A History of the Arab Peoples

Posted on August 17, 2009 by smellincoffee

A History of the Arab Peoples

© 1991 Albert Hourani
565 pages, including appendices, maps, notes, and index.
I picked this up (with both hands) to add historical context for my reading of The Essential Koran and to fill in the gaps of my knowledge of Arab history, which are as vast as the sands of the Arabian desert. Hourani‘s History is an expansive work, covering Arab history from the arrival of Muhammed to the late 1980s. The work is general history, with seperate sections within a chapter covering political, social, and economic change. There is a wealth of information here, although that comes at a price: some sections, particularly political history after the first part of the book, feel rushed. Sixty pages after the Ottoman Empire rises, it is the sick man of Europe and the Young Turks are attempting to seize control. Although it is readable, I think the book better serves as a reference than a popular history read, especially given the way Hourani divides the book — most notably, his pause from the general political history of the first part of the book to deliver several chapters on the geography of the Arab world and life in its cities and countrysides.
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Star Wars: the Force Unleashed

Posted on August 15, 2009 by smellincoffee

Star Wars: the Force Unleashed

© 2008 LucasFilm & Sean Williams
319 pages
Jar Jar Binks: Where wesa goin?
Qui-Gon Jinn: Don’t worry. The Force will guide us.
Jar Jar Binks: Ohh, maxi big ‘da Force’. Well, dat smells stinkowiff. (The Phantom Menace)
When I saw this in the library catalogue, I blinked — wasn’t The Force Unleashed a video game? Indeed it is, but it’s also a book. LucasFilm decided to do something they’ve done before, which is to present a story told across multiple mediums. I’m assuming Williams took a general plot from one of LucasFilm’s creative types and turned it into a book.
Star Wars legend has it that Luke Skywalker’s original last name was Starkiller, but Lucas changed it to prevent damage being done to his hero’s “feel”. That our main character here – a young apprentice who has been raised as a child to be Darth Vader’s protege — has the name “Starkiller” is no accident. I wonder if this is the story that would have been told had Luke Skywalker been not hidden away on Tatooine, but raised by Vader in secret. Our protagonist is being raised to help Vader overthrow the Emperor, which Anakin was already thinking about on Mustafar, when he told Padme that they could rule as an imperial couple and “make things the way [they] want them to be”.
When the book begins, Starkiller is nearing the end of his training. To test him, Vader dispatches him on a number of assassination missions in which he is to fulfill Order 66 by killing a few Jedi masters who have been hiding in the ten or fifteen years that have apparently passed since Revenge of the Sith. He is joined by a young pilot named Juno Eclipse (Darth Vader evidently forgetting the effect spending a lot of time in dangerous situations has on young people who are attracted to one another) and a droid named PROXY who is able to project holographic images of various dead Jedi and mimic their fighting styles. PROXY has been Starkiller’s nursemaid and friend, although his primary programming is to test Starkiller’s saberfighting by attempting to kill him periodically.
The first 77 pages or so are a bit tedious: they remind me most of a video game in that Darth Vader shows up only to say “Go here, kill him” and the main characters fly off to dispatch their foes within a few pages. Things pick up once the Emperor discovers Vader’s secret apprentice and Starkiller is thrown out of an airlock. I haven’t read very many novels in which the main character is killed within eighty pages, but this is one of them. That’s not the end of it, as you might imagine, but I won’t spoil anything. After this, the novel picks up strength and becomes a fairly enjoyable read for Star Wars fans. Additionally, the book feeds into A New Hope: the Alliance to Restore the Republic, hinted at very strongly in Revenge of the Sith‘s deleted scenes, will feature in the plot.
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Dolphins

Posted on August 13, 2009 by smellincoffee

Dolphins

© 1975 Jacques-Yves Cousteau
304 pages
In every color, there is the light. In every stone sleeps a crystal. Remember the shaman, when he used to say — “Man is the dream of the dolphin.” – “The Dream of the Dolphin“, Enigma
“It is obvious that dolphins are often motivated by curiosity, and especially by curiosity about man. One can literally see it in their eyes. This is a fact that can be doubted only by someone who has never really looked a dolphin in the eye. The brilliance of that organ, the spark that is so evidence there, seems to come from another world. The look which the dolphin gives — a keen look, slightly melancholy and mischievous, but less insolent and cynical than that of monkeys — seems full of indulgence for the uncertainties of the human condition. Among primates, one sometimes detects what appears to be sadness at not being human. This sentiment is alien to the dolphin.” – pg. 27-28
Back in 2007 I read Cousteau’s Whales, consisting of recollections of his years spent on the open seas tracking whales (organized topically) replete with plenty of pictures. Dolphins is very much the same: like Whales, it’s a translation from the original French and consists of informational recollections about dolphins. There isn’t an obvious organization behind the way chapters are arranged: a chapter on dolphin biology may be followed immediately by a chapter recounting human-dolphin interactions throughout history. Nothing other than the subject (and the binding) holds the book together, but given how interesting the subject is to most people, I doubt that it is very much hurt by this.
Despite how familiar dolphins seem, Cousteau writes, we know very little about them. What little information we posses has been collected by observing dolphins in captivity, where their behavior has been “deformed”, to use the word his translator likes to use so often. There’s a lot of information in here, especially in the chapter focusing on historical interactions between humanity and dolphins. A story from Pliny detailing how fishermen used to fish with dolphins, allowing the dolphins to drive fish toward the shore is followed by Cousteau’s account of visiting a tribe in Mauritania that has subsisted on fish caught with the aid of dolphins for untold generations. This section has some of the more interesting pictures, in my view: historical depictions of dolphins. Apparently Jesus has been presented as a dolphin before.
Although the book’s subject is interesting, some of the information contained therein might be dated: this was written in 1975, when technological limitations made it impossible to gather detailed information on dolphins in the wild. Today, palm-sized cameras and equipment like this probably make marine biologists’ jobs a lot easier.
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This Week at the Library (12/8)

Posted on August 12, 2009 by smellincoffee

Books this Update:

  • Gold, Isaac Asimov
  • Aristotle’s Children, Richard Rubenstein
  • Footprints of God, Greg Iles
  • Anthropology for Dummies, Cameron Smith
  • Securing Democracy, ed. Gary Gregg III
  • Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
This was a well-rounded week, I think: history, politics, essays, short stories, intelligently-written novels, and a guide to anthropology. Isaac Asimov’s Gold was first, consisting of essays relating to and stories with the theme of science fiction. I’ve not seen the essays or short stories in any other collection, and they were classic Asimov: funny, charming, and intelligent. In a few of the stories he pushes his creative envelope: one in particular sees a robot named Cal realize that there is something driving him that may override the Three Laws: the yearning to create.
Aristotle’s Children is a work of medieval and church history that focuses on the effect of Aristotelian thinking in the Catholic church’s ever-evolving theology. It’s a very readable narrative featuring characters like Thomas Aquinas and Peter Abelard prominently. Its success may be limited by its topic: the intellectual life of the Catholic church isn’t a topic that enjoys a wide readership.
Greg Iles‘ Footprints of God is a gripping science fiction and fantasy thriller that builds off of the US Government’s attempts to create a superintelligent computer — one that combines the processing speed of a supercomputer with the creativity and reasoning abilities of the human brain. When main character David Tennant and his friend Dr. Fielding attempt to suspend the project so that side-effects of the projects’ human testing can be investigated, Dr. Fielding suddenly dies of a stroke — and Tennant is given a strong impression by his coworkers that if he doesn’t play nice, he will be next. In no time at all, Tennant is running through the woods being chased by government helicopters while having dreams that he is Jesus or God. Iles combines science fiction with metaphysical speculation while doing both well. I enjoyed more than most of Iles‘ works to date.
Anthropology for Dummies is an introduction to the obvious field. Like most for Dummies books, it is heavily organized and written informally, introducing the reader to the field itself as well as to its areas of interest: biology, language, history, sociology, and a litany of other fields relating to the study of humanity. The book was very helpful and nicely written: I may purchase it in the future for my personal library.
In order to determine how the Electoral College functioned, I checked out a book of essays intended to explain its function to Americans like myself who have very little idea of what it was meant to do or how it works. I was particularly interested in the role of delegates. The book was very informative — a feat easily done considering how little I knew on the subject. The essays do their job well, explaining both the College’s function as it was meant at its inception and now after reforms have made the United States more democratic than it was in its beginnings.
Lastly, I read Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, a science fiction novel set in a dystopian world where human happiness is pursued at the expense of human culture. Although it does have a story, there’s no strongly developed plot that I saw and I suspect the book functions more as a peek into a world meant to raise questions about our own than it does as an entertaining story.
Pick of the Week: Gold, Isaac Asimov.
Next Week:
  • The Essential Koran, the heart of Islam : An introductory selection of readings from the Qur’an; Thomas Cleary. I’m reading this for cultural literacy purposes.
  • History of the Arab Peoples, Albert Hourani. This will give me context for the above read, although I had planned on checking it out for itself.
  • Dolphins, Jacques Yves-Cousteau. Back in 2007 I read his Whales.
  • The Venus Throw, Steven Saylor. You may remember me reading a number of Saylor’s historical fiction mystery novels set in republican Rome: it’s been a while, but I’m returning to them.
  • The Force Unleashed, Sean Miller. A novelization of a video game, although not one I’ve played.
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Brave New World

Posted on August 11, 2009 by smellincoffee

Brave New World

© 1932 Aldous Huxley
270 pages
In Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman introduced the book with his suspicion that Brave New World’s predictions were coming to fruition — namely, that human happiness will be pursued by destroying human culture, or to put it in more ironic terms, all that makes us human. It’s a book you’ve probably heard of: I was introduced to it through a Star Trek novel. The story is set in the future, where Earth is controlled by the World State, which dominates the lives of its wards. Every human institution you know and love — or despise– is gone. Even the most basic, the parent-child relationship, has been removed: the opening chapter has a group of teenagers being taken on a tour of a hatchery. As the guide gleefully tells the story of how human beings come to be in this world, she also explains how the World State arose in the after math of a nine-years war.
Humans are now biologically engineered and socially conditioned to fall into caste systems, ranking from administrators (Alpha++) to brute labor (Epsilon–). Pavlov-like conditioning is implemented throughout a person’s lifetime to keep them loyal to their caste, to their job, and to the ideals of the world state. When emotional distress occurs, it is dealt with through soma, a drug of some sort. The World State doesn’t control everyone: there are “savage reservations” where people still live off the land, and WS people sometimes tour these areas for their own amusement.
The book’s story shows that despite all of this conditioning, the human animal has still not created a society in line with its nature: several of the main characters are frustrated by it, and some by their inability to fit in as well as they would like. One of them — Bernard Marx — takes a female acquaintance of his to a Savage Reservation, where he meets a World State citizen named Linda who was lost on her outing here — and who has in the meantime become a mother, an act which is obscene in the extreme for World-Staters. Her grown son John (“John the Savage, typically referred to as The Savage”) has grown up trying to behave like a man of two worlds: he tries to please his mother, who has been conditioned to live in the world state, and he tries to live like those on the reservation. He can do neither well, so he asks Bernard if he might join him on a trip back to the World State.
From the Savage’s reaction to what he finds in the world state — not the utopia his mother described but a shallow, sterile, and shockingly indecent place where no one cares about anyone else — where the joys and miseries of human existence are absent, replaced by self-indulgent human-sized infants. He eventually confronts a world controller (a top bureaucrat), and the two talk for a few pages as the controller explains why science, art, religion, and the family had to be destroyed — and the Savage defends them.
I don’t know a lot about the book’s historical context. I’m more familiar with HG Wells’ idealistic notions. It’s certainly thought-provoking. One question it raises is the source of human happiness: does it come from avoiding unpleasant things and enjoying as many pleasurable sensations as possible? Or do we as sentient creatures really need things like wonder, art, and family to feel fulfilled? Again, I don’t know the context Huxley was writing, and I’d like to know more about the social developments that led him to write this to see what their long-term implications might mean. I think it, like Ibsen’s A Doll House, could be a “discussion” work, rather than one you just read for the story.
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Securing Democracy

Posted on August 10, 2009 by smellincoffee
Securing Democracy: Why We Have an Electoral College
© 2001 ed. Gary Gregg II
171 pages
“The Framers of the Constitution would have been appalled at the notion that over time the presidency would become an objection pf partisan ambition, that candidates for the Electoral College would be identified on the ballot as supporters of particular candidates or pass unmentioned altogether, that in some states the electors would be required by law to vote for the candidate to whom they were pledged, and that for all intents and purposes the President of the United States would be directly elected by the people.” – p. 61, author Paul Rahe
I collect recordings of political speeches, and there’s one from 2004 that tends to bother me. It’s either former President Bush’s address to the RNC or his victory speech, but in one of the two he addresses party members, citizens, and “delegates”. That one word makes me raise an eyebrow. Delegates? I’ve had a basic understanding of the Electoral College’s function since high school, I suppose, but when I heard “delegates” and remembered that people don’t actually vote for the president, I was instantly bothered. What’s going on here? I know that the winners of a given state’s election get that state’s electoral votes, and it those votes that count in the national election, but I was bothered by the fact that there were people who cast those votes. Who’s to say they won’t just vote how they see it, instead of how the people see it? I decided to read this book to sort out these questions — to figure out where delegates fit into the system. Humorously, I found the answer to those questions in the introduction — but I read the rest of the book, too, and I’m glad I did.
The book is a collection of essays from various authors published as a result of the drama following the 2000 election, when people started calling for the abashment of the College. Concerned, Gregg began looking for contributors for a book meant to explain and defend the electoral college. The themes in the various essays are by and large the same: the Constitution was written to create a series of checks and balances not only in the central government, but between the government, the states, and the people themselves. In his introductory essay, Gregg writes that the founders did not intend to create a wholly democratic country: they intended to create one that created good laws, and to this end they attempted to create means through which laws and presidents would be decided on with great deliberation — not drummed in through majority rule, which is susceptible to growing wildly passionate about one issue or one man. (I suppose an example of that is people in Alabama voting for a ban on same-sex marriage: no gay person in their right mind would come to Alabama to get married. That’s like going to Saudi Arabia as a woman to feel the sun on your face.)
According to Gregg and the other authors, the states were to send delegates — prudent statesmen with no government role and well-respected citizens — to a convention, where they would all talk together and decide on what man was best for the job. Also according to the authors, this worked twice: once to elect George Washington, and once to re-elect him. After that, the formation of party politics changed the nature of the electoral college. Interestingly, although the College no longer works the way it was intended, it works still to moderate the two-party system. Many of the authors elaborate on this.
The book reads well: since the authors were not working in concert with one another, they sometimes repeat one another on general statements, but there’s a general variety of topics here. Often they will mention the same facts or refer to the same situations, but use them to discuss different sides of the issue. The book gives me a lot of think about, as my own political opinions in regard to ideal democratic systems are mixed. It did help me understand the function of the College, both today and as it was intended. The book includes several relevant articles from the Constitution and from the Federalist Papers.
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Anthropology for Dummies

Posted on August 9, 2009 by smellincoffee

Anthropology for Dummies: From Archaeology to Linguistics — Your Plain-English Guide to the Study of Humankind

© 2008 Cameron Smith with Evan T. Davies
360 pages
“The human species has found many ways to be human.” – p. 259
I don’t think I’ve commented on a for Dummies or Complete Idiot’s Guide book on here before, although I posses perhaps a dozen of them, all history-related. I’ve found them to be useful guides for finding out general information and they serve nicely as introductions to subjects I know little about. Although some people do not take them seriously, the television show Jeopardy! has shelves of them in their library: take that as you will.
This book follows the pattern of most for Dummies books: it is highly organized for readers looking for specific chapters and sections, written in an informal matter (the author referring to himself with “I” and to the reader with “you”) that incorporates joking statements and witty section titles (“My Career is in Ruins” covers archaeology, for instance), and ends with two “Top Ten” chapters. One contains the top ten things the reader must remember about anthropology if nothing else, and the other contains the top ten movies and books with an anthropological theme, including one of my favorites, Carl Sagan’s Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors. The impersonal and simple language make the book easy to read through, although some readers may object to the author offering personal opinions that may not be warranted. (A case can be made for the author referring to the most probable of hypothetical situations, but there were other instances in which I didn’t think his opinions had place in the text. This may be personal taste, however.)
Given the book’s subject – anthropology being the study of humankind here — there’s a lot to cover. Anthropology and the book incorporate history, linguistics, biology and evolution specifically, sociology, sociological theory, economics, agriculture, religion, and more. Dr. Smith’s own speciality seems to have been archaeology, but he explains the other disciplines well, too. Before “The Part of Tens”, which is a hallmark of the for Dummies book, Smith ends the book proper with a chapter on how anthropology can be used to inform and plan public policy. I enjoyed the experience, found it helpful to read about the development of the field itself, and may purchase it in the future for my own library. It’s a recommendation to those interested in the included subjects or humanity in general.
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In the Footprints of God

Posted on August 8, 2009 by smellincoffee

In the Footprints of God

© 2003 Greg Iles
459 pages
The saying Deus ex machina, literally translated as “god from the machine”, refers to a plot device in which a superman power is used to suddenly resolve the conflict that drives plot. This could refer to all manner of things, but by extension it happens when the characters suddenly reveal something that stops the plot cold. In a way, it renders the entire story preceding it pointless. But literally, “god from the machine” — that’s an interesting phrase.
David Tennant is in quite a situation. He’s been asked by the President of the United States, a friend of his brother’s, to provide ethical oversight to a government program that will dwarf the Manhattan Project in importance if its goals are realized. The Trinity project seeks to create artificial — nay, super-intelligence. By combing the reasoning and imaginative powers of the human mind with the processing speed of a supercomputer functioning at quantum levels, the Trinity program intends to create a computer that will make existing computers look like like abacuses in comparison. Given the controversy over the Manhattan Project about the use of nuclear weapons, the US President has decided to cover his posterior here by having ethical oversight.
So what happens when people start dying for trying to suspend the project so that problems of a serious nature can be investigated? You end up with a classic Hollywood movie plot: the compassionate doctor who knows too much being chased through the country, hounded by an amoral Government Agency and nearly killed by German mercenaries who only show emotion when they want to terrify you. If that sounds typical or even generic, keep reading: that isn’t the end of the story. That only sets up the bulk of the novel, and it will bring Deus ex machina to mind — but not yet.
David Tennant’s story is told through the first-person, and his voice tells most of the story — although curiously enough Iles does switch to third-person limited and focuses on the amoral government agency’s security chief to tell the first part of the story from the vantage point of both pursued and pursuer. Later, she will fade, but the third-person will be used for two other characters. Tennant and his friend Dr. Fielding are responsible for stopping one of the most expensive government programs to date (save for wars) on the basis that scanning equipment related to the plot is causing brain dysfunctions among test subjects, including our own David Tennant — who frequently dreams that he is seeing the history of the world through the eyes of God, and the history of Jesus through the eyes of Jesus. What makes this interesting is that Tennant is nonreligious: he’s an atheist who would probably attach the humanist label to himself in the same way that Penn Cage did in The Quiet Game and Turning Angel.
This and the potential of the planned supercomputer (Deus ex machina) make a science fiction novel address metaphysics, but not in a “New Age” way. In Turning Angel I was impressed by Iles‘ ability to render characters of various skeptical bents and religious affiliations believable, and this continues here. Although Iles‘ characters do talk about God and the God-idea does feature in the plot, it is close to Contact. While I’ve never read The Tao of Physics, I’ve gotten a sense of its reputation from skeptics and my own skeptical sensibilities were not offended.
The book is quite strong: Iles has rendered another thriller, this one most interesting in touching on metaphysical issues. Unlike some of his previous works (Turning Angel again), violence and elaborate descriptions of sex are fairly absent. Although Iles could have easily shot himself in the foot writing about sensitive issues such as these — religion, namely — I don’t think he does. This may be his most riveting book yet.
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Aristotle’s Children

Posted on August 7, 2009 by smellincoffee

Aristotle’s Children: How Christians, Muslims, and Jews Rediscovered Ancient Wisdom and illuminated the Dark Ages

© 2003 Richard Rubenstein
368 pages
That title is a touch misleading. While Rubenstein will mention Christians, Muslims, and Jews rediscovering ancient wisdom, he only does so in one chapter. What this book is really about is the growth of intellectual life in western Europe after Aristotle’s works begin filtering into the continent — and subsequently, the development of Catholic theology as it resists, co-opts, and is finally changed by Aristotelian thinking. This is presented in a very readable narrative, often focusing on key individuals whose names are typically well-known, with some exceptions. Peter Abelard and Thomas Aquinas are two examples of characters who feature prominently.
Much of the book concerns the growing intellectual life of the Catholic church. Some readers may find it unusual that the Catholic Church served to make Aristotle a part of the culture, but as far as I know, the church was the only way any intellectual idea could have made its way into the culture. The universities themselves developed from cathedral schools: for a long while, the Church was the only culture-producing entity in Europe. As a result, the Church is the subject throughout the bulk of the book with the exceptions of its first and final chapters. Rubenstein keeps the narrative grounded in more material history, weaving political and economic stories in with the intellectual history.
Rubenstein uses the last chapter — in which Aristotle’s logic is used to disprove his ideas about the geocentric universe — to call readers to question traditional narratives written about science and religion that pit the two always against one another, as well as to recognize that modern science, despite its depth of knowledge, does not have what Aristotle had in a unified view in which science, ethics, and metaphysics were one. That’s a discussion for another time, I think. As said, the book reads well and if you’re interested in the influence of Aristotle or the growth of intellectual life in the Church during the time period of the opening centuries of the second millennium, this is for you and you’ll find it a worthy read, I think.
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Gold

Posted on August 6, 2009 by smellincoffee

Gold

© Nightfall, Inc. / The Isaac Asimov Estate
345 pages
“At present, when there are a great many writers attempting to scale the mountainside of science fiction, it must be rather annoying for them to see the peak occupied by elderly has-beens who cling to it with their arthritic paws and simply won’t get off. Even death, it seems, won’t stop us, since Heinlein has already published a posthumous book and reissues of his old novels are in the works.” – p. 146, from “Inventing a Universe”.
Frequent readers know how big a fan I am of Isaac Asimov, and how much I especially love his short-story collections, so I was very much looking forward this to collection of previously uncollected work. The book is possibly a companion piece to Magic, as both were published in the same year, both share the same format, and both have similar cover art. Like Magic, Gold is a collection of short stories and essays by the late and great Isaac Asimov. Like Magic, Gold is devided into three sections: stories, essays, and more essays. The difference here is that the first set of essays deal with science fiction in general while the second set of essays deals with writing, and writing science fiction in particular.
The stories rate as some of the best I’ve read from Asimov so far, although to be fair my enjoyment may have been heightened by anticipation. The titular piece, “Gold”, is especially good: Asimov tells the story of an artist in the future who composes “compudramas” — works of art that seems to be somewhere between Pixar-type animated works that are serious, IMAX experiences involving both music and etheral images, and a holodeck. The artist is best known for bringing King Lear to life for his “modern” audience despite the cultural gap, and is approached by a relatively unknown science fiction writer who wishes our artists to create a compu-drama based on a very esoteric work of “hard” science fiction where the lead characters are so far from normality that the artist has to push his creative boundaries to make them alien yet relatable to the human audience. Asimov takes us through the artist’s process — something that seemed to me would be difficult to do even for a seasoned author such as Asimov. Some of the stories are elaborate pun setups, and one of them in particular — “Cal” — features a robot who discovers something greater than the Laws of Robotics.
The second section consists of essays on science fiction as a genre and seems to pull from anthologies that Asimov edited, using his introductory essays. These are unedited, meaning the reader will experience Asimov referring to volumes of stories they have no access to. At first this seemed clumsily done — why not edit the references out? — but it doesn’t retract from the essays too much. Some essay topics include the problems with proposed ways to travel the galaxy, robots, women and science fiction, psychohistory, “golden ages”, flying saucer literature, and the influence of science fiction. The third and final section seems to consists of editorials from one of Asimov’s magazines in which he writes in response to readers’ questions (as he does in “Religion and Science Fiction”) or muses on his own subject. These concern the writing process — plot, use of metaphor, and the importance of dialouge.
The collection was a true joy to read: Asimov is as ever funny, lovable, intelligent, and inspirational. Here was a man who loved life, loved his craft, and loved his readers. Gold is a a fitting tribute to him.
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