This Week at the Library (3/9)

Books this Update:

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

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

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

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

Quotation of the Week:

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

- Alexander Pope, "Esssay on Man", quoted in The Ascent of Science.

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

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

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

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

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

Next Week:

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

This Week at the Library (15/8)

Books this Update:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next Week:

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

This Week at the Library (7/8)

Books this Update:

• Interview with the Vampire, Anne Rice
• The Age of Synthesis, Ray Spangenburg and Diane Kit Moser
• Foundation, Isaac Asimov
• Civil Disobedience, Henry David Thoreau
• I, Robot; Isaac Asimov

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pick of the Week: Foundation, Isaac Asimov.

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

Next Week:

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

* Not really.

This Week at the Library (31/7)

Books this Update:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next Week:

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

This Week at the Library (24/7)

Books this Update:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• The Crowned Lemur
  
• The Verreaux Sifaka
  
• The Golden Lion Tamarin
  

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

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

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

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

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

Next Week:

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

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

This Week at the Library (17/07/08)

Books this Update:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This Week at the Library

Books this Update:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

Next Week:

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