Casebook of the Black Widowers

Casebook of the Black Widowers

© 1980 Isaac Asimov

222 pages

Readers who have been with me since last summer know how delighted I was to find the Black Widower mystery series. In the year since, I have checked out of a library or purchased through Amazon every Widower collection I could find. With Casebook of the Black Widowers, I have come to the series' end for myself, having read the others before. This is not to say I won't be enjoying them in the future: I chronically re-read my books and Widower solutions are frequently esoteric enough that I can be puzzled all over again.

Although it is last for me, Casebook is actually the third of the collections that gather stories of the Black Widowers social club -- a group of intellectuals seven strong (including the waiter, Henry) who meet monthly at the Milano restaurant in New York. Every month's meal is hosted by a different Widower, and it is customary that he bring a guest. The guest is treated to a fine meal and an evening of "hopefully edifying conversation" for the price of an interview: after the meal is done, the host appoints an inquisitor who "grills" the guest. In the Black Widower tradition, the guest invariably presents a puzzle for the Widowers to reason out a solution. Someone may approach the seated six for help, like an aspiring author did here in "The Backward Look". At other times, one of the Widowers may spot an unanswered question in the lives of their interviewees, as was the case in "The Cross of Lorraine". Whatever the question, the Widowers will hash it out, exhausting all of the possibilities until everyone save Henry is stumped. Although the stories all follow this same formula, including Henry seeing the solution that no one else saw, they do not grow tiresome.

The stories are written with Asimov's characteristic wit and are happily followed by a short afterword. It was as ever enjoyable.

The Return of the Black Widowers

The Return of the Black Widowers
© 2003 Isaac Asimov, ed. Harlan Ellison
304 pages

As regular readers know, I greatly enjoy Isaac Asimov'short story collections, and in particular his Black Widower series. The Black Widower stories are "cozy" mysteries, in which a group of intellectuals from disparate fields meets once every month at a local restaurant. Each month, a different member plays host and is entitled to bring a guest. After dinner, one of the Widowers "grills" the guest, and a mystery of sorts will arise from the guests' answers. The story is driven by conversation, as the Widowers talk amongst themselves and attempt to find some conclusion. The books are very appealing to me, for a number of reasons, but particular to the Widower books is the ability of the reader to revisit the characters again and again.

This collection of Widower tales is special. Released nearly a decade after his death and introduced by Harlan Ellison, it consists of Asimov's favorite Widower stories as well as uncollected stories that don't appear in the previous books. The book is divided roughly in half, with an homage to Asimov appearing in the middle. The "homage" is a story written in the same style as Asimov's stories, with a group of friends meeting monthly and who find themselves presented with a mystery -- much to the delight of one of the characters,who has read Asimov and realizes the similiarity. Eighteen stories in all, the book ends with two pieces: one last Widowers story, but one not written by Asimov, and an 'afterword' by Asimov that has been taken out of one of his autobiographies in which Asimov writes about the series.

The book was very enjoyable: I read it in bits and pieces all through the school year, typically when my library reading was exhausted. It's definitely a favorite. I have now read all but one of the Widowers collections -- Casebooks of the Black Widowers.

Puzzles of the Black Widowers

I've been reading Puzzles of the Black Widowers on and off for a couple of months now. Rather than reading it straight through, I'd read a puzzle or two whenever I ran out of my weekly reading. This morning, I finished another Black Widowers book. Asimov follows the same formula: in every story, the Black Widowers -- a small club of six or seven gentlemen who meet once a month for dinner together -- go to their restaurant. The host brings a guest, and in the course of the guests' interview, a mystery arises. The Widowers then try to work out the solution to the mystery through rational thinking. After they have exhausted all possibilities and are stymied, the last Widower -- Henry the waiter -- points out the obvious and unforeseen solution.

As usual, there are twelve "collections" in this series. A few of the mysteries:

• In "Unique is Where You Find It", the Widowers try to puzzle out what element of the periodic table is most unique to a particular college professor who has challenged their guest.
• In "The Envelope", the Widowers are asked to speculate on the significance of an envelop tucked into the jacket of a spy.
• "The Recipe" is a locked-room mystery that the Widowers attempt to solve.

They were all enjoyable, excellently written. I enjoy these Widower tales very much, as the characters are interesting and the stories always quite interesting. "The Recipe" had a fairly obvious solution, though. Usually I have to think about them to solve the mystery, but in "The Recipe", I simply read and wondered, "When are they going to bring up...".

All in all, though, superb as usual. Asimov is the master.

This Week at the Library (17/9)

Books this Update:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next Week:

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

This Week at the Library (3/7)

Books this Update:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here goes, then.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This Week at the Library (17/6)

Books this Update:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




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