Summary Blaise Pascal was a philosopher, mathematician, and scientist. Just another run of the mill renaissance man. Pensées, or ‘Thoughts’ are a collection of loosely collected writings put together posthumously. What starts as a series of somewhat disconnected thoughts ends in a fairly coherent apologetic for faith in general and Christian faith in particular. Thoughts I did not research this book before reading it. I saw this quote: The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of… ...

Summary The final installation in Atkinson’s WW2 trilogy, which follows the allies from D-day to V-day from 1944-45 in the European theater. Thoughts Leading up to D-day there was a lot of uncertainty in the outcome of the war, but with the success of D-day allied victory over Germany seemed like a given, it was only a matter of time. This reminds me of playing the game Age of Empires, ( which is a real time strategy game where players control an empire and try to destroy the other players’ empires) there comes a point in the game where the balance falls so far to one side that, outside of miraculous intervention, the outcome is decided, from here on out it is up to the losers to decide how long to prolong the fight before surrendering. This was essentially the Axis’ position post D-day, Hitler just refused to give up and intended on doing everything in his power to make a miracle happen. This caused the war to drag on for nearly another year incurring another two hundred thousand casualties in the already battered German army. On top of that you had the absolutely brutal allied bombings that laid to waste many of Germany’s large cities inflicting another estimated five hundred thousand civilian casualties. This feeling of how unnecessary this conflict was tinged the book for me, it wasn’t as ’enjoyable’ as the other books because nothing seemed in to hang in the balance anymore, but still you had to watch people die anyway for a decision that had already been made. The single most important lesson I took from this book was never underestimate the power of production and logistics.

Thoughts Frank ‘Arrakis is a planet with not very much water, seriously its crazy how little water there is, have you considered how much we take water for granted on earth but how difficult it would be to have little water, you know like Arrakis because it’s a desert planet that has almost no water’ Herbert tells a very entertaining story on a very dry planet. Jokes aside this was a very good book with excellent world building. It made me realize how important names are in Sci-fi books. They can make the difference between your sci-fi book just being another run of the mill DnD group meet-up versus a really entertaining novel. Herbert must play the role of Adam in naming things that do not exist, but in a way that elicits the correct conscious and subconscious reactions from his western readers. He does a great job, for example nobody has to tell me that the Harkonnens are evil I can tell by their name. Bene Gesserits are obviously a religious order and Mentats a logistical one. The Fremens are interesting, the name to me conjures images of rats, vermin or rodents. This in part makes sense because the Fremen lived in holes in the ground and were like pests to the Harkonnens. They are also set up to become an invasive species. I’ll be interested to see where that goes. The role religion plays in the book is interesting and tied into Dune’s vision of time and determinism. Religion gives us a potential future, but we have to work to bring that potential future into existence. The warning is also that the vision and process of creation does not bring with it control over that future when it comes. Dune does a great job of maintaining the experienced paradox of self-aware agents in a complex system. In some ways the book could be recast as Paul being some Calvinistic hero attempting to slay the Arminian dragon of predestination. He seeks to control a future that is already cast. Another theme throughout the book is the idea that opulent civilizations grow lazy and soft. They are then replaced by civilizations that are sharpened by adversity. I wonder if we as a species have surpassed this point? The idea that decadence leads to decay which leads to collapse seems more plausible for the Roman empire than for a modern society. It seems hard to imagine what a modern-day Visigoth invasion force would look like, but then again, the average Roman may have felt the same way. The Fremens are also interesting because they are cast as a sort of noble savage, like we think of the Comanche for example, where they are brutal but honorable people. But what sets this apart from other troupes is that they also produce sophisticated technology. This made me wonder if it would be possible for an advanced technological society to adhere to old time-y eye for eye moral codes or if there is requirement that aggression must be repressed in a society to allow sophisticated technology to emerge.

Summary H.G. Wells writes his own version of Plato’s Republic laying out the process required to make humanity 2.0 otherwise known as the ‘New Republican’. Abandoning hope of finding absolute answers on any questions social, political or ethical, Wells decides to view life in its essence as a succession of births. If this be so, then how might we improve this succession and make it the best process possible? Wells has a plan, and he spends the next 10 chapters walking the reader through how a new republican would be welcomed into life, early education and eventually seated into the greater world of society. His ideas touch on many areas of life, sex, literature, and parenting styles. ...

As a note I am combining my reviews of this book and Buddhist’s Ethic - A Very Short Introduction. Summary Buddhism is gaining in popularity, but it has so many varying practitioners that it is hard to put a finger down on what it is exactly. I wanted to find out what it was from the horse’s mouth, and nowhere produces horses better than London’s universities, so that is where I decided to get my information. I’ve read quite a few books from the “Very Short Introduction” series and have yet to be disappointed; this was no exception. Since I am from the west most of my understanding will be filtered from that worldview. ...

Summary Heretics is a collection of essays by G.K. Chesterton written prior to World War 1. It is a defense of orthodoxy, not any particular orthodoxy but a defense of having explicit belief structures in the first place. This book is a polemic in the most fundamental sense. I use the word polemic carefully because, at least for me, the word carries a negative connotation. It brings with it ideas of narrow sightedness, or blindness. Chesterton would argue that the inverse is true. That any work that is not a polemic, has no vision to begin with, and therefore it is better to be narrow sighted than not to see at all. To put it succinctly and in Chesterton terms, the spirit of the modern age is one of negative definition, which at the end of the day is no definition. We can quickly point out where things go are wrong but have difficulty nailing down what things are “right”. ...

We were silent again for a minute. “Cher,” he concluded at last, getting up quickly, “do you know this is bound to end in something?” “Of course,” said I. “Vous ne comprenez pas. Passons. But … usually in our world things come to nothing, but this will end in something; it’s bound to, it’s bound to!” Summary Dostoyevsky chose as the epigraph to this story the passage of Luke where Jesus sends the demons into the swine, and they subsequently throw themselves off a cliff. A curious passage, and one that will come up over and over in this book. I won’t bother to write a plot summary because spoilers, and also like all of Dostoyevsky’s books, the plot is the tortilla of the burrito. It serves mainly to deliver the contents of the book. The contents are the conversations. The characters are unforgettable, you have a fifty-year-old child, who was influential once, but is of no practical use and literally runs away from home. You have Stavrogin, a man who can’t bring himself to believe in anything, but apparently can’t stop influencing people with the force of his ideas. You have the power-hungry revolutionary sociopath Pyotr Stepanovich who is always willing to break a few eggs to make an omelet. Last but not least, one of the most compelling characters Kirillov, the atheists par excellence, consumed by an idea, courageous, selfless, and ultimately doomed. In short, this work is a literary masterpiece that managed to divine the future of Russia with astonishing clarity. ...

Summary Foucault writes a history of civilization’s ever-changing relationship to madness. Starting inquires around the Renaissance, he tracks how madmen were once considered to be bearers of knowledge, although unintelligible from the edge of experience. His central thesis was that there once was a language that connected reason to unreason, and through various shifts in culture that dialogue has been cut off. The Renaissance gave way to the “Age of Reason” that signaled the beginning of the shift towards confinement. This separation eventually created a new category, the “insane”. This category objectified and concretized madness as both a thing to be studied, and something undesirable to be cured. From here the rest as they say is history, all sorts of treatments and testing were tried to cure and restore sanity. ...

Summary Army at Dawn documents the United States entry into the fight against Germany in North Africa. This picks up after the allies seized the critical port town of Tunis. This allied victory opened the possibility of attacking in the words of Churchill “the Axis’ underbelly” in Italy. Crossing from Tunis to Sicily (the island attached to the toe of the Italy’s boot) the allies began their slow march towards Rome. During and after the capture (or liberation if you prefer) of Tunisia there was a great deal of disagreement between the British and the US over what the next target of attack should be. The Americans favored a cross channel invasion jumping from England to France, but on the other hand, after the Dunkirk debacle the Brits were much keener on the idea of invading Italy. So in a compromise they decided to do both, but since the allied troops were already stationed near Italy it was decided that the cross-channel invasion would occur a year later to allow for planning and logistical difficulties to be sorted out. In the meantime, the allies would use their deployed units to invade Italy and try to take some pressure off of Russia. It sounds good on paper, but as the casualties mounted and progress crawled to a halt in the inhospitable Italian mountain winter, victory was far from certain. ...

Summary This book (as the title implies) is interested in the emergence of species, and now that we are talking about it, what are species to begin with? At the time, there were many very experienced naturalists who would disagree on whether a certain plant or animal belonged in species A as a variety or actually should be considered a distinct species. These disagreements arose due to the fact that no one had a clear theory as to how these differences arose and up to then we used internal and external structure to define species. If these structures diverged enough, we would separate them into species. They also used the concept of whether entity A could potentially breed with entity B. If not, then the two entities must not be in the same species. There were other methods used, but these two should suffice to show how difficulties in definition might arise. For example, the internal and external structure of sexed organisms may very greatly as in humans, but we obviously must be the same species, right?….. Actually, that might explain some things. As for mating, this brings its own difficulties (I’m on a roll), but strictly speaking, you can have two different species reproduce, like a grizzly bear and polar bear, and this happens quite often in the plant kingdom. On the other hand, you have many instances of creatures in the same species category that can’t reproduce inside their own species. Think Mastiff and Chihuahua. So these principles are by no means black and white. The prevalent view at the time was the belief that each species was created individually, with this view the categorization of species should be much more straight-forward than it is, but Darwin had other ideas. Using pigeons, due to their availability and the long history they have of human selection, he built an argument. He stated that if we had found the various varieties of pigeons in the wild, we would without a doubt classify them as different species. We only refrain from doing so because we happen to know in this case that all the varieties descended from rock pigeons. What if this same concept applied to the whole animal kingdom? What if instead of individually created species there was a single progenitor which has given rise to the magnificent variety we observe today? How far might these accumulated minute changes take us? ...