Reviews

Summary A fictional account of the three (+1 wallflower sister) Mirabal sisters and their role in the revolution in attempting to overthrow the Trujillo dictatorship of the Dominican Republic. The sisters are eventually assassinated indirectly by Trujillo, this appears to have paved the way for his own assassination six months later. Thoughts While I appreciate the engaging narrative presented by Julia Alvarez, I feel conflicted in providing a comprehensive review of this book, as I initially believed it to be more historical than fictional. The unique format—each chapter narrated by one of the four sisters—may take some getting used to, with many passages resembling journal entries. In her afterword, Alvarez explains her decision to rely on the essence of the sisters’ lives rather than conducting in-depth interviews or research, drawing from her father’s involvement in the anti-Trujillo underground network as justification for this approach. ...

Rachel Evans has done all the research on the bible that you probably meant to do but never got around to. Like researching the canonization of the Bible, comparing different types of those canonizations. Researching the similarities to other older religions and the Bible generally trying to figure out what its deal is and why people still give a fluff about it. The author comes from a similar-ish background to what I did, but since she is a woman the things that made her start questioning the stories she was told were different than the ones that caused me to question. Her’s I would guess started with the treatment of women in the Bible. So, she tries her best, like we all do to honestly question what we are supposed to do with the “good book” in the year of our lord 2020. She has some interesting insights and gives me plenty to think about. It is always really weird to me to hear from someone who has such a completely new translation of what the bible means to them as opposed to what we were raised in. When you hear the same thing in the same way for so many hours you get the idea that there is only one way to read something. And even though you know that is not true you don’t know how else to read it. At any rate this is a decent book. It seems pretty fairly written with manageable biases here and there.

Living in the fictional small town in Kentucky named Port William from shortly before WW1 to the 70s the industrialization and with it, the destruction of small communities in America functions as a backdrop in this story. The main character, Jayber a name the locals gave him converted from his original name Jonah, is sent to the orphanage at 10 years of age. He has vague memories of his parents and images he has seen of the terrible war, he finds himself alone in a situation that is outside his control. This will be a theme in the story, the idea that life often just happens to you and is seldom what one plans. Without spoiling the plot too much, he feels that he is “called” to be a Baptist minister, although deep down he was never quite sure, but he joins a Bible college that convinces him that he was not meant to be a pastor. He decides to “make something of himself” by going to the big city (Lexington in this case) and get a college degree, but much like his biblical namesake he gets vomited back onto the shores of Port William sometime later. He ends up living his life in this small town as a barber and outsider. The writing was beautiful, many of the themes of Unsettling of America are worked out in the narrative by the characters. A swan song to when the farmer was one that “tends” the earth instead of “mining” it. Reminds me of some of the supposed writings of the Indians as they watched in detached depression the once thriving balanced ecosystem they knew get turned into a sex-worker. Apparently, this is just one book of ~50 that Berry has written set in the fictional town of Port William. I guess he really liked that DnD map and didn’t want to leave it. I would recommend this to be added to the reading list but not urgently. ...

This book is easy reading and goes by fast. It’s about a lawyer who represents death row inmates as well as other mostly poor black folks and children. The stories contained in this book are enough to make anyone’s blood boil and want to start a civil war against the Alabama court system. The book is more than just the complaints of a black lawyer though. Bryan Stevenson has a lot to say about the death penalty and the way we enforce crime in general. This book at times was profound, at other times sad. Most of the time it provided a fairly even take on mass incarceration. I do think the book in general is similar to listening to an emergency room doctor in New York talking about covid, or a general in Iraq talking about the Taliban. What he is saying is definitely true, but also definitely not the case for everyone everywhere IMO. I’ll end this review with a compelling quote on the death penalty which is probably old news for you folks but was the first time I’ve heard it put so succinctly. This quote comes after he personally witnesses the execution of a convicted criminal “We would never think it was human to pay someone to rape people convicted of rape or assault and abuse someone guilty of assault or abuse. Yet we were comfortable killing people who kill, in part because we think we can do it in a manner that doesn’t implicate our own humanity, the way that raping or abusing someone would. I couldn’t stop thinking that we don’t spend much time contemplating the details of what killing someone actually involves.”

Summary A concise account of one of America’s most popular presidents and his infamous assassination. Thoughts The authors’ intent with this book was to write history in a way that was “fun.” They largely succeeded; Killing Kennedy reads similarly to a tabloid, filled with murders, conspiracies, villainous Russian leaders, and, of course, lots of sex. In defense of Bill O’Reilly, if ever there was a presidency that lent itself to this lens of analysis, it was JFK’s. Serving from 1961 to 1963, JFK was at once the most powerful man in the world and nearly the youngest president in US history. In those three short years, America navigated through the Cuban Missile Crisis, the rise of the Civil Rights Movement, and the inception of the Vietnam War. This book is a quick and easy way to get some context surrounding America’s 35th president, as long as the writing style doesn’t grate too strongly against your sensibilities. ...

Another round from Dennett attempting his best materialistic explanation of the mind. This seems to be his main goal in life. To cut to the chase I would recommend “From Bach to Bacteria and Back” as it is newer and more convincing than this book. The main message of this book is that we should stop anthropomorphizing things, or at least be more self-aware when we do. Specifically, around the experiences of animals. He argues that questions like “what is it like to be a spider, bat, etc” makes a huge assumption, viz that being the creature in question is like anything. He has some interesting thought experiments to feel this out. For example, were your arm to get amputated and you brought it to the doctor to slap it back on you should the doctor give both you and the amputated arm pain killers? Were we to find something so big and complicated in the wild we would probably assume that it would be wrong to dice it up as it would appear to have nerves, etc. etc. Furthermore, if the amputated arm DID feel pain how would it communicate it? The example obviously has gaps, considering that there is “no brain” for the arm, but is the presence of the brain where we assume pain comes from? He then uses the example of rolling over in your sleep to relieve pain or discomfort on your limbs. Do you experience this pain? The big difference between animals and humans (according to Dennett) is language. All creatures receive information through their senses, but his idea is that this information is tokenized in a storable form vis-à-vis words. Consider words to be additional layer on the operating system that allows a system to start labeling nodes in the brain that were just “instinct”. (I’m going into non canon examples here, but I think he would agree) Consider various things we all do out of habit, like driving. Have you ever driven a common route and been so up in your head that you were a little surprised when you pulled into work? You were functioning on a sort of auto pilot, much like your heart, digestive system, and most other functions in your body do 24/7. Is it “like” anything to be your heart? Maybe? but we don’t offer it the same affordances when it is on the surgery table as we would a cat. Now say that as you are driving your ‘attention’ comes back to driving. You experience driving, what is it that you are doing when you are experiencing? Perhaps no more than tokenizing incoming visual/audio/olfactory data from related nodes inside your neural meat case to words that act as a sort of post it note to various states. He isn’t trying to argue that we should treat living things as automata, but his point is there probably won’t be some clean line between organisms that experience human like pain and ones that don’t. In fact, I think he would go so far as to say the evidence is indicating that no animals experience pain “like” we do. Another example from the book was a Rhesus Macaque monkey was observed to have one of its testicles bitten off in a fight, but showed few signs of pain and the next day was observed mating again (what a chad), but does that mean Rhesus monkeys don’t feel pain? Probably not, but they definitely don’t feel pain in that one scenario the same way as humans, which is surprising given their other human like behaviors. He also had a quote in talking about perceptual biases that was worth sharing ...

This book has been on my list for a long time, as it could be considered one of the most influential texts in shaping the western world. Written in 1651 Hobbes gives his views on political philosophy and touches on almost everything else along the way. Ghosts, validity of scripture, hell and truth. The central tenant of the book is his view on men in a “state of nature” which is synonymous with the state of “war of all against all”. He famously said that in this state “life of man, (is) solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” The book is broken into 4 parts and the first deals with this as well as an overview of Hobbes’ philosophic framework with which he is operating. Hobbes is a materialist and Christian in that way a sort of relic of his time. He discounts all events supernatural excepting a small handful which God did during biblical times. In the first part of the book, he describes man as a machine, tossing the platonic idea of soul out the window as silly. His logic is incisive and leaves little room for grey areas. In some ways it feels like you are indulging a senile old man who still believes that truth can be got at by “precise” definitions and clear statements, but on the other hand, it is hard to knock the man’s models as we live in a world partially built by him. If nothing else, he seemed to have a clear view of human nature. The crux of this book is that he believes (much like Sam Harris) that it is best to start considering political philosophy from the worst-case scenario. To him the worst-case scenario is a state of nature. This means that any government, no matter how tyrannical is preferable to the state of nature and therefore all efforts should tend towards preserving governments. To Hobbes a government at its core is always representational. A group of people agree to give up their right of ruling to a person or group of persons in order to avoid the state of nature. The person or group of persons is the embodiment of the people (book’s cover photo), otherwise known as the commonwealth. This brings about some other interesting conclusions from Hobbes’. Again, viewing the world in black and white terms, he believes you are either part of the commonwealth or not. If you are, then you agree to give up your representation to whoever your leader is. Since you’ve done this, you (and everyone in the commonwealth) could be considered to be the authors of the leader’s actions. This in turn means that the sovereign cannot do anything considered unjust as like God, justice is defined by the sovereign and the sovereign owns the agency of the subjects. To be brief Hobbes feels that the worst thing in the world is to be in a state of anarchy and the best defense against that is a strong united government, otherwise known as the leviathan. Something that everyone works to preserve to make it as difficult as possible to kill. Whatever consequences the ruler imposes the subjects should consider worthy sacrifices to avoid the state of nature. He finishes the book by trying to couch his principles in Biblical terms. He, unperturbed by the millions of scholars before him, wades into the murky depths of exegesis and comes out on the other end with his political philosophy intact. I was quite glad to finish this one as the last half was quite dry and I thought a little pointless as once a person with a brain turns 16, they stop being convinced by other people’s readings of scripture. I will say that his incisive logic did not sleep on religious matters either though as he brought up some really good problems overlooked by many. Like this thought on divine inspiration: ...

An easy-to-read book that makes a case that aging is at the center of all humanity’s health issues. Before David Sinclair, there had never been a unified aging theory that stood up to scientific scrutiny. Sinclair argues that aging is a disease. Our body is constantly reproducing itself on the micro level. As we exist things cause damage to our bodies (UV radiation, Coca Cola, the mail man etc) these mini disasters cause cells to go into disaster recovery mode where they leave their domestic tasks to address the foreign catastrophe. While they are gone their grass at home gets long, their mailbox gets full and some never make it back home. Overtime these absences stack up like scratches on a DVD. All the sudden a cell that was making sure a certain other cell wasn’t reproducing, never makes it back and you get cancer. Like scratches on a DVD Sinclair is confident that we can and have made progress in interventions that would essentially expose the data underneath the scratches and be able reverse the effects. Sinclair looks at the current medical approach as an ineffectual game of whack a mole that address various symptoms of aging but has never worried about aging itself because it was assumed that aging was an inevitable process that should not/could not be messed with. Sinclair’s grandmother and mother both died in the typical modern way. That is their lifespan was extended, but their quality of life was ignored. Those two events are the cornerstone of his life’s work, which is to extend vitality not just lifespan. He makes some very optimistic predictions about life spans extending in the near future. For example, saying that the first person to live to 150 has already been born. The writing itself is pretty standard for this type of book, engaging but not unique in any way. To me, most of Sinclair’s metaphysics was a breath of fresh air. I am still a maladjusted pig boy that enjoys living, and would enjoy living longer than 80 years, maybe not forever but longer than 80 years. More than that I would like to still be kicking when I’m 80, because what is the point of living 1000 years if you are in an old folk’s home for 900 of those years. This is exactly what Sinclair is saying will happen in the near future. He doesn’t make any predictions for life spans longer than 150, but he does make the claim that there is no biological limit to lifespan, there are only biological entities that experience aging and those that don’t.

Premise : group of boys 13 and under get stranded on a desert island. Chaos ensues as they try to build a society with immature minds. Gets dark pretty fast. Interesting implications about the origin of religion and the effect of personality on political tendencies. Definitely more of a Hobbes take on men in the state of nature. Very entertaining and not hard to follow Leviathan

Lost in the Cosmos is a uniquely styled book. It loosely follows the theme of modern alienation. In most chapters Percy sets up a scene, asks a question, and then provides multiple choice answers leaving it to the reader to decide. I can see how the format could be a turn off for some, but I found the whole exercise very interesting although I admittedly never stopped to formulate my own answers. He also takes a detour into semiotics (the study of signifiers and signified) which never fails to get into the weeds but provides a context for many of his thought experiments. The central thesis of the book is that humans are “naming things”. We live in a world full of objects that we name and put inside boxes. This is all well and good but something uncanny happened when we became self-aware. We found that in a world full of named things we are unable to name ourselves. Everything is something to the subject, but the subject is nothing to itself. The attempt to say who you are is like trying to see the back of your head. This creates alienation in the individual that used to be salved by religion naming you as a creature, brahman, atman, something is better than nothing but now we live in an age where it is extraordinarily difficult to believe in those stories so most jettison the whole thing leaving themselves alone in the cosmos. To further illustrate this idea the book opens with a beautiful quote from Nietzsche: ...