The Gospel According to the Son

Posted on July 1, 2009 by smellincoffee

The Gospel According to the Son

© 1997 Norman Mailer
242 pages
I spotted this on on Amazon while looking at Chopra’s Jesus. I often look up books I’ve read on Amazon to find similar books. You might remember that Jesus was a novel about the obvious character depicting him in his twenties as he develops what Chopra referred to as “god consciousness” — in effect forcing the view of Chopra as expressed in The Third Jesus into a novel that started off well and quickly fell apart. Mailer’s The Gospel According to the Son is somewhat different. It is a first-person novel that recounts the basic story of the traditional gospels. While Mailer’s Jesus does comment that the gospel writers got some things wrong — especially “Jew-Hating Luke” — he does toe the Nicene line and sticks to basic Christian doctrine until the very end (at which point he seems to dipose of it completely). He fleshes out some New Testament stories and omits parts of others. An example of both is his retelling of the miracle of the fishes and loaves — or one of them, seeing as I remember that happening twice. For those of you who didn’t attend a fundamentalist Sunday School, this is the one where Jesus is speaking to a crowd in the middle of no-where and realizes that the crowd is growing hungry. His disciples come up with some kid’s lunch (two fish and five loaves of bred) and somehow distributes these among five thousand men, not counting their wives and children. The stories generally depict the food magically regenerating as Jesus and his followers distribute it, and even managing to exceed what the crowd needs: the disciples are stuck toting twelve baskets of left-over fish and bread back to their town through the hot desert. Mailer’s Jesus doesn’t do this: he tears the food up into over five thousands teeny tiny little bits and distributes them out: the tiny bits become fulfilling once someone “eats” them by putting them on their tongue. It’s an interesting take that stays true to canon while toying with a little bit.
How does this work as a novel? Intermittently. The quality was never consistent for me: it would be dry for a few pages as formal quotations from the New Testament are linked with basic sentences that betray little character from Jesus or anyone else and then suddenly it begins reading like a novel, with real people actually experiencing emotions and speaking in ways you might expect a human to speak. Unfortunately, those moments are not as frequent as they need to be and the book in general read flatly for me. The story as a whole read like the New Testament sometimes: as an account of scarcely linked stories about Jesus that lacked emotional depth. If you were to present this book to a person with no knowledge whatsoever of Jesus or the traditional apocalyptic Jewish god, I don’t think they could appreciate it as a novel. There’s no story here, no overall narrative that ties things together and makes it seem real. Characters usually say things out of the blue: they react in jerky ways like the author is just pulling their strings and making them. Chopra’s characters did this too, but not as long — and many of them developed real depth, especially Judas and Mary Magdalene. There are high points here: Mailer does do Judas well, although I prefer Chopra’s Gospel of Judas-inspired Judas to the traditional villain Judas, even though he’s rendered believable here. The chapter about Satan tempting Jesus in the wilderness has a very intriguing Satan who (from my perspective) makes valid criticisms about Yahweh’s behavior (if for less-than-noble reasons) who continues to play a subtle part in the story despite being told off.
I suppose this book is like a plane that gets off the ground but never really takes to the air, instead constantly dipping into and bouncing off of the runaway before suddenly jerking to a stop. There are little moments, but it seems somewhere between fair and mediocre. I think those who find the four traditional Gospels to be an enjoyable read might like this, although those who are very attached to literalism may be annoyed.
Related Reading:
  • Chopra’s Jesus.
  • Only Begotten Daughter, featuring Jesus’ half-sister Julie Katz. This book is the first time I found a take on Jesus that was interesting.
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This Week at the Library (1/7)

Posted on July 1, 2009 by smellincoffee

Books this Update:

  • The Age of American Unreason , Susan Jacoby
  • Socrates Café, Christopher Phillips
  • Why Evolution is True, Jerry A. Coyne
  • A People’s History of the American Revolution, Ray Raphael
This week began with Susan Jacoby’s excellent The Age of American Unreason, a critical look at contemporary American society and an explanation of how it got this way. Jacoby’s work doubles as a history of intellectual and anti-intellectual movements in the United States, and she addresses a range of issues from biology to celebrity cults. The book reads very well and seems to be fairly well-argued, and was immensely interesting.
Next I read Christopher Phillip’s account of his attempt to take philosophy to the streets by hosting hundreds of “Socrates Cafes” in which people of all ages and backgrounds are brought together to ask questions of themselves — and to grapple with them in the spirit of philosophical inquiry. Although Phillips advocates for the spirit of philosophy to be revived in our everyday lives, his concern seems to be more about living in a sense of wonder and trying to find the truth honestly and less of applying philosophical advice to living one’s life (like you would find in something written by Tenzin Gyatso, for instance). I found the subject matter to be very interesting.
Jerry Coyne’s Why Evolution is True is a very straightforward introduction or refresher to the theory of evolution. It seems to be written for a popular audience, judging on its length and style. Coyne first establishes what evolution is, writing about the general principles on which it operates. He then makes predictions based on these principles, shows that the evidence fits those predictions (devoting separate chapters to the fossil record, vestigial organs, and so on), and finally explains how evolution works in practice. His last chapter is separate from his argument, but explains his belief that evolution denial is based more on the fear of potential consequences of evolution if it is true, including moral uncertainty. He then attempts to to do with those fears, rather briefly. I think it’s a very good introduction or refresher.
Finally, I read A People’s History of the American Revolution, which focuses on the common people of the Revolution — those who were not Founding Fathers. Individual sections comment on political activism among the common people long before 1775, the plight of common soldiers, the increasingly active and miserable lives of colonial women, the treatment of native Americans and blacks, and the treatment of loyalists and pacifists who opposed the war on their respective grounds. Although some history books may give lip service to these people, this book is all about them: the Founding Fathers and the Constitutional Convention are barely mentioned. The book manages to give the Revolution more depth and greater context than I’ve ever encountered.
Pick of the Week: I’m giving the nod to Susan Jacoby’s The Age of American Unreason.
Next Week:
  • The Gospel According to the Son, Norman Mailer. Jesus records the Gospel in the first person.
  • The Art of Travel, Alain de Botton. I’m reading this more for the author than for the book: he hosted a six-episode television show that I’m very fond of on the usefulness of philosophy in everyday life.
  • Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig.
  • You Don’t Have to be Wrong for Me to be Right, Rabbi Brad Hirschfield. This is in the pursuit of my comparative religion studies.
  • (And maybe) The Earl, Cecelia Holland. This is historical fiction set during the reign of the English Henry II.
I was going to read a recommendation from reader Pom Pom, but it was checked out this morning. It was there just last night, too.
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A People’s History of the American Revolution

Posted on June 30, 2009 by smellincoffee
A People’s History of the American Revolution: How Common People Shaped the Fight for Independence
© 2001 Ray Ralphael
386 pages
I look for some books, and some books happen to find me. This is one of the latter, as I spotted its title while meandering aimlessly through my library’s shelves. (I do this a lot because it’s a good way to bump into unexpected books.) As you might guess by the title, it’s associated with Howard Zinn‘s A People’s History series, although not written by him. The book reads as less politically controversial than Zinn’s books, meaning that even bellowing BillO‘ would have to work at growing truly angry. Although this is a history of the American Revolution, it is not a military history. The course of the war is discussed, but only in relation to the declining or — very rarely — increasing fortunes of the common people that the book takes its title from. Separate sections concern the growing civil unrest among colonials in the pre-Revolution years, the plight of the common soldier, the changing and increasing demands on women*, native Americans, the “ideologically unsound” loyalists and pacifists, and finally freed and enslaved involuntary African emigrants, also known primly in the book as “people of color”. (The section title is “African Americans”, but I found the repeated “of color” reference humorously anachronistic.)
The book is written very neatly: author Ray Raphael ends every chapter with a summary to die every he’s said so far together, and the final chapter of the book is a summary of the whole, with conclusions being drawn from said summary. Each section aside from the final one examines the role of its specific group within the context of the Anglo-American conflict, beginning shortly after the end of the Seven Years’ War. What develops, as you might imagine, is a history of the conflict told from the “rabble’s” point of view. What I didn’t realize was that they’re already in the history books — they just aren’t mentioned. The attendees at the Boston Tea Party were not John Adams and Thomas Paine, but roughneck cobblers and the like. Raphael gives the American Revolution a depth I’ve never seen before, beyond the occasional paragraph in a school textbook that might mention spinning bees or Crispus Attucks. The first section of the book, which deals with civil unrest (by which I mean “pandemonium”), was especially interesting reading for me. The history I’ve read depicts riots that led to the Boston Massacre as accidental and oddly consequential, but according to Raphael, it was just one in a series of confrontations between put-upon people and whoever got in their way. His section on Native Americans is similarly strong.
What I like about the book is that Raphael doesn’t get very romantic — and I wonder if he could, what with some of the people had to deal with, men who burned down people’s homes to make a political point. Even George Washington, he who is more legend than man, is shown losing his cool and taking a random Loyalist citizen hostage if the murderers of rebel/patriot sympathizer do not step forward. (He is then shown to regret what he did. Bound by a code of honor, Washington can’t kill the boy and can’t let him go of his own accord: fortunately, Congress “officially” orders the hostage’s release.) This is not a “times were tough, but the good common folk prevailed and everyone lived comfortably well off” story: times were miserable, they got a lot worse, and then they went back to miserable — only this time with war-related poverty and death.
The glorious fourth — again appears
A Day of Days — and year of years,
The sum of sad disasters,
Where all the mighty gains we see
With all their boasted liberty
Is only a Change of Masters.
The above appears in the diary of a woman named Hannah Griffitts, writing in 1785. That’s not the only piece of “meet the new boss, same as the old boss” observation made by people writing at the time, but it is the shortest. I think the book has enough meat in it to give anyone room for thought. It’s nicely written, has convenient summaries, and adds a great deal of context to a pivotal moment in western history. This book reminds me that important moments in history like this — and I consider them important just for the Constitution, while making the way easier for those of us who follow, did nothing for the people who made them happen. That good fortune often has to be created by misery is another indicator to me that the laws of the universe were not created with us in mind.
Related Reading:
  • Jeff Shaara’s Rise to Rebellion and The Glorious Cause, historical “fiction” novels that tell the story of the political divide and war from the viewpoint of soldiers and generals. I mention it here because Shaara seems to draw from some of the same sources as Raphael. What they both agree on is that the generals of the Continental Army liked to complain about the militia’s uselessness as a fighting force.
*There’s one thing every woman’s missed in Massachusetts Bay/ Don’t smirk at me, you egotist; pay Heed to what I say / We’ve gone from Framingham to Boston /And we cannot find a pin / “Don’t you know there’s a war on?” / Say the tradesmen with a grin / Well, we will not make saltpeter Until you send us pins!”

On a final note — and solely for your and my amusement — when I was a kid and had only heard of the “Boston Tea Party” as having something to do with the Revolution, my mental image was of the Founding Fathers sitting at a table with British officals drinking tea and yelling at one another, leaving at some point to go start the revolution. When I saw a picture of Indians throwing tea chests off of a ship in my history book, I was confused.
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Why Evolution is True

Posted on June 28, 2009 by smellincoffee

Why Evolution is True

© 2009 Jerry A. Coyne
282 pages
Evolution is actually one of my favorite science topics to read about. Back in high school, I was a young-earth creationist who wore Kent Hovind tapes out while shaking my head in self-righteous disbelief at the incompetent-when-not-evil Evolutionists. Obviously, things change. My defense of creationism was a defense of my then-identity as a fundamentalist Pentecostal, and when that identity vanished so did my fixed determination to defend Genesis. Once I began to accept the facts of evolution, I found a renewed joy in science: evolution seems to knit the world together(“…beyond any untying”*), and it informs my approach to any field of study that involves humanity. It is an immensely enjoyable theory. This year may be called the “Year of Evolution” owing to it being the 200th birthday of Charles Darwin and the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species. Given that, I have read and will most likely read more in the field of evolution this year. (I’ve read Evolution for Everyone and The Reluctant Mr. Darwin so far).
What this is is a very straightforward accounting of why the theory of evolution is regarded as and used as fact by virtually every biologist save Liberty University’s gardening staff. Coyne begins by explaining the six principles (which Coyne untactfully calls tenets: the word has an unfortunate religious or ideological connotation) of evolution, and then makes predictions based on those principles for what we should see in the natural world. The chapters that follow show that we do see these things: separate chapters cover the fossil record, the geographical distribution of life, and the existence of vestigial organs and what would otherwise be bad design. After setting out the evidence, he then spends a few chapters detailing how exactly evolution works, including a look at speciation. The last chapter of the book proper is an examination of human evolution. The book is finally completed with Coyne addressing the question of why evolution is so controversial. He comments that no one lies awake at night pondering the arguments for and against evolution: they like awake at night worrying about social problems. The reason people resist evolution, he says, is because they have some emotional attachment to it not being true. Acceptance of evolution will come not when the fossils and DNA have convinced people, but when they no longer fear it being true. He ends the book on the note of trying to address people’s fears about morality and the value of human life and so forth.
This is a very tidy book: Coyne makes his case simply and does not bore the reader with page after page of arguments and examples. I think the ideal reader for this book is someone who doesn’t know what the arguments for evolution. If you are looking for a book to serve as reliable ammunition against creationist, I would suggest looking at Eugenie Scott’s Evolution vs. Creationism. Coyne’s book, however readable and well-done, doesn’t have the page after page of examples, arguments, and counter-arguments that thicker books have. The only attack he does make on creationism is the rather oblique look at examples of what would be “bad design” if it were deliberate design This is a definite recommendation to anyone who wants a refresher or introduction to evolution.
Related Reading:
* The quote is from the Star Trek episode “Who Mourns for Adonais”, in which Captain Kirk convinces one of his crew to leave the Greek god Apollo and return to the ship. Full quotation:

Give me your hand … your hand! Now feel that: Human flesh against human flesh. We’re the same. We share the same history, the same heritage, the same lives. We’re tied together beyond any untying. Man or woman, it makes no difference, we’re human. We couldn’t escape from each other even if we wanted to. That’s how you do it, Lieutenant. By remembering who and what you are: a bit of flesh and blood afloat in a universe without end. And the only thing that’s truly yours is the rest of humanity. That’s where our duty lies. Do you understand me?

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Socrates Café

Posted on June 28, 2009 by smellincoffee

Socrates Café: A Fresh Taste of Philosophy

© Christopher Phillips, 2001
241 pages
Although I have never taken a single philosophy class, I consider myself a student of philosophy. I discovered it in the autumn of 2006 after a friend asked me to listen to a Christian apologist named Ravi Zacharias. Listening to Zacharias, I found myself in the novel position of really thinking about life in a serious way. In an attempt to deal with his arguments, I would often write about the topic at hand. The result of this process was that I found myself thinking about everything, turning that principle of freethought (of which I approved) into practice for myself. Philosophy became all the more interesting when I realized through the works of Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus that it could be put into practice — could be lived. One YouTube account, “PhilosophicalMedia“, contains a few episodes of a show in which the host tries to look at philosophers whose work involved a different way of thinking about life, or a different way of living. The videos have such titles as “Seneca on Anger” and “Epicurus on Happiness”. One of the videos is on Socrates, and at one point in the video the host puts the Socratic method into practice by going out into the streets and badgering people with questions.
I like to see people grapple with philosophical questions: it seems to me that we are at our most human when we are engaged in philosophical inquiry. When I spotted this book in the library catalogue and skimmed through its description, I immediately became excited because it seemed as if this book would take philosophy to the streets. As it turns out, that is not quite the case — but I was so interested in what the book actually was that I didn’t realize that book wasn’t what I had expected until hours after I finished it. Christopher Philips does take philosophy to people — he just does it in a more civilized way than Socrates himself. The book is his account of hosting hundreds of “Socrates Cafés” in which people voluntarily gather to ask questions — and discuss those questions. At first, these meeting sessions are held in actual cafes, but the author will host them in prisons, nursing homes, libraries, and schoolrooms. Each session starts out with Phillips asking people to submit a question: once someone comes forward, people begin discussing that question and asking questions about the question until hours have passed and people have immersed themselves in philosophical inquiry. The people who come are not just curious or philosophically-minded adults: some are children, and at one point Philips hosts a meeting that consists only of children and senior citizens. Through the course of the book, Phillips and his congregants discuss love, friendship, age, emotions, and all manner of things until the book ends with two questions on metaphysics.
What surprised Phillips was how meaningful philosophy and the cafes became to people. Although it is clear that Phillips has hosted hundreds of these events all around the country, he apparantly invested a lot of time in one or two of the groups, developing deep friendships and even falling in love with and marrying one of his fellow “Socratics”. From what Phillips has written, the discussion groups create a lot of intellectual and emotional intimacy between people, and they regard the weekly sessions as vital, finding in them religious communion even though religion is never discussed. What Phillips aims to do with these clubs and with this book is to foster a sense of philosophy in more people, seeing the decline of intellectual life — intellectual life being actively thinking about things, rather than just knowing facts — as detrimental to people’s mental health and to society in general. The records of the cafes are tied together with thoughts by Phillips, who attempts to connect what he and his fellow Socratics are discussing with what other philosophers have discussed. Sometimes “cafe sessions” are linked with such an essay.
The book was a treat to read, although some of the discussions toward the end were too metaphysical in nature for me to follow enthusiastically. I confess that I may have enjoyed the book more for its concept than for the writing itself: the linking essays were sometimes unfruitful reading, and Phillips sometimes repeats himself. What I like most about this book is that it shows people grappling with questions, rather than giving up and accepting trite responses.
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The Age of American Unreason

Posted on June 25, 2009 by smellincoffee
The Age of American Unreason
© 2008 Susan Jacoby
356 pages
Oddly enough, I first heard of this book about a year ago when author Susan Jacoby was invited on Point of Inquiry to talk about it. I remember being intrigued at the time, although I didn’t imagine I would be able to access it anytime soon: my local libraries are not replete with books on skepticism or related issues. I was pleasantly surprised, therefore, to accidentally stumble upon The Age of American Unreason in my local library’s web catalogue a month or so back. (I’ve been forgetting to check it out for a while, obviously.) The book is a general history of anti-intellectual movements as well as movements that profit from ignorance in the United States and an examination of those movements’ causes — including repeated looks at post-Nixon American culture. When I think of anti-intellectual movements, I think of Creationists versus Biologists — but Jacoby’s range is far broader than that. In the book’s three hundred pages, Jacoby will look at America’s treatment of intellectualism in its opening decades, criticize Social Darwinism, Communism, middlebrow culture, narratives of the 1960s, celebrity cults, fundamentalism, ideology both old and new, and contemporary American culture (“the culture of distraction”). What emerges is an explanation for why the United States has the anti-intellectual culture that it has now, drawing on the history of intellectual and anti-intellectual movements in the United States and an analysis of their consequences.
There’s a lot going on this book, but I never found Jacoby’s presentation of her material to be either limited, confusing, or overwhelming. She’s a professional author who knows how to present her case. It reminds me a lot of Neil Postman, especially as television and the Internet enter her narrative. She is a cultural conservative in the style of Postman as she defends the intellectual potency of print culture against the kind of culture that constant television and Internet access generate. Media-driven culture is in her opinion one of the major contributors to a general culture of ignorance — along with, of course, religious fundamentalism. I think Jacoby argues fairly well: she looks to try to emulate intellectuals from ages past in giving opposing opinions a voice in her narrative. As I read any book, I engage it and attempt to play the devil’s advocate. There were some stretches here, but overall I think she builds her case well — there ought to be enough in here to give everyone something to think about. Those who are not Americans need not be excluded: the US appears to be contagious. It’s an informative and easy-to-follow read and a definite recommendation.

“Is it possible that American voters have learned something about the consequences of choosing an intellectually challenged chief executive on the basis of a beer test? […] The most active candidates for the presidential nomination in both parties over the past year cannot be accused of being dumb. […] Each of them pronounces the word “nuclear” correctly. It is a safe bet that all of them read newspapers and that none of them waits for a staff briefing each day in order to avoid being exposed to “opinions” from the outside world. It remains to be seen, as the campaign heats up and comes down to the final two, whether “elitism” will resurface as a political negative. One wonders whether any candidate, instead of trying to prove that he or she is just one of the folks, would dare to tell voters that what the nation needs not an ordinary but an extra ordinary president as president and that one crucial qualification for the nation’s highest office is the intellectual ability to distinguish, in times of crisis and on a daily basis,. between worthwhile and worthless opinions.”

– page 287. Emphasis added by me.

Related Reading:
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This Week at the Library (24/6)

Posted on June 24, 2009 by smellincoffee

Books this Update:

  • Jesus, Deepak Chopra
  • Bagombo Snuff Box, Kurt Vonnegut
  • Blue Like Jazz, Donald Miller
  • Black Holes and Baby Universes and Other Essays, Stephen Hawking
  • Medical Firsts, Robert Adler
I started the week off on a fictional note with Deepak Chopra’s Jesus. I read a book about Jesus by Chopra last week and didn’t like it much, so I suppose it’s a little strange that I checked out another. What made me do it, though, was that this was a novel — and I thought it would tell the story of the Christian gospels from Jesus’ point of view. It isn’t quite what I expected. Chopra decides to focus on Jesus’ journey to enlightenment during his twenties. Because there is no evidence documenting what his life was like during that time, Chopra instead uses what he refers to as a template of enlightenment — a path that all who have realized “god-consciousness” have followed. Unfortunately, the novel never really grows from that point: it doesn’t read like a real human story, it reads like some kind of spiritual Mad-Libs. Although this is set in a historical setting, that setting has no influence on the story: this book could have been written in modern-day Croatia. The characterization of Jesus seems forced after a while. I think people who find Jesus interesting and who are not attached to a particular interpretation of his life will probably find something to enjoy here, but without that I think the novel would fail to hold people’s interest.
Whenever I have a book of essays or short stories, I don’t read them all in one go but choose to enjoy them throughout the week instead, so the order that I comment on them may be slightly out of order from the order in which they were read. Throughout the week I read from Kurt Vonnegut’s Bagombo Snuff Box, a collection of his earliest (pre-1953) work. There are over a dozen short stories here, all terribly interesting and most making sly criticisms of the culture. The settings vary: some are set during the Depression and some are set during the space age, but most of them are confined to the late forties and very early fifties. The book ends with a commentary by Vonnegut on his time as a contributor to short-story magazines. The book is a must-read for Vonnegut fans, and I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend it to people who enjoy reading in general.
Blue Like Jazz was probably the most interesting book this week, being the story of one man’s life and his relationship with Christianity in various forms. The book is not organized beyond topical chapters: it seems to have been written free-form, and Miller goes from thought to thought in a way that’s lively, but not distracting. Although his writing style is somewhat whimsical, he does talk about serious issues of life and I think he does so seriously. My thoughts about the book changed from sentence to sentence, from paragraph to paragraph — Miller can be frustrating, mystical, uplifting, and funny all at the same time, and I find it hard to really get my head around the book. I can’t say who I’d recommend it to: it was overall a fun and sometimes thoughtful read, but it’s unpredictable and so is the way people are liable to respond to it.
Black Holes and Baby Universes and Other Essays by Stephen Hawking is much more straightforward. The book is a collection of essays, some on personal topics and some on scientific topics — beginning with the one and working its way forward to the other. I find it hard to be thrilled about black holes and quantum theory –which the science essays are generally about, but Hawkings isn’t dull. The book ends with a transcript of Hawkings “Desert Island Discs” interview, in which he is grilled on various topics while playing the eight songs he would bring with him to listen to on a deserted island.
Lastly, I read the quite enjoyable Medical Firsts by Robert Adler. I’ve read Adler before — last March, when I read his related Science Firsts. Medical Firsts contains a dozen chapters on innovative ideas and practices in medicine, all very readable and well-composed. The book is a good read about the history of medical science for even casual readers.
Pick of the Week: Bagombo Snuff Box, Kurt Vonnegut. This is easily my favorite short story collection of Vonnegut’s.
Quotation of the Week: “All men are created equal, endowed with reason sufficient to manage their own affairs and even to get to the heart of abstract and philosophical matters. The miracles attributed to the greatest prophets and religious leaders are tricks, no more real than the illusions of street-corner fakirs. People do not need rules handed down and enforced from one high to form orderly societies. In contrast, blind belief in the absolute truths of religions inspires fanaticism and hatred. All authorities and accepted knowledge need to be questioned. Each generation has the opportunity to move science forward through new observations and experimentation and because of such progress, society itself often advances.” – Abu Bakr al–Razi, as quoted-in-paraphrase in Medical Firsts. Razi died in Iran in the 900s.
Next Week:
  • The Age of American Unreason, Susan Jacoby.
  • Why Evolution is True, Jerry A. Coyne
  • Socrates Cafe, Christopher Phillips
  • A People’s History of the American Revolution, Ray Ralphael
  • (and perhaps) The Earl, Cecelia Holland.
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Medical Firsts

Posted on June 24, 2009 by smellincoffee

Medical Firsts: From Hippocrates to the Human Genome

© 2004 Robert Adler
232 pages
A little over a year ago, I read Science Firsts, a fairly enjoyable book that prepared me well for a summer focusing on the history of science and was pick of the week in its time. I wanted to read more from the author, but I had no access to this book, which is identical in approach and different in topic. Like Science Firsts, this book consists of a dozen chapters, each written on a particular innovation or novel approach in the field. The ideas are varied: the first chapter concerns Hippocrates’ patient-centered approach to medicine, another addresses the discovery of viral diseases, another is on the development of the Pill, and so on. Most of the innovations have a specific thinker attached, and so most of the book reads like Profiles in Medical History. The later chapters — concerning topics like the worldwide coordinated effort to destroy smallpox and the human genome project — focus more on the thing itself rather than the person driving the change. The personality-centered theme of the book isn’t necessarily a weakness: these men and women are worth honoring. (I don’t think I’d ever heard of Abu Bakr Al-Razi, but I’m glad I have now. According to Adler, he was a man of the Enlightenment before his time.) The chapters read well: I don’t think you have to be scientifically literate to enjoy them and learn something, and indeed I think the book is aimed for more casual readers.
Related Books:

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Blue Like Jazz

Posted on June 23, 2009 by smellincoffee

Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality

© 2003 Donald Miller
243 pages
In addition to my comparative religion and philosophy studies, I’m also trying to get a handle on why one religion in specific — Christianity — matters so much to people. I can appreciate Christianity just fine when people approach Jesus as a moral teacher, but when they start gushing about his dying for them, I’m lost. I don’t see the appeal. Christian theology on this point seems to me to be utterly arbitrary: “Okay, there was this one time when this guy named Adam disobeyed God, and got all of his relatives utterly cursed with this thing called sin. It separates us from God. But then, thousands of years later, God made a little love-child with a human and this guy let himself be killed so that you can live free of sin.” And I blink. If you tell me that the guys who died in Vietnam died for my right to vote, I’ll disagree but know where you’re coming from. But this sin thing? It’s arbitrary. You have to force belief onto a series of statements: one, that everyone is doomed to be a bad guy: two, that this is because of some taint called sin: three, that this sin can be dealt with by killing innocent beings: and that four, that Jesus was utterly innocent and was thus the ultimate sacrifice and his willing death ended sin’s power over people. I cannot force belief. I cannot make myself believe in arbitrary things even if I want to — and in this case, I certainly don’t want to. Now, if Christianity actually freed people from sin, this might give some credence to what they’re saying — but as far as I can tell, in all the lives I’ve observed first-hand and read about, in all the various approaches and interpretations, people who believe in Christ’s power over sin and who believe they are personally filled with his spirit still do bad things. Where’s the power? In the religion I was raised in, getting the “holy ghost” meant that you had this source of living sin-free inside you, that if you worked at it you could live a perfect life — but only through work. None of the forced beliefs made sense to me, and I was really concerned about the whole “most everyone is going to be tortured in a fiery pit forever” thing, so I said screw it and left organized religion. That’s when I realized I could change my life myself — so I became a self-empowered humanist and I’ve flourished ever since. But — in the past year I’ve found myself being able to get inside the minds of religious people and see what we have in common, and why we’re different, and I’m curious to see if I can get inside the head of a Saviour-Christ-believing Christian to understand. That’s what brings me to Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality.
Its title is a prelude to the things that come: it’s confusing. Author Donald Miller isn’t actually nonreligious. He’s nondenominational, which means that he has his own fundamentalist but fluid grasp on Christianity. The book is the story of his life, arranged topically and written in a manner that seems freeform. Although I’ve read “stream of consciousness”-type literature before and disliked it, I liked this: his writing style seemed to be quirky, fun, and lively. It’s like you’re listening to this guy talk to you, and he’s just leaning back against the wall in a cafe or restaurant and chatting about whatever comes to his mind — with some topical restrictions. He has spent his entire life grappling with what Christianity means to him, and the book is at times frustrating, insightful, muddled, mystical, uplifting, and funny. I suppose it’s like people: there are few people who you or I can say we like everything about. This book is that way, because it’s a look inside his head — and sometimes I liked what I saw there, and sometimes I didn’t. I despaired for him when he inflicted dogma on himself — fretting about having sex or drinking beer or not reading the Bible — and I was utterly confused when he started gushing about Jesus fixing his “Sin nature” — but there were times when I’d laugh or sit back with a smile because he’d made me laugh. I can’t understand the idea of having a personal relationship with a metaphysical being, but I do get thinking about values, and I do understand his thoughts about dealing with difficult people, because that’s something I think a lot about. Do I recommend the book to you? I don’t know, because I can’t get a firm handle on how I feel about the book. I know I like reading what other people have to say about it: I know this is the kind of book I’d like to hear people discuss and argue over, because it is a book about life and dealing with the meaning of it. What Miller says, you might not like — but then again you may. Both conservative Christians and former-Christians-turned-skeptic who I’ve read from dislike the book, and they both despair over its popularity among young Christian evangelicals. One of their particular beefs is that Miller doesn’t take Christianity seriously enough, but I disagree. His youth group doesn’t get together to have pizza — they go serve soup at homeless shelters. They try to live their lives with love, which I think is admirable, because it’s easy to talk about but hard to do. In this line of thought they criticize him for hand-waving away logical arguments against Christian dogma: as he says, the intellectual arguments about Christianity ceased to be about God a long time ago, so he doesn’t bother. While I understand why someone would think that wrong, I also suspect that religions are to the spiritual more about inspiration — not truth. Miller’s book is very much open to interpretation, I think.
Click here for a google search including the skeptical and conservative Christian viewpoints I mentioned earlier. I read the first, third, and fourth entries.
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Black Holes and Baby Universes

Posted on June 23, 2009 by smellincoffee

Black Holes and Baby Universes and Other Essays

© 1993 Stephen Hawking
182 pages
Well, this is one book that recquires very little explaination. It’s a book of essays written by Stephen Hawking, most of them being on scientific topics. The beginning essays are biographical, and they work their way up to being chiefly science related: after a couple of essays about his life, he writes an essay on A Brief History of Time, which he calls “A Brief History of A Brief History“. From this point, Hawking moves on to theortical physics — black holes, quantum mechanics, free will vs. determinism, that kind of thing. After his final science essay (this one on the future of the universe, or rather potential futures), he ends the book with a transcript of an interview, the “Desert Island Discs” BBC interview. This is or was a hallmark program of the BBC, in which famous people were asked to bring eight records that they might bring with them if they were to be marooned on a desert island. The standard interview — covering topics in line with the theme of this book, namely his life and work — is periodically interupted by the reporter asking Hawkings to play one of his records in order. The interview ends with Hawkings being asked to choose a favorite among the records, and to talk about what book and luxury item he would plan on bringing. For those who are curious:
  1. Gloria, Poulenc
  2. Brahms Violin Concerto
  3. Beethoven’s String Quartet, Opus 132
  4. The Valkyrie, act one
  5. “Please Please Me”, the Beatles
  6. Requiem, Mozart
  7. Turandot, Puccini
  8. “Je Ne Regrette Rien”, Edith Piaf
His book is Middlemarch by George Eliot, and his luxury item a large supply of crème brûlée. The book is written in Hawkings’ usual way, although it lacks his fondness for illustrations. The science may be dated by this point, but it’s probably still a good read for Hawkings fans.
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