Reviews

Finally checked this one of the list, of course that raises the question of what I mean by “finally”. The word obviously indicates a sequence of events and sequence indicates time and time indicates a required conscious observer. So, in a sense I’ve read this book both before, after and not yet. Jokes aside this book raises a lot of interesting questions, making you think about things a little differently than you had before. And that is the most and best that you can ask from a book. The writing in the book is kind of poor and a little self-aggrandizing at points but the ideas are original enough to make that not too difficult to look past. This book also made me want to read Emerson. While some of his conclusions and observations have in recent years been “proven” wrong (most notably the experiment of being able to read someone’s intentions up to 10 seconds before they actually make a decision) there still seems to be plenty of latitude in the field of consciousness to allow for his ideas to have value. Good suggestion has given me a lot to think about.

Black Robe is a simple story about a 17th century priest trying to make it out to an isolated mission near the Great Lakes. He is to be guided by a small group of Algonquian in exchange for six muskets and a few other items. The main theme that is in the faces of the reader is the clash of cultures. Two ways of thinking so disparate, it is hard to imagine any bridge large enough to span the chasm. Moore avoids the easy trap of making caricatures of either side, but instead presents both the priest and his guides with an even sympathetic hand. An interesting undercurrent to the book was the idea of contingency. While reading the book you get the feeling that you as the reader have as much control over the outcome of events as the characters inside the book. There is a long string of events that leads Father Laforgue to his current mission, stretching all the way back to scenes from his childhood where statues to martyrs have shaped his dreams and life ambitions. Likewise, the Algonquian, uneasy and fully aware of tectonic shifts occurring are grasping at any hand hold they can find to buy some extra time as they slowly slide towards oblivion. The priest relies on his guides, who in turn are at the mercy of autocratic fort captains who in turn bend the knee to the pope. Like a cancerous tumor, trade spreads and starts to erode cultures into a single melting pot of “necessary” relations. Inside this maelstrom of turmoil Father Laforgue attempts to do and be good, but as Moore painstakingly makes clear that is no simple matter. The story is interesting, dark, and at times moving. The Algonquian’s way of speaking in the book is heavily laced with profanity, this (from an author’s note) is supposed to be historically accurate, and it increased the strange juxtaposition between their speech and the speech of a 17th century priest. That being said, at times it was so informal as to be distracting and reminded me a little of the “jive” language from Airplane. Really enjoyed the setting and look forward to reading more stories from around this era.

Summary It is the distant future, the year 2000 and we have managed to bully suffering right out of the human experience. But were the sacrifices worth it? Thoughts The only scarier thing than the unknown is the mundane. This tension shows lurks in a Brave New World where the reader is left to decide on their own which world they would prefer. Huxley is firmly against this “Brave New World” full of shallow vapid people but doesn’t seem to provide a really convincing alternative. One of the most interesting themes to me was the anxiety around having a complete mechanistic understanding of the ‘human machine’. This fear is embodied by the unseen character Ford or Freud. Homages to Henry Ford and of course my golden ziggy, the former mechanized production and the latter the mind. Huxley envisions a world where humans are seen as machines and treated as machines. Machines with complicated maintenance schedules, one missed appointment might just cause a piston to misfire or a belt to break. This human machine world is further exaggerated by the very lack of machines. Instead of what now seems a plausible future where robots outnumber humans by several magnitudes, Huxley has a caste system of humans in place to supply labor. So in the place a mechanical butler would stand, you have a human that was baked to love his chains. The gauntlet being thrown, so to speak, if you really believe humans are soulless automatons, then why would you object to creating them in such a way that they have no ambition? The transcendence of course is revolt, even with such a finely tuned system there are still a few homo-sapiens that slip through the cracks and aren’t entirely integrated. The reader again is left to wonder if this is true transcendence or maybe just a bug. Maybe, as some characters suggested, they didn’t receive proper doses during incubation, at any rate they are dissatisfied with the status quo. This is the typical awakening archetype, where a character transitions from the unconscious to the conscious. The modern twist is the uncertainty that follows the awakening, don’t jump to the conclusion that to see your position in the world is an unalloyed good. This book is a really good object for contemplation and clearly has been a cornerstone of the dystopian utopia genre. One thing I didn’t care for was the overcompensation used when discussing families. It seemed naïve or like a cheap shot to have the characters react so strongly to the ideas fathers and mothers. Almost like Huxley was wanting to really show how scary the techno-optimist future would be. These guys will make it so everyone thinks mom and dad are DISGUSTING.

Candide Have you ever been so maddened by a single sentence that you decided to write a book? Leibniz is famous for his claim that we live in “the best of all possible worlds”, after the Lisbon earthquake which killed somewhere between 12,000 to 50,000 people Voltaire rejected this claim. In large part this book is a parody of this optimism. Candide the main character grows up in a sheltered privileged life where his tutor Pangloss teaches him that he lives in the best of all possible worlds. After a series of events our naïve hero is kicked out into the real world and is almost immediately kidnapped by Bulgarians and pressed into service. Leading to one of my favorite scenes where in Voltaire’s dark comedic tone is captured. ...

This book is where the phrase Catch-22 came from. A friend of mine recommended the TV show and I got it all twisted for a book recommendation, so I listened to the book. This book is set in an island in the Mediterranean nearing the end of World War 2. Centered around a group of bomber pilots who are pretty much over fighting and just want to go home but their superior officer keeps moving the goal lines on how many combat missions they have to fly before they can go home. There is this a way in which the pilots can go home early. They have to be declared crazy by the base doctor. If they are declared crazy by the doctor, they can go home. The doctor asks you one simple question. “Do you want to get out of combat duty?” This question is the catch 22. Because if you say you do want to get out of duty then that proves that you are sane because you are worried about your safety. Whereas if you say you do not want to get out of combat, they never turn down volunteers, so they send you into combat. To be honest this book was equal parts stressful and funny to me. Picture this book being set in the “greatest generation” setting with more of a “Vietnam” attitude. There are no heroes in this book just mindless bureaucrats and people who incredibly adept at getting out of work. Whereas this is comical it also reminds me too much of real-life people getting out of work which stresses me out.

There was a lot packed into this short book, or long essay. Nearing the end of his life, and the end of the period of peace between WW1 and WW2 Freud was still Freuding. This book is ostensibly about the restrictions that civilization imposes on individuals, but probably more importantly in the psychoanalytic field it further sketches out a new primal drive in human nature, namely aggression. For most of his life Freud had looked at human nature through the lens of the “Pleasure principle” which is that all actions humans take can be explained in avoidance to unpleasure. This principle ran into problems, one example is how the mind seems to relive traumatic experiences over and over again. Enter the “death drive”, the main assertion of this book was that our two main drives (pleasure and aggression) are antagonistic to civilization. In that sense, civilization can be conceived of as a mechanism of repression and redirection of those drives towards behaviors that are beneficial to the group. He has called this process “Eros” and the later drive has come to be known as “Thanatos”. Eros is a work of unification at the cost of individual desire, i.e. civilization. The question (or warning) of this book is that Eros doesn’t seem to care about the individual at all, it will sacrifice the individual completely to achieve its goal of unification which will perhaps make living life in wonderful unity not worth it in the end. There is so much more inside this short book, it is widely considered one of Freud’s most important works. I would recommend it to anyone, no matter their views on Freud’s other ideas. This book has also tied in with thoughts I was already having in regard to the exclusivity inherent in inclusivity, the need for Orwell’s two-minute hate, etc etc. ...

Read this as a book club choice and having read the Kybalion earlier in the year I was somewhat interested in what this book had to say. I also intended on coming into it with an open mind. I read it in two days, so what I will say was that it was not boring, and not “difficult” to understand. I was also intrigued because unlike the Kybalion the author made it quite clear that “sorcery” was not beneath the per view of this book. That being said, I am not sure how anyone could take this sort of thing seriously. There were many parts of the book that were absolutely laughable. There is a phenomenon in many of these types of books where there will be a lot of words and concepts that together make an amazing edifice, but as soon as these ideas come into contact with the real world they oxidize, and you are left with an empty façade. It is as if you are on a foggy pier, and you run into some wizened old sailor missing a leg. He looks up and says “yarg, you want to see Atlantis?” You excitedly say that you do, and he says, “follow me”. You follow the old man into his rickety boat and descend into his dank cabin to find that he has constructed some sort of island city out of LEGOs. He looks at you with his one good eye and says, “yarg, this be Atlantis”.

Summary Created near 400BC this book constitutes one of the earliest Christian autobiographies we have. Written as a protracted and one-sided conversation with God, Augustine attempts to lay out his soul to God and his many readers. Written as a collection of thirteen books, the first nine deal with his life up to the age of 33 which is the traditionally accepted age of Jesus when he was crucified. The main story is his conversion to Catholicism and the backdrop is his own personal struggles and failings. His central struggle was in the eradication of his sexuality, the journey to celibacy was a difficult one for Augustine, he had a few mistresses including one during his pending engagement which was broken off after his conversion. This struggle takes up most of the pages dedicated to character flaws, while his key psychological struggle was being converted from Manicheism. Another interesting topic that got discussed thoroughly was astrology, evidently Augustine used to be paid by others to read their future in the stars, he would have had all the girls in 2023. If there is one thing to know about Augustine, it is that he questions, he questions everything. This ultimately leads him to lose faith in Manicheism in favor of the more convincing ideas presented by Catholicism. One way of looking at this text is as a tract to any would be Catholics who were currently Manichaeans. The last four books shift into abstract questions about memory, time, creation, and interpretation of scriptures. ...

Summary I remember coming across the Wikipedia summary for this book after Baudrillard did an analysis in his bewildering Simulacra and Simulation, which read: It follows a group of car-crash fetishists who, inspired by the famous crashes of celebrities, become sexually aroused by staging and participating in car accidents. At the time, I thought it was a strange summary, maybe a typo or something—after all, it doesn’t make any sense! So I, in my naivete, tucked this away in the “read later” list. I’ve read the book and can confirm the above sentence is a valid summary. ...

This was one of the densest and most abstract books I’ve read. The first section was Karl Marx breaking down his view of economy down to first principles. Answering questions like where money comes from, how are babies made and what’s the difference between the commodity form of gold and the money form of gold. Descriptions of the relationships between supply and demand in the simplest and in my view unnecessarily dry way. This discussion turned to how capital breeds capital. The book is full of references to the terrible working conditions for people during the industrial revolution. Really makes you glad that you live in an era of 40-hour work weeks and PTO. It seems like in some sick twisted way a pinko commie might have been what was necessary to get the people riled up enough to push the glacial pace of change in the right direction. Part of me wonders if Marx was alive today if he would still be as anti-capitalist (I know, I know, put your sickles down) as he was. I feel like the answer would be yes and I would be disappointed. It seems to me that many of his complaints about capitalism, while still inherent in our economy, have been addressed. Do not let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Overall Marx was a brilliant thinker, and I can see why he thought the way he did. It would be hard not to agree with him back in the day when six-year-olds were forced to work 17-hour shifts. ...