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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This Week at the Library (24/7)

Posted on July 24, 2008 by smellincoffee

Books this Update:

  • Personal Memoirs, US Grant
  • The Universe in a Nutshell, Stephen Hawking
  • Asimov’s Mysteries, Isaac Asimov
  • Primates of the World, Rod and Ken Preston-Mafham
  • The Rise of Reason, Ray Spangenburg and Diane Kit Moser

I began this week with President Ulysses S. Grant’s autobiography, which was simply titled Personal Memoirs. Grant finished the book shortly before he died, and it was published posthumously by his friend Samuel Clemens, who had also encouraged him to write the book to begin with. While the book is dominated by the American Civil War, the first 2/5s concerns his pre-war life growing up and his experience in the Mexican-American war. Grant also supplies commentary in the midst of his accounts of battles. I typically found his opinions on various matters to be more interesting than accounts of military. The commentary was always interesting and often amusing. For instance:

It did seem to me, in my early army days, that too many of the older officers, when they came to command posts, made it a study to think what orders they could publish to annoy their subordinates and render them uncomfortable. I noticed, however, a few years later, when the Mexican War broke out, that most of this class of officers discovered they were possessed of disabilities which entirely incapacitated them for active field service. They had the moral courage to proclaim it, too. They were right; but they did not always give their disease the right name. (Chapter III, p. 19)

According to Grant, it was his father’s idea to send him to West Point. Grant himself was very much opposed to the idea, and at first looked for any opportunity that would allow him to escape it — which I found quite humorous. As he grew more accustomed to army life, he decided that he could endure it long enough to merit a professorship — but fate intervenes and he finds himself a lieutenant in Mexico, serving as a quartermaster. He comments that people have very little control over their own fates, and offers his own life as a testament to this. I want to share some of the commentary.

In the case of the war between the States it would have been the exact truth if the South had said, — “We do not want to live with you Northern people any longer; we know our institution of slavery is obnoxious to you, and, as you are growing numerically stronger than we, it may be at some time in the future endangered. So long as you permitted us to control the government, and with the aid of a few friends at the North to enact laws constituting your section a guard against the escape of our property, we were willing to live with you. You have been submissive to our rule heretofore; but it looks now as if you did not intend to continue to do so, and we will remain in the Union no longer.” Instead of this the seceding States cried lustily, –”Let us alone; you have no constitutional power to interfere with us.” […] The fact is the constitution did not apply to any such contingency as the one existing from 1861 to 1865. Its framers never dreamed of such a contingency occurring.” (Chapter XVI p. 111)

That particular section of the book has a lot of commentary. I would like to share more, but the passages are so long that it wouldn’t be practical. Grant’s commentary, of course, is his own, and he does not pretend to be a neutral observer of the war. He refers to the Union side as the National side, refers to the rebels as rebels, and records the arrival of southern diplomats as “peace commissioners of the so-called confederacy”. I thought this wonderfully snarky.

Grant doesn’t spend a lot of time on the time between the two wars or on his post-war life. His “Conclusion” begins right after the surrender and he comments on political affairs in Europe as well as on how the war has shaped the nation. On the whole, I enjoyed the book as much as I could. I loved the commentary, but I’m not that interested in military history with a few exceptions — the growth of air warfare being one of them. I rather wish he had written about his time as president, as one of my hobbies is reading the autobiographies of American presidents. (My favorite is Gerald Ford’s A Time to Heal. I don’t really have a least favorite, although I have read W’s A Charge to Keep . It doesn’t qualify, though, as he only wrote about his experiences as governor — not as president and…whatever title would be best for his office now, since he has seen fit to greatly increase its powers during his reign. ) A final quotation from Grant, one that regards my hometown:

“Wilson moved out with a full 12,00 men, well equipped and well armed. He was an energetic officer and accomplished his work rapidly. Forrest was in his front, but with neither his old-time army or his old-time prestige. He now had principally conscripts. His conscripts were generally old men and boys. He had a few thousand regular cavalry left, but not enough to even retard materially the progress of Wilson’s cavalry. Selma fell on the 2nd of April, with a large number of prisoners and a large quantity of war material, machine shops, etc, to be disposed of by the victors. Tuscaloosa, Montgomery, and West Point fell in quick succession. These were all important points to the enemy by reason of their railroad connections, as depots of supplies, and because of their manufactories of war material.”

One minor note. The index of Grant’s autobiography lists “Grant, Ulysses S.” in the index. The resulting entry goes on for several columns.

Next I read Stephen Hawking’s The Universe in a Nutshell. Hawking is one of those rare scientists that most people have heard of, even if they don’t have a bastard clue as to what he does. I checked out The Universe in a Nutshell primarily because I wanted to see what his writing style was like. In this book, Hawking explains the ideas composing modern physics, beginning with Einstein’s theory of general relativity. While I was able to understand most of the book, there are some things — the shape of time, to name one — that befuddled me. Hawking is a good writer, and the book was replete with computer-generated illustrations to make his points easier to visualize. He devoted one chapter to what the future might hold, comparing it to the ideal world of Star Trek. (Hawking is a fan of Star Trek, and even made an appearance on a The Next Generation episode, where he appears in a holodeck program of Data’s design. The program allows Data to play poker with Hawking, Newton, and Einstein. You can view a short clip here.

I enjoyed the book, although I must say that a lot of the physics is still over my head. I’m getting there, though. According to the Blessed Wikipedia, Hawking has co-authored a children’s book about physics. I’d like to find A Briefer History of Time, as it is supposedly written in regard to a wider audience. (Meaning, of course, ‘easier to understand‘. To borrow from Star Trek, “Brane and brane! What is brane?!” sums up my response to some portions of The Universe in a Nutshell*).

Next I read Asimov’s Mysteries, by the obvious author. Asimov’s Mysteries is a collection of short mystery stories, most of which are set in a science fiction context. One of the short stories is really short: only a page and a quarter. The story was actually used in Asimov’s Treasury of Humor, because it ends with a punch line uttered by one of the characters. While science fiction stories can be a bit dodgy sometimes — if they depend on technology or on alien settings, the author has to be able to explain the implications of said setting or technology to the reader, and sometimes that doesn’t work so well — Asimov is a master at writing them, and every single story was excellent. Even the story he wrote as a teenager was interesting. Of course, Asimov included his usual afterwords and forewords. My only complaint is that the book ended. If I’m wrong about the existence of the gods and I die to find myself at the Elysian Fields, I hope they have a library stocked with Asimov’s complete works. Anyway, in conclusion, Asimov rocks my socks off.

Primates of the World was next on my list. It’s a fairly straightforward text on primates. (You might have guessed that from the title.) There’s no argument to be made, no astonishing revelation to be reached: it’s purely informative. The book begins with a listing of the primates, from the oldest forms (prosimians, like lemurs) to the younger forms (apes, humans included). Here’s a sample:

The ring-tailed lemur is immediately recognizable on account of its long black and white ringed tail and its black eyes, nose, and mouth contrasting with its white face. As already mentioned, it may be distinguished from members of the genus Eulemur by the presence of special scent glands situation on the forearm and the inner side of the upper arm. Ring-tails move around the forests of south-western Madagascar in groups of up to twenty-four individuals, feeding upon plant material such as fruits and seeds.

After the listing is finished, the authors move on to discussion various aspects of primate life: feeding habits, social arrangements, predators, and so on. The book ends with a look at how humans are making a mess of things and driving various primates into extinction. I was prompted to look for this book when I saw Jack Hanna on The Late Show with David Letterman, and he had an animal one that Hanna described as “not a monkey”. The animal in question was a prosimian — a lemur. The next night, Craig Ferguson (of The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson) ranted about lemurs for some reason or another. So, I decided to look for a book on primates. I have a large interest in primates — specifically chimpanzees and gorillas — so I looked forward to the read. The primate family is home to some truly interesting creatures — here are some of the more interesting specimens that caught my eye:

Lastly, I read The Rise of Reason by Ray Spangenburg and Diane Kit Moser. When I checked this book out, I thought it was a new series. It appears that it is instead the On the Shoulders of Giants series rewritten, which is fine given that that series is over a decade old. The Rise of Reason, for instance, has a notice on the copyright page that says that it is a rewrite of The History of Science in the Eighteenth Century. It would be prudent of me to read the later books in this series — those written after The History of Science from 1945 to the 1990s ended — but why re-read the books at the beginning? I decided to read the first one anyway.

This was enjoyable, as the eighteenth century was one of the more fun centuries in science. Benjamin Franklin, for instance, pops up all over the place — in the colonies flying a kite, in England at the Lunar Society with Erasmus Darwin, in France serving on a council to investigate quackery. There are a lot of interesting stories in this book . Take for instance Charles Linnaeus, who developed the system of biological taxonomy we still use today. (That is, the practice of separating life forms into kingdoms and genera and orders and so on.) He was forever skipping classes because they didn’t teach what he was interested in — botany. His early life is a series of instances of him getting caught skipping classes and sneaking into libraries by older professors, who take him under their wing, give him full access to their botanical libraries, and then send him on his way to places he can pursue his interest further — paying for his education by lecturing other students on botany, knowledge of which he had obtained from his constant hooky sessions and stolen library sessions. The guy was a serial vagrant, but he was lucky enough to encounter a string of intelligent professors who cared about their students and who encouraged him. As a result, he winds up creating our taxonomic system. Or take the story of William and Caroline Herschel, a brother and sister who charted the skies together and funded their science by building and selling telescopes. These aren’t vague figures from the past, they’re real people who pursued their interests and made a way for themselves to do so that was actually conducive to their interests.

Do not think, however, that this book is merely an updated treatment. While the book does retain some aspects of the On the Shoulders of Giants series — the section on the Scientific Method, the division of the book into Physical and Life Sciences — it includes a third section: “Science and Society”. That section explores how the Enlightenment gave birth to the American, French, and Industrial Revolutions. It then looks at the accomplishments of Diderot and Voltaire and the introduction of The Encyclopedia, moves onto to quacks and others who were starting to prey on scientific ignorance, and concludes with a look at the revolt against reason — romanticism. (Boo, hiss.) I recommend reading the book. (Of course I do. Why wouldn’t I?)

Pick of the Week: Asimov’s Mysteries, by Isaac Asimov.
Quotation of the Week: “I would not have the anniversaries of our victories celebrated, nor those of our defeats made fast days and spent in humiliation and prayer; but I would like to see truthful history written. […] The justice of the cause which in the end prevailed, will, I doubt not, come to be acknowledged by every citizen of the land, in time. For the present, and so long as there are living witnesses of the great war of secessions, there will be people who will not be consoled for the loss of a cause they believed to be holy. As time passes, people, even of the South, will begin to wonder how it was possible that their ancestors ever fought for or justified institutions with acknowledged the right of property in man.” (p. 85, Personal Memoirs, US Grant.)

(Grant was a bit of an optimist on that. I quote directly from one group: “All that the South wanted to do is to establish the CSA to uphold the principles of the founders concerning limited government. lower taxes and individualism.” If that link and quotation made you cry, click here for one that will make you laugh. )

Next Week:

  • The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx. I decided a few months ago to start reading historically significant books, and this is one of the biggies. Outside of religious texts, I can’t think of a more historically significant book — although just like religious texts, the influence of the book can be both good and bad.
  • The Elegant Universe, Brian Greene. The book is about the theory of relativity, quantum theory, and their relationship to one another.
  • Books that Changed the World, Robert Bingham Downs. I’m checking this one out to aid in my quest.
  • Building a Bridge to the 18th Century: How the Past Can Improve Our Future, Neil Postman. I found this one while searching for “Enlightenment”.
  • Nine Tomorrows: Tales of the Near Future, Isaac Asimov. Yes, once again I found another collection of short stories after I thought I was very nearly out.

* That reference will either (1) have no meaning to you, (2) enrage you, or (3) amuse you deeply.

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This Week at the Library (17/07/08)

Posted on July 17, 2008 by smellincoffee

Books this Update:

  • The Complete Idiot’s Guide to the Harry Potter Universe by Tere Stouffer
  • The Undertaker’s Window by Philip Margolin
  • The History of Science from 1945 to the 1990s by Ray Spangenburg and Diane Moser
  • Asimov’s Guide to Shakespeare by Isaac Asimov
  • The Neandertal Enigma by James Shreeve

I began this week with The Complete Idiot’s Guide to the Harry Potter Universe. While I was amused by the idea of a Harry Potter encyclopedia — there are, after all, probably already Potter wikis out there — I actually found the book to be amusing. The author, who holds a Masters in Children’s Literature and who is apparently one of the first Harry Potter scholars (?), wrote her graduate paper on the differences between the Potter universe and the universes of other similar fantasy works by C.S. Lewis and J. R. Tolkien. This is sort of what she does in this book. Stouffer looks into the origin of various characters’ names, the origin of their spells, the history of mythological creatures in human literature — drawing on various mythologies and folk tales, from the Judeo-Christian bible to Celtic fairies. It’s a brief, but interesting read if you like the Potter books and want to learn more about trolls and so on. I’m not much for fantasy, but the Potter books are unique in …bewitching me.

Next I read Philip Margolin’s The Undertaker’s Widow, which I found to be rather captivating. It’s about an ethical judged named Quinn who finds himself rapidly being entangled by a web of conspiracy, deceit, and blackmail. I enjoyed it immensely. While blurbs on the back of the book describe it as a “legal” thriller, it could be variously described as mystery, a political thriller, or a legal thriller. The story takes place in Portland, Oregon, and the mystery begins when a contender for one of Oregon’s senatorial slots shoots an intruder in her home after he shoots her husband. It was a fast, tight story with several nice twists.

After that, I read The History of Science from 1945 to the 1990s. I commented last week that the physics was rapidly going over my head, and that problem was exaggerated here. I read the section on gluons and muons and that sort of thing several times and didn’t understand a lick of it. Since the book was published in the 1990s, it doesn’t mentioned string or M-theory, one of which I actually remember from Dan Falk’s terrific Universe on a T-Shirt. I think I should revisit that book, since I remember actually understanding — at least a little bit — the atom. Happily, atomic theory is only one small section of the book. As ever, the book is divided into two parts: Physical Science and Life Science. In all of the preceding books, an appendix in the back included a section on the scientific method. In this book, that section introduced the book. Life Science was mostly about viruses — AIDS received much more publicity back then in the 90s. I only see an occasional commercial about it now, and if it weren’t the fact that I read newspapers from around the world, I might be oblivious to its continuing existence. I haven’t heard anything about AIDS from network television in years.

What made this book a blast for me was the rest of the Physical Science section, as large parts of it were on space and that I understand quite well. The book was written in the early 90s, so it mentions possible plans for “Freedom Station”, which I know from reading Basecamps to the Stars was the planned US-only space station before the idea was scrapped in favor of the International Space Station, which sounds much less gimmicky. The book references the then still-living Carl Sagan, which was a bit weird. He died in 1996. It’s strange reading a book from the 1990s and realizing it was over a decade ago. I came of age in the 90s, so it’ll always be my “home” decade — or the decade that my temporal frame of reference is at least partially tied to.

Next I read The Neandertal Enigma. (While “Neanderthal’ is the typical spelling, the author drops the second H because the “th” sound doesn’t exist in the German language, which is where “Neanderthal” derives from.) The book is about the author’s struggle to figure out where Neanderthals fit into human evolution. The impression I have from contemporary reading of various books is that Neanderthals aren’t our ancestors: they were roaming around Europe and Asia, but eventually squeezed out and eliminated by our ancestors, who were migrating out of Africa. This in fact a new theory when the author hears it in this book, and it is in opposition to the old idea that Homo sapiens evolved directly from Neanderthals. The Leakeys and their work at Olduvai Gorge are mentioned a lot.

Ancient bones from Olduvai
Echoes of the very first cry
‘Who made me here, and why?’
‘Beneath the copper sun..
African ideas, African ideas.
Make the future clear, make the future clear.
And we are scatterlings of Africa, both you and I
We’re on the road to Phelamunga,
Beneath a copper sky
And we are scatterlings of Africa,
On a journey to the stars..
Far below we leave forever dreams of what we were.

I should note that I didn’t quite finish the book. As the argument and counter arguments about the “Eve” hypothesis (that all modern human beings descend from one African woman, whose ancestors then populated Europe and Asia while pushing out the Neanderthals) were developed more and more, I began to lose interest. It didn’t help that during my reading I had a sinus headache, which has just gone away today. It turns out that I am less interested in Neanderthals than I thought I was. On a side note, the author mentions Jean M. Auel’s Earth’s Children series, which depicts Cro-Magnons (ice age humans) and Neanderthals living beside one another. I read the five books in the series last year. He refers to them as “romance” novels, which is interesting. I think he means they show a romanticized view of life back then, since sex doesn’t show up that much until the third book. After that, of course, Ayla and Jondalar are inseparable, joined at the…hips. The writing of The Neandertal Enigma is good, it’s such that it was becoming something I wasn’t all that interested in — a lot of discussion about mitochondria DNA.

Next I read some of Asimov’s Guide to Shakespeare. I say “some” because the book offers commentary on Shakespeare’s plays, and it would be rather silly of me to read commentaries on plays I’ve never read. While Asimov does quote liberally from the plays he’s commenting on and summarize the plot, I decided I didn’t want to read commentaries of plays I’ve not read. I did read some, and some were enjoyable even without having read the original plays, but I decided not to go on. (I decided to not go on right in the middle of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, because I was tired of reading about fairies and goblins. I moved on to Julius Caesar.)

Pick of the Week: The History of Science from 1945 to the 1990s.
Quotation of the Week: Not an exact quote, but in The History of Science, the author commented that Pluto’s position as a planet seemed to be safe for the time being. I thought it amusing.
Next Week:

  • The Rise of Reason, Ray Spangenburg and Diane Moser. The authors of The History of Science series have another series.
  • Primates of the World, Rod and Ken Preston-Mafham
  • Personal Memoirs, Ulysses S. Grant
  • Asimov’s Mysteries, by Isaac Asimov. Science-fiction mysteries in short-story form.
  • The Universe in a Nutshell, Stephen Hawking.
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This Week at the Library

Posted on July 10, 2008 by smellincoffee

Books this Update:

  • The History of Science, Ray Spangenburg and Diane Moser
  • The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood
  • Murder in the Lincoln Bedroom, Elliot Roosevelt
  • Isaac Asimov’s Treasury of Humor by Isaac Asimov
  • Darwin, his Daughter, and Human Evolution, Randal Keynes

I began this week with The History of Science from 1895 to 1945. At usual, the book is separated into the physical and life sciences, but this book does away with the recap that the other books employed — previous advances are summarized in their respective chapters. Some of the advances in this book include quantum theory and the discovery of viruses. While the book is as well-written as the ones preceding it, some of the topics — like quantum theory — are harder to understand, and so I enjoyed this book less. The book does mention “the Leakey’s brilliant son, Richard”, which amused me as a few weeks ago I read one of Richard Leakey’s works — his commentary on The Origin of Species.

The next book I read was a recommendation from a friend. The book, by Margaret Atwood, is called The Handmaid’s Tale and is set in a dystopian world where the United States has turned into a monotheocracy, functioning as a military dictatorship where society is stratified along religious lines. How exactly this happened is unclear. A massive earthquake along the San Andreas vault causes numerous nuclear power plants to “explode”, and then a conspiracy takes over the government and suspends the constitution. It is unclear as to whether or not the conspiracy was already in place and just seized the moment or if it formed immediately after.

While it doesn’t seem possible that dull-minded people like fundamentalists could manage to take over a country in one fell swoop, their job was made considerably easier by the fact that paper money had been done away with — everything had become computerized. Once the unnamed group takes over the government by assassinating everyone in the Congress (it must not have been an election year), they suspend the Constitution and seize control of the money so they can make the United States a Christian nation — or at least their version of a Christian nation. Now, you would think that the military would object to this, but they were fooled into thinking Islamic fanatics from Iran did it. Bear in mind, this book was written when fundamentalism was rising in both Iran and the United States — when people like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell were gaining political power.

The new government is run along strict biblical lines, although the goons show a decided preference for the Hebrew scriptures; indeed, the stratification of women is completely based on Abraham’s family. Abraham, for the uninitiated, is the legendary father of both the Hebrew and Arab peoples. According to the Hebrew bible, Abraham was a tradesman from Ur, which is not far from Babylon. Yahweh told him to leave Ur, and he did, and in return Yahweh promised Abraham that he would have a child and one day he’d have a mess of descendants. The promised kid doesn’t come for a long time, though, and eventually Abraham’s wife Sara becomes barren — so Sara tells Abraham to knock up her handmaid Hagar so they’ll have a child. So Abraham does: he knocks the girl up and they have a kid named Ishmael. Although Hagar wasn’t Abraham’s wife, she’s Sara’s handmaid, and Sara is Abraham’s wife, so…the kid is technically Abraham and Sara’s somehow. (Yahweh doesn’t think so, but fortunately his twin brother Allah does.)

That’s what happens here. The people running the government — old guys who like uniforms and call themselves “Commanders” and their wives, old “Ladies Against Women” types — are all barren, so they need young hussies to propagate the species. The women are divided into five different castes — “Wives”, “Marthas” (old servants), “Handmaids” (whose job it is to get pregnant and give the commander and his wife a child), “Aunts” (who train girls to be handmaids), “Jezebels” (prostitutes, who serve the Republic by doing whatever prostitutes do), and “Unwomen”, or women who are too educated or lesbian to be of any use to the Republic of Gilead. Unwomen are either killed, sent to The Colonies for hazardous duty, or turned into Jezebels.

The Handmaid’s Tale is about one handmaid — who before the takeover was a college graduate living with her husband and wife and working in a library. She only accepts her fate because she hopes that there is a resistance — hopes that there are those working to destroy this New Order. This story is about her own personal resistance — the story of a free mind rebelling against those with power over her. I won’t say more. Once I found the book, I found it rather gripping. According to Wikipedia (the fount of all knowledge), The Handmaid’s Tale is on the American Library Association’s list of most-challenged books, as some see it as “anti-religious”.

Even if that were so, intellectual cowardice is no excuse not to read the book. As it happens, though, the book is not anti-religious. While the Republic of Gilead is a religiously-defined world, the religion in question is practiced only by a nutty few. Most Christians in the United States are just ordinary people who happen to wear crosses at their necks. There are some who are assholes, but that’s just the law of averages. This book isn’t about the majority of Christians or even most fundamentalists — it’s about the ones who transcend batshit craziness and become positively evil — like cells that turn cancerous just for the sake of being little microscopic dicks.

After The Handmaid’s Tale, I read Murder in the Lincoln Bedroom, a murder mystery set in the 1943 White House, during the Trident Conference. Murder…is part of a series of mystery novels starring Eleanor Roosevelt. I am amused by the idea of Eleanor Roosevelt dressed in Sherlock Holmes’ cloak, cap, and pipe, closely followed by FDR in a Watson-style bowler, who says ‘But Eleanor! How did you know?”, and her replying “Elementary, my dear Franklin.” The book was interesting. As it was penned by Elliot Roosevelt, one of the Roosevelt sons, I imagine it’s a fairly accurate depiction of 1943 D.C.  — or at least as accurate a picture Elliot could paint from his own memories and research. The series of books appears to have been published after Elliot’s death.

I took a break from conspiracies and murder to read Isaac Asimov’s Treasury of Humor, which is a collection of some 600 jokes complete with commentary by Asimov. He included all sorts of jokes, from puns (some of which I’ve used to annoy my friends with already) to cultural/ethnic jokes. Asimov being Asimov, though, the jokes in question are not offensive and still funny. Here’s my version of a favorite from the book:

There’s this Palestinian walking in the desert, going from his school to his family home. As he’s walking, he suddenly gets an eerie feeling. Pausing to take things in, he realizes that a sandstorm is bearing on him and will overtake him in only minutes. There’s no way that he can make it to his home in time, so he decides to dig a small pit for himself. He figures that he can lay on his belly in the pit and tuck his face into his jacket so that he’ll protect his mouth, eyes, and nostrils from the sand. So he drops down and starts digging furiously. As he’s digging, he encounters a curious sort of container. It looks old. He tries to take the top of so he can use it as a cup to aid in his digging, but when he opens it he finds himself face to face with a genie.

The genie roars “Thank you for saving me, young master! For your reward, I shall grant you three wishes! Choose wisely.” The young guy is taken aback, but quickly asks that the genie get rid of the approaching sandstorm. All at once, the sandstorm is gone. The Palestinian is amazed — this is real. “Your second wish, young master?” inquires the genie. The Palestinian stands and thinks for a while, then says that he wants a large home surrounded by lush farmland — filled with servants and luxury goods, along with a wife. The genie nods, and suddenly the desert transforms into a magnificent estate, surrounded by farms that are ripe for the harvest. The estate looks like the old Hanging Gardens — magnificent. There are sport cars in the driveway, and the young man is suddenly flanked by a beautiful woman who is his wife.

“For my first wish, I saved my life. For my second wish, I secured my future. For my third wish, I should look to the welfare of my people,” said the young Palestinian. “I want you to destroy the nation of Israel”, he says to the genie. All at once, the estate and wife are gone, and the sandstorm is seconds from overtaking the young man. The moral of the story? Be careful what you wish for: your genie may be Jewish.

Asimov’s version was more medieval — an Arab dying of thirst in the desert who wishes for a palace with camels and who wishes for the destruction of the Jews. I made it contemporary. My favorite chapter was the chapter on wordplay, because I like puns. I like puns because I don’t have to memorize anything: all: mine are usually extemporaneous — I just happen to hear an opportunity and I seize on it. I will do this even if the pun is a particularly terrible one, because groans can be rather melodious.

Next I read Darwin, his Daughter, and Human Evolution by Randal Keynes, who is related to both Charles Darwin and the economist John Maynard Keynes. As I mentioned last week, I basically checked this book out because the cover art caught my eye and the inside text looked fairly interesting. Like Charles Darwin: the Naturalist who Started a Scientific Revolution, this book focuses on Charles Darwin and his theory of descent with modification. Since both books are essentially on the same subject, a comparison is due. The Naturalist Who Started a Scientific Revolution is a much more comprehensive biography of Darwin and the theory. Its beginning chapters focused on Darwin’s family history, and the book went into depth exploring what books and what scientists inspired Darwin and so on. Darwin, his Daughter, and Human Evolution is different. While the book does cover the development of the theory, its author does not describe the voyage of the Beagle in detail. This book is about Darwin, the adult scientist and family man — the man who pauses his daily trips around the Sandwalk to play with his children, who rented a home for his family while he was undergoing treatment in another city just so they would be close by — the man who made notes about his children growing up, from the time they were babies — and who monitored his daughter Annie’s death in hopes of finding a cure. I mentioned before that the author is related to the Darwins. Because of that, he has access to family items like Annie Darwin’s writing case — complete with writing quills that still have dried ink on the tips.

Pick of the Week: Darwin, his Daughter, and Human Evolution
Quotation of the Week: “If I had to live my life again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week.” – Charles Darwin, p. 308 of Darwin, his Daughter, and Human Evolution. Original source is his Autobiography.

Next Week:

  • -The Complete Idiot’s Guide to the World of Harry Potter. I’m not kidding. I saw it when looking for one of my other books, and the very idea of it amused me so much that I had to check it out.
  • Asimov’s Guide to Shakespeare, because I like Asimov and am only familiar with Shakespeare’s tragedies.
  • The Neanderthal Enigma, which I checked out because Neanderthals may be interesting.
  • The History of Science From 1945 to 1990, which is the last book in the On the Shoulders of Giants series — alas.
  • The Undertaker’s Widow by Philip Margolin, which I checked out because I like Margolin.
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This Week at the Library (3/7)

Posted on July 3, 2008 by smellincoffee

Books this Update:

  • The Steel Wave, Jeff Shaara
  • The History of Science in the 19th Century, Ray Spangenburg and Diane Moser
  • Tales of the Black Widowers, Isaac Asimov
  • No Ordinary Time, Doris Kearns Goodwin
  • The Blank Slate, Stephen Pinker

The first book I read this week was Jeff Shaara’s The Steel Wave. I’ve been waiting for it for a little over a year, or ever since I finished The Rising Tide. Strictly speaking, The Steel Wave is “historical fiction”: Shaara attempts to tell a story from history through the eyes of various historical personalities, using memoirs and such to inform his retelling. The style is informal, and quite personal. If you remember, The Rising Tide was first in a planned trilogy of WW2 books: The Rising Tide focused on the American invasion of Africa (Operation Torch) and all that followed, including the invasion of Sicily and the Italian peninsula.

Three characters from The Rising Tide return in The Steel Wave: General Dwight Eisenhower, who is now in charge of planning the invasion of continental Europe, or “Operation Overlord”; Field Marshall Erwin Rommel, who happens to have been sent to the “backwater” Normandy countryside as punishment for losing Africa and being too “defeatist’; and Sgt. Jesse Adams, a paratrooper. Adams participated heavily in the invasion of Sicily, as his paratroop unit was to help tie down Axis armor in the area. General George Patton also appears in the beginning and end of the book as a viewpoint character, but he spends the overwhelming majority of the book commanding the fictitious First Army, which the Nazis believe is poised to invade northern France. Shaara also uses supplemental characters when necessary. For instance, he introduces the book with “The Commando”. whose job it is to infiltrate the area around Utah beach and collect soil samples to see if the area is sturdy enough to handle heavy equipment.

The book isn’t quite as thick as some of Shaara’s other contributions, but it’s a good read. I was never disappointed by the story, which moved quickly. While the central conflict of the book is military, we also see bureaucratic conflicts. In The Rising Tide, Eisenhower has to balance the forceful personalities of George Patton and Omar Bradley, both of whom want the glory — while dealing with the cautious and methodical style of Bernard Montgomery, the British officer in the area who had been defending British possessions in Africa from Rommel. In The Steel Wave, Montgomery and Bradley are both nominally under Eisenhower’s command. While Montgomery’s cautious approach arguably costs the Allies’ military campaign, Eisenhower has to balance military needs with the need to keep the morale of British citizens up by keeping their hero in the fight. Eisenhower also has to deal with Patton, who has a tendency to make an ass of himself and embarrass the American side of the Allied command. Fortunately for Eisenhower, he finds the perfect place to stick Patton and keep him out of trouble.

On the German side, Rommel — who takes his duties seriously — has to deal with a variety of issues. Hitler is becoming more authoritarian and less competent — a pair of traits that seem to go together. The Reich is stressed because of this, as the war in Russia is not going well. By “not going well”, I mean that the Red Army has stopped only because Stalin wanted to wait for the Allied invasion of France. Rommel can’t get the supplies he needs to adequately defend against the threat of Overlord, and Hitler’s constant interference means that Rommel has to ask the Fuhrer’s permission to even use his panzers — a problem that will cost Hitler’s empire down the road.

Overall, the book was good. The narrative was excellently written. I didn’t see anything factually wrong, although I did have exclamation point movements every time characters would mention the Luftwaffe, as in the book they seem to regard it as a credible threat. I thought that the Luftwaffe was pretty much a nonentity by this point; the Allies enjoyed a massive advantage in numbers (something like 25 to 1), and Eisenhower was confident enough about that advantage to tell the troops that the only planes they would see would be Allied ones. Because of this, it’s hard for me to take these characters’ concerns seriously — but I think Shaara must have justification for writing it. Perhaps the German army officers were unaware as to how many planes the Luftwaffe was losing.

Next I read The History of Science in the 19th Century. The 19th century is huge for science. Not only are some tremendous advances made in chemistry, biology, and astronomy, but science as a discipline is really taking form — the scientific method is beginning to be adopted, leading (pleasantly) to the partial extinction of things like phrenology and astrology — which live only in the minds of the gullible. I learned about something completely new in this book — spectroscopy. If you want to learn about it, you can go here. It’s a good resource for explaining scientific concepts to laypersons like myself. I found the site initially when I looked for how we know what the speed of light is, and when I looked this up again while reading The History of Science, I happened upon the above linked topic just as I was beginning to read about spectral lines, which is something of a coincidence. I said before that science as a discipline was taking form — here we see groups like the Lunar Society, which was frequented both by Benjamin Franklin and Erasmus Darwin, Charles’ grandfather. Other groups, like the American and British Associations for the Advancement of Science, are formed in this time period. The National Academy of Science was also founded in the United States at this time, although the British, French, and German equivalents were founded two centuries earlier.

After this, I read Isaac Asimov’s Tales of the Black Widowers, the first collection of his “Black Widower” mysteries. The Black Widowers are a group of six men who meet in a New York restaurant once every month to socialize with a guest — a guest who invariably happens to bring a mystery to the table. Tales of the Black Widowers contains twelve titular tales. In each, the Widowers attempt to find the solution to the mystery through reason. As in More Tales from the Black Widowers, the “mysteries” vary. Sometimes one of the Widowers catches something intriguing in their customary interview of the guest and wants to follow up on it: sometimes people come to the Widowers for help. One of the stories was completely different, and it is by far my favorite in either book. It’s called “The Obvious Solution”, and I think the book is worth finding just for that one story alone. As usual, Asimov introduces the book and provides lovely afterwords after each story.

Because I have a friendly and personal writing style, readers have a tendency to write to me in a friendly and personal way, asking all kinds of friendly and personal questions. And because I really am what my writing style, such as it is, portrays me to be, I answer those letters. And since I don’t have a secretary or any form of assistant whatever, it takes a lot of the time I should be devoting to writing.
It is only natural, then, that I have taken to writing introductions to my books in an attempt to answer some of the anticipated questions in advance, thus forestalling some of the letters.

For instance, because I write in many fields, I frequently get questions such as these:
“Why do you, a lowly science fiction writer, think you can write a two-volume work on Shakespeare?”

“Why do you, a Shakespearean scholar, choose to write science fiction thrillers?”

“What gives you, a biochemist, the nerve to write books on history?”

“What makes you, a mere historian, think you know anything about science?”
And so on, and so on.

It seems certain, then, that I will be asked, either with amusement or with exasperation, why I am writing mystery stories.

Here goes, then.

This is how Asimov begins his introduction to this book: as ever, I enjoy this part of his short-story collection the most. I think Asimov intended for his readers to solve the mysteries along with the Widowers, and sometimes I was able to do so. But honestly, sometimes I found myself so enraptured with the story that I just wanted to see how he ended it, brilliantly. I was only disappointed once, but I won’t mention the story lest I spoil it for someone else. As usual, I love this book. Sadly, though, my local library doesn’t carry any more of the Widower tales. I think they have one more collection of short stories, but just the one.

Next I read a recommendation: No Ordinary Time by Doris Kearns Goodwin. The book is a larger one, which is fitting given that it focuses on the lives of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Eleanor Roosevelt, two historical personalities who seem larger than life at times. FDR is far and way my favorite president, and has been ever since I can remember, so when a friend of mine brought my attention to the book, I made haste to find it. The book is about life in the United States during the Second World War, but because the Roosevelts were so involved, the book is dominated by their two personalities.

The book is essentially the story of what happened on 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, beginning in the late 1930s. The author takes care to introduce subjects when they come up — offering brief biographies of various personalities, brief histories of issues like civil rights and the labor movements — but it moves at a steady pace through the end of the thirties and into the forties. Because FDR is my favorite American president, I knew quite a bit of it already — but there were numerous things I didn’t know. For instance, toward the end of the book the author brings up FDR’s plans to build a new “liberal” party. According to the author, Franklin believed that the nation needed a defined liberal and a defined conservative party: as it was then, both parties were fractured. He aimed to start this process by partnering with Wendell Wilkie, the man who ran against him in 1940 — a liberal Republican who seemed to back FDR’s policies very nearly to the letter. One can certainly see why Roosevelt would have wanted a strong liberal party, as he struggles constantly with the southern Democrats, who are vigorously opposed to any kind of social reform. (By “vigorously opposed”, I mean “beating up people for being black”). Civil rights becomes a major issue because the nation needs soldiers and it needs workers — and blacks (the author uses the word “Negroes”, apparently so the reader won’t lose contextual focus) were being largely ignored (and beaten up). Roosevelt got his wish posthumously, of course — the Democrats adopted civil rights as a key party platform and the southern bloc left. (Good riddance.)

Civil rights is a recurring issue throughout the book, for two reasons: the war makes the racial reckoning unavoidable, and Eleanor Roosevelt is determined to effect positive change however she can — which causes the president some problems. The author also mentions FDR’s balancing act between helping labor and getting big business on his side to fight the war without isolating either. A few weeks ago when I was doing some temporary work for a plant, I thought to myself that it would have been most unpleasant to be a factory hand in the 1940s. I assumed (rightfully so, it turns out) that workers would be made to work long hours in uncomfortable environments — and I speculated to myself that one couldn’t complain without being branded an enemy sympathizer. It turns out my suspicions were correct, as apparently both labor and big business accused one another of trying to use the war to assert their own primacy.

The other recurring home-front issue that bears on today’s world is that of women’s rights. As the men were being drafted to fight the war, women were running the factories — and finding out that they rather liked the idea of being productive. Social expectation changed, and society started to change with it. It seems that the headway that was made in civil rights and gender quality was lost in the 50s, though, as I’ve never heard of any real advances in either of those areas happening until the 1960s.

This book isn’t completely about social history, of course — but social history is one of my pet history subjects, so these three topics were the ones I paid most attention to. The author also writes about the Roosevelts’ various friendships, their hobbies, and their personalities — but I was most interested in the social developments. While the book is mostly complimentary of Roosevelt, it does bring up one of the more infamous acts of his presidency — executive order 9066, which allowed military commanders to define areas of the country as “military areas”, which would allow them to forcibly resettle the people living and working in certain areas — and “certain areas” turned out to be Japanese-American farms and neighborhoods. The policy also made the military responsible for housing displaced persons, and the result was camps for people whose ancestors came from Japan. Outside of John Adam’s Alien and Sedition acts, the Red Scares, and the Military Commissions Act, the internment of American citizens is one of the darkest moments in the history of American civil liberties. The book is a lengthy read, but well worth if it you like the Roosevelts or want to learn more about social developments in the 1940s.

Lastly, I read Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. It’s also a recommendation, although I think I would have gotten around to finding it myself, given my interest in neuroscience and the biological (no Freud) aspects of psychology. Pinker deals with three ideas about human nature in his book: the blank slate, or the idea that human minds are born as Play-Doh, completely malleable : the Noble Savage, the idea that human beings are essentially good creatures and are corrupted by societal pressure and needs: and the Ghost in the Machine, the idea that in each of us is some ethereal spook that makes choices independently of the biological processes of the mind. Pinker doesn’t call the book The Modern Denial of Human Nature for a reason: it is his idea that the latter two can be safely tied to the Blank Slate idea. Throughout the book, Pinker first deals with the implications of the Blank Slate as a whole, and then deals with the latter two specifically.

I found this book astonishingly interesting. Ever since I can remember, I’ve always wondered why people were the way they were. Even during high school when I was incurious about the world at large, I was still captivated by the question of why people were the way they were. This is one of the reasons I liked sociology so much when I first discovered it in my first two years of college — and the reason I like books like V.S. Ramachandran’s Phantoms in the Brain and this one. My view of human nature is naturalistic, of course, and was that way even when I was a fundamentalist Pentecostal. I still believed in an immortal soul, I just didn’t know where it went or what it did. (Since I believed then and still believe now that every aspect of “being human” is controlled by our genetic information, the idea of a soul to explain anything is really superfluous.) In high school, I was introduced to the “nature/nurture” debate where people question which has a bigger influence on why we are what we are: our genes, or our environment? Now, back then and until recently (recent years) I thought our environment had a bit more to do with it. In the past two years, though, as I read more and more biology, I realize how much our genes impact our lives. While the environment we’re raised in is very important, our genes determine how we respond to that environment.

Pinker’s view places more emphasis on genes than I have previously. After establishing this, he goes on to examine four arguments against the naturalistic view of human nature :

The anxiety about human nature can be boiled down to four fears:

If people are innately different, oppression and discrimination would be justified.

If people are innately immortal, hopes to improve the human condition would be futile.

If people are the products of biology, free will would be a myth and we could no longer hold people responsible for their actions.

If people are products of biology, life would have no higher meaning and purpose.” (P. 137)

He then commits a chapter to each. He then examines how this idea of human nature “can provide insight into languages, thought, social life, and mortality (Part IV), and how it can clarify controversies on politics, violence, gender, childrearing, and the arts. (Part V).” (P. 3) While some of the book is pure science — and thus will take some time to digest it — most of the book is simply an exercise in reasoning, looking at what that science means. Pinker uses a lot of quotations to illustrate points . Richard Dawkins and E. O. Wilson (both biologists) are quoted heavily, but he also references the ancient Greek aristocrat Pindar and the poet Kahlil Gibran, as well as employing popular culture references (“Gee Officer Krupke” from West Side Story and comic strips, as well as bits of 1984 and Huckleberry Finn) to make his points. In my view he’s an excellent writer and the book deserves to be read — even if it makes some of its readers, including myself, slightly uncomfortable. According to Wikipedia, Skeptic magazine criticized the book, which is interesting. I’d like to read that criticism.

Pick of the Week: A tie between Tales of the Black Widowers and The History of Science.
Quotation of the Week: There was an excellent quotation on the importance of maintaining civil liberties during war by Eleanor Roosevelt in No Ordinary Time, but I’ve not been able to find it again — so I’ll just substitute one from her autobiography. “Life was meant to be lived, and curiosity must be kept alive. One must never, for whatever reason, turn his back on life.”

Next week:
– The History of Science from 1895 to 1945. I’m continuing the series, of course.
– Isaac Asimov’s Treasury of Humor: 640 Jokes, Anecdotes, and Limericks, Complete with Notes on How to Tell Them, from America’s Leading Renaissance Man by (of course) Isaac Asimov.
– Murder in the Lincoln Bedroom by Elliot Roosevelt. When reading No Ordinary Time, I discovered that one of the Roosevelt sons wrote a series of mystery novels starring his mother. No, I’m not making that up. I decided to check one out to see what it was like.
– Portraits of Great American Scientists by various authors. I found this book when I looked up “E.O. Wilson” at my local library. Since E.O. Wilson is on the cover of this one, I’m going to take a leap of faith and say he is one of the scientists looked at in the book.
– The Handmaid’s Tale, a dystopian novel set in a world where the United States is taken over by fundamentalist Christians; a recommendation.
– Darwin, His Daughter, & Human Evolution by Randal Keynes. While moving toward the science section to pick up the history of science book, I saw this one displayed. The cover caught my eye, and it looks readable so I decided to go with it.

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This Week at the Library (17/6)

Posted on June 17, 2008 by smellincoffee

Books this Update:

  • The History of Science in the 18th Century, Ray Spangenburg & Diane Moser
  • More Tales of the Black Widowers, Isaac Asimov
  • god is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, Christopher Hitchens
  • The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins

This week I continued my foray into the history of science by reading The History of Science In the 18th Century, second in this series (beginning with The History of Science From the Ancient Greeks to the Scientific Revolution). The authors, Ray Spangenburg and Diane Moser, continue to impress me. My local library carries a number of books by them, and I predict that I’m going to be reading them all. One of their books — sadly not available at my local library — is a Carl Sagan biography. Spangenburg and another of his co-authors, Kit Moser, have a website that you can view here.

The book begins with a prologue, briefly summarizing where “science” was at the beginning of the 1700s. The name of this series is “On the Shoulders of Giants”, originating from Newton’s statement that ‘If I have seen farther it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.” This is fitting because Newton’s various theories allow science to progress further and faster than it ever has before. His laws of motions and insights into optics make people realize that all of nature is governed by laws, and that these laws can be figured out by human beings if we are observant, clever, and imaginative enough. The idea of a “clockwork universe” emerges, and from it emerges Deism. Science in the latter half of the 18th century is influenced by political and technological revolutions — namely, the French and American revolutions and the Industrial Revolution. This means, of course, that science and history are inescapably tied together — which is a joy for me to realize in full given my interest in both.

The book is, if you will excuse the pun, enlightening. The connections to history have already been mentioned, but the authors put a lot of emphasis on Newton’s importance. I knew he was considered important, but had not realized the full scope of his contributions’ importance. I will certainly be continuing this series, and will as mentioned look for further books by these authors.

Next I read god is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. I said last week that I wasn’t particularly interested in reading a book on atheism. As it turns out, though, this book isn’t about atheism: it’s about the damage that religion can cause. While the book’s title resonated with me a year ago, I’ve softened a bit since then and I’m more concerned with actually communicating with people. I think the book’s title will serve to alienate more people than its message will serve. This is not necessarily the fault of its author: the root cause is that people aren’t as receptive to listening to ideas when they’ve just been insulted. It strikes me as vain for whatever reason, but then I’m one who will read something precisely because it’s insulting.

Hitchens begins the book by describing his break from religion, which happened in childhood as a result of him observing four things, although I’m certain that Christopher Hitchens as a child articulated these things with fewer and simpler words:

“There still remain four irreducible objections to religious faith: that it wholly misrepresents the origins of man and the cosmos, that because of this original error it manages to combine the maximum of servility with the maximum of solipsism, that it is both the result and the cause of dangerous sexual repression, and that it is ultimately grounded on wish-thinking.”

That one sentence is more obnoxious in tone than the tone of the rest of the book: it’s really not stuffy at all. Hitchens goes on to discuss various topics that elaborate on that original summation. The various topics Hitchens covers are too various to be comfortably summarized, so I’ll simply provide you with a list of chapter subjects: : “Religion Kills”, “A Short Digression on the Pig”, “A Note on Health”, “The Metaphysical claims of Religion are False”, “Arguments from Design”, the Hebrew scriptures, the New Testament, the Koran, miracles, Hell, “Religion’s Corrupt Beginnings”, “How Religions End”, “Does Religion Make People Behave Better”, eastern religions, “The Last Ditch ‘Case’ Against Secularism”, “A Finer Tradition: the Resistance of the Rational” and it concludes with “The Need for a New Enlightenment”.

I think the listing of the chapter titles should tell you whether you want to read this book, regardless of your own personal beliefs. If you’re religious and fair-minded, you should be interested. Despite the book’s provocative title, I think its contents are fair. Its contents are also hilarious. Here’s one passage I was particularly delighted with:

With a necessary part of its collective mind, religion looks forward to the destruction of the world. […] This has been a constant trope, ever since the first witch doctors and shamans learned to predict eclipses […] to the best-selling pulp-fiction Left Behind series, which, ostensibly “authored” by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, was apparently generated by the old expedient of letting two orangutans loose on a word processor.”

You may not be able to appreciate the humor in that if you’ve not read the Left Behind books. I’ve read all sixteen and they’re hilariously awful. On that note, I will promote once again Slacktivist’s running commentary on the books. The Slacktivist blog is run by a Christian, by the way: that those books are bad is not just the contention of a religious cynic like myself.

Moving on to something less controversial, I next read Isaac Asimov’s More Tales of the Black Widowers. This is a collection of short stories, although I had no idea what they were about until I began reading the book. Asimov introduces the book himself, and here is a portion of that:

“I don’t think there’s much more to say about the Black Widowers than I’ve already said in Tales of the Black Widowers. That was the first book in the series and the one you’re now holding is the second.

In that first introduction, I explained that the Black Widowers was inspired by a real club, to which I belong, which is called the Trap Door Spiders. I won’t tell you anymore about that here because if you’ve read Tales of the Black Widowers you’d just be bored by the repetition, and if you haven’t read it I’d rather leave you in the agony of curiosity so that you will then be driven to buy the first book and repair the omission. […] That’s all I have to say now, but lest you rejoice too quickly at being rid of me, I must warn you that I will appear again in a short afterward following each of the stories.”

My favorite part of reading Asimov’s short-story collections is his introductions and afterwords. They reflect so much of his humor and gentle charm that reading his personal comments is often more enjoyable than the stories themselves. As for the stories, they are puzzle stories; mysteries of a sort. Essentially, the Black Widowers always meet once a month for supper, and each month they are joined by a guest who invariably presents them with a puzzle to solve. Sometimes this is intentional, the guest having been invited just so he can enjoy the advice they offer. Sometimes the puzzle emerges accidentally, such as in “Nothing Like Murder”. The guest is a Soviet scientist who expresses his amazement that in New York people openly plan murders. When he is asked what he means by this, the scientist responds that while he and a comrade were sitting on a bench near a university, he overheard two young men plotting a murder. The Widowers express their doubts that college students would plan a murder openly like that, and the story is about the Widowers trying to sort out what exactly transpired, using the Soviet’s memory of what they said. Ultimately they figure it out, and it turns out to be harmless. The guests that join the Widowers range from Soviet scientists to puritanical Christians: they don’t fit stereotypes. I found each story to engaging, and recommend the book. It’s good stuff, especially if you like trying to figure things out. I actually managed to figure out one story’s solution before the Widowers did, which was heartening.

Lastly I read Ricard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene, published in 1976. This is the third time I have tried reading this book. Out of curiosity, I looked at the book’s “Due Date” slip affixed to the back cover, which serve as an indicator of when the book has been checked out. This particular copy of The Selfish Gene has been checked out six times:
16 October 1996
13 December 2000
26 January 2002
15 August 2006
31 October 2006
24 June 2008

Now, naturally, the book wasn’t checked out on those dates: in each instance, it was checked out two weeks prior. The last three due dates are my own. 2006 was a monumental year for me: it’s the year everything changed. It was the year that I rediscovered a delight in simply learning things — when the library opened up an immense world for me. This was the year I discovered authors like Carl Sagan. By late summer of 2006, I was growing more and more aggressive in my reading, trying to expand my knowledge. Around that time I heard of Richard Dawkins and checked out two of his books — Unweaving the Rainbow and The Selfish Gene. I finished Unweaving the Rainbow, but only got half-way through The Selfish Gene. Evidently, I checked it out a couple of months later, hoping to finish it, but I don’t remember making any progress in that second attempt. Since then, and until now, the book has remained in the back of my mind. Every time I see it on the library bookshelf, I am reminded that it and I have unfinished business.

I should say “had”, as I finished the book. It was published in 1976 and introduced Richard Dawkins to the world of popular science. He has since then become a prolific science author, and I have read a number of his books — The Ancestor’s Tale, The River Out of Eden, Climbing Mount Improbable, and so on. Dawkins is one of my favorite scientists, as I often hear him in interviews and see his lectures online. The Selfish Gene advocates a gene-centered view of evolution, which is why it took me so long to read it. My brain doesn’t like genetics. To finish this book, I had to clear the major hurdle of the introductory chapters, where Dawkins explains how what genes and chromosomes are and how they work. Thanks in part to the biological knowledge I have accumulated through a lot of reading in the past two years and a lot of determination, I was able to clear that hurdle and the rest of the book was…easier. There were some chapters (“Aggression: Stability and the Selfish Machine”, “Battle of the Sexes”, “Memes: the New Replicators) that were easy for me to get, and there were some (“The Long Reach of the Gene”, “Immortal Coils”) that were harder.

The chapter on memes was particularly interesting. A meme is an idea that is transmitted from being to being — from the songs of birds to the religions and philosophies of human beings. Dawkins says “When we die there are two things we can live behind us: genes and memes. We were built as gene machines, created to pass on our genes. But that aspect of us will be forgotten in three generations. […] Our genes may be immortal but the collection of genes that is any one of us is bound to crumble away. Elizabeth II is a direct descendant of William the Conqueror. Yet it is quite probable that she bears not a single one of the old king’s genes. […] But if you contribute to the world’s culture, if you have a good idea, compose a tune, invent a sparking plug, write a poem, it may live on, intact, long after your genes have dissolved in the common pool. Socrates may or may not have a gene or two alive in the world today, as G.C. Williams has remarked, but who cares? The meme-complexes of Socrates, Leonardo, Copernicus, and Marconi are still going strong.” (p. 199, 9th edition.)

I like this passage because it supports my own view of heritage. I do not count my heritage as being genetic, and for good reasons. My genetic heritage doesn’t matter a bit. The paternal ancestor whose last name I carry hailed from Germany. While many people are proud to be German — and there’s no reason not to be, because Germany has contributed much to western culture — it would be rather silly of me to be proud of this. As Dawkins so eloquently points out, even if I was a direct descendant of Frederick II, it is likely that he and I have no genes in common. What links he and I is that we may hold some of the same ideas — we both value learning and religious tolerance, for instance. This is the same thing that links myself and Robert Ingersoll, or myself and Marcus Aurelius. This is easier for me to realize, being American, because I share that distinction with people who don’t look a thing like me: we are alike because of the ideas we live by, namely the ideas of the Constitution.

Pick of the Week: Undoubtedly, The History of Science in the 18th Century.
Quotation of the Week: “Violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism and tribalism and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children: organized religion ought to have a great deal on its conscience.” (god is not Great, Christopher Hitchens, p. 56)

That concludes this week’s reading. What’s next? Well, my library carries Tales of the Black Widowers, which I’ve never read in spite of reading its sequel. I will have to “remedy the omission”, in Asimov’s words. I’ll be continuing the history of science series by Spangenburg. Jeff Shaara recently released The Steel Wave, which is a sequel to his The Rising Tide, which I read last year and commented on here*. I also have a couple of recommendations to look into: No Ordinary Time, which appears to a joint biography of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, and The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker.

*Amusingly enough, in the same post that I commented on The Rising Tide, I said that I wouldn’t read history of the Roosevelts. It appears that I’m about to.

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This Week at the Library

Posted on June 10, 2008 by smellincoffee

Books in this Update:

  • The Origin of Species, Charles Darwin
  • The History of Science from the Ancient Greeks to the Scientific Revolution, Ray Spangenburg
  • Charles Darwin: the Naturalist Who Started a Scientific Revolution, Cyril Aydon

I began this week with The Origin of Species, by Charles Darwin. I read this book for historical, rather than scientific, reasons. I imagine that it is of little use as a scientific text today as it was published in 1859 — before heredity and DNA were discovered. I decided to read it to see what the book was like, since it caused such a sensation in its day. I would do the same for other historically important texts — The Wealth of Nations, The Communist Manifesto, The Jungle, etc. As a student of history, and a fledging student of the history of science in particular, I’m quite interested in this book. It also helps to be armed with facts for those chance encounters with fundamentalists who are prone to saying “Darwin said…”. I figure if I read The Origin of Species, I could call them on their BS promptly. (Some people hunt. I call BS. We all have our sports.)

The Origin of Species, despite being written in the Victorian era, is actually rather readable. The edition of the book I’m reading features commentary (sometimes corrective) to help put things into perspective. While Darwin’s book introduced the idea of descent with modification to a larger audience than the Royal Society, his chapter on “The Struggle for Existence” bespeaks of ecology to me. I do not know enough about the history of ecology to say if many naturalists had observed it, Darwin certainly did. Take, for instance, this passage:

I am tempted to give one more instance showing how plants and animals are bound together by a web of complex relations. I find from experience that [b]umblebees are almost indispensable to the fertilisation of the heartsease and some kinds of clover. [B]umblebees alone visit red clover, as other bees cannot reach the nectar. Hence we may infer that, if the whole genus of [b]umble-bees became extinct or very rare in England, the heartsease and red clover would become very rare, or wholly disappear. The number of [b]umblebees in any district depends in a great measure on the number of field-mice, which destroy their combs and nests. Now the number of mice is largely dependent on the number of field mice, which destroy their combs and nests. Now the number of mice is largely dependent […] on the number of cats; and as Col. Newman says, ‘Near villages and small towns I have found the nest of [b]umblebees more numerous than elsewhere, which I attribute to the number of cats that destroy the mice.’ Hence it is quite credible that the presence of feline animals in large numbers might determine, through the intervention from mice and then of bees, the frequency of certain flowers in that district. “

How else to describe ecology rather than ‘plants and animals bound together by a web of complex relations’? Wikipedia says that “ecology” was coined in 1866, and that its founder was Eugenius Warming. I may read more on ecology later on; it’s an interesting topic. Most of the chapters are fairly interesting. I thought “Instinct” was a little dull, but other chapters, like “Geographical Distribution”, made up for it. That chapter was particular interesting, as Darwin describes his experiences in probing to see how seeds could be transferred from one island to the next. Three methods he came up with were (1) seeds carried by seawater, (2) seeds in dirt clumps attached to natural debris that is shuffled from island to island through the currents, and (3) through animal scat, since birds can often be blown hundreds of miles from their natural routes by prevailing winds. Darwin actually tests these ideas — submerging seeds in seawater to see if they would germinate, liberating seeds from animal feces and successfully planting them, etc. The man was meticulous.

Next I read The History of Science from the Greeks to the Scientific Revolution. I am enjoying a growing interest in the history of scientific thought. It combines my lifelong interest in history and a newly awakened and burgeoning affection for science rather nicely. This book was quite excellent, I thought, in presenting its information. The book is divided into three parts. The first starts the development of natural philosophy in the Greek world and its progression and moves through the death of the classical world to the rebirth of knowledge in the medieval era with Copernicus. As I read about Copernicus and Galileo (who promoted Copernicus’ idea of heliocentrism), it struck me that all Copernicus had to substantiate his claim that the Earth and planets moved around the Sun rather than the reverse was simple math. All either Copernicus or Galileo could do was observe the movement of the planets and other celestial happenings and say “This is what we think is happening. It seems to fit the facts at hand.” There was no hard, undeniable evidence outside of the math, and there wouldn’t be until the space age. Imagine that! For hundreds of years, people were taught that the Earth moved around the sun not through undeniable evidence but through simple rational and math. As I read about this, I realized that the same was true for both Darwin and Mendel. Darwin spent years observing the natural world, just as Copernicus and Galileo observed the heavens, and then made an observation. As I found out in a later reading, Darwin’s initial title for The Origin of Species began with “An Abstract of an Essay On…”. Darwin’s idea was just that, an idea: a mental abstraction, just like Copernicus‘. Here’s where it gets interesting: Darwin saw natural selection as the basis for evolution, but had no idea what made that work. How did parents pass on traits to their children — faster limbs, bigger brains, etc? Mendel figured that out when he realized what we now call genetics, but he lacked the tools to find the actual genes that were doing what he described. Later on, DNA was discovered, meshing Darwin, Mendel, and Watson’s discoveries together. I find this sequence of events uncommonly fascinating. Anyway, after finishing the introduction, the book is split into two more sections: the physical sciences and the life sciences. Both are interesting in themselves. The history of medicine isn’t something I know a lot about other than what I learned in Theories for Everything, but this book’s section contained a wealth of information. Speaking of Theories for Everything, I wonder if the thrilling narrative presented by that book is what prompted my interest in the history of science?

Next, I read Charles Darwin: the Naturalist Who Started a Scientific Revolution. I found this book and the one preceding it by searching for “scientific revolution” at my local library in the interests of expanding my knowledge of the history of science. It’s a biography of Charles Darwin. I recently watched a video that piqued my curiosity about the life of Charles Darwin, and specifically the voyage of the Beagle. As far as narratives go, I have to say this one is excellent. Biographies can be dull despite being about an interesting personality, but this book is anything but dull. The author presents a lively telling of Darwin’s life, drawing conclusions about why he was able to do what he did based on his surroundings. The book concludes by saying that Darwin was marvelously fortunate. He was born into the landed gentry, which made his life as a naturalist much easier. His father supported him financially, allowing him to spend his time doing research and writing. He married a woman who gave him immense emotional support, and he was able to surround himself with some of the leading minds of the day, who inspired and encouraged him. This book gave me new insight into Darwin and his book. I got a good laugh when perusing the “Suggested Reading”. The author mentions Richard Dawkins’ The Blind Watchmaker, and says that Dawkins has taken Alfred Huxely’s role as “Darwin’s bulldog”. The author says that ‘like Huxeley, he is a tremendous popularizer [of science], and like Huxeley he takes no prisoners.’ That’s one way to characterize Richard Dawkins: a bit like saying FDR had a way with speeches.

I have other books — namely, The History of the Ancient World, Modern Germany: Its History and Civilization, and Biology: Demystified. However, each presents problems: the first two are large, while the last is a self-teaching book, and as such I cannot read it straight through. I have to re-read sections to make sure I remember everything. I checked out Biology: Demystified in the interests of helping me better understand biology (as you might imagine) and thus far it is — although I do have problems with the book, which I will elaborate on should I finish it and include it here.
Instead of trying to make more progress with those larger books, I decided to visit the library today (I had the day off of work because we had no work to do) and fetch some other books. I began with The History of Science in the 18th Century, which is the second book in the series that The History of Science […] to the Scientific Revolution began. Next I checked out Christopher Hitchens’ god is not Great: How Religion Ruins Everything. I should note that I have read Hitchens before (his biography of Thomas Jefferson) and didn’t really like his tone, which seemed to be…overly academic. I’ve seen the guy in interviews and enjoy him there, but not in that book. You can probably guess the book’s theme from its title. I’m only reading it to say I have: I’m actually not interested in books about atheism. It does get old.

Next I’m reading — or attempting to read — Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene. I have tried to read this book twice before, only to be stymied by the fact that my brain yelps and hides under the couch when it encounters genetics. I know a smidge more about genetics now than I do the last time I read this book two years ago, but as evidenced by the slow progress I am making in Biology: Demystified, this subject does not come easily to me. I’ve heard that the third time’s the charm, but even if I can’t get through it, I will try again. I will continue trying to read the book until (1) I die or (2) Athena tells me not to. I don’t know how long I have before case one is reached, but I doubt case 2 will be realized any time soon. Why am I so determined to read this book? Because I tried once, and failed. I won’t have it said of me at my funeral that a book got the better of me — even if it was written by an Oxford professor.

Next I checked out a book on Greek mythology and I finished my round with a collection of short stories by Isaac Asimov. I think that’s everything. I was thrilled to find the Asimov collection: I was concerned that I had read all of his short-story collections at the library.

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This Week at the Library (15/5)

Posted on May 15, 2008 by smellincoffee

Books this Update:
– In at the Death, Harry Turtledove
– Fatherland, Robert Harris
– Garden of Beasts, Jeffery Deaver
– Playing for Pizza, John Grisham
– The Two Georges, Harry Turtledove and Richard Dreyfuss

My first read this week was In at the Death by Harry Turtledove, which completes his “Southern Victory” series that began with How Few Remain. As you might recall, “President” Jake Featherston of the Confederacy invaded the United States in 1941, only to realize that the Union isn’t as big of a pushover as his electorate. The result is a war of economies — one that Featherston cannot hope to win without superior technology, like bombs that can destroy whole cities. This book ends the series with two continents devastated by war and dealing with the dawn of the Nuclear Age.

In general I found the series to be enjoyable reading. As a student of history, I enjoyed looking for the parallels Turtledove attempted to draw to the real world and thinking about the world he was fashioning. I found that some things didn’t make that much sense, but all in all I have no real complaints. I noticed that technology seemed to advance more quickly in this series than in real life — specifically in terms of airplanes. An example of this is the advancement of bomber technology in the “Great War”. In real life, bombers did little actual damage — but in the books, even WW1 planes are capable of bombing cities into ruins.

Next I read Fatherland, which is an mystery novel by Robert Harris set in an alternate history setting. In Fatherland, Nazi Germany succeeded in winning the Second World War. This success came about partially because of Nazi Germany’s triumph over the Soviet Union. I’m not altogether sure that this alone would have given Germany victory — it failed to in 1917, when Russia withdrew from the Great War, surrendering most of the territory Nazi Germany gained in this fictional timeline. It’s a moot point, though. The book is set in 1964. Nazi Germany controls Europe in the same way the USSR controlled eastern Europe, with the exception that western countries are allowed to pretend that they’re free — when in reality they’re subject to Nazi Germany’s every whim. A cold war exists between the United States and Nazi Germany, but the aging Hitler wants to ease tensions for a reason I’ve forgotten at the moment. U.S. President Joseph P. Kennedy announces a visit to Berlin, and this sets the stage for the book. A German police officer is startled to realize that a murder he is investigating is tied to a string of murders. All of the “victims” are former Nazi high-ups who are being eliminated for some mysterious reason. It is the job of Officer March to find out what.

I thoroughly enjoyed the book, reading through it fairly quickly. The characters are solid, and the plot makes sense. I never felt lost. The book has been written with a great eye for detail, using actual historical documents as Officer March’s evidence. There are lots of little touches: for instance, March mentions a symphony being conducted by Herbert von Karajan, who was in real life an Austrian national who conducted the Berlin Philharmonic for many years. He was also a member of Austria’s Nazi party, although I don’t know how involved in it he was. Outside of the point of derivation, I didn’t see any really questionable developments in world politics in this alternate-history setting, although I am curious as to how the aging Kennedy became president.

Next I read Garden of Beasts, which is a mystery novel by Jeffery Deaver set in 1936 Berlin. I found this book and Fatherland by doing a search at my local library for “Berlin”. I’m interested in the history and culture of select cities, and found these two books in the same way that I found Philip Margolin‘s books while looking for information about Portland. In Garden of Beasts, a German-American hitman is hired by individuals working on behalf of the U.S. government to travel to Germany and eliminate the man responsible for Nazi Germany’s rearmament. That I describe this novel as a mystery novel and not adventure should tell you that the above description is not nearly complete. I was thoroughly entertained by the book, and will look for this author more. 1936, by the way, is the year the Olympics were held in Berlin. As you can imagine, the Nazis are eager that nothing sensational should happen.

I should mention John Grisham’s Playing for Pizza, which I read back in December but for some reason never thought to write about until I wrote about The Appeal. Playing for Pizza is a fairly short book, and was published right before The Appeal. As you might suspect, it is not a legal thriller. If you’ve read Bleachers or The Broker and liked either, you’ll probably like this one. An American football player with reputation for screwing up under pressure finds an opportunity to play football in the unlikeliest of places: Europe, specifically Italy. Italy, like Europe and the rest of the world (except for the United States) is dominated by soccer — with little demand for American football. There are clubs (or at least there are in Grisham’s world: I don’t know if there are in reality, but I figure Grisham wrote the book out of his shocked discovery that Italians played American football.) in Italy. The men playing in these clubs do so only for fun, but Rick (the aforementioned American) will be paid. The book is about Rick and his move to Italy and his acclimating himself to a new culture. This is why I figure those who like either Bleachers or The Broker will like Playing for Pizza. Bleachers is about football, and The Broker is set in Italy and features an American getting used to Italy while fleeing for his life. The highest praise I can give this book is that Grisham is actually able to keep me interested in a book about football. John Grisham is one of my favorite authors, and this book doesn’t disappoint.

The next book I read was The Two Georges, a book set in an alternate history in which George Washington traveled to England on behalf of the colonies in the 1760s, obtaining a fair deal for the colonies. The result is a world radically different from ours, where the sun never sets on the British Empire. The Crown possesses North America, Australia, and India while keeping the Ottomans, Chinese, and Hawaii within its sphere of influence. Opposing it are the Holy Alliance (an alliance between France and Spain, with various holdings across the world including “New Spain” in Central America) and the Russian Empire. France’s revolution was spoiled by one Lt. Col. Bonaparte. Although the book seems to be set in the mid 1990s (judging by a recent major earthquake in San Francisco and that a wine produced in the early 1980s is just now starting to come into season), neither Germany nor Italy are united. Technology has also progressed more slowly, it seems, and much differently. Cars, for instance, use steam engines and are referred to as “steamers”. Strangely enough, electric cars are also mentioned. Airships are used for commercial flights, not fixed-wing aircraft — even though the latter are available. Although the television is starting to become commercially available, telephone technology is very limited. These changes are largely unexplained. While I can understand the political developments of this worlds, the technological ones are beyond me. Why has technology in general progressed so slowly in this world? That I don’t know.

The Two Georges refers to a painting that shows Colonel George Washington bowing before his sovereign, and is symbolic of the strong relationship between Great Britain and its dominion in North America, the North American Union. The NAU enjoys something in the way of autonomy, although its head (Governor-General) is appointed by the king. The head of the NAU in this book is one Martin Luther King Jr. Sadly, his father changed his name to Martin Luther in honor of said brute in this timeline, too. At the beginning of the book, the painting is stolen, leading Colonel Bushell of the Royal American Mounted Police (RAMs) across the continent as he searches for the culprits. The likely culprits are the Sons of Freedom, white supremacists who double as fanatical separatists. In general I found it a fun read, although I was able to realize the ending before Colonel Bushell.

Pick of the Week: Garden of Beasts, Jeffery Deaver

Next week: I am knee-deep in a variety of history texts, including two I mentioned last week (History of the Ancient World and Modern Germany: Its History and Civilization).

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This Week at the Library (2-5-08)

Posted on May 2, 2008 by smellincoffee

Books Included in this Update:
– Only Yesterday, Frederick Lewis Allen
– Since Yesterday, Frederick Lewis Allen
– The Appeal, John Grisham
– The Center Cannot Hold, Harry Turtledove
– The Victorious Opposition, Harry Turtledove
– Return Engagement, Harry Turtledove
– Drive to the East, Harry Turtledove
– The Grapple, Harry Turtledove

I’ve waited a while to write this, as it will be my last library-related post from the University of Montevallo. At 3 PM today, I will have to vacate Napier and leave Montevallo behind. While I did not read nearly as much during the school year as I did in the summer leading up to my return, I did read quite a bit. As you can see from the listed books above, my reading for the past month or so has been dominated by schoolwork or the Turtledove series.

The Frederick Lewis Allen books come from my historiography class, where we examined history as an area of study. One of our assignments was a book review, and I asked to review The Making of the Middle Ages by R.W. Southern. I did not find the book all that interesting, as it was mostly about the development of the Christian church — and I have zero interest in that, really. So I asked my professor if I could switch to another book. He gamely agreed, and I read Only Yesterday by Frederick Lewis Allen. Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s is a book that I started reading last term, but never finished. (I did, however, mention the book in one of these posts.)

Allen was an amateur historian working for Harpers magazine: his book is not written for academics, but for popular consumption. As such, his style is informal. In the prelude this is mildly annoying, but as the book progressed I found I liked it. Allen published this in 1931, so it was fairly recent. You can read the book online — which is where I read it — here.

The book moves through the 1920s, topic by topic. Some topics include the rise of crime (thanks in part to Prohibition), the rising hemlines, and the Red Scare. The topics themselves are smartly arranged chronologically, and Allen is careful to refresh the reader’s memory from time to time to ensure that she or he is getting the broader perspective. It’s a nice touch, I think. It was this book that my first university-level history instructor recommended to me when I asked him for book suggestions regarding the 1920s and 1930s in the United States, and I pass the recommendation on to you.

I commented in my review for class that Allen’s tone may have changed had he written this book ten years later, after the Depression was revealed to have been a long-term issue for the world and not just a temporary panic. In order to see if this was the case, I checked out Allen’s sequel to the book, aptly named Since Yesterday. This book follows the same style and has the same inherent readability, so I again recommend it to those of you who have an interest in this era. The style is very informal, but not so much that the reader would feel insulted. The only dull part of the books I remember is a chapter on land speculation in Florida in Only Yesterday. The chapter about the Bull Market wasn’t all that interesting, either, but then again I am not an economic historian or even a student of economic history. My favorite kind of history is social history, and these books provide that.

I received John Grisham’s The Appeal for my birthday. Grisham is a favorite author of mine, although I’m not exactly alone in claiming that. The Appeal, as you might be able to guess from the title, is based in the field of law — which is a return for Grisham. His early works (A Time to Kill, The Firm, The Pelican Brief, etc) were all legal “thrillers”, but then he started varying from that with titles like A Painted House, Skipping Christmas, and Playing for Pizza. That didn’t hurt him, as far as I’m concerned. All of those non-legal books are well-written and entertaining as well. What follows is an introduction to the book, not a plot summary. The Appeal is principally about a chemical company that has been caught disposing of toxic chemical byproducts in ravines, poisoning the water table and giving the county the name of “Cancer County”. The chemical company is sued by a married law couple, who nearly go into bankruptcy trying to afford the costs of the trial. The chemical company pins its hopes on a successful appeal — to a friendly court. This is where the book’s drama really begins, as people working on behalf of the chemical company will attempt to influence local elections to affect a change in the make-up of that court: specifically, attempting to replace a moderate judge with a conservative one. I’m not sure what Grisham’s intention was with this book, other than entertainment. I personally think that it conveys a message about the power of corporations and the danger of easily-influenced voters.

I also continued reading the so-called ‘Southern Victory” series by Harry Turtledove. Since Turtledove’s style is about the same throughout the series, I won’t bother commenting on each book one by one. Turtledove’s style, you might remember, is to tell the story through the eyes of viewpoint characters. The characters in this part of the series are varied — legislators, soldiers, sailors, dictators, death camp commandants, civilians caught in the middle, etc. The only comment I will provide other than a plot summary is that while there were sex scenes in the first three or four books, Turtledove eases off on them later on. Turtledove’s sex could never match Jean M. Auel’s caveman erotica, but it was still a bit strange. The later books are all about social history and military conflict. I left off at the end of the Great War. Considering the progress I’ve made since, it’s pathetic that it has taken me this long to bother writing. If you plan to read this series and do not want anything to be spoiled, read no more.

Blood and Iron finishes the Great War. The United States and Germany are victorious, and inflict brutal peace terms on their vanquished foes. I rather enjoyed seeing the South get the same harsh treatment as Germany did in the real world, and seeing the same results — the rise of radicalism, which is where The Center Cannot Hold probably gets its name from. As people living in France and the Confederacy deal with crippling inflation and the indignity of Versailles-like treaty conditions, they become easy prey for demagogues. Far-right conservatives seize power in Britain, France, and the Confederacy, and the world is pushed toward war.

Jake Featherston, Turtledove’s answer to reality’s Hitler, remilitarizes the south and prepares the Confederates for a war with the United States. There’s a difference between the two, because the South (or Germany in the real world) could have rearmed without going to war. Turtledove’s road to war follows the “real” road to war pretty closely. At the beginning of the 1940s (in Return Engagement) Featherston declares war against the United States and moves in, winning early victories. He fails to force the United States to capitulate, though, and is left with a war. (The Drive East, The Grapple). Even as he is fighting the United States, he is also engaged in a “final solution” of his own. During the Great War, a red revolution instigated by ill-treated blacks drained some Confederate troops from the front line. The United States would have emerged victorious regardless, but because of the “revolution”, it was easy for Confederates to blame blacks for their woes. Finding a scapegoat is always easy.

The war is currently going south for the South. Every world power is trying to develop the bomb: the United States and Germany seem to be closest. I only have one book left in the series, and I believe I will be starting it this next week. I don’t know what the result will be, but I’m rooting for the Confederacy’s utter destruction.

Pick of the Week: Only Yesterday, Frederick Lewis Allen

Upcoming Reads:
– In To the Death, Harry Turtledove
– Daily Life in Rome
– The Roman Way
– Modern Germany
– France Since 1815
– History of the Ancient World

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