Barry Cunningham
An excellent read, masterfully written.
Beschloss fleshed in a lot of detail about the motivations for the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Spanish American War, and the Korean War that weren't in my history classes in school or in my previous reading. They make more sense to me now, twisted and perverted as that sense is.
It also demonstrates how in every war, the power of the President to wage war has increased, quite contrary to the founders intention in the Constitution. Partly this is because the founders were so naive about how the nature of international conflict was to evolve centuries later, a failure which is certainly understandable. But it is also our fault. Allowing ourselves to fall prey to the myth of the inerrant, all-wise founders allows those who wield 21st century weapons to evade the ineffective controls designed by 18th century imaginations.
A very complete debunking of the attempts to rationalize this myth from the Gospel of Matthew as any sort of astronomical phenomenon.
On the surface, this is fairly simple because the “star” described in Matthew does not remotely behave the way any astronomical body would behave. Adair goes through in detail all of the “explanations” that have been proposed over the years (e.g., nova, supernova, meteors, meteorites, planetary conjunctions, eclipses, occultations, etc.) and systematically notes how each of these phenomena differ markedly from what is purported. He also shows what we know historically about the world astronomy of the era is good enough so that the fact that such a singular astromical display is not mentioned in any records from the time is very suspicious.
Finally, he does something which I have not seen done by other authors on the subject: he looks at whether it is possible that what is being described is an astrological event rather than a physical event. Delving into the astrological systems of the time in the region, he shows that such an interpretation is even more problematic.
The five stars is for the completeness of the exposition. While Adair tries to keep things simple and give a popular expostion on the subject, the nature of the argument is such that not every reader is going to find this to be much of a page-turner. But, if you've ever sat through one of those 50 minute planetarium shows around Christmastime and wanted to know from someone who isn't trying to sell you a ticket what the real story is, this might be a worthwhile read for you.
Still interesting
This book, though a little dated in its examples and details, is still a classic and worth a read.
This is actually at least the third time that I've read it. The first time was sometime in the late 1950s when I was still in elementary school. Much of it was above my head then, so I think I didn't finish it then, getting bogged down someplace in the orgones.
I read it again around 1970 during my senior year at MIT. It was a good reminder to me at that time of what science was about and that however cool and trendy the psychic hoogie-moogie, astrology, and occultism of my friends early in the Aquarian Age seemed, ultimately it had to be self delusion or fraud.
The bits that are now the most dated are simply the refutations of the fallacies being debunked; 70 more years of scientific progress makes it much easier find disproofs, especially in the fields of genetics, biology, planetary science, and physics.
Nightwood
Well written I suppose. But for all its descriptive bluster, scandalous-at-the-time homoerotic themes, and lovelorn agonized characters, to me it comes off basically as pretentious romantic twaddle. Sometimes amusing, but, while less formulaic, it's no more serious than the chivalric romances that drove Don Quixote mad.
Nothing really new about Trump that hadn't made the news long before I made it through the wait list for this book at the library.
Omarosa may be an unreliable narrator, but even taking what she had to say at face value I was most struck by how tone deaf she was, taking so much time to tumble to what a jerk the Donald was and is. I was reminded of Upton Sinclair's famous quote: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” Trump's show made her a celebrity and rich, so I suppose the quote would have to be modified appropriately.
Her jumping from Democrat to Trump's inner circle during the 2016 campaign, which I suppose she is trying to portray as political naivete, seems more like calculated self promotion with little in the way of moral or political compass. Her claim that she was about to quit because she was finally realizing that Trump was a jerk is most probably just her attempt to spin the fact that she was voted off the island of the White House yet again.
Reasonably well written and readable, but assessing her truthfulness would take more effort than I was willing to invest. Under the most charitable assumptions, I was not favorably impressed. Fact checking would be likely to send my already low opinion down through the floor.
Read it if you're sufficiently interested. But it could be profitably skipped otherwise.
Useful survey.
Good but not great.
There are technical flaws (diagram misprints / duplications, misprints in move sequences) — not an overwhelming number, but enough to be very annoying. The Kindle formatting of move sequences is irregular, making some of them all but unreadable.
The detailing of the various methods is spotty. In particular, the F2L cases are never enumerated. There is enough there so you can figure out what to look up, but it's not really a self-contained reference.
Useful but not adequate.
A vast sprawling Pyncheonesque read
Engrossing many-threaded story with few neat endings. Many great characters kept drawing me in. The longest section, Part 4, a fast cutting litany of femicides leaves me with the idea that extending the idea of Murder on the Orient Express the killers may be an entire society.
It's not really about Trump
It is a memoir about Comey's life, education, and events that shaped him. It condenses his lifetime of thoughtful analysis of what means and takes to be an ethical leader.
Trump is the last and most egregious of several counterexamples who demonstrate how not to be an ethical leader. Others included Rudy Giuliani, Dick Cheney, George W. Bush, Andrew Card, Karl Rove, and the Clintons.
Weird, engaging read
More of a novella than a novel really.
A well written page turner.
I'm supposing that even with all of the magic it is supposed to be a political morality tale. Not sure that it works on that level.
But the first person narrator Danielle's voice is compelling enough to make it enjoyable as simply a bizarro morsel.
A sensible approach
to evaluating the probability of assertions about history. Carrier's approach using Bayes's Theorem to cut through specious arguments is a valid scientific method, an important analytical tool, and can be helpful pedagogical technique.
While I would rate the main thesis and content of the book as 5 stars, overall readability is perhaps more like 3 stars. Hence my rating of 4 stars.
The first difficulty Carrier faces is that of trying to explain mathematical concepts of probability and statistics that are thoroughly garbled most people's minds to a nontechnical audience. I have 3 degrees in mathematics, so I mind this and don't view this as adversely affecting readability directly, but it does mean that he does face a difficult problem as an author.
There were three main problems with readability that I noted.
(1) Typos and other small errors: these were mostly minor and just a little annoying. For example, missing parentheses in formulae, numerical errors in cross-references in explanations, and the introduction of mathematical techniques in notes (specifically Laplace's Rule of Succession) that are not explained in the book itself.
(2) Philosophical prolixity: an unfortunate tendancy to lapse into philosophical jargon when it is not really needed. As a reader with considerable mathematical training, I find this simply to be annoying noise. I can only conjecture that the effect on a nontechnical reader is not likely to be good. I think it marks a lapse in the author's awareness of the needs of his target audience.
(3) Diffuse reasoning in analysis: this is a problem in presentation style. In Carrier's analysis of historicity criteria the presentation of the analytical reasoning tends to be too diffuse. In presenting his analysis he also presents and refutes all common counterarguments as he goes along. This sometimes makes it comically difficult to follow the overarching thread of analytical reasoning over the course of 80 pages say, when a dozen or more examples of counterarguments are brought up and refuted in the course of the explanation. It would be much easier to follow the reasoning if it were first succinctly outlined an argued in 10 to 20 pages. Then examine the examples after the argument is completed and in the reader's mind to exhibit their fallacies.
Excellent detailed critical analysis of the Gospel of Mark in its historical context.
Extensive historical analysis of the academic literature on Mark and related biblical literature.
Makes sense of Mark as an etiological myth for the Markan community that historicizes a mythic Jesus as a response to the aftermath of the Roman-Jewish War.
It moves along at a breakneck pace, so it is engaging from that point of view. But, in the end, everybody gets killed off. Ultimately, it just seemed like a tremendous waste of time.
Started Master of Games, but gave it up about 20% of the way into it. It seemed like it was starting to head off into the weeds and I was starting not to care about the characters.
A very difficult read. I read it as an eBook on my iPhone, which made it doubly difficult because all the footnotes are interlineated in the text.
Historically, the book is very important. Darwin had left off dealing in detail with man's place in evolution in The Origin of Species because he knew it would be a lightning rod, and, as such, a distraction from his exposition of principles of natural selection.
I found the book's organization somewhat confusing. Only the first part of the book is really devoted to analyzing man's place in the natural world and how he has evolved. The second part of the book is devoted to sexual selection, surveying sexual characters throughout the animal kingdom. The third part attempts to tie together the first two parts, examining sexual characters in man.
Throughout this book, I was struck by how little data Darwin actually had on which to base his inquiries. One hundred forty years later we have exponentially more data on species, their genomes, relations, and behaviors. Hence, much of Darwin's discussion is speculative, as he readily acknowledges. DNA was unknown to Darwin, so he speculated about “gemmules” being transmitted to offspring. Much of his speculation about the relations among species is outdated by the precise information we have from DNA sequencing.
Unfortunately, Pasteur's insights into the crucial importance of microbial life, which were being formulated at that time, seem to have come a little late to have much influence on The Origin of Species and The Descent of Man. In reading this book, I can easily find flaws in his speculation on particular subjects: we now know about the importance of symbiosis as a mechanism driving evolution thanks to the work of Lynne Margulis; we know about the influence of geography, native species, natural resources, and infectious diseases in accounting for cultural and technological differences that Victorians might have attribute to race (e.g., see Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel and Collapse; and the language about lower and higher species, savage and civilized races, now seems hopelessly Victorian.
Darwin was a trailblazer. This book reminds us how little Darwin could see from where he stood in the mid-19th century. We must also remember where he started and how far he came. His broad vision of the web of life and man's place in it was insightful and revolutionary.
An involving tale of intrigue, well written and well paced, with an engaging main character, Richard Hannay. Perhaps little dated, being set just before the outbreak of World War I. The plot is driven by just one or two too many coincidences to be completely convincing.
Still, a worthwhile read. I plan to add some of Buchan's other novels featuring Richard Hannay to my list of books to read, perhaps as a guilty pleasure.
An infuriating book in some ways.
A collection of early, mostly not-so-good short stories, as Pynchon makes clear in his Introduction.
A Small Rain just kind of lies there. I found it hard to give a damn about the characters.
Low-lands is really a kind of fantasy: sort of like a Behind-the-Looking-Glass view of a favorite Leonard Cohen song.
I just didn't get Entropy.
As Pynchon mentions in his Introduction, Under the Rose was lifted largely from an 1899 Baedeker's guide to Egypt for a writing seminar he was taking at Cornell. It reads like an Baedeker-obfuscated parody of John Buchan, who Pynchon also mentions in his Introduction. Anyway, it inspired me to start The Thirty-Nine Steps, which is infinitely better written, better paced, clearer, and engrossing.
But, finally, at the end, The Secret Integration was a sort of gem, a redeeming feature of this book for me. A surprise ending in more ways than one.
Another uneven collection of short stories; this one in Alastair Reynolds's Revelation Space universe.
The first couple, Great Wall of Mars and Glacial, feature characters from his later opus: Clavain, Galiana, and Felka. They provide some backstory mentioned in the later books.
Most of the rest of the tales, while set in the RS universe, are entirely peripheral to the later books. A Spy in Europa, Dilation Sleep, Grafenwalder's Beastiary, and Nightingale I found to be uncomfortably dark. Nightingale is longer, better developed, and more engrossing, but with a quite morbid twist at the end. Weather falls into the dark category too, but has the interesting feature of revealing a secret of the Conjoiner drives.
The story Galactic North itself starts not quite 200 years in the future, but finishes, leaving us hanging, somewhere near the Restaurant at the End of the Universe. It recalls other of Reynolds's time numbing car chases across spacetime, but perhaps exceeds them all in scale.
The Afterword is refreshing. Reynolds is aware of and blunt about the flaws in his stories. He provides some interesting personal history of their writing and his influences.
Not a book for everybody. Had I not read most of the other Revelation Space books, thing probably would not have fit together as well and I might have rated it more like 2 stars.
Actually, the Project Gutenberg edition on Stanza on my iPhone.
I read Muir's The Yosemite last year and found that book and him utterly amazing. Decided to read some more of his works, and this seemed like the logical place to start.
His origins may not have been that unusual for his time, but where he went from there in his late youth and early manhood seem entirely unexpected.
His early life and his narrative fall into three parts: his early youth in Scotland, his emigration to America and adolescence spent in help his family carve two farms out of the wilderness in Wisconsin, and his remarkable pursuit of an education and cultivation of his inventive genius.
In his early schooling in Scotland, corporal punishment was the chief pedagogical technique. Sort of an early form of standardized testing: no child left unscathed. This, and the savagery of the other boys in school, might have soured one on education forever. Remarkably, in Muir's case, they did not. Even in the narrative of his early youth, he describes his explorations of nature: observing birds and finding their eggs.
Suddenly, in 1849, when Muir was about eleven, his father decided the family would emigrate to America. First, his father and the three eldest children, made the crossing and found some land in Wisconsin. They built a shanty and set about the hard work of making a farm out of the wilderness. By fall, they had cleared the land and built a frame house so that the rest of the family was able to join them. But despite the hard labor that this entailed, his description of this time is one of overwhelming joy as he and his brother Daniel enjoy the freedom of the wilderness and discover the animals of the woods and the farm. This part of his narrative contains vivid descriptions of his discovery of nature around him.
After eight years, having already built a comfortable farm, his father bought another half-section of land four or five miles distant, and again commenced the back-breaking work of clearing it and building it up. Remarkably, for all the strenuous work he was doing and his father's strict religious discouragement, Muir set about trying to educate himself in what little time he had available outside of work. He got his father to buy him a book on arithmetic, and despite not having attended school since the age of 11, he was able to work through it in short order. He then set about trying to read all that he could, borrowing or acquiring books as he could. All this was sternly opposed by his father, who believed that the Bible was the only book he needed. Muir would try to steal five to ten minutes to read by candlelight around 8pm before his father would admonish him to put out the light and go to bed to be ready for work tomorrow.
One night, his father made the tactical mistake of telling him that he shouldn't have to be scolded every night into putting out the light, but that he could get up as early as he liked. Immediately, Muir began going to bed with the rest of the family, but getting up at 1 AM to work on his inventions. He built scientific instruments and whittled clocks of his own design.
Later, when he showed them to a knowledgeable neighbor, he was told he should go exhibit them at the State Fair, and that he could easily secure a job in a machine shop. Eventually, this is just what he did. When he left home for the State Fair, his father assured him that he was on his own and if he should run into a rough spell, he shouldn't look to his father for help.
At the State Fair, he was offered a job in a machine shop. After a few months though, it did really work out. There wasn't enough work or instruction available to satisfy him. So he moved to Madison. After a little while he figured out that he could get into the University of Wisconsin, teaching himself enough to keep up with the rest of the students, and earn enough doing odd jobs to put himself through college.
So that's just what he did, learning a great variety of things befitting his wonderous curiousity: botany, geology, chemistry, sciences, and engineering.
End of youth. He wrote more books about later.
Fell in love with Ibsen when I first read this sometime during my freshman year, in 1966-67. A couple of years later in the Yale Art Museum, some friends and I came across a large portrait of Ibsen – with his large, muttonchop sideburns, he seemed impossibly cool and hip for 1969.
In the first two acts, it almost reads like a sitcom, straight out of I Love Lucy or I Married Joan. (You'll have be of a certain age to get both those references.)
But, in the end, Nora turns any comfortable expectations we had on their heads. I, for one, have to love her.
Reads just as well from my view now as it did in the 1960s foothills of the women's liberation movement.
A book I had been meaning to read since high school, inspired by the movie. As one might infer from the fact that it took me nearly fifty years to get around to it, that wasn't a really great motivation for what is a bit of a tough read.
The book is much different than the movie. A lot more fleas, malaria, lice, and stupidity of war and tribal and international politics. The book does give us T.E. Lawrence's internal voice, including his self-doubts and perceptions of the roles of various players in the war against the Ottoman Empire in the Middle East during WWI. As such, it is a lot more nuanced and not as glorified as the movie.
But, reality is actually a lot more complicated. Lawrence was playing very complicated game. While Lawrence shows us more about his complicated role in the Arab Revolt than the movie can, he doesn't show us all his cards either. Quite a lot of political intrigue was kept secret during Lawrence's lifetime, indeed until the late 1960s. Some followup reading of one of the more modern biographies of Lawrence really is needed to fill in the gaps.
Compelling argument for remembering the lessons of Keynsian economic about how to end a depression. Unfortunately, our myopic politicians in Washington seem bent on out-Hoovering Hoover. The end result of following the Republican economic dogma of slashing and burning the government spending will be to sink the U.S., and probably the world, economy for at least a generation.
For those not familiar with L. Frank Baum's Santa Claus, let's just say he has a different backstory than St. Nick living with elves at the North Pole that later generations have been raised on. Altogether, I think he is a pleasanter, less-commercial fellow; a little goody-two-shoes perhaps, but our fairy tale characters are not supposed to be nuanced.
In this short-story, the baddies try to kidnap Santa Claus to spoil Christmas for all the children. But, I don't suppose it's a spoiler to say that their plan fails. After all, Santa has friends.
Some of C. L. Moore's earliest stories, all but one from Weird Tales between 1933 and 1936. These hardly strike me as being science fiction anymore. We now know so much more about Mars, Venus, and the moons of Jupiter as real places that these places in Northwest Smith's universe can seem no more that the stuff of dreams. That said, it does not really detract much from the stories, which are very much stories of dream states and epic battles fought in dreams.
I fell in love with C. L. Moore's writing years ago reading No Woman Born. The writing here is not in the same league with that, but is still engaging. In the earlier stories, I detected Lovecraftian elements: over-the-top, non-concrete descriptios of horror (and beauty); oblique hints about ancient gods and strange geometries recalling the Cthulhu Mythos. Doing a little research, I discover why. In 1935, Moore was one of a group of writers in the Weird Tales group that contributed to a round robin story in the Cthulhu Mythos titled The Challenge from Beyond, published in September, 1935 issue of Fantasy Magazine.
The stories tend to be formulaic: our anti-hero encounters one or more exquisite femme fatales in a mind-numbingly exotic locale, falls into an epic, sexually tinged dream state battle with the otherworldly being running the show, and either triumphs or escapes by dumb luck. This is not a spoiler. The end of the journey is not a suprise. There are other stories later on in the book. It is the journey that is important. We are in it for the ride. And, generally, the ride is pretty entertaining. Nothing is quite as it seems.
A remarkably timeless analysis of our notions of individual freedom and our obligations to each other.
Some examples are topically 19th century of course, but these are not major distractions. The analysis tends to fall apart for a modern reader though because it does not address second order effects our behavior has on others that have become critical in our time. Pollution, global warming, overpopulation, depletion of natural resources, and the power of nongovernmental organizations radically affect the lives and limit the freedom of all people, ourselves and our children.
I think that had John Stuart Mill lived in our time, he would have addressed these issues as a major part of his analysis. As it is, this book is a milestone in our human thought on liberty, and a good start on framing a discussion, but it is only a start.