My Amazon Book Reviews
By Andy Ross
A scattershot volume that lacks coherence
Hitch-22: A Memoir
by Christopher Hitchens
August 6, 2010
***
The Hitch is a public figure now, so this book will sell whatever I say. But
don't expect too much. It's a collection of essays, some quite interesting,
some less so, that tend toward autobiography. If, like me, you know some of
the protagonists and were there at some of the events, the accounts Hitchens
offers can be quite fascinating. But the chapters record a political
evolution from naive student Trotskyite to posturing socialite
Neoconservative that will grate on you if your views differ from the offered
line by so much as a hair.
Given that unwelcome fact, the book has
its merits. The book is written with a certain polish and includes some deft
phrases. And the cameos of British boarding school life, of Oxford
undergraduate demagoguery, of shabby London literary life, and of variously
loathsome political and revolutionary figures worldwide, are often sharp and
vivid. The energy the Hitch has invested in meeting, like Forrest Gump, all
the big names of his time is impressive to behold. But the effect, in the
end, is more depressing than inspiring. All that sound and fury has resulted
in a scattershot volume that lacks the crafted coherence of a classic.
Hitchens has emphatic views that brook no opposition. As his best friend
Martin Amis once said, resistance is futile. With the Hitch it's my way or
the highway. In the end, after a mind-numbing recital of famous and infamous
events and names of our time interspersed with repeated drum-rolls of
self-righteous grandstanding, all leading up to a tedious review of his
Jewish roots that exhausts all patience, this reader hit the highway.
A manifesto for rebuilding life on Earth
G.O.D. Is Great: How to Build a Global Organism
by Andy Ross
July
26, 2010
*****
Andy Ross says we are busy creating a global organization so integrated that
we become parts of a single living organism that he calls Globorg. He claims
our best hope of flourishing is to identify with Globorg. Recalling the
psychology of group solidarity, he says that we shall learn to see and act
as one. But first we shall need to smooth over the join between new science
and old religion. As a former logician and consciousness researcher, Ross
proposes a logical foundation for a new psychology that can accommodate
machine minds alongside humans. On the basis of this psychology, he proposes
a new philosophy of life.
The book has the stated aim of serving as a
road map to take us from here and now to Globorg with this century. Some
readers will find it utopian. Others may find the proposed changes
appalling. But the issues Ross raises are realistic and practical, and they
will be upon us sooner than many people think. This book is exactly the sort
of primer we need to prepare ourselves. Not only that, it's engagingly
written and filled with fascinating detail. Read it and glimpse our future.
Ross is also the author of Mindworlds: A Decade of Consciousness
Studies.
A balanced, dramatic, and factually sound history
The Battle of Britain
by James Holland
July 3, 2010
*****
This is an account of Britain's finest hour that you can safely recommend to
history buffs of all kinds, from amateur enthusiasts to university students.
Actually, the finest hour here lasts six months, but that's long enough to
take the Sceptred Isles from their day of greatest peril when the Nazi
forces started their Blitzkrieg in the West to the period when the acute
danger of invasion and collapse had receded and the war settled to a
relatively sustainable slog. This is also the honeymoon period of
Churchill's first six months in command, when he secured his place in the
hearts of the English speaking people for all time by saving Europe and the
world from its darkest years since the Black Plague. So the bar for this
book is high. Only the very best is good enough to sit on the same shelf as
so many other accounts, up to Churchill's own official history.
The
special ingredients that Holland brings are balance and drama. He emphasizes
the experiences of the warriors on both sides, and the reader is encouraged
to sympathize with the German pilots and other ranks as well as with the
British heroes. As for drama, the clash of Spitfires and Messerschmidts
would seem exciting enough without more ado, but to keep the tension high
over hundreds of engagements until the strategic picture becomes clear is
one of Holland's big achievements. From our position 70 years later, the
facts are in and we can be relatively objective, but the challenge of
marshalling the facts into a coherent narrative is serious, and Holland has
met it.
The book is not perfect. Sometimes the author's grammar runs
away with him in the enthusiasm of the chase, and some fine technical detail
about aircraft and engine systems could have benefited from deeper research,
but these are quibbles. Also, the big picture, where the place of the Battle
of Britain alongside the struggle on the Eastern Front or the debate in
America over siding with the British Empire deserve some weight, gets short
shrift in Holland's account. But this is no shame in a popular history.
Holland deserves congratulations for a job well done.
A scrumptious feast of mad ideas for obsessives
36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction
by Rebecca
Goldstein
June 9, 2010
*****
Rebecca Goldstein is a rare find among novelists: not only a big imagination
but also a sharp analytic brain behind the scenes. She writes books that
reward serious thought. For anyone who has moral scruples about reading
novels during daylight hours this is a huge bonus. The 36 arguments are such
delicious hokum, so often trotted out in earnest yet so flimsy, that a
lampoon like this book is the only adult response to their emergence in
public discourse. And the characters! Don't get me started. I recognized the
real-life originals (yes, living, breathing souls) for her cartoon figures
and saw them in all their sensual glory as the tale unfolded. On the other
hand (ahem), some of the intellectual set-pieces explaining technical
details for lamer readers did come over as the day job intruding into what
would otherwise have been sweeter indulgences, but then again that touch of
astringency is just what my ascetic palate, for one, finds most titillating.
Any philosopher whose soul has been hung out long enough to dry will love
the impish glee behind the caricatures of pomp and academic circumstance on
parade here. The tale also presents a diorama of strangely anachronistic and
dysfunctional Judaism in action, but with just the lightness of touch and
compassion for its oddity that redeems the social commentary and lets the
reader off the judgmental hook. Altogether, any readers who can savor the
high life of the mind so scurrilously trashed here will hoot with joy as
they read this gem.
Right on the Money
June 9, 2010
*****
Ian McEwan is the best British novelist of his generation. And Solar is one
of his best works. A comedy about a physicist that's a hard act to pull
off. But he did it, and creditably too. The novel is less dazzling than
Martin Amis' Money, but the conception is similar, and I'm sure McEwan sees
Solar as a kind of homage to Martin's comic brilliance. In fact, you can
read Solar as Money reconstituted in a more craftsmanlike style and with a
more substantial and credible central figure. Like Saturday, McEwan's other
contender as his second-best novel, there's a lot of solid research behind
Solar, which some readers may find too much but I find reassuring. If your
conscience says you shouldn't be wasting time reading novels, you can tell
yourself that the factual background is worth the lost opportunity to be
reading something more worthy. And Solar is often really funny. That's
already worth the time spent flipping the pages. Still, Atonement is
McEwan's crowning and definitive masterpiece. Solar isn't in that league at
all. But it doesn't pretend to be, and it's so much better than most novels
out there that five stars are the least it deserves.
A tombstone for eternity
The Pregnant Widow
by Martin Amis
June 8, 2010
****
This is Martin's best novel since The Information. But it's not his best
novel. That was Money. The Pregnant Widow is written with a long view, with
a view to the reputation in decades and centuries to come. Perhaps it's a
begging letter to the Nobel Prize committee. Or a required text for his
university course, with the requisite plethora of vaguely scholarly
references to more or less classic writings. But an airport novel it's not.
That was Yellow Dog, which I bought in its first days as a hardback to read
over the Atlantic and felt compelled to hide from the traveler beside me to
prevent his seeing the shameful words on the page before me (once I'd read
it to the bitter end, I tore up the book and trashed the shreds). By
contrast, this new novel is worth sporting on the shelf for a lifetime. It's
Martin's best shot yet at classic status. In times to come, when the London
trilogy has lost much of its contemporary sizzle, The Pregnant Widow will
live on as a challenge for English undergraduates eager to test their
exegetical powers on a worthy target. This new novel also deftly overshadows
Martin's first three novels, The Rachel Papers (where in effect he channeled
the skills of his father Kingsley), Dead Babies (a pulp work that I panned
with more zeal than craft in my 1975 Oxford university magazine Isis review
of it), and Success (the less said the better), and leaves Martin with an
airbrushed but serviceable legacy for posterity. In fact, the 2010
contribution to the collected works is better than all its predecessors in
several ways. It's more sober, more craftsmanlike (except for the sometimes
oppressively esoteric vocabulary and references), more reflective (despite
the profusion of stylistic tics, such as in-sentence repetition, and pet
topics, like breast and stature statistics), and more philosophical. Yes,
Martin is aging, and it shows. But so are we all, and there are still plenty
of readers ready to read a doorstop like this one to recall the
embarrassments of their younger years. One detail for gourmet readers the
Ted Hughes story of Narcissus that reappears regularly in the novel as a
leitmotif is brilliant, almost so much so that it overshadows the murky sex
games in the castle. That, more than any other visible thread in the
tapestry, is what will give the book classic status, if indeed it gets it.
For Martin's place in history, it also makes the book a suitably impressive
tombstone.
Sock it to 'em, Chris!
God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything
by Christopher Hitchens
June 8, 2010
*****
As good as it gets from the New Atheists — if you only read one of their
books, read this one. The more serious arguments you can find in the other
tomes and pick earnestly over their logic or the scientific evidence for
this or that claim. With the Hitch, you get the punch in the gut that tells
you the religionists are a bunch of scoundrels who urgently need to put
their own house in order before they presume to tell us how to live our
lives. I was at Oxford with Chris and we had common friends (though I
detested his leftist activism and his general debauchery), so don't accept
my opinion. Just read the book and find you agree with my assessment.
This is a good little book
June 8, 2010
****
Alva Noe is a good philosopher, and the argument he presents in this book is
worth taking seriously. As a philosopher too (who should disclose that he
has traded words and shared parties with Alva), I'm not convinced entirely
by his case, but I find the general drift quite persuasive. Essentially, the
prevailing orthodoxy that minds are implemented by brains is conceptually
lazy and possibly only half the truth, but we have our work cut out trying
to go beyond it. Noe has made a brave start. Naturally, there's still an
awful lot of mileage in the mind-brain orthodoxy, and much of the hard
science in the area would be incomprehensible without it, in some form, but
minds extend beyond brains and are sustained in being by more than brains.
As an intuition pump here, imagine that minds are like money. Dollar bills
and so on implement money, but money is a lot more, even if you exclude
collateralized debt obligations and credit default swaps and so on as beyond
the pale. Minds are part of a huge public institution by which we build our
organized and collective appreciation of nature and our place in it. Noe
sees something like this (my gloss on the view is of course my own to live
down) and gives the view a hearty helping hand. My reservation (hence four
stars) is over the rather folksy rhetoric that decorates the book. This
creditably personal style makes the hard core argument easier and smoother
reading, and many will welcome it for that reason, but for me as a logical
purist it was rather ad hominem. Anyway, that said, read this book in
conjunction with Andy Clark's Supersizing the Mind. The basic message is the
same. This is a message whose time is coming, I think. And Noe has done a
great job in putting it out there for all interested readers to enjoy.
A biologically authoritative rant
The God Delusion
by Richard Dawkins
June 8, 2010
****
Richard Dawkins is a chap with a chip on his shoulder. He's the world's most
accomplished and persuasive Darwinist and he's a man of high intellectual
conscience who won't tolerate lazy thinking. His rant that's the best word
I can find for this book is a great joyride for readers who like to see
some righteous indignation behind an atheist tract in the tradition of
Bertrand Russell. Dawkins has fallen in with some odd company since his best
days as a popularizer of Darwinism, the essential core of an organized
science of biology. Now Dawkins runs in a pack of four well-known New
Atheists. Dan Dennett is respectable enough. He's perhaps the greatest
living philosopher in the Western tradition and a fellow Darwinist of some
renown. The rest of the pack are atheists of lesser fame. Sam Harris wrote a
scandalized and electrifying, and best-selling tract against religion
following 9/11 (and now studies neuroscience) and Chris Hitchens is an
all-purpose rhetorical bruiser (an ex-Trot, no less, but a great journalist)
I recall from my Oxford days many years ago. The four of them Dick, Dan,
Sam, and Chris are the "four horsemen" of the atheist apocalypse, in the
title characterization on the DVD proudly advertised on Richard Dawkins'
website. The God Delusion is the literary reference that makes the "four
horsemen" posturing respectable for Dawkins. Otherwise I'd worry that his
atheist hobby-horse was fellow-travelling, to use a trope familiar to Chris.
Anyway, if you're passionately for or against both Darwinism and
Christianity (or for D and against C or for C and against D, of course),
this book is an absolute must-read for you. Otherwise, maybe not: you'll
just be bemused at all the speaker's spittle flying in your direction.
A very illuminating biography
Beyond the Darkness: A Biography of Bede Griffiths
by Shirley Du Boulay
January 11, 2010
*****
I confess I was skeptical before I started reading this book. I expected an
uncritical hagiography. But I was pleasantly surprised. While never doubting
that Bede was a quite extraordinary holy man, the author succeeds in
maintaining the distance needed to present the facts without spin. In fact,
this is an impressively skilled piece of writing, with everything logically
in its place and presented correctly to enhance the quality of the overall
portrait. The level of detail is impressive too, with much more than the
average investigative journalist would have extracted. Altogether, Bede is
fortunate indeed to have such a fine biography.
Insightful and still important
The Marriage of East and West
by Bede Griffiths
December 28, 2009
****
This book is an insightful classic by a Christian mystic. Driven by an inner
vision of the shared goal of all genuine religions, Dom Bede argues
passionately that Western religion, by which he really means Christianity,
can be "married" with Eastern religion, and in particular with Hinduism. His
own experience as a Catholic monk in India makes this view persuasive and
convinces this reader at least that the vision is lucid and veridical. But
the book is not perfect. Bede's disdain for science and industry, indeed for
the whole "modern" world that has developed since the Renaissance, is
unreasonable, in my humble opinion. For me, his understanding of modern
science is too superficial and his antipathy toward the popular desire for
creature comforts is too procrustean. Also, his views on Semitic versus
Asiatic thinking and male versus female psychology are badly dated. Still,
the man deserves to be a saint and his book deserves to be read by anyone
interested in deep spiritual experience.
A loose and sloppy ramble that could have been more
April 15, 2009
***
I first read a novel by Rudy Rucker in 1980 and was totally delighted. Over
the years I read several of his more serious books and was often very
impressed. Also, I respect his curriculum vitae, which is intriguingly
similar to mine but consistently a notch or two (or more) better. So I
embarked on this book with some hope. And indeed there are glimmers of
brilliance. But for a book that in ambition and scope invites comparison
with Douglas Hofstadter's Gφdel Escher Bach and Stephen Wolfram's
A New
Kind of Science it offers far too little. Rucker has written too much and
blown his mind too far. Verdict: only for Rucker fans.
A fun take on some heavy math
The Pea and the Sun: A Mathematical Paradox
by Leonard M. Wapner
April 15, 2009
***
This book is about the Banach-Tarski paradox. It is light and easy to read,
with the technical nitty-gritty decently veiled in light banter. The
"paradox" is a proof that you can cut a ball into a finite number of pieces
and reassemble the pieces into two equally big and equally solid balls. Or
one or more bigger balls. This magic trick is done with infinities you
define fractal cuttings that you can twist and hence pull more stuff from
infinity. A total cheat, of course, and Tarski should have been spanked for
failing to deprecate his "achievement", but there it is. Wapner offers some
personal stuff about Banach and Tarski and their milieu, but for that side I
prefer the big book on Tarski by Feferman and Feferman.
A sober and sobering analysis of European secularism
The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West
by Mark Lilla
April 15, 2009
***
For anyone seriously concerned to understand the secular trend in Europe
over the last few centuries, this is an important and relevant text. Lilla
offers a solid and competent analysis of how the Christian concept of God
slowly evaporated in Europe as philosophers and others attacked the
foundations of faith. Lilla sees this more pessimistically than I would
prefer, and fails in my view to rise to an understanding of what is gained
in the scientific rationality that we now enjoy in what an American
neoconservative a few years ago (I forget who or exactly when) called our
"Kantian paradise". I quite like it here myself.
The early years of a saint
The Golden String: An Autobiography
by Bede Griffiths
April 15, 2009
****
Bede Griffiths is an exceptional figure, as good a candidate for sainthood as one could hope to find outside the orthodoxy of institutional religion. This candid and lucid autobiography covers Bede's early years, up to the time when he became accepted as a Dominican monk but before he went to India. Since it was in India that he developed the compassionate and shining presence that makes him the very image of sainthood, this book can only whet the appetite for more. Also, to be critical, I found myself unable to celebrate his rejection of modernity in almost all its forms, which for Bede stretch back to the thirteenth century CE. Still, it was helpful for me to appreciate how and why he took this procrustean position.
