Reviews

Summary This book looks into what is known as the Bronze Age collapse. There was an interim between the Bronze and Iron ages where highly connected systems of trade and communication went dark. Cline tries to investigate various theories as to why this happened. Long story short, it was a lot of things. There was a mega drought, or more likely two mega droughts which together spanned 150 years. This was no doubt part of the reason why certain tribes had to migrate escalating tensions. There is some evidence of earthquake storms happening around the same time, which are caused by two tectonic plates who won’t stop dancing. There were signs of internal rebellion, no doubt exacerbated by the famine. All single things that on their own could be survived, combined into a perfect storm causing a complete collapse of the interconnected Mediterranean world. The date picked to represent the culmination of this collapse is 1177, but this is just a neat handle, much like the term Bronze Age. The actual collapse probably took over 50 years. ...

Summary McCullough gives a fairly detailed account of the first year of the American Revolution against the British. Focusing largely on George Washington, this book is more interested in the military maneuvers of both sides without getting too bogged down in the political philosophy of the moment. The first year of America’s Revolution was a dark one, but by its end several close calls set the stage for surprise attack by Washington which reinvigorated a fledgling nation’s resistance and would be forever memorialized by the famous “Crossing the Delaware” painting. ...

Finished this book UNABRIDGED, double plus good. Hated how believable it was. This should be required reading. The main new idea I got this time through was that the party doctrine sounded a little bit like biocentrism. They had just swapped the party for consciousness. Biocentrism says reality exists only by conscious observation. Winston said reality only has true existence by the party’s doctrine. He who owns the present owns the past. Winston’s point about immortality through the party is also the same point that people have made about the “I” continuing to exist through the other “I"s that succeed it. In Winston’s case he believed he was immortal because the party would never die. I think this is a great insight by Orwell, because it would seem that it is impossible to set up a society without bringing along metaphysical baggage. The desire (need?) for metaphysics is like a sexuality that if repressed just comes through the cracks in very disturbing ways.

I had bought this monstrosity of a book shortly before moving to Africa. I had heard an interview about it on NPR which piqued my interest. I had planned to read it in my down time and on flights but I was a beta reader back then and only got a couple hundred pages in before getting distracted. One of my pacts I’ve made with myself is not to have a book on my bookshelf that I haven’t read and this one had been staring at me for half a decade. I picked it back up and was surprised how interesting it was. It is actually 5 novels in one book that are tied together by common thematic elements. There is an obscure German author who goes by the pseudonym Archomboldi and the book opens with 4 literary professors from different parts of Europe who are obsessed by this obscure author. The author’s real name is unknown, but they spend many years trying to glean personal details about him from his publisher and anyone else who has ever heard of him. They end up in the small town of Santa Teresa Mexico where they had gotten a tip he was hiding. This small Mexican town plays as the second key thematic element and becomes a focal point that shows up again and again in the other novels. There is a rash of women being killed in Santa Teresa, over 200, and the police can’t seem to do anything about it. This is the backdrop for the lives of the next several novel’s main characters. We follow a washed-out professor, a detective, a journalist from Brooklyn, and many many more characters who are somehow all drawn to the town in one way or another. I guess Bolano was a good short story author, and this is his magnum opus where he writes his longest book. I didn’t realize this while reading, but it makes sense because really this book is group of short stories that are linked together loosely by various details. I definitely had to shift into low gear on this book, as you must be prepared to get sidetracked by anyone’s life story at any point. Also, there isn’t always a neat ending to the novels. Many are left feeling a little unfinished. If you are ok with that and are not in a rush, the book takes you many strange and interesting places. From Chile with a struggling film crew that is trying to make a raunchy B movie into the head of an aging black man who is the last member of his communist cell in Boston. The magnitude of detail in this book is mind boggling. Just thinking about the amount of imagination it took to create these many backstories is overwhelming. I started to become more and more worried as I came to the end that things would not be tied up, but in the last 30 pages he pulls it out a sort of No Country for Old Men ending. An ending that is not complete but is still satisfying in its own way.

Summary After writing several books targeted at specialists Stephen Hawking tries to write a book targeted at the everyman. In the book he lays out where our conceptions of the universe and time came from, and how and why they’ve been updated as more and more discoveries have been made. Thoughts I don’t know if this book was a waste of Hawking’s time, but it was fairly clear after reading the book that the talent for mass communication that other popular science writers have is somewhat lacking here. As one of the most intelligent and acclaimed scientists of our time it is not that surprising that the average layman may have difficulties keeping up. I in part blame Einstein for this because up until his general theory of relativity it seemed to me that the basic ideas of physics could be conveyed in a way that most people could understand, but once you start talking about gravity bending time and space, I think the allegories have to be dumbed down so much that they essentially represent nothing to the non-specialist and are quickly misunderstood by the masses. That being said there were some gems in the book, specifically the anthropic principle which we’ve all thought about many times in one direction. That is, we often have heard or thought “what are the chances that this universe unfolded in such and such a way. It’s impossible for that to have been purely chance”. What this observation neglects are that in order to make the observation in the first place the universe had to have unfolded in such and such a way. Every long string of events looks improbable in retrospect, yet any outcome of a sufficiently long string of events looks improbable. I guess this is similar to the idea that if something odd DOESN’T happen in your day, that would be a truly odd day. Hawking is also of course famous for his work on radiation observed around black holes, and so he goes into how black holes work which didn’t help me to sleep any better at night. In fact, I am now convinced that no one believes in black holes. The fact that the universe spawns these giant mouths that consume everything they come into contact with is something that I will continue to ignore.

After talking about it yesterday oh my brothers, I got curious, and your humble narrator checked out the book. Overall, I couldn’t believe how much of the book was fit into the Kubrick movie. It made me respect the movie that much more. To me, it seemed to perfectly communicate the ideas of the book without much loss in translation. Anthony Burgess wrote it in 3 weeks. He originally wrote it with 21 chapters to signify 21 years, the age of an adult, but when trying to get it published in New York the publisher wanted to cut the last chapter. Needing the money, he agreed, and this is the version that the film was based on. Naturally this burned the author’s beans and he thought that this was a huge mistake. Inevitably, this book ended up becoming his most influential as well as his least liked book that he authored. ...

This is a story that takes place entirely inside a hotel in Moscow from just after the Bolshevik revolution to just after World War 2. The main character is a man who was part of the bourgeoisie, a count. He is spared summary execution by the red army because he had penned a poem that helped start the revolution. For this reason, instead of being executed he was sentenced to live the rest of his life inside an iconic hotel that is a block away from the Kremlin. The story is told from his perspective. That is to say from someone that is watching his entire world be turned upside down. Reading this book will make you nostalgic for an Era that can never be recreated. Whereas you could argue that the bourgeoisie still exists the gentlemen that used to occupy it (at least in our imagination) have been replaced with people named Chad who drive their daddy’s BMW. I also had watched a couple episodes of the show “The Great” around the same time (which is very loosely based on Catherine the great) which cemented this idea. The show is set largely in a palace, with fancy ball parties and what not. But it was upsetting me to watch because the language of the show is modern and casual. Littered with penis jokes and modern curse words. Which was in keeping with the shows aesthetic but annoyed me for some reason. I think that reason is after reading this book the main character is an example of best-case scenario of nobility. He is well read, charming, respectful, and honest. So, when those folks are given wealth, it seems natural like fish in water. But when we see people like the characters in “The Great” it reminds one of a pearl necklace on a pig. Of course, the latter is probably more common, but the former is what we like to remember.

This is a book I literally stumbled on because of the title. It ended up being probably my favorite book I have read all year long. It is a collection of short stories each based around a central theme. Stories range from Noah to astronauts. I must say after the first story I was only halfway on board, but by the end of the second story the author had won me over. I have not been as challenged mentally by a book in a long time. Delightfully dark and depressing with just enough humor and love to keep you from giving up. Which could be an allegory for life I suppose, either way I highly recommend this book. Get it in audio-book form, each story is about an hour long and will give you something to think about while you are stuck in traffic.

Summary The gospel of philosophy according to Bertrand Russell begins at the dawn of historical records. In the beginning were the Pre-Socratics, who said many things. Then came the Platonists, who said fewer things, only to be surpassed by the Aristotelians, who said even less. When we arrive at the Middle Ages, folks were saying very little indeed. In the Dark Ages, a silence had broken out; it continued for quite some time, but alas, this state of affairs could not continue. Sooner or later, someone would start talking again. Literally crawling out of an oven, René Descartes presented a freshly baked philosophy to the world, which started the conversation again, and people haven’t stopped talking since. ...

I find myself questioning how things are typically done to see if there are any better ways out there. Currently my interest is focused on education. This book is widely recommended by overanxious parents everywhere. If I remember correctly Alethea was founded on some classical principles that were most likely inspired by Dorothy Sayers (1893-1957) and Sayers is a contemporary of Mason (1842-1923). Most likely influenced by her. Their methods have a lot of overlap but some differences as well. Charlotte Mason thought that all kids should have the right to an education and not just the rich ones. She came up with her own method of education which minimized the amount of time talking by the teacher and replaced it with the students “narrating” what they had just read. This narration is a cornerstone to her method as she believes it cements what the student has learned in their minds and helps the student to incorporate the new knowledge into their brains. I sure hope this is true as this is the main reason I write these reviews. She also believed that children did not need to be trained how to think but instead should be exposed to the best thinkers and use their innate reasoning to process the best kinds of information. She believed that every subject (excluding math) should be taught in a literary form as story is the best way to learn. The younger children would narrate paragraph by paragraph, then chapter by chapter and then finally an entire book at a time. This narration would start out in verbal form but would eventually become written. In short starting from around age 6 children should be exposed to the best art, literature, music the world has to offer and this “mind stuff” will be good food for a growing brain. This nutritive aspect of learning is also prominent in Mason’s thinking. For the postmodern push back, Mason assumed everyone would be on the same page when she said “best stuff” i.e. Dickens, Rembrandt, Mozart etc. But why not Peterson, Heffner, and Cardie B? I tended to agree with her approach as I feel like kids often underachieve because they aren’t asked to achieve anything worth achieving. The other thing about her method which was interesting was she didn’t like tests, or homework, but structured her curriculum to be consumed (dependent on stellar focus, which may be a relic by now) at high speed in the morning and then in the afternoon to work on handicrafts or learn out in nature. Give the children beautiful things to think about and they will become beautiful thinkers. Overall, I enjoyed the book, and it gave me some valuable perspective from a very experienced and well-read person. The downside of this is that I don’t know how realistic it was as a lot of it sounded insane in a modern context, but I would love to be wrong on that point.