Reviews

This book sets out to answer the question that most people have thought about once or twice, but quickly dismiss because they are afraid of where their intuitions take them. The question is, why did certain civilizations advance into “civilized” modern cultures while others seemed to have gotten left behind in the stone age. Why does the UN exist in the same timeline as people who are still hunting with stone weapons? What might intuition say? Probably some form of “manifest destiny”. Well, that sort of thinking is thankfully inappropriate in our current discourse, but this self-censorship kills the question before a reasoned and viable alternative is presented. Therefore, due to the fear of your probably racist intuitions, you don’t spend enough time to see how they could possibly be wrong, you just ignore them like your aunt with the bad breath and close hugs. Well, Jared Diamond wants to give you some reasons you can look at that aunt with bad breath and show her the door. ...

So I listened to this as a dramatic reading while driving to and from Cincinnati, and I think this is how I will consume Shakespeare plays from now on. The actors have had to do all the work of translating the archaic language and sentence structure into universal feeling which made the play much easier to digest. I also mostly listened to this so I could really appreciate the hidden subtleties of this skit. ...

Summary This is one of those books where revealing anything is too much. The book opens from the perspective of a scruffy stray dog who encounters a mysterious Dr. Filipp Filippovich. Things get out of hand. Thoughts I enjoyed this book. From the author of The Master and Margarita, which I read almost exactly a year ago, Bulgakov offers another incisive satirical take on the Bolshevik Revolution. The book presents a dual critique: on one hand, it addresses the hubris of the revolutionaries, who are overly confident in their understanding of human nature. On the other hand, it highlights that people are indeed different; some are worth listening to, while others should be ignored. This book provides a literary vision of an unfortunately successful bourgeois (which I don’t feel a part of until I can spell the word without looking it up) social architect and portrays an exaggerated, unwashed proletariat wielding newfound power. Beyond any political interpretations, the book is fairly short and entertaining for the most part. The writing is unsurprisingly quiet good and makes for a perfect Halloween season read from the USSR. Onward comrades!

I had heard this book mentioned a couple times and so I had it on my list for a month or so and finished it in one sitting. Very entertaining, the mood was very tense. It reminded me a little of Lovecraft’s style. The story follows a captain of a steamboat for an ivory trading company that goes up a mysterious river in Africa. The plot started to feel familiar to me about halfway through. Turns out it inspired the movie Apocalypse Now which I had just seen for the first time less than a week prior, one of those rando coincidences. So, there are many similar themes between that movie and this book. Here are some notable quotes to summarize the feeling: ...

This book was pretty interesting. Especially since probably the last couple years I noticed that the idea of heaven and hell don’t seem to show up in the Old Testament very much at all. Which makes for some very interesting questions. Written by an historian of early Christian religion, this book makes some startling claims. The goal of the book was to walk through recorded history (in the western world) and take note of what was said about the afterlife that indicates what beliefs were popular at the time. The cornerstone thesis of this book is that the historical Jesus did not believe in a heaven and hell in the now traditional sense, but a different conception that is based on a tradition of Jewish apocalyptical ideas. Ehrman starts with what is probably the oldest fiction we have the “Epic of Gilgamesh” and works his way up to the Greek authors Virgil, Homer and eventually Socrates examining how the idea of the afterlife was expressed at each stage. He then turns his attention to the Bible and works his way chronologically through the Bible stating pretty categorically that the main idea of the afterlife presented in the Old Testament was that there wasn’t one. After looking at the OT he spends some time in a couple apocryphal books written in between the OT and NT which shed some light on how the idea of afterlife was evolving. He then comes to the clickbait part of the book where he explains that he believes the historical Jesus believed that God was going to come back and set things right in the world and rebuild Jerusalem and have a physical Kingdom on this earth that believers would be part of. He also believed that Jesus thought this was happening soon (Matt 16:28). As for non-believers they would be annihilated into nonexistence. From there he continues through history into the early 300AD time period up through the conception of purgatory and ends the book with the idea of universalism that is the idea that all eventually make it into heaven. This was surprisingly a view of one of the early church theologians, Origen who lived around 200AD. This book was well written and pretty easy to follow. It is another book that at the end of the day you read it and realize, that you just have to go back to the bible because everyone has always agreed about what it had to say about things.

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”. ...

Also available as a long essay. Thoughts This book was thoroughly enlightening but quite dry and dense and around 850 pages. This is partially why I have written such an extensive summary hoping to convey some of the themes that I think are important to know without just saying “read the book”. When it comes to topics like morality it is easy to have an axe to grind. Lecky provides what appears to me to have been an even-handed recounting of this slice of history. This book is full of useful information and interesting context that is often lost when trying to understand the events of history. I am sure there are mistakes and misunderstandings, but there is so much else that is of value that what few mistakes there are will be dwarfed by the new perspective given to the reader. I found myself often copying large sections of the text while in other parts leaving surprised questions marks when a new fact that sounded preposterous turned out to be true. If you have the time, this book is worth it. ...

Another book by my homie Yuval. In Sapiens he retold the story of the past in Homo Deus he investigates possibilities for the future. Yuval makes the claim that since the cognitive revolution 70,000 years ago humans have been dominated by 3 things. War, Famine, and Disease. He then proceeds to layout some convincing evidence as to why the tide has turned on those three problems in the past hundred years. What used to look like impossible tasks are now tantalizingly close. In fact in many ways, we have already achieved these goals in one form or another. This raises the question “what’s next?”. This is what the rest of the book about. His guesses are that immortality, divinity, and the secret of happiness will be the next items on the agenda. But with each of these innocuous sounding goals comes all sorts of problems that may indeed make things worse. As crazy as this sounds you don’t have to look far for proof of this, just consider that suicide rates are higher in first world countries as opposed to the developing world. So maybe whatever goals we’ve had in the past have not contributed much to overall human happiness. He then examines how these goals are based largely on humanism and that technology poses a major threat to the tenants of humanism. Humanism proclaims that humans are the most precious thing in the universe. We are the peak of creation, and this is reinforced by our domination of the objective world. This stance may become more difficult to maintain once we find ourselves outsmarted by machines and artificial intelligence. Our creations may end up casting us out of the garden. This book was really good, full of more interesting insights that Harari has a knack for pulling out of his hat. I would suggest that more space be given between the reading of Sapiens and Homo Deus than what I gave though because there are some overlaps of ideas. This book was fantastic but not as good as sapiens, as one deals with history (or our best guess at the time) of the world, while interesting as this book is guesses about the future are seldom close to what ends up happening.

Summary Rosenberg sets out to ‘prove’ through Neuroscience that the way we understand our past, present, and future might not be based on a misunderstanding. In what is sure to ruffle the feathers of academics of every stripe, Rosenberg uses various studies as a lever to overturn several common theories of mind. For the uninitiated, a theory of mind is an explanatory framework whose purpose is to explain the mind to itself. Most common theories of mind rely on the iconic duo of desire and action. Charles is crying because he can’t get an ice cream cone. In the previous sentence, we are met with Charles’ desire and the action that results from the desire, a cause and an effect. Rosenberg then uses this as a jumping-off point to argue that this core assumption that almost all theories of mind make is flawed. ...

This is a collection of short stories written by Ray Bradbury. The stories varied in length from a half hour to a little over an hour. The stories are a sort of anthology. Some really brilliant stuff in here. Very much like good black mirror/ twilight zone episodes. In fact, I want to send a copy of it to the black mirror studios so they can make good stories again. Not every story was a homerun but there were quite a few that were brilliant. The “title track” story actually was turned into a twilight zone episode. So, if you don’t read the book, you can at least watch that episode to get a taste of what the book was like. A lot of robots.