Science Frontiers

Posted on December 26, 2008 by smellincoffee

Science Frontiers: 1945 –
Ray Spangenburg and Diane Kit Moser © 2004
246 pages including index

This week I resumed my reading of Spangenburg and Moser’s updated “History of Science” series, finishing it off with Science Frontiers, which examines science since 1946. After an introduction on the scientific method, the book is divided into the Physical Sciences, the Life Sciences, and Science in Society, following the same pattern established in their preceding books in this series. The physical sciences are dominated by particle physics and quantum mechanics. The authors didn’t seem to do the excellent job they usually do of explaining the topics: perhaps I was off. This first part ends on amuch more easy note, that of the solar system and Earth. Thanks to the satellites projects of the seventies and eighties, we have a wealth of data on the other bodies in the solar system. The last chapter, “Mission to Planet Earth”, includes the topics of plate techtonics, dinosaur extinciton theories, ozone depletion, and the greenhouse effect.

In The Life Sciences, one chapter is devoted to the discovery of DNA. The next chapter concerns the origins of life, and examines viruses, AIDs, genetic eingeering, cloning, and the possibility that life arose from clay. The last chapter in this section concerns human evolution. Part 3, “Science and Society”, was very interesting. It consists of two chapters. In one, “Hot and Cold on Science”, the authors look at a curious situation: while the atomic age create fear and distrust about science and scientists, the space age turned them into heroes. The last chapter concerns the rise of superstition, post-modernism, and the new age.

As usual, the book is concise and presents a very readable narrative, especially beyond the chapters on physics which I thought fell short of their usual superbness.

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The Echo of Greece

Posted on December 22, 2008 by smellincoffee

The Echo of Greece
© Edith Hamilton 1957
224 pages

About two years ago I read The Greek Way by Edith Hamilton, which was an exploration of the Greek mind as reflected in law, philosophy, art, and more. The book introduced me to the works of Pindar, and I generally remember the book favorably. While poking around in the classical literature shelves, I spotted another book by Hamilton, and upon seeing that it included a chapter on the Stoics I wanted to read it. The book concerns itself with the twilight of Greece civilization (prior to being absorbed into the Roman Empire): the fourth and fifth centuries B.C. She begins it:

Fourth century Athens is completely overshadowed by Athens of the fifth century, so much so that it is little considered. Any brief history of Greece will more likely than not end with Athens’ defeat in the Peloponnesian war in 404 B.C.There will be references, perhaps, to Demosthenes and Philip of Macedon and Alexander the Great, all too important to be omitted, but no account of the time they lived in will be thought necessary. Real interest in Greece ceases with Sparta’s victory over Athens. Plato and Aristotle live in a timeless word of philosophy without any local inhabitation, and are hardly thought of us Greeks but as intellectual forces. And yet, their century, the fourth century, has a special claim on our attention apart from the great men it produced, for it is the prelude to the end of Greece, not only of her glory, but of her life historically.

The book is divided into ten chapters. The first two chapters (“Freedom” and “Athens’ Failure”) concern themselves with events of the fifth century before the birth of Jesus. In “Freedom”, Hamilton writes about the Athenian mind and its focus on individualism and moderation, contrasting it to the grandiose and authoritarian ideas of its neighbors. In “Athens’ Failure”, she addresses the consequences of the Persian and Peloponnesian wars, wherein the ideals and freedoms that Athens once stood for are betrayed by its new-found obsession with power.

In the next two chapters (“The Schools of Athens” and “The School Teachers”) Hamilton writes on the intellectual life of Athens. It is in this chapter that the reader learns a bit about Greek philosophy, which is focused less on ethics and more on the substance of what is (epistemology) and politics. We are told about Plato’s Academy and Isocrates’ Lyceum, as well as another school. The next two chapters (“Demosthenes” and “Alexander the Great” are historical in nature and are a narrative of Macedonia’s rise, the defense of Greece against the designs of Alexander, his triumph, and the waxing and collapse of his world-empire. Hamilton examines the way Greek philosophy (through Aristotle) shaped Alexander’s mind, how his actions impacted the Greek and Athenian mindset, and how his actions transmitted Greek thought across a wider portion of the map. The next chapter, “Menander”, uses the life of a playwright to observe how Greek culture is changing in response to the various political changes that Greece is going through.

The next chapter is on the Stoics, and I enjoyed it immensely. While Hamilton writes about many of of the known Stoics, the three she concentrates on are Zeno (the founder), Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius. Hamilton’s narrative has Stoicism and the other new schools of thought being created because of Greece’s newfound domination by Alexander (and later, Rome):

The people who listened to Zeno were afraid and very evil things kept happening to them. […] the great majority were in a state of confusion and fear, thrown off their base by events never dreamed of before by any Athenian. Their city, the only place in the world where they could look to any well-being, which had been the freest city and the proudest, and suddenly been cast down helpless. […] To the Athenians [Stoicism] was a message of hope to the despairing, of liberty to the conquered, of courage and self-reliance.

Hamilton writes at-length about the Stoics, often comparing it to Christianity — which came three hundred years later. On page 166, she writes ‘Stoic sayings again and again recall Christ’s teachings. He too preached a hard doctrine and disregarded nonessentials”. Given the chronology, that might be better worded “Christ’s teachings again and again recall Stoic sayings”.  In the next chapter, “Plutarch”, Hamilton looks at the historical books of Plutarch and at his way of looking at things to get an insight as to how the Greeks perceived their own history.

In the last chapter, “The Greek Way and the Roman Way”, she compares the Greek/Athenian mind to the Roman mind: individualism and idealism compared to authoritarianism, a contemptuous attitude toward the public, and a penchant for brutalism. She then laments that the Catholic church choose the Roman way rather than the Greek way, and attributes the cruelties and dogma of the Roman Catholic Church to its adopting that viewpoint. In her view, it was the Greek way that was closest to the teachings of Christ.

“In all Athens’ history, Socrates was the only man put to death for his opinions. His executioners killed him by giving him a poison that made him die with no pain. They were Greeks. The Romans hung Christ upon a cross.”

All in all, I enjoyed the book immensely. She uses primary sources materials extensively, giving the reader the opportunity to sample quotations from plays, lectures, and so on. Hamilton is a gifted writer, I think. Some of her phrasings border on poetic, at least in my estimation. I do have three objections:

  • Firstly, her narrative seems to be to be very romanticized. I like the classical Greeks and I will praise and defend them when appropriate. I do not, however, believe that the Greeks were as exquisite examples of humanities as they are painted here. While there is much to be admired about the classical Greeks (more than their contemparies, fans like myself would argue), they were people and they were undoubtedly given to the same mistakes as everyone else.
  • Secondly, while this book is about Greece, it is Athens that features most promimently and I am concerned that the casual reader might be given the impression that the Athenian mind and the Greek mind were identical. They were not, and couldn’t be. While there were undoubtedly shared cultural norms, Hamilton herself points out the extreme differences between Athens and the rest of the poleis in “Athens’ Failure”.
  • Thirdly, I think Hamilton’s translation of various Greek phrases into “God” is slightly misleading, in that depending on the source they could be referring to deities, a sense of Cosmic Order, or a monotheistic supreme being.

That said, I reccommend the book to any who are interested in the subject at hand.

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Asimov’s Guide to the Bible

Posted on December 21, 2008 by smellincoffee

Asimov’s Guide to the Bible – Volume I
© Isaac Asimov 1968
677 pages plus indices

This week I read volume one of Isaac Asimov’s two-volume guide to the bible. The first volume is on what Christians call the “Old Testament”. The books Asimov uses come directly from the Protestant tradition: there are no books of the Maccabees here. Given the religious importance of the Hebrew scriptures in various religions, an introduction to the author and his religious views is in order. Although Asimov is technically Jewish, his parents were completely secular. According to Asimov, his only exposure to Judaism came through interaction with other Jews and in learning Hebrew, which he did when his father took up a position in a Hebrew school. Because he was not really segregated from the rest of American society (as he would have been had he been raised as Orthodox), he was shaped by the Christian-influenced culture of the early-mid-20th century. He acknowledges that some Christian mythology worked its way into his Foundation series when he created a religion there. In his biography, Asimov commented that his two-volume set on the Bible was written with the perspective of a “secular humanist”. In the introduction of the volume I read this week, he describes the series as ‘a consideration of the secular aspects of the Bible.’ He maintains that the Hebrew and Christian scriptures have secular worth in that they contain history, literature, and so on.

This is a view I agree with, although until this week I have never regarded the Hebrew writings as reliable history — wholly because I had never read an account like this, where the history as recorded in the Hebrew (I use that term in lieu of Jewish: our ideas of what Jewishness is are western, and the people of the “Old Testament” are not western.) scriptures was compared to other historical accounts. I was raised in a strict Christian tradition wherein the Bible was taken as literal fact, but even as a believing child I always found myself surprised when I spotted shreds of “real” history in the Bible history — and felt vindicated when history books referenced the Bible. The first time this happened was in sixth grade, when Moses appeared in my world history book.

Asimov works his way through the “Old Testament” (a term I don’t like using, but one which is more convenient than “the Hebrew scriptures”, and is more easily understood by the reader), beginning with Genesis and ending with the last so-called prophet, Malachi. Because Biblical Hebrew serves as the international language of Jews, Asimov — thanks to being forced to learn Hebrew as an older child — can convey the meanings of the actual Hebrew words instead of relying on their significantly biased English translations. Asimov is not exempt from allowing his biases to impact his interpretation of what a word might mean, but unlike King James, he is not creating a Bible that will justify a particular religious domination’s dogmas. I am acutely aware of humanistic viewpoints when I spot them, and this book — while focusing on the secular aspects of the Old Testament — doesn’t scream “humanist bias” to me. It did probably infuriate Bible literalists, but then again those who chuckle at the idea of a talking snake infuriate the literalists.

Asimov relies on his knowledge of Hebrew, his knowledge of world history, and the work of others gone before him (those who have located and translated Assyrian and Egyptian documents, for instance). He uses that knowledge and the records of the empires surrounding Palestine to fit the historical happenings of the Bible into the historical events recorded in other accounts. Generally, the amount he writes is proportional to the length of the book. Genesis and Isaiah are long “books”, and the time he spends on them is appropriatly long. Some books are quite short (like Habbukkuk) and only merit a page or two. Habbukkuk got a paragraph. Some books are lengthy but deal with the same material over and over. Levitucis, for instance, is a book of rituals and describes in great detail the minituia of Hebrew law, most of which is incomprehensible to the modern mind. The Hebrews were like the people surrounding them fairly primitive by our standards, and their laws are bizaare. Other books, while lengthy, don’t get a lot of commentary: Psalms and Proverbs are examples. The Book of Proverbs is compared to other “Wisdom Books” of the Hebrews and other cultures.

Each book of the Old Testament merits a chapter, and in each Asimov sums up the time period the book concerns, when it was probably written, when it worked its way into the canon, and what the book concerns. He spends a lot of time investigating what particular words mean. One book might contain a name-reference that is not mentioned in another book, but Asimov will glean the meaning of it by looking at the original Hebrew word and commenting on the way it might have been a mistranslated form of another word that makes sense. There are no great leaps of faith here — the overwhelming majority of these place-names do look like common mistake in the original writing or in the translating process: compare Nebuchadnezzer to Nebuchadrezzer, for instance.

One technique of Asimov is to date books by the references within them, and this sometimes brings him to the conclusion that the date given by the author is misleading. For instance, in the book of Jonah, the author describes the stoy as being set during the reign of Jeroboam II, but at the same time references that Nineveh was the great city of the mighty Assyrian empire. The problem is that during the reign of Jeroboam, the Assyrian empire was nonexistant, and Nineveh was a podunk town of no significance. He often looks for anachronisms.

To read this book is to become versed in the etymology of various words, to read about the history of the ancient and early classical world, to learn about the history of the early Jewish faith (which Asimov terms “Yahvism”, after Yahveh), and to learn about Jewish mythology. Bible literalists would object to that description, but the Bible has giants, “unicorns”, angels, and takes seriously astrological tales. I see no problem in dealing with Jewish religious instruction and Jewish mythology as two seperate elements of the same culture that subsequently influence one another someway.

My lone complaint about the book is that Asimov tends to romanticize particular elements. I am thinking of his treatment of the prophets in particular, who he persisently describes as religious personalities outside the priesthood who railed against the excesses of the priesthood and who stood up for the poor and oppressed. He compares them to the uncaring priests who are obsessed with ritual. Perhaps prophets like Elisha did stand up the poor, but I am not so much of a romantic that I think that was their only concern. They had their dogmas they wanted to be uniform: these were men who advocated the murder (or killing-of, if you resent that connotation) of people of differening religious faiths. I liken them to people like Lenin: idealists in their speech, but dogmatic and ambitious for power in reality.

All in all, quite an interesting read. The book has limited appeal, of course. Only those interested in the Bible will be interested. I was raised with a strict literalist perspective and had “Sunday school teachers” who taught me the stories — brutal as they were — of the Old Testament, so this book was a bit like returning to the days of my childhood, albiet with a much different perspective. Whereas once I read the stories and feared a god, I now read the stories and marvel at the combined beauty and brutality that humanity is capable of.

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The Caves of Steel

Posted on December 20, 2008 by smellincoffee

The Caves of Steel
© Isaac Asimov 1953

I finally found a copy of The Caves of Steel this week. I’ve been looking for this book since the beginning of November, but my libraries have been unable to procure a copy that isn’t lost. The Caves of Steel is a detective story set in the future — roughly around the 23rd century. Earth’s cities have become “Cities”: enclosed structures where people are not exposed to the open here. People move from place to place through moving “strips” — a la Jetsons ? — and no longer live and eat as separate families. Suburban sprawl has been replaced by sectional “boxes”. Each sectional building is divided into sections, and each section has apartments for families to live in. These apartments do not include kitchens, laundry room, or bathrooms, though — those are all communal.

The main character is a man named Elijah Baley, a plainclothes detective working for the City government. His City is New York, and it is now the second-biggest city in the world, the first being Los Angeles. Baley is tasked with finding out who killed a Spacer sociologist. A Spacer is a resident of one of the fifty Spacer worlds — fifty worlds settled by Earth with very little population density. The Spacers have created for themselves “C/Fe Societies”, wherein humans (carbon-based) and robots (iron-based) work together. The Earthers, being conservative, are very much opposed to robots, and such is the environment that Baley has been raised in.

When Baley is asked to solve this murder, he is also asked to take on a robot partner. We would call this partner an android, for he looks like a human and has been programmed to mimic human behavior. Baley is at first aghast at the prospect of working with his new partner — R. Daneel Olivaw — but grows accustomed to him by book’s end. The book is the story of their efforts to find the murderer. Asimov’s writing seems to be even better than I’m used to, but anticipation may have heightened my enjoyment. I enjoyed learning about the world he created, and I think he did a good job. He thinks about the impact living in these apartment-boxes has on people, including taboos and so on. I found the book to be excellent reading, and I will enjoy reading more in the series.

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This Week at the Library (19/12)

Posted on December 19, 2008 by smellincoffee

Books this Update:

I began this week with a large book spanning the social sciences: Jared Diamond’s Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel is well-known for connecting the environment of the success of civilization. That book has shaped my thinking, and is probably responsible for making me look for connections between the various social sciences themselves and between they and the ‘real’ sciences. While in that book Diamond focused on the success of civilizations based on the environment and ecology of the area they were based in, in this he examines the reasons why civilizations decline. While he establishes a five-point framework to deal with the question, the book is overwhelmingly focused on the environmental and subsequently economic reasons they fall. After using Montana as a case-study to show that environmental issues do affect the lives of people in economic ways, he examines various ancient and modern civilizations using the framework he established. He also looks into the reasons why people fail to respond to environmental/economic concerns when they rise and then defends the idea that the lessons from the examples he used can be used to help us. I found the book to be thought-provoking and quite well-written.

Next I read Modern Science by Ray Spangenburg and Diane Kit Moser in their modern “History of Science” series. This book covers science from 1896 to 1945. As usual, the book is short, clear, and concise. They explain more abstract scientific concepts well while writing a narrative that holds together. As usual, the book is divided into three parts: Physical Sciences, Life Sciences, and Science in Society. In the first part, they examine physics, astronomy, and that sort of thing. In the second part, they look at biology and particularly at the search for human ancestors. They include information on the Piltdown hoax. The last part is the briefest and concerns mainly the rise of women in the sciences.

Lastly I read This I Believe II. It is a second collection of essays in which people write about the beliefs that they live by. The essays concern not religious or philophical disicplines, but singular ideas like “I believe in living in the moment” and “I believe in the power of redemption”. I found this collection of essays to be enriching, if not as much as the previous collection — perhaps because I read this too soon after reading the first collection. I should return to this book later when I’m not quite so full, so to speak. The essays are submitted from people from all walks of life.

Pick of the Week: Collapse: How Socieities Choose to Fail or Succeed, Jared Diamond

Quotation of the Week:
“What I want more than ever is to appreciate that I have this day, and tomorrow, and hopefully days beyond that. I am experiencing the learning curve of gratitude. I don’t want to say ‘have a nice day’ like a robot. I don’t want to get mad at the elderly driver in front of me. I don’t want to go crazy when my Internet access is messed up. I don’t want to be jealous of someone else’s success. You could say that this litany of sins indicates that I don’t want to be human. The learning curve of gratitude, however, is showing me exactly how human I am.” – Mary Chapin Carpenter

Future Reading:

  • Asimov’s Guide to the Bible, Isaac Asimov
  • Science Frontiers, Spangenburg and Moser
  • The Pinball Effect , James Burke
  • Where Do We Go From Here?, ed. Isaac Asimov
  • The Echo of Greece, Edith Hamilton


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This I Believe II

Posted on December 18, 2008 by smellincoffee

This I Believe II (also known as This, Too, I Believe*)
© This I Believe, Inc.

Last week I read This I Believe, a collection of eighty essays in which people wrote about their deepest convictions or ideals. While meandering through the philosophy/religion shelves in my local library looking for Asimov’s Guide to the Bible, my eyes fell upon This I Believe II. Lo! Fate. I checked it out, of course, and read it throughout the course of the week. The book’s layout follows the format of the previous book: the editors (Jay Allison and Dan Gediman) introduce the This I Believe project. This introduction is followed by seventy-five essays. The book concludes with the editors’ reflection on the This I Believe project and guidelines for submitting an essay. A year or so ago I wrote an essay titled “This I Believe“, but it is too long and too broad for the kind of essay they are requesting.

This collection of essays seems to be composed entirely of contributions to the modern project, unlike the past collection which used essays from the 1950s project. In each essay, a person writes on an idea that shapes them and molds their thinking: “I believe in living with integrity”, “I believe in strange blessings”, “I believe in doing what I love”, “I believe in living in the here and now”, “I believe in living what you do every day”. The writers use stories from their personal lives to explain why they believe this. I found this collection of essays to be enriching, if not as much as the previous collection — perhaps because I read this too soon after reading the first collection. I should return to this book later when I’m not quite so full, so to speak.

The essays are submitted by people from all walks of life — teenagers, old people, the nonreligious, Catholic priests. Many voices come from people who are new to the United States. (This I Believe is an NPR program and thus deals entirely with the stories of Americans.) I noticed that this collection of essays is less religious than the previous one. I am neither exhulting nor complaining: I prefer perspectives that aren’t rooted in what I believe to be superstitious ideas, but the religious essays of the last book helped me get a better handle on religion’s relationship with helping people to improve their lives.

If this program sounds interesting to you, you can listen to the podcast (updated every Monday with a 2-3 minute spoken essay) here.

* Not really, but I saw an opportunity.

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Modern Science

Posted on December 17, 2008 by smellincoffee

Modern Science 1896 – 1945
© 2004 Ray Spangenburg and Diane Kit Moser
206 pages


I continued this week in a series that I began in the summer — Spangenburg and Moser’s “The History of Science” series, which is an update to their “On the Shoulders of Giants” series. As usual, the authors divide the book into two major sections and one minor one: the Physical Sciences, the Life Sciences, and Science and Society. The book’s introduction and prologue work well to integrate this book into the rest of the series and to give the reader a broader perspective. There are ten chapters in all.

This period isn’t my favorite period of science — that probably goes to the 19th century — but I found the book’s content to be interesting. In the physical sciences, we learn about the beginnings of modern physics, starting with the discovery of X-rays and moving on from there — to radiation and quantum theory and to all they entail. The author organize the Physical Sciences chapter along structural lines: its chapters include “The New Atom”, “The New Universe, Part One”, “The New Universe, Part Two”, and then go into more particulars with “New Observations of the Universe” and “The Atom Split Asunder”.

In the life sciences, we see the rise of antibiotics and insulin. Mendel’s work is rediscovered and is applied toward Darwinian evolution. The eighth chapter concerns the search for ancestral historeis, including information on the various hoaxes like Piltdown. The third part of the book is new to this series, and focuses on Science and Society. In this particular book, the authors continue to look at medical quacks but also shine a light on the growing rise of women in science. Miniture biographies are woven throughout the book, and many are of women.

In essence, what I’ve come to expect of the authors: the book is short, concise, interesting, and informative. It may be geared toward a younger age-group than adults, but I find it useful to keep me apprised of the basics.

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Collapse

Posted on December 17, 2008 by smellincoffee

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
© 2005 Jared Diamond
560 pages plus index

A few years ago, I read Guns, Germs, and Steel by this same author, who put forth the idea that the success of world civilizations owes much to the surrounding natural environment. While this is obvious in some cases — a dependence on water, for instance — Diamond extends the hypothesis to the effect that the uses to which local flora and fauna could put by human civilizations, and examined the possible results. The book was stimulating, and I suspect that it began my habit of looking for connections between the social sciences and the “real” or physical sciences. I enjoyed the book very much, and so I looked forward to reading Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed.

While in Guns, Germs, and Steel Diamond examined the growth of civilizations, in this book he examines factors relating to their collapse. He begins with a set of five factors that he believes all collapses share in common:

  1. damage done to the environment by humans
  2. climate change (owing to non-human factors, historically)
  3. the presence or ability of hostile neighbors
  4. decreased support of friendly neighbors
  5. society’s responses to the above issues.

This constitutes his introduction. He then moves into the book proper by looking at Montana. He does this to examine the way environmental factors change the way people live today and how their actions work on their environment. His goal seems to be two-fold: one, to show that humans and the environment do shape one another, and two, to put a human face on economic problems by examining individuals living in Montana.

In part two, Diamond examines past societies: their rise and fall. The evidence that Diamond is forced to draw from is usually indirect: using historic trash to come to conclusions about the people who lived there — their numbers and their economic situation. He also uses natural evidence likes tree rings and ice “cores” to track the natural health of the environment through the years that these societies were in existence. The historic societies he examines range from small villages in Greenland to the grand civilization of the Maya. He begins with Easter Island and moves to more recent societies like shogunate Japan. Not all societies represent failures: Japan is used as an example of how societies can learn to deal with their situations.

In part three, Diamond looks at modern societies. In chapter ten, he examines Rwanda: in chapter eleven he contrasts the Dominican Republic and Haiti: in chapters twelve and thirteen he focuses on the growth of China and the woes of Australia, in each examining their relationship to the natural world and its condition. He concludes the book with Part IV, “Practical Lessons”. In this last part, he examines various reasons why societies make bad economic decisions. He lists a few —

  • failure to anticipate problems
  • failures to perceive problems that already exist
  • rationalizing bad behavior
  • possessing values systems that run contrary to doing what’s necessary
  • being discouraged by unscceessful attempts at solution

There are a few others, but those are the ones that stuck out. The above constitutes chapter fourteen. In chapter fifteen he looks at the relationship between big business and the enviroment, examining ways that modern industries — oil, logging, mining, fishing — are dealing with environmental problems and increasing public awareness. Last, he deals with potential objections to ideas in the book and looks at reasons for hope.

All in all, I found the book to be very well-written. The conclusions that Diamond comes to from the available evidence in the the part on past civilizations where little written information is available seem fairly valid to me. Diamond explains environmental problems and their connection to human history with great detail and with a knack for getting the essence of his idea across. It is a good read — taking me several days to work my way through it — but if you’re interested in history, economics, ecology, and the relationship between the three, I’d recommend the book to you.

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This Week at the Library (11/12)

Posted on December 11, 2008 by smellincoffee

Books this Update:

It took an entire semester, but circumstances finally got the better of me and disrupted my weekly cycle. I began with a book on skepticism by Michael Shermer entitled Why People Believe Weird Things. The book addresses the scientific method: its origins, its premises, and its usefulness. After examining a score or so of number fallacies, Shermer then examines “pseudoscience, superstition, and other confusions of our time”. That phrase covers UFOs, Objectivisim, holocaust denial, evolution denial, and so on. He wraps the book up by looking at the basic biological and sociology reasons why people believe these things. I enjoyed it enormously.

Next I read The Knight in History by Frances Gies, which examines — as you might expect — the development of the mounted knight and its influence on European history. Gies does a good job of fitting the knight into its proper social, historical, and economic contexts. She does this week background chapters and then illustrates the various developments of knighthood through case-studies. I didn’t expect much from this book (I have no real military interest) but found it very enjoyable.

Lastly I read a collection of essays from the This I Believe program. In said program, ordinary individuals share their personal beliefs — the beliefs that tie their life together — in a short essay. 80 essays are in this first collection. The worldviews range widely, and there were a number I disagreed with. Yet the book helped me. There were many insightful and touching essays that moved me, and I am very glad that I took the time to read it. I reccommend it.

Pick of the Week: This I Believe

Quotation of the Week: “I have made a ceaseless effort not to ridicule, not to bewail, not to scorn human actions, but to understand them.” – Spinoza

Next Week:
– I don’t know. I will probably resume the Colonization series and perhaps begin Asimov’s Empire series.

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This I Believe

Posted on December 11, 2008 by smellincoffee

This I Believe: the Personal Philosophies of Remarkable Men and Women
Various authors, edited by Jay Allison and Dan Gediman
© 2006

For a few years now I’ve listened to an NPR feature called “This I Believe”, wherein a variety of individuals present a personal belief that guides their lives. I almost always find that listening to this enriches my own life, giving me insights that I’ve never before had. As such, I was quite excited when I learned that some of the essays had been released in book collections. This week I read the first collection, and it was very enjoyable. The book consists of eighty such essays, with forewords and afterwords at the beginning and end of the book to introduce the series and explain the purpose of the books — to share the personal beliefs of ordinary people.

This I Believe has existed in two distinct periods: the original program ran in the 1950s, and the current one runs still today. The book uses essays from both the 1950s and from the current program. While most of the stories do come from ordinary people, some essays come from more well-known personalities like Helen Keller, John McCain, Jackie Robinson, William Buckley Jr. , Bill Gates, Newt Gingrich, and so on. While some people view NPR as a bastion of liberality, you can see by some of the names cited that this collection that the range of worldviews is quite wide. There are eighty very distinct people here. I didn’t agree with everything that was said, and I’m glad I didn’t. The book would have been less useful, less enriching, if that had been the case.

The book is enormously, tremendously touching. Many essays brought tears to my eyes. This is a book I want in my personal library. I’m glad I had the chance to read it, and I recommend it to you.

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