Reviews

Published in 1962, nine years after his psychedelic experience that he documented in Doors of Perception, Huxley writes the “yang” to Brave New World’s “yin”. This story follows a cynical journalist who is shipwrecked on an island called Pala. These people do things in their own way thanks to the chance encounter between a Scottish doctor and the previous King of Pala about a hundred years prior to the main story in the book. The island represents a utopia imagined by Aldous with the best of east and west. This book started off with a bang then lagged a little in the middle but picked up at the end. Like many utopian ideas there is no shortage of opportunities to pick holes in ideas and explain why they wouldn’t work, but instead of doing that I’ll point out some ideas that seemed really interesting: ...

Summary On September 30, 1965, a group of officers and soldiers of uncertain provenance executed six of Indonesia’s top military generals and one lieutenant, throwing the country into chaos. Parts of what became Indonesia had been under European colonial pressure since the early 16th century, but for a brief moment after WW2 ended, Indonesia was left without a master. Sukarno and Mohammad Hatta stepped up and issued a proclamation of independence. The Netherlands, their previous colonial rulers, were none too pleased and attempted to restore their control over the country. They ultimately failed, facing local resistance and strong pressure from the United Nations and the United States. ...

Man, I don’t even know where to begin with this book. I had started this book last spring but took a break for a couple months. Even during the sabbatical, thoughts from this book would recur in my head until I eventually picked it back up about a month ago. Written towards the end of Tolstoy’s life it was banned from Russia so initially it was printed in Germany. This book comes at a very interesting point in history. About 30 years after Das Kapital, and only 20 years prior to a world war that the book predicts without intending to, but almost as an inevitability. While people were arguing and continue to argue the virtues of Communism over Capitalism or vice versa, Tolstoy presents a possible third choice… neither. Tolstoy’s fundamental belief springs from the nonresistance taught in the sermon on the mount. As a result, he draws striking conclusions about governments and the people who support them. He draws a consistent line from this single doctrine to show that a government of any kind is incompatible with this belief. When I say to anti capital punishment people something like “if you are against the death penalty, then disband the army”. Tolstoy would say yes, absolutely and also defundThePolice. As such his ideas were inherently anarchistic, but in the most compelling and consistent of ways. He makes his argument that human’s moral development is in stages. The first stage is that of a savage where one only cares about themselves. The second stage is that of a citizen where one only thinks of the group they belong to (family, nation, etc.) the third and final stage is that of divinity when one cares for the entire world. Whereas this might sound cliche, he backs it up with brilliant reasons, and allegories to elaborate his thinking. It is a very interesting pairing to read this book directly after Just Mercy. The two of these books have me again questioning crime and punishment, death penalty etc. I will be thinking about points in this book for some time to come. ...

This is a book a little out of my wheelhouse, but I am glad I read it. The author is an Afghan American who does a brilliant job of describing the life of a privileged Afghan in pre-war Afghanistan. By far the best part about this book was the perspective it gave on life, or at least one life in the middle east. It was also interesting to hear Islam talked about from a neutral point of view instead of either fearmongering or blind acceptance. The book richly describes the culture through food, family and the center of the book kite flying. The book reads as a biography but is in fact a fiction. As for the criticisms of the book there were several literary devices the author overused and some plot choices that seemed a little predictable, but believable. Overall, a very entertaining book.

I read this book because of the article I found on Hermes Trismegistus a character who shows up in the weirdest places. The alleged inspiration behind the Egyptian god Thoth and the later Greek god Hermes, Hermetic philosophy appears to be incredibly influential in world religion yet something I had never really heard of. This is where we get the phrase “Hermetically sealed” from as the process was used in alchemy in attempts to make the philosopher’s stone. Enter the Kybalion, a fairly popular book written by the three initiates which puts the hermetic philosophy into a nice, condensed package. ...

Heard this book referenced in a podcast as one of the best historical novels ever. I’m not sure I would go that far, but it was a very entertaining read. The writing and setting were beautiful. It follows the last in a long line of Sicilian nobility while Sicily and Italy as a whole is experiencing revolution and political turmoil during the unification of Italy that was happening ~1870s. This novel further cemented my views on the inevitability of history and the material blow to culture from the extinction of the noble class. Any remnants of the nobility left today are mere SIMULACRA of the originals.

Summary The Master and his Emissary written by Iain “Right brain so hott right now” McGilchrist is the product of twenty years of research into hemispheric differences in the human brain. He starts out by dismantling the pop psychology version of the hemispheric differences saying that the simple male(left)/ female(right) dichotomy is incorrect because the right is actually good at logic too so now, we can’t find a female part of the brain anywhere. To put the book in a single sentence it would be that the left sees parts while the right sees the whole. Part of the impetus of this book seems to be that the right hemisphere has been neglected by research and considered of lesser importance than the left (which does the talking) according to McGilchrist this is flipped. The “master” in his title is in reference to the right hemisphere and the emissary to the left. His claim is that thought originates in the RH and is sent to the LH but must importantly return to the RH to find its grounding in lived experience. He makes some really broad claims that are bound to ruffle a few feathers. Shots are fired at many folks, like Descartes, everyone’s favorite punching bag, Plato who we are assuming you understand if you are disagreeing with him, and Chomsky the misguided genius of the left. This book is full of interesting anecdotes about the functions of the brain, here are a few that stood out. The LH and RH seem to work in a sort of opponent processing. Where if one side loses some power, the other side will step in to fill the gap. This usually causes undesirable outcomes for example in stroke patients or the like. He claims the singing (RH biased) preceded language (LH biased) due to its simplicity and the way our brains pick up rhythm and some studies that showed that babies tend to pick up words lyrically prior to syntax. [Chomsky shakes his fist in feudal rage] The corpus callosum is the major connector between the LH and RH. This is what was severed in patients with severe epilepsy because it appeared to ease the symptoms creating what we call “split brain” patients. Two things are interesting here, first that for the most part the patients were able to live normal lives after the operation. Secondly, that bridge appears not only as a connector, but a borderline that held the hemispheres at bay. So, after the operation the instances of strange behavior like the left hand reaching for a coat (controlled by the RH) and the right hand (controlled by the LH) reaching out to stop it are caused by this imbalance in opponent processing. One of his major claims in the book is that the western world has become a machine world, the LH preferred way of looking at the world. We moved away from the dynamic world of the RH which is full of curves, circles, and flow into the static world of the left, line segments, n-gons, and timesteps. From art to the written word itself, the world has shifted towards an LH biased mode of operation. Language used to be written vertically and made with pictograms (like hieroglyphs) which meant reading favored the RH, we now use abstracted symbols and read left to right which is exactly the way LH prefers it. The shift to favor the LH has torn us out of an experiential world and placed us into a mechanistic world where we are observers. He makes the case that this perspective is very similar to cases of schizophrenia, which are primarily a malady wherein the LH is overactive. He ends the book by looking at the ways in which this LH bias is not as apparent in eastern cultures and that perhaps this signals a way forward for us. ...

Written by Mikhail Bulgakov(Ukrainian) in the USSR during Stalin’s reign the book was censored and only published in full posthumously. The book is now widely considered to be one of the best novels of the 20th century and with good reason. The novel opens with a conversation between a literary editor and a poet. The editor had just commissioned the poet to write a satirical poem belittling Jesus and was upset with the poet’s creation. According to the editor, the poet’s approach was all wrong because he admitted that Jesus existed in the first place and was not a completely mythological creation. With great erudition he points out the similarity between different mystery religions and Christianity, and also the parallels between the dying and rising gods category of mythology. While the poet listens deeply impressed by these new facts a mysterious tall stranger sits on a bench next to them. Overhearing their conversation, he breaks in asking what they were talking about. The stranger then relates a captivating account of the conversation between Pontius Pilate and Jesus. He then predicts that the literary editor will be beheaded…. I will say no more of the plot as I would highly recommend this book makes its way onto your read list. The writing is superb, the story is engrossing, sags a little in the middle but picks up again at the end. I also guarantee whatever ideas about the plot you have, given the introduction I gave are pleasantly mistaken. Say what you will about Stalin and the rough Russian climate, but the images of hope, forgiveness, and love that the area produced seem to be unparalleled.

Synopsis Published in 1942 Camus began writing this book as France (his home country) was collapsing under the pressure of the German advance. Let’s just say it was probably a pretty dark time to be a Frenchmen. This book starts off by Camus asking what he considers to be the most important question in philosophy. Which is: does the realization that life is meaningless and absurd necessarily require suicide? He then begins by defining exactly what he means by absurd. According to Camus the absurd emerges when man’s passionate and ceaseless desire for an answer from the universe is, and forever will be met by silence. He asserts that many philosophers have started from this realization but have in the end taken a leap to get around or alleviate the discomfort of this conclusion. Either by turning to a God or elevating reason until it essentially serves the function of God. He labels this leap “philosophical suicide”. He says that suicide in general is admission that either life is too much for you or that you do not understand it. The same could be said of this philosophical leap. His approach is rooted in acceptance of the absurd without hope, but a perpetual revolt in spite of this fact. He uses the story of Sisyphus (the guy who is cursed to roll a rock up a hill only to see it roll back down again) as a guide to how to live in this absurd world. He says, “there is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn.” This is the attitude of revolt that the absurd hero must adopt. To at once be fully conscious of the meaninglessness of your life while at the same time transcending this conclusion by acceptance. As the famous quote from this essay states “one must imagine Sisyphus happy”. The point is that you can choose to find freedom in a universe that does not have a predefined path. ...

This book was complete trash. This wins the worst book I’ve read since I can remember. There weren’t any redeeming factors in this book. The author was a strong proponent of the “Jesus went to India” theory, which is literally based on one book by some random Russian dude who may or may not have gotten rich from the story. No modern-day scholars put any merit in this theory. That doesn’t mean it’s wrong necessarily, but it does mean you can get a show on the History channel if you believe in it. For some unknown reason the author tried to write the story in a sort of prose, which if you ever have heard spoken world then you know exactly the style this book was written in. The author’s views were an infusion of eastern mysticism with Marxist overtones. This by itself is great, but why not write in a normal format. Also why try to foist your views onto a 1st century Palestinian? This book would have been more convincing and enjoyable had it been written like a normal book instead of in Goodwill prose, also if he could have cited sources, for further research that would have been much appreciated.