My Amazon Book Reviews
By Andy Ross
Good honest fun, readable and realistic
One Day
By David Nicholls
January 12, 2012
****
This is a surprisingly and
impressively good novel I say this as a jaded and picky connoisseur of
novels by Martin Amis and other relatively literary writers that really
comes alive. The pair Dexter and Emma come over as real people, portrayed
honestly in all their human imperfection, and their interactions are
presented with the lovingly clinical attention to detail that only the best
authors can pull off convincingly. The story is fun too, with incidents and
accidents that regularly put a smile on the reader's face. And unlike some
longish novels, this one has you turning the pages - the tale pulls you
along effortlessly. The author knows how to write too, with enough cute
phrases and gracefully conveyed scenes to keep the pot bubbling without
snagging your attention on contrived effects or overwrought sentences. So
altogether this is as good as the hype suggests.
Yet it's not
perfect. The one day per year device worked fine, and didn't chop up the
tale excessively at all. Also, the ending is real enough, and life can be
like that. But the later flashback chapters had me frowning. I'd have
preferred them up front, even at the cost of some dramatic suspension and
closure. And the pair were irritating enough in their limitations to make me
want to stand back further, to put their foibles in more perspective. The
movie, which in many ways does a fine job of reflecting the mood of the
book, made that aspect clear enough for me before I read the book, so if you
saw the movie already you'll know what to expect there. Also, some of the
sentences in the book had me reading them twice just to catch the correct
sense. That suggests some suboptimal writing, which is forgivable when all
the rest is so good but can be distracting.
More trivially, the
physical book was too cheap for words. The typeface reverted to typewriter
font for italic caps and the print was sometimes blurred. In my copy, pages
37 and 38 were printed on the overlapped sheets where a second printer roll
took over, and came complete with a sticky tab that gummed the pages. The
volume had a production quality that would disappoint me in a toilet roll. I
guess I should have read the Kindle edition. Perhaps these are End Times for
paperbacks, or perhaps someone at Hodder should wake up.
A proof that Homo sapiens is not rational
Thinking, Fast and Slow
by Daniel Kahneman
January 5, 2012
*****
Kahneman has performed the historic feat of finding hard evidence for the
limits of human reason. With simple but convincing experiments, he has done
more to advance psychology as a science than anyone else in a hundred years.
The implications for the rationalist ideology behind economics are what led
to his Nobel prize, but those implications will probably take a century to
work their way into political life, where much of the psychobabble about
reason that is used to defend Western political ideals is now revealed as
obsolete and scientifically untenable.
Kahneman's book is
impressively readable, indeed compelling, and the argument he builds up is
as solid as anything in psychology. Using simple questionnaires and
elementary statistics, the author reveals facts about Homo sapiens that do
more to destroy our self-serving illusions than anything since the
breakthrough work on the psychology of religion by William James or the
radical exploration of sexuality in the human psyche by Sigmund Freud. In
his review of Kahneman's book, Freeman Dyson says Kahneman outranks those
thinkers as a scientist. A physicist would say that, but even a lay reader
will sense greatness in this book.
Martin at his best
The
War Against Clichι
by Martin Amis
January 5, 2012
*****
Martin Amis was an excellent journalist and this volume of essays spanning
three decades proves it. One can be — and I am — sceptical about the merits
of some of his novels, but the literary quality of the essays in this
collection is pretty much undeniable. For any student who wants to
understand the Anglo-American zeitgeist of those decades, this may be a
better place to start than Martin's novels. Once you see the majesty of his
mental landscape in these essays, you can dive into the murk of those novels
with more sympathy for the sensibilities of the muck-racker that he there
reveals himself to be.
A novel for big bucks, not for big brains
Robopocalypse
by Daniel H. Wilson
August 31, 2011
****
This is a real page-turner with a great concept and a neat execution. But
the focus on butchery and horror is too much for a cool chap like me. I
don't see any possible future where robots go berserk like this. Sorry, Dr.
Wilson, you may be a robogeek but in all honesty the scenario sucks. I too
studied robots and I published a 1996 novel (now defunct) exploring a way
for robots to take over the world in a slightly more civilized fashion. As
for the writing style, the breathless verbatim reports of immediate
observers is great for putting the reader in the battlezone but is really a
cop-out for an author who couldn't make a more considered perspective on
this scenario fly straight if he tried. The novel is a great addition to the
Michael Crichton tradition and a natural for Steven Spielberg treatment, but
I despair for your soul, Dan Wilson. If you want to see how the robots can
really achieve their Global Organo-cybertronic Dominion, read my 2010
manifesto G.O.D. Is Great and
weep. Snoozilicious it may be compared to Robopocalypse, but at least it
seems feasible in the cool light of day. In short, Dr. Wilson has written a
novel for big bucks, not for big brains.
A must for any serious student of consciousness
The Character of Consciousness
by David J. Chalmers
August 31,
2011
*****
David Chalmers is perhaps the greatest living philosopher of consciousness.
The essays collected in this anthology of his best short writings for
professionals are definitively classic. But many of them are hard work to
read through. An introduction to the field this is not. Written over a
period of a decade or so and published in a variety of outlets, the essays
add up to a fascinating portrait of genius at work in a field where the
final truth is still decades, if not centuries, away. By a curious
coincidence, in 2009 I published a similar collection of my writings in
consciousness over a decade or so —
Mindworlds and in effect dedicated it
to David. Perhaps his new book, in concept if not in content, is his way of
responding. Whatever the truth, his book is an absolute must for any
dedicated consciousness buff. More serious appraisal must await peer reviews
in professional journals.
An incendiary manifesto for reason
The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason
by Sam
Harris
April 6, 2011
*****
I read this book soon after it first appeared and was electrified. It
changed my world. Harris pulls no punches in his attacks on the absurdities
of organized religion and the atrociousness of much of what now passes for
Muslim faith in particular. He wrote it as a young man and the book has the
flaws you might expect: it's sometimes clumsily written and somehow poorly
structured, but the clarity and brilliance of the central message is
outstanding enough to put all that in the shade. As his "war work" in
response to 9/11, this book is Harris' finest achievement to date though
he would probably wish to insist that his recent work as a brain scientist
turned moral philosopher in The Moral Landscape deserves recognition
independently of that achievement.
A fun take on the science of mind and brain
Thinks ...
by David Lodge
April 6, 2011
****
This novel is light and inconsequential but fun. I read it years ago, when
it first appeared, and when I was in the community of researchers into the
science of consciousness. Although the novel is rather British, it did catch
some of the conceits of the community remarkably well, both sharply and
wittily. In fact, I presented at a "Brain and Self" workshop in Elsinore,
Denmark, in 1997 where David Lodge gave a talk and evidently gathered
experiences for the novel. Some of the stuff in the book is rooted in that
event. If you have any interest in the intersection of British academia and
neuroscience, this book is for you.
Based on an idea by Max Tegmark
The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos
by
Brian Greene
April 2, 2011
****
Brian Greene must have enjoyed Max Tegmark's May 2003 Scientific American
article on parallel universes, since he recycled the concept for the third
book in his physics trilogy. After covering string theory in The Elegant
Universe and inflationary cosmology in The Fabric of the Cosmos, Greene
covers alternative, possible, and parallel worlds and universes in this new
book. He does so with a light touch and an easy manner, honed by years now
of delivering such highly theoretical and speculative content to popular
audiences. Whether he succeeds in whetting your appetite is another matter.
Personally, I loved his first book, really liked his second one, and felt a
slight ennui over the third one.
The fact is that the science of all
these possible worlds is hardly science at all in the traditional sense, and
there's a lot of hand-waving and vague philosophizing in Greene's account of
it all. Like Steven Pinker, who wrote several big popular books in quick
succession and found his content thinning out accordingly, Greene has found
that the physics on show in his new parade is less meaty than most physics
buffs will hunger for. Indeed, when string theorists admit that they need
five hundred zeroes just to write out the number of possible universes on
their recent estimations and when Greene admits that we might just as well
be living inside a giant simulation in an alien supercomputer, ΰ la Matrix,
we are right to sigh and lose heart for the new physics.
Physics has
had a great run in the last hundred years. From the Newtonian world of
colliding particles in absolute space and time, perfused with
electromagnetic waves, we have moved on to the weird world that Greene has
presented as well as any physicist since Heinz Pagels, who published a fine
trilogy on quantum physics, big bang cosmology, and the emerging science of
complexity a quarter of a century ago. We need these popular prophets for
physics even in times like these when the theory has navigated into a fog
bank. Perhaps a bright kid somewhere will be inspired by Greene's books to
find a way out of the fog.
Note added in proof: For a physics buff,
the notes in Greene's new book are the best part. It's a pity that most
readers, me included, will probably never read them all. Greene should have
the courage of his professorial salary and put the good stuff in the main
book where it belongs, and forget about trying to reach the top of the
bestseller lists with a book that without the notes is too bland.
A long march on the left-right brain
The
Master and His Emissary
by Iain McGilchrist
March 9, 2011
*****
Iain McGilchrist has poured his life's work into the capacious frame of this
book. Only a thinker who first spent some twenty years getting his case
together could have produced so massively buttressed an argument for greater
awareness of hemispheric differences between the two halves of our cerebral
cortexes. The scientific need for a deeper and more nuanced understanding of
our brains' lateralization is clear and acute, and the social pathologies
consequent upon our ignoring this key feature of our anatomy are
correspondingly important. That said, the investigations brought together in
this book can only represent a small start on a huge task.
Dr.
McGilchrist is certainly to be congratulated for having made a start.
Previous work on this topic has been of variable quality, a fact which
becomes alarmingly clear as McGilchrist reviews the panorama of that work.
Such contrasts as intuitive versus logical, or emotional versus rational, or
even male versus female, hardly do justice to the subtle and often tricky
nuances of our hemispheric specialization. In future, any researcher who
wishes to do justice to this topic will have to take due account of this
fundamental book. In fact, any such researcher will have to start here, for
it brackets all that went before.
At first I expected a monograph
that in its scope and ambition would essentially update the classic work on
the bicameral mind published in 1976 by Julian Jaynes, but Iain McGilchrist
takes a rather different tack. Although the depth and the scope of his work
invites comparison with Jaynes, who was thinking so far ahead of the
empirical work of the time that parts of his classic work now seem almost
nutty, McGilchrist has wisely held back from speculating on the evolution of
consciousness. Given the cataract of works on consciousness that have
appeared in recent decades, this is perhaps only prudent, but it also
reflects the fact that hemispheric lateralization cannot really be expected
to shed much light either on the physiological question of how the operation
of neural networks sustains or creates phenomenal experience or on the
psychological question of how the emergence of consciousness can be traced
in the cultural evolution of Homo sapiens. However, McGilchrist does not shy
away from conjecturally tracing any number of historic cultural impacts back
to our differentially lateralized brains.
One reservation is worth
emphasizing. This book is not a work of science in the modern data-driven
sense. It is much more correctly considered as a work of philosophy in the
sense that prevailed a century ago before the logicians took over. Iain
McGilchrist is a writer who in comparison with William James or Sigmund
Freud is more inclined to cite artistic works that have no scientific
credibility in support even of his more scientific claims. For example, he
expects his readers to accept that poetic thinkers like Wordsworth or Goethe
had insights that we can translate reliably into harder modern terms. I
doubt that this translation is possible without controversy, and hesitate to
endorse the pursuit of science in such a manner. Gilchrist also writes in a
dense and allusive manner that many scientists will find hard to take. The
fact that readers of a more reflective disposition will enjoy the style is
beside the point. The message of this book, if summarized too sharply, will
sound to many scientists like a rant or a jeremiad against modern
civilization and its evils. My five stars are intended to persuade such
scientists to read the book anyway.
A good history with a very real flavor
The Pacific: Complete HBO Series [Blu-ray]
Presented by Tom Hanks, Steven Spielberg, Gary Goetzman
December 26, 2010
****
The war in the Pacific from 1941 to 1945 can only be sketched in ten hours.
This sketch captures the grit, the horror, and the sort of people who became
heroes. It misses the grand strategy, many of the set-piece events, the
technology, and the whole perspective from the Japanese side. But what it
does it does well. It portrays telegenic characters who react believably to
the unbelievable horrors of war and it frames a social history that brings
the action home to a couch-bound viewer. The production values are superb
and this is state-of-the-art historical reconstruction.
I watched
the ten parts soon after watching the ten-part Band Of Brothers: Complete
HBO Series
[Blu-ray]
covering the American ground war in Europe in 1944 and 1945 in a similarly
episodic and character-oriented way. I must say Band Of Brothers did it
better. It was based on a real unit with consistently real events and
characters, and seemed more real to me. The Pacific story, by contrast,
seemed to have been dramatized to a formula. But this is a personal reaction
and I have no hesitation in recommending both products as a pair for anyone
who wants to invest twenty hours in understanding the American war against
fascism from the grunt's eye view.
Reader's Digest for the soul
Teachings of the Christian Mystics
Andrew Harvey (editor)
December 26, 2010
***
Andrew Harvey has been a one-man industry in matters mystical. His
credentials as a Christian are thin (a gushing book on Jesus —
Son of Man:
The Mystical Path to Christ that put me right off) but for this collection
it hardly matters. The classics presented here are obvious choices and brief
enough for hurried readers who just want a bit of mystic titillation before
moving on with their lives. Anyone who wants to engage with the deep thought
paraded here will have to go much, much deeper than this anthology, but at
least it points them in the right direction. Maybe it's the sort of book to
put by the bed instead of a Gideon's Bible, or to put by the loo for people
who have about one minute to spare. Think of the volume as Reader's Digest
for the soul.
Overproduced and disappointing
December 26, 2010
**
The topic of this book is intriguing but perhaps it is too early to give it
the treatment it deserves. This book shows every sign of having been
produced too hastily without sufficiently critical editorial attention. The
text is brief and thin and the illustrations are of mixed quality. The
layout seems designed to display the weaknesses of this content as lavishly
as possible. The whole thing could have been edited down to a good in-depth
magazine article for a periodical like Wired. A deeper analysis of the topic
that appeals to me (I haven't read it yet) is
Wired for War: The Robotics
Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century.
Much better than I feared from the hype
November 13, 2010
*****
Franzen has become a really good novelist. His earlier best-seller The
Corrections was pretty good, but it was only a proof of promise, as far as I
was concerned. I took a long time to get through it because I thought some
of it was silly and boring, but it did show the emergence of real talent.
Freedom has been so hyped that I was ready to find it as useless as Joyce's
Finnegan's Wake. But no, after reading the first 24 pages I realized I was
hooked and read the rest at high speed. For me, that's high praise already.
I won't bore you with the details — I'll just recommend it.
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.
