The Story of the Titanic

Posted on October 10, 2008 by smellincoffee

The Story of the Titanic, as Told By Its Survivors
Edited by Jack Winocour; 320 pages.
Dover Publications, Inc. New York
© 1960

The story of the R.M.S. Titanic, of the White Star Line, is one of the most tragically short is is possible to conceive. The world had waited expectantly for its launching and again for its sailing; had read accounts of its tremendous size and its unexampled completeness and luxury; had felt it a matter of the greatest satisfaction that such a comfortable and above all such a safe boat had been designed and built — the “unsinkable lifeboat” — and then in a moment to hear that it had gone to the bottom as if it had been the veriest tramp steamer of a few hundred tons; and then with it fifteen hundred passengers, some of them known the world over! The improbability of such a thing ever happening was what staggered humanity. – Lawrence Beesley

The Story of the Titanic is a collection of four survivors’ accounts from the loss of the Titanic in April 1912. If you are interested in seeing 1912 video footage of the Titanic’s survivors, the ice field where Titanic went to its death, and other related material, click here.

When I was just a child, I owned a pack of “cards” — I’m not sure if that’s the best way to describe them, as it seems they were bigger than 5 by 7 index cards — that displayed historical events. The front of each card displayed a picture of the event, while the back of it supplied generous information. One particular card that I remember quite vividly depicts the Titanic sinking. Its stern is high in the air, still well-lit, and appears to be quite dramatic set against the background of the stars. Small lifeboats filled with shadowy human forms occupy the foreground. You can see a similar scene if you click here and forward the video t the 8:34 mark.

The picture struck me, and from that moment on the Titanic held fascination for me. I remember drawing pictures in second grade of that scene, with little stick-figures in lifeboats watching the ship go to its death. My interest in the subject has not waned, and as such I’ve read a lot of literature on the subject — but until this week, I’ve never read any primary source material, nothing from the actual survivors. I’ve read quotations from them in the Walter Lord books, of course, but not their actual accounts. Titanic, the 1997 blockbuster, was on television a few days ago, and I watched it for a few minutes before having to go somewhere. Seeing it reminded me that it’s been some time since I read anything on the subject, and I decided to remedy that.

My local library happens to have access to The Story of the Titanic, As Told By Its Passengers. The book is really a collection of four survivor accounts, two of which are full-length books in and of themselves. The accounts are by Lawrence Beesley, a science instructor from England; Colonel Archibald Gracie, a native Alabamian and an amateur historian; Second Officer Charles Lightoller, and Junior Marconi Operator Harold Bride. Since there are four separate accounts, I shall be commenting on each one separately.

Beesley’s book The Loss of the S.S. Titanic (1912) is quoted liberally by Walter Lord and other Titanic historians, and with good reason. Beesley wrote it in the month following the sinking, and has an incredible mind for seeing and memorizing details Given his profession as scientist, it comes as no surprise that he comments on the technical aspects of the ship with an idea for details. To add to all of this, he is also a talented writer, at least in my opinion and in the opinion of Colonel Gracie, who will quote him in his own book. Beesley travels as a second-class passenger (I believe) and was on his way to the United States for a bit of sight-seeing. He was the only person in this collection who actually got into a lifeboat before the ship sank: he was offered the chance to go down when there were no more women on his part of the ship, and he took up the opportunity. (The rest were all washed over and managed to swim to overturned lifeboats in the water.) Beesley ends his account with a chapter on “Lessons Learned”, and makes suggestions for making the Atlantic safe. (Not that it will matter much longer: commercial avitation will begin to come into its own after the Great War.) You can read his account at Project Gutenberg for free.

Colonel Gracie (who you can spot in the 1997 movie: click here for a list of characters and look at the bottom of it) was an amateur historian with a particular interest in the Civil War, unsurprising given that he’s from Alabama. Even today rural whites in the deep south sport Confederate flags and talk of “General Lee” with great veneration. Gracie states in The Truth about the Titanic (1913) that he was on the Titanic to recover from writing his The Truth About Chickamauga. Gracie’s account is the largest, as the last two chapters include a gorge of information from the American and British inquiries.

The next account, “Titanic”, is by the only senior officer to survive, Charles Lightoller. He dedicates it to “my persistant wife, who made me do it.” Lightoller will, incidentally, live to help out at the evacuation of the British army at Dunkirk in 1939. Lightoller’s account betrays the period most: he is a career officer of the White Star Line and is quite proud of it. He writes of the differences between the merchant marine — his fellow commercial sailors — and the Royal Navy. While the “Bluejackets” of the Royal Navy are trained to obey every order without question, the men of the merchant marine pride themselves on being able to think on their feet and respond to problems out of a commitment to duty. Lightoller also speaks sneeringly of the American Inquiry because of its naval ignorance, and he records his experience of forcing a group of “Dagos” to leave an unattended lifeboat at the point of a gun — probably the inspiration for the scene in the 1997 blockbuster where Lightoller brandishes a gun on a crowd of passengers and yells “Get back, I say! Or I’ll shoot you all like dogs! Keep order here! Keep order, I say!” Before reading Lightoller’s account, I had scoffed at the scene, but that’s really no better than forcing a few men out of a boat and then sending it down with empty seats. During the final moments, when people are drowning in the ship, Lightoller writes that “It was mostly men, thank God.”

The last and shortest account is by Junior Marconi Operator Harold Bride. The “Marconi” was the Titanic‘s wireless set. It was included mostly as a luxury, much like the elevators, and so the two operators were not really seen as part of the “crew”. They were paid separately by the Marconi company. Thre was no rationalized procedure for conveying iceberg warnings directly to the bridge (the merchant marine liked winging it, as we’ve learned from Cmdr. Lightoller), which is in my opinion one of the causes for the accident. I would like to believe that had Captain Smith received all six messages, he would have put them together and realized that the Titanic was steaming into a massive ice field.

Bride’s account is really rather short, and the most memorable incident he mentions is that after the Captain released the men from their duty, Senior Operator Philips stayed at his post. Bride went into their berths in the next room to gather Philips’ and his belongings (the water already covering the floor), and when he returned he saw someone trying to remove Philips’ life-belt. Philips was oblivious, concentrating on his work. Bride writes that he hit the intruder over the head and left him to die. “I hope I finished him,” he said.

There are common threads woven through the three main accounts — other than “The ship sank. People died.” Beesley, Gracie, and Lightoller all speak well of Captain Smith, although Beesley does write that the captain has to take some of the blame: he took a gamble and lost. All three agree that the whole Titanic incident was conducted with dignity and self-control. They all write that the officers and sailors did their duty quickly, quietly, efficiently, and safely — while the passengers never lost their heads and conducted themselves like proper Britons. Beesley in particular writes about the self-control of the “Teutonic Race”, the way the officers did their duty and the way the passengers complied with them completely. Bride doesn’t mention this, but he and Philips were in the Marconi cabin the entire time, practically until they were both washed overboard.

Beesley and Gracie also maintain that the ship did not break apart. Beesley states that the accounts in American newspapers of the great ship breaking into two are pure fiction. We know that they’re incorrect: the ship currently lies in three pieces. The bow is completely shattered and is scarcely recognizable as being part of the ship, while the stern is relatively intact but rotting quickly. There’s a hunk of wreckage near the bow that is unidentifiable, and the physics of the sinking explain all of this. So why did they not witness it?

1. Beesley: in a lifeboat at the time of the breaking. He writes that the night is so dark that he couldn’t even see the face of the woman next to him. Consequently, when the lights on the Titanic failed, I imagine all he could make out was a shadowy mass that was constantly moving and impossible to define. Thus, when he heard the boilers crashing through the ship and the ship breaking apart, he thought it was just the sound of the boilers. Who would imagine a ship breaking in two like an twig?

2. Gracie: he would have been in the water swimming as all of this happened — very near the sounds of screaming people, the roar of the ship’s beds and boilers tearing from the floor and falling downward. He’s also in darkness and immersed in chaos. He writes that he was under the water for four minutes, and by the time his head emerged the ship was gone. Others have written that the ship seemed to speed up as it sank — but still, four minutes for half of a ship to sink? That’s pretty quick.

Being on a ship as large and grand as the Titanic, I can’t blame them for not believing it could be snapped in two. Gracie mentions having visited the Olympic (Titanic’s sister ship, built on the same plans) to confirm details of the ship’s layout. That trip must have been rather haunting. On a similar note, I read in a Titanic encyclopedia that Lawrence Beesley visited the set of A Night to Remember and tried to stay on the ship as it sank. You can see the trailer here.

Each account was informative. While each of these accounts were written in the nineteen-teens, the language isn’t overly stilted. Beesley is rather wordy, but in an eloquent way. To students of the Titanic I would reccommend this, so long as they realize that these are only four perspectives and not necessarily wholly reliable. I would especially recommend Beesley’s account, however, because of his way of coming to terms with how and why things happened the way they did.

There seemed to be a sense of loneliness when we were left on the se in a small boat without the Titanic; […] we waited head on for the wave which we thought might come- – the wave we had heard so much of from the crew and which they said had been known to travel for miles — and it neer came. But although Titanc left us no such legacy of a wave as she went to the bottom, she left us with something we would willingly forget forever, something which is well not to let the imagination dwell on — the cries of many hundreds of our fellow-passengers struggling in the ice-cold water.

I would willingly omit any further mention of this part of the disaster from this book, but for two reasons it is not possible — first, that as a matter of history it should be put on record; and secondly, that these cries were not only an appeal for help in the awfuld conditions of danger in which the drowning found themselves — an appeal that could never be answered — but an appeal to the whole world to make such conditions of danger and hopelessness impossible ever again; a cry that called to the heavens for the very injustice of its own existance; a cry that clamored for its own destruction. – Lawrence Beesley

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This Week at the Library (7/10)

Posted on October 8, 2008 by smellincoffee

Books this Update

I continued in the Worldwar series by Harry Turtledove, which sees an alien invasion of Earth in 1942 — thus interrupting the second world war and creating an alternative history and science fiction scenario. Last week I read the first in the series and enjoyed it, so I’m continuing. Humanity continues exhibiting a distressing ability to innovate, much to the alien invaders’ — the Race’s — distress. The Race is slow to adapt to change, which is fortunate for humanity. The human governments realize that the only way they can win this war is to continue destroying the Race’s finite supply of equipment and by gaining atomic weapons. To do this they must cooperate with one another, which is difficult for the Nazis and Soviets, being ideological enemies.

We see growing technological progress: both the Nazis and Brits employ jet aircraft. Jet technology was known in the ‘real’ war, but didn’t see any real consequential use. People continue to innovate new ways to fight the lizards, although it is difficult to see at this point a light at the end of the tunnel. As I read I couldn’t help but wonder how elections were going to be handled in the United States: Germany and Russia are both being lead by dictatorships, and Britain’s system doesn’t mandate scheduled elections. In the United States, however, presidential elections happen every four years — period. How, I wondered, is that political system going to work when much of the country is controlled by the Race and the parts of it that are still free have been disconnected from transportation and utility networks? Will the elections go on as scheduled — somehow — or will FDR simply suspend the Constitution and maintain the incumbent administration? Also, I wonder if the stress is going to lead to FDR’s early demise. It’s a safe bet that April 1944 — when FDR dies — will not see the Allies or humanity on the precipice of victory in this timeline. If in the (likely, to my thinking) event that elections are done away with, and FDR dies, what kind of president will the third-term vice president Henry Wallace become? Yet another issue is the question of how much of a boot technology will receive from this war — from both necessity being the mother of invention and efforts at reverse-engineering Race technology.

After Tilting the Balance, I read Prelude to Foundation by Isaac Asimov. Prelude is written as a — well, prelude — to the Foundation series, but in the afterword of Foundation’s Edge, Asimov says that it’s a good idea to read Prelude and the books that chronologically precede it after reading Edge and Foundation and Earth. The Foundation series begins with the realization by a psychohistorian named Hari Seldon that the Galactic Empire is decaying. Psychohistory is a fictional science that involves using computers and complex mathematical formulas to predict what large groups of human beings will do. Using this psychohistory, Seldon seeks to instigate a series of events that will bring galactic peace and harmony — and he begins by establishing two Foundations.

Prelude to Foundation takes us “back” in history to when Hari Seldon was a young man who had just started creating psychohistory. While sight-seeing in the imperial capital of Trantor (the inspiration for George Lucas’ Coruscant), Seldon presents a paper on the theory of psychohistory, and catches the eye of various political individuals who want to use his predictive power to further their own success. Seldon maintains that his theory has no practical applications, but is forced on the run anyway. Prelude to Foundation concerns itself with what happens to Seldon during his fugitive period, and hints at the events that unfold in Foundation’s Edge and Foundation and Earth.

I continue to utterly enjoy Asimov’s series. The story moves quickly, is very interesting, and provides a background for the rest of the series. The book won’t displace Foundation or Foundation’s Edge as being my favorites in the series, but it is quite good.

Lastly I finished reading Parasite Rex. From the book’s rear cover:

Imagine a world where parasites control the minds of their hosts, sending them to their destruction.

Imagine a world where parasites are masters of chemical warfare and camouflage, able to cloak themselves with their hosts’ own molecules.

Imagine a world where parasites steer the course of evolution, where the majority of species are parasites.

Welcome to earth.

This book is a recommendation from a fellow student of science, and as you can probably deduce, it’s about the wild weird world of parasites. The parasites in the book do not include bacteria and viruses, but are limited to larger organisms — ranging from microscopic worms that swim in blood to wasps to animals that chew away fish tongues and take their place. I’ve been asked, “Why on Earth are you reading about that?”. The book’s front cover does attract stares, and the question was generally asked of me while eating in my university’s dining hall, as I will read there if I can’t find anyone to eat with. Considering the setting, I can almost understand their disgust.

Parasite Rex would be interesting if it were only about the life cycles of various parasites. This is a subject I find interesting for whatever reason — I have a strong interest in science and even if I didn’t, the world of parasites is so bizarre that it would capture my attention. It did back when I was in high school, a fundamentalist Pentecostal, and as incurious as enthusiastic Bill’O’heads. I went to a youth service where the designated screamer roared about parasites — and he had slides. One of the parasites he spoke about was one that gets into ants, then gets them to crawl up blades of grass — where the sun fries them and where they are eaten by cows, who then serve as a dandy new host for the parasite. The book mentions these, and it also mentions that if ants spot warning signs in an infected ant, they will haul it far away from their colony’s territory. Ants are such fascinating creatures.

Zimmer also writes about the importance of parasites to ecosystems and writes about the ways their evolution has driven the evolution of other life — including human beings. He concludes with ways we might coexist with parasites for mutual benefit. I don’t say much about the book — although I enjoyed it — because frankly, if you don’t like thinking about parasites you aren’t going to want to read the book. But for those who are like me morbidly interested in the bizarre and horrifying world of parasites — give it a go.

Pick of the Week: Prelude to Foundation, Isaac Asimov.
Next Week:

  • Forward the Foundation, Isaac Asimov
  • The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity, Roy Porter
  • The Story of the Titanic, as Told by its Survivors
  • Trial By Error, Mark A. Garland
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This Week at the Library (1/10)

Posted on October 1, 2008 by smellincoffee

Books this Update:

  • In the Balance, Harry Turtledove
  • Foundation and Earth, Isaac Asimov

I had an extraordinarily busy weekend when it came to schoolwork, but I was able to read In the Balance between writing sessions. In the Balance is an alternate-history and science fiction novel by Harry Turtle, the publisher- or self-proclaimed “Master of Alternative History”. I wouldn’t go that far, but considering how much I’ve read by him I obviously enjoy what he writes. In the Balance is set in the middle of the Second World War. A fleet of alien spacecraft from Tau Ceti 3 (this according to the Fount of All Knowledge) arrives in December 1941 with the intentions of conquering Earth — to find to their horror that human beings have progressed much in the 800 years since their probes first examined our humble planet.

They had expected to find a globe occupied by rudely-armed peasants and knights errant, since their own technological progress had been slow. They found instead dense urbanization and countries in the middle of the second industrial revolution — with planes, trains, and automobiles. While they arrived at Earth — or as they call it, Tosev 3 — with more weapons than they needed, they find that we Tosevites are not so easy to suppress. The aliens, who call themselves the Race, find that humans are imaginative and unpredictable. This presents a problem, because the Race is not very good at responding to changing situations. In the Balance covers the first year of the Earth-Race war.

One of Turtledove’s strengths is inserting minor details that make the story seem real. At the beginning of the book, before the Race begins its invasion, we learn that one of the principle characters is a science fiction aficionado. He races to the newsstand to buy the latest copy of Astounding Stories. Turtledove writes that “the latest serial from Robert Heinlein had just ended”, but that the character (Sam Yeager) was still excited to see what the new offerings would be from Heinlein, Asimov, and others. The forties and fifties have been described (by Asimov and others) as science-fiction’s heyday, and it was nice to see the cultural reference. The reference probably had to be made, of course, given that this is a science fiction novel and had it actually happened, people would think of magazines like Astounding Stories. Another example of this specificity is that Turtledove portrays the Race as having to figure out why humanity is the way it is — examining human behavior by looking at biological and environmental factors. As a history/sociology student, I find the observations interesting.

Turtledove’s cast of characters is fairly varied. Some of the more memorable characters include a ball playing sci-fi fan turned soldier; an American nuclear physicist; two German panzer crewmen, a female Russian pilot, and a Jewish quasi-rabbi in Poland. There are also various historical personalities — Foreign Minister Molotov of the USSR, Italian scientist Enrico Fermi, George S. Patton, and Adolf Hitler. These historical personalities are not viewpoint characters, however. An extended scene between Molotov and Hitler was interesting read: how do you put words into the mouth of a man who is used as the standard for pure evil? How do you write him? It’s the same question I would ask if I read Anne Rice’s Jesus books: how do you put words into the mouth of a man who is regarded as a god?

The members of the Race are reptilian in nature; the human characters in the book refer to them as the Lizards. Being a Star Trek fan, my initial mental image was that of the Gorn, from the original series’ “The Arena”. Turtledove adds that the Lizards are only waist-high compared to most humans, and consequently their name for us is “Big Uglies”.

Considering that these lizards have come across the stars to add Earth to their growing space empire, they’re not that technologically advanced. They came to Earth in sleeper ships, although the Fount of All Knowledge says that they have apparently achieved half the speed of light. That’s fairly quick — it means you can get from the Sun to Earth in four minutes. Outside of that, though, the Lizards don’t seem that technologically advanced. They attack with helicopters, jet aircraft with heat-seeking misses, and land cruisers that don’t seem that far beyond 21st century Earth.

Overall, I enjoyed the book. The plot works: it seems plausible. The fictional characters emerge as distinct people, three of them in particular. The story was interesting to me, and I say if science fiction relating to Earth or alternative history with science-fiction elements interests you, give the first book a try.

Next I read Isaac Asimov’s Foundation and Earth. Chronologically, it is the last book in the Foundation series, at least according to the Fount of All Knowledge’s list of books in the series. The series is set in a galaxy occupied by human beings, far in the future. I have read five of the books in the series proper, I believe. Asimov intended that people be able to enjoy this book without having read any of the books preceding it, and I think he was successful. Reading Foundation’s Edge, first, though, is recommended by me. The Foundation Triology isn’t necessary, although would make the reading of Foundation and Earth more rich, I think.

To describe the book without spoiling any plot points in the preceding books, Foundation and Earth is about the search by three people (Golan Trevize, Janov Pelorat, and “Bliss”) to find Earth. The galaxy of the series is set over twenty thousand years in the future, and the characters know that humanity have to have evolved on one planet and then settled the rest of the galaxy. They want to find this planet; Pelorat for historical reasons and Trevize for reasons that pertain to the plot of the book. They hope that finding Earth will answer questions that they’ve had since Foundation’s Edge. Since this book is last in the meta-series, it does as you might imagine answer questions and tie up some loose ends and everything it’s supposed to.

I’ve become something of an Asimov enthusiast in recent years, especially in the last year. That enthusiasm is supported by how much I continue to enjoy reading his fiction books. With the exception of Foundation and Empire — the enjoyment of which I think was spoiled by having accidentally read its sequel before it — I have enjoyed the books in this series thoroughly. I can find nothing ill to say about them except they keep ending on me. I am happy that I still have many books in the meta-series to read yet, but I understand that sadly one day I’ll have read the entire series — because I intend to borrow or buy every book I can. I must confess that part of me wants to have a bookcase in my future home that is sagging under the weight of all of the books in it just so that I can sit there admiring my bookcase and say “Just look at all that Asimov!”

Pick of the Week: Foundation and Earth. Turtledove is interesting; Asimov is…amazing. Here’s an interview with him.

Quotation of the Week:

“The enlightened people of the SSSR have cast the rule of the despots onto the ash-heap of history,” Molotov said.

Avtar laughed in his flat face. “The Race has flourished under its Emperors for a hundred thousand years. What do you know of history, when you were savages the last time we looked over your miserable pest-hole of a planet?” The Fleetlord heartily wished the Tosevites had remained savages, too.

“History may be slow, but it is certain,” said Molotov stubbornly. “One day the inevitable revolution will come to your people, too, when their economic conditions dictate its necessity. I think that day will be soon. You are imperialists, and imperialism is the last phase of capitalism, as Marx and Lenin have shown.”

The interpreter stumbled through the translation of that last sentence, and added, “I have trouble rendering the natives’ religious terms into our language, Exalted Fleetlord. Marx and Lenin are gods or prophets in the SSSR.” He spoke briefly with Molotov, then said, “Prophets.”

This particular scene struck me as funny. Molotov, the foreign minister of the USSR, has been hauled up into space to treat with the Lizards — or rather, that’s what the Lizards hauled him up there for. Molotov is completely unbothered by the fact that he’s standing in an alien spaceship orbiting Earth and completely at their mercy. Confronted with a demand that the USSR surrender to the Emperor of the Race, he states that he was part of the revolution that killed his own emperor and then starts predicting that Communism is the future for the Race, too. Here’s another scene I found funny. For context, two German tankmen have survived an encounter with Lizard land cruisers in Russia. They take off into the countryside to look for a way back to Wehrmacht headquarters, finding their way to a Russian village. Their rifles attract the attention of a Russian pilot who lands; after coming to terms with the whole “ideological enemies” thing, they begin discussing the Lizards

So here is German arrogance first hand, Ludmila thought. Having admitted that the Lizards had smashed his unit to bits, all the panzer major cared to talk about was the foe’s shortcomings. Ludmila said, “Since our equipment is unfortunately not a match for theirs, how do we go about fighting them?”

“Das ist die Frage,” Sergeant Schultz said solemnly, for all the world like a Nazi Hamlet.

Next Week:

  • Prelude to Foundation, Isaac Asimov
  • Tilting the Balance, Harry Turtledove
  • Parasite Rex: Inside the Bizarre World of Nature’s Most Dangerous Creatures, Carl Zimmer
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This Week at the Library (24/9)

Posted on September 24, 2008 by smellincoffee

Books this Update:

  • Rules of Civility, George Washington
  • Foundation’s Edge, Isaac Asimov
  • Holidays on Ice, David Sedaris
  • The Leopard, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
  • Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot and Other Observations, Al Franken

I began this week with George Washington’s Rules of Civility. I spotted it while looking for another book, and knew immediately that I had to examine it. When I went to check it out, I was informed that I looked as though I already knew how to be civil. I’m not sure what that means, but I have a suspicion that it means “I notice you’re not wearing a shirt with Bill O’ on it..” The book is a collection of rules Washington supposedly followed. Many of them are holdovers from a different era — Washington elaborates on situations with your “betters” and your “inferiors”. Some of the rules are common rules you would expect — don’t sneeze or cough in front of company except with your mouth covered (and your head turned, preferably); don’t clean your nails or relieve yourself of body lice at the table; don’t chew your nails in front of people, that sort of thing. Here are some of the ones I liked:

  • Be not hasty to believe flying reports to the disparagement of any.
  • Associate yourself with men of good quality, if you esteem your own reputation; for it is better to be alone than in bad company.
  • Let your conversation be without malice or envy, for it is a sign of a tractable and commendable nature; and in all cases of passion admit reason to govern.
  • Speak not injurious words, neither in jest or in earnest scoff at none though they give occasion.
  • Speak not evil of the absent, for it is unjust.

There are more here. Next I read Asimov’s Foundation’s Edge, the fourth book in the Foundation series. According to It’s Been a Good Life, a posthumous autobiography, Asimov was asked to pen another Foundation book a number of years after he had written the trilogy, and so had to read the trilogy again to recover his thoughts. This book mentions the robots that Asimov wrote so much about in other works. Before I read his biography, I wondered why there were no robots in his Foundation universe, seeing as it was set in the far future and robotics would have come a long way. I assumed that the rising suspicion regarding them (a theme throughout Asimov’s robot novels and stories) led to their demise. Asimov deals with that question in this book. Foundation’s Edge is a marvelously written book; it’s probably my second-favorite Foundation book, right behind the first. Excellent stuff.

Next I read David Sedaris’ Holiday on Ice, a short book themed around Christmas. Half of the book is typical Sedaris — essays recalling memories from his life and relating them to the reader in a dry, amusing narrative. The other half of the book consists of stories written by Sedaris with a holiday theme. My favorite section of the book was “The SantaLand Diaries”, which you can listen to here. Sedaris reads the essay on “This American Life”. He starts about four minutes in.

Next I read The Leopard, by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa. The book is set in the mid-19th century — the 1860s, precisely. During this time Italy was approaching unification, and the book is written to document the waning power of the aristocracy. The story itself is interesting: the book…wasn’t. I found it very difficult to read get through and the plot seemed to be jumpy. The most interesting chapter for me was the chapter where the Prince slowly approaches his death.

Don Fabrizio had always known that sensation. For a dozen years or so he had been feeling as if the vital fluid, the faculty of existing, life itself in fact and perhaps even the will to go on living, were ebbing out of him slowly but steadily, as grains of sand cluster and then line up one by one, unhurried, unceasing, before the narrow neck of an hourglass. In some moments of intense activity or concentration this sense of continual loss would vanish, to reappear impassively in brief instants of silence or introspection; just as a constant buzzing in the ears of the ticking of a pendulum superimposes itself when all else is silent, assuring us of always being there, watchful, even when we do not hear it.

Lastly, I read Al Franken’s Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot and Other Observations. The book, written in 1996, purports to be satire of the growing lack of civility in American politics. Franken focuses his ire on a few personalities in particular: Limbaugh, Pat Buchanan, and Pat Robertson. There are others, of course, ranging from Oliver North to Arlen Specter. I don’t have much to say about the book: parts of it were amusing; other parts not so much.

Quotation of the Week: “…and in all cases of passion, admit reason to govern.” – George Washington

Pick of the Week: Foundation’s Edge, Isaac Asimov

Next Week:

  • Parasite Rex: Inside the Bizarre World of Nature’s Most Dangerous Creatures, Carl Zimmer
  • Foundation and Earth, Isaac Asimov
  • Worldwar: in the Balance, Harry Turtledove
  • Puzzles of the Black Widowers, Isaac Asimov
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This Week at the Library (17/9)

Posted on September 17, 2008 by smellincoffee

Books this Update:

  • The Way You Wear Your Hat: Frank Sinatra and the Lost Art of Livin’, Bill Zehme
  • Banquets of the Black Widowers, Isaac Asimov
  • Sinatra: the Artist and the Man, John Lahr
  • Blood of Flowers, Anita Amirrezvani

I began this week with a book I’ve not read since early 2005. Were I to commit such blasphemy as to name a favorite singer, I would name Frank Sinatra. I started listening to Sinatra in 2004 (beginning with “The Very Good Years” from Reprise) and quickly become an enthusiast, and not long after I began reading Sinatra biographies. One of them was The Way You Wear Your Hat: Frank Sinatra and the Lost Art of Livin’. Anyone familiar with Sinatra knows that he was a man of singular style, who lived life passionately and in his own way. The Way You Wear Your Hat is not a biography. The author explores the way Sinatra lived — with chapters dedicated to style, women, and his drinking preferences. There are a lot of quotations from Sinatra and a lot about him. I easily recommend the book to anyone who is interested in Frank Sinatra, even vaguely so. It remains a favorite.

Next I read Isaac Asimov’s Banquets of the Black Widowers, the fourth book in his Black Widowers mystery series. The Black Widower books are all collections of Black Widower tales. Each tale is a short story — a mystery. They are all set in the same place: every month, a group of friends who call themselves the Black Widowers meet at a restaurant. Each month, the host brings a guest — and each month, without fail, a problem arises that has to be sorted out by the Widowers. The mystery is typically presented by the guest, but not always. I found this book to be altogether interesting. One story was a bit weak, but only the one. As is typical, Asimov provides chatty commentary at the end of each tale.

After this I went to another Sinatra biography, Sinatra: the Artist and the Man. There’s really not much to say: it’s a biography that presented its information in an organized way and told the story of his life. Half of the book is biography: the other half is page-sized pictures. The pictures are from his entire life and are of rather good quality.

Lastly I read The Blood of Flowers. I won this book during the summer in a contest hosted by a history blog I read frequently. The book is set in 17th century Persia. The author is an Iranian-American who wrote the book after she began wondering about the lives of the people who made the exquisite Persian rugs that she was familiar with: this book is an attempt to explore the lives of those people. The story is told in first-person through the eyes of an un-named narrator. You would think that it would be difficult for an entire novel to go by without a single named reference to the narrator, but Amirrezvani does it and does it well. I never realized that I never knew the name of the main character until I reached the author’s afterword. The young woman’s father dies, leaving her and her mother poor. They go to the then-capital city of Isfahan to seek out a male relative who will take them in. The narrator’s chief joy comes in knotting rugs, and her uncle happens to work in the royal rug-making workhouse. While he cannot formally teach her the craft at his workhouse, he does teach her at home. Most of the book is about the young woman’s life in Isfahan — the ups and downs. Folk stories are interwoven throughout. I rather enjoyed the book, and found it hard to put down at times. I especially enjoyed learning about 17th century Iran, or at least this author’s presentation of it. I recommend the book. Much to my amusement, Amirrezvani often describes Europeans as “farengi”, which inspired whichever Star Trek writer who created the Ferengi — a race obsessed with material wealth. This is not an association I made myself: I heard it years ago listening to an interview with one of Deep Space Nine’s producers, and he said that the race name came from this word. A selection from the book to pique your interest — a selection that alludes to the author’s inspiration for writing the book.

I will never inscribe my name in a carpet like the masters in the royal rug workshop who are honored for their great skill. I will never learn to knot a man’s eye so precisely it looks real, nor design rugs with layers of patterns so intricate that they could confound the greatest of mathematicians. But I have devised designs of my own, which people will cherish for years to come. When they sit on one of my carpets, their hips touching the earth, their back elongated, and the crown of their head lifted toward the sky, they will be soothed, refreshed, transformed. My heart will touch theirs and we will be as one, even after I am dust, even though they will never know my name.

Pick of the Week: Blood of Flowers, Anita Amirrezvani (And Asimov’s streak is ended!)

Next Week:

  • Washington’s Rules of Civility, George Washington
  • Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot and Other Observations, Al Franken
  • Holidays on Ice, David Sedaris
  • Foundation’s Edge, Isaac Asimov
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This Week at the Library (10/9)

Posted on September 10, 2008 by smellincoffee

Books this Update:

  • Me of Little Faith, Lewis Black
  • When You Are Engulfed in Flames, David Sedaris
  • Surviving Auschwitz, Primo Levi
  • Carl Sagan: A Life, Keay Davidson

I began this week with Me of Little Faith, which is a book about comedian Lewis Black’s experiences with religions and the paranormal. Black is a comedian often featured on The Daily Show who hosts his own show on the Comedy Central channel called The Root of All Evil. It’s not anti-religious, which came as a surprise to me given his comedy routines. Black was raised Jewish and considers himself a Jew even though he doesn’t follow Judaism. This makes him a “cultural Jew”, which Black says sounds like a name for some sort of yogurt. Black begins by describing growing up in a family of “cultural Jews”, then moves on. The book is a book of comedy, so there’s no real organization to it. Black describes his experiences and knowledge of various religious entities (Jonestown, Oral Roberts, Mormons, the Amish, televangelists), reflects on religions’ various effects, and provides personal anecdotes to give the reader a feel for Black’s own religious beliefs. As far as I could figure, he believes in a god, believes in ghosts, believes some people are gifted with psychic abilities, and is easily impressed by astrological coincidences. He mentions experiences he’s had — seeing things while visiting the Farm, seeing things while being touched by a guru, etc. A large part of one chapter comes from his “Red, White, and Screwed” show; a clip of which you can see here.

Next I read David Sedaris’ When You Are Engulfed in Flames. Sedaris is a comedian, one I became familiar with thanks to NPR. He often appears on the show “This American Life”, and when he read from Me Talk Pretty One Day, I was so amused that I had to go find the book. I ended up reading all of his humor books, and I looked forward to this new one with great anticipation. It was not disappointing. Sedaris’ particular style of humor is as ever delightful. If you want to listen to Sedaris reading from one of his books — and thus get an idea for what is included — click here for one of my favorite readings. That’s a short version: you can watch the longer version here.

Also this week I read Surviving Auschwitz, which is the story of an Italian man named Primo Levi who was captured by fascists while hiding in the countryside of Italy. Owing to his Jewish ancestry, he was sent to Auschwitz. Because he was captured in 1944, he was only forced to spend a year in the work-camp. While the SS had suspended mass killings by this point — wanting to maintain as much of a work force as possible to help with the war effort — death was still common. Levi describes the work details, the infirmary, the rituals of life in the camp. It’s an interesting read.

To finish the week’s reading off, I read Carl Sagan: A Life by Keay Davidson. The book is a large biography of Sagan, host of Cosmos and an astronomer associated with the Mariner and Voyager projects. He’s one of my favorite people to learn from, and as such I enjoyed this biography very much. The book does not shy away from Sagan’s failings, which I appreciate. Reading the book is a bit like reading about science, skepticism, and psuedo-science from the 1950s to the 1960s. Here are a few Sagan-related links:

  1. Celebrating Sagan
  2. “Pale Blue Dot“; Sagan reading from Pale Blue Dot. Beautiful video.
  3. “Wonder and Skepticism”, parts 1 and 2. His last lecture.
  4. Ted Turner interviews Carl Sagan, part 1. You can find the rest from there.

Pick of the Week: When You Are Engulfed in Flames, David Sedaris

Next Week:

  • The Leopard, Giuseppe di Lampusa. This book is another book for school.
  • Banquets of the Black Widowers, Isaac Asimov. Given how much I enjoyed the first two books in the Widowers series, I’m sure I’ll enjoy this one.
  • The Way You Wear Your Hat: Frank Sinatra and the Lost Art of Livin’, Bill Zehme. I read this book in early 2005 and am anticipating a good re-read.
  • Sinatra: the Artist and the Man, John Lahr
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This Week at the Library (3/9)

Posted on September 3, 2008 by smellincoffee

Books this Update:

  • Jailbird, Kurt Vonnegut
  • The Ascent of Science, Brian Silver
  • Foundation and Empire, Isaac Asimov
  • It’s Been a Good Life, Isaac Asimov
  • For the Love of Life, Erich Fromm

I began this week by reading Kurt Vonnegut’s Jailbird, which I had not planned to read at first. I’ve read a little bit of Vonnegut before, although his fictional style is a unlike anything I’m used to. I picked up Jailbird and began to read through it: it seemed interesting, so I checked it out. The book is about a man named Walter F. Starbuck, a well-intentioned and little-appreciated bureaucrat in the Nixon White House, having earned a meaningless post by accidentally advancing Nixon’s career. Starbuck’s life is quite interesting, and the story of that life unfolds throughout the book as he or an author telling the story of his life recollects them — think of the approach taken with Forrest Gump. In a very limited way, Gump and Starbuck’s stories are similar in that they are frequently and accidentally involved in the stories of history. The plot is much easier to understand than Slaughterhouse-5, although the latter is far more popular given that it’s a criticism of the Dresden firebombing. The story is quite interesting, as is the book. Oddly enough, even though it is a fiction book, it has an index. The book is described by Vonnegut through the voice of one of his characters as being about economics. Many of the characters’ lives are influenced by both the industrialists/capitalists and the socialist movement then present in the United States.

Last week I began reading Brian Silver’s The Ascent of Science, but didn’t finish it as it is rather lengthy and I was reading other books at the same time. Silver’s book is essentially a history of western science, but it is presented more as a history of scientific ideas — the controversies they generated and the influence they had. The book, written for lay audiences, explains scientific concepts fairly well while maintaining an informal spirit. The author includes himself in the book, offering opinions and making comments. The book is written well, and Silver takes care to explain how scientific ideas influenced political and social history. Despite this, I would only recommend it over Ray Spangenburg and Kit Moser’s two series if you’re an adult who doesn’t want to be bothered with an entire series to start getting a handle on the wide world of science.

Last week I read Isaac Asimov’s Second Foundation and commented that it was set far enough apart from Foundation that there was probably a novel in between. There is — Foundation and Empire. In Foundation and Empire, we see that the Foundation has grown into a large trading empire, and its elected “Mayors” have become autocrats — which is resented by a sizeable group on the planet, who maintain a “democratic underground”. I wonder if that’s where that’s where the website of the same name gets it from. What’s left of the Galactic Empire vanishes in this book, but before the Foundation can capitalize on the opportunity, they are toppled by the Mule, a mutant who can his mind to inflict or induce strong emotions in people — “hypercharismatic” is the way I described him last week. The book was an interesting read, although I think it’s the weakest of the trilogy.

Quotation of the Week:

“Know then thyself, presume not God to scan;
The proper study of mankind is Man.
Go Wond’rous creature, mount where Science guides.”

– Alexander Pope, “Esssay on Man”, quoted in The Ascent of Science.

This post is a little unusual because of my return to Montevallo. I read the aforementioned books two weeks ago. Last week I was unable to post about them because of computer problems, but now I am online again. This past week, I read Isaac Asimov’s posthumous autobiography, It’s Been a Good Life. The autobiography was published by his wife, Janet Asimov, from text he had written and from his letters to her. Despite of the fact that it is a loose compilation, the book is put together well. Asimov’s style is perfectly engaging and is quite conversational. I enjoyed it thoroughly.

Lastly I read Erich Fromm’s For the Love of Life. Fromm was a German social critic, and I’m not quite sure how I found the book. The book is composed of essays by Fromm and interview transcripts, so the topic of the book drifts. The first part was about “Affluence and Ennui” and is essentially a critique of a society obsessed with consumerism. The book also contains a lot of psychoanalysis: Fromm maintains that various thought-systems — the Judeo-Christian tradition, Zen Buddhism, Freudian psychology, and Marxism — all inform his worldview. (Fromm is described as a humanistic philosopher, but I don’t think that refers to contemporary humanism: humanism means different things in different contexts, and the rational “life stance” of humanism would be a strange bedfellow to most of the systems he mentioned. I say most because I’m not that familiar with Zen Buddhism.)

My enjoyment of the book changed depending on which section I was reading. While I liked “Affluence and Ennui”, the bits on dream interpretation and the psychoanalysis of Adolf Hitler weren’t all that enjoyable. I’m very skeptical when it comes to dream interpretation and psychoanalysis. Given that our dreams are our thoughts, I’m sure they betray things about us. The level of analysis Fromm goes into is too much for me. One of the examples Fromm uses is one of Freud’s dreams. Freud dreamed about a white flower that was shriveled and behind a bell-jar. Freud wanted to give the flower to his wife, but he could not remove it from the bell-jar. This is supposed to mean that Freud had reduced sexuality — the flower — to a thing to be studied and so could not really enjoy it. I don’t follow the logic: is it supposed to be another instance of “unweaving the rainbow”? The analysis of Hitler was the same. Fromm’s conclusion was that Hitler was a necrophiliac and hated all living things, so he was possessed by this enormous urge to destroy.

Pick of the [Update]: It’s Been a Good Life, Isaac Asimov

Quotation of the Week: “To learn is to broaden, to experience more, to snatch new aspects of life for yourself. To refuse to learn or to be relieved at not having to learn is to commit a form of suicide; in the long run, a more meaningful type of suicide than the mere ending of physical life.” – Isaac Asimov, It’s Been a Good Life.

Next Week:

  • When You Are Engulfed in Flames, David Sedaris. Sedaris is a comedian that I particularly enjoy. The title (for those of you whose curiosity has been piqued) comes from a translation error Sedaris observed while visiting Japan. I know this because he talked about it when promoting the book on The Late Show with David Letterman.
  • Me of Little Faith, Lewis Black. I like Lewis Black’s comedy, having become a fan of him via YouTube.
  • Carl Sagan: A Life by Keay Davidson. Carl Sagan is on my shortlist of “heroes”.
  • Survival in Auschwitz, Primo Levi. Required reading for one of my classes, but I’m reading it early as it looks interesting.
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This Week at the Library (15/8)

Posted on August 15, 2008 by smellincoffee

Books this Update:

  • Firestarter, Stephen King
  • Hard Call, John McCain
  • Second Foundation, Isaac Asimov
  • Technopoly: the Surrender of Culture to Technology, Neil Postman
  • The Ascent of Science, Brian L. Silver

I began this week with Stephen King’s Firestarter, which was recommended to me by several friends. Firestarter is about a young girl named Charlie who can start fires with her mind. She picked up this ability courtesy of the fact that her parents were both involved in a Secret Government Experiment during the 1960s. The experiment entailed treating college students to a drug referred to as Lot Six to see if it generates psi-talent by doing ’something’ to the pituitary gland. Since the majority of people in the experiment self-destructed in one form or another, the Government takes special note of the fact that two of its experiment’s survivors married and reproduced. As it turns out, they had good reason to take note, since Charlie can set people on fire. Naturally, pops doesn’t want the Government trying to turn his daughter into their secret weapon, and the fact that they tortured and murdered his wife doesn’t make him think that they have Charlie’s best interests at heart. Such cynicism, and at his age.

The story was engaging and well-written, in my opinion. King never bores me, and the ending wasn’t cliché at all. My only complaint is the dubious claim that “psi” abilities exist and can be linked to the pituitary gland. However, getting upset about that would be like growing annoyed with the idea of a fairy godmother in Snow White or miracles in the Left Behind series. It’s book magic.

Next I read Arizona senator John McCain’s latest book, Hard Call. I found the book accidentally. I decided to finish the week’s selection of books by exploring the biography shelves, and while examining the biographical anthologies, I saw McCain staring at me. The book looked interesting, so I decided to give it a go. Senator McCain begins by writing about the process of making decisions, and says that he believes that “Awareness, foresight, timing, confidence, humility, and inspiration” are “the qualities typically represented in the best decisions and in the characters of those who make them.” He divides the book into six sections, one for each attribute. After introducing each one, he shares several historical accounts that he believes represent those attributes well. His definition of “humility” leads to me to think that he would have been better off using another title, like “Empathy”, “Compassion”, or “Altruism”.

Overall, I really enjoyed the book. While I was familiar with many of the stories he used, there were quite a few others that I was completely unaware of, and I found them enjoyable. The weakest section was “Inspiration”, in my opinion. The last account he renders is of Abraham Lincoln’s decision to issue the Emancipation Proclamation. According to McCain, the decision was the result of a bet President Lincoln made with God/Fate. (Seriously.) McCain only cites one source of this (cites it twice, actually), which I question on the basis that if it’s true, it’s ridiculous. Consider:

Option 1: Abraham Lincoln, being an astute politician, who had on previous occasions maintained that he had no desire to stamp out slavery, decided that issuing the Emancipation Proclamation would be a wise move to keep England and France out of the war, but realized that he could only issue it in the aftermath of a Union victory. When McClellan’s army successfully blocked Lee’s army at Sharpsburg/Antietam Creek, Lincoln seized on his opportunity and changed the Union’s war goals from being “preserve the Union” to “restore the Union and end slavery”.

Option 2: Lincoln, an astute politician who had on previous occasions maintained that he had no interest in ending slavery, made a bet with God//Fate: if the Union won a great victory, he would issue the Emancipation Proclamation and free the slaves. (Well, the ones in rebelling states that the US Army reached.)

I can’t take seriously the idea of an intelligent Abraham Lincoln putting his reputation and possibly the fate of the war on the line for an arbitrary bet with fate. Aside from that major gaffe, I enjoyed the book. I didn’t read one chapter (one on reconciling Christianity and the decision to go to war, which isn’t of interest to me), but it was only one small exception. Since Senator McCain is a political personality, I probably should comment on his obvious biases, if any. To be honest, I really didn’t see a lot of bias in the book, which impressed me. His chapter on Harry Truman’s support of the civil rights movement was particularly impartial. There are a couple of issues, though. Were I to believe his section on Reagan, I would come away thinking Reagan was Superman. McCain, or his ghostwriter, also treats The Media and The Wisemen as ever-wrong naysayers, who are always out to make his heroes’ lives more difficult. Everyone likes to malign the scientific “elite” for doubting innovative ideas that have yet to be proven, but they always seem to forget that the “elite” also have a knack for killing ignorance like spiritualism and homeopathy. Well, I support you, Intellectual Elite. You mitigate the effects of obnoxiously gullible people on my life.

Overall, though, I enjoyed the book and recommend it if you want to read some interesting accounts of some inspirational people. The book gets extra kudos for having a section on Gerald Ford, who I think doesn’t get enough credit.

Next I read Isaac Asimov’s Second Foundation and was thoroughly captivated by it despite the fact that it was set hundreds of years after the first book and that there is probably a novel separating them. Second Foundation continues Asimov’s political saga set in the stars. In Foundation, the story began with a Psychohistorian named Hari Seldon forseeing the future of the then-waning Galactic Empire and setting a plan into action to bring about a restoration of that empire within a thousand-year span. He does this by establishing two Foundations: one on Terminus, which the first book concentrated on, and the other “at the other end of the galaxy, at Stars’ End”.

At the beginning of this book we find that the first Foundation has fallen under the boot heel of something that Seldon’s Plan could not have anticipated: a mutant, a galactic conqueror who calls himself the Mule and the First Citizen of the Union of Worlds. The Mule is a mutant because he can transform the minds of people around him by exerting some kind of emotional control. He is in effect hyper-charismatic. As Seldon’s plan could not have foreseen the birth of such a mutant, his actions throw the Plan into chaos. The Mule becomes aware of the plan, and develops a sort of paranoia around it. He sees the Second Foundation as his enemy, and they are a particularly dangerous enemy because he doesn’t know where they are. There is no planet called “Stars’ End” — and as the Galaxy is a three-dimension object in space that is lens-shaped, it doesn’t really have an end.

The book is divided into two general parts: the first part concerns the Union of Worlds that the Mule establishes and his efforts to locate the Second Foundation so that he can destroy it. The second part of the book concerns the ongoing galactic political situation: after the Mule’s death, his Union collapses (this isn’t a spoiler: a political entity built around the abilities of one man is doomed to certain failure as soon as that man dies.) and the Foundation is restored. On Kalgan, the capital world of what was the Union, its ruler seeks to destroy the Foundations so that he can establish his own galactic empire. Some on Terminus — site of the first Foundation — are also seeking out the Second Foundation so that they can destroy it.

The book offers interesting comparison to two ideas: first the idea is the idea of free will. Many people, even nonreligious people, spend a lot of time discussing free will. Why this is relevant has always baffled me, but people persist. The religious and naturalistic origins of the free will discussion in our own universe can be examined elsewhere: in Asimov’s Foundation universe, the argument is set against the Plan. It is now common knowledge throughout political worlds (Kalgan and Terminus) that centuries ago, Hari Seldon set into effect The Plan, and that it knows what everyone is going to do and that the Foundations are manipulating events, consciously or no, to further the Plan, to bring it into fruition. In one section of the book, a character tries to decide what to do on the basis of what the Plan would suggest. Since he dislikes living under the Plan, he wants to do the opposite of what he might be expected to do — but he doesn’t know if the Plan expects him to do the unexpected.

I mentioned that this character dislikes living under the Plan. He is not alone. The ruling political powers dislike the idea that their actions are predictable and that they are living their lives and creating their empires just to fulfill a long-dead scientist’s Master Plan to restore the Empire in the future. They want the Empire restored now, by them, for their glory. This was not always so, though. In Foundation, the ruling party of the Foundation on Terminus was quite happy to abide by the Plan. It saved them in crises. They knew that whatever came up, the Plan would save them. But as they grew in power and influence, they wanted to take the initiative: they disliked living under the Plan. This is true only of the ruling party: the people of both Kalgan and Terminus believed fervently in the plan, had perfect trust in it.

The comparison is to the idea of gods, or religion. For people without much power — people who are poor, or who are in the political minority — it is easy to seek solace in the idea that there are gods watching out for them, guiding them. Even some of those who are nonreligious are given to the idea that the human race is proceeding to a better day — that we’re progressing. And we are, in a sense. While human nature is fundamentally unchanged, each generation (at least, in progressive societies) moulds its children’s brains along different lines. Six hundred years ago, boys would have been trained to follow their father’s line of work and girls would have been taught to be good domestic servants and loyal concubines — for that is what medieval wives were, by our standards. But today, schoolchildren in the west are taught that they pursue any career or vocation that interests them, and our governments make the effort to see that they are equipped with the tools to pursue their interests. I would take society today at its worst over 15th century society at its best. But in the larger sense, the human race is still very much the same: we’re still irrational and limited animals, we’ve just manage to domesticate ourselves.

Anyway, so people take solace in the idea that there’s a Plan, or that things will get better eventually. An example of that is Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s statement that “the moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice”. But as people grow in power, as they become more able to take care of themselves, they no longer need to take comfort. Look at it this way: if you’re in a desert and find an unlimited oasis with company and all of the pleasures you would want to imbibe in, would you really keep tromping through the desert because you were told that there was a city that offered more? Modern people in the west no longer fear Zeus’ wrath when a thunderstorm moves in — although some still pray for rain when there’s a drought.

(I say “in the west” because I can only speak for what I know. As I don’t live in Egypt or India and don’t have access to contemporary Egyptian or Indian literature that I could use to sort out what the average Egyptian or Indian might believe, I can’t speak for their mindsets.) Second Foundation is a highly enjoyable piece of science fiction and is made better by the fact that there’s more to it than story — or at least that I read more into it than just the story.

Next I read Neil Postman’s Technopoly, which I attempted to find last week but failed to do. Technopoly, published in 1993, concerns what Postman had been observing since the rise of television: technology’s growing monopoly on how we live and understand our lives. He divides world cultures into three groups, based on their relation with technology: tool-using cultures, which use tools to solve immediate problems (watermills) or to contribute to political/religious symbolism (cathedrals); technocracies, where life is structured by technology (political systems depending on technology like the printing press, or the increasing role of technology in capitalism); and technopolies, where people and culture are dominated by the tools they’ve created — but not in the World Robot Domination kind of way.

The book is short but explosive: it’s full of provocative ideas and I spent a lot of time mulling over the things the author was saying so well. It’s rather hard to sum this book up in a couple of paragraphs: frankly, a sociology student could write graduate papers in response to the book, in disagreeing with it or in using how far we’ve come since 1993 as a demonstration of how right he was. I don’t know where to begin, so I won’t try to do commenting on the ideas justice. I will say the book is exceptionally well-written. Postman explains why he believes as he does quite well, and his ideas are quite interesting. I really dislike leaving this commentary on Technopoly as it stands: the book deserves further comment, and I hope that future sociology classes will give me the opportunity to use the book.

I do have some comments, though. In the book he points out that for many people, science has become the new mythology. This is not to say that physicists and biologists are High Priests and that the universities are the new seminaries — merely to say that just as people once believed the priests implicitly, now they believe science or anything that is science-y implicitly. As an example, he uses an experiment he performed on friends and acquaintances: he asked them if they had heard the results of a latest study by a prestigious university. He mixed up what the study “proved” depending on who he was dealing with, but all of his stories sounded ridiculous. What he found was that people believed him because the ridiculous conclusion was arrived at by a prestigious university, by “Scientists”.

He mentioned the same idea in Building a Bridge to the 18th Century: people today are as gullible and superstitious as ever. They know more, but they’re just about as intelligent. As a skeptic, I’m very much in agreement here. It’s important for people to know things, but it’s more important for people to be able to know things for themselves, to be able to sort truth from fiction. Otherwise they’re dependent on other people for truth. The strength of modern science is not what we know, but our approach to knowing. One quotation I never tire of is Carl Sagan’s “Science is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking. It is a way of skeptically interrogating the universe with an idea for human fallibility. If we are not able to ask skeptical questions, to interrogate those who tell us that something is true, to be skeptical of those of authority, then we’re up for grabs for the next charlatan — political or religious — who comes ambling along.“

One of the problems that Postman has with technopoly is that it divorces us from a cohesive worldview, creating a gap that systems like the political “religion” of Communism can exploit to our detriment. He writes that as our ability to access information has increased, we have made efforts to manage this information by presenting it in rational ways: one of his examples of “information management” is public schooling. However, he maintains that there is so much information available today — through television and the internet — that parents and their attempts at information management are waning and that we are being overwhelmed by information and have no way of putting it to use. He proposes that education be presented as part of a theme focusing on the human story. One of his ideas, one which I like very much, is that every subject be presented partially as history — because it is only within a historical context that we can really understand any subject. If you understand historical contexts, then you are better able to process new information or to examine the veracity of things you already ‘know’. There are a lot of ideas in this book. While I didn’t agree with everything, it was very thought provoking and I like that in the books I read. I recommend it.

Next I began reading Brian Silver’s The Ascent of Science, which is a largish book that attempts to present the history of science to the average person. The story is not told a recitation of facts, but is presented as a story of ever-evolving ideas about the universe — which I like. I’m not quite finished yet, but I’m quite close and will comment more on it next week.

Pick of the Week: Second Foundation by Isaac Asimov and Technopoly by Neil Postman.

Quotation of the Week: “There have always been those who have held that life is property that cannot possibly arise out of inanimate matter, not because they can’t conceive of the chemical pathway but because it offends their view of the universe. This is the ‘Life-is-something-special” school of thought, for whom the uniqueness of life is threatened by mean little scientists in scruffy lab coats trying to prove that a proto-Bach originated in a mixture of gases that was struck by lightening.” – Brian Silver, The Ascent of Science, p. 339

Next Week:

  • Foundation and Empire, Isaac Asimov
  • Jailbird, Kurt Vonnegut
  • Iron Coffins: A Personal Account of the German U-Boat Battles of World War II, Herbert Werner
  • American Origins to 1789, Dumas Malone and Basil Rauch
  • The Ascent of Science, Brian L. Silver
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This Week at the Library (7/8)

Posted on August 7, 2008 by smellincoffee

Books this Update:

I began this week with Anne Rice’s Interview with a Vampire. Rice is a well-known author, but one I’ve never read before for the reason that I’m not much for fantasy and horror. Despite that, I do like vampires — go figure. Since Rice has written a host of vampire novels, I decided to try one. The one I’ve heard about is Interview with a Vampire, mostly because there’s a movie based off of it — and so I checked it out and began to read.

Interview with a Vampire begins with a young man sitting down with a vampire to interview him. The story of the book is the vampire’s story. The vampire’s name is Louis, and he lived in pre-Revolution New Orleans as an indigo planter. In 1791, another vampire named Lestat turned him into a vampire as payment for Louis allowing Lestat and his mortal father to stay at the plantation and enjoy Louis’ profits. This is where the story begins, as Louis finds himself for the first time really enjoying life, through the heightened sensibilities of vampires — who have superhuman hearing, sight, and smell. I wonder how this is accomplished without having longer noses and larger ears. (Book-magic, of course, is the answer.) Louis’ newfound appreciation for life (now that he’s undead) is tainted with confusion about where he fits into the scheme of things, and he racks his brains with questions of evil, good, God, and the devil. (I wonder if there is any correlation between vampire stories and Christian mythology: do Aztec and Chinese legends have vampires, I wonder?) Lestat does not appreciate his fledgling’s attitude and behavior: he grows bored of the philosophical questions and makes fun of Louis’ habit of losing himself in watching people or observing the night. Because of this, Louis eventually leaves to find out more about himself: his travels lead him to Europe and beyond.

Rice’s vampires seem to be mostly rooted in popular myth, but there are exceptions. Her vampires are unbothered by garlic, crosses, holy water, or “Get thee behind me, Satan!”-type utterances from her characters. They can see themselves in mirrors, and they can’t change their form into steam or bats or wolves or anything of the like. They do die when exposed to sunlight, sleep in coffins, and say ‘Bleh!” all the time*.

I have only ever read one another serious vampire novel, and that is Amelia Atwater-Rhodes’ In the Forests of the Night. Atwater-Rhodes’ vampires have a much easier time of things, though: they don’t have to sleep in coffins, they don’t turn to dust in the sun; and they can change their form willy-nilly. In addition to this, they also are unbothered by crosses, holy water, and “Get thee behind me, Satan!”-type utterances. They do object to sunlight and garlic, but only because they have heightened senses of sight and smell. There are similarities in the two stories, through. The way a vampire turns a mortal human into a vampire is very similar — draining the human victim of nearly all blood, and then replacing it with vampiric blood.

It was an intriguing book, although for whatever reason I began losing interest in the story after two hundred or so pages. The first part of the story was interesting, because the world the book is set in was being slowly developed. It’s difficult to pin down why exactly I started losing interest in the story, but there are some things I can say. The themes penetrating the book — existentialism, despair, question of evil, etc — seemed to be too obvious, and they were rather boring themes to me. I like my themes to be more subtle. The ending of the book was rather obvious, and it didn’t leave me with the desire to read more. I think I’ll stick with Amelia Atwater-Rhodes for my vampires. Her In the Forests of the Night is much shorter, but the atmosphere is not only better but developed more quickly. I don’t see myself pursing Anne Rice further, although I may read one of her recent Jesus books to see how her style has changed.

Next I read The Age of Synthesis by Ray Spangenburg and Diane Kit Moser. It’s a re-write of their The History of Science in the 19th Century. The nineteenth science was a formative era in the history of science — for instance, John Dalton reintroduced atomic theory and the team of Charles Darwin and Wallace introduced the theory of evolution. Electricity and magnetism are brought together, and electricity and atomic theory both help revolutionize chemistry –hence why the authors chose to call the book The Age of Synthesis. Like The Rise of Reason, this book is divided into three sections: the Physical Sciences, the Life Sciences, and Science and Society. In Science and Society, the authors comment on the rise of psuedosciences and pure bunk like homeopathy and spiritualism. They also explore the ways that science effects the lives of everyone. Interestingly, many of the United States’ founding fathers were members of the American Philosophical Society. While rationalists like Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson were members, I was surprised to learn that men like George Washington and John Adams were as well. (Washington’s philosophical attitudes are especially ambiguous.) As it turns out, Lewis and Clark’s expedition was financed by this society, and there were nearly fifty people involved — not just Lewis, Clark, Sacajawea and York. One of the more amusing stories in this book concerns John Dalton: it seems he realized he didn’t see colors the same way as the majority of people, so he had his eyeballs donated to science after his death. Some morbidly curious personality in the mid-90s examined them with an microscope and found that his corneas responsible for seeing the middle of the light spectrum were missing.

Next I read Isaac Asimov’s Foundation. Although Asimov is one of my favorite authors, I have not read the work he is most famous for — until this week. Foundation is set many years in the future, when the human race has spread throughout the galaxy, courtesy of hyper drives that allow us to get past that annoying speed-of-light speed limit that Zeus so thoughtlessly imposed on the universe. (This is a common element of science fiction, and I wonder who started it. Star Trek has “subspace”, Star Wars and Foundation have “hyperspace”, and one science-fiction series I read in middle and high school had “zero space”.) The empire is very old, and one scientist who uses statistical analysis believes that it will decay into irrelevance, leaving anarchy and a galactic dark ages in its wake. Hari Seldon is this scientist’s name, and he is a “psychohistorian”. He can somehow predict how people will respond to social changes using statistical analysis, and so can predict the future.

Foundation is a collection of five short stories, each set at various periods of the Empire’s advancing decay. In the beginning, Seldon puts a plan into action that will bring about a new Empire — a better empire. His plan begins with sending a group of a hundred thousand people to a world devoid of resources, called “Terminus”. They establish the Foundation to carry out Seldon’s plans. I won’t divulge much more for fear of spoiling the book for those who want to seek it out. As it is Asimov’s most famous work, it may be easier to find than the Black Widower stories. One of the causes for the Empire’s stagnation is that intellectualism is gone: no one is really thinking anymore. The Emperor is never questioned: people just assume that he’s right, that he knows what he’s doing, and that he can take care of everything. Scientific advance is essentially nonexistent — for that matter, advance of every sort. One of the plot elements is hilarious, and it penetrates most of the stories in this book. I can’t explain it without giving anything way, so I’ll leave it at this: Asimov thought of Clark’s third law before Clark did and his characters made it practical.

I thought this book was part of a trilogy, but according to the Fount of All Knowledge, it’s part of a series of fifteen novels and dozens of short stories. I took a peek at the list of books, and I doubt I will EVER find all of those. I’m not sure where to go from here, but it’s an interesting series and I want to continue. I want to comment on a couple of things. Asimov describes the Imperial capital planet as a planet covered by the metal of the imperial city, where the inhabitants can go their entire lives without seeing the sky. The capital of the Galatic Empire in George Lucas’ Star Wars universe is intended to be an illustration Asimov’s of city-planet — quite the nod considering Star Wars’ popularity.

After reading Foundation, I turned my attention to Henry David Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience. It is an essay, written in 1849, written to express his views on government and the people’s relation to it. “The government that governs best governs least,” he says, and an ideal government governs not at all. Governments, while a necessary evil, are still an evil and an evil with effects that must be mitigated as much as possible. Even in a democracy, people have little actual power over the government. Actions are taken by the government before the people can voice their consent or disapproval, and those in the government will often undertake those actions for their own aims. The example Thoreau is thinking of is undoubtedly the Mexican War, which he saw as an expensive endeavor of the United States that was done simply to further the expansion of slavery. President Grant was of this opinion as well: he saw the Civil War as a direct consequence of the Mexican War, because the new states extorted at gunpoint from Mexico aggravated the slavery issue in the country when they were being admitted.
Thoreau states that when the government errs, it is not likely to offend the majority of voters, who may be apathetic. The few who do vocally object to courses of action undertaken by the government are in actuality powerless if they cannot overcome their countrymen’s apathy. Even if they vote, those votes will be ignored. The problem lies in the apathy of the majority, of people who are content to obey the government without questioning what laws being passed actually mean. Here are two quotations to illustrate Thoreau’s thoughts:

There are thousands who are in opinion opposed to slavery and to the war, who yet in effect do nothing to put an end to them; who, esteeming themselves children of Washington and Franklin, sit down with their hands in their pockets, and say that they know not what to do, and do nothing,; who even postpone the question of freedom to the question of free-trade, and quietly read the prices-current along with the latest advices from Mexico, after dinner, and as it may be, fall asleep over them both. What IS the prices-current of an honest man and patriot today? They hesitate, and they regret, and sometimes they petition; but they do nothing in earnest and with effect. They will wait, well disposed, for others to remedy the evil, that they may no longer have it to regret. At most, they give only a cheap vote, and a feeble countenance and Godspeed, to the right, as it goes by them.

Unjust laws exist: shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once? Men generally, under such a government as this, think that they ought to wait until they persuaded the majority to alter them. They think that, if they should resist, the remedy would be worse than the evil. But it is the fault of the government itself that the remedy is worse than the evil. IT makes it worse. Why is it not more apt to anticipate and provide for reform? Why does it not cherish its wise minority? Why does it cry and resist before it is hurt? Why does it not encourage its citizens to be on the alert to point out its own faults, and do better than it would have them? Why does it always crucify Christ, and excommunicate Copernicus and Luther, and pronounce Washington and Franklin rebels?

I enjoyed the essay. After I read it, I read Asimov’s I, Robot, which is a collection of short stories about robots. The stories are all related, and are presented in the book as being the recollections of Dr. Susan Calvin, a prominent character in Asimov’s robot-related works. As she plays an important part in Earth’s major robot manufacturer (US Robots and Mechanical Men), her stories are of great importance to the fellow interviewing her. Several of the stories featured the same two likable characters testing robots, so there’s not a lot of jumping around. I, Robot is supposed to fit into Asimov’s Foundation universe in some way, but I’m not sure how. The only thing I can think of is the invention of hyperspace in one of the later stories. Curiously, though, robots seem to have vanished by the time of the Galactic Empire. I enjoyed the book immensely, which is par for the course for Asimov.

Pick of the Week: Foundation, Isaac Asimov.

Quotation of the Week: “I think we should be men first, and subjects afterward. It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the ‘law‘, so much as [a respect] for the right.” – Henry David Thoreau

Next Week:

  • Second Foundation, Isaac Asimov
  • Firestarter, Stephen King
  • Technopoly, Neil Postman
  • The Ascent of Science, Brian Silver
  • Hard Call: Great Decisions and Extraordinary People Who Made Them, John McCain

* Not really.

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This Week at the Library (31/7)

Posted on July 31, 2008 by smellincoffee

Books this Update:

  • The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx
  • Nine Tales from Tomorrow, Isaac Asimov
  • Building a Bridge to the Eighteenth Century, Neil Postman
  • Books that Changed the World, Robert B. Downs
  • The Elegant Universe, Brian Greene

I mentioned a few weeks ago that I wanted to start reading historically significant books. The Communist Manifesto strikes me as being one of the most influential books in human history, for better or for worse. Before this, I had the vague impression that Marx and Engels had somehow created the ideas of communism in this book. It turns out that Marx was asked to write the book to articulate the thoughts of communist and socialists, which would indicate that communism and socialism were both ideas that were already around and with a following — unless Marx is a time-traveler. While the book is written to express the views of the “communist party”, this does not actually refer to any actual organized political party, but rather the body of people who shared communist ideas. This leads me to wonder how communist and socialist ideas were actually formed. It would be interesting research if I cared, but I don’t really. The Communist Manifesto is in essence a political tract, and it strikes me as being quite romantic. In the beginning, when Marx is writing about how capitalism has transformed the society, he writes that it turned the family into a mere economic unit and so on. I suppose if you’re advocating any kind of utopia, especially one run by working-class revolutionaries who wouldn’t know how to govern, you have to be a romantic. Of course, I have the utmost respect for the working class (being part of it when I’m not in school) — but governing modern societies is quite difficult and quite frankly without more education and civil experience than the average working person has, a dictatorship of the working class is not going to end well.

Next I read Nine Tales from Tomorrow, a collection of short stories penned by Isaac Asimov that are all set in the future of Earth. Two of the stories were also in Asimov’s Mysteries. As usual, Asimov didn’t disappoint. There were two stories in particular I thought were really interesting. The first (“Profession”) was about a society where conventional education is no longer practiced. There is so much specialization of information and so much progress in neuroscience that people are “programmed” by machines to do things. Children are strapped into a machine and “programmed” to read at age eight. When they are approaching adulthood, they are taken to machines again; the machines scan their brains, determine what programming (Computer Technician, Chemist, etc) is most compatible with their brains, and then they’re programmed.

This begs the question of what the devil those kids and teenagers are doing until their “Reading” and “Education” days. I also wonder if the machines take into account what occupations are most needed when they are about to program people. For instance, suppose you have a large amount of people one year who happen to be receptive to being programmed as master electricians, but you only need a few electricians. What happens then? What happens if there are desperately-needed jobs like root-beer manufacturers, and too few people are best-suited for root-beer programming? It’s an interesting society to ponder. The story set in it is about one man who proves to be unsuitable for any kind of programming: he’s one of those curious sorts that seeks out knowledge for the sake of it and resists being told what to think.

The second story I found quite interesting was “The Feeling of Power“, set in a time where people have become so dependent on computers that no one knows how to do any kind of math anymore. This story is especially interesting because Asimov has his characters using pocket computers that are remarkably prescient of today’s PDAs Other stories are about characters who range from suicidal supercomputers to nurses taking care of Neanderthal children who have been ripped out of their own time by some kind of machine that is used to examine historic specimens. Sadly, Asimov does not use forewords and afterwords in this book.

After this I moved on to Building a Bridge to the Eighteenth Century: How the Past can Improve the Future. The book is by Neil Postman, who the exalted Wikipedia says was a social critic who was especially concerned with how the ubiquitous nature of information today and its presentation as mere entertainment has cheapened its value. He makes the point that people today are in fact more gullible than the people of the middle ages: it’s just that the authorities they heed unthinkingly are television personalities who happen to know more than thirteenth-century priests by accident of birth. Al Gore writes about the mass media’s role in cheapening the value of information in his The Assault on Reason. Postman looks at how the century of the Enlightenment — the century of Voltaire, Thomas Paine, and countless others — can help us improve our lives today in the areas of progress, technology, language, information, narratives, children, democracy, and education. There were many parts of this book I agreed with, and there were parts I disagreed with. My favorite chapter was the one on education, where Postman presents five suggestions for improving the nature of our educational system:

  • Teach children the art of asking questions.
  • Logic and rhetoric should be given more importance given that they help students “defend themselves against both the seductions of eloquence and the appeal of nonsense.”
  • Teach a scientific outlook — get children to think about how we know scientific claims are truth rather than simply presenting them as facts to be memorized and recited. As Carl Sagan said, “Science is more than a body of knowledge. It is a way of thinking; it is a way of skeptically interrogating the universe with an eye for human fallibility. If we are not able to ask skeptical questions, to interrogate those who tell us that something is true, to be skeptical of those of authority, then we’re up for grabs for the next charlatan — political or religious — who comes ambling along.” Postman then says that we should teach creationism in the classroom. In his words, “Good science has nothing to fear from bad science.” This is very true, but it doesn‘t apply to creationism — it isn’t science, bad or otherwise. It is in this chapter that Postman comments that modern humans are more gullible than their medieval predecessors: a farmer or a lowly cobbler may have believed the sun went around the Earth, but in his defense he did observe the sun apparently cycling the Earth. Until the advent of the space age, how many billions of humans believed that the Earth went around the sun without appreciating the subtleties of solar system patterns and the way that they can be worked out through mathematics? Those people believed in a heliocentric universe — which is utterly counterintuitive — and did so blindly. His point is almost lost now that we have a space station orbiting Earth and robot drones scattered around the solar system, but it’s still true in other instances.
  • Teach children about the psychological, social, and political effects of new technologies.
  • Teach comparative religion in the interests of furthering understanding of our culture — literature, music, and so on. Postman warned that this was his most controversial opinion, but I see nothing wrong with it — so long as teachers treat each religion according to the same standard and don’t push religion on kids.

The book was an interesting read. The Enlightenment is one of my favorite historical periods to study. While I didn’t agree with everything he said, I don’t mind being annoyed if I can be made to think about my own assumptions in the process. I think I’ll be reading a little more of him.

Next I read Books that Changed the World. The author comments on sixteen books that in his opinion have changed the world. They are, in order: The Prince, by Niccolo Machiavelli; Common Sense by Thomas Paine; Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith; Essay on the Principle of Population, Thomas Malthus; Civil Disobedience, by Henry David Thoreau; Uncle Tom’s Cabin, by Harriet Beecher Stowe; Das Kapital, by Karl Max; The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, by Alfred T. Mahan; The Geographical Pivot of History, by Sir Halford J. Mackinder; Mein Kampf, by Adolf Hitler; De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium (The Revolutions of the Heavily Spheres), by Nicolaus Copernicus; De Motu Cordis, by William Harvey; Principia Mathematic, by Sir Isaac Newton; The Origin of Species, by Charles Darwin; The Interpretation of Dreams, by Sigmund Freud; and Relativity, the Special and General Theories, by Albert Einstein.

The author, Robert B. Downs, dedicates a chapter to each book, taking care to introduce the book within its historical context. The book was published in the 1950s, but its commentary on Das Kapital is surprisingly rational given that it was published during the second red scare. I thoroughly enjoyed each commentary. Only one of the books was completely unfamiliar to me (The Geographical Pivot of History) , but I’ve not read most of these. The book stirred my interest in some of them, though, and I will be looking around for them. I recommend the book if you can find it.

Lastly, I want to comment on The Elegant Universe, by Brian Greene. I didn’t finish all of it, nor do I see myself doing so before I return to university. It’s not a huge book, but the ideas are sizable and I have to re-read passages several times and think on them for a while before they finally click. The first part of the book is on general relativity, and that is the part I finished. The part I am currently on is on quantum theory, and more particularly on how matter can act both as waves and particles. While I don’t understand this, I do finally understand why time appears to slow down the nearer you approach the speed of light. I suggest finding the book if you have an interest in this. Incidentally, thanks to all of the reading I’ve been doing on this subject (mainly the Spangenburg/Moser book, Stephen Hawking’s book, and part of this book), I knew almost all of the answers in the “Fission” category in one of Jeopardy’s recent Tournament of Champions episodes. I say almost because the contestants had answered one before I walked into the room.

Pick of the Week: Nine Tales of Tomorrow, Isaac Asimov. I think maybe on weeks where I’m reading something by Asimov I should mention the runner-up, not the Asimov book, as by this point it’s fairly obvious that it’s not fair to ask other books to compete with Asimov.

Quotation of the Week: “A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defense of custom.” – Thomas Paine, The Crisis

Next Week:

  • Foundation, Isaac Asimov
  • State of Denial, Bob Woodward
  • Civil Disobedience, Henry David Thoreau
  • Interview with the Vampire, Anne Rice
  • The Age of Synthesis, Ray Spangenburg and Diane Kit Moser
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