| Date | Author |
Title | Comments |
| 06/2005 | John Stuart Mill |
Utilitarianism |
John Stuart Mill is officially my philosophical muse! Here he presents a compelling defense of the philosophy that human morality derives from one simple concept: the seeking of pleasure and the avoidance of pain. Any religious person who insists that there can be no morality without a God just strikes me as ill-informed; God may indeed be the root of human morality, but it's not clear how any logical thinker can insist that God is the only possible explanation.
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| 06/2005 | Martin Gardner |
The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener |
Brilliant. This is the best general philosophy overview that I have ever read, by far. It is made so by the fact that Gardner openly admits right from the start that A) he is not introducing any new arguments here, and B) there can be no "proof" with any of the classic questions of philosophy. It turns out that Gardner, a "philosophical theist," has identical beliefs to me on almost all of the topics he covers, with one glaring difference: he makes an emotion-based choice to believe in God, and I do not. That is fine with me.
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| 06/2005 | George Lakoff |
Don't Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate--The Essential Guide for Progressives |
You can't argue with Lakoff's assessment of the way the Right is manipulating language to further its ambitions, and this book serves as an empowering manual for progressives to strike back in kind, and with honor. The one thing I do disagree with is that "science" or "reason" are nowhere presented as core progressive values. In a world where our best hope for progress has proved to be science for the past several hundred years, this strikes me as a glaring omission.
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| 05/2005 | Lawrence Wright |
Remembering Satan |
A compelling critique of the shameful rise of "repressed memory" counseling in the late '80s and early '90s. Wright paints a fairly one-sided picture overall, but he does not shy away from the ambiguity inherent to this particular story: the accused are far from perfect people, and the explanations for their actions are not always fully satisfying. Wright is at his best when he portrays the grief caused by unquestioning belief in "victims'" testimony, regardless how bizarre and unsuported by objective evidence it might be.
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| 05/2005 | M. Scott Peck |
Denial of the Soul: Spiritual and Medical Perspectives on Euthanasia and Mortality |
A mixed bag. On the plus side, Peck's relentlessly practical mindset regarding many aspects of medicine and psychology is something that I strongly agree with, and he had heartfelt and compelling things to say about the management of physical pain. On the negative side, Peck is a zealous believer in the existence of God and the human soul, and he seems to take a one-size-fits-all approach to psychiatry that is incompatible with anyone who doesn't have a professed "spiritual" side. The most offensive thing, to me, was Peck's primary justification for avoiding euthanasia in the majority of cases: that "the work of dying" (a mental and physical struggle and coming-to-grips process) is an important learning process for the soul that would be beneficial later on down the line. Feh, I say! That's a justification that cannot possibly appeal to a skeptic like me.
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| 05/2005 | Martin Gardner |
Weird Water & Fuzzy Logic: More Notes of a Fringe Watcher |
Gardner's most prolific genre seems to be the essay. The problem is that he so freely cross-pollinates ideas and phrases that some of his essays seem strongly derivative of others. Such was the case at various points here, though much of the book was fascinating. His "Fringe Watcher" books are essentially distillations of his Scientific American columns over the years.
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| 05/2005 | Martin Gardner |
The Healing Revelations of Mary Baker Eddy: The Rise and Fall of Christian Science |
Gardner is right at home in writing a Victorian Era biography, and it is fun to watch him savage one of America's nuttiest religious cults. Really, it's more Eddy who is savaged, as Gardner relentlessly hammers away at her "illiteracy," lack of sophistication, blatant plagiarism, and monomania. In my opinion, the book would have been more compelling if it had included more personal tales of the trauma wrought by Eddy's irrational belief system.
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| 05/2005 | Martin Gardner |
The Colossal Book of Mathematics: Classic Puzzles, Paradoxes, and Problems |
My first book in an orchestrated Martin Gardner binge, and by far the lightest in terms of philosophy. Damned heavy with math, though! I read perhaps 70% of it, and found maybe 50% to be engaging. People with more math intuition (like Jeanie) would probably enjoy this more than I did.
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| 05/2005 | Paul Dickson |
The Joy of Keeping Score: How Scoring the Game Has Influenced and Enhanced the History of Baseball |
Not as engaging as I had hoped. I suppose I wanted more of an educational book that focused on the nuances of scorekeeping. Instead, this book was packed with a lot of filler material, such as an A-Z glossary of baseball trivia.
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| 05/2005 | Stephen Hawking |
A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes |
I hit on the idea of reading this back-to-back with Weinberg's book. Both are good, but my overall impression is that Weinberg's version is more accessible. Though both men are atheists, Hawking seemingly gets the benefit of the doubt from John Q. Public thanks to his courageous work in spite of his battle with ALS. It was fascinating to see some disagreements between Hawking and Weinberg on cosmological details such as thermal conditions in the early universe and the effects on large-scale isotropism; of course, Hawking had the benefit of writing his book more than a decade after Weinberg's.
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| 05/2005 | Steven Weinberg |
The First Three Minutes: A Modern View of the Origin of the Universe |
It was a crime that I had never read the book containing the classic quote: "The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless." I agree in principle, and like Weinberg, I don't think this is an inherently depressing observation. Mostly, this book is a cosmological treatise, and a very engaging one.
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| 04/2005 | Robert Wright |
The Moral Animal: Why We Are, the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology |
An absolute tour de force! Immediately one of my favorite books on this list. Wright presents a grand tour of human behavioral psychology in a style somewhat analagous to the way Jared Diamond sweeps through anthropology. Feminists and cultural relativists beware, though! You will encounter many chapters and paragraphs that infuriate you. I, on the other hand, revelled in absorbing Wright's evolution-based analysis of human behavior.
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| 04/2005 | Michael Scheuer |
Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror |
Just a little bit over the top, enough to turn me off. I guess what I don't like is the author's willingness to present his views as absolute truth, whether he's disparaging the actions of various U.S. administrations or analyzing the motivations of Osama. He's probably on-target with a lot of it, but I could have used a little more subtlety.
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| 04/2005 | Thomas Asbridge |
The First Crusade: A New History |
For the first time, I have some sense of the reality of the Crusades, including the political scene, the geography involved, and the strategy required for an army to fight its way down from Europe to the Holy Lands. This book combines a lot of interesting detail about the motivations of the First Crusade's leaders with a strong narrative that pulls you along right up to the point that the crusaders lay siege to the walls of Jerusalem.
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| 03/2005 | Bill Clinton |
My Life |
God, I love Clinton, but this book is one of the least creative biographies I've read. Clinton essentially took his datebooks from the last thirty years, expanded on the dates and times with a torrent of detailed reminisciences, and ka-bam! Biography! Some of it was fascinating (who knew Clinton travelled so much while he was President?), but other parts were completely uninteresting. And he didn't come off as blindingly smart as I expected (purposefully, perhaps)--more like blindingly well-connected instead. Nevertheless, I come away convinced that Clinton was the most accomplished governer--runner of a government--that this country has seen in a long damned time.
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| 03/2005 | Alister McGrath |
The Twilight of Atheism: The Rise and Fall of Disbelief in the Modern World |
I was hoping for much more, but McGrath turned out to be a poor arguer. In fact, nothing much from the book actually stuck with me! Much of it is focused on reviewing the rise of atheist-minded philosophers over the past 300 years or so, but the author really fails to present a good justification for his belief that--in the face of these 300 years of the rising influence of atheistic thought--the last 30 years worth of "spiritual rebirth" portends a future that turns its back on the atheist worldview.
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| 02/2005 | Sir Ranulph Fiennes |
Race to the Pole: Tragedy, Heroism, and Scott's Antarctic Quest |
A rousing yarn! Not having read any other Scott biographies, I was unaware of the anti-Scott revisionist current that Fiennes claims has arisen in the last few decades. He sure does take that school to task in this book! Beyond that, though, Fiennes does a great job of communicating the still-gentlemanly spirit possessed by most adventurers of the early 20th century. It's like reading the O'Brien books and being shocked to find that a victorious sea captain would subsequently host the loser in kingly fashion in the early 19th century. That spirit has been stamped out in almost every line of endeavor today.
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| 02/2005 | Arthur N. Strahler |
Understanding Science: An Introduction to Concepts and Issues |
I can never resist a book about the philosophy of science, and this is the most general such book I have found yet. Unfortunately, it's a real mixed bag, with a lot of very elementary material presented cheek-by-jowl with much more challenging material. Much of the text is also pulled directly from other authors, and by the end I felt like I was reading the kind of book that I could probably write. Still, though: ontology, epistemology, teleology. Love those words!
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| 02/2005 | John Horgan |
The End of Science |
The great redeeming quality of this book is the completely opinionated quality of its writing coupled with the relentless little character studies of the eminent scientists that Horgan interviewed. I know from personal experience that Horgan got Marv Minsky right, so there is some reason to believe that he is somewhat accurate in his other characterizations, and they are fascinating! You definitely won't agree completely with Horgan's assessments, but it's interesting to see what great scientists think about the prospects for science. As with all these "The End of X" books, many reviewers completely miss the point of what X is really supposed to represent.
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| 02/2005 | Sam Harris |
The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason |
Now, this is one "The End of X" book where you get exactly what you paid for! I liked this book for the same reason that liberal Democrats like Howard Dean: it says "Wait a second here, your philosophy is valid! It's nothing to be ashamed of! On the contrary, it's the religious people that owe us an explanation, and we should be allowed to ask for one." Sometimes Harris is over the top, but I am one with him in the sentiment that we need to be making value judgments about cultures and ideals. The best thing here for me was the concept that a godless morality is dead simple: it boils down to happiness versus misery. Of course, that matches my own viewpoint to a T.
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| 01/2005 | Gregg Easterbrook |
The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse |
I really enjoyed this one. For one thing, it solidified my notion that objective progress is all around us, by almost any objective measurement you can conceive. Of course, the one thing that isn't changing is our subjective level of happiness. I, for one, don't look at this as an insurmountable problem, but just another realm for improvement.
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| 01/2005 | Tom Shachtman |
Inarticulate Society: Eloquence and Culture in America |
This was dense and by no means uplifting, in that it traced the steady erosion of articulateness in our society over the past several hundred years. What I liked best was the study of network TV newscasts between about 1965 and today, showing that the objective vocabulary withered and the length and complexity of the sentences used shrunk to just about the minimum possible size by the 1990s.
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| 01/2005 | David C. Geary |
The Origin Of The Mind: Evolution Of Brain, Cognition, And General Intelligence |
Could not finish this, but got about 2/3 done. It was a bore. I think it was aimed at readers with a little less general knowledge of science and philosophy than I suppose I've accumulated. It does a good job of emphasizing our animal-like nature and detailing some of the mechanistic functions of our brains, and it would surely piss off anyone who doesn't subscribe to a materialist viewpoint of humanity.
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| 01/2005 | Tom Wolfe |
I Am Charlotte Simmons |
A heck of a read, regardless what the critics say! Predictably, my twin brother and I enjoyed this book to about the same degree. My greatest wish for Wolfe is that he would please, for the love of God, STOP TRYING TO WRITE RAP LYRICS! Jesus. It would be so much easier to swallow his postmodern worlds if he would just pull up short of trying to write their soundtracks. Otherwise, I think Wolfe's creation is right on in many respects, and is particularly impressive given his age and gender. I'd like to read more reviews from thoughtful women to find out if they think he got Charlotte right or not. One major flaw: there truly is no protagonist here, no one you are rooting for. Instead, you root for bad things to happen to these people to punish them! That makes for a typically unsatisfying Wolfe ending.
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| 12/2004 | Robert Wolke |
What Einstein Told His Barber : More Scientific Answers to Everyday Questions |
Damn, I love this guy! Each one of these books spawns a series of great conversations, because Wolke often presents ideas as more complicated than you might initially think. Some of my favorites this time involved the phases of the moon (I stupidly thought they were caused by the Earth's shadow), the bubbles in shaken soda pop (I forgot that nucleation kinetics were to blame), and the principle of lift (I always subscribed to the Bernoulli idea--dead wrong, apparently).
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| 12/2004 | Malcolm Gladwell |
The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference |
Worth a read, because it illuminates how the real world works. Gladwell boils things down into three archetypical actors playing specific roles in the development of certain social phenomena, and it does help to illuminate why certain things happen the way they do.
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| 12/2004 | John Stewart and the writers of The Daily Show |
The Daily Show with Jon Stewart Presents America (The Book): A Citizen's Guide to Democracy Inaction |
Entertaining. Better than I expected, given some bad reviews on Amazon. What is there to say? It's his show, in book form.
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| 12/2004 | Philip K. Dick |
The Minority Report and Other Classic Stories |
I read perhaps 1/3 of his stories, and that was about enough. Clearly some fascinating stuff here that spawned movies and adaptations galore, but Dick is a true one-trick pony with setting and characterization. Everything is apocalyptic and all women are mired in the 1950s.
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| 12/2004 | George Smith |
Atheism, Ayn Rand, and Other Heresies |
The guy writes well on atheism, you gotta admit (I had wanted to read another book of his that wasn't available). He's convinced me to re-embrace the word again, instead of trying to find some expression that hasn't been dragged through the mud. The rest of it was a struggle for me.
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| 12/2004 | Richard Clarke |
Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror |
It's good to reflect on the fact that the Clinton presidency really was pretty damned concerned about terrorism, because it makes it more clear how incompetent the Bush gang was in 2001. Some over-the-top descriptions that make Clarke seem like Superman, but pretty sound overall.
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| 12/2004 | Evan Harris Walker |
The Physics of Consciousness: The Quantum Mind and the Meaning of Life |
This book succeeds where The Emperor's New Mind fails, in that it is well-written and entertaining in its development of a theory of consciousness by way of quantum mechanics. The author ultimately makes a series of highly questionable suppositions, but he nevertheless makes a very clear and concrete case interleaved with a personal memoir that becomes surprisingly powerful as the book progresses.
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| 12/2004 | Marcia Angell, M.D. |
Science on Trial: The Clash of Medical Evidence and the Law in the Breast Implant Case |
It's rewarding to see a skeptical, rational feminist savage her sister feminists who would dare to abandon science. As Angell predicted, the dispute raged on even as the science became increasingly clear, and the FDA again dodged the approval of these implants in January 2004.
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| 12/2004 | Louis Menand |
The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America |
A mixed bag, but a good balance of history and philosophy (and a good accompaniment to the Roosevelt books). My new hero: Oliver Wendell Holmes. "...he thought only in terms of aggregate social forces; he had no concern for the individual. The spectacle of individuals falling victim to dominant political or economic tendencies, when those tendencies had been instantiated in duly enacted laws, gave him a kind of chilly satisfaction. It struck him as analagous to the death of soldiers in a battlefield victory, and justified on the same grounds--that for the group to move ahead, some people must inevitably fall by the wayside."
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| 12/2004 | Jerry Pournelle |
Starswarm (Jupiter) |
Again, a random pick from someone's Amazon list. The book really does read like a Heinlein juvie (the main character's name is Kip, for god's sake!), but the writing isn't as good. The plot device is great, though: the idea of a brain implant that links you to a sentient supercomputer. Nice.
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| 11/2004 | Edmund Morris |
Theodore Rex |
I was Dee-lighted! to read this sequel to The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt. Point: 100 years ago, this country had an iron-fisted ideologue of a President who many considered to be a power-mad imperialist. The big difference is that even his detractors acknowledged his polymath brilliance. I might be happy with Bush today if I actually respected his abilities...
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| 11/2004 | Stephen Leather |
The Chinaman |
Some other Amazon.com user with apparent good taste suggested Leather, so I got an arbitrary one of his thrillers from my library. Diagnosis: fun, easy reading; sort of like a Dick Francis novel, but even more fanciful and less believeable. I may try more.
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| 11/2004 | Marcia Angell, M.D. |
The Truth About the Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What to Do About It |
Great, great, great! And timely: the day after I finished it, I was treated to a great segment on the Lehrer News Hour that touched on a lot of the same issues regarding the role of the FDA. This book is certainly biased, but the facts it lays out are hard to dismiss. The American political scene is in such deep trouble with regard to rational behavior!
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| 11/2004 | Chinua Achebe |
Things Fall Apart: A Novel |
During the Kerry campaign, I met a fascinating guy named Festus Ohaegbulam, who is a professor emeritus at USF, is from Nigeria, and was a tireless campaigner for John Kerry. I read this at his suggestion. It was engaging, and in the end I'm confused about its message, so I'll have to read others' opinions. Its greatness isn't immediately obvious to me.
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| 07/2004 | Stephen J. Glain |
Mullahs, Merchants, and Militants: The Economic Collapse of the Arab World |
Why the hell does the country of Jordan exist? Syria? Israel, for that matter? In this book, a former Middle East correspondent for the Wall Street Journal presents his odyssey around the region, interviews locals in "Arab and Jew" fashion, and gives his take on the history and current state of the region in terms of economics and the decisions made by the governments of these nations. Not enough about Mullahs (nothing, really), but a great read for anyone who wants to get a better sense of the identities of the lesser-known Middle East players.
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| 07/2004 | Joe Conason |
Big Lies: The Right-Wing Propaganda Machine and How It Distorts the Truth |
Another entry in the pantheon of Bush-bashing books. It's a worthy effort, with the best thing being the Top Ten List style that gives the reader a better chance of putting the various bashings into a higher-level conceptual framework (and makes this an ironic follow-up read to the previous book on my list!). Go, Kerry!
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| 06/2004 | Pat Robertson |
The Ten Offenses |
I couldn't resist. The whole book is, of course, a biased rant on the virtues of obeying Absolute Laws. In order to accept any of the arguments, you have to first accept the concept of God-given Scripture, and of course I do not. That said, my favorite moment in the book was the chapter on Obeying the Sabbath. In that chapter, Robertson first spends a few pages excoriating those of us who dare to work or play on Sunday. He explains how wrong it is for employers to keep their nonessential businesses open on Sunday, and he congratulates the owner of Chick-Fil-A for remaining closed. Then, the priceless moment: in setting up an anti-Super Bowl argument, Robertson writes "Several years ago, my wife and I drove to a local restaurant at about six o'clock one Sunday evening in late January." Uh...hold on, Pat. If it's so important to set a good example and not force people to work on the Sabbath, then why the hell are you and the missus eating out at a restaurant?
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| 06/2004 | Simon Winchester |
Krakatoa : The Day the World Exploded: August 27, 1883 |
Eh. Because I had recently read "Guns, Germs, and Steel" (below), it was obvious how relatively inferior "Krakatoa" is when it comes to anthropology and history of the Pacific islands. Granted, this book has a much narrower target, but I didn't find myself consistently gripped, even in the midst of the actual days of the eruption and explosion. To make things worse, the author made the unlikely case that political and social instabilities in the wake of Krakatoa planted the primary seeds for the modern wave of Islamic fundamentalist terrorism. Seems like a good way to sell as many books as possible.
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| 05/2004 | Michael Moore |
Dude, Where's My Country? |
Really only salvaged by the last chapter or so, where Moore gives extremely practical advice on how to appeal to conservatives why they should boot Bush out of office. Hint: it's all about the pocketbook! Otherwise, it's pretty standard Moore fare, and I really find myself struggling to believe that the House of Saud and the Bushies are in some grand cabal together--a topic that Moore explores far too tenaciously early in the book. I understand that the "movie version" (Fahrenheit 911) will focus a little more on the folly of the war itself, which is the right place to attack.
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| 05/2004 | Carl Sagan |
Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space |
Yawn! Sheesh. With this offering, I've come to the conclusion that I just don't like Sagan's writing very much. Not that writing was the focus here; the book is mostly a vehicle for hundreds of gorgeous photographs and illustrations of various objects in our Solar System. While it's still sort of thrilling to imagine our spacecraft swooping by the moons of Saturn, I've reached a point personally where I just don't think our future lies in space. Inward, not outward, sez I.
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| 05/2004 | Charles Wheelan |
Naked Economics: Undressing the Dismal Science |
Made me wish I had taken some economics somewhere along the line in school. Reading this made me a little more open to the idea that decreasing taxes _could_ stimulate the economy, but I still have to laugh at the Laffer Curve! This was a very clear book that covered all the high-level issues in economics that we should all have some intuition for.
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| 04/2004 | Paul Krugman |
The Great Unraveling: Losing Our Way in the New Century |
After reading books, I like to go and delight myself by perusing the Amazon.com reviews of them. In this case, it was stupefying to find multiple reviewers taking Krugman "the newspaper columnist" to task for his book's supposedly ill-conceived forays into economics. This about a guy who won the equivalent of the Nobel Prize in economics years before hooking up with the Op-Ed page of the Times! It's the old "none are so blind as those who will not see" situation; it really seems that there's little to be done, rationally, to reach mainstream America. In any case, this book (pretty much just Krugman's NYT op-ed pieces over the last four years with a few context-setting chapters) is powerful, and I thank Jeanie's mom and dad for putting me onto it. Other books like "Bushwhacked," "Rogue Nation," and "What Liberal Media?" (below) do pretty much the same thing, but Krugman puts the neocons in their greedy places with more clarity and authority than anyone else I've read.
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| 04/2004 | Robert T. Pennock |
Tower of Babel: The Evidence against the New Creationism |
Wildly uneven, in large part because he so often had trouble completing a topic without making references to a thousand other points that "we will revisit later." Yech. And the Babel analogy doesn't really get anything like the spotlight you might expect given the book's title and the threats Pennock makes in the preface. Thank god, because that was the most boring (and perhaps the least intellectually rigorous) part of the book. The middle of the book is philosophy-of-science gold, though! I found myself really locking into some of the arguments he made against attacks that science is a religion or constitutes a dogma; sadly, I already cannot restate them as clearly as I grasped them in the moment, but it's given me a lot to think about. Beware of an overload of words like ontology, teleology, and epistemic! Tough going at times.
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| 04/2004 | Richard Dawkins |
A Devil's Chaplain: Reflections on Hope, Lies, Science, and Love |
Many short essays here, some better than others, but on the whole far more personal than any other Dawkins stuff I have read. One thing this book has going for it is a super-strong denouncement of religion in principle--it's refreshing to see something like that, although given that Dawkins is a Super-Brit, it doesn't pack the same punch as it might from a well-known American writer. The glimpse into Dawkins's private life was revealing and more than a little sad. It seems that he basically got excluded from the raising of his daughter, which may owe a lot to his professional ambition, although that's just my guess. His essay to her "on her 10th birthday" urging her to strive to be a critical thinker seemed pretty heartfelt, and I find myself hoping that they have some sort of a relationship today.
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| 04/2004 | Lou Dubose, Molly Ivins |
Bushwhacked: Life in George W. Bush's America |
Right when my righteous outrage over the Bush administration was flagging just a little bit, this got me pumped up again! Grrrrr! It's long on finger-pointing and insinuation and relatively short on solutions, but you just have to believe that most of it is on the money. As an aside, this is a book written by Texans and sort of for Texans, so prepare for a lot of references to I-35 and armadillos.
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| 04/2004 | Dragan Bujosevic, Ivan Radovanovic |
The Fall of Milosevic: The October 5th Revolution |
I picked this up from the new releases shelf of my library. It's a wonderfully specific (and probably very biased) timeline of a very narrow series of events right around 10/5/2000, but it explicitly avoided making any effort to set any wider historical context for those events. Fine, but I need to go out there and read more about the history of Yugoslavia.
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| 04/2004 | Glen Gold |
Carter Beats the Devil |
Read this on my brother's recommendation after loving the Kavalier and Clay book that my brother gave me. Result: not anywhere near as good in pretty much every dimension! While C&K was believably historical and had a fascinating and inspirational plot, this book was cluttered with things like weird magician supervillains and alternate reality assassination plots of Warren Harding.
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| 03/2004 | John R. Lott Jr. |
The Bias Against Guns: Why Almost Everything You've Heard About Gun Control Is Wrong |
This book is a clear attempt by Lott to capitalize on the popularity of his breakthrough "More Guns, Less Crime." I read it because I'm naturally such a liberal on the gun control issue and I figured another book on the conservative side might give me a more balanced (or at least more knowledgeable) viewpoint. I would actually recommend reading this over More Guns, Less Crime--most because it rehashes the main points of Lott's earlier work without burying them in so much mind-numbing data, and it adds a lot more sociological context. I am planning to add more commentary on Lott in an Amazon review of More Guns, Less Crime.
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| 03/2004 | David Frum, Richard Perle |
An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror |
Not nearly as bad as I had hoped. In fact, most of it is quite sober and reasonable. The biggest problem is that the solutions to modern terrorism offered by these two conservatives are impractical. No matter how much I might like the US to lay down the law against Saudi Arabia, it's just not going to happen as abruptly as is suggested here. The problem is not the defense department or state department (the culprits in most of our foreign policy shortcomings, according to these two), but the fact that we just don't have enough leverage against most of the bad actors in the world to take such immediate, drastic action as is suggested in this book.
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| 03/2004 | Jared Diamond |
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies | Worth the read for many reasons--not the least of which is to get a wonderful crash course on the origins and worldwide migratory paths of humanity. Among many fine concepts is an examination of how infrequently writing has been independently invented and a great discussion of how difficult it was for humans to migrate very far along any given North/South axis.
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| 03/2004 | Michael Chabon |
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay | I really admire the amount of time and effort Chabon must have sunk into his research here in order to represent both the era and the viewpoints of the various characters. Any novel that gives a young Stan Lee (of Marvel Comics and "Excelsior" fame) a gruff little cameo is a hit to me!
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| 03/2004 | Tom Diaz |
Making a Killing: The Business of Guns in America | The crappy counterpart to the pro-gun Lott book below. It is not nearly as analytical and relies instead on ad-hominem type attacks against a range of subjects including Guns and Ammo magazine, the NRA, and John Wayne.
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| 03/2004 | John R. Lott Jr. |
More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun-Control Laws | Some right-wing Tampa resident referred to this book in a Letter To The Editor of the Tampa Tribune, and some research online revealed that it might have a troubling amount of validity, so I bought it used. I'm reading it in conjunction with another pair of books that present the pro-gun control side of the issue. In the end, I think Lott's book does misrepresent its side, though it does so in a skillful way. I share some of the feelings I found in this article about the perils of multiple regression analysis.
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| 02/2004 | Isaac Asimov (editor) |
Tomorrow's Children | I tracked this down in a local library after giving a used copy to Knave for Christmas. We both read it when we were in elementary school, and it's great fun to revisit it. My favorite "misses" common to most of the stories: the inaccurate forward projection of women's roles (almost all the female characters read shockingly like modern "pipe-smoking father" stereotypes of 1950s women), and the inability to envision the transformation to the information age (e.g. because it's so incredibly large, the lunar colony complex in one story has no maps other than an anologously-massive holographic one that is housed in a 60m tall tank!).
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| In Progress | Ernest Campbell Mossner |
The Life of David Hume | Interesting to contrast the biographical research style of Morris in the late 1970s (below) with Mossner, here in the 1950s.
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| 02/2004 | Mark Amadeus Notturno |
Science and the Open Society: The Future of Karl Popper's Philosophy | Rewarding for its points about truth and the clarity of its summary of Popper's basic philosophy. Timely reading in a society where critical challenges are often shouted down by accusations of mean-spiritness and intolerance; there's a great anecdote contrasting Neils Bohr's amiable tolerance of fools with Popper's incredibly aggressive inquisition during a pseudoscientific seminar presentation.
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| 01/2004 | Mary Lefkowitz |
Greek Gods, Human Lives: What We Can Learn from Myths | Feh! Lives down to its reviews on Amazon, unfortunately. I foundered for the last time around page 80. A rare clunker of a Christmas Book from Mom and Dad.
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| 01/2004 | Edmund Morris |
The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt | Inspirational, though it makes me sad that we all didn't get to gallavant around Europe when we were 10. Jeanie is pleased because it's inspired me to want to go now, anyway. |
| 01/2004 | Roger Penrose |
The Emperor's New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds, and the Laws of Physics | Could not read it all! Too horrible. Gives me courage that I, too, could write a best-selling book. |
| 01/2004 | Francis Fukuyama |
The End of History and the Last Man | I believe. This man has my worldview. As a bonus, I learned a lot of philosophy in this book--a great tour of some of the fundamental ideas of Plato, Locke, Hobbes, Kant, and Hegel. |
| 01/2004 | Michael Lewis |
Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game | A book about the other, non-gay, Billy Beane. Not quite as meaty as I'd hoped. Note: going for high-OBP guys does _not_ work in most fantasy leagues, I have learned! |
| 01/2004 | Robert Wolke |
What Einstein Told His Cook: Kitchen Science Explained | Learned lots of cool things, like my Mom can use clarified butter even though she's lactose intolerant. |
| 12/2003 | Clyde Prestowitz |
Rogue Nation: American Unilateralism and the Failure of Good Intentions | I've seen lots of elements from this book in various Democrats' position statements for the 2004 Primaries. Great exposition of the ideological failure of the Bush administration. |
| 12/2003 | Ann Coulter |
Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right | Pretty bad, but also pretty persuasive. She resorts too much to saying things have to be right if the majority of Americans think so. |
| 12/2003 | Eric Alterman |
What Liberal Media? The Truth About Bias and the News | Excellent! Has a mission as well as facts: to restore the dignity to the journalistic profession. |
| 12/2003 | Billy Bean |
Going the Other Way: Lessons from a Life in and out of Major-League Baseball | Gay guy in baseball. Not the GM of the Athletics, though. |
| 11/2003 | Frank Tipler |
The Physics of Immortality: Modern Cosmology, God and the Resurrection of the Dead | Skipped the middle, but love the idea (which is apparently grounded in good physics). Too bad we don't seem to live in a closed Universe after all, though, because all of Tipler's ideas depend on that. |
| 11/2003 | Richard Dawkins |
The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design | Great--very vision-driven. Includes an excellent evolution simulator model he wrote and goes over specifics of the most important "transitional forms" we have run into so far. |
| 11/2003 | Phillip Johnson |
Darwin on Trial | Good laundry list of some of the areas where evolution needs refinement. |
| 11/2003 | Michael Behe |
Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution | Could not get past chapter three or four--very repetitive. I agree with his thesis that more rigor should be demanded of the science of biochemical evolution, though. |
| 10/2003 | Salman Rushdie |
The Satanic Verses: A Novel | Read it all, but didn't really get it. Needed to be Indian and Muslim, really. Like the portrait he drew of the "inspired" writing of the Koran, though! |
| 09/2003 | Al Franken |
Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right | Kickass! Too bad his radio show won't be able to be as profane. |
| 08/2003 | Hank Hanegraaff |
Counterfeit Revival | I say listen to his radio show instead, but you can't argue with Hank's theology. |
| 03/2003 | C. S. Lewis |
Mere Christianity | Not good for non-Christians. Too much rests on his thesis of "all cultures have pretty much the same morality," which doesn't prove anything even if it's true! |
| 01/2003 | David Sloan Wilson |
Darwin's Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society | In favor of re-examining things in a social-darwinist manner--got me thinking about group selection theory. |
| 11/2002 | Ray Kurzweil |
The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence | Ray (MIT '70!) thinks like I think, sort of, but he also likes to make weird predictions about the coming 10 years that are pretty off. I'll stick to farther out, thank you. |
| 03/2002 | Douglas Hofstadter |
Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid | Best...book...ever! Took me many tries, though. |
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