A People’s History of American Empire

Posted on April 23, 2009 by smellincoffee

A People’s History of American Empire: A Graphic Adaption
© 2008 Howard Zinn
273 pages

Earlier in the week, I read A People’s History of American Empire, composed by Howard Zinn, Mike Konopacki, and Paul Buhle. The book is a graphic novel, and framed through a lecture given by Howard Zinn — featuring Zinn as a character, introducing his lecture on American imperialism in the introduction before beginning it in chapter one. The story of American imperialism is expanded in twelve chapters, beginning with the end of the “Indian Wars” and ending with the invasion of Iraq. Most of the text is Zinn speaking, with the pictures providing illustrations. There are numerous “stories” set in the text, in which Zinn-as-narrator almost disappears. Given the nature of the book — or the graphic novel, as it were — its narrative reads very well.

This is very much a book about individuals who have resisted American and corporate imperialism as well as government and corporate indifference to the misery they cause. There are two general themes: one, the developing nature of imperialism, and two, the reactions of the ‘people’. The reader thus will be engaged in a critical history of the United States which gives the labor, civil rights, and peace movements their due. Both stories are developed pretty well, I think, and the illustrations were good as well. (I’m not exactly sure how to comment on a graphic novel other than to say I enjoyed the pictures.) I did find fault with one panel, in which the Lusitania is shown carrying tanks. The Lusitania was sunk before the development of tanks, and one of the tanks appears to be a model from the Second World War.* As for its historical credibility: I knew much of this before, having accidentally learned it for the most part. If he took liberties with the facts, they weren’t obvious to someone who is — in my and other’s estimations — a fairly well-read history student. Some interpretations are more questionable than others: no one can deny the self-serving motives of the Spanish-American War or the Indian Wars, but it’s also fairly difficult to cast World War 2 in such a cynical light.

Although the book’s story can be seen as somewhat grim, the number and conviction of people who have stood against the book’s villains gives the reader cause for hope — and indeed, Zinn deliberately concludes the lecture/book on a hopeful note. “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.”

I’m going to recommend this one.

* This may be excusable on the basis that lay readers will more easily equate “tank” with ‘weapons” than unmarked boxes of ammunition.

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The Associate

Posted on April 22, 2009 by smellincoffee

The Associate
© 2009 John Grisham
373 pages

I will admit to taking John Grisham for granted. Like old t-shirts and Star Trek, when I begin a Grisham novel I do so with the expectation that I will enjoy it. Grisham rarely disappoints. Although he is known for his legal thrillers, in recent years his new releases have been away from the courtroom. He returned to legal thrillers last year with The Appeal, but it seemed different from the novels of old and was (in my experience) reacted to negatively. Although Grisham’s novels rarely end with everyone living happily ever after, the ending of The Appeal struck readers as…”wrong”, somehow. It is one of the few Grisham books that I didn’t really enjoy — but with The Associate, Grisham has returned to a similar style.

This book, like most Grisham novels, is written in the third-person. The book’s main character is Kyle McAvoy, the son of a small-town lawyer who has little interest in making a career out of working for big-league Wall Street lawyers. The book begins one night at a community basketball game, at which McAvoy is coaching. As he watches the game and yells at the kids, he sees a rather obvious man watching him — a man dressed in the apparel of a government agent. Unnerved, he tries to leave the gym after the game via a back entrance, but is apprehended regardless. The man — a “Bennie Wright” — asks Kyle for ten minutes of his time.

Kyle soon realizes that Bennie holds power over him — evidence that links him and three of his friends to rape allegations from their early college days. While Kyle is perfectly innocent, the evidence shown to Kyle makes him realize that there is a very real possibility two of his friends aren’t, and that their indiscretion may ruin him. Bennie knows Kyle’s fear, and exploits it: in return for a guarantee that there will never be a trial about this issue, Bennie wants Kyle to accept a job at a major Wall Street law firm and gather information for him. Kyle is thus stuck between Scylla and Charybdis: he can risk the ruin of his name by helping Bennie and violating his future clients’ trust, or he can risk the ruin of his name by allowing the federal investigation to go on. Neither are attractive possibilities, but the latter ruin is far more likely than the former.

Even as Kyle bites the bullet, he learns that Bennie is not who he claims to be. There is something far greater going on here than an FBI investigation: defense contractors are going to (legal) war with one another over the design and production rights of a major piece of military equipment. Not only are the investments of the United States government at risk, but there are foreign governments like China, Russia, and Israel willing to interfere in the trial — and Kyle is being made to take part in this madness, to help unknown people by stealing information from his law firm and delivering it to his handlers.

Kyle, knowing unpleasant things are bound to happen to him if he just passively cooperates, begins planning his extrication from the situation he’s been trapped in from the very start. Although the book is primarily about him, Grisham occasionally gives the reader a rest from Kyle and follows Baxter Tate — the alleged rapist — instead. Tate’s problems with alcohol and descent into the world of rehab and relapse provide occasional breaks for the reader and eventually connect to Kyle’s problems.

The case of the lacrosse players from Duke entered into my mind, and I would wager that their trial in 2006 gave Grisham inspiration. The book is somewhat similar to The Firm in that a brilliant young antagonist quickly finds himself stuck between two impossible-to-accept scenarios, who has to find his own way out of the mess. The book’s ending chapters were pretty gripping for me, although I did have a “Wait, really? That’s it?” moment at its final conclusion. It’s almost as if the ending isn’t properly realized. The book doesn’t have the “untold story” quality of The King of Torts or the criticism of The Street Lawyer or The Rainmaker, but it was pretty enjoyable for me all in all.

(Please note that The Associate is not a prequel to The Partner.)

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This Week at the Library (20/2)

Posted on April 20, 2009 by smellincoffee

Books this Update:

  • Persian Fire, Tom Holland
  • Shattered Mirror, Amelia Atwater-Rhodes
  • Kingdoms of Gold, Kingdoms of Jade, Brian Fagan
  • The Guiding Light of Lao Tzu, Henry Wei
  • The Moscow Option, David Downing

Although I read most of Persian Fire last week, I didn’t quite finish it before my weekly trip to the library. Tom Holland writes on the development of the Persian Empire and its extended period of conflict with the Greek powers of Athens and Sparta. He employs the same narrative approach he used in Rubicon, much to my enjoyment — I prefer my history written as a story. The book is quite thorough, and I think Holland does a good job of not only writing about the material causes of the war and the political development of the various powers, but gives the reader an impression of how these people so far removed from us thought. One of the more interesting aspects of the book is that Holland frames the war from the Persian perspective as a religious conflict between those who serve Truth and those who serve lies.

Next I returned to Amelia Atwater-Rhodes’ fiction in Shattered Mirror, the third of her books and one set in the same universe as In the Forests of the Night and Demon in my View. While the protagonists of the former books were respectively a vampire and a human, this book (written from the third person point of view) focuses on Sarah Vida, a young witch. Her family and kind serve to protect humanity from the vampires who prey on them — but Vida’s moral and familiar obligations come into question when she accidentally befriends two pacifistic vampires. I enjoyed the book — perhaps more than Demon in my View — but it seemed quite busy after the half-way point. There are more principle characters involved here.

Brian Fagan’s Kingdoms of Gold, Kingdoms of Jade was next, in which I read about many various cultures of the Americas before Columbus. Although I had expected to read about the Aztecs, Maya, and Inca, Fagan’s approach is more broad: he writes on those three, but he also dwells with small tribes living in South America’s desert and everywhere else — from Inuit to Moundville people in Alabama. He writes on societal structure, religion, history, and agriculture. The last topic also constitutes the bulk of his last chapter, in which Fagan explores the agricultural and medicinal contributions of the Americans to the Europeans who vanquished them. The book is quite well written and enjoyably illustrated by hundreds of photographs.

Next I moved from history to religion and read Henry Wei’s The Guiding Light of Lao Tzu, a book written on the Tao Teh Ching, the basis of Taoism and written by Lao Tzu. The book is divided into two parts. In the first, Wei introduces the reader to Taoism and writes on specific topics within Taoism, such as the possibility of the afterlife and the benefits of meditation (including time travel). The Tao Teh Ching itself is reproduced in the second part of the book, with commentary from Wei. The book’s organizational scheme works well: thanks to Wei’s interpretive essays in the first section, I was not as confused by the Tao Teh Ching’s more mystical passages. I’ve not read enough about Taoism to say if this book is apt: it was fairly enjoyable to read, for whatever that is worth.

Lastly, I read The Moscow Option, on loan to me from a coworker. The book is alternative history, although it does not present a “Nazi victory” scenario: when the book closes, the war is still on-going. Author David Downing focuses rather on how the war would have proceeded differently had two little things been changed, changing both the War in the Pacific and Hitler’s invasion of Russia. The book begins with the Russian campaign, hence the “Moscow option”. Some reviewers at Amazon took offense to how the campaign is presented in the book, but the day people aren’t arguing on the Internet is the day there is no Internet. I don’t know enough about the “orders of battle” to comment on the historicity of most of the book: what was written seemed to be plausible. The style of the book is a different story: at times it seemed like a popular history book from an alternate universe, and at times it seemed like a military report. Sometimes the author invents fictional characters and has us see what is happening through their eyes, but they never linger long and are mostly forgotten by the time the reader has moved on. Although it’s not a crime for history books to not be written in narrative form, I thought the writing — more so in some parts than in others — was choppy. Sentences that should have been tied together were left alone, and some that were stuck together were not done so well. It’s as if the editor read over those passages and forgot to change them.

Pick of the Week: None of the books I read this week demand special recognition (as some do), but I could be pressed into recommending either Persian Fire or Kingdoms of Gold, Kingdoms of Jade.

Next Week:

  • The House of the Vestals, Steven Saylor. This is a collection of short stories written under his Roma sub Rosa series and featuring Gordianus, ancient Rome’s private eye.
  • Out of my Life and Thought, Albert Schweitzer. This is one of the books I saw mentioned in The Book that Changed my Life.
  • A People’s History of American Empire: A Graphic Adaption, Howard Zinn.
  • Abounding Grace: An Anthology of Wisdom, ed. M. Scott Peck.
  • The Associate, John Grisham. I’m finally getting around to reading his latest, which I received for Easter a few weeks back.
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The Moscow Option

Posted on April 20, 2009 by smellincoffee

The Moscow Option
© 2006 David Downing
256 pages

Working in a university setting means being surrounded by readers, and this occasionally gives rise to book recommendations. This week, I read a brief alternate history book from the library of my boss, who thought I might be interested in it. Written by David Downing, The Moscow Option is a summary of what happened in different World War 2 in which Germany and Japan are given advantages they did not hold in real life — twists of fate that went their way and not the Allies’. While I am a touch weary of “Nazi victory” scenarios, seeing Wehrmacht troops marching through Moscow on the front cover piqued my curiosity. More than a little of my interest stems from the treatment of east Germans under the Soviet puppet government during the Cold War, I must admit.

Surprisingly, the book isn’t a “Nazi victory” scenario: the book ends in 1942 with neither side victorious, although the reader is given an impression of who will triumph in the end. The “surprisingly” part is even more so because — not only is that the way books are written — but because the book is written from the perspective of a historian, who is seeing these events as the past. He knows what’s going to happen: he just doesn’t finish the entire story for the reader. This is apparently a “Why did the war go that way instead of another?” book written for people living in an alternate universe.

Downing begins the books by writing that he wanted to modify the direction of the war by adjusting subtle things after it had already started. There are two major points of deviation that I observed: firstly, Hitler is rendered comatose after a plane crash on the Russian front, thus preventing him from interfering in the various Wehrmacht generals’ plans for bringing the USSR down. Secondly, the Japanese figure out that their codes have been broken shortly before Midway. The book’s writing is a bit technical: it isn’t a narrative. This is a nonfiction book of military history written about a fictional event, and it reads like a military report with some literacy devices thrown in. I often read through passages of short sentences that could have easily been linked with commas and conjunctions, and should have. In other passages, the author linked sentences together with commas but nothing else, forcing the reader to mentally add in the phrases that tie sentences together. There were a few highlights: alternative historians like to wink at real history by hinting at what-might-have-been, and in a few cases Downing adds a good bit of humor and muscle to the skeleton of a historical account he has rendered. In writing on a Japanese air attack on Los Angeles, for instance, Downing writes that a stray bomb knocked the “H” and the “Wood” off of the famous Hollywood sign, and then cites Oliver Hardy claiming that the Japanese recognized his artistic merit. (Granted, this joke is only amusing to those who are familiar with the work of Laurel and Hardy.)

The history rendered is interesting, and probably plausible in most aspects. (I don’t know enough about the minutia of the war to grouse about anything, anyway.) The writing itself, however, needed work.

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The Guiding Light of Lao Tzu

Posted on April 20, 2009 by smellincoffee

The Guiding Light of Lao Tzu : A New Translation and Commentary on the Tao Teh Ching
© 1982 Henry Wei
234 pages

In the interests of cultural literacy, I’ve been trying to get a handle on major religions I have little knowledge of: this mostly extends to the “eastern” religions, as I’ve read on Judaism and Islam in the past — although my Islamic literacy is still quite limited. As evidenced by previous’ weeks’ reading, I’ve been poking into Buddhism. Now, my interested piqued by a quotation from Lao Tzu posted in someone’s forum signature, I turn to Taoism. The book is divided into two sections. In the first, the author addresses various topics within Taoism. Wei begins with an introduction to Taoism. The “Tao” is alternatively the way people should follow and some thing behind or underpinning the universe, although it seems to be separate from the idea of God. It is described in various “mysterious” ways.

Although I found the first section cumbersome, my interest picked up after he began writing on topics relating to meditation. Throughout this section — and indeed, throughout the book — Wei tries to connect the Tao Teh Ching with scripture from the Judeo-Christian bible. The second section of the book consists of the Tao Teh Ching itself with annotations and explanations provided by Wei. Because Wei had already talked about interpetations of topics within the text, I wasn’t quite as confused as I might have been when reading the poetic and “mysterious” passages. The book seems to have been written for the benefit of rulers, so some of the advice is impractical for those of us who don’t manage kingdoms of peasants. There wasn’t as much ethical philosophy as I expected, but it wasn’t terrible reading.

When the world goes in accord with Tao,
Horses are used for hauling manure.
When the world is out of keeping with Tao,
Horses are raised in the suburbs for war.
No sin is greater than yielding to desires.
No misfortune is greater than not knowing contentment.
No fault is greater than hankering after wealth.
Therefore, know contentment.
He who knows contentment is always content.

This was the only bit of the translation I copied, although there were other bits and phrases “a hallway filled with jade is not easily guarded” that I liked. I’m not exactly sure why I copied the above down: I don’t agree with it fully*, and parts of it like the last line seem to state the obvious.

*Desires aren’t always unhealthy to fulfill.

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Kingdoms of Gold, Kingdoms of Jade

Posted on April 18, 2009 by smellincoffee
Kingdoms of Gold, Kingdoms of Jade: the Americas Before Columbus
© 1991 Brian M. Fagan
240 pages, including 180 photographs set into the text

I’ve had a fascination with the Aztecs for most of my life, since I first saw pictures in second grade depicting their water-city Tenochtitlan. Growing up in Alabama, my fourth-grade history text also introduced me to the fascinating lifestyles of the various indigenous people living here before European colonization. As such, I looked forward to reading this, which I figured would deal heavily with the Aztecs, Maya, and Inca. My interest in getting a book by this particular author stems from a lecture he gave at my university a number of weeks back, in which he described the Mayan temples as both sacred places and ways to catch and channel water. Although the book does address the three cultures I expected, the book’s scope is more broad than that and so Fagan does not go into a lot of detail — there are many other cultures to visit.

Although he begins with brief chapters on the Aztecs and Incans, he quickly moves to the beginning of human settlements in the Americas. I’m hard-pressed to make sense of his organizational scheme: although writing on civilizations and cultures all over the Americas, he tends to move back and forth through time. The smaller cultures are not ignored in favor of the more memorable ones, an approach I grew to like. Although the information I was expecting was not in here — the water-channelling rule of Mayan temples — there is a wealth of information on the various cultures of the pre–Columbian Americas. Fagan writes on politics, agriculture, religion, symbolism, and history. He ends the book with a quick lecture on what the Americas gave the world in terms of foodstuffs and medicinal knowledge.

The book is well-written, provides ample pictures for illustration, and provides what I think is a generally good survey of the Americas. I enjoyed this book more than The Great Warming, at any rate, and will continue reading Fagan.

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Shattered Mirror

Posted on April 17, 2009 by smellincoffee

Shattered Mirror
© 2001 Amelia Atwater-Rhodes
227 pages

Given the current Twilight mania, I am just a touch self-conscious about reading a vampire novel written for young adults. Back in high school I read Atwater-Rhodes’ In the Forests of the Night, and found it entrancing. Her world was different from the fantasy settings I’d read about before, and her rules seemed to make more sense. It was also dark, but not off-puttingly so. A few months back I finally got around to reading another novel of hers, and here I read a third. The book is written in the third-person, but sometimes seemed like first-person, as most of the book is spent in the protagonist’s — Sarah Vida — head. Interestingly, Sarah is very much like Rhodes’ previous protagonists: teenage, female, living on the fringes, “dark”, strong, and very stubborn and independent. Despite this, Sarah is fundamentally different from the other protagonists: Risika was a vampire, Jessica Shade a human, and Sarah a witch.

Witches were mentioned in In the Forests of the Night as being vampire-hunters, but in Demon in my View, we learned through the story of Jessica Shade that witches seek to protect humanity from the vampires who prey on them — although it is clear that some witches enjoy killing vampires for the sake of killing. I found this idea very intriguing, so I was delighted to learn that this book’s protagonist was a witch — and specifically, a hunter. Using an ability to detect vampiric auras, superhuman strength, and magic knives, she and her kin seek out vampires and kill them. As the book begins, Sarah and her family have recently moved to a small Massachusetts town, prompted by Sarah accidentally destroying part of her school in a recent hunt. (This reminds me of Riordian’s Percy Jackson series, in which Jackson seems to switch schools every book after destroying part of each school he visits by defending himself against monsters. ) As soon as Sarah enters her first classroom, she immediately catches the attention of two teenage vampires.

Sarah’s life and the lives of the two vampires — Nissa and Christopher — will be drawn into friendship and conflict as Sarah tries to reconcile the rules of her family, her moral imperative to kill vampires, and the confusion that is wrought when her family’s leading target turns out to be connected to the two vampires Sarah meets. Atwater-Rhodes expands her universe in this book, adding in a “SingleEarth” organization — a union of vampires, witches, and humans who want to live peacefully together. Compared to the two other books I’ve read by her, this one was “busy”. I think this is so because there are more principle characters. In the Forests of the Night had two, Risika and Aubrey: their power conflict constituted the plot of the book. Demon in my View had three: Jessica Shade, Aubrey, and a teenage witch who tries to protect Jessica from her and Aubrey’s increasing interest in one another. This book has four principle characters and three more who cannot be ignored. Consequently, there were times I had to pause and re-read parts of the book to keep track of what was happening. Regardless, the book was a quick and enjoyable read.

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Persian Fire

Posted on April 16, 2009 by smellincoffee

Persian Fire: The First World Empire and the Battle for the West
© 2005 Tom Holland
418 pages

After reading Holland’s Rubicon, blogger ResoluteReader recommended that I read Persian Fire as well. I have an interest in the various Persian and Babylonian empires that rose and fell thousands of years ago, and given my strong interest in the ancient Greeks, the book was thus quite appealing. Holland begins his narrative by establishing the early histories of the Persian Empire, Athens, and Sparta, including Persia’s absorption of the Babylonian and Egyptian polities. I knew very little about the various empires in “Iran”, and was especially surprised to learn about the religious aspects of the Persian emperors. Holland will frame the emperors’ religious views in explaining their decisions to move to the east. A couple of them seem to think of themselves as Plato’s philosopher-king’s. In telling the story of the Greeks, Holland is especially through in detailing their petty quarrels with one another.

Roughly around the three-fifths mark, Greece and Persian come into conflict and resulting chapters detail the Persian Wars that Darius and Xerxes carried out against the Greeks. The Persian motivations are quite romantic: they intend to show everyone that Ahura Mazda is not mocked, nor is his Empire scorned, and neither will either tolerate “evil”. The classic battles of the wars — Marathon, Thermopylae, Salamis — are all included, typically given a chapter all of their own. The book is quite thorough and very readable. Although its level of detail amounts of a somewhat imposing read, it’s fairly easy to get through. He does persist in using modern terminology — putsch, generalissimo, and so on — but that’s just a trifling matter. The book ends by hinting at the conflict between Athens and Sparta — the “Peloponnesian Wars”.

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This Week at the Library (13-4)

Posted on April 13, 2009 by smellincoffee

Books this Update:

  • Gang Leader for a Day, Sudhir Venkatesh
  • Arms of Nemesis, Steven Saylor
  • The Universe in a Single Atom, Tenzin Gyatso

This week’s reading started off on a high note, with Sudhir Venkatesh’s Gang Leader for a Day, an account of how he spent six years spending time in a Chicago in the midst of a gang of drug traffickers, making their base the Robert Taylor housing projects. Although the book does serve to give the reader an idea of what life is like for gang members, it isn’t really a work of voyeurism. It reflects his dissertation in that it does show how impoverished people are struggling and adapting themselves to their situation. In a place where the federal government doesn’t exist and the city government is negligent when not impotent, people make due with what they’ve got, leading people to make what an outsider would see as morally questionable choices. I found myself both sympathizing with and slightly put-off by some of the people who emerged. At the same time Venkatesh is writing about this community in the projects, he also labors to connect it with the greater context of the late 20th century and especially the early 1990s. It was a very readable book.

Next I read Steven Saylor’s Arms of Nemesis, another mystery novel set in ancient Rome starring the classical detective Gordianus the Finder. After being pulled out of bed in the middle of the night and offered enormous amounts of money to take a job, he finds himself on a ship leaving Rome and headed for the “Cup” of Italy, where all the patricians keep their villas. One particular patrician, Marcus Crassus, has recently lost a family member: his brother, who manages one of his estates, has gotten himself killed. Two slaves have also vanished, and a message on the floor near the fallen body implies that they have revolted and run off to join Spartacus. Crassus, who wants the Senate to grant him an army to destroy Spartacus with, declares that in five days his remaining slaves in the villa will be put to death if Gordianus does not find that they are innocent. Gordianus soon realizes that Crassus neither expects nor wants the slaves to be vindicated: he is in fact disturbingly anticipating the opportunity to show how tough he is by putting them to the death. When Gordianus finds hidden piles of weapons and gold in the villa’s port, he begins to suspect that something larger is happening — and it may be large enough to get Gordianus himself killed. The book was quite enjoyable, more so than Roman Blood in my opinion.

Lastly, I read the Dalai Lama’s The Univere in a Single Atom, in which he attempts to connect Buddhist ideas like “emptiness” and “the beginningless universe” to quantum theory and the big bang. He also reflects on Buddhist and scientific ideas concerning consciousness and writes about possible problems with genetic engineering. The chapters on consciousness were interesting, but overall I could have given the book a pass.

I almost finished with Persian Fire, but my busy schedule — tests and papers — stopped me from that.

Pick of the Week: Gang Leader for a Day, Sudhir Venkatesh

Quotation of the Week: “Decapitation has a way of making even the most powerful men irrelevent.” – Steven Saylor, commenting on Crassus‘ eventual fate in his epilogue.

Potentials for Next Week:

  • Persian Fire, Tom Holland. I’ll finish the last fifty pages or so.
  • The Guiding Light of Lao Tzu, Henry Wei
  • Kingdoms of Gold, Kingdoms of Jade: the Americas Before Columbus, Brian Fagan
  • Shattered Mirror, Amelia Atwater-Rhodes
  • Embroidered Textiles (I thought this would be a book on world religions for some reason.)
  • The Moscow Option, David Downing
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The Universe in a Single Atom

Posted on April 13, 2009 by smellincoffee

The Universe in a Single Atom: the Convergence of Science and Spirituality
© 2005 Tenzin Gyatso
224 pages

This week marked the first time that I read something by the Dalai Lama that was not concerned primarily with ethics. The book begins with “Reflections”, as author Tenzin Gyatso tells of how he became fascinated by the world of science and technology. He then launches into the book proper, looking for connections between Buddhism and modern science. His opening chapters deal with “Emptiness, Relativity, and Quantum Physics”, which reminded me of Doug Muder’s essay Humanist Spirituality in which he begins by dispelling the idea that quantum mechanics is mystical. (I have run into this attitude myself, in meditating with a friend. When I asked him to explain his belief in chi, he asked me if I believed in quantum mechanics.) His next chapters deal with the evolution of sentience and cosmological evolution, in which he compares the Buddhist idea of the “beginningless universe” to the big bang. Several chapters on consciousness follow, and he ends with a chapter on the ethics of genetic manipulation.

It’s hard to comment on the book: doing so would require greater understanding of the ideas he is comparing. I thought the chapters on consciousness were interesting, and he seems generally fair about the idea of genetic engineering in plants. He’s also critical of “scientific materialism” and enjoys using “reductionism” and variations thereof. I didn’t find what I was expecting in this book, namely biological reasons for acting ethically. I suppose I shall have to stick to Richard Dawkins‘ The Selfish Gene, since in it he explores the idea of altruism being beneficial to us.

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