Reading Freely

Books this Update:

• A People’s History of the United States, Howard Zinn
• The Great Journey: Peopling the United States, Brian Fagan
• Change Your Thoughts, Change Your Life, Wayne Dyer
• Wicca for Beginners, Thea Sabin

I began last week by reading the biggest book first — and at over seven hundred pages, Howard Zinn’s history of the underdogs was definitely the biggest. After acknowledging that all historical accounts — be they notes scribbled down by Spanish friars, US Army army reports, college textbooks, or popular narratives — are written from a biased perspective, he owns his own bias and states that this book is intended to be a history of the losers in American history, meaning a history of almost everyone except white, male landowners. Beginning with Columbus’ treatments of the natives and ending with the invasion of Iraq, Zinn takes the reader through a very bloody and unpleasant history of the world’s self-titled “first democracy”. Although I knew much of its contents already, Zinn still manages to leave me reeling at parts. Obviously, a book like this isn’t going to appeal to people like my high-school self, whose feelings are better cared for when reading a history about America the Beautiful, constantly striving forward to more freedom and prosperity. As I’ve learned since high school, material prosperity always comes at a high human price.

I continued reading history with my next book, although it was not a narrative. Brian Fagan’s The Great Journey is more of a summary of what archaeologists and historians now believe about the arrival of humankind to the Americas. Fagan discusses the problems with finding out anything about the earliest human settlements — environmental factors that don’t lend themselves to the preservation of artifacts, for instance. What few artifacts survive — stone tools, for instance — are discussed at length. I’ve not read this much about flint knapping since the Earth’s Children series. The book is arranged chronologically, and Fagan tries to present it in terms of being a play — labeling the chapters as “acts”, for instance. Although it could be a bit dry at times, interesting information would surface unexpectedly — after page after page on stone-shaping, I found myself reading about an archaeologist who witnessed an Indian elephant die and immediately decided to test reproductions of stone tools by butchering it. I was then informed of the best method to strip an elephant of its meat — can’t say I was expecting that.

Through the week, I read bits and pieces of Wayne Dyer’s Change Your Thoughts, Change Your Life, a devotional using the Tao Te Ching as its source. The book consists of 81 essays, each written on a verse from Lao Tzu’s book of mystic wisdom. Dyer draws from various translations of the book for his essays, but always includes a verse in the text for the reader. He also connects Taoist thoughts to other religious and philosophical teachings as well as attitudes expressed in poetry. After initial comments on the verse, he distills it into one or two statement, and then comments on those. He ends each essay with a “Do the Tao Now” section, in which he makes suggestions to the reader for putting the thoughts into practice. I found this book to be more helpful than The Guiding Light of Lao Tzu, although sometimes it felt too…prescriptive. I have something of a distrust for intuitive “statements”. I was chagrined to find an advertisement of Sylvia Browne in the back of the book.

Lastly, I read Wicca for Beginners by Thea Sabin. My interest in this, like my interest in architecture and various other topics, stems from a PC game I play as a hobby — The Sims 2. (It’s not the first time a PC game has given me new interests, and it won’t be the last.) Although I was initially reading out of curiosity’s sake, I quickly connected it to my comparative religion studies. Sabin begins by explaining what Wicca is, hoping to shake the reader from his or her Hollywood- or church-given notions. I’ve heard a few sermons on the evils of Wicca in my lifetime: fundamentalist sects, like the one I was raised in, are quick to connect Wicca with Satanism. My own understanding of Wicca before reading the book was that it was a ritualized form of earth-goddess worship, but I found to my surprise that it has two deities as well as plenty of ritual. What I found most intriguing is that unlike most religions, Wicca is not built on philosophical or ethical practice, although it has an ethic component. The Wicca described in this book is very much about the power of symbols, rituals, and spells, and Sabin goes into great detail explaining what means what. I wasn’t expecting to find that brooms had symbolic significance or that witches wear special robes to rituals depending on the season, but these are some of the things I learned. The book was very informative, even though it is written to the potential initiate. (The “Mr. Spock” portion of my brain that Sabin urges the reader to turn off several times is far too implacable for me to be an initiate in any tradition.)

Pick of the Week: A People’s History of the United States, Howard Zinn.

Quotation of the Week:
The poem “Wild Geese” by Mary Oliver, which Dyer quoted in his book.

Next Week:

• Here I Stand: My Struggle for a Christianity of Integrity, Love, and Equality; John Shelby Spong
• Fates Worse than Death, Kurt Vonnegut
• World Religion: Opposing Viewpoints, various authors
• The Return of the Black Widowers, Isaac Asimov

Books this Update:

• The Associate, John Grisham
• A People’s History of American Empire, Howard Zinn
• Abounding Grace, M. Scott Peck
• The House of the Vestals, Steven Saylor
• Our Inner Ape, Frans De Waal
• The Sane Society, Erich Fromm
• The Reason for God, Timothy Keller
• Out of my Life and Thought, Albert Schweitzer

Please note that Out of my Life and Thought, The Sane Society and The Reason for God have not received individual comments yet, although they will. Two of the books require more thoughtful commentary than usual, and I’ve not finished ordering my thoughts yet. As for the third, I just forgot about it until now. I began the week with John Grisham’s The Associate, his latest legal thriller and one that is in some ways a return to the style that made him popular. Although it has received mixed criticism, with an author as well-known as Grisham I don’t know that it really matters: people with high expectations will be disappointed, while those who just expect to be entertained will probably be so. The book is pure entertainment, lacking the criticism of The King of Torts, The Street Lawyer, The Last Juror, The Rainmaker, and a few others. (There are those who don’t like Grisham expressing his opinions about society in what they expect to be just a bit of amusement, but quite frankly you’re going to get opinions even if you read the Sunday comics.). The book reminded me of The Firm: in both books, the young hero finds himself between a rock and a hard place. Although the book was a page-turner, it ended somewhat clumsily and if I didn’t know Grisham better I’d think he was setting up a sequel.

Speaking of entertainment-as-criticism, I then read Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of American Empire, presenting a lecture by Zinn on the history of American imperialism in the form of a graphic novel, or comic book. Zinn begins with the last of the Indian Wars and ends with the invasion of Iraq. Had the book been published later, there’s no telling how much Zinn could have found to write about. Most of the book serves to illustrate Zinn’s lecture as a comic version of him gives it, although sometimes Zinn uses stories that seem outside of his lecture’s narrative to push the book’s overall story forward. The story itself is the growing power of American and corporate imperialism, their indifference to the sufffering they cause, and the people who fight against them. Although this isn’t really a “comic book”, it definitely has its heroes and villains. I knew most of what Zinn wrote about, and I think his interpretations are mostly fair. One of my friends voiced objection to Theodore Roosevelt’s association with racists, but I don’t know enough about his “Rough Riders” to comment intelligently. I enjoyed the book and thought it a pretty smart commentary.

Throughout the week I read from a book of quotations called Abounding Grace, compiled by M. Scott Peck, some of whose work I read a few weeks back. The quotations are organized into twelve themes — Courage, Happiness, Love, Faith, and so on, most of which have subheadings. The only theme without a subheading, actually, is “Wisdom”, the book’s final chapter. Peck introduces each theme with a brief essay that delves into why he thinks the matter important and — indeed, what he thinks it means. I have shared my favorite quotations from the book at my philosophy and humanities blog.

I also continued in Steven Saylor’s Roma sub Rosa series, although I deviated a little from the pattern and read one of his short-story collections instead of the actual novels. I want to read his books through chronologically, not in their publishing order. The House of the Vestals is set between Roman Blood and The Arms of Nemesis, tying them together well. The book consists of nine mystery stories, most of which are solved by Gordianus the Finder. (The remaining story is not actually a case of Gordianus‘: rather, it is a mystery story told to him by the woman would will become his wife.) I enjoyed all of the stories, and appreciate Saylor grounding them in historical accounts.

I finish Erich Fromm’s The Sane Society this week, a sturdy book of social criticism published in the 1950s. While it is not “popular sociology”, it isn’t a stuffy academic tome, either. Fromm was a member of the Frankfurt school, which is sometimes labeled Neo-Marxist from its members’ shared criticism of capitalism. Fromm begins by asking the question: can we criticize a society and make useful judgements about it? He believes we can, and then establishes criteria to that effect. A good portion of the book is devoted to “Man in Capitalistic Society”, as Fromm believes we can only understand why people are the way they are by studying the culture that shaped them. In this, his biggest chapter, he analyzes the needs of capitalism and shows how they are met by trying to reshape the minds of men — but since our minds are not infinitely moldable, and since the shape we are being pressed into is unnatural, misery develops. He then addresses attempts by people to reform the system through “Supercapitalism” and “Socialism” and delves into their problems. He finishes the book with “The Path to Sanity”, in which he introduces the reader to “Humanistic Communitarian Socialism”, which is a bit of a mouthful. The book reads well, given that it is being written for old Germans in the mid 1950s with very specialized vocabularies. Its scope is wide-ranging: Fromm discusses everything from religion to consumerism. I found the book interesting and engaging, to say the least, but I don’t know how many readers it would actually appeal to.

Next, at the behest of a friend, I read Timothy Keller’s The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism. Apparently, it’s all the rage in evangelical circles these days and is touted as an answer to all the various atheist books released in recent years. Keller addresses the “Four Horsemen” — Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens — by name at various points in the book and cites from some of their work, although he displays a decided preference for quoting Dawkins and Hitchens. I suspect this is because their style is more aggressive. After introducing his worldview — a fundamentalist perspective that includes a desire for social justice — Keller addresses various “attacks” on Christianity. Although some of what he says is true, he rarely seemed to address the claims themselves. He seemed to dance around, attacking questions rather than answering them, and he lost my respect a hundred pages in. It took me two weeks or so to read through this book, mostly because I would pause to avoid getting trapped in a argumentative mindset. In the second part of the book, Keller presents arguments for Christianity, including an argument from beauty and an argument from “well-why-would-they-have-written-it-down-if-it-weren’t-true?”, in which he expresses his belief that it’s more likely that Jesus did rise from the dead than that people would make it up. He asks “Why else would they have said this?”. Why do Catholics canonize saints who “perform miracles” in their life? Why do people share testimonies about being abducted by aliens? Given that all these people are expressing the same basic story — “I was abducted by bobble-head aliens who gave me an anal probe!” — isn’t it more likely that this is True rather than they just made it up? I mean, what is the likelihood of people just believing things because it feels good?

The book is in my view a poor example of apologetics, and I am amazed that so many Christians are raving about it. It seems to me a matter of “preaching to the choir”. I will be posting more formal responses at my philosophy and humanities blog on Fridays. Also, I was disappointed by another matter. When I placed this next to The God Delusion, nothing happened. I was hoping that they would be repelled by one another like oil and water, or attracted like the opposite ends of magnetic poles, but nothing happened.

Next I read Albert Schweitzer’s Out of my Life and Thought, a biography of sorts that I found through reading The Book that Changed my Life. Having read it, I’m certain why it changed that essayist’s life. It’s certaintly about a very interesting man who expresses engaging thoughts, but much of the book consists on theological musings and a history of the organ. Schweitzer — who I had never heard of before — grew up in Alsace, a German-French region that officially belonged to the German Empire, although its citizens spoke both German and French. Schweitzer details some of his life — mostly his experiences at seminary, his writing career, and his position as a doctor in Africa — while musing on various topics. He writes about the decay and need-for-revitalization of western civilization, which he sees as having lost an ethical impulse that drives society forward. He comments on various religions and philosophies, giving Stoicism in particular high marks. I will be looking more into this man, who I had never heard of before.

Lastly, and a very enjoyable reprieve from the heavy criticism and philosophy, I read Our Inner Ape by Frans De Waal, a Dutch primatologist who uses the book to compare chimpanzee, bonobo, and human societies against one another to see what our biological heritage can teach us about power, violence, sex, and kindness. De Waal believes that our nature is Janus-like, in that it has two faces. The same heritage gives we and the other apes a propensity for violence as well as empathy. In a very casually written and enjoyable narrative, De Waal goes into great detail about his and other’s experiences observing chimpanzee and bonobo tribes. I found it thoroughly enjoyable.

Pick of the Week: Our Inner Ape, Frans De Waal. To be fair, there’s something of a three-way tie this week, and I probably went with this one because its impression is so fresh on my mind.

Quotation of the Week: “There is a tendency to think that what we see in the present moment will continue. We forget how often we have been astonished by the sudden crumblings of institutions, by extraordinary changes in people’s thoughts, by unexpected eruptions of rebellion against tyrannies, by the quick collapse of systems of power that seemed invincible. To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, [and] kindness. If we remember those times and places — and there are so many where people have behaved magnificently — this gives us the energy to act. Hope is the energy for change. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live in defiance of the worst of everything around us is a marvelous victory.” – Howard Zinn, The People’s History of American Empire

Next Week:

• Comments on Out of my Life and Thought by Albert Schweitzer, The Reason for God by Timothy Keller, and The Sane Society by Erich Fromm
• A People’s History of the United States, Howard Zinn
• The Great Journey: Peopling the Americas, Brian Fagan
• Change Your Thoughts, Change Your Life: Living the Wisdom of the Tao, Wayne Dyer
• Maybe more, because most of my classes are winding down and my computer is broken so my main source of entertainment is reading. (This is the reason my list is longer this week.)