Well, another year. (Here's last year. Here's the first book depository.)
2024-01-18
Today I finished Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude.
One Hundred Years of Solitude can be read and enjoyed as merely a chronological sequence of events in the lives of the Buendia family, but it helps to know something of the underlying meaning. Gabriel García Márquez uses a fantastic fictional story as an expression of reality, with myth and history overlapping. Myth serves as a vehicle to transmit history to the reader. For example, the characters in the novel experience the Liberal political reformation of their colonial way of life, the arrival of the railway, the Thousand Days’ War (1899-1902), the corporate hegemony of the “banana company,” the cinema, the automobile, and the massacre of striking workers.
The inevitable and inescapable repetition of history is a dominant theme in One Hundred Years of Solitude. Márquez reiterates the metaphor of history as a circular phenomenon through the repetition of names and characteristics belonging to the Buendía family. The characters are controlled by their pasts and the complexity of time. Throughout the novel the characters are visited by ghosts that are symbols of the past and the haunting nature that the past has over their lives.
I found the writing to be quite poetic at times. There was a sense of history and grandeur and folly and farce and wisdom. At other times I felt like Marquez was a little too in love with his own talent.
2024-01-24
I don't really like ebooks. But sometimes I don't feel like lugging a physical book around with me. So I got something short. Britannica Educational Publishing's Ancient Rome, Michael Anderson ed.
I wouldn't say it's "provocative." It DOES very succintly talk about a lot of important stuff, such as the attempts of the Plebians to challenge the Patricians and the descent into imperialism; Roman literature; Rome's wars; Roman architecture. It's only 88 electronic pages!!!
2024-01-30
Yesterday I finished reading Jon Ronson's The Psychopath Test.
Ronson is his usual funny naif self.
The Psychopath Test is funny, informative, and even suspenseful. I want to point out the first chapter in particular: the first chapter might be the best thing Ronson has ever done as a writer. The book begins with Ronson learning about a series of self-made books that have been distributed to an exclusive group of people internationally. The people who receive these books are primarily academicians and intellectuals, but no one can quite discern WHY they received this cryptic book. The book itself seems to be a coded message, and many of its passages are ominously foreboding. Ronson attempts to get to the bottom of this mystery, and it launches him into search for what makes a psychopath. This first chapter was such a joy to read, and things become so crazy and strange — Ronson makes for a good character to lead us down this rabbithole. If you are on the fence regarding this book, sample the first several passages on Amazon, and that should be your litmus test.
The story that is told in the first chapter ultimately serves as the smoking gun for what comes later. Ronson interviews alleged psychopaths in a mental ward, researchers who pioneered work in psychopathy, the man who developed the current scale used to diagnose psychopaths, a psychopathic millionaire CEO, one of the first criminal profilers, and the man who devised the current form of the DSM (more on that in a bit). I do a lot of work in the field of psychology, so a lot of this information was not particularly new. However, with that said, the materialthat wasn’t new to me was still fun to revisit. Ronson retells a lot of this information with incredulously wide eyes and in a dry, witty way that’s hard not to love. If you’ve read any of Ronson’s work before, you know that the man is a very anxious, neurotic individual. This trait is accentuated here as Ronson travels among murders and other unhinged individuals. As Ronson becomes more involved in the subject matter, the more neurotic and paranoid he gets. Is he himself a psychopath? Are psychopaths going to find him and kill him for exposing him?
Interestingly, I found that most of the best moments in this book came from when Ronson was interviewing the perfectly “sane” people — the researchers who have spent their lives trying to pinpoint the identity of psychopaths seem to show the most psychopathic traits. This point is overtly made in one of Bob Hare’s seminars. Hare is the inventor of the current scale used to assess for psychopathy, and one of the members of his audience stands up and proclaims the man to be a psychopath himself. Hare, along with some of the researchers in the field all exhibit strange, quirky mannerisms, and their curious interviews were more interesting than, say, when Ronson interviews a mass murderer later in the book. To that point, hearing about the creation of the Diagnostic Statistics Manual (or DSM; the handbook on which ALL current abnormal psychological disorders are diagnosed and informed) was one of the highlights for me. When this interview comes late in the book, it feels only tangentially related to the main thread of The Psychopath Test, but as someone who works in the field, I was captivated by the story behind the influential manual.
It's clear from the testimony of some people that they really do lack any understanding of how other people feel. But the case of Al "Chainsaw" Dunlap shows the dangers of generalizing. Dunlap is clearly a selfish, self-centered, self-important asshole. But not a psychopath.
2024-02-01
Just finished Scott Anderson's Lawrence in Arabia: Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East. (It was published in 2013.)
From the link:
Given the horrors since 2013, especially the Israeli Nazi Party's genocide of the Palestinians happening at this very moment, the arrogance and the idiocy of the European imperialists depicted within this book are all that much more maddening. Anderson does provide a very compelling portrait of T. E. Lawrence.
2024-02-11
I read Michael Kupperman's graphic memoir All The Answers. The title is very clever. Because (as the review states) M. Kupperman's father had been a child prodigy on 1940's radio quiz shows. He knew all the answers. The guy who designed those quiz shows went on to design the 1950's television quiz shows like "The $64,000 Question" which later turned out to have been rigged, with popular contestants having "all the answers." But his father's childhood experiences marked him forever and therefore impacted the author's life and he finally wants to sit down and discuss this verboten topic with his father to get "all the answers."
From the review:
All the Answers documents Michael Kupperman’s efforts to learn more about the years his father, Joel Kupperman, spent as a child performer on Quiz Kids, first a radio game show and later an early television program. Throughout the book, he contends with both the hastening of his father’s dementia and a reticence about Quiz Kids that predates that diagnosis. The program had been a "forbidden subject” during Kupperman’s own childhood, and he devotes much of All the Answers to exploring how the experience might have damaged his father. This means also turning toward a curious intersection in US history.
...
In its gravity, scope, and personal focus, All the Answers marks a major departure for Kupperman, best known for absurdist humor comics such as Tales Designed to Thrizzle. And yet fans of those comics may still find much to like in Answers. Kupperman arrives at a variety of surreal images, such as a row of Quiz Kids participants in graduation gowns, waiting to be heard across the nation. The strangeness of Joel Kupperman’s youth often defies belief; he meets Orson Welles at one point and has no patience for Welles’s magic tricks. Kupperman’s talent for the bizarre is especially useful during a sequence in which a ghoulish Henry Ford—“trying to repair his image by reversing his stance on Jews”—stops by a hotel room Joel is occupying with his parents, keen to speak with the boy.
Answers includes a more limited selection of formal flourishes than a reader would find in a Thrizzle collection. This is a more restrained Michael Kupperman.
Glad I got it out from the library.
2024-02-20
I finished Tim Cook's second volume of his history of the Canadian Expeditionary Force in World War I: Shock Troops: Canadians Fighting the Great War, 1917-1918 last night.
I read his first volume: At the Sharp End a few year's ago.
The linked review provides lots of stuff to summarize the book. I'll add that there are interesting anecdotes such as the troops believing there were deserters from both sides living as ghouls in No Man's Land between the trenches, living by coming out of their holes at night and eating fresh corpses. The biggest takeaway for me was the insane waste of soldiers' lives (especially effective veterans) in the "Hundred Days." In my innocence I thought that the biggest casualties were taken earlier in the war and that all the training of the Canadians and the depletion of the Germans had made the casualties of the CEF in the last months of the war relatively light. Instead, it seems that instead of having really absorbed the lessons of the war, the generals (especially the French generals such as Allied Supreme Commander Ferdinand Foche) were still wedded to the "hit them hard, hit them everywhere and wear them down [and ignore the toll it's taking on us]" that had inspired the Somme and the Nievelle and Passaschendele offenses. You see, the Germans had spent their last bolt in their 1918 offensive and Canadian Commander Arthur Currie's initial counteroffensive was done according to his own timetable, despite the protestations of his superior Douglas Haig. And it was a great success. But after that, Currie either succumbed to, or agreed with the orders of his superiors to keep on attacking, again and again, and Canadians died in the thousands running up against still effective German defenses, without artillery support, without proper reconaissance, with nothing, basically, but the hard-won offensive skills of infantrymen who were being constantly sacrificed.
Would the war have been prolonged into 1919 if Currie had been given or taken a few more days here and there to plan his offensives?
The story of the soldier saved by a dream of his brother. The sections on how information was better shared within the smaller, less conservative CEF than in the British Army, the sections on the occupation of Germany and then the demobilization, when pent-up anger and frustration occasionally went past the boiling-point; and the sections on the postwar experiences of the veterans and the war's impact on Canada were quite well done.
2024-03-06
I finished Christopher McDougall's Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen a couple of nights ago.
It's from 2009. (I think.) I first heard about it when randomly flipping with the remote and coming across McDougall being interviewed on "The Daily Show" by Jon Stewart. It sounded fascinating. I actually kept it in mind for years, but never got around to reading it until someone left a copy in one of those little libraries where people put books they're finished with.
McDougall covers a heck of a lot of ground, and the book would seem scattershot if not for the throughline of McDougall’s fascination and interaction with Caballo Blanco (White Horse), the near-mythical figure at the heart of the story. Caballo is alternately venerated and vilified in the book; on the one hand, he’s a gringo on a quest for self-discovery like so many runners, on the other, he’s a grouchy, flaky, off-putting sort. He’s weird, but he works, because he feels like fiction, even though he isn’t. Too strange to make up sums him up nicely.
What also works for the book is its grounding in a couple of places: specifically the Leadville 100 Race and the underground race that takes place in the Copper Canyons. Multiple chapters are given over to these two races, which gives the reader a sense of the sprawling nature of distance running and the time and introspection that such an endeavor invites.
And I’d be remiss if I didn’t talk about the two chapters that keep me coming back to the book the most (and which have nothing to do with its narrative … more on that later): the chapters on the history — and indictment, really — of running shoes and on biomechanical evolution (chapters 25 and 28, respectively). These two chapters have done more to change the way I think about running as a whole and the way I run than a couple of years’ subscription to Runner’s World magazine and endless hours trawling running and exercise forums. In short: the human body evolved as a paragon of distance-running, and it didn’t evolve that way with $200 motion-controlled shoes on its feet.
Beginning with Caballo Blanco, an elusive runner who lives as a loner among the Tarahumara in Mexico’s Copper Canyons, a rush of eccentric characters runs through the book’s pages. We’re introduced to Ann Trason, ultra-running prodigy of the 80s and 90s. She’s pitted to race against Tarahumara men who wear little more than colorful robes and sandals for a high elevation, 100-mile run, day and night through the Colorado Rockies.
That’s just an introduction. Next we’re told about Emil Zatopek, a Forrest Gump-esque Olympic prodigy of the 1950s from Czechoslovakia. Soon we’re on to Scott Jurek, arguably the sport’s biggest star, as he collapses in Death Valley on yet another sadistic race.
From there we go to the east coast, where a young couple runs together at Virginia Beach to the rhythm of Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl,” tearing up ultra events throughout the Appalachians.
Eventually McDougall gets back around to the question of “Why does my foot hurt?”
The answer, as you might guess by this point in the story, is because of the modern running shoe industry. He argues that the human body is designed to run for long distances without all that cushioning and arch support, and that such “protective” shoes are the reason behind such a high incidence of running injuries.
He takes it a step further, sharing a theory about human evolution. To sum it up, some think that distance running played a role in homo-sapiens becoming the dominant species on earth. Despite our smaller brains and less-impressive physical stats compared to neanderthals, homo-sapiens possessed an Achilles tendon and other evolutionary features that led to greater endurance.
Our aerobic capacity allowed us to hunt in packs and literally run our prey to exhaustion, supplying a steady diet of meat that grew our brains and helped us thrive as a species. You could say that evolution has made humans born to run, thus the title. McDougall makes a compelling argument, with scientific data to back it up.
Both of those reviews say what I was going to say. It's a page-turner. I felt somewhat lost from time to time, as McDougall jumps around and keeps introducing new characters. But not as bad as the first reviewer evidently did. And the order of the stories makes sense. Especially after you've completed it.
The first review ends with high praise that I (who am not a runner, I find it boring and my right knee is fucked) agree with:
Warts notwithstanding, Born to Run, I think, takes the flying leap from being a good book about running to being a good book. If you’re going to read a book about running, this is the one to read.
And yesterday I finished Stephen F. Cohen's War With Russia? From Putin & Ukraine to Trump & Russiagate.
It's kind of depressing, reading it 2024, as Cohen describes the lying, the delusion, the stupidity of the neocon's actions against Russia since 2014, and knowing how things only got worse since the book's appearance in 2019 and Cohen's death in 2020.
This book is based on a series of weekly radio broadcasts made by Cohen under the rubric The New US-Russian Cold War. The broadcasts began in 2014 but Cohen had long argued that a new cold war was unfolding in American-Russian relations.
There is an urgency and anxiety running through Cohen’s commentaries because he sees the new cold war as much more dangerous than its predecessor. Russiagate has been accompanied by a pernicious Russophobia that demonises not just Putin but the Russian people. The resultant hysteria has been ramped up by US media, by grandstanding politicians, and by blatantly self-serving military and industrial interests. American elites seem to have lost their fear of atomic warfare, while there is little or no mainstream political opposition to current hawkish policies aimed at Russia. As Cohen points out, even at the height of the Soviet-American cold war – an existential struggle between capitalism and communism – there were many mainstream advocates of détente with the USSR. During the old cold war the communist bloc acted as a buffer between the two sides. The new cold war is being fought directly along Russia’s borders, most dangerously in a proxy civil war being battled out in Ukraine.
One response that I had was when Cohen continually mentioned how Putin was trying to help the USA to combat Islamic terrorism and that Washington's blinkered Russophobia was throwing away a valuable partnership. It is now clear to me that the Washington foreign-policy psychopaths don't give a shit about terrorism. Otherwise they wouldn't do so much to actually fund and arm and generally support them. It's all about the chaos.
2024 -03-09
Yesterday I finished Samantha M Bailey's Woman on the Edge. This turned out to be a bigger departure for me than I'd planned. A scan of my blog posts about my reading will reveal that I am not a big fiction reader. I've recently tried to rectify this because there are classic works of fiction out there that speak to the realities of their time and place as well as the timelessness of the human condition. And, as well, I know that there are current authors writing brilliant works, some still under the radar, who I would like to discover.
With that in mind I googled something like "Best Canadian Thrillers 2000's" and found a link with the "10 Best Canadian Mystery & Thriller Writers." Woman on the Edge was the first one and the fact that it had a female author appealed to me as I want to read more works by women. It was about something that happens at a subway station so I thought it would be set in Toronto.
The first few pages were dedicated to glowing reviews. I didn't want to risk any spoilers so I skipped them and started reading. I'd gotten it as an ebook from the library and, as such, I had no real indication of how long it would be. It turned out to be a short book. More plot than characterization as the review linked to above says. There's two women, one a new mother and one a lonely young widow, and the new mother has some dark secrets in her past that, combined with post-partum depression, turn her into a basket-case emotionally. She's being targeted by persons unknown who start to really turn the screws that send her over the edge. (That ain't no spoiler. It happens in the first chapter and is hinted to on the cover.)
The lonely young widow has her own skeletons in her closet and she gets wrapped up in the other woman's life and can't figure out why. I have to say that I found it irritating how, even before the pressure is really applied, the first woman can't confide in her husband AT ALL. She supposedly loves the guy but not only will she not tell him why she's acting so strangely (the stuff from her past more than the post-partum bizness) but she rejects any and all offers from him to help her. Like, if I was him, it would have gone WAY beyond a new mother overwhelmed by her hormones and the huge change in her life. I would have been thinking of getting the fuck out of there myself.
Meanwhile, while the new mother is refusing to talk to anyone but her P.A., the widow can't stop going after people to find out what's going on. Even when her lawyer is begging her to just stay put and not give the police any more reasons to suspect her of anything.
After I finished it I went to read all the glowing reviews and it turns out they're all from other women authors of similar books who probably do these things with their publishers as a form of mutual aid.
2023-03-11
Last night I finished Graham Robb's Victor Hugo: A Biography.
'One of the best biographies I have read, ever' Selina Hastings 'Mr Robb has written an enthralling book -- one of the great biographies of our time. He contrives not to be dwarfed by his subject, which is some contrivance. He makes of Hugo's life a story as exciting to read as it was extraordinary to have lived. He has a matchless gift for narrative. His style is epigrammatic and compelling. His judgements seem fair -- not something Hugo was used to in life. Every Place Victor Hugo should now have a Cafe-Bar Graham Robb. He deserves, and will probably get, the Legion d'honneur' Allan Massie, Daily Telegraph 'Robb achieves the goal of all good literary biographies by making us long to regain, or savour for the first time, Hugo's company as a writer. Surely no chronicler of his life or analyst of his work has ever looked this prodigy of nature so unflinchingly in the eye' Jonathan Keates, Literary Review 'Graham Robb's exuberant biography of the French writer blows the cobwebs away from a neglected hero and sets him before us in lurid and quite unforgettable shape. Robb's jaunty, self-confident style is gloriously appropriate to his subject ...Robb's enthusiasm is hugely exhilarating and his biography is a fascinating study in the making of a celebrity' Miranda Seymour, Sunday Times, Books of the Year 'The best life of the writer available in English (and likely to remain so for some time) . ..His fascinating, totally readable Life will introduce Hugo to many readers who know him only as a name' Robin Buss, Independent on Sunday
As I understand it, Robb says that most Hugo biographies (whether French or English or whatever) are either hagiographies or hatchet-jobs. Robb claims that his biography of Hugo is going to be objective and based on a wider reading of sources, both of Hugo's contempories and Hugo's own writings and personal papers.
I saw this book and I figured that I'd known about his name and the titles of some of his works for almost my entire life, even though I'd never read anything by him (a very common thing in the English-speaking world) and what I did know was that he was a hero of the French Left and, as an old man, he remained something of a satyr.
This biography is nicely written. Robb has his own voice and his own sense of humour. It is effortlessly interesting because Hugo's life was inherently interesting. (For instance, at one point in his childhood he live in a palace in Spain because his father was a Napoleonic general engaged in the sort of activities depicted by Goya in his "Horrors of War" series.)
Hugo's reputation as a socialist is remarkable considering his neutral opinion on the 1830 Revolution, his violent opposition to the 1848 Revolution, his penchant for sex (occasionally paid) with female servants and other working class women and, lastly, his great wealth.
With regards to the sex part, in 1870, when Hugo returned to France from nineteen years of exile at the age of 68, women lined up on his stairwell to have sex with him. I was particularly surprised (and somewhat delighted) to read that the courageous revolutionary Louise Michel was one of them. [It turns out from that Wikipedia page that they'd been corresponding through letters for five years by that point. I'd read that page before, but hadn't processed that factoid.]
2024-03-16
I read David Eagleman's The Brain: The Story of You from 2015.
It was about 220 pages of fairly large font but it had a lot of cool stuff in it. I'd seen the bit of the BBC documentary about the teenaged brain being very insecure about its developing personality. Agonizing about fitting in socially and an undeveloped part of the brain that evaluates risk makes for a risky time of life.
His depiction of the world outside our senses was one of the clearest expressions of what I'd refer to as Schopenhauer's "Will." According to Eagleman it is silent, dark, odourless. It is just energy. Light photons bouncing off of objects, atoms within molecules moving around environments of other molecules. None of it having any impact except when it impacts on the senses of biological creatures and those senses are sent (in our case and in some other life forms) to these brains, encased in the darks of our skulls.
He says a lot of fascinating things. As a leftist I got a little irked how he used the 2008 financial crisis as an illustration of how people tend to value immediate goals over future benefits. Most of the people who signed those garbage mortgages were lied to. But he does mention how the financial sector was also guilty of thinking short-term. (Unless they were sure they'd get bailed-out by the taxpayers.) And the weakest part of the book was the part about transhumanism.
But the parts about synesthesia, schizophrenia, how time doesn't really slow down like it sometimes seems to do in a crisis, and about how much calculation and unconscious activity is going on to allow us to not only play chess, but to move the pieces, adjust our position, walk without thinking about it, and so-on and such-forth, ... really cool.
2024-03-27
I read Serotonin by Michel Houellebec (translated by Shaun Whiteside).
I didn't think it was as horribly misogynistic as that reviewer did. Though I didn't think it was a feminist tract either. The novel is credited with predicting the Yellow Vest movement in France and, upon re-reading it in that context it's pretty cool. The narrator's parents loved each other and not so much him. I couldn't really sympathize with the narrator. Good looking. Upper-middle class background. Financially rewarding career. A series of beautiful love interests, two of whom he betrayed and now regrets that. At many times a shallow man. But, I suppose, depression can afflict anyone and we are all the self-pitying tragic hero of our individual stupid lives. It was interesting to read about contemporary France in the voice of an actual Frenchman.
2024-04-08
I finished Alessandro Barbero's Dante (Allan Cameron, trans.)
Turns out that not much is known conclusively about Dante's life. Much of the book is about piecing together fragments from letters and legal documents directly connected to Dante himself. Also, the contribution of current events to the writing of his poems, and speculation about how things said in Dante's poems might establish when they were written, and where. Finally, historical knowledge of the period that would have had an impact on Dante's life are looked at.
It was interesting to see how merchant republics incorporated the idea of "nobility" into their value system. I was a trifle disappointed that Dante's great love, Beatrice, was just someone he met once at a party when they were both children. Men and women lived greatly segregated lives in Medieval Florence. Dante saw Beatrice only twice after that. And, if I recall correctly, was too shy to say anything to her both times. I knew that she married someone else and that Dante later married a woman with whom he had a few children and that Beatrice died young from an illness. But I thought there'd been more to the relationship. Finally, it was kind of funny to read about how Dante was forced to write the praises of men he'd condemned in his earlier poems because, as an exile, he needed their help. Luckily for him his status as a great poet made his friendship valuable to them.
2024-04-13
Just finished Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility from 1811.
I'd read Pride and Prejudice (1813) before and quite enjoyed it. I actually liked it more than Sense and Sensibility. But I think her big success in her lifetime had been Sense and Sensibility for which she had accepted a lump sum payment from the publisher who thereafter took all the proceeds from its sale. She negotiated better terms for subsequent novels but they didn't sell as well and she remained in genteel poverty for the rest of her short life. (She died aged 41.)
That being said, Austen does have her critics. Charlotte Brontë was quoted describing this debut as, ‘a carefully fenced, highly cultivated garden, with neat borders and delicate flowers; but no glance of a bright, vivid physiognomy, no open country, no fresh air, no blue hill, no bonny beck.’
...
There’s a lot of walking, and talks of love and marriage while WALKING in a rose garden – at least that is something different. Marrianne, who is considered the ‘sensibility’ portion of the two sisters, while walking (I feel like I am repeating myself, but there is just so much walking. I might as well call this book ‘The Guide to Walking’ by Jane Austen), slips and sprains her ankle and is saved by the dashing and highly eligible Willoughby. Love starts to bloom . . . kind of (it’s a bit of a slow burn, but I don’t mind a slow pace). Drama of regency proportions follows Elinor, who constitutes the ‘sense’ of the book. She also has a love blooming . . . kind of (on and off again).
...
I would recommend Sense and Sensibility if you are like me and are reading the books in order (I like chronology) and wanting to begin with the first of Austan’s published works. However, as fast paced as this book is, it comes to a halt towards the end. I definitely think Austen got better at her craft as she went along (at the time of writing, I am making my way through Pride and Prejudice, and I can see the improvement).
For my part, Austen's treatment of the servant class, as irrelevancies beyond the occasional tasks they perform, is jarring. We have these idlers consumed with their romances, decorating their homes (if they can afford it) and attending dinners and parties where (according to Austen) most of the conversation is artificial and boring. They all talk about being unable to live on incomes at least three times greater (for the poorest among them) than a working man's wages, as if the human beings making up their beds, getting their horses, or sending their messages, have no personal lives of their own worth speaking about.
Still, Austen is a good writer who describes her characters well. The development of the main characters' opinion of Mrs. Jennings was something I enjoyed. She, herself, remained a somewhat overbearing, talkative, good-hearted busy-body, but her innate decency and good nature, and her devotion to her friends, gradually win her their affection.
2024-04-29
I brought three books to a conclusion this weekend. First, I read an e-book version of A. C. Grayling's War: An Enquiry. Here's two reviews ONE and TWO that liked it more than I did.
Personally, I found the first chapter confusing at the beginning. It seemed to be a hurried summary of the major wars and warriors of the Mediterranean region and onward, but it eventually resolved itself into an account of how technology affected war-making and therefore political power. If it had clearly been introduced as such, I wouldn't have been so puzzled thinking that I was supposed to be reading a book about the history of ethical and moral thinking about war.
Then there was a chapter on the origins of war that wasted a lot of time wondering if WAR (organized violence on the part of states) could be blamed on human nature. The discussion seemed confused because it didn't define its terms at the beginning and, therefore, the fact that individuals and prehistoric societies don't engage in war (because war is something done by states) led Grayling and his cited authors to conclude that war is not a natural thing. But of course pre-state human societies (families and tribes) and individual humans up to the present day cannot did not and cannot engage in something that, by definition, has nothing to do with them. If Grayling had instead discussed VIOLENCE and traced the path from violence to war, and the path from individuals and tribes to organized states, it would have been a much more useful discussion.
Then there's a chapter on the "Just War" theorizing from Saint Augustine through to the Renaissance and up to the present day. It was here that the stink of Western liberal delusion about the moral superiority of the Western Europe and the Anglo-American world truly interfered with my enjoyment of the book. Apparently terrorism and violent conflict (in places like El Salvador and Colombia) are, like Russian and Chinese irredentism, problems that the ethical superstars in Washington, London and The Hague are forced to wrestle with as they strive to maintain peace and build a better world for us all.
I also finished Shigeru Mizuki's Showa 1944-1953: A History of Japan.
This is the third volume of a multi-volume work. I haven't read the other two. This was just on display at my local library and I decided to check it out.
Showa 1944-1953: A History of Japan continues the award-winning author Shigeru Mizuki's autobiographical and historical account of the Showa period in Japan. This volume recounts the events of the final years of the Pacific War, and the consequences of the war's devastation for Mizuki and the Japanese populace at large.
After the surprise attack at Pearl Harbor, Japan and the United States are officially at war. The two rival navies engage in a deadly game of feint and thrust, waging a series of microwars across the tiny Pacific islands. From Guadalcanal to Okinawa, Japan slowly loses ground. Finally, the United States unleashes the deathblow with a new and terrible weapon-the atomic bomb. The fallout from the bombs is beyond imagining.
On another front, Showa 1944-1953 traces Mizuki's own life story across history's sweeping changes during this period, charting the impact of the war's end on his life choices. After losing his arm during the brutal fighting, Mizuki struggles to decide where to go: whether to remain on the island as an honored friend of the local Tolai people or return to the rubble of Japan and take up his dream of becoming a cartoonist. Showa 1944-1953 is a searing condemnation of the personal toll of war from one of Japan's most famous cartoonists.
I found the part where he sneaks away from the army hospital to live with the forest people to be rather strange. The savage discipline of the Japanese army didn't seem to extend to the medical sector. And why other men didn't run off to eat better in the jungle was odd.
And then there's a part where the almost total breakdown of the Japanese economy in the immediate postwar years caused Shigeru Mizuki's fellow wounded veterans to decide to form a club, to do what, exactly, they hadn't decided. And they squat in an abandoned building and just hang-out like a gang of adolescent boys. Strange.
It's a good way to introduce yourself to this part of Japanese history.
Finally, I finished Peter Ackroyd's biography of Charles Dickens.
I'd been meaning to find a biography of Dickens for over a year. I'd heard that he fell in love with a younger woman and tried to have his wife committed to an insane asylum. That turned out to be an exaggeration. But he did separate from his wife (who never stopped loving him) and he did have an infatuation with a younger woman. (This happened more than once. And I think I agree with Acroyd's contention that these infatuations were never sexual. Dickens had a bizarre fixation on pure, angelic young women who he could love as purely as a brother loves a sister. If they died young and tragically, even better.)
I also heard that he started out as a journalist. This was true. I'm glad that I read this biography that explains this giant of a writer.
Dickens seems to me to have been an extremely charismatic man-child. He gave public readings from his books later in his career where his personal magnetism could work on crowds. He suffered from the adulation of national celebrity. He knew he was on display early in his career. He was a man of great devotions and petulant hatreds. A selfish, insecure, generous and confident extrovert.
2024-05-10
I finished Elif Shafak's The Island of Missing Trees a few days ago. I got it out of some neighbour's little lawn library box.
It's an enjoyable read and it deals with a lot of weighty subjects in a surprisingly light way. Everything is woven into the narrative in a natural way.
In the weeks after finishing this novel, I found myself referring to the tree narrator in the book on multiple occasions. How she spoke such truth! Some of the facts she shared seemed unbelievable, then I would read others that I knew to be true. So I counted everything she said as a reliable narrator.
The Island of Missing Trees captivated me as I learned some history of Cyprus and some tree wisdom— not an expected combination! There are myriad ways for readers to connect their experiences and learning with this novel. Intergeneration trauma is explored in Ada’s family as well as in nature, as the story unravels through bits and pieces in three time periods— Cyprus in 1974, Cyprus in the early 2000s and London in the late 2010s. In addition the ecosystem, the flow of time, and secrets are essential elements of the novel that we have each experienced personally.
I'm glad that I found it.
2024-06-04
I just finished the 2007 edition of Tom Standage's 1998 The Victorian Telegraph.
I read about its existence in David Deutsch's The Beginning of Infinity (which I'm still slogging through) and I thought it sounded interesting. It's pretty good. Standage does a great job of explaining the development of the science that produced the telegraph, its cultural impact, and the similarities it shares with today's internet. (Apparently Western Union stopped providing telegraph services in 1996!)
It really did help build the modern world. Communicating information via electricity was an enormous development from communication via physical objects (usually on paper) or via some visual signalling system (such as the early French telegraph system). Diplomacy, war, business and human interaction were all transformed and the world hasn't been the same since.
2024-06-17
I finished Andrew H. Browning's The Panic of 1819: The First Great Depression.
I thought it was an excellent book. When I first became political, back in the 1990's, I was interested in the history of money. John Kenneth Galbraith's books on the subject always mentioned the USA's early experience with under-capitalized, unregulated banks and their flood of paper money that lead to speculation, inflation, and disaster. Browning's book goes into this topic in great detail, while providing a very clear explanation of why things happened the way that they did. The review that I linked to provides a good summary of the book. I would have liked a chapter dedicated to those who profited from the bad times. Who purchased the debtors' land when it went up for auction. Who was able to sieze the assets of land and capital for when the economy rebounded?
Still and all, an excellent book about a a very important, but often overlooked bit of economic history.
2024-06-19
I'm giving up on reading Barbara Marx Hubbard's Conscious Evolution: Awakening the Power of Our Social Potential (1998. 2015).
I was looking on my ebook library catalogue for a book on evolution. This was one of the first that I saw. When I looked into it, it seemed a little similar to what David Deutsch is saying in The Beginning of Infinity [which I'm still reading].
I got 1/3rd of the way through it and she has been saying the same thing over and over again. Humanity is now a global culture. There's now a world mind. We're all connected to the Earth and now we're conscious. We have it within us to divert from the destructive path that we're on and choose to evolve to a higher form of society comprised of higher evolved forms of life.
So, Barbara Marx was the daughter of a wealthy Jewish toy manufacturer. She wanted more than money and material blessings. What was life all about? While at La Sorbonne in Paris she went into a cafe and asked the young man there, Earl Hubbard (no relation to the Scientology guy) what his thing was and he apparently gave her some laughably pompous statement about his art that swept her off of her feet. She became Barbara Marx Hubbard. (Wikipedia says that her sister married Daniel Ellsberg of Pentagon Papers fame!)
She seemed like she was a nice lady with a good heart. I'm a cynical pessimistic misanthrope so maybe I should turn off my negativity and try to (at least temporarily) embrace her more positive view of the development of life on earth and the sources of the world's religions and yadda yadda yadda. Even after she says that she's not providing a blueprint for how to transform her vague notions into a specific program for the complete evolution of our species and our society. (She was just planting the seed of an idea!)
Then I got to this:
As Nassim Haramein, founder of the Resonance Project, told me in a personal conversation, we will not need to manipulate our own biology, but rather tap into the causal level in the quantum vacuum. We will be able to "engineer the vacuum" as Haramein puts it. We will thus gain direct access to the almost infinite energy in the vacuum. We will gain the capacity to affect gravity and to evolve our own bodies, eventually transcending the current creature-human condition through resonance with geometric structures at the causal level, that which is causing physics and biology. We are midway between the infinitely large and infinitely small, capable of resonating with the fundamental code of evolution.
Which sounded pretty dodgy. I had to look the guy up. Turns out (unsurprisingly) he's a fraud.
This book is interesting in that it shows what people born into money with a certain amount of "spiritualist" delusion informing their worldview will produce.
2024-06-24
I [actually] finished David Deutsch's The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World last night.
This review provides an excellent summary of the book's many ideas. I got interested in Deutsch from his appearance in another book where he said that we will never understand reality or existence. We will solve mysteries only to reveal new mysteries underneath. It's mysteries all the way down.
I've mentioned this book as I've read parts of it two or three times already. At the end of the day I'd have to say that I agree with Deutsch more than I disagree, but he is clearly much more of an optimist, and much more a devotee of liberal-capitalism and "Western Civilization" than I am.
He has a chapter on electoral systems dedicated to the premise that politics should be about being able to try new ideas and to discard bad ideas and bad decision-makers when their policies prove themselves to be bad. That is his only ideal. For Deutsch, "democracy" is good only to the extent that it can do this better than other political systems. Somehow or other, this belief leads him to champion the UK's (and Canada's and the USA's) reliance on the FPTP eletoral system. It's a silly chapter full of all sorts of naivete that could only have been written by someone who has done all right for themselves materially.
There's a section where he talks about static and dynamic societies. Dynamic societies are to be preferred over static societies, because dynamic societies allow for creative people to solve problems. Static societies (every society that resisted the Enlightenment) are horrible places because problems can't be solved because people can't solve them. Deutsch writes about being a student of Paul ("The Population Bomb") Ehrlich and being subjected to his pessimistic prophecies. (Prediction is preferable to prophecy says Deutsch.) Generally speaking, I agree. But I think Deutsch is too glib and dismissive of how people at the bottom of a social-economic hierarchy (the majority of humanity) might respond to social upheaval. And he doesn't seem to really care about the ideas behind "sustainability" and seems to embrace the nitwit capitalist hope that we'll innovate our way out of any self-created crisis.
He believes that there is an objective criteria for beauty and truth. That all isn't relative. He's harshly dismissive of postmodernism or post-structuralism and the whole "linguistic turn" in philosophy. So he isn't a fan of Wittgenstein. I have yet to read Wittgenstein but from what I know about him, he believed very strongly in things he claimed to know nothing about, and therefore should have had no opinions, one way or the other.
It would be a fun thing for you to read more reviews of this book. I have. I came to it already agreeing with Deutsch about a lot of things and ended up being infuriated at times by his sloppy (through overconfidence in his own ideas) writing and his arrogance at the rightness of his thinking, which is most evident in his childish enthusiasm for late-capitalist Anglo-American society.
2023-06-07
I read The Age of Innocence, the first volume of the complete "Alack Sinner" comics by José Muñoz and Carlos Sampayo.
They're a writer-artist team from Argentina. Alack Sinner is a Korean War veteran, ex-cop, private investigator, taxi driver who lives in New York City. It's a very film noir, extreme early-1970's Scorcese vision of NYC. But very suited to the stark contrast black & white artwork.
2024-07-01
I read S. E. Tomas's Crackilton.
S. E. Tomas bills himself as "Toronto's Street Author" and he sells his series of books at a table in downtown Toronto. For a while he was at Front and Bay Streets in front of Union Station. Now he's at other locations. Crackilton is about being a crack cocaine addict in Hamilton. I used to live near the neighbourhoods in question in the novel and wanted to buy his book for the longest time.
The book is very dry and matter-of-fact about how an out-of-work carnival worker manages to feed his crack habit in the off-season. Crack sounds like a horrible drug to get addicted to because it's so futile. All that happens is the guy's hearing gets really sharp, he gets paranoid, and then it wears off and he wants to do it again.
Tomas doesn't tell us much about his protagonist. Perhaps, being a junkie, he doesn't feel like saying or thinking about anything other than crack. So, he never sees his daughter in Toronto. He hardly thinks about her. His live-in girlfriend Christine (who never seems to really wonder why he NEVER has any money even though he's out every night driving people around for cash) is just always studying for her statistics in social work class or making quick meals that he never eats.
It was fun picturing the various locations in Hamilton that he drives to. And hearing about how people scrambled in this society. I suspect his other book about being a carny would be more entertaining.
2024-07-10
I finished Worlds Without End: Exoplanets, Habitability and the Future of Humanity by Chris Impey.
I was hoping for some science-based speculation about possible life on other worlds. You know, ... what if you're living on a moon orbiting a gas giant in the "Goldilocks Zone" of a red giant star? What would you see? How would life be affected by your position? It wasn't about that. But it was one of the best summaries of the methods for detecting exoplanets that I've yet read. Impey has a way with simplifying concepts. And there is some worthwhile prediction of the near future of space exploration and habitation within the next two generations.
2024-07-14
I finished Deborah Blum's 1997 book Sex on the Brain: The Biological Differences Between Male & Female.
It's not a bad book. Blum presents a lot of then-cutting edge science in an accessible manner. How confident she and some of the experts she speaks with would be about the statements they made in 1997 I couldn't say. She seems a little too comfortable endorsing stereotypes about male and female behaviour, but, then again, while only five percent of men are violent criminals, 95 percent of violent criminals are male. There's a lot of overlap in male and female behaviour but there are also clear trends that show us separating into separate streams.
I found this book on my bookshelf and I don't remember where or when I got it.
2024-07-22
Last Friday I finished The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens.
As this blog-post will show, I just read a biography about Dickens, and it made me remember how huge a writer he was and how little I know of his work. The Pickwick Papers started off as a series of anecdotes about a quartet of independently wealthy guys travelling about the English countryside and it was to accompany a series of illustrations and run in a montly magazine or a daily newspaper or something. But Dickens took command of the whole thing, the original artist eventually committed suicide (for separate reasons apparently) and everything changed.
The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (also known as The Pickwick Papers) was the first novel by English author Charles Dickens. His previous work was Sketches by Boz, published in 1836, and his publisher Chapman & Hall asked Dickens to supply descriptions to explain a series of comic "cockney sporting plates" by illustrator Robert Seymour,[1] and to connect them into a novel. The book became a publishing phenomenon, with bootleg copies, theatrical performances, Sam Weller joke books, and other merchandise.[2] On its cultural impact, Nicholas Dames in The Atlantic writes, "'Literature' is not a big enough category for Pickwick. It defined its own, a new one that we have learned to call 'entertainment'."[3] The Pickwick Papers was published in 19 issues over 20 months, and it popularised serialised fiction and cliffhanger endings.[4]
Me, I thought it was amazing seeing such a talented writer and knowing that this was the book that started it all. Dickens was highly charismatic and it shows in the excitement of the text. He was also an incoherent thinker, full of right-wing maudlin sentiments, lofty progressive idealism, rampant racism and misogyny. In this book, women are truly delightful creatures, until they get older than their mid-twenties, after which they become tiresome hags, hysterical spinsters, dupes to religious grifters, or someother unpleasantness.
Some funny moments and many memorable characters as well. The appreciation at the end by G. K. Chesterton was a valid addition.
2024-07-23
I finished Edward Dolnick's The Clockwork Universe: Isaac Newton, The Royal Society and the Making of the Modern World last weekend. I was listening to it being read on YouTube and thought I'd read it for myself.
The book offers oft-forgotten context to the earliest discoveries of the scientific revolution. It is easy to forget that the world which brought us the universal law of gravitation was a world still full of angels and demons, plagues and deadly fires, high murder rates, and, vividly, the odors that come from an unbathed populace. They believed in magic, madness, heaven, and sin. We think of the scientific revolution being a dramatic reversal from the “dark ages,” but the picture is far more nuanced. A great deal of intellectualism thrived during the medieval period; the shift toward empirical thinking developed slowly over the centuries.
It's a fun, informative read.
2024-07-31
I read The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine by Michael Lewis.
I'd already seen the movie and enjoyed it. The movie turns out to have done a pretty good dramatization of the book. The book explains more about how mortgage bonds (and a few of the other financial products mentioned) did, at first, have some sort of utility. It also goes more into detail about how CDO's were garbage and how the whole thing got so confusing and dishonest that even the bond market grifters managed to confuse themselves along with the rating agencies
Along the way, the reader is also introduced to artists, writers, friends, and lovers of the existentialists, especially in postwar Paris. These include the novelist and jazz musician Boris Vian, who died tragically young at age 39 of a heart attack; Claude Lanzmann, the maker of Shoah, de Beauvoir’s lover, and the current editor of Les Temps modernes; the American expat Richard Wright, deeply influenced in his later work by existentialism; and the Hungarian writer, journalist, and activist Arthur Koestler, a friend of Sartre and Camus who eventually fell out with both after a fight at the end of a night of drunken revelry and political disagreement. Finally, Bakewell fills out her team with the Anglo-American friends, fellow travelers, and popularizers of the existentialists and their thought. These include Iris Murdoch and the “angry young man” Colin Wilson in the UK, and, in this country, William Barrett and Walter Kaufmann.
Beyond the leading figures of the age, Bakewell also moves further afield, discussing the impact of Sartre’s ideas on, for example, the Czech political leaders during the Prague Spring of 1968. She also traces the impact of de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex on British and American women of different walks of life. Exhaustively, perhaps even exhaustedly, she also examines existentialism’s impact on popular literary and cinematic works of the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s. These include The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, The Incredible Shrinking Man, and Invasion of the Body Snatchers. All are notable for their portraits of alienation and conformity, Sartre’s category of en soi. (Bakewell could of course mention many other works as well, given the popularity and prevalence of existentialist themes, not only in British and American popular culture, but in that of other countries as well.)
As this suggests, At the Existentialist Café is in fact much more than an “existentialism light” primer. It is also a sensitive analysis of individuals and of the interplay of personalities against the backdrop of intense and fraught intellectual times.
The vague emotions of daily life, the interesting characters we encounter, the sights and sounds and smells of new places—good autobiographies direct our attention to these little details.
In this spirit I picked up Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia to read during my trip to Seville. It was an excellent choice. It’s been a while since I’ve read Orwell, and I’d nearly forgotten what a fine writer he is. In fact, perhaps the most conspicuous quality of this book is the caliber of the prose. It is written with such grace, clarity, and ease, that I couldn’t help being constantly impressed and, I admit, extremely envious at times. The writing is direct but never blunt; the tone is personal and natural, but not chummy. The book may have been a bit too readable, actually, since I had a hard time prying myself away to go explore Seville (and a book has to be very good indeed to compete with Seville).
There seems to be a bit of confusion about this book. Specifically, some people seem to come to it expecting to learn about the Spanish Civil War. This is a mistake; Orwell only experienced a sliver of the war, and his understanding of the political situation was limited to the infighting between various leftist groups. The events and conflicts that led up to the war, and the progress of the war itself, are for the most part unexplained. This book is, rather, a deeply personal record of his time in the Spanish militia. We learn more about Orwell’s military routine than about any battles between fascist and government forces. More light is shed on Orwell’s own political opinions than the political situation in Spain.
If you come to the book with this in mind, it will not disappoint.
2024-09-09
I finished Daniel C. Dennett's From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds about a week ago.
Even though he was apparently one of the infamous "new atheists" with Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, I'd never heard of him. He said he'd been writing for 50 years, so I knew he was old. The book was from 2017. I was surprised to find out he had recently died. The writing is so alive. It's the work of a man conveying the culmination of decades of research and debating and theorizing.
I don't agree with some of it but I quite agree with most of it. Dennett argues that for the most part, human brain activity is "competence without comprehension." We flatter ourselves that we are really these literally self-directed entities doing what WE want to do and understanding things the whole time.
Dennett argues that much of what we do is no different from a bacteria reacting to something in its environment out of self-preservation. He mentions a cuckoo chick pushing the other birds' eggs out of the nest after it hatches. Dennett says that it is very cold-blooded and, also, that the cuckoo chick is acting instinctively with absolutely no comprehension of the significance of its actions. We humans evolved from this to greater and greater complexity. As primates, living in collectives we needed to be able to read social cues to survive. As collectives, we needed to work together to survive.
I don't recall if there was a lead-in to the topic, but it just seemed as if Dennett starts talking about memes. And I really don't have a problem with most of what he says, but I don't remember the bio-evolutionary context as to where they came from. Dennett just introduces them. Memes are random products of human culture. A snippet from a song, wearing one's baseball cap backwards. A huge category of memes are WORDS. Words are ideas in our heads. I'm not convinced, I'm actually put off by Dennett's attempt to conflate memes with viruses. Viruses try to get inside a host and reproduce themselves. Their origins in chemistry and biology give them some sort of reality and a connection with actual life.
At one point Dennett asserts that an optical illusion (seeing red and blue colours after staring at their contrasting colours for example) have absolutely no reality. Not even inside the brain. But somehow "memes" are real and they "want" to propagate.
Aside from that, I have no problem with Dennett's main point that memes are a product of our social culture, and that (however it developed) language turbo-charged our ability to create culture and share knowledge and express ourselves and to create our own individual notions of human consciousness. Facial cues, body language, grunts, hand signals, speech, writing, words, ideas, concepts, ... took our evolution from blind natural selection towards intelligent [human] design.
Lastly, I took issue with Dennett's insistence that animals do not have the self-awareness that we do. I would see myself as inbetween the vast chasm separating Dennett from those who think that dogs are almost equal to humans in their thinking. Speaking of dogs, when Dennett is discussing language acquisition in infants, toddlers and children, at one point he claims that a child pointing at a dog and saying "Doggie!" has no idea what they're doing. That seems a trifle extreme.
A couple of days ago I finished Harold R. Johnson's Peace and Good Order: The Case for Indigenous Justice in Canada.
I don't want to be someone who reads one book on a contentious subject about people from a different culture and thereafter insist that I now know the answer to difficult questions, simply because the writer was so persuasive. I will state that I think Johnson is absolutely right when he says that Canada's First Nations should take their justice system into their own hands, because the status-quo is failing miserably.
Peace and Good Order is a scathing indictment of the Canadian criminal justice system presented through Harold Johnson’s lived experiences as an Indigenous defence lawyer and later Crown prosecutor in Northern Saskatchewan. The book alternates in tone, acting in part as a memoir, at times as a confession, but always presenting a compelling critique of Canadian criminal justice. The seamless shifts between the different tones combine to provide a powerful testimony to the utter ineffectiveness of incarceration as a deterrence mechanism and the havoc it wreaks on the lives of Indigenous communities. Johnson argues that despite all evidence to the contrary, the “principle of deterrence” continues to reign supreme in Canada’s justice system.1 Johnson does not resign himself to this grisly reality, however. Instead, he presents a forceful call: Indigenous Peoples must revive their own justice systems, with or without Canada’s approval.
What made it interesting reading about Canada's abusive, destructive relationship with the First Nations, within the context of Israel's current genocidal colonization campaign, is that Johnson depicts the growing incarceration rates of Aboriginal peoples in Canada's prisons as being an almost accidental process. Some of the calls for greater policing in First Nations communities come from the communities themselves. (Johnson points out that social views within Aboriginal communities run the gamut from right-wing, socially conservative, free-market Christians to environmentalist, traditional spirituality.) As well, Johnson writes about individuals among the colonizers, from police and lawyers to politicians and other policy makers who are genuinely alarmed at the sorry state of things and seem to genuinely want to change things to serve First Nations peoples better.
It's a clearly written, persuasively argued look at a very complicated, fraught topic.
As he was finishing this book, Johnson found out that he was dying of lung cancer. The second part of the book are excerpts from an unfinished memoir that he'd started to write upon hearing this news. It's very eloquent and moving and it also touches on much of what he spoke of in the first half of the book. The book came out in 2019.
2024-09-19
I finished Leonardo: The First Scientist by Michael White (formerly of one of the less-famous iterations of "The Thompson Twins.") the other day. (White has since passed on, but he was writing a book a year apparently. Wow.)
White disagrees (as do I) with contemporary scientists who pooh-pooh claims that Leonardo da Vinci was a scientist. While it's true that Leonardo doesn't meet the criteria of a 20th-Century definition of "scientist" it's nonetheless true that he was applying scientific criteria to the study of the world in the early-16th Century.
The way that White says it is that if we change the definition of "scientist" we can make Leonardo one. I say that we should just show how isolated, path breaking, original, skilled and brilliant Leonardo da Vinci was in his own time and ask who could have hoped to have measured up to him in his own time.
Leonardo da Vinci, being born out of wedlock, was unable to access a top-of-the-line education. But he compensated for that by being willing to get his hands dirty. He learned what he could of Aristotle's (mostly wrong) speculations of the world, but then had the courage and dedication to the truth to discard Aristotle when experience and experiment said reality was otherwise.
This isn't a heavy scientific book. But it's a biography that told me more about the subject than I'd known previously and was an enjoyable read.
[A British television show built one of Leonardo's military tanks according to his designs and it worked pretty well.]
2024-09-23
I read Fatherland by Nina Bunjevac.
It tells the tragic story of her own father's fatal involvement in right-wing Serbian nationalism. As a story-teller, Bunjevac knows how to arrange events and reveal emotions and convey information so that everything flows effortlessly. And that skill is reinforced by her beautiful artistic style.
Let's see what The Guardian has to say about it:
It's a sad story, and Bunjevac presents it in stark black and white panels that evoke photographs and propaganda posters but have enough nuance to capture family life. She does not shy away from brutality – silhouettes of a grieving mother and scenes from detention camps hit hard. Fatherland's main focus is domestic, and Bunjevac's portrait of a broken family reveals the personal impact of geopolitics. It's a shame the book doesn't drill deeper – none of the characters are developed as much as they could be, and the historical background is brief. But this is a poignant memoir, and a fine introduction to the Balkans' troubled 20th century.
I also read Reasons of State by Alejo Carpentier. I can't recall the steps on the e-reader search thing that led me to it but, regardless, I'm quite happy that I found it. Carpentier was pals with Gabriel Garcia Marquez apparently, and had as much to do with the invention of "magical realism."
I don't know why Carpentier switches from first to third person narration occasionally, but I decided to just go with it. I wasn't sure at first what time period the story takes place in but it's just before the First World War and then proceeds into the late-1930's. It tells the story of a South American dictator from his perspective. His corruption and violence are just mentioned in passing. Such as when the new model prison is being built out of concrete. Or when he's in an ambulance thinking about all the housing and road improvement projects that he stole from. You don't really sympathize with him but you see him as a [very] flawed individual with his own mind.
The thoughts of the dictator and his nemesis "The Student" were very well crafted. It's a funny, entertaining, educational sort of book.
2024-09-29
I'm giving up on e-reading Montaigne's Essays. I've gotten as far as an essay on horses. (Chapter XLVIII). tHIS VERSION was translated by one Charles Cotton and edited by someone named William Carew Hazlitt. And it was originally published in 1877.
This isn't something suited for an e-reader. Also, I'm not enamoured enough of the writing to plough through it all in one go so that I can finish it before I need to return it. Montaigne seems like he was a bit of a cold fish. I have to believe that there was a degree of self-parody in that letter he wrote to a noblewoman on how she should educate her son. His own writing seems like an example of the overly polished, excessively wordy style he says should be avoided. I get the feeling that he'd experienced combat during the French religious wars between Catholics and Hugenots.
2024-10-03
I finished Hallie Rubenhold's The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper.
I agree with a few of the things said in the review linked to above:
The writing is very clear and confident, and reads much like fiction rather than non-fiction. I’m sure this is a conscious decision on Rubenhold’s part, but the serious lack of primary source evidence must be jointly responsible for this. The book is split into five parts as expected, with subchapters that feel well organised and well-paced, starting most cases with the parents of the victim and ending abruptly after their deaths.
A secondary objective of the book seems to be to dispel the myth that the victims were all prostitutes, a broad brush that the media had elected to tar the victims with. This book has received some criticism on this point: “does it really matter if the women were prostitutes?”. Yes. Should it matter? Now that is a different question, the answer to which is of course no. Whether the victims were or were not prostitutes has no bearing on how they deserved to have their lives ended, but it is undeniable that this generalised characterisation of the victims at the time is part of the reason why some people subconsciously disregarded their personal history as not important. In this respect, then, Rubenhold is right to correct those misconceptions.
But now I'm going to see what the reviewer at The Guardian had to say.
Forests have been felled in the interests of unmasking the murderer, but until now no one has bothered to discover the identity of his victims. The Five is thus an angry and important work of historical detection, calling time on the misogyny that has fed the Ripper myth.
It is astonishing how little we know about these five, apart from their names. Hallie Rubenhold fleshes out their stories from the scraps that are available: coroner’s inquests (three of which are missing); “a body of edited, embellished, misheard and re-interpreted newspaper reports”; parish registers; court registers; birth, marriage and death records; rate books and the archives of the London workhouses. For accounts of poverty in London she turns to Francis Place, Henry Mayhew and Charles Booth; she gets facts and figures from Mrs Beaton. With the documentary veracity of a set of Hogarth prints, Rubenhold follows the victims’ doomed footsteps from birth to death. Except that there is no attempt to imagine each woman’s last moments, or describe the state of her body, or further the search for their killer. Instead she asks how it is that these women – all of them somebody’s daughter, somebody’s sister, somebody’s lover – ended up alone and destitute on the streets of Whitechapel.
Their lives are grimly similar: born into hardship, they moved from the briefest of childhoods into a cycle of childbearing, alcohol dependence, poverty, emotional despair and homelessness. They died in hell, but they lived in hell, too – not least, Rubenhold argues, because they were born female: “Their worth was compromised before they had even attempted to prove it.”
I remember once thinking that 19th Century London showed more concern about catching the killer of what they thought [wrongly] were prostitutes than Vancouver did with finding the pig-farmer guy who killed many more women. Also, I have a book about Jack the Ripper on my bookshelf (that someone in the neighbourhood left outside in a box) which is a serious history that does not denigrate his victims (as do some books, that Rubenhold quotes) and the story is fascinating for many because it's unsolved, it happened at a time when mass media could first have the power to make a story as it did, the possible surgical skill of the killer (which made it possible he was a mad doctor) and that letter "from hell" that was received.
The book does provide an excellent introduction to the circumstances of ordinary women in late-19th Century Britain.
2024-10-04
I finished Adam Bunch's The Toronto Book of the Dead.
Unlike the review in the link above, I quite liked it. But then again, I didn't know much of Toronto's history when I read it. I knew enough to recognize many of the names and I had a hazy outline of some of the events in it, but nothing that would make me any sort of expert. (Also, this past summer I visited the Toronto Island lighthouse and read the plaque about the supposed murder and the subsequent ghost.)
The thing is, I don't know how completely accurate Bunch's history is. I later read the biography of John Simcoe at both Wikipedia and the Dictionary of Canadian Biography and Bunch has stuff in it that neither of those sources do. I'm just saying that I, personally, won't vouch for the absolute accuracy of everything in it, but whatever the facts, Bunch is a great story-teller. He really makes everything come alive. He makes Toronto sound like a cool place to be, even though (as he points out) Emma Goldman (who had been chased out of, or fled, every other country in the world she'd wanted to live in) found her exile in Toronto to be excruciatingly boring. (She still managed to make a go of it and save an Italian anarchist from being exiled to fascist Italy.)
I'll see what one other reviewer has to say (for Good or for Evil) :
Sometimes gruesome, sometimes eerie, “The Toronto Book of the Dead” is also highly fascinating and very informative.
What makes it so is that author Adam Bunch treats death and tragedy with respect, but also with the feel of an insider’s travelogue. Here is where ancient bones were found. There is where Canada’s first hanging happened. Toppy Topham almost died here, here, and here. Over there, a beloved literary figure perished from an “apparent suicide.” The site references lend immediacy to these stories, which range from Toronto’s beginnings to tales that are quite recent, in lengths from a few pages to near-novella size. That, of course, makes them perfect for day-trips, macabre outings, or just for browsing on what’s left of a long winter’s night…
You don’t have to live in Toronto to enjoy what’s inside “The Toronto Book of the Dead.” You can sit right in your own chair, miles away, and dig in. Just know that what you’re reading is true, every step of the way.
There.
2024-10-14
I read Andrew Jackson's 2021 memoir, The Fire and the Ashes: Rekindling Democratic Socialism.
I pretty much agree with the reviewer:
“[P]art personal memoir, part historical analysis, part political manifesto” (1), the short monograph offers unique insights into the past fifty years of Canadian history, especially the practically ineffective resistance from the left to the increasing dominance of neoliberalism. Jackson recounts his experiences as a researcher for the New Democratic Party (ndp), as chief economist for the Canadian Labour Congress (clc), and as a contributor to left-wing think tanks – specifically the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (ccpa) and the Broadbent Institute – revealing tensions within the labour movement and in its relationships with the electoral system and demonstrating the exclusion of workers from the decision-making processes at all levels of society. Significantly, he provides compelling arguments regarding the relevance of democratic socialism to the 21st century and sets out a clear vision of a more just and equitable world that might be achievable.
...
The 147-page book is, however, too short, with brief chapters that would benefit from additional context and analysis. For example, Chapter 6, “The Great Free Trade Debate,” runs only four pages despite its significance, Jackson claims, to democratic socialists in Canada and the rise of the neoliberal order around the world. Regardless of the potential audience – committed lefties, young activists, scholars, and students, or the general public – many will not know or understand the varying perspectives presented or how the political dynamics evolved throughout the period; Jackson has access to information and perceptions that are unavailable in the mainstream literature and could add nuance to understandings of these events. In addition, Chapter 10, “Workers Teaching Workers,” argues political education is essential to labour unions but, in less than three pages, does not engage with the literature, practice, and purpose of such programs. This is not an academic book, nor should it be held to those standards, but more detail and background would help substantiate the central arguments.
Happy Thanksgiving.
2024-10-24
The other day I finished Victor Hugo's 1831 gothic novel The Hunchback of Notre-Dame.
It's a "Wordsworth Classics" edition and I don't know who the translator is. There are a few strange typos and missing words, but not enough where any sentence becomes unintelligible.
I thought it was great. Earlier this year I read a biography of Victor Hugo and I realized that I probably had never read a page of the guy's actual work. I was determined to rectify that.
I thought this book was great. Hugo goes into digressions but I think they're always useful. Although his re-creation of Medieval Paris by comparing it to then-current early-19th Century Paris was lost on me I understood the effect that he was trying to produce.
The writing is genius. Even when it's obvious what is going to happen, the words Hugo puts in his characters' mouths are moving. And his description of the battle at the Cathedral between Quasimodo and the Truands (with each side thinking they're going to rescue Esmerelda) is just incredible.
What does this random reviewer think?
It’s really interesting how Victor Hugo managed to take what at first I took as a comedic piece that was a conversation about Paris and the people in it with some sass and pride for his city and to lead the reader into a very dark somewhat desolate end where the only comfort remained in the melancholy solace of Notre-Dame. While I’m not happy with the ending and even less happy with Disney taking an abusive character and deciding to make him the love interest in their adaptation I do think the book is good, in a very haunting way that creeps up on you. He also supposits a very interesting theory that the printing press would destroy the beaut and art of architecture. Which is such an interesting concern, especially for a writer.
Depending on which translation you get please note that some of the language might be jarring due to different meanings from the time which have become slurs.
Well, she liked it.
Also, yesterday I finished Harold Mattingly's Christianity in the Roman Empire (1967).
This book is based on a series of lectures given at the University of Otago in 1954. Which is apparently in New Zealand. (I thought this guy was lecturing at a small US-American university when I was reading it.)
I'm trying to put together a course about the democratic impulse in the West and there's something democratic about Christianity. I was interested to know how and why Christianity became so popular in the pagan world of Ancient Rome. I was hoping to find a more recent book, and one written by an atheist, but no such luck. This book is pretty dry, plainly written, and about something I realize that I know very little about. The Tetrarchy, all the emperors between Constantine and Justinian. Early Christianity in general. This book provides a very quick survey of the imperial response to Christianity from its early days to the establishment of its supremacy.
2024-11-04
I read about 2/3rd's of Judith Herrin's Byzantium: The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire.
I decided that I knew so little about this important civilization and it was time that I rectified that situation. But I got lost in all the new information (names of people and places and things that I had no context for) and I found it slow going at first. Not because of the writing. Herrin is a fine writer and the information is presented clearly and concisely. I just read it slowly at first and by the time I found my stride it had to be returned to the library because someone else wanted it.
Byzantium. The name evokes grandeur and exoticism--gold, cunning, and complexity. In this unique book, Judith Herrin unveils the riches of a quite different civilization. Avoiding a standard chronological account of the Byzantine Empire's millennium-long history, she identifies the fundamental questions about Byzantium--what it was, and its special significance for us today.
Bringing the latest scholarship to a general audience in accessible prose, Herrin focuses each short chapter around a representative theme, event, monument, or historical figure, and examines it within the full sweep of Byzantine history--from the foundation of Constantinople, the magnificent capital city built by Constantine the Great, to its capture by the Ottoman Turks.
I'll try to read the rest of it.
2024-11-05
Today I finished The Siege of Krishnapur by J. G. Farrell.
When I saw it at the bookstore I thought that its subject matter about British imperialists under siege in the 1857 Sepoy Rebellion would be suitable reading during a time when zionist imperialists are themselves being besieged.
In case you haven’t yet had the heady delight of reading this masterpiece (that’s right: masterpiece), a brief summary: It’s a retelling of the Siege of Lucknow, based partly on contemporary accounts, diaries and letters of the British colonialists who defended their Residency against Indian soldiers for several long, bloody months during the Indian mutiny.
The Siege Of Krishnapur is a superb portrayal of physical horrors and psychological fallout. Intolerable heat, appalling insects, abominable rations, the stench of putrefaction, the sweat and shake of fever, the blood and shit of cholera – all are evoked in unflinching detail.
Likewise, as the siege goes on, the skein of Victorian civilisation slowly frays, before unravelling entirely. Farrell’s hero the Collector, a man devoted to his contemporary culture, sees all his ideas about religion, technology, civilisation, Englishness and life itself undermined and fatally undone. “From the farmyard in which his certitudes perched like fat chickens, every night of the siege, one or two were carried off in the jaws of rationalism and despair,” writes Farrell in a typically lovely phrase.
Farrell pulls off the impressive trick of not only making us feel like we are inside this struggling garrison but also of showing us (as Elizabeth Bowen put it) “yesterday reflected in today’s consciousness”. Even though we never emerge from the Victorian headspace, this becomes a book about the folly of colonialism and the illusions of civilisation, as well as one about survival in impossible circumstances.
I wouldn't praise it quite so highly as that reviewer, but I did really enjoy it. I studied the Victorians pretty closely and Farrell does an excellent job of bringing them to life. He also inserts his humour at frequent and well-timed intervals. Glad I read it.
2024-11-18
I finished American Ulysses: A life of Ulysses S. Grant by Ronald C. White last week.
I was at the Toronto Reference Library a while ago waiting to use their Digital Innovation Hub and I grabbed a biography of Grant off the shelf on a whim and started to read the introduction. He sounded like an interesting guy. I knew very little about the US Civil War so I didn't know why Grant was called "The Bulldog" or why he succeeded where other Union generals had failed. Still interested a few months later I put this biography on my phone.
Ronald White’s “American Ulysses: A Life of Ulysses S. Grant” was published in 2016, two years after I spent eight weeks reading six other biographies of Grant. White is a well-known historian and the author of nine books (including one of my favorites on Abraham Lincoln). He is currently working on “Abraham Lincoln’s Diary” which is a collection of notes and reflections left behind by Lincoln (due out in 2020) and a biography of Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain (due in 2021).
...
Most readers will find this 659-page biography (not including 100+ pages of notes and bibliography) to be articulate, engaging and generally well-paced. One-fifth of the book is devoted to his early life, just under half the book focuses on his Civil War service and another one-fifth covers his presidency. The remainder is divided between the years just prior to, and those following, his presidency.
The best feature of this biography may be its extensive collection of maps, charts and pictures. These add invaluable context and detail and cover a wide variety of topics – from summaries of specific Civil War campaigns to an excellent diagram illustrating Grant’s extensive post-presidential world tour.
...
Overall, Ronald C. White’s “American Ulysses” is a solid but not exceptional examination of the life of Ulysses S. Grant. For readers who are new to the 18th president, this biography will unquestionably provide a suitable, comprehensive introduction to his life. But for anyone who has already navigated Grant’s life, there is probably not enough new insight or analysis to make “American Ulysses” a truly compelling read.
As I have nothing to compare it to, I'll say that it is a good introduction to a guy who the USA would do well to remember. Grant seemed to genuinely believe in the equal rights of all races. He hated the abuse of animals and male violence against women. I agree with the author that Grant did not have a drinking problem aside from one period in his life when he was posted at a lonely fort in the Pacific northwest and started drinking out of soul-killing boredom and isolation. Afterwards he was able to take a drink now and again and there were no specific instances where he was publicly the worse for drink that his critics could mention. Just (it seems) slanderous rumours that men who worked closely with him for extended periods of time would quickly refute.
2024-11-29
Finished Industry and Empire by E. J. Hobsbawm, which is Volume 3 of the Penguin Economic History of Britain. It covers the period from 1750 to the mid-1960's. (That's because the book came out in 1968.)
I found the first chapter a little slow-going because Hobsbawm spends most of it hemming and hawing because there aren't a lot of statistics about the economy from the 1750's until the Napoleonic Wars. Which is understandable, but it also makes you wonder how much of a slog it is to read the previous two volumes.
Eventually though, he does get things underway and I found it to be a very clear, focused summary of the rise of English manufacturing, its stagnation, and its transformation during the 1920's and 1930's. (There is a separate chapter on the development of Wales and Scotland during this time. Wales was an isolated, undeveloped region until it became interesting for the English for resource extraction, especially coal and, to a lesser degree, iron. The section on Scotland is interesting for explaining how they developed a dynamic technological/entrepreneurial culture that was (sadly) based on a relatively impoverished society. I've no doubt that Welsh or Scot readers would find parts of his summaries condescending, but I sense that the general framework that he presents is accurate.)
Above all, England’s elite were devoted to commerce and profit. One of the motive forces of the civil war of the 1640s had been King Charles’s insistence on granting monopolies of trade to favoured courtiers and spurning genuine entrepreneurs who came to form a powerful bloc against him. But all that had been sorted out a century ago. Now this politically independent oligarchy was interested in trade and profit of all sorts.
But these were only one of the many differences which distinguished 1750s England from the continent. Foreign visitors also remarked on the well-tended, well-organised state of the land and the thoroughness of its agriculture. They commented on the flourishing of trade: England was noted as a very business-like nation, with well-developed markets for domestic goods of all kinds.
...
The first wave of the industrial revolution was based on the mass processing of raw cotton into textiles. 100% of Britain’s cotton was imported from the slave plantations of the American South and a huge percentage of it was then exported to foreign markets, in Africa and then to India where, in time, the authorities found it necessary to stifle the native cloth-making trade in order to preserve the profits of Lancashire factory owners. The facts are astonishing: Between 1750 and 1770 Britain’s cotton exports multiplied ten times over (p.57). In the post-Napoleonic decades something like one half of the value of all British exports consisted or cotton products, and at their peak (in the 1830s), raw cotton made up twenty per cent of total net imports (p.69). So the industrial revolution in Britain was driven by innovations in textile manufacturing and these utterly relied on the web of international trade, on importing raw materials from America and then exporting them in huge quantities to captive markets in British colonies.
...
Britain had established itself as master of the world’s seas as a result of the Seven Years War and already had a thriving trade infrastructure at ports like Glasgow, Liverpool, Bristol and London. What kick-started things, in Hobsbawm’s view, was the opening up of overseas markets. It was the ability to send ships full of cloth products to India and other colonial markets, to make large profits and then reinvest the profits in further innovations that led a generation of Lancashire entrepreneurs to experiment with new devices and machines and ways of working.
So, Hobsbawm’s thesis rests on a set of linked propositions, that:
- Britain had a uniquely warlike series of governments through the 18th century (pp.49 to 50)
- Britain was able to rely on a far more advanced and sizeable navy than its nearest rival, France, which was always distracted by wars on the continent and so preferred to spend resources on its army, thus, in effect, handing rule of the oceans over to Britain
- in the mid-1700s a series of foreign wars conquered all of north America, most of the Caribbean and India for Britain
- and it was the complex web of international trading thus established by its a) warlike government and b) its world-dominating navy which provided the economic framework which motivated the technological and business innovations which led to the Industrial Revolution (pages 48 to 51)
This vast and growing circulation of goods…provided a limitless horizon of sales and profit for merchant and manufacturer. And it was the British – who by their policy and force as much as by their enterprise and inventive skill – captured these markets. (p.54)
I've studied British history and British and international economic history so much of this was familiar to me. But I still think it was a masterful summary.
2024-12-12
I recently completed Mark Twain's The Innocents Abroad (or the new Pilgrim's Progress) as well as Jean-Jacques Rousseau's The Social Contract.
First Twain:
Having recently read a biography of Ulysses S. Grant I was re-introduced to Mark Twain. I read a Classics Illustrated version of Huckleberry Finn when I was a kid and I was also familiar with Tom Sawyer whitewashing the fence. And I knew he was a famous humorist. But he also seems to have been a 19th-Century Gadabout, kissing asses and shmoozing with the oligarchic elites of his times. He was in regular correspondence with sanctimonious, narcissist-hypocrite Andrew Carnegie, and he appears in U.S. Grant's social circle during his Presidency. With regards to Grant, he went on a world tour in 1877, during which he was treated as an international statesman. I first read about THAT tour in Late Victorian Holocausts.
Anyways, Twain talked about Grant's tour in the light of his own newspaper-financed five month tour of Europe and "The Holy Land" of 1867. That's where I remembered hearing a title called "The Innocents Abroad."
So, Twain's book is full of racist bigotry. So much that it's difficult to know where it stops being a 19th Century rich white dude joking around and becomes actual hatred. It's also revealing about how poor Southern Europe was at the time. Twain was travelling with a pretty wealthy group and they got a surprise visit with Alexander II of Russia when they visited Yalta.
It was weird reading about a cruise where they had daily prayer meetings. It was also weird reading about a visit to the Levant from a guy who believed in the miracles of The Bible. Jerusalem had a population of 14,000 or so at the time (says Twain).
Like the review I link to above, I think that Twain's account of his disappointing visit to a Turkish bath in Istanbul was hilarious. I also got a chuckle from finding out that the tale of Egyptians burning old mummies to power their steam trains (which I knew from a Laurie Anderson song) turned out to be one of his inventions.
Now for Rousseau:
He was certainly a smart guy. Obviously a weirdo.
2024-12-21
I read Medieval People: Vivid Lives in a Distant Landscape (2014) by Michael Prestwich.
I was just looking for something at BMV and I saw this beautiful coffee-table book selling for a steal of a price. It is lavishly illustrated.
Apparently (from this review that hated it for claiming that "El Cid" was Charlton Heston's most famous role) it deals with 70 historical personages from the years 500-1500. Yeah, most of these biographies are four pages in length accompanied by some pictures. It's a pretty light touch. But if you're not any sort of expert on the period (I have a patchy, hodge-podge knowledge of the period) it's a good introduction. I'd say that it's an effective survey that covers Catholic, Greek Orthodox and Islamic actors (with a good attempt at including noteworthy female figures) of the period.
2 comments:
Interesting that you have just read a book that has been around since 1967. When I read the book in 1976 G.G. Marquez was already a legend so I wonder about your comment that he was in "love with his own talent". I am not being critical as I welcome opinion on a great book and great author. You might also like "No one writes the Colonel" and other works of Marquez. He has numerous books that I am sure you will enjoy. I think we could all use a little "escapism" reading in our downtime amid the madness that is currently around us.
zoombats,
I don't read a lot of fiction (something I'm trying to change), and a lot of stuff's been written in the last 300 years (alone!), so there's a couple reasons I only just read 1OOYoS.
By "in love with his own talent" I mean that he knew how good he was. It's like a musician showing off. That's how it felt to me on a few occasions.
I read "No one writes to the Colonel" last month. It's in my 2023 readings post. Near the end obviously.
I started "Love in the Time of Cholera" in commemoration of the pandemic and I really enjoyed some parts and always thought the writing was good. But the story eventually lost me.
I got 2/3rds in and couldn't muster the desire to continue.
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