beautiful book, and I wish I had room to quote about half of it – so really, you should just go read it. It’s short (about 160 pages) and the brevity of its sections and subsections makes it easy to read in bits and pieces – though I imagine reading it in one sitting is an interesting experience.

I’ll end with an excerpt, the second section titled “Continuous Cities”:

If on arriving at Trude I had not read the city’s name written in big letters, I would have though I was landing at the same airport from which I had taken off. The suburbs they drove me through were no different from the others, with the same little greenish and yellowish houses. Following the same signs we swung around the same flow beds in the same squares. The downtown streets displayed goods, packages, signs that had not changed at all. This was the first time I had come to Trude, but I already knew the hotel where I happened to be lodged; I had already heard and spoken my dialogues with the buyers and sellers of hardware; I had ended other days identically, looking through the same goblets at the same swaying navels.

Why come to Trude? I asked myself. And I already wanted to leave.

“You can resume your flight whenever you like,” they said to me, “but you will arrive at another Trude, absolutely the same, detail by detail. The world is covered by a sole Trude which does not begin and does not end. Only the name of the airport changes.”

I’ve read about this book before that it might help with visualizing worlds with different numbers of dimensions than our own. I don’t know if it really does that all that well, particularly with visualizing worlds with more than 3 spatial dimensions. In any case, it serves its satirical purpose on social hierarchy quite well, and I think this is the main strength of the book.

I liked all 3 of the plays, but my favorite was The Wild Duck. I will definitely be reading more Ibsen.

The main thrust of the book is the development of the medieval mind-model of the physical and metaphysical universe. Because this model is constantly referred to, and it is assumed everyone already knows it, it can be difficult to get on reading old texts without having at least a cursory understanding of it.

I feel I learned a lot from this. I found it interesting that the concept of plagiarism as being bad didn’t exist in medieval times, as authors constantly copied old works and changed them. One only has to look at the plethora of Arthurian stories to see this. Because there was a sort of truth to the stories, it was kind of like copying a fact rather than an original piece of intellectual property.

I’ve never really been a serious student of medieval or renaissance literature, but I would guess that the contents of this volume would probably help to catch some of the references.

What I was most impressed with is how different classical conceptions are with neo-classical ones. The economics we learn in school is much more similar to that of Alfred Marshall than it is to Adam Smith’s. Smith, and other classical thinkers, didn’t have any real conception of equilibrium prices, and instead thought of the true value of things rather than their prices. This was quite surprising to me, as I had always assumed that Smith formulated equilbrium prices.

The whole dynamical construct of free markets solving for optimal parameters is really completely neo-classical. I also still have no idea why everything thinks Keynesian economics is so great. I’d love to find something that would pursuasively argue for it. I guess I should just read Keynes.

The book pretty much goes chronologically through the foundation of the republic and the emperors, and the last fifth or so covers the rise of Christianity in the empire. Much time is spent on Rome proper, but, in Durant’s characteristically holistic style, some time is spent exploring the outer provinces as well. Treatment is giving to literature, philosophy, architecture and the arts as well.

I’ve been inspired to read Plutarch’s Lives and Lucretius next, but I won’t get to them for a little while. A lot of people are said to have really loved the Parallel Lives and On the Nature of Things is an amazingly accurate scientific treatise/poem for its time. I also still plan on going through Gibbon, but I won’t start it this year.
I was very pleased with the book, and will be starting the Age of Faith next month.

It’s written in a smooth, butterlike style. It’s really a joy to read, and the characterization is great. Highly recommended.

I always enjoy a little stoicism, but I found most of this stuff pretty dry. I think Seneca’s De Ira is a masterpiece, but they didn’t include much of it. So I guess I would say going to the originals is probably better in my opinion, though I wouldn’t really know.

It took me a long time to get around to reading the whole thing. The bulk of the book is fairly detailed projections of a variety of aspects, centrally brain scanning and life extension.

Kurzweil seems pretty confident about most of his predictions. He gives margins of error, but they aren’t very wide. In 50 years, we’ll know if he was way off or not. Basically, he believes that the growth in technology is accelerating at such a pace that we will be able to scan our brains into computers in 20 years or so and that in this way, we will essentially conquer death. Then, only a short while later, the entire universe will be permeated with information. There’s a lot of other details I’m leaving out, but these two strokes of transhumanism and singulitarianism I think are the two most important.

I myself essentially buy everything that’s said in the book. Though many of the details of how these transformations will be effected are necessarily unknown at this time, this does not imply that a belief in their occurrence is simply blind faith. This however, is the point I have the greatest trouble with. Kurzweil answers the criticism from Malthus simply by saying that when a limit is reached, new paradigms will be found. The trouble is, we sometimes don’t know what those paradigms will be, or more often, don’t really know for sure if we can bring them about or how. For example, quantum computation is theorized to be practical, but we don’t know how to do it or even if we really can. Kurzweil answers these criticisms with a faith that we’ll figure it out. And he thinks that this faith has great historical justification.

There are a lot of other writers and speakers on the subject of the singularity. I myself haven’t perused a lot of the literature, but I have enjoyed the things Ken has forwarded me and the Singularity Summit talks I’ve seen.

When the tortoise first started speaking to Brutha, he assumed he was going crazy. When the tortoise started telling him that it was actually the Great God Om, Brutha assumed he was being tempted by a demon. When his faith was strong enough for him to accept that the tortoise actually was the Great God Om, Brutha began the transformation from simple minded gardener and novice monk to the greatest prophet his faith has ever known.

Shortly after Brutha began carrying around a tortoise and speaking to it he was chosen by the head of the Omnian question, Vorbis, to accompany him to the neighboring town of Ephebe. He was chosen because even though he had never learned how to read and really hated to think, he was gifted with an eidetic memory that Vorbis thought would come in handy. They were going to Ephebe because there was a group of people there who were worshiping the Great Tortoise, because they believed the world was a flat disc riding on the backs of four giant elephants, which were in turn riding on the back of an even more giant tortoise. This seemed insulting to the Omnians, because they believed the Great God Om was the only real God, and that he would never manifest as something as lowly as a tortoise.

While in Ephebe, Brutha and Om became acquainted with three philosophers, and while talking to them Om came to the disturbing realization that even though many people worshipped him out of habit or due to fear of the Quisition, Brutha is the only person left who truly believes in him. This was a problem for Om because a god’s manifestations and powers are dependent on the number of believers they have, and if anything were to happen to Brutha, he would fade away. Fighting broke out between the Omnians and Ephebians, and Brutha memorized many scrolls from Ephebe’s extensive library before escaping in a boat. Brutha and Om wound up trekking back home through the desert with a badly injured Vorbis, and Om spent many anxious hours protecting Brutha from the various small gods floating through the desert looking for someone to believe in them. Once they came to the edge of the desert a recovered Vorbis tried to kill the tortoise, abducted Brutha, and rushed to Omnia to be declared the eighth Prophet.

Back in Omnia, Vorbis ordered Brutha to be publicly burned for heresy on the back of a brand new torture device that looks like a giant turtle. At the last possible moment, Om fell from the sky onto Vorbis’s head, killing him instantly. Upon seeing this miracle, many people began to once again truly believe in Om and he became powerful once again. He then named Brutha the eighth Prophet and allowed him to establish the new Church doctrines. Together they avoided war between Omnia and Ephebe, and Brutha lived on for another one hundred years, turning what was supposed to be the bloodiest century in Omnian history into a century of peace.

I guess what you get out of this novel depends on how you choose to look at it. Some people think it’s purely a fun read, some people think it’s a commentary on today’s religious disagreements, and some people think that whatever it was meant to be, it was horrible. I enjoyed it, but I wouldn’t use it as a way to frame my opinions of real world religious dynamics. Another good thing about it is that even though it is a part of the Discworld series, you don’t have to know any of the Discworld culture or backstory to enjoy it, so if you are wanting to familiarize yourself with Pratchett’s books it’s a good one to try.

That disputed author’s note serves as a springboard for the haunting story of Sierva Maria de Todos los Angeles, the daughter of a spineless, fearful marquis and his drunken, drug addicted wife. The parents hate each other so much that they hate their own daughter because they can see each other in her. They send her to live with the slaves and she becomes enamored with their lifestyle, moving around silently (even when her mother forces her to wear a bell around her wrist), worshiping their gods along with practicing Catholicism, and lying just as easily as she tells the truth. One day when one of the servants takes her with them to the market she is bitten on the ankle by a dog. It is just a small wound, so the servant dresses it and sends the girl on her way without even thinking to tell her parents. The next day, the servant returns to the market and sees that the dog had been killed and hung up to let people know that it had rabies. Everyone then becomes consumed with the fear that Sierva Maria has the disease. From then on, things just keep getting worse for the poor girl. Even though she never shows any signs of rabies, she is subjected to so many different treatments that what was once a healed wound became a festered sore that she couldn’t even walk on. A doctor befriends her father and treats the girl, but says that there is nothing that can be done.

The local Bishop summons the girl’s father to his home and tells him that he believes the girl is possessed. After a while, the father decides to listen to the Bishop and has his daughter committed at a local convent. The nuns and the abbess immediately start attributing every bad thing that happens in the convent on Sierva Maria. She fights them, tears up her cell and her clothing, and becomes little more than a wild animal in response to their treatment. Then the Bishop sends his personal librarian to be the girl’s exorcist and from there everything begins to change. The priest makes sure the girl is treated humanely, and she begins to respond to him. Eventually, the priest and the girl fall in love. It is fascinating to watch the love story between the two characters unfold, and heart breaking to see all the obstacles that come between Sierva Maria and any form of happiness. Once again, Gabriel Garcia Marquez has crafted a unique and entertaining story that will linger in the minds of its readers for years to come.

The hero of Stardust is Tristran Thorn, from the small English village of Wall. Wall is a town that borders on the magical land of Faerie, and the gateway between Wall and Faerie is guarded at all times. Except, of course, for once every seven years when people come from all over England to be allowed to cross through the Wall and into the Faerie marketplace. Unbeknownst to him, Tristran is the result of a chance encounter between his father and a mysterious woman at one of those market places. When he was born, he was pushed through the gap in the wall with a note, and since there were only restrictions on people going into Faerie and not coming out, he was given to his father.

One day, while trying to convince the girl that he loves to marry him, Tristran notices a falling star. The girl tells him that if he brings back the star, she will marry him. Tristran goes off to retrieve the star, and is allowed to cross the wall into Faerie to find it since that is where he came from. Unfortunately, bringing home a falling star is easier said than done. Not only are there witches trying to find the star too, the rules of everything in Faerie are different and hard for Tristran to comprehend. It also doesn’t help that the star actually turns out to be a woman, and she doesn’t want to be rescued.

Gaiman has altered his style in this book in homage to the old fairy tales that were the inspiration for it, but his personality comes out in the humor and the ridiculous escapades in this book. It is a fascinating, vividly described story full of intriguing characters and whimsical turns of plot. Very entertaining, and a must read for anyone who is a Gaiman fan.

There are 2 parts of quantum mechanics, the dynamical equations of motion which are completely deterministic, and the collapse which is probabilistic. Nobody has ever provided any way of determining when this collapse occurs. The problem of doing so is called the measurement problem, and was first elucidated by the great John Von Neumann. As some of you might have suspected, things like the “consciousness causes collapse” idea are completely speculative.

You’ll often hear people, sometime very eminent ones, making statements that the world is essentially random, and that that has been proved by quantum mechanics, which will never be overturned. It is true that most people suspect that we need a theory that makes the same predictions as quantum mechanics does. This suspicion is fueled by a very precise and unfailing accuracy in all of the predictions quantum mechanics has ever been asked to make. (People will probably only start allowing themselves to consider looking for theories that make different predictions if quantum mechanics starts making erroneous predictions, and nobody expects that to happen.) However, there are interpretations of quantum mechanics that don’t involve a collapse of the wave function, and there are other complete theories that make the same predictions as quantum mechanics, notably Bohm’s theory. These theories, because they only rely on the dynamical equations of motion of quantum mechanics, are completely deterministic.

One thing that everyone needs to know is that the Many Worlds interpretation has very serious problems. Hugh Everett III’s paper did not actually specify the Many Worlds interpretation, the Many Worlds interpretation being just one interpretation of Everett’s paper. It could also be read in such a way as to suggest that the collapse is a delusion that the dynamical laws can be shown mathematically to bring about in us. One of the most damning things about the Many Worlds interpretation is that the separate worlds that are actually generated depend on the basis in which one writes down the universal state vector. And quantum mechanics, like most mathematical theories, is invariant with respect to basis. For example, whether I specify a vector with polar coordinates or Cartesian ones, it’s still the same vector, even though I’m choosing to use two different point-sets to describe it. Nobody has come up with any way of finding some sort of canonical basis which we can use to tell which worlds are actually coming in to being, so to my mind Many Worlds is nonsensical (i.e. not well-defined). Some attempts to figure out how to construct a preferred basis have been made since the publication of this book (1994), but I haven’t evaluated all of them. Most of them have smackings of anthropomorphism, which strikes me as not the best direction to be going. As of 2001, the problem had still not been solved.

Another interesting thing that one can show is that any theory whatsoever that does not involve collapse will not be distinguishable by experiment from any other of the theories that don’t involve collapse. This means that if collapse is ever shown to not happen (and this is difficult but possible and also what I happen to believe), then there are widely varying metaphysical interpretations, each one of which is completely untestable even in principle.

In short, you can’t even begin to understand quantum mechanics until you’ve read this fascinating book.

There’s also a response to the Hegelian notion that one can somehow go “beyond” faith by studying philosophy. To my mind, it’s always been obvious that no satisfactory logical proof has been found for or against God, but I guess people really wanted to look for one for a long time, so they lost their objectivity somewhere in the process.

I really liked the idea of The Knight of Faith, i.e. someone who trusts that good things will come to him on the strength of the absurd. I think I live this courageously sometimes. I have ventured to consider the possibility of achieving things that it would be absurd for most people to even consider achieving. And further, I have then been successful. This is one of the reasons I count myself luckier (but also braver) than everyone else.

The first selection, Why I Write is mostly about the necessity of writing at least tangentially about politics in the age in which George Orwell is living. The Lion and the Unicorn is a discussion of what makes Britons Britons, and sort of a call to arms and to socialism. A Hanging is a short story about a dude getting hanged. Politics and the English Language is an instructive piece about not using big words all the time and how politicians try to obscure their meaning.

Overall, I found the selection quite nice, but definitely need to read more Orwell, in particular Homage to Catalonia. This is actually the first thing I’ve read of his. I know, I’m self-deprived.

Dead Souls is about a man who goes about in early nineteenth century Russia buying up dead souls, that is people’s serfs who had died but were still registered with the government and incurring taxes. Exactly why he does this is suspended until the end, but it’s very anti-climactic as I believe there was supposed to be a second part of the book, but people say it’s awful and incomplete.

What makes the book really great is the characterization. I found myself laughing out loud many times while reading it. I would even dare say that it’s a bit like The Office in its caricatures. Gogol breaks the fourth wall a lot, even at one point hinting about how he wasn’t in Russia while he was writing the book.

I also suspect that much is owed to the particular translation I got, which is by B.G. Guerney. He uses a lot of words not commonly used in English anymore, and has some interesting styles of writing, but I think he did a really good job of making it flow. By the way, when he talks about them playing Whist, they’re almost certainly actually playing the extremely popular Russian card game Preferans (преферанс).

Pick it up if you want to get a taste of Old Russia without having to read Tolstoy or Dostoevsky.

Apparently, Taylor Helzer was a perfectly normal, devout Mormon until he went to a self help course that taught him that right and wrong don’t exist. I maintain that if he was perfectly normal, one really horrible self help course wouldn’t have been enough to take him from successful stockbroker to self proclaimed prophet and mass murderer, but to each his own I guess. This book was extremely well researched, and pays excellent attention to detail. Even the murders are recorded down to the last drop of blood.

This is a gripping story and a fascinating look into the mind of a madman and the people who followed him like sheep. The details of the crimes are not really for those who are weak at heart, but I commend the author for including the ugliness of the reality instead of glossing over it for the sake of the book. Definitely worth reading once, but not something I plan to read again in the future.

I’m sure that if someone were to put in enough effort to blog this book properly it would contain paragraph upon paragraph about finding your enlightenment, and the symbolism, yadda, yadda, yadda. Screw that. I say you should read the book for yourself, draw from it what you will, and then if you’re interested read what other people have to say about it.

As I’m sure you could guess from the title, this book takes a look at some of the more prominent religious sects and attempts to explain some of their doctrines, a little bit about their history, and their meeting/worship styles. The different groups covered are: Seventh Day Adventist, Jehovah’s Witness, Mormon, Liberalism, New Thought, Christian Science, Spiritualist, and Theosophist. The information is presented in several different ways so that you can choose to go through it in whichever way suits you best, and even though there is a lot of information it isn’t overwhelming. If you have any interest in learning about these sects and what they believe in, I highly recommend this book.

If you have any interest in becoming more familiar with the history of the Catholic Church, this an excellent place to start. It is an engaging read and is quite easy to follow. Louis de Wohl has made writing about the (Catholic) Church his mission, and it clearly shows through his writing.

Obviously, if you want to learn anything about philosophy, reading a book of jokes is not the way to go. I didn’t start the book expecting to learn any mind shattering truths, therefore I wasn’t disappointed when I didn’t. I guess maybe this would work for you if you are hoping to use jokes as a way to make people think you know something about philosophy.

The good news is, the book is incredibly short so if you’re curious about it you can read it without a very big time commitment. However, if you do try it and think it’s not good, don’t blame me for recommending it.

Which is to say that they sat on my shelf for a very long time. Everytime that I went to read them, I opened to Molloy, thumbed through, saw that it was a block of text, shut it, and put it off for later.

I finally forced myself through Molloy. I almost quit about 20 pages in, but pushed through. And I am infinitely glad that I did.

Molloy is comprised of two monologues, one by Molloy, the second by a detective named Moran. Molloy’s monologue spans the first 90+ pages of the book, and Moran’s is the second half.

What’s so daunting about the book is that Beckett has done away with many of the comforts of fiction, and stripped it to a bristling block of stream-of-consciousness. Molloy’s monologue is two paragraphs, with one lasting for over 90 pages. On top of that, Molloy is insane. This is not pick-it-up fiction, but a serious investment. But with the investment comes reward.

If you want studied, scholarly analysis of what Beckett is doing here, there are many internet resources. You most likely, if you haven’t read it, care little about his altering of character voice, his desire to reduce the first person to a point of simply consciousness; nor do you care about whatever his intentions were with stating something about language, about its inability to not introduce errors and intentional obfuscations. Maybe you do, but I have little interest in writing a second-rate lit paper. And when I say “interest”, I mean “ability.”

The book is worth reading, as opposed to articles about what it wants to achieve, because Beckett has one of the most razor sharp voices for our inner drive towards complete vegetation. There are images contained in Molloy that strike me as deeply as any in fiction. Not only that, but Beckett has an eye for the darkly humorous. Beckett is dark. Really, really fucking dark. After the hammering that is Molloy’s monologue, Moran’s quickly proves to be even more bleak, with the protagonist an abusive father, himself slowly going insane. But somehow this is tolerable due to Beckett’s imbuing everything with equal parts humor and dread. It’s a chocolate/peanut butter combo that runs through the book beautifully.

Beckett owes a lot to Joyce, as has been stated by others. Both monologues are similar, in a way, to Molly’s at the end of Ulysses. I think Molloy is more of an enjoyable read than Ulysses, however. Similarly, it is no surprise to me that Paul Auster edited Beckett’s collected works, as his City of Glass, part of it’s own celebrated trilogy, owes much of its final pages to Molloy. If Auster, Joyce, Markson, or Robbe-Grillet tickle any parts of you below the belt, then you probably have already encountered Beckett, and aren’t going at it ass-backwards like I am.

If you read only one 90-page stream-of-conscious paragraph this year, make it Molloy. I would easily say that it’s the most enjoyment I’ve gotten out of a book since 2666/One Hundred Years of Solitude.

As the title explains, The Drowned Book is written by Bahauddin, the father of Jelaluddin Rumi, the Islamic mystic poet of the 13th century.  The title comes from when Rumi was teaching something from his father’s writings by a fountain to his students, and Shams of Tabriz, a crazy wandering dervish that had an intimate friendship with Rumi, pushed the copy of the book into a fountain.  Rumi gets pissed, but Shams says that when he reaches in the fountain to get the book, it’ll be dry.  Of course, the book comes out dry and not ruined, and Rumi learns the lesson that he can’t be bound by his dead father’s teachings and that there are higher planes of experience.

Basically Bahauddin’s book was a private journal that he kept, with everything from mystical experiences written down, to meditations on the Quran, to wild sexual fantasies which would’ve scandalized the community, to tips on treating nausea and gardening.

I appreciate his realness as a person–he was a man who had appetites–sexual and spiritual, and his love for God wound both together.  Some of the spiritual wisdom he offers is a bit tedious to read though, but not enough to make me dislike the selections all together.

And I have to admit that I prefer the poetry of Rumi than to his father’s writings, but Bahauddin is a delight in his respective ways too.

The Mystical Baker has blogged.

Eventually, holes began to appear in this strategy. In 1954, W. A. Lewis published a paper which gave some of the theoretical impetus for state-led development. Lewis theorized that the wage rate would remain at the level of agricultural subsistence, thus providing a cheap source of labor for industry. In reality, urban wage rates grossly outstripped rural rates. These unequal gains precluded the emergence of a mass market for consumer goods, thus reducing demand and inhibiting the growth of the industrial sector.

Additionally, governments squeezed the rural agricultural population to prop up industry, making agriculture increasingly unattractive and giving rise to a rural-urban exodus. Squatter cities were born. This lack of focus on developing primary markets was one of the most serious omissions of ISI. From my own experience in Namibia, many families no longer even produce enough food to subsist, relying instead on the few of their relatives who have succeeded in gaining formal employment. These state-supported incomes then become stretched over many people.
In the late 1970s, state intervention was largely discredited and neoclassical theory came to the fore. It was posited by neoclassical theorists that the four “little tigers” or “dragons” of East Asia: Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, and South Korea owed much of their success to a reduced role for the state.

Neoclassical theory also had problems. In insisting on state retrenchment, it seems the pendulum swung back a bit too far. It is not enough to lower inflation and interest rates to achieve increased investment. Infrastructure must be available as well. People will wait for paved roads, plumbing, and electricity from the government before tacking that cost onto their new factory. Investors, particularly from abroad, waited for governments to make the first move, but the orthodoxy of the day was that the state should not interfere, and the the governments never did.

Other problems included a tendency for neoclassicals to overestimate the extent of currency overvaluation, primarily because secrecy and black markets existed, thus making the official currency evaluations applicable only in some parts of the economy. In addition, it came to light that general theoretical assumptions such as the rational actor assumption and the efficient market assumption are sometimes far from true in the third world. People do not always behave rationally. One example of many is that laborers, because familial structures in some third world countries, often are not the recipients of the fruits of their toil. In this case, one can hardly expect someone to behave in a manner that would increase their economic gains. Rather, one would expect them to work far less than the rational actor theory would presuppose.

It would seem that bringing the state back into development would be the way to go. However, in most of the countries that could benefit from this, an increased role for the state is no longer possible. These states simply lack the strength to implement a strong state-led development model. First world countries are also not in the mood these days to give trade concessions and more aid to programs of this sort.
The most modern development is postdevelopment thought. Postdevelopment theorists question or reject the value of development. Some of them think that development is really just a way of integrating and globalizing people, and that achieving a net increase in welfare for the world’s poor has never been the goal of development projects. People may have been happily producing food for themselves instead of for the market, but because it was not monetized, it did not register on the most used statistics gauging welfare. Thus, when “development” takes places, gains are illusory and happiness may actually decrease. Postdevelopment thought is connected in some ways to the anti-globalization movement, but it’s not a perfect intersection. A major arc of postdevelopment theory is that we need to focus on the particular human cases and stop trying to develop grand theories for states.

I’ll stop here. I’ve touched on probably only a tenth of what I could say about this topic. In any case, despite my loathing for all things postmodern, there is something to postdevelopment thought. Before I came to the Peace Corps, it didn’t register to me that organizations like the Peace Corps only go to tribes that are “integrating” into the global system and trying to “develop”. They’re not going to send you to live with a truly traditional people like the Himba here in Namibia. In light of this, one wonders whether helping people is really the goal of development.

This book goes to the Bible to give examples of people who were truly bold for God, and shows the differences between Christian boldness vs. worldly boldness. Brown is also very clear that boldness comes with a price, and that it may not be something everyone is willing to pay, although they should. This book is an excellent motivator for Christian people who are looking for their voice, and a great reminder for those who may need a little kick in the butt. I recommend reading it if you can find a copy, but then again I think all of Steve Brown’s books are worth reading.

The book is what it sounds like. Zinn attempts to tell the story of US History from the side of the people instead of the ruling classes, the elite, or the establishment. He spends a good deal of time on issues of race, gender, minorities, labor and class struggles, slavery, war, and other forms of oppression.

There are some similarities with Lies My Teacher Told Me, but that book doesn’t attempt to be a comprehensive history as Zinn’s book does. I certainly learned a lot from it, and am very happy to have read it.

Issues that are considered include war, anti-technology people, public works, unions, and interventionist policies of all kinds.

So many people support Keynesian theory these days that you have to seriously consider the possibility that you are a fool if you don’t. I’ve had a couple of spirited conversations with a friend of mine about the money supply and the gold standard and these types of conversations always seem to go to this place where it is remarked that the kind of thinking and logic one might apply to individuals and families is inapplicable to macroeconomics. Indeed, if Keynesian theory is to be believed, only experts can really understand macroeconomic policy. On this, Hazlitt quotes Adam Smith: “What is prudence in the conduct of every private family can scarce be folly in that of a great kingdom.”

I don’t know the answers, but I can definitely say that even if there were some merit in some of the interventionist policies taken by the government, these policies could definitely be brought about in a fairer way. For example, if it really is necessary to increase the money supply, why not give new money to everyone at the same time? They do it when they give us our “stimulus” checks. In any case, it’s quite clear to me that in the rare instances that logic can be found in macroeconomic policy, the middle and lower classes get the short end of the stick.

There isn’t much to say about the book because it’s a pretty generic experience. Since it follows the day to day life of one man, if I tell you what happens it becomes not worth reading. A lot of things go on in the book, but when you add them all up it doesn’t make a very substantial whole. If you have a several empty hours to fill it will help you pass them, but I personally don’t think that it’s something you will carry around with you for very long afterwards so I think I would read something else instead.

The Amber Spyglass wraps up the His Dark Materials trilogy. Trying to separate the books makes for a bit of a quandary, especially when read back-to-back, as they form a cohesive piece. But The Amber Spyglass is definitely a worthy ending to the trilogy.

I will not explore the grievances I might have had with Pullman’s humanistic evangelical approach as I originally planned. Laying out my concerns to my roommate, she stated that she was unaware of the background of the novel, and thus didn’t notice when she should have taken offense. This seems like the most desirable position. If you have a novel for kids where God is getting killed, the lines are probably already drawn on whether you can enjoy it or not, regardless of what the author’s intent was.

The book follows two children as they attempt to bring about a second fall. Introduced are new characters and worlds and creatures, and the book is by far the most imaginative of the three in terms of content. The protagonists go to a world with miniature spies with poison-tipped spurs who travel on dragon flies, to the land of the dead, and to the home that the Authority (God) lives in.

What’s amazing is that Pullman dispenses with much of the religious overtones with over a hundred pages to go, and shows that the story is largely about love. Not love in a bullshit humanistic-hold-hands-fellow-men kind of way, but love in the sense that we all, if we are lucky, have experienced it growing up: the feeling that you aren’t a kid anymore, because you love. And it’s weird, and it’s sexual, and it’s confusing, and you know you’re still a kid, but you don’t want to be, and you figure out that this is the color of life that you have been missing. Pullman manages to capture this almost pitch-perfectly. And there are still little midget dudes running around with spurs on dragonflies.

I can see this book changing a kid’s life, probably for the better. And I can see it being helpful to occasionally be reminded of the wonder of logic and love as an adult.

Anyhow, A Fire Upon the Deep was one of the most incredible, thought-provoking books I’ve ever read. The intricate plot is galactic in scale and impossible to summarize, so I’m going to gloss right over the story and talk about the backdrop, which is where Vinge shines. (Who cares about story anyways?)

Vinge believes in writing plausible hard science fiction, but believes that the technological singularity will happen before the middle of this century, making it impossible for anyone to really set a hard science fiction novel very far in the future. In some Vinge’s novels, such as Rainbows End, he stays away from the prediction wall by writing about the near future. In others, like A Fire Upon the Deep,  he’ll invoke a singularity-stopping deus ex machina. In this case, it’s laws of physics which don’t permit AI in our part of the universe.

So the galaxy is stratified. There are slow parts of the galaxy where people can’t get much more sophisticated than we are now. There are other parts where faster-than-light travel and all kinds of fancy AI are possible. Most races, given enough time, colonize the more permissive parts of the galaxy, experience a technological singularity, and then “transcend” into different kinds of existence, becoming angel/demon-like “powers” first, and then disappearing, for reasons that mere mortals could never understand.

And so this story is populated with everything from god-like creatures to unsophisticated bottom dwellers of the universe who make centuries-long voyages in “coldsleep” while civilizations and singularities pass them by.

It’s bewildering. After every two chapters or so I had to put it down and gaze at the wall, glassy-eyed, and contemplate the true possibilities of our future.

Our civilization’s history, mercifully free of planetary catastrophes and other game-changers, has always had me believe in a sort of unilineal cultural history of planets, culminating in a technological singularity and then happiness ever after.

Vinge, with a visionary mathematician’s erudition, took care to demolish my pompous simplicity with a half a dozen compelling examples of the different ways that a planet’s history might turn out incredibly weird. The combinitorics are unfathomable. Who the fuck knows what’s going to happen.

Investigation eventually proved that the group of young men that attacked the von Steins did it because of a plot dreamed up while they were playing Dungeons and Dragons. Lieth von Stein had just received a fairly large inheritance, and the boys dreamed of killing him and using the money to buy nice cars and a huge house in the woods so they could spend their lives playing Dungeons and Dragons to death. The most chilling part of this story is that one of the men so consumed with killing a couple to get money to play a fantasy game was their own son.

This crime has attracted a lot of attention, probably due to the twisted logic of the killers. It was made into a movie, and there was another book written about it. However, even with all of the interest in the story there are a lot of questions that remain unanswered. Certain forensic evidence such as the stomach contents of the body don’t match the timeline given to the police by Bonnie and corroborated by credit card receipts. The man convicted of being the one who actually beat Mr. von Stein to death is not the man that Bonnie believes was in her room that night. Bonnie’s daughter was just down the hall and claims to have slept through the entire attack. This is the kind of story that will stay with you for a long time, if even its only because of all the loose ends that are left behind.

The novel is set on the HMS Bellipotent, and follows Billy Budd, a young sailor impressed into service in Her Majesty’s navy. The ship’s master-at-arms, John Claggart, develops an odd, sexually-charged, lust-filled hatred for Billy, and eventually decides to accuse him of conspiring to mutiny. This is a serious charge at any time, I suppose, but the novel is set in the late 1790s, shortly after a couple of serious mutinies (one of which is the awesomely-named Spithead mutiny) — and so the charge is especially serious. The ship’s captain, Edward “Starry” Vere, has also taken a liking to Billy (though probably not that kind of liking), and doesn’t really believe Claggart. Vere brings Claggart and Billy both into his cabin, so they can work things out man-to-man-to-man, which doesn’t go well: Claggart accuses Billy to his face, Billy’s stutter kicks in, and so he punches Claggart (really, REALLY hard) instead of offering a more reasoned rebuttal, and Claggart falls dead to the floor. Vere decides Billy will have to hang for killing an officer, because order must be maintained on the ship at all costs.

The current in the novel that deals with fears of mutiny and the rule of law in a closed system like a naval ship is both interesting and well-handled; for instance, it’s difficult to fault Vere’s line of reasoning, despite feeling that his conclusion to execute Billy is completely wrong. The novel’s examination of Claggart’s psychology — his reasons for hating Billy — is also excellent; there’s the infamous “soup scene” which you should just read, right now. The sexual symbolism is, I should hope, both obvious and hilarious.

What I found most interesting about the novel, however, was the way it played with the idea of narratorial authority. The penultimate chapter (or maybe the one before it…) is the ‘official’ version of the events recounted in the novel, published in a naval gazette; it describes Budd as a budding mutineer, and Claggart as an upstanding officer stabbed in the performance of his duties. The novel’s narrator disparages this account, naturally, as it contradicts the entire novel – but the novel is being recounted long after the fact by a man who gives no indication that he was an eyewitness, and so there’s no reason to believe that the novel’s version of events is any more correct than the ‘official’ version. The reader doesn’t become aware of this problem until the novel is nearly over, though, by which time the narrator’s authority has been taken for granted. It’s diabolical, is what it is.

The main character of the book is a really weird guy, but I can empathize with him. That probably makes me a weird guy too, but it might be that I have Absurdist feelings. He doesn’t really care about things and choices that people are supposed to care about, but it works.

I wouldn’t say I would buy the book for my friends or pull anyone’s arm to read this, but it satisfies my effort/reward limits. It’s a teeny book you could knock out in a few hours, so even with a tiny reward it’s probably still worth the read. On the other hand, if you can find a similarly teeny book which you think will have a lot of reward, you’re economically and morally compelled to read that one first.

This is a rebuttal to Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion, a book which I have never read. I have seen a few lectures and interviews with Dawkins and feel I know where he’s coming from. To me, it seems like he thinks atheists as a group are misunderstood and attacked, particularly in America. As such, atheists need to get angry and verbally attack religious people, in particular Christians who believe in Creationism or Intelligent Design. He thinks it is a good strategy to compare people’s belief in God with a childish belief in Santa Clause and doubts whether most Christians will respond to anything other than an emotivist attack.

So, on to The Dawkins Delusion. I didn’t really learn much from the book. One interesting point which I’d never heard before is in answer to the claim that there is an infinite regress in causality so it doesn’t make sense to look for a final cause of the world. The authors say that this is precisely what physicists look for when they search for a “Theory of Everything”. I don’t know how true this is. I’m reminded of Hawking’s musings in A Brief History of Time that, even after discovering the single set of equations that describe all of nature, we will still have to wonder what breathes life into them.

I was unsettled by the authors’ rejection of the idea of “viruses of the mind” and “memes”. I always thought these were some of Dawkins’s most loved devices among academics, but the authors’ of this book seem to think it’s superfluous to use memes to understand culture and belief, and that many academics don’t think memes exist.

I was also happy to see the authors’ refutation of Dawkins’s belief that atheists are nonviolent. The authors’ bring up historical cases such as the Soviet’s destruction and elimination of churches and priests between 1918-1941 and other violent persecution of Christians in the name of Atheism. The authors’ also make the point that, based on Robert Pape’s study, Dying to Win, suicide bombings have a political rather than religious motivation, and that religion is neither sufficient or necessary to account for such radicalism.

Well, I’m still not religious, and I think the author isn’t going to get any converts out of this, despite the authors hope in the introduction that the book would be read by atheists as well as Christians. It might change some people’s minds about being militant a la Dawkins, but I think that’s unlikely and it will probably serve Christians looking for refutation more than anything else.

In the midst of its jokes and offbeat plot twists, Making Money tells the story of steering an economy through the transition from the gold standard to paper currency, and of the panic associated with such a big change. Like many of the Discworld novels, Making Money is both an extremely enjoyable read and a look into a system that only makes sense because we all say it does. If you are a Pratchett fan, I think you will really enjoy this book, even though I doubt that it becomes an instant favorite. If you’ve never read anything by Pratchett before I would still keep it in mind to read later, but you may be better off to start with something else like Good Omens (co-written with Neil Gaiman), or at least read Going Postal first since it has the beginning of Moist van Lipwig’s story in it.

By this point I expected that this was going to be the same story formula set in a different place, and I wasn’t surprised to find that the supporting characters were pretty much the same people with different names. Redundancy between different books is one thing, what I couldn’t handle was the fact that this book seemed to keep repeating itself somehow. A set of characters would have an exchange, share a revelation found in some obscure symbol, then take off across town. Their route would be painstakingly described down to the last step, then a slightly different set of characters would have a slightly different exchange in a slightly different place, and share a slightly different revelation from a slightly more obscure symbol before once again taking off across town. After struggling through all of this over and over again for five hundred pages, the huge discovery at the end is a complete letdown. Very predictable object, found in a very predictable place.

For fans of the previous two books, or of Brown’s work in general, this book will probably be worth the read. If you are not a die hard fan of Dan Brown or of the Robert Langdon character and you are wanting to devote enough time to read five hundred pages of something, I promise you there are many other books more deserving of your time.

Fantasy books are not usually my bag. Especially children’s fantasy that adults read. I haven’t read, monolithic in the fantasy genre, Narnia, Harry Potter, or the Lord of the Rings. I am missing the essential building blocks of the fantasy genre. So, why start with a second-tier series like His Dark Materials?

The reputation of the trilogy is that where Narnia and, to a lesser-extent, Lord of the Rings (from what I have read of them, and not in them) are Christian tales, His Dark Materials is an atheistic rebuttal. I would like to state that if I chose to read a rebuttal of a style before reading what it is refuting because of some minor confluence of deistic opinion, which at best might be mere surface agreement, I should be beaten about the town square and forced to carry a sign that reads “Jackass.” The sort of small-mind that can only stand that which agrees with it, and will seek it out in a manner that allows it to ignore what that material itself very well might be referencing, is so child-like and retarded as to appear crippled irreparably.

I chose to read His Dark Materials based on strong recommendations from both of my roommates. I have yet to run across as determined a set of personal advocates for the other classics of the fantasy genre, so I bowed in deference to their taste. If a similar fan of Lord of the Rings or Narnia argues for those series as convincingly, I will gladly go through them. I was particularly swayed by the fact that I will, in fact, cry upon finishing the trilogy. I am slightly atwitter about the prospect of having human emotions.

Any advocate of fantasy, however, must first leap through my own prejudices against the genre. I don’t know why, but for some reason the whole business has very, very little appeal for me. Usually, the very mention of goblin, orc, or dwarf will instantly repel me.

The Subtle Knife introduces a new protagonist to the story, and follows him for the first chapters, but does eventually continue the story from the first book. The opening chapters of The Subtle Knife are compelling, portraying a boy of twelve living in Oxford who cares for his mother who is, seemingly, schizophrenic. However, it becomes apparent that something really is after Will and his mother. The story of the Golden Compass was much more traditional children’s fantasy fair, full of heroic little girls, armored bears, and magical fortune telling compasses from the beginning. So, maybe that’s why it took me a year, despite the fact that I liked The Golden Compass, to get to the Subtle Knife.

Which is unfortunate, on my part, because The Subtle Knife is, in my opinion, a superior book to The Golden Compass. It seems like Pullman has given up any semblance of pandering to children. His language isn’t simplistic, and his concerns seem to be as adult as most fiction every strives for.

There is a certain level of enjoyment at how subversive Pullman will go. And as the story shifts into a possible plot to murder God, its tough not to take this back to the realm of its social context. But suppressing that, ignoring that this is a children’s book (or young reader, or whatever the fuck), we have a fantasy story where Pullman has upped the stakes by using very potent symbolic creatures to say something that directly relates to most people with any connection to Western religion. But ignoring the target-audience and potential massive disagreements with the author’s final thesis aren’t exactly small caveats to leap over.

Update: After I wrote this, I decided to do my basic research. Which is Wikipedia. And the article on Pullman kinda made me want to scream. He sounds like a douche. A gigantic douche, in fact. I think I’ll fully delve into the whole thing once I finish with the third book, so as not to shitstain my perception too much with his potentially being a gigantic a-hole.

That being said, I don’t think that you have to be Catholic to enjoy the book, but I think you do have to be open minded about the concept. JP2 made an effort to give clear answers on several issues, and they deserve to be considered. Unlike many who have read it, I didn’t think that the answers pointed to Catholics being the only was that were “right”. It was pretty clear that it was his belief that God’s Grace extends to all baptized believers. Whether or not you would agree with the answers, I definitely think that the book is worth reading.

He talks a lot about the human need for something he calls the “Power Process”, which basically involves the ability to set one’s own goals, expend significant effort on them, and achieve them. He says that our ability to engage in this process is very minimal today and that this is the source of psychological ills. He also talks about surrogate activities, such as getting a Phd in something completely unrelated to survival, and how they can not really provide the same happiness one gets from truly engaging in the Power Process in the kinds of more meaningful activities we evolved to engage in.

There are some difficult questions to which I don’t have the answer:

1. Should we accept becoming something qualitatively different from our present selves?

2. Does AI and the singularity result in happiness or infinite sadness for us?

I don’t really know. Perhaps it’s a brazen stance to take, but I’m rolling with technology and loving it. I think that we may be able to control events so that in answers to the questions above, our identity is still something recognizable and we have a valuable life well into the future. I also kind of don’t think Ted’s revolution is possible. By the way, I just posted this from Africa where I live in a mud hut with no electricity and I’m going to go smoke my ecig now.

Note: Ted really seems to understand some things about primitive peoples that I didn’t know until I lived with them. For example, he states that people are quite content to site for hours at a time in primitive society. It’s true. Five people can literally sit for three hours staring at the fire without saying a word or moving. It’s a bit hard to deal with coming from the red hot center of technico-industrial society.

The editor of this volume seems to have the desire to show Rilke in an uncustomary light. I don’t exactly know what the customary light is, so I can’t say how well he achieved this objective. There’s a long essay which is in actuality snippings from a variety of Rilke which reads very nicely as if it were written at once. Then there are some poems on love, and some poems on other difficulties.

I will continue to read more Rilke to see if there’s anything I like. I’m starting to uncross my fingers though.

This is the story of post-independence Africa starting around 1950 until the 2000s. Although not completely organized in this way, most of the chapters cover one or two countries during a particular period. You then usually meet the same country again 10 or 15 years later in 10 chapters or so. It’s a little jarring sometimes, but probably the best way to respect chronology and the sequence of movements and ideas, as well as staying focused on one place at a time.
The problems confronted by Africa, as well as many other places in the world, are unfortunately usually presented in a vacuum by the media. This makes it very hard to understand cause and effect, so this book really helped me to understand why people are fighting and starving in this place or that. For example, one must understand the revolution in 1974 in Portugal if one is to understand the happenings in Mozambique and Angola shortly thereafter. And one must understand the happenings in those countries to understand things that happened in other sub-Saharan African countries.

I’m currently volunteering in Namibia. If you ask a Namibian, they portray their independence as a military victory won by a bloody struggle. In fact, independence for Namibia was part of a peace deal for Angola reached by the South Africans, Cubans, Russians, and Americans. So it is that in order to establish a sense of national unity and pride, Namibians and those living in other young nations have their own independence struggles grossly obscured and revised by central governments.

In the end, Meredith sort of ends in despair. He talks of all the times things have seemed extremely promising, and all the times we’ve been let down shortly thereafter. He identifies bad governance as the worst problem in Africa and doesn’t suggest how it can be repaired. He lists only South Africa and Botswana as nations that appear to be in good shape in terms of government at present and I agree with him, although both of those countries have huge problems with AIDS. I don’t really have answers either, but I do know that eliminating trade barriers would be worth much more money than all the aid we’re giving. I also think microfinance is a very much better way to handle the situation of aid. Empowering local people to solve their own problems, whilst still holding people accountable to repayment seems to me to be a much more sound policy for the future of Africa.

As an adventure story, it’s actually fairly entertaining - lots of suspense, chases, tracking, a few grisly murders, tight spots, improbable escapes, convenient coincidences, and feats of bravery and derring-do. The prose - well, it’s not what I consider elegant, though I wouldn’t go so far as to call it ponderous. Judge for yourself.

It’s an incredibly racist book, though its racism is that odd sort which would be offended if you called it racist. The Native Americans are constantly referred to as savages, though sometimes this means barbarian cannibals and sometimes it means “noble savages.” Hawk-eye constantly reminds whomever he’s talking to that his blood is “without a cross” of Indian blood, even though people might think otherwise because he’s such an awesome woodsman/scout/hunter/whatever. At times this anxiety about purity is ridiculous: the French Indians have named him “La Longue Carabine,” a name he takes issue with on the grounds that his gun is a rifle, and not a carbine.

The ending bothered me: the older of the two kidnapped (half-)sisters, Cora, who is “remotely descended” from an African, is the one who dies at the end (and in such an unceremonious way!), while the younger, fairer, blonde sister marries a strapping young major in His Majesty’s Royal something-or-other. I don’t think Cooper would say so if one could put the question to him, but it seems obvious (at least to me) that the novel’s internal logic requires that Cora die, because she’s a tiny bit not white.

I hate recommending books merely because they’re “classics,” so I won’t recommend this one; I’ll say, instead, that you should start with The Pioneers, and move on from there if the spirit so moves you.

The book is amazing. Kaczynski says: (1) Man has been warped by civilization, and is generally less happy than his primitive forebearers (agreed), (2) most careers and modern obsessions are surrogates for the things that we were really made to do (agreed), (3) liberals and conservatives are both wrong, and we need to tear the whole system down (agreed), (4) there is a time coming, 40 to 100 years from now, when we will become something post-human (agreed), and (5) because a compromise between our technological civilization and human dignity and freedom cannot be reached, there must be a revolution, now, before it’s too late, and we must intentionally force another dark ages (disagreed).

This last belief (apparently) is what led Kaczynski to start murdering advertising and computer science people. I can’t help but think I could talk him out of it. I wonder if this he’d write me back if I wrote to him in prison.