Books

Summary The title being a play on Dicken’s David Copperfield, Kingsolver instead writes about a boy growing up as a foster child in Appalachia. Surrounded by drugs and poverty, what kind of life can a kid expect? Spoiler: not a great one. Thoughts The Good The book is entertaining, and you easily become attached to the main character and are invested in how he turns out. The book is really good at making you feel like you are a dirty, poor, uneducated, overlooked teen. So, if that’s what you’re in the mood for this book delivers. Also, Kingsolver makes decent points about the acceptable and prevalence of racism versus rednecks or hillbillies. She also makes some interesting, yet less convincing, arguments around this discrimination being fueled by the fat cats who want everyone to be part of the money economy (i.e., get everything by paying money) which can be taxed versus land economy (i.e., produce goods like food and clothing off the land) which cannot be taxed. The goal of the book was to enlighten urbanites to the suffering of the poor whites, and to shine a light on the damage caused by pharmaceutical companies which knowingly got entire counties hooked on cheap opiates. ...

Summary A nameless father with his nameless boy tries to survive in a world that has been destroyed by a nameless catastrophe. Whatever it was that destroyed the earth left its surface coated in ashes and its skies so perpetually cloudy that nothing can survive. There is no life save a few scattered bands of humans slowly dying off by starvation or violence. Thoughts McCarthy does a great job of world building, or I should say withering. It turns out he can describe dilapidated cityscapes just as well as western prairies. This book has been lauded as being a champion for climate change, but I think that is incidental. The main question is as Camus says, “why not commit suicide?”. McCarthy destroys the world and all the creeping things that crawl along its face just to put this question in sharper relief. This book also made me realize that all post-apocalyptic stories are actually just visions of who humans are without society. There are many mini apocalypses in history we can use for inspiration, like the siege of Leningrad or countless other sieges that remove the mask of society to expose the truth that lies beneath, the earth is not a symphony of symbiosis, but a network of mouths and teeth. Even your own body will eat itself if you can’t find something else to sacrifice. ...

Summary Blaise Pascal was a philosopher, mathematician, and scientist. Just another run of the mill renaissance man. Pensées, or ‘Thoughts’ are a collection of loosely collected writings put together posthumously. What starts as a series of somewhat disconnected thoughts ends in a fairly coherent apologetic for faith in general and Christian faith in particular. Thoughts I did not research this book before reading it. I saw this quote: The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of… ...

Summary The final installation in Atkinson’s WW2 trilogy, which follows the allies from D-day to V-day from 1944-45 in the European theater. Thoughts Leading up to D-day there was a lot of uncertainty in the outcome of the war, but with the success of D-day allied victory over Germany seemed like a given, it was only a matter of time. This reminds me of playing the game Age of Empires, ( which is a real time strategy game where players control an empire and try to destroy the other players’ empires) there comes a point in the game where the balance falls so far to one side that, outside of miraculous intervention, the outcome is decided, from here on out it is up to the losers to decide how long to prolong the fight before surrendering. This was essentially the Axis’ position post D-day, Hitler just refused to give up and intended on doing everything in his power to make a miracle happen. This caused the war to drag on for nearly another year incurring another two hundred thousand casualties in the already battered German army. On top of that you had the absolutely brutal allied bombings that laid to waste many of Germany’s large cities inflicting another estimated five hundred thousand civilian casualties. This feeling of how unnecessary this conflict was tinged the book for me, it wasn’t as ’enjoyable’ as the other books because nothing seemed in to hang in the balance anymore, but still you had to watch people die anyway for a decision that had already been made. The single most important lesson I took from this book was never underestimate the power of production and logistics.

Thoughts Frank ‘Arrakis is a planet with not very much water, seriously its crazy how little water there is, have you considered how much we take water for granted on earth but how difficult it would be to have little water, you know like Arrakis because it’s a desert planet that has almost no water’ Herbert tells a very entertaining story on a very dry planet. Jokes aside this was a very good book with excellent world building. It made me realize how important names are in Sci-fi books. They can make the difference between your sci-fi book just being another run of the mill DnD group meet-up versus a really entertaining novel. Herbert must play the role of Adam in naming things that do not exist, but in a way that elicits the correct conscious and subconscious reactions from his western readers. He does a great job, for example nobody has to tell me that the Harkonnens are evil I can tell by their name. Bene Gesserits are obviously a religious order and Mentats a logistical one. The Fremens are interesting, the name to me conjures images of rats, vermin or rodents. This in part makes sense because the Fremen lived in holes in the ground and were like pests to the Harkonnens. They are also set up to become an invasive species. I’ll be interested to see where that goes. The role religion plays in the book is interesting and tied into Dune’s vision of time and determinism. Religion gives us a potential future, but we have to work to bring that potential future into existence. The warning is also that the vision and process of creation does not bring with it control over that future when it comes. Dune does a great job of maintaining the experienced paradox of self-aware agents in a complex system. In some ways the book could be recast as Paul being some Calvinistic hero attempting to slay the Arminian dragon of predestination. He seeks to control a future that is already cast. Another theme throughout the book is the idea that opulent civilizations grow lazy and soft. They are then replaced by civilizations that are sharpened by adversity. I wonder if we as a species have surpassed this point? The idea that decadence leads to decay which leads to collapse seems more plausible for the Roman empire than for a modern society. It seems hard to imagine what a modern-day Visigoth invasion force would look like, but then again, the average Roman may have felt the same way. The Fremens are also interesting because they are cast as a sort of noble savage, like we think of the Comanche for example, where they are brutal but honorable people. But what sets this apart from other troupes is that they also produce sophisticated technology. This made me wonder if it would be possible for an advanced technological society to adhere to old time-y eye for eye moral codes or if there is requirement that aggression must be repressed in a society to allow sophisticated technology to emerge.

Summary H.G. Wells writes his own version of Plato’s Republic laying out the process required to make humanity 2.0 otherwise known as the ‘New Republican’. Abandoning hope of finding absolute answers on any questions social, political or ethical, Wells decides to view life in its essence as a succession of births. If this be so, then how might we improve this succession and make it the best process possible? Wells has a plan, and he spends the next 10 chapters walking the reader through how a new republican would be welcomed into life, early education and eventually seated into the greater world of society. His ideas touch on many areas of life, sex, literature, and parenting styles. ...

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. ...