Book

As a note I am combining my reviews of this book and Buddhist’s Ethic - A Very Short Introduction. Summary Buddhism is gaining in popularity, but it has so many varying practitioners that it is hard to put a finger down on what it is exactly. I wanted to find out what it was from the horse’s mouth, and nowhere produces horses better than London’s universities, so that is where I decided to get my information. I’ve read quite a few books from the “Very Short Introduction” series and have yet to be disappointed; this was no exception. Since I am from the west most of my understanding will be filtered from that worldview. ...

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”. ...

We were silent again for a minute. “Cher,” he concluded at last, getting up quickly, “do you know this is bound to end in something?” “Of course,” said I. “Vous ne comprenez pas. Passons. But … usually in our world things come to nothing, but this will end in something; it’s bound to, it’s bound to!” Summary Dostoyevsky chose as the epigraph to this story the passage of Luke where Jesus sends the demons into the swine, and they subsequently throw themselves off a cliff. A curious passage, and one that will come up over and over in this book. I won’t bother to write a plot summary because spoilers, and also like all of Dostoyevsky’s books, the plot is the tortilla of the burrito. It serves mainly to deliver the contents of the book. The contents are the conversations. The characters are unforgettable, you have a fifty-year-old child, who was influential once, but is of no practical use and literally runs away from home. You have Stavrogin, a man who can’t bring himself to believe in anything, but apparently can’t stop influencing people with the force of his ideas. You have the power-hungry revolutionary sociopath Pyotr Stepanovich who is always willing to break a few eggs to make an omelet. Last but not least, one of the most compelling characters Kirillov, the atheists par excellence, consumed by an idea, courageous, selfless, and ultimately doomed. In short, this work is a literary masterpiece that managed to divine the future of Russia with astonishing clarity. ...

Summary Foucault writes a history of civilization’s ever-changing relationship to madness. Starting inquires around the Renaissance, he tracks how madmen were once considered to be bearers of knowledge, although unintelligible from the edge of experience. His central thesis was that there once was a language that connected reason to unreason, and through various shifts in culture that dialogue has been cut off. The Renaissance gave way to the “Age of Reason” that signaled the beginning of the shift towards confinement. This separation eventually created a new category, the “insane”. This category objectified and concretized madness as both a thing to be studied, and something undesirable to be cured. From here the rest as they say is history, all sorts of treatments and testing were tried to cure and restore sanity. ...

Summary Army at Dawn documents the United States entry into the fight against Germany in North Africa. This picks up after the allies seized the critical port town of Tunis. This allied victory opened the possibility of attacking in the words of Churchill “the Axis’ underbelly” in Italy. Crossing from Tunis to Sicily (the island attached to the toe of the Italy’s boot) the allies began their slow march towards Rome. During and after the capture (or liberation if you prefer) of Tunisia there was a great deal of disagreement between the British and the US over what the next target of attack should be. The Americans favored a cross channel invasion jumping from England to France, but on the other hand, after the Dunkirk debacle the Brits were much keener on the idea of invading Italy. So in a compromise they decided to do both, but since the allied troops were already stationed near Italy it was decided that the cross-channel invasion would occur a year later to allow for planning and logistical difficulties to be sorted out. In the meantime, the allies would use their deployed units to invade Italy and try to take some pressure off of Russia. It sounds good on paper, but as the casualties mounted and progress crawled to a halt in the inhospitable Italian mountain winter, victory was far from certain. ...

Summary This book (as the title implies) is interested in the emergence of species, and now that we are talking about it, what are species to begin with? At the time, there were many very experienced naturalists who would disagree on whether a certain plant or animal belonged in species A as a variety or actually should be considered a distinct species. These disagreements arose due to the fact that no one had a clear theory as to how these differences arose and up to then we used internal and external structure to define species. If these structures diverged enough, we would separate them into species. They also used the concept of whether entity A could potentially breed with entity B. If not, then the two entities must not be in the same species. There were other methods used, but these two should suffice to show how difficulties in definition might arise. For example, the internal and external structure of sexed organisms may very greatly as in humans, but we obviously must be the same species, right?….. Actually, that might explain some things. As for mating, this brings its own difficulties (I’m on a roll), but strictly speaking, you can have two different species reproduce, like a grizzly bear and polar bear, and this happens quite often in the plant kingdom. On the other hand, you have many instances of creatures in the same species category that can’t reproduce inside their own species. Think Mastiff and Chihuahua. So these principles are by no means black and white. The prevalent view at the time was the belief that each species was created individually, with this view the categorization of species should be much more straight-forward than it is, but Darwin had other ideas. Using pigeons, due to their availability and the long history they have of human selection, he built an argument. He stated that if we had found the various varieties of pigeons in the wild, we would without a doubt classify them as different species. We only refrain from doing so because we happen to know in this case that all the varieties descended from rock pigeons. What if this same concept applied to the whole animal kingdom? What if instead of individually created species there was a single progenitor which has given rise to the magnificent variety we observe today? How far might these accumulated minute changes take us? ...

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. ...

Summary A history of the United States entering WW2 in North Africa. This 700 page book is the first of a trilogy about WW2 in Europe. It covers a single year of the conflict starting with the US landing in Northern Africa and ending with the capture of Tunisia. Thoughts A fantastic history, reading this book really gives you the feeling of living through the events. Not in a first-person sense, but more as a near omniscient deity who is really interested in America’s military. What feels like every skirmish, battle, air raid, and flat tire has been listed. Every shell casing counted, and temperature noted. All this is done in a way that manages to stay compelling throughout. -The Allies I never realized just how tense the relationship was between the Brits and the Yankees. There was quite a bit of animosity and distrust between the old power and the new power that was coming of age in this war. British folks thought of the Americans as inexperienced bumbling idiots who would only be useful as a support role in WW2. The Americans had their own reservations, one of my favorite quotes that sums up this new relationship was from Harold Macmillan: ...

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. ...

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. ...