Reviews

Summary This book follows the protagonist Julien Sorell in his attempts to make a name for himself. Julien is the son of a carpenter but has dreams of becoming the next Napoleon. During a period known as the Bourbon Restoration, France is experiencing a brief moment of peace after Napoleon had been defeated and monarchs were back in charge. Julien decides that the only possible path to the glory he seeks is through the church now that Napoleon is no longer around. He soon finds out that in order to climb the ranks of the France elite he must first learn to play their games. ...

Summary Haidt argues that morality is an emergent property from the neurological equivalent of taste buds and that different types of people have different tastes. He also makes the case that our moral judgements are gut feelings justified by post hoc rationalizations. Haidt also takes a dualistic approach to mind, comparing it to an elephant with a rider. The elephant represents inarticulate passions while the rider represents the part of the brain that reasons. From here he uses the divide between liberal (using the American definition meaning those on the left side of politics) and conservative to highlight the different moral taste buds that each political party activates. ...

Premise Modernity is obsessed with individual identity at the cost of destroying culture. The modern self has been reduced almost entirely into the sexual self. Carl Truman takes the reader on a scenic tour from Augustine to Marcuse tracing the way in which the modern conception of the self or “psychological self” has become increasingly disconnected from the physical self and its realities. Good Parts This book does a fair job of running through some of the intellectual heavy weights of the western cannon (think Rosseau, Kant, Marx, etc). The mainstream bits from these thinkers will be review for anyone familiar with philosophical history, but with some interesting threads being drawn out. Ironically, this book taught me some things about the LGBT community that I didn’t know like the theoretical difference between “gay” and “lesbian”. One of the most interesting points to me was that some feminist refuse to accept man to woman trans people as being technically women because of the fact that they for the most part become patriarchal stereotypes of women. There is also the more common argument about certain biological realities lacking in a M2W trans experience. ...

Summary A nameless father with his nameless boy tries to survive in a world that has been destroyed by a nameless catastrophe. Whatever it was that destroyed the earth left its surface coated in ashes and its skies so perpetually cloudy that nothing can survive. There is no life save a few scattered bands of humans slowly dying off by starvation or violence. Thoughts McCarthy does a great job of world building, or I should say withering. It turns out he can describe dilapidated cityscapes just as well as western prairies. This book has been lauded as being a champion for climate change, but I think that is incidental. The main question is as Camus says, “why not commit suicide?”. McCarthy destroys the world and all the creeping things that crawl along its face just to put this question in sharper relief. This book also made me realize that all post-apocalyptic stories are actually just visions of who humans are without society. There are many mini apocalypses in history we can use for inspiration, like the siege of Leningrad or countless other sieges that remove the mask of society to expose the truth that lies beneath, the earth is not a symphony of symbiosis, but a network of mouths and teeth. Even your own body will eat itself if you can’t find something else to sacrifice. ...

And upon completion of this book, I would like to please receive a paper certificate that indicates my commitment to the advance of woman’s equality in society. Furthermore, I would like to be acknowledged as being a forerunner in the movement to bring about a peaceful conclusion to the war between the sexes. To put it shortly I feel as though I have solved all issues based on sex and am equipped to fully exercise my god given authority over women now that I have a complete understanding of them. Jokes aside this was a very dense book, but had many valuable insights nestled in there. Published in 1949 the information, descriptions, and approach of this book are unavoidably dated, due to the fact that it has been so influential in shaping modern conceptions of “the plight of womankind”. That being said I feel as though our upbringing and indoctrination created similar expectations about women as those widely held in the 50s. So, this book was ‘convicting’ more so for me than it probably would be for most people in our modern culture. Split into two volumes the first volume discusses what “woman” is. Looking first at biological examples from various insects, animals and eventually humans. Then with this foundation she transitions from the physiological to the psychological. While critical of most thinkers (like Freud and Adler) that had attempted to analysis woman’s condition it is easy to tell that she was heavily influenced by their form of analysis. I’ve seen/heard many people talk about how she completely disagreed with these thinkers, but that is not how I read it. For example, the Freudian concept about women suffering from penis envy, is rebaptized in her thought as the fact that women are envious of the privileges that come along with having a penis. This is a long and interesting (to me) conversation but long story short, I don’t see this view as a complete contradiction, but more of a reformation. She ends volume 1 with an in depth look at the various mythical styling that are given to women. In particular focusing on a handful of author’s depictions as a case study. Noting that each of these different types of mythologies make heavy use of mystery when describing woman. This mystery is largely responsible for creating this idea of the “other” where woman isn’t another subjective free acting human, but something else. Volume 2 then describes woman’s experience from infancy to old age. This section was actually very interesting to me, and I feel like I learned a fair bit that I was not aware of previously. To summarize, the distance between the starting line and the finish line of becoming a unified self is much longer and more confusing for women than it is for men. There are many more opportunities for women to stop halfway on the path to individualization than there are for men thanks in large part (but not entirely) to the path society has set out for them. She then cycles through many stereotypes of women and provides a psychoanalysis of each case which would always start off with me thinking she was insane, or overstating things and by the end, everything she said started making sense. The book concludes with her talking about why there haven’t been very many great women authors, artists, etc. Put simply (do not strike me dead Simone) women have to first convince themselves and the world that they are competent individuals. This initial effort takes so much energy and time that they are left with little energy to go further. This “going further” is essential in becoming great. Few men achieve it even with having a head start, which explains why even fewer women achieve it, and why “Wuthering Heights, in spite of its stature, does not have the scope of Brothers Karamazov” (Had to sneak in a Dostoevsky plug in there). You cannot expect a black slave to write a transcendent epic like Moby Dick, because the experiences that allowed the author to create the epic are not open to the slave. This book was, as I said dense. Some parts were slow, others interesting. But most modern ideas about birth control, abortion and economic equality of the sexes, and objectification have their birthplace in this book. I could definitely see re-reading some of these sections again to be reminded of some of the insights she presented. Great stuff

Secret History is a murder mystery told in reverse, where the reader is shown the victims and perpetrators at the beginning. The book is narrated in first person by one of the perpetrators, and the events are revealed through his recollections of them. The story is set in a fictional small college in New England in the 1980s, where a group of six students form an exclusive cohort under the tutelage of a professor of Greek classics. This professor has peculiar practices, such as being very selective about which students he allows in his classes. He only lets a few students in at a time, and takes total control of their schedules, becoming almost their only professor by teaching multiple classes at once. This creates a close-knit group of students who are almost strangers to the rest of the students on campus. ...

I had written an extensive review that was erased. Here is a really good one from an expert in the field. https://drive.google.com/file/d/10W5lAhu_QmXTfCjzGwg6-3S_bi05NkGo/view The short version is ape alone weak, ape together strong! The secret our success is our ability to leverage the smarts of an entire society instead of relying on individual brilliance. As Henrich says: “We stand on the shoulders of a very large pyramid of hobbits”. One way to drive this intuition home is to take a minute and try to imagine which objects around you, could you, if stripped of all experience re-invent. Looking around, I think the only thing that made it on my list was a cup, and that is probably being too generous.

This book was fairly interesting if somewhat opaque to me due to my ignorance around Buddhism. There were some interesting ideas put forth in the book, I really liked the following quote The traveler who finds his road blocked by a river will use a raft to reach the opposite shore, but, his shore once reached, he will not carry the raft on his shoulders while continuing his journey. He will abandon it as something which has become useless. ...

This is another short story that came with the hard copy i bought of “heart of darkness” so i read it this week. Very entertaining read, probably pretty easy to finish in one sitting under normal circumstances. It is about a new ship captain that is a “stranger to the ship and its crew” but makes an unexpected connection with a stowaway that he must hide from the rest of the ship’s crew. As with the heart of darkness, Conrad is able to produce a tense, and mysterious atmosphere that makes you feel present in the action, while keeping things dark and primal feeling. Very fun quick read.

Summary Dawkins argues that the fundamental unit of natural selection is at a gene level. He then continues to build the world from single genes into what we see today, explaining why many different behaviors that are confusing at first, when examined from the “gene’s eye view” they start to make sense. If you have heard of Darwin, then odds are you’ve heard the phrase “survival of the fittest”, but the question that this statement raises is, survival of what? The fittest claw? The fittest lion? The fittest pride? The fittest species? Dawkins makes the case that what is surviving is the gene and for this to work he defines gene slightly different than a geneticist would. He says a gene is the smallest single or collection of chromosomal material that lasts enough generations to act as a unit of natural selection. An easily understandable example would be the gene for blue eyes. On the face of it this definition seems circular, by definition he can’t be wrong. Genes — segments of chromosomal material — are the smallest trait-carrying units we know of, so if natural selection exists, it must start there. One might be tempted to ask why he didn’t define genes as a group or single quark that exists together long enough to be a unit of natural selection, but he spends a fair bit of time expanding this definition into less of a tautology and more of a theory. One interesting question the comes up is if natural selection is at the gene level and logically therefore all genes are acting selfishly (anthropomorphizing to help us think about the situation), then why would they band together with competing genes to form flesh suits, or elm trees? To answer this he brings in the concepts of replicators and vehicles. Another term he uses throughout the book was survival machines, this was a clever choice as it applies to anything that is alive, plants, animals, etc. Dawkins says that genes are the replicators and survival machines are their vehicles. So since we are already anthropomorphizing, I don’t think it would be too much of a stretch to picture a chromosome behind the wheel of a car on a speeding highway trying not to die, the car in this case would anything from single celled amoeba, to a giraffe. When we come back to reality of course this does not work in this way, as a single gene has next to no control over where a bat is going, or over the next word I type. But Dawkins chooses to zoom in on the “next to nothing” influence, because if you put enough next to nothings together, you just might have something! ...