Book

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.

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”.

Gogol is one more of those Russian authors (actually born in Ukraine) that was an inspiration to many other authors (Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Kafka, etic) I thought it was about time to take the old boy out himself. Dead Souls follows a mysterious character that the reader gets to know as the book unfolds who just as mysteriously wants to buy dead serfs from Russian aristocrats. The writing style was easy to digest, and the book is filled with many charming and ridiculous characters. This book was somewhat unique as the author would break the fourth wall from time to time and give his own views about things. Full of insightful social commentary and awkward predicaments the book was called the Russian Pickwick Papers, but I wouldn’t go that far, I would say this book is a lot less ridiculous and more surreal, which I would guess is why it appealed to Kafka. The book surprisingly ends in mid-sentence leaving scholars to argue whether or not it was supposed to be that way. Whether it was or not it definitely felt like the rug was pulled from under you. Gogol was another one of those Russian authors that seemed to live like a character from his books. A complete chad that wanted to teach Cossack history but instead was offered a job teaching Medieval History at the university of St. Petersburg a subject of which he had no qualifications. ...

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.

Keeping this review short, I really enjoyed this book. Full of very interesting points and theories, really helped to get a grasp on the story about what happened between big bang and man. Got way more acquainted with monkey sexual practices than I had expected. The things that I didn’t like was that on one hand we have the insistence (correctly I think) that evolution is blind and has no destination in mind, where on the other hand there was still the subtle presence of the idea of “evolving past something”. Most notably xenophobia, this struck me as inconsistent with the previously utilitarian view presented on the universe. The other thing that caused some mental friction was their approach to chimps learning language. This section felt like quite a stretch to me, as I think it misrepresented chimps’ linguistical abilities. In total, I still enjoyed this book quite a bit and it is worth a read if only to see the interesting overlaps between monkey culture and human culture.

This was probably one of the most difficult books I’ve ever read, but at the same time one of the most thought provoking. As the first book I’ve ever read from Baudrillard, this book felt like jumping on a bullet train that was traveling to some unknown destination at top speed. Never pausing to offer his readers any lifelines Baudrillard forges on with twisted logic and esoteric analogies. Steeped in the culture and place of France in the 1980s I found myself often at a loss and not catching the references to geography or pop culture. Even so this book has stuck to my mind like glue, and for the rest of the year I was unable to shake it. His view of the world seeped into mine, and irrevocably changed it. Let’s just say I won’t be going to Disney World anytime soon, I for one am satisfied with the unreality that the rest of America has on offer. ...

This book was a wild ride like watching some guy on the history channel talk about something that you have no clue about. Could be classy…. could be demonic, but either way entertaining! I found his points about the complexity of DNA and the stability of animal archetypes after the Cambrian explosion to be quite interesting and something that I will have to keep an eye out for in the future. Big bang debunked?! But seriously, I think we should be able to hold Darwinism as loosely as we hold Mormonism. If something else comes along and replaces it, all the better! I thought the book raised a lot of good questions and gave some pretty shaky answers, not that I have any better theories to sally forth, I shall sit back and let someone braver face the ridicule of the scientific world. As Planck’s principle says, “Science progresses one funeral at a time”. Perhaps our conceptions of soup to cell, needs a snake!

Was really interested at the start of the book, but the dialogue seemed canned and eventually the weird melting stuff in the book became laughable. Interesting plot, but the execution in the end did not do it for me.

The Good Earth tracks the life of a peasant farmer in early 20th century China. Opening with the main character’s (Wang Lung) wedding day and then follows him and his wife through the end of their lives. Famine, Bandits, War, and odious family obligations stand in between Wang Lung and his quest for good farmland. Written (1931) by the child of an American Missionary in China, I was surprised by the lack of judgment and the sympathetic way it presented the Chinese culture. The author definitely demonstrated an intimate understanding of the Chinese culture, but I still think it was written as an outsider when compared to Wild Swans. A very entertaining and moving book, I would recommend this book if you were interested in the topic. I appreciated the fact that the book didn’t have a clear moral or apparent agenda.

There is a phenomenon where a large group of ideas and people are looked at in the academic world with contempt as if they were below consideration. Or perhaps we have progressed past them in some way. But at every turn we see signs of their influence and general acceptance. I feel like Jung, Campbell, and especially Freud with their ideas fit neatly into this category. The influence of a hero with 1000 faces (1949) is insane. Pretty much any story you’ve ever enjoyed either implicitly follows the structure laid out by Campbell or was directly influenced by this book. From Watership Down to Jim Morrison, the Matrix, Harry Potter, Star Wars, etc. Campbell makes the claim that all of the different mythologies in the world are actually part of a monomyth which emerges from the human psyche. As such a myth in any part of the world will loosely follow a structure, which he calls the Hero’s Journey. One way of thinking about myths are that they are stories that can’t not be told. A dream is a personalized myth, and a myth is a de-personalized dream. Myths in this light are our primary link to metaphysics. After having already read the Power of Myth there won’t be much new in this book other than a more rigorous explanation of the stages of the hero’s journey. Also (my favorite part) many entertaining myths that you’ve probably never heard of. Like all work relating to myth, it is highly speculative and prone to the brain seeing patterns that do not exist. This objection must in some sense be ignored though, due to the resonance this book has had. It seems like there must be something to it even if it is just a glitch in our brains. It doesn’t matter if these ideas are ignored, they seem to seep through the cracks of our psyche anyway. For the average reader I would probably recommend just reading this or Power of Myth if you are looking for something shorter. To read both of them is probably only necessary if you are in need of a double dose of mythological pimping.