Arms of Nemesis

Posted on April 12, 2009 by smellincoffee

Arms of Nemesis: A Mystery of Ancient Rome
© 1992 Steven Saylor
318 pages

Two weeks ago I read Roman Blood, a mystery novel set in late-Republican Rome. It was the first in the series Roma sub Rosa, and Arms of Nemesis is the second. Both are written in the first-person from the perspective of Gordianus the Finder, the era’s version of a private detective. The book begins with a rude awakening: Gordianus is summoned by gladiators to enter the service of an as-yet-unknown benefactor at five times his usual rate. Gordianus, being curious and in need of the money, agrees. Soon he finds himself on a ship headed for the “Cup” of Italy: the arch of its “boot”. Along the way, Gordianus muses himself about the ill treatment of slaves, which hints at the plot.

Once arriving in the Cup, Gordianus confirms what he already suspects: he has been hired by Marcus Crassus, the richest man in Rome. Crassus is a mysterious and potentially dangerous man to work for: he is known as the richest man in Rome and has a private army. He is also in the middle of a power struggle with Pompey the Great, which I’ve read about in Rubicon and Imperium. Crassus‘ brother, who managed one of Crassus‘ many villas, has suddenly turned up missing half of his head. Two slaves are also missing, and the presumption is that the two slaves murdered their master and then ran off to join Spartacus, who is at the present time terrorizing the patricians of the Republic with his army of slaves-turned-revolutionaries. The dead man’s wife doesn’t buy the idea that the slaves of the house did this, and so at her bidding Crassus has agreed to allow someone to investigate the matter. That someone is Gordianus, and he soon finds out that if he does not find out who is responsible for this in five days, the remaining slaves of the villa — 99 in all — will be butchered as an deterrent to other patricians’ slaves and to prove the manliness of Crassus.

As Gordianus develops his investigation, he begins to suspect that Crassus has no real interest in questioning the supposed guilt of the slaves, and realizes that Crassus may want to make an example out of them just to prove to the Senate that he is quite the embodiment of Roman virtue and thus perfectly fit to be given command of the army being raised to fight Spartacus. The plot further thickens when Gordianus discovers bags of swords, shields, spears, and money hidden in the port of the villa: clearly, there is something else going on here other than revolt by two slaves.

The book was very enjoyable to read, and I must say that I like it over Roman Blood. I was not expecting the plot to end the way it did, but it ended well.

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Gang Leader for a Day

Posted on April 8, 2009 by smellincoffee

Gang Leader for a Day: a Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets
© 2008 Sudhir Venkatesh
302 pages

One of my ways to find reading related to my interests is to visit Amazon and search for books I have read before and liked: I then browse the “Related Books” section. It was in this way that I found Gang Leader for a Day, having searched for Freakonomics. One particular section in Freaknomics — about a young University of Chicago graduate student who spent years associating with a Chicago gang, whose research showed how little money most crack dealers actually made — intrigued me, and after I began reading Gang Leader for a Day I realized that this was the very same graduate student.

The story goes that while a grad student at UC, Venkatesh joined a project overseen byDr. William Julius Wilson and was tasked with visiting a housing development and asking a few questions. Venkatesh does so, and immediately draws the attention of several gang members who believe him to be a spy from one of the Mexican gangs in the city. They force him to stay in one of the buildings under their paranoid eyes while they wait for their boss (a man Venkatesh will name “J.T.”) to arrive. When J.T. he arrives, he asks Venkatesh about his studies, and bursts into laughter when Venkatesh begins to ask him questions from his survey — “How does it feel to be black and poor?” J.T. quickly informs Venkatesh that if he wants to find out about life in the projects, he has to spend time with the people who live there — not walk around with a clipboard asking census questions.

So begins an at least six-year project in which Venkatesh spends time with people living in the Robert Taylor housing projects in Chicago, a a major source of drug trafficking. While Venkatesh’s initial years are spent with J.T. and other members of the BK gang, his research — which eventually assumes the form of exploring how people living there respond to poverty — takes him into the community of the housing projects. The distinction between the two is very vague: the gang members are quick to assert that the gang is a community-building project, hosting parties and helping out people who need a hand, and as Venkatesh will see, community leaders from tenant presidents to local ministers have to deal with the gang as if they were a “legitimate” part of the community. Indeed, Venkatesh documents the power conflict between J.T. and Ms. Bailey, the tenant president.

This is not a Goodfellas–esque work of voyeurism: Venkatesh’s book does more than just showing the “secret work of drug leaders”. It reflects his dissertation in that it does show how impoverish 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.

The book makes for gripping reading. It’s an easy narrative to read through, even when Venkatesh is trying to relate what he’s seeing to the outside world and thus giving the reader background information. It’s also extremely thought-provoking. I’m not reading the book at a very deep level, but even in my relatively casual reading experience a lot of questions surfaced. It changed my idea of what Chicago gangs were like — I am only familiar with the old Italian gangs of Prohibition and to a lesser extent the modern drug gangs in Los Angeles — but it also showed me how deep the problem of inner-city decay is. It also helped me to understand a little of the racial divide in Chicago, something I hadn’t thought of until last Saturday when I listened to a This American Life show called “The Wrong Side of History”. It gives me a new respect for what President Obama and his colleagues must have had to go through when working in Chicago, and now I want to read about his work there.

I definitely recommend this.

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This Week at the Library (6/4)

Posted on April 6, 2009 by smellincoffee

Books this Update:

  • Through a Window, Jane Goodall
  • The Book that Changed My Life, ed. Roxanne J. Coady
  • The Great Warming, Brian Fagan
  • The Ghost, Robert Harris
  • The Words of Martin Luther King, ed. Coretta Scott King

Four out of five authors recommend starting book titles with “The”. Jane Goodall, the lone voice of opposition, is mildly famous for her experiences living among chimpanzees, and in Through a Window she records some of her experiences. I’ve never read any Goodall before this week, but I must say she’s earned her reputation for being enjoyable to read. She has spent decades of her life among the chimpanzees, watching generation turn into generation and leaders rise and fall. Her book explores themes as they relate to chimpanzee society — war, family, sex, etc. — and devotes specific chapters to certain chimpanzee individuals that made a larger-than-normal impact on their communities or were of particular interest to Goodall and her colleagues. She also compares chimpanzee behavior to human behavior and chastises humanity our unneighborly behavior.

Next I read The Book that Changed My Life, a collection of essays by seventy-one authors on the books that had a profound impact upon them. Perhaps the book gave them a love for reading, made them think a new thought, or led them to making life choices that they might not have otherwise made. Being the philistine I am, I recognized only two of the essayists — Senators Joe Lieberman and John McCain. The books the various authors chose are mostly literature, although there a few nonfiction titles thrown in here and there: Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August, for instance, or Ernst Becker’s The Denial of Death.

A couple of months ago or so, professor Brian M. Fagan spoke at my university on the topic of climate change and its influence on human history. While his lecture and The Great Warming began with the positive effects of the “Medieval Warm Period” on Europe’s climate and civilizations, the net effect on humanity does not appear to have been positive. Most of the book is concerned with droughts, flooding, and mudslides. There are not isolated affairs, either: Fagan places special emphasis on the fact that these drought periods were extended, wreaking havoc across generations. While the information presented was disturbing and interesting, it wasn’t the strongest narrative I’ve read. I will be visiting more Fagan, though.

What is a strong narrative is Robert Harris’ The Ghost, a short novel about the mysteries that surround the United Kingdom’s retired prime minister after he announces he intends to publish his memoirs. After Adam Lang’s ghostwriter strangely washes up on a beach, his lawyer contracts our narrator to edit and build on the work already done. Because the memoirs are supposed to be written in Lang’s voice, the narrator must find Lang’s voice — but Lang is both a politician and a man, and the ghostwriter struggles in finding who the real Lang is. While he investigates into Lang’s past to find reasons for his taking up the vocation of politics, he is bothered by the mysterious death of his predecessor and the feeling that something isn’t right. He soon finds himself in the middle of a mystery/political thriller that has lethal consequences — possibly for himself. I enjoyed it immensely.

Lastly I read a collected set of quotations by Martin Luther King Jr, compiled by his now-late wife Coretta Scott King. I don’t have much to say about a book of quotations: it’s not a very cohesive source. Bits of his two most famous speeches are added at the bottom, but not the full text of either. I saw no selections from “Why I Am Opposed to the War in Vietnam”, the speech that made King come alive for me. This was somewhat disappointing.

Quotation of the Week: “What Camus is saying is that there is reason to be hopeful, that man must understand his condition and must struggle, fight, and rebel against the absurdity of life. There is hope, and hope is to be found in man and in man only. Man defines himself, gives himself an identity through his actions. Even though the futility of our condition leads us all to the same end, we must and can dignify life through our needs and behavior.” – Jacques Pepin, commenting on Camus’ Myth of Sisyphus.

Pick of the Week: Tie between Through a Window and The Ghost.

Next Week:

  • Arms of Nemesis, Steven Saylor. I’m continuing in the Roma sub Rosa series.
  • Gang Leader for a Day: a Rouge Sociologist Takes to the Streets, Sudhir Venkatesh
  • Persian Fire, Tom Holland — a recommendation from “ResoluteReader“.
  • Scientific Explorers: Travels in Search of Knowledge, Rebecca Stefoff
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The Words of Martin Luther King Jr.

Posted on April 6, 2009 by smellincoffee

The Words of Martin Luther King Jr.
© 1983, edited by Coretta Scott King
112 pages

I had intended to read a book on Martin Luther King Jr. back in January near his birthday, but the requested book never arrived. After watching Gandhi last week — repeatedly — I thought of King and decided to find another book containing his work. The Words of Martin Luther King Jr. do not contain the full text of his speeches, but consists rather of quotations organized by topic. The most famous portions of “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” and “I Have a Dream” are listed, but not “Why I Am Opposed to the War in Vietnam”, which was the speech that made King come alive for me. The quotations are fitted into various selections — “The Community of Man”, “Racism”, “Civil Rights”, “Justice and Freedom”, “Religion and Faith”, “Nonviolence”, and finally “Peace”, with the bits from his most famous speeches inserted at the end along with a proclamation of Martin Luther King day, signed by Ronald Reagan, and a chronology of King’s life. For those interested, I will soon post some of the quotations I liked most at my philosophy/humanities blog. The book’s contents were generally enjoyable, but its use is limited: this is a collection of quotations, and while I could make some generalizations about the character of King as they portray it, I would rather draw from a greater context — like a book containing full speeches.

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The Ghost

Posted on April 5, 2009 by smellincoffee

The Ghost: a Novel
© 2007 Robert Harris
412 pages

I know the Internet is the stuff a paranoiac’s dreams are made of. I know it parcels up everything — Lee Harvey Oswald, Princess Diana, Opus Dei, AL Qaeda, Israel, M16, crop circles — and with pretty blue ribbons of hyperlinks it ties them all into a single grand conspiracy. But I also know the wisdom of the old saying that a paranoiac is simply a person in full possession of the facts…

With those words, a ghostwriter’s struggle to find his client’s voice begins to grow into a mystery thriller, ending unexpectedly. The controversial prime minister of the United Kingdom stepped down from his post two years ago, accepting ten million dollars by a US publishing firm for the publication of his memoirs. Wanting to leave a testament behind him but unwilling to actually do the work, Adam Lang — a “thinly veiled” version of Tony Blair — passes the work off to loyal aide Mike McAra, who spends two years engrossed in libraries doing research. As Lang and his ghostwriter approach the deadline, McAra’s body washes up on a beach. The PM’s wife Ruth Lang, having read several ghost-written works by our narrator — as the book is written in first-person — recommends him to finish the job.

The timing is most inconvenient, as an ex-colleague of Lang’s has recently seen fit that the International Criminal Court should investigate Blai— pardon me, Lang‘s — role in allowing the United States to kidnap several Pakistani nationals and then stick them in secret “black site” interrogation centers to be tortured for information. As such, Lang — holed up on an island in the United States while resting from a recent lecture tour — is forced to respond to those accusations while being interviewed by our narrator. The potential stress of the job does not compete with the $250K our narrator is being paid for the month of work, and so he takes it on.

He struggles to find his subject’s voice early on, grappling with the question of who his client is. Who is the man behind the public face? Nothing makes sense, and in the course of doing his research he stumbles into more serious questions, questions that endanger his life and trap him in a web of political intrigue. I enjoyed the book extremely: unlike Enigma and Archangel, I didn’t have to work my way through this one. Every page captured my attention, and I finished it in a matter of hours. Characterization is particularly strong in this novel, I think. I laughed out loud when reading the narrator’s response to seeing his predecessor’s work for the first time: after reading through an extremely dull manuscript (which he is expected to revise), he realizes how much work there is ahead of him and describes his reaction: “I pressed my hands to my cheeks and opened my mouth and eyes wide, in a reasonable imitation of Edvard Munch’s The Scream.” After the emoting, he turns to see Lang’s wife staring at him. Her only response is to raise an eyebrow and say, “As bad as that?” I found the scene funny: Harris doesn’t have his narrator describe his feelings: he has the narrator show them in a spontaneous way. The characters’ personalities come through in little quirks like this. Another example is Ruth Lang’s bodyguard, who likes to read Harry Potter books on the job. There aren’t too many major characters, and each of them are fleshed out well. (Lang, interestingly, receives no physical descriptions beyond his clothing: if Lang is indeed Tony Blair, I suppose Harris thought none was necessary. It’s as if he’s telling the story with a wink to his audience. The story, by the way, is told to the reader — breaking the fourth wall — by the unnamed narrator, and so includes bits of foreshadowing. Nothing is ruined, though. Beyond characterization, the book’s plot develops in interesting ways. Harris is plainly used to the modern era: at one point he has the narrator Googling for information and presents search results in the text — including fake Wikipedia articles, lending a touch of realism. These little touches and the plot in general made for a fun read — extremely enjoyable stuff, and a very worthy diversion from the sociology paper I worked on all day.

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The Great Warming

Posted on April 4, 2009 by smellincoffee

The Great Warming: Climate Change and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations
© 2008 Brian Fagan
282 pages

Earlier this year, Dr. Brian M. Fagan visited my university to deliver a talk titled “Climate Change, the Flail of God, or the Elephant in the Room” in which he spoke on the effects of the “Medieval Warming Period” on societies then existing. Fagan elaborates in the book that while the “Medieval Warm” was a topic of discussion occasionally bandied about, there was little in the way of concrete evidence outside of oral history. He did find evidence to support such a theory, but more disturbing was the evidence of severe climactic disturbances elsewhere on the global — perhaps different consequences of the same weather pattern. This book is — as I’ve hinted — a full elaboration of that brief lecture, and in fact answered a question I raised during the question and answer session that Fagan only answered half-heartedly then. The full title is Climate Change and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations. Fagan is primarily concerned with the global consequences of the Medieval Warm period, and his chapters — while beginning in sunny Europe, enjoying a climate far more conducive to being able to grow surplus food than ever before, take us to the Sahara, following Moorish caravans, eventually visiting every continent except Antarctica.

I read Collapse by Jared Diamond back in December, and this book reminded me of it in many ways. Both Fagan and Diamond examine the expanding reach of the Vikings and how settlers in Greenland struggled to survive in the harsh climate, eventually being cut off from Europe when the warm period ceased and vanishing all together. (My question to Fagan was if the warm period had affected Scandinavia to the point that surpluses had created a population boom, necessitating the Vikings attempting to make a living for themselves by trading with and sacking parts of Europe. That’s a lot to fit into one question, so there’s little wonder he misheard me then. The answer, according to the book, is yes. My suspicions were confirmed.) Diamond and Fagan both address the Mayan “implosion”, although I will say that Fagan’s coverage of the Maya was more exhaustive. In his lecture, Fagan told us how the Mayan temples were actually used to catch and channel water in additional to being tall and intimidating. Fagan covers more ground than Diamond, though,visiting places I’ve never heard of.

The theme of the book is how climate change alters human societies differently depending on where they live. While some societies — the Europeans, for instance — fared well during the warm period, severe and extended droughts and flooding periods in other parts of the world killed millions and in some cases dealt societies a staggering blow from which they would not recover. An observation of mine was of how vulnerable we are to droughts, flooding, and so on: we seem utterly at the mercy of the climate. My opinion of the book is mixed. While the information was interesting and generally presented well, it wasn’t that strong of a narrative: it didn’t grip me the way Diamond did. I’m going to read a little more Fagan to see if it was just this book, though.

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The Book that Changed my Life

Posted on April 3, 2009 by smellincoffee

The Book that Changed My Life
© 2006 editors Roxanne J. Coady and Joy Johannessen
197 pages

Last week while ending a walk about town, I stopped in my university library to refill my water bottle and investigate On the Road to see if it was worth reading. While strolling through, I happened to see The Book that Changed my Life on display. Its title amused me to the point of picking it up, and I settled down to read it at various intervals throughout the week. The book consists of seventy-one essays by authors on the book (or sometimes, “books”) that changed their life in some way. Most of the essays are short — a page and a half seems to be average — and all were fairly easy reading. The books covered are mostly literature, with some exceptions — The Guns of August, for instance, which inspired Doris Kearns Goodwin to become a historian even though it was a field — was and still is, perhaps — dominated by men. Some essayists shared books in common — J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby were both mentioned multiple times. The essayists’ motivation for choosing one book or another varied. For some, it introduced them to reading for pleasure: for others, their books gave them new insights. One person wrote on the effect that the Sears Catalouge had on him as a child. Of the essayists, I only recognized two — Senators Joe Lieberman and John McCain. (One of Lieberman’s picks was “The Bible“, but he gives it little more than lip service, as would be expected.) The book was an enjoyable read, and will be of interest to “readers”: I was able to find a few suggestions for further reading.

Just a few of the titles I wrote down:

  • Out of my Life and Thought, Albert Schweitzer
  • Letters to a Young Poet, Ranier Maria Rilke
  • The Snake Has All the Lines, Jean Kerr
  • The Denial of Death, Ernest Becker (this was mentioned twice)
  • The Reason Why, Cecil Woodham-Smith
  • An Introduction to Contemporary History, Geoffry Barraclough

It seems appropriate, after reading this book, to consider the question of the book or books that have changed my life. There are many that have changed my thinking — Neil Postman immediately comes to mind — and some that have entertained me beyond measure (John Grisham’s The Rainmaker), but when I turn my mind to the question but don’t think about it, Paul Zindel’s The Pigman* comes to mind. Zindel was the first author I ever read who wrote about “strange” things, and his The Pigman was the first book about serious issues I ever read. As a child, the book seemed to be very “adult”, and I remembering it being perhaps the first book to move me to tears, to have a memorable response other than basic enjoyment. This is a book that lingers in my memory. Because of it I read everything my high school library had by Zindel, including The Pigman’s Legacy and The Pigman and Me.

* Ordinarily I’d link you to the Wikipedia page, but the page in this instance is abysmally done and I won’t be responsible for whatever impression it gives about the book.

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Through a Window

Posted on March 31, 2009 by smellincoffee

For now we see as through a glass, darkly…

Through a Window: My Thirty Years with the Chimpanzees of Gombe
© 1990 Jane Goodall
267 pages

I’ve always been fascinated by the behavior of our fellow apes. Unlike ants or birds, they behave in ways similar to us — in ways we can understand. And because of their similarities to us genetically, their behavior can give us insight into our own history. I realized this latter observation in reading Carl Sagan’s Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors. Jane Goodall is a name I’ve heard of many times before, but have never been able to read until now. As you may be able to discern from the title, the book is her account of the thirty years she has spent observing a chimpanzee community in Tanzania.

She begins it frankly in “The Mind of the Chimpanzee” by commenting on the difficulties in analyzing chimpanzee behavior.We can’t know chimpanzees are experiencing anger or depression: we can only allow their responses to what happens to them to guide us, giving us information that we can infer such a conclusion from. The same is true — although she does not use this as an example — of hierarchies within chimpanzee communities. From here she comments in general on chimpanzee intelligence as we have been able to detect it. Next she introduces “The Research Centre”, describing how she came to Gombe and what she and her fellows attended to accomplish.

The bulk of the book consists of chapters on a particular subject — “Mothers and Daughters”, “War”, “Sex”, “Mothers and Son” — as well as chapters concentrating on particular individuals within the chimpanzee community that contributed much to its history. As the book covers thirty years, we see leaders rise and fall — some to rise again. Goodall, through these various chapters, not only relates information about the structure of their community, but gives it a history, as well. There was sense of time passing as I read, bringing with it highs and lows. This is supplemented by pictures — mostly black and white, but some in color. The black and white pictures generally accompany the timeframe of the chapter they are set in, but the color photographs — set in the middle of the book — reflect a much broader period. Goodall writes very well: the praise I’ve heard about her is duly given.

In the antepenultimate* chapter, Goodall uses her observations to reflect on similarities and differences between humans and chimpanzees in regard to war, compassion, parenting,and other social issues. Next, in “Our Shame”, she informs the reader of the dire state of chimpanzees in the world today: not only are their habitats receding rabidly, but they are being poached in the wild. Many are stolen and subject to severe mistreatment. This reminds me of the Primates of the World book I read back in the summer, with almost every chapter ending with a section on how that chapter’s animal was in grave peril. The last chapter includes finishing thoughts, including musings by Goodall on how chimpanzees might write their own history.

And so to end: the book was well-written, quite interesting, and entirely worthy of reccommendation.

* I read today that this word — meaning second-to-last — is no longer used. Because it’s such an interesting word, I’m going to use it when I can.

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This Week at the Library (30/3)

Posted on March 30, 2009 by smellincoffee

Books this Update:

  • Freakonomics, Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner
  • Roman Blood, Steven Saylor
  • Rubicon: the Last Years of the Roman Republic, Tom Holland
  • Transforming the Mind, Tenzin Gyatso

I began the week with the strangely-titled Freakonomics, work done by Steven Levitt and written by Stephen Dubner. The original work was apparently quite popular, as it merited a “revised and expanded” edition. The original book’s contents — a series of essays on social questions analyzed using economic principles — have been supplemented by a number of shorter essays in a similar vein, as well as a number of “blog” posts rendered in print form. Beyond using economic principles, there is no unifying theme to the book and none is intended. Its specific topics include cheating, real estate, the economics of crack trafficking, the decline of crime in the 1990s, and the impact of gun control. Although economics is not a strong subject of mine, the book was fun to read and easily understandable.

Next up, a little fiction: I read Steven Saylor’s Roman Blood, a mystery novel set in the latter days of the Roman Republic. The era’s equivalent to a private eye — Gordianus the Finder — is commissioned by a young advocate, Cicero, to help him build a case defending a man accused of killing his father. What begins as a simple murder mystery expands to a tale of political intrigue that threatens the life of Gordianus. The book is a bit over four hundred pages long and fairly captivating, although there are some purely gratuitous sex scenes that seemed to add little to the actual story.

Staying in the same topic but moving to a different genre, I read Rubicon by Tom Holland, a narrative history work depicting the twilight years of the Republic and the beginnings of the Empire’s long night. Although the book is principally concerned with the political conflicts that lead to the Republic’s crumbling — the civil wars between Sulla and Marius, for instance — Holland fits those conflict into particular themes. Sulla and Marius’ conflict, for instance, is grounded in the same patrician versus populist politics that will see the rise of both Pompey and Caesar. Men like Cicero and Cato also receive their due. The book reads quite well, although the author did use modern terminology more than I would have liked. Describing Roman affairs using World War 2 terminology may convey ancient ideas to modern readers, but I have the feeling that they cheapen those ideas as well.

Lastly I read a transcription of a series of lectures delivered by the 14th Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, about the power of mental transformation. The lectures seemed to be more about Buddhist doctrine and less about ethics. I think his An Open Heart is better at explaining how his religious principles influence mental discipline, and that Ethics for the New Millennium and The Art of Happiness are better for ethics purposes.

Pick of the Week: Rubicon: the Last Years of the Roman Republic, Tom Holland

Quotation of the Week:

More than two millennia after the Republic’s collapse, the “extraordinary character” of the men — and women — who starred in its drama still astonishes. But so too — less well known perhaps than a Caesar, or a Cicero, or a Cleopatra, but more remarkably than any of them — does the Roman Republic itself. If there is much about it we can never know, then still there is much that can be brought back to life, its citizens half emerging from antique marble, their faces illumined by a background of gold and fire, the glare of an alien yet sometimes eerily familiar world.

– from Rubicon

Potentials for Next Week:

  • Through a Window, Jane Goodall
  • The Ghost, Robert Harris
  • The Great Warming, Brian Fagin
  • The Words of Martin Luther King Jr
  • The Moscow Option, David Downing, a recommendation.
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Transforming the Mind

Posted on March 30, 2009 by smellincoffee

Transforming the Mind: Teachings on Generating Compassion
© Tenzin Gyatso 1999
168 pages

This book was not written as a book: it is, rather, the transcript of a series of lectures Gyatso gave in London. According to its introduction, many people asked for a print form of the material and Transforming the Mind is that. Because this was not meant as a book on its own, it can’t really be compared to Ethics for a New Millennium or The Art of Happiness. It reminds me of An Open Heart in that it focuses more on religious practices and less on secular ethics. Gysato explains the Four Noble Truths and their relation to transformation, and one of the book’s three parts features commentary on an eight-verse prayer related to the subject. The text of question and answer sessions is also included, as is a brief lecture titled ‘Ethics for the New Millennium“. I think this book would mainly appeal to those who wanted the lecture transcription, as the book’s religious material is dealt with better in An Open Heart and its ethical material in Ethics for a New Millennium.


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