This Week at the Library (26/11)

Posted on November 26, 2008 by smellincoffee

Books this Update:

I began reading Harry Turtledove’s Colonization series this week, which is a sequel series to his Worldwar. The Worldwar books, you may remember, featured a race of aliens interrupting the course of World War 2 by invading — forcing Nazis, Soviets, the Japanese, Chinese nationalists, Chinese communists, and the Allies to work together. The lizards — who call themselves the Race — are unable to complete their plans to annex Earth, as they were unprepared to fight humanity, which had industrialized far more quickly than the Lizards anticipated. This series is set twenty years later. Human society and Lizard society co-exist, fairly peacefully, and each influences the other. Some humans — Chinese nationalists and communists, as well as Muslim fundamentalists — still fight the Lizards. Human technology has increased dramatically: cars are now hydrogen-powered, and humans have landed on both the Moon and Mars. As the book wears on, we see the increasing strain that the arrival of the Race’s colonization fleet — full of equipment, females, and so on — is putting on Race-Human relations. Very good stuff: a refreshing change from the military-focused writing of the last books in the Worldwar series.

Next I continued reading the Gies’ medieval history series with Life in a Medieval Village. The Gies’ approach was similar to previous works — using a case-studying, quoting heavily from primary sources, and weaving an enjoying and fairly interesting narrative. I didn’t find this one qite as captiving as others — like last week’s Cathedral, Forge, and Waterwheel — but perhaps those more excellent ones have spoiled me. We’ll see.

Next I read a collection of short stories by Isaac Asimov called The Winds of Change and Other Stories. There were 21 stories in all, and I found all but one of them to be quite enjoyable. There’s humor here as well as Asimov’s brand of technological “thriller” stories. Quite enjoyable. Some were repeats, but I don’t mind re-reading Asimov’s stuff. Even if I know what is going to happen, his stories are such a delight to read for me.

Lastly I read a compilation of two works by Epictetus, a Stoic philosopher. The works were translated into modern English by Sharon Leben. The book is rather short (I finished it in two sittings) but very page is full of wisdom. The discourses are simply worded, quite frank, and exceptionally compelling to the student of philosophy. I was thrilled to read it. Epictetus advocates a life of virtue and self-control, saying that philosophy is a matter of everyday living — not something that should be limited to religious instructors and professional philosophers. Exceptional stuff, I think.

Pick of the Week: The Art of Living, Epictetus, trans. Sharon Leben
Quotation of the Week: Anything from The Art of Living. Here’s a sample: “Those who seek wisdom come to understand that even though the world may reward us for wrong or superficial reasons, such as our physical appearance, the family we come from, and so on, what really matters is who we are inside and what we are becoming. […] The overvaluation of money, status, and compeetition poisons our personal relations. The flourishing life cannot be acheieved until we moderate our desires and see how superficial and fleeting they are. “

Next Week:

  • Armageddon in Retrospect, Kurt Vonnegut
  • Women in the Middle Ages, Frances and Joseph Gies
  • Colonization: Down to Earth, Harry Turtledove
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The Art of Living

Posted on November 25, 2008 by smellincoffee

The Art of Living
Epictetus, translated by Sharon Lebell (© 1994)
115 pages

One great asset I have access to is my university library. Being a university library, its historical nonfiction offerings are far greater than any public library (except for perhaps the behemoths like the New York Public Library). Thus, in addition to modern historical books, we have the books of history — Herodotus’ Histories, Newton’s Principles of Mathematics, and a great sampling of Greek philosophy. My own worldview is inspired partly by Greek philosophy, particularly Stoicism. Epictetus is a name I’m familiar with, but I’ve never actually read from his Discourses — written “transcripts” of his lectures — until this week.

The edition I found last night is a modern translation and sometimes uses English expressions like “two steps forward, one step back”. There are other translation in far more poetic and formal English, but I went with this more modern one because it seemed to be very readable. I did read through some of the more formal translations after I finished this book, simply to establish a comparison, and based on that, I think there is nothing lost. Epictetus was a Stoic philosopher. His Stoicism is classical in that he, like Zeno (the founder of Stoicism) believed in an Ultimate, in Deity — in the idea that there was a divine order to the Cosmos, that everyone had a place in it, and that reason had been given to humanity so that we could transcend our untrained animal nature and become like the ultimate.

True philosophy doesn’t involve exotic rituals, mysterious liturgy, or quaint beliefs. […] It is, of course, the love of wisdom. It is the art of living a good life. […] Philosophy is intended for everyone, and it is authentically practiced only by those who wed it with action in the world toward a better life for all.

Epictetus believes that philosophy is not for religious leaders and professional philosophers — it is for everyone, to help everyone live good lives. He says that philosophy “must be rescued” from the aforementioned types of people. Although the book isn’t lengthy, every word in it is full of wisdom. I did not agree with everything he said (as it was recorded and translated), but the overwhelming majority of the book is solid. The value of his teachings is incredible, and I find myself wondering just how so much could be known and expressed so eloquently just to one man. When I read a book, I typically keep a page of notebook paper nearby so that I can write down any interesting quotes. For this book? I have twelve pages of quotations. I had planned to post them on my humanities blog, but I have far too many to fit in one post — I will have to break them down.

The essence of his teaching is self-mastery over one’s own life. The classic Stoic idea — that pain is caused when desires and reality do not conform to one another, and so one must shape desire to fit reality. Epictetus, like Marcus Aurelius, holds that it is not “things” that pain us but our reaction to them. Controlling our responses to what happens to us, to what is said to us or about us, is one of the dominant threads of the book. The other concerns the choice to think about responding — to beginning to use reason to master yourself, to hold yourself to ideals so that you can live the virtuous life. These two ideas dominate the book. Although the lectures are not tightly organized the way 21st century readers are used to books being organized, all of the elements of a in-depth book are here. Epictetus does not only describe how one should live a “virtuous” life, he explains what virtue means to him and why it cannot be achieved in any other way except for mastery of the self. “Personal merit cannot be achieved through our associations with people of excellence. […] Other people’s triumphs and excellence belong to them. Likewise, your possessions may have excellence, but you yourself don’t derive excellence from them,” he says.

Epictetus advises his readers (or listeners) to not concern themselves with other people’s opinions of them, but to simply enjoy our lives, not allow ourselves to become undone by events of our lives, and to excel in what we do — to practice our crafts and to relate to one another as best we can. Society’s rules are also no judge — both the “ends and means” are not conducive to creating virtue. “Socially taught beliefs are frequently unreliable. So many of our beliefs have been acquired through accident and irresponsible or ignorant teaching. Many of our beliefs are so deeply ingrained that they are hidden from our own view.” (My sociology teacher would add that the power of culture is that we don’t realize that culture is shaping our ideas.) Virtue, in his eyes, is its own reward. He also advocates living as part of a global, human community — he speaks of the “human contract” and says we ought to live our lives to serve one another. (The “family of humanity” value is common among Stoics.)

I could easily write a term paper on the ideas in this book — I have twelve pages of notes, after all. This isn’t the place for that, though. I found the book to be…incredibly interesting, and very stimulating. Even as I read, I felt as if my thoughts were being slowly ordered — tuned, to use a musical metaphor. It was well-worth the read, and I am glad that I took care to write down my favorite thoughts. This will be pick of the week.

Be suspicious of convention. Take charge of your own thinking. Rouse yourself from the daze of unexamined habit. Popular perceptions, values, and ways of doing things are rarely the wisest. Many pervasive beliefs would not pass appropriate tests of rationality. Conventional thinking — its means and ends — is essentially not credible and uninteresting. Its job is to preserve the status quo for overly self-defended individuals and institutions.

Judge ideas and opportunities on the basis of whether they are life-giving. Give your assent to that which promotes humaneness, justice, beneficial growth, kindness, possibility, and benefit to the human community. Examine things as they appear to your own mind; objectively consider what is said by others, and then establish your own convictions.

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The Winds of Change and Other Stories

Posted on November 25, 2008 by smellincoffee

The Winds of Change and Other Stories
© 1983 Isaac Asimov

Having survived the flood of term paper deadlines, I can now cool my heels and relax — and so I did, with another collection of Asimov’s short stories. This particular collection contains 21 such stories, all preceded by one of Asimov’s charming forewords, explaining the context in which he wrote it. A couple of the stories are quite short and function almost as lengthy set-ups to a pun — Asimov loved wordplay.

A couple of the stories were repeats for me, not that I mind much. I re-read them and enjoyed them just as much as I did when I read them for the first time. There are some very funny stories in here, such as “How it Happened”, which was supposed to be the first in a collection of short stories depicting cosmological history. It’s…well, I shook with laughter for a while. One story, “Belief”, deals with a physical scientist who realizes he can levitate — and has trouble figuring out how to convince his (rightfully) skeptical colleagues that he’s not pulling tricks on them. “Ideas Die Hard”, written in the mid-fifties, concerns man’s first space flight to the Moon — interestingly enough, Asimov depicts the astronauts taking about three days to get to the Moon, which is how long it took the various Apollo astronauts to travel there. One of my favorite stories was “Lest We Remember”, and it involves an experimental drug that is supposed to increase the ability to recall.

Asimov entertains and delights as usual. If you can find it, why not give it a try?

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Life in a Medieval Village

Posted on November 24, 2008 by smellincoffee

Life in a Medieval Village
© 1990 Frances and Joseph Gies
207 pages, plus index, notes, and a bibliography

This week I continued reading from the Gies’ excellent series on daily life in the medieval era. This book, like Life in a Medieval Castle and Life in a Medieval City, uses one particular example as a case-study. The authors chose the village of Elton in England as their case study for this book. The book is divided into ten chapters. The first introduces the medieval village, comparing it to its ancestors. The authors claim that the medieval village is a unique entity: a new way of living and producing, and one that has not been since since feudalism faded from history.

Subsequent chapters deal with how villagers live, the organization of marriage and family, the village as a working area, how the local parish was integrated into the feudal system, village justice, and finally with the demise of the medieval village. As usual, the Gies quote extensively from primary source materials, including the medieval equivalent of police logs and instructions to parish priests. The book is an in-depth look at manorialism, understandably so since the Gies hold that “the medieval village is unthinkable without its lord”. Under manorialism, the majority of people were serfs — slaves, nearly, tied to the land. They were not allowed to leave the village without their lord’s permission. The authors also examine the various types of field systems used.

In general, I found this book to be weaker than the other ones by the same authors. There wasn’t as much information on village laws as I was expecting. I was also looking for more information about craftsmanship. Still, it was an interesting enough of a read.


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Colonization: Second Contact

Posted on November 22, 2008 by smellincoffee

Colonization: Second Contact
© 1999 Harry Turtledove
598 pages

A few weeks ago I read the Worldwar series by Harry Turtledove, which depicts what happens when lizard-like aliens who call themselves the Race invade Earth. While they expected to face humans armed with swords and spears, they found instead tanks, machine guns, jet aircraft, and atomic weaponry. Unprepared for this, their planned conquest quickly stalled as they found themselves running short on supplies and constantly stymied by the ever-changing tactics of their human foes. At series’ end, the two sides — human and Race — agreed to a truce of sorts, wherin the Lizards maintained control of most of the southern hemisphere and China.

Second Contact is set twenty years in the future — in a world where humans and Lizards have grown used to living beside one another. Driven by Mother Necessity, technological progress has surpassed the progress of the real 1960s. Humanity has left the warm and safe confines of Earth to explore parts of the solar system. We’re told Nazis landed on the moon — “Das ist one small step for a man, one giant leap for the Deutsche Volk!“, I’m guessing — and Americans have landed men on Mars. (I’m not altogether sure why: our main reason for exploring Mars is to see if there was ever life there, to settle of the question of ‘Are we alone’. The precense of the Lizards seems as if it would have made that a moot point.)

There are three major spacefaring nations — the United States, the Greater German Reich, and the Soviet Union. Britain and Japan have also poked around, but they are not major contenders. Hitler and Stalin have both died — in their places are Himmler (head of the SS, which maintained the Nazis’ death camps) and General Secretary Molotov. Earl Warren — who presided over the “Who Shot JFK?” commission in real life — is the president of the United States. Now that they are no longer fighting Lizards, the various nation-states are once more subjected to friction. Britain is slowly becoming a client state of the Reich, and the Nazis and Soviets still despise one another. The Lizards, meanwhile, have been fighting problems of their own. The Chinese Civil War never concluded with a Communist victory here (1949 was the year China became “Communist” in real life), but Mao’s fighters have not given up — and they are being supplied by the Soviet Union.

Tensions between humanity and the Lizards increase when their colonization fleet arrives. The fleet of the 1940s was purely for conquest: it was male-only, and contained no supplies for making Earth theirs. The colonization fleet carries building materials and females, however — the tools for reshaping the Earth the way the lizards want to see it. Interestingly, females do not seem to be relegated to breeding stock: they hold rank in the Race’s hierachy. This first book focuses on how Earth has changed in the last twenty years with the precense of the Race, exploring how human cultures and the Race have impacted one another. It also provides plenty of political intrigue: a mainstay throughout the book is the question of what the United States intends to do with the large space station it is building in deep space. Also, an un-named power keeps attacking the Race, which annoys them greatly.

This first book in the Colonization series was extremely interesting. What I like about Turtledove is that his books often employ political and cultural stories — not just military. I’m not too much interested in military matters, with the exception of looking into how wars shape society. (There are other exceptions: I’ve written several papers on early air warfare, for instance.) I look forward to continuing the series.

Tosevite males wore robes and headpeices of cloth to shield themselves from the sun the males of the Race found so friendly, while the females swaddled themselves even more thoroughly. The Argentine Big Uglies, who lived in a harsher climate, wrapped fewer cloths around themselves. Fotsev had trouble understanding the reasons behind the difference.

When he remarked on that, Gorppet answered “Religion,” and kept on walking, as if he’d said something wise.

Fotsev didn’t think he had. Religion and Emperor-worship were the same word in the language of the Race. They weren’t the same here on Tosev 3. The Big Uglies, not having had the benfefit of thousands of years of imperial rule, foolishly imagined powerful beigns made in their image, and then further imagined that those powerful beigns had created them in their image rather than the other way around.

It would have been laughable, had the Big Uglies not taken it so seriously. As far as Fotsev was concerned, it remained laughable, but he did not laugh. […] If [the local Tosevites] thought they had to bow down five times a day to revere the Big Ugly they had writ large in the sky, easier to let them than to try to talk them out of it. […]

Gorppet must have been thinking along related lines, for he said, “If they are going to have these absurd notions, why do they not have the same ones, instead of arguing about who is right and who is wrong?”

(The Race’s relationship with middle-eastMuslims, especially after the rise of militant fundamentalism led by Khomeini, is funny.)

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This Week at the Library

Posted on November 19, 2008 by smellincoffee

Books this Update:

(Click titles for individual commentaries.)

This week is unusual in that I have more nonfiction in it than fiction: it hasn’t been that way since the summer. Asimov and Turtledove’s series have much to do with that. My intended reading was nonfiction-only, but I was able to read the two Asimov books while taking breaks from my papers. I think it’s interesting that I managed to read five books in the same week that I worked on three papers.

The first book I read was Isaac Asimov’s extended biography. I didn’t mean to read it through, but Asimov has that effect on me: once I started reading it, I didn’t like to stop. Asimov’s biography is large and written in a personal style: it seems like an intimate conversation between the reader and the man. Asimov writes about his life, his work, and his views about death. One particular opinion he expressed was on the relationship between television and reading. Television, he said, was a passive activity: it supplies every aspect of the story, so the viewer need only to receieve. In reading, though, the information you are provided with is limited, so the reader’s mind has to actively construct the world about which he or she is reading: he has to provide the scenery and sounds and so forth.

I also read a collection of twenty or so short stories by Asimov called Buy Jupiter and Other Stories. The title is a fun, which Asimov is fond of. The majority of the stories were new to me, and almost all were enjoyable. There were a few I didn’t quite get, but it didn’t help that I was reading with a headache.

Next I read Frances and Joseph Gies’ Cathedral, Forge, and Waterwheel: Technology and Invention in the Middle Ages. The Gies have written a series of books on life in the medieval era, and I have enjoyed all of them thus far. This latest has quickly become my second-favorite. The Gies are quite thorough: they begin by surveying the technology of the ancient era, establishing where it was when Rome began its decline. They show that there was no real “fall” of technology of knowledge: it slowly faded in the north, but lingered much longer in southern France and Italy. They write a narrative of the medieval era that depicts society slowly changing over time, arriving at new inventions as it does. As ever, the Gies force me to broaden my percetions.

After this I moved on to a history-of-science book. Hal Hellman presents ten feuds of science — hence the name Great Feuds in Science: Ten of the Liveliest Disputes Ever. The stories begin with the beginning of science as we know it — with Galileo. Galileo was important in that he taught his students to rely on observable evidence. He popularlized Kepler’s notion of a heliocentric universe, bringing him in conflict with the Church. The feuds that follow track science’s course: Newton and Lebniz fighting over who discovered calculus first, followed by the “evolution wars” and Kelvin’s fight with the geologists over the age of the Earth. The book ends with social science, with a feud that epitomizes the nature versus nurture debate. All in all, interesting.

Lastly I read Peter Singer’s Writings on an Ethical Life, in which he attempted to use sheer rationale to construct ethical arguments about vegetarianism, abortion, euthenasia, infantacide, practical living, and political systems. He attacks both conservative and liberal positions, and if you read this I suggest you commit time to it: some chapters aren’t light reading. I thought some of his arguments were too unemotional: people are emotional creatures, and any ethical system has to consider that.

Pick of the Week: I, Asimov, Isaac Asimov and Cathedral, Forge, and Waterwheel by the Gies.

Quotation of the Week:

  1. “It always seems to me that it’s not hard to be nice to people in small ways, and surely that must make them more willing to be nice in small ways in return.”
  2. “There are no nations! There is only humanity. And if we don’t come to understand that right soon, there will be no nations, because there will be no humanity.”

Next Week:

  • The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke, Arthur C. Clarke
  • Life in a Medieval Village, Frances and Joseph Gies
  • Colonization: Second Contact, Harry Turtledove
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Writings on an Ethical Life

Posted on November 19, 2008 by smellincoffee

Writings on an Ethical Life
Peter Singer, © 2000
329 pages, plus an index

Almost every Friday, I listen to an online show called “Point of Inquiry“, which features 20-minute (or so) interviews with various personalities. While the show is produced by a skeptical think-tank, its guests are not necessarily involved in the skeptical movement — the host, D.J. Groethe, often interviews religious philosophies and personalities. Last week, he interviewed Peter Singer — and I was interested enough in what he said to find one of his books.

Writings on an Ethical Life is a collection of selected chapters from various books of his, taken from books like Animal Liberation and Practical Ethics. He writes on a variety of topics: environmentalism, vegetarianism, abortion, euthanasia, living ethically, and so on. He attempts to arrive at ethics through strict rationalism. According to the New York Times Book Review, “Singer’s documentation is unrhetorical and unemotional, his arguments tight and formidable, for he bases his case on neither personal nor religious nor highly abstract philosophical principles but on moral pisitions most of already accept”.

I almost think that some of Singer’s arguments are too rational. We can’t seperate ethics from emotion, for we are emotional creatures and those needs must be considered. Singers’ rationalizations are typically built on utilitarianism, or at least a form. Utiliarianism is a ethical philosophy that advocates that we should base our decisions on whatever provides the greatest good for the greatest number of people. My own ethical philosophy tends toward this, butI’m leery about going too far.

The chapters on abortion, infantacide, and euthenasia constitute a good bit of the book. Singer attacks the idea that human life is necessarily sacrosanct: he attacks both conservative and liberal issues, including my own that “humaness” starts with the development of the brain. I find it particularly difficult to summarize or comment on his views on any of these (with the exception of euthenasia, which I view as a right) It’s safe to say, though, that whatever your views are, Singer challenges them. His arguments are all based on a kind of utiliarianism: he suggests that in some cases it’s best to kill a deformed fetus or even an infant, in the interests of the quality of life. I agree with this, but what unsettles me is the emotions surroundin the death of a baby. I have been raised in a culture that views the death of a baby as more tragic than the death of an adult, and even I can’t go against that without feeling uncomfortable.

His last chapters deal with the good life — with the value of treating people well and responding to their needs. In “Darwin for the Left”, he writes that the political left ought to adopt Darwinian thinking: to realize that human beings are naturally inlcined to look only after their own self-interests and that we should push for a system that takes this into account and doesn’t ignore it the way current governments do — ones that expect people to behave themselves and live by ideals.

It was an interesting, if slow and difficult, read.

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Great Feuds in Science

Posted on November 17, 2008 by smellincoffee

Great Feuds in Science: Ten of the liveliest disputes ever
Hal Hellman © 1998
192 pages, plus bibliography and index

Last week I wanted to read a little science, and while roaming through the shelves, my eyes found this book. It looked interesting, so I checked it out. The book has ten chapters, each on a historical scientific “feud”:

  1. Galileo versus Pope Urban VIII: An Unequal Contest
  2. Wallis versus Hobbes: Squaring the Circle
  3. Newton versus Lebniz: A Clash of Titans
  4. Voltaire versus Needham: The Generation Controversy
  5. Darwin’s Bulldog versus Soapy Sam: Evolution Wars
  6. Lord Kelvin versus Geologists and Biologists: The Age of the Earth
  7. Cope versus March: The Fossil Feud
  8. Wegener versus Everybody: Continental Drift
  9. Johanson versus the Leakeys: The Missing Link
  10. Derek Freeman versus Margaret Mead: Nature Versus Nuture

The author introduces the ‘contestants’, providing brief biographies, then moves on to the conflict between the two (or more, in the case of “Evolution Wars”) contestants. While I’ve heard of some of these conflicts, there were were a few (Wallis versus Hobbes, for instance) that were complete unknowns to me. Overall, the book was fairly interesting, and helped to add background to conflicts I’ve read about in brief — like Cope versus March, which is mentioned in an inside in Spangenburg and Mosers’ history of science series. According to Spangenburg and Moser, they were less scientists and more entrepreneurs who thought of nothing of dynamiting their fossil sites after they were done to prevent other people from finding out about anything they’d missed.

The authors are fairly throrough, although some articles — “Evolution Wars”– were stronger than articles like a “A Clash of Titans”. The last article on “Nature versus Nurture” was particularly interesting to me. I am interested in both biology and sociology, and so the question of whether our genes or socialization are more important in determining how we act and how our societies function. This author seems to give the impression that the nurture argument is more odminant, at least in the specific case that it examined — Margaret Mead’s experiences in America Samoa.

All in all, fairly interesting and well-organized. If you pay attention to the dates and themes, you may realize that the book starts at the beginning of science as we know it — Galileo’s insistance on observation — and moves through the history of the centuries following, up to the development of social science in the 20th century.

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Cathedral, Forge, and Waterwheel

Posted on November 16, 2008 by smellincoffee

Cathedral, Forge, and Waterwheel: Technology and Invention in the Middle Ages
© 1994 Frances and Joseph Gies
291 pages, plus notes, an extended bibliography, and an index

The Gies’ various books on life in the middle ages have continued to delight and entertainment, and so I looked forward to this particular book. My anticipation was only heightened by the fact that I am interested in pre-industrial technology, particularly concerning architecture and craft. The Gies did not disapoint, and this book has become my second-favorite Gies book — the first being Life in a Medieval City. The book consists of seven chapters.

The first, “Nimrod’s Tower, Noah’s Ark”, examines popular conceptions about technology in the middle ages. The Gies are forever forcing me to broaden my perceptions about the middle ages, and they do so again — and again and again — in this book. In “Triumphs and Failures of Ancient Technology”, the Gies track the growth of technology up until the decline of the Roman Empire. They cover water wheels, road-building, weapons, smelting technology, astronomical tools, horse equipment, handicraft, and the like. In the chapters to follow, they move chronologically through the middle ages, ending with a chapter titled “Leonardo and Columbus”. Another chapter, “The Asian Connection”, is tucked in between the end of the early middle ages (500-900) and the beginning of the economic revival of the early 11- and 1200s. This particular chapter focuses on how technology and learning drifted west fro the Arab world, India, and China.

This is definitely one of the most interesting books I’ve ever read. The Gies cover a nearly unbeliable about of material in only three hundred pages, and I’m at a loss as to how to properly summarize it. They write about bridges, cathedrals, ship-building, glass-blowing, road-laying, pottery-making, iron-forging, masonry, the growth of universities, the development of art, water wheels, proto-industrial looms, the spice trade, crossbows, the Columbian exchange, mail armor, the Greek disdain for manual labor, trebuchets, cannons, the Roman preference for tehnology over natural philosophy, sanitation programs in cities, Leonardo’s technical drawings, the birth of paper — I could go on and on. All of this is informed by primary-source materials, from which the Gies quote liberally. They also use medieval depictions of water wheels and clock towers and so forth to illustrate what they are writing about. Joseph Gies once edited the technology articles for the Encyclopedia Brittanica, and his knowledge comes through in technical explanations. I didn’t understand all of his explantations — especially in regard to complicated mechanisms like printing presses and clock towers — but many were.

The Gies also fit all of this into a general narrtive about the development of the medieval world, and I could appreciate this all the more, having read their other books. This book was enormously interesting: I really can’t say that too many times. I reccommend it eagerly to anyone who is interested in the medieval era or the history of technology. I only wish the Gies had an official website.

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Buy Jupiter and Other Stories

Posted on November 14, 2008 by smellincoffee

Buy Jupiter and Other Stories
Isaac Asimov, © 1979
207 pages

Today while in the library taking notes for my two term papers, I read through Buy Jupiter and Other Stories. I did not intend to finish it, but I realized I was finished with my notes ahead of time, and rather than starting my first paper an hour before lunch, I decided to return to and finish Buy Jupiter. It is a collection of some 20+ short stories by Isaac Asimov, each with generous afterwords and forewords. It turns out that I am not the only fan who adores these little asides by Asimov — apparently he was written to by fans who thanked him for them.

Many of the stories are quite brief. There were about four that I didn’t quite “get”, but there were also some stories that really struck me and have become favorites. I’ll mention a few of the stories: all are not necessarily favorites.

  1. “Buy Jupiter” concerns the reaction of Earth when aliens approach requesting to buy the planet of Jupiter. The conclusion is rather comedic.
  2. “The Founding Father” is about the crew of five Earthmen who crash on an Earth-like planet with an atmosphere of ammonia. They labor to make it livable. Excellent conclusion — one of my favorites.
  3. “Button, Button” features an inventor who uses German sentence structure whenever he grows emotional. As a student of the German language, I found that particularly interesting.

Many of the stories feature a first-person narrative voice, which is unusual for Asimov’s short stories — at least the ones I’ve seen. The book is an exceptionally quick read.

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