Paging All Bookworms! discussion
PAGE COUNT TRACKING 2016
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JamesF's 2016 Challenge
January 114. Robert R. Stoll, Sets, Logic and Axiomatic Theories [1961] 206 pages
After reading the Penrose book (The Road to Reality), I'm beginning to review my math in the hopes of going a little bit beyond where I stopped in college. I began by re-reading this little book on the foundations. It's actually an abridged edition of the first chapters of the author's Set Theory and Logic.
The book is in four chapters; the first chapter is an intuitive introduction to set theory, the second chapter is on logic (statement logic and first order predicate logic), the third chapter is on axiomatic theories and develops the material of the first two chapters in a more rigorous way, and the fourth chapter is an introduction to Boolean algebras.
According to the preface, the book is intended for four groups: undergraduates who are planning to take a course in abstract algebra, future and present high school math teachers, and "brilliant" high school students. He says that the first two and a half chapters constitute about what "every educated person" should know about the foundations of math. I think his assumptions about high school students and "educated" people may be outdated, at least in the U.S. today after almost a half century of dumbed-down math -- this book was written in 1961, when math teaching was becoming more rigorous rather than less -- but for the most part it is a very simple introduction given how comprehensive it is. Some reviews I have seen have said that you already have to understand the material to understand the book, but I think that is only true of the very end of the last chapter, where he covers homomorphism and ideals in a very condensed section which is rather hard to understand without some background in group theory.
January 13
5. Martin P. Nilsson, Greek Folk Religion [1940] 166 pages
Originally published in 1940 under the title Greek Popular Religion, this is a classic account of the popular agricultural, "folklore" and "superstitious" beliefs which underlay the official religion and literary mythology of classical Greece, and much of which outlived the official religion and persisted into Christian Greece in the form of folk customs and beliefs. While some of the details, especially the anthropological theory, are undoubtedly outdated, it is still an interesting read. The political uses of religion haven't changed much essentially, however different the forms may be.
January 176. Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Death by Black Hole and other cosmic quandaries [2007] 384 pages
Like the many books of essays by Stephen Jay Gould, this is a collection of columns from Natural History; and like Gould, Tyson is a good writer with a knack for simple explanations of science. This book seems rather simpler than those, although that may just be because I know more about astronomy than biology. It covers most of the topics of astronomy from planets to the big bang, at a very basic level without much depth. It is written at the lower level of popular science writing, without any mathematics, for the person who knows little about science; it would be a great book for a middle school student (and that's the audience which would probably best appreciate his often corny jokes). But it has something for the more advanced reader as well; the fun is in the details -- many historical anecdotes, such as the explanation of why Percival Lowell saw spokes on Venus, and facts that I had never come across before. There is a certain amount of "gosh-wow", but less than I would expect from a book at this level. Although the essays were written over a ten year span, they seem to have been revised to include the latest developments up to the time it was published nine years ago. Because of the originally independent nature of the selections, there is a certain amount of repitition; the organization is by topics. It ends with a section on "Science and Culture" mainly lamenting the scientific illiteracy of American culture and the "intelligent design" nonsense. A good introduction for absolute beginners, and a fun read for the rest of us.
January 207. Stanislaw Lem, Return From the Stars [1961] 247 pages
This was a better than average science fiction novel. Hal Begg has returned from a space expedition 127 years after leaving Earth; because of time dilation, he is only forty. The novel shows his difficulties in reintegrating himself into a culture that has changed almost beyond all recognition. The first chapter is astonishing; it really manages to project the sense of a believable real future, rather than just transferring the present or some past into the future with a higher technology. Of course, being written in 1961, there are points on which the real future has already gone ahead of what he imagined -- for example, the hero at one point is searching for a telephone; there are a few pages where he is amazed by e-books, with a technology that seems rather backwards compared to my Kindle (127 years after an interstellar expedition), but still the prediction is fairly accurate (I don't remember any other science fiction writer from the sixties describing e-books).
The technology however is secondary to a social theme; the price of achieving world peace and a society without violence. A thought-provoking and well-written piece of serious science fiction.
January 248. Stendhal, Armance: ou quelques scènes d'un salon de Paris en 1827 [1827] 236 pages [in French, Kindle]
Armance was Stendhal's first novel; although not nearly so well-written or interesting as Le Rouge et le Noir, it already foreshadows Stendhal's style in the way it combines a romantic plot with a basically realist (though not quite realistic) social analysis. Unlike the later novel, however, it simply juxtaposes the two rather than truly integrating them. The plot concerns a wealthy French nobleman, Octave vicomte de Malivert, and a "poor" Russian noblewoman named Armance de Zohiloff; they fall in love but spend most of the book trying to avoid admitting it to each other, Armance because she is afraid of what people will think of her, and Octave because of an undisclosed "secret". (The main focus is on Octave rather than Armance.)
The protagonist in this book, Octave, like Julien Sorel in Le Rouge et le Noir, is a liberal who has to dissimulate his ideas in a very reactionary society -- something I can relate to living in Utah. The difference is that while Sorel comes from the petite bourgeoisie and is trying to rise in the world of the nobility, Octave and Armance are members of the nobility who reject the ideas of their own class. Stendhal may not be at his best in delineating the nobility.
The romantic elements -- in this case a romance in the current sense of the word -- seem much less believable in this novel, but this may be simply because the attitudes of the early nineteenth century nobility are so remote from anything today. To make it worse, the "secret" is never explained in the novel, but depends on knowing what Stendhal wrote about the novel in a letter. (Although the name of the character and certain allusions to an otherwise forgotten novel by someone else may have made it obvious to the original readers.) It may have been considered "daring" when it was written, but today it seems more quaint, if not somewhat boring, especially for the first half of the book, which starts very slowly compared to a modern novel. The style is very romantic in the worst way -- authorial comments predominate over straight narrative, and the main character is an extremely unusual personality (although at least there are no improbable coincidences driving the plot.)
January 279. Leonard Susskind, The Black Hole War: My Battle with Stephen Hawking to Make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics [2008] 470 pages
Earlier this month I read Susskind's The Cosmic Landscape and was not especially impressed. This is a much more interesting book. It deals with the history of the dispute over information loss in black holes; Stephen Hawking and originally a majority of physicists believed that information was lost in the evaporation of black holes, while Susskind, Gerard t'Hooft, and a few others considered this to be a violation of basic principles of quantum mechanics.
My problem with the earlier book was that it seemed too oversimplified; this book begins the same way, with a very simple explanation of basic concepts of black holes and entropy. The main interest in this section was just the personal anecdotes about various physicists. However, as the book went on, it got much more interesting, giving simple explanations of the ideas of black hole entropy, Black Hole Complementarity, and the Holographic Principle. It carries the story up to the date it was written.
Not everyone would agree with Susskind's interpretation of the "war" and its results, and I'm not a physicist so I can't really judge, but it was very interesting and I at least got a qualitative idea of what the discussion was about and some of the more recent concepts.
January 3010. Magda Szabó, The Door [1987] 262 pages
I apologize for having come so late to this discussion; the book just arrived at the library on Thursday after having been on back order since I requested it in December. I think my interpretation of the book is somewhat different from others who have commented on it.
I had never read any contemporary Hungarian literature (or any Hungarian literature at all, for that matter.) This psychological novel was about the relationship between two women, the first person narrator, a writer, and her housekeeper, Emerence.
At first, it seems to be about Emerence, an unusual person with mysterious secrets and a lot of idiosyncracies. As I read, I realized that it was more like Henry James' early novel, Roderick Hudson, which is ostensibly an analysis of Roderick but actually an analysis of the narrator; in this novel as well, we learn about the psychology of the narrator by what she understands -- and more importantly, doesn't understand -- about Emerence. However, this is also not the whole story; the novel is really about the deeper, unconscious dynamics of their relationship.
Szabó, to judge both by the novel and by the short biography at the beginning of the book, was a Christian and to some extent a dissident, and there is very little explicit politics in the novel, but I think she has, perhaps without intending it, written a very Marxist book: the underlying theme is the alienation caused by the separation of intellectual and physical labor, a contradiction which became more rather than less acute in the Stalinist states like postwar Hungary. Emerence, having been denied an education by the poverty of her family, comes to find her basis of self-esteem in physical labor, taking an extreme anti-intellectual position; but obviously at some deeper level she feels the loss, and has a need to validate herself by excercising an emotional power over the intellectuals she works for. The narrator is an intellectual, but as so often in an anti-intellectual society she feels a subconscious guilt that she is different from the majority, perhaps not as authentic as those who are not intellectuals, or even that she is actually incompetent, unable to do the normal things in life. Emerence senses this and manipulates her through this guilt. At times, the narrator realizes that she is being manipulated, but she represses the knowledge and rationalizes Emerence's behavior in ways that makes Emerence seem right and herself always wrong. She says that Emerence loved her, and it is probably true, but it was a manipulative, conditional love that was doled out on condition that she become emotionally dependent on Emerence. Her husband, also an intellectual, and apparently poor health, plays very little role in the novel. Perhaps it is no coincidence that the one seemingly reasonable character is the police Lieutenant Colonel, whose position involves both intellectual and physical labor; this is the only hint of a synthesis between the two opposed characters.
I don't want to suggest that this is the only thing the book is about; it is actually very complex and deals with various psychological and ethical issues, such as personal dignity and independence. I am glad the group chose this book because otherwise I would probably never have come across it.
February 411. Evalyn Gates Einstein's Telescope: The Hunt for Dark Matter and Dark Energy in the Universe [2009] 305 pages
A very clear and simple introduction to the idea of gravitational lenses and the uses to which they are being put in observational astronomy. One of the most important questions in astrophysics and cosmology today is the question of what the universe is made of; the dark matter and dark energy which seem to make up the vast majority of the mass of the universe (unless our understanding of gravity needs to be revised), about which we know virtually nothing. Gates explains very well in popular, non-mathematical language the current state of the science and how gravitational lensing is being used to investigate the structure of the universe at large scales and try to provide some observational constraints on the theories. Up to date as of about seven years ago.
February 512. Frederick Copleston, S.J., A History of Philosophy: Volume IV, Descartes to Leibniz [1958] 370 pages
I finally got started with this again, going forward into the early modern period. Copleston divided the pre-Kantian period into two volumes; this, the first, deals with the Continental “Rationalist” tradition, the next will deal with the British Empiricists. Actually, this is less a complete history than a study of three important figures, Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz, each of whom gets four or five chapters, supplemented by three shorter chapters on Pascal, Malebranche, and the minor Cartesians. The Catholic bias was less noticeable in this volume, probably because the question of agreement with Catholic theology was actually an important question to at least Descartes, Pascal, Malbranche, and the other Catholics, and relevant to the acceptance or non-acceptance of Leibniz and Spinoza as well, so it doesn’t seem so much Father Copleston’s personal opinionizing. The presentation of the actual philosophies was of course very thorough for a general history. There was very little in the way of the social background of the philosophy, but one wouldn’t expect that from a writer of this perspective.
February 713. Lord William Taylour, The Mycenaeans [revised ed. 1983] 180 pages
Following up on my last year's rereading of the Iliad, I checked out this short summary of what is known about the Mycenaean culture. Taylour is an expert who was responsible for much excavation at the sites he discusses, so the book is presumably very reliable. It is now about 35 years old, but since it is mainly description of what has been found with very little speculative analysis, there's not much to become outdated. The main problem is that it was so short (perhaps because of the series it was part of), and much of that space was taken up by the (very well chosen) illustrations.
February 1014. Daniel Kennefick, Traveling at the Speed of Thought: Einstein and the Quest for Gravitational Waves [2007] 319 pages
A semi-popular history of the concept of gravitational waves from the origins of General Relativity through the various disputes to the observational confirmation by the discovery of binary pulsars, and the beginnings of the search to detect the waves themselves. (I finished the book last night; this afternoon, the BBC News had the report that they have just been detected for the first time.) I call the book semi-popular because, while aimed at a lay audience and without being highly mathematical, it does require for example knowing what tensors are and what invariance and covariance under transformations of coordinates mean and why this is important. In short, it isn't a book for absolute beginners. The author is particularly interested in using the history of general relativity and gravitational wave studies to present his meditations on the philosophy of science, which not everyone will be interested in (I was, as a former philosophy student). The book is occasionally repetitious, especially in discussing individual scientists and their personalities.
February 1515. Michael Wood, In Search of the Trojan War [1985] 272 pages
More on the Trojan War. . . This was written in conjunction with a PBS Television series, which probably influenced the way it was organized. It takes a historical approach, beginning with Heinrich Schliemann's excavation of Hissarlik, then going on to the excavations at Mycenae and the other Bronze Age sites in Greece, to the excavation of Knossos, and ultimately to the Linear B tablets and the Hittite archives. It was actually fairly interesting. The author's conclusions: the question is still open, but the Trojan War probably was an actual event, Hissarlik (specifically Troy VI) was probably Troy, and was probably sacked by the Greeks sometime around 1260 BCE; this may be connected with the dispute between Ahhiyawa and Hatti over Wilusa; and Troy VIIa was probably destroyed about 1180 BCE by the Sea Peoples.
February 1616. Annie L. Burton and others, Women's Slave Narratives [2006] 154 pages
17. Octavia V. Rogers Albert, American Slaves Tell Their Stories: Six Interviews [1890] 87 pages
Two Dover anthologies of slave narratives written between 1863 and 1909, that is much earlier than the bulk of slave narratives which were collected from very old ex-slaves during the Depression by the Federal Writers Project; but their earlier date is balanced by the fact that they are a much less representative sample and were written and published for religious edification more than history.
Women's Slave Narratives consists of five short books originally published separately, Annie Burton's Memories of Childhood's Slavery Days (1909, slightly abridged here), Memoir of Old Elizabeth, a Coloured Woman (1863), Dr. L. S. Thompson, The Story of Mattie J. Jackson (1866), Lucy A. Delaney, From the Darkness Cometh the Light, or Struggles for Freedom (c. 1891), and Kate Drumgold, A Slave Girl's Story 1898.
American Slaves is a republication of a single book of five conversations, originally published in 1890 under the title The House of Bondage or Charlotte Brooks and other slaves: original and life-like, as they appeared in their old plantation and city slave life; together with pen-pictures of the peculiar institution, with sights and insights into their new relations as freedmen, freemen, and citizens. (Why does Dover do this?) It was published first as a series of articles in the magazine South-western Christian Advocate, then reprinted as a book.
All of the works in both these books have a very strong religious content, and were written more as religious "testimonies" than as factual descriptions of slavery, but apart from the memoir of "old Elizabeth" they do give a certain amount of information about the conditions of the slaves. The women's narratives are all by domestic servants ("house slaves") rather than field slaves, so in that respect they could give a somewhat distorted impression of the economic importance of slavery, and are mostly from the northernmost states of the slave region; the second book has interviews with actual field slaves, in Louisiana.
The House of Bondage is the book that contains the quotation, "the half has never been told" which Baptist uses as the title of his history of slavery, which I am currently reading and which puts the narratives into their context.
February 2318. Hector Berlioz, Les soirées de l'orchestre [3rd ed. 1878] 436 pages [in French, Kindle]
This wasn't originally on my reading list, but a Shelfari friend recommended it as one of Berlioz's best books. The premise is that the players in an orchestra have conversations during boring operas, telling stories and so forth. It is a miscellaneous collection of satire, music criticism, music biography and other things; very uneven but some is very funny. There's even a science fiction story set in 2330. Some of the items are in other works by Berlioz which I had already read.
February 2519. Edward E. Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism [2014] 528 pages [Kindle]
This book was an excellent synthesis of the history of slavery, which integrated slave narratives with economic and political history to explain the reasons for the rise and fall of slavery in the American south. Baptist explained many of the events of U.S. history from a very different perspective than I had read previously.
February 2820. Adrienne Koch, Jefferson and Madison: The Great Collaboration [1950] 294 pages
This book was recommended reading for my high school AP American History course (1968) and has been on my reading list (and my bookshelf) ever since; I finally decided to read it for a Goodreads challenge to read something on Jefferson. The book was originally published in 1950.
Ostensibly an account of the life-long friendship/collaboration of Jefferson and Madison, it is (despite being based on original scholarship) actually a political rather than a scholarly book, designed both to idealize the two subjects and to bring them into the fold of New Deal Democratic Party liberalism. Although twentieth century concerns are not mentioned explicitly except in a very vague way, they seem to me to underlay much of the emphasis and selection of the material. The focus of the book is to emphasize Jefferson's position that the Constitution should be revised every generation to accommodate the current majority, while diminishing his strict constructionism (against those in the 1930s and 1940s who idolized the wisdom of the Constitution and the founders, as an argument for conservatism); to reinterpret the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions as a defense of civil liberties rather than "States' Rights" (the conservative code-word for preserving Jim Crow); and to suggest that the Supreme Court and the judiciary is more dangerous to liberty than the elected branches of government (an issue in the 30's; I wonder whether she would have emphasized this so much four years later, when it became a conservative argument against desegregation by court order.)
There was much of interest in the book about the history of the early republic, and particularly the struggles between the Federalists and the Republicans, but it is very selective. The biggest omission is any mention of slavery -- there is one paragraph on page 13 defending Jefferson as being against slavery (on the basis of a very early position he took in 1783) and that is literally the only mention of slavery in the entire book. After just finishing Edward Baptist's book which interprets the history of the U.S. from the Jefferson administration on as being mainly about slavery and its extension (this may be an exaggeration as well, but certainly the question was important from the beginning, and didn't just pop up at the time of the Missouri Compromise as one might gather from the usual high school history) it seemed very odd to hear Jefferson talking about the Louisiana Purchase as an "empire of liberty" without the author ever pointing out that it was in truth an empire of slavery. The entire account takes Jefferson's and Madison's rhetoric at face value, without questioning the actual tendency of their actions.
Partly of course, this was because of her interests in writing it, but it is also a symptom of the treatment of slavery and Jim Crow by American historians in general, compartmentalizing them in particular chapters as specific aberrations rather than showing them as important and even dominant factors in the general history of the country (apart from the immediate pre-Civil War period.)
I had expected to like this book, as I have always considered Jefferson and Madison as our most intelligent and among our best presidents -- as they were from a perspective of freedoms for white citizens. The country would have been much less democratic in the short term if the Hamiltonians had succeeded; but on the other hand, the North would have become dominant much earlier, had manufacturing been encouraged as Hamilton wanted. Certainly if one looks at their writings rather than their actions, Jefferson and Madison would have to be considered better than most of those who came after. I was struck by the way they emphasized education and tried to be as well read as possible; I can't help but contrast an incident in the 2008 U.S. election, where the Bush and Obama supporters argued about which candidate was better educated -- the Bush supporters accusing Obama of being better educated, and the Obama supporters retorting that Bush was. That sums up everything wrong with our electoral system today.
The book was worth reading, but not particularly great; and probably some at least has become outdated.
March 121. Allendoerfer and Oakley, Fundamentals of Freshman Mathematics [second edition, 1965] 588 pages
Inspired by the Penrose book, I have begun a project of reviewing my high school and college mathematics, with the intention of going beyond them to the next steps. I decided to begin by re-reading my eleventh grade algebra book. The "freshman" in the title refers to college. There seem to be two meanings to the course name "College Algebra" depending on the college: it can mean high school algebra from a more rigorous standpoint, or what comes after high school algebra (i.e. abstract algebra). This is the first type; it would be a low level college text, sort of remedial for those whose high school math wasn't sufficient for calculus, but for high school it was fairly high level. It could probably best be considered as what used to be called "ATA" (Algebra-Trigonometry-Analysis); in present day terms, Precalculus plus a simplified version of the first month of calculus. The author's assumption is that the student will be going on to study science or engineering, rather than pure math, so it is written from that perspective.
Being written before the circa 1970 dumbing down of high school math, it begins with a brief introduction to logic and set theory, then gives a somewhat more advanced review of number systems and basic algebra (i.e. what today would be Pre-algebra, Algebra I and II), goes on to cover simultaneous equations and inequalities, vectors and matrices, exponential and logarithmic functions, and basic trigonometry, and ends with an intuitive introduction to limits, derivatives and integrals.
At some point, I acquired a second used copy of this, and used it for tutoring students who were returning to college after forgetting most of their high school math, or simply worried (rightly, usually) that their high school math courses were not an adequate preparation for college math.
The main "shortcoming" from a present day perspective is that there is nothing about how to do everything on a calculator (the introduction mentions that they are "far too expensive" for the average undergraduate!). There are also a few typos which affect the sense, especially in the equations.
Not the world's most interesting book, and somewhat less advanced than I remembered (some of what I thought I learned here I must have gotten later in my calculus courses), but a decent review of things I had partly forgotten (especially vectors and matrices.)
March 322. Jim C. Hines, Revisionary [2016] 339 pages
The fourth book in the Magic ex libris series of fantasy novels about a library cataloger and libriomancer. As with most fantasy series, once it gets beyond the length of a trilogy it becomes less original, and in this case, because there is no "constraint" on what the protagonist can do with his magic, no absolute rules the reader can count on, it all seems too easy -- get into a seemingly impossible situation and he simply discovers some new aspect of the magic to get him out of it. The only thing really that got me into reading this series to begin with was the hero's occupation as a library cataloger (like me) and that has long since become essentially forgotten. The fact that the "bad guys" are racist politicians, bureaucrats, Homeland Security and the military, though better than the reverse in so many thrillers, is an easy choice and not backed up by any real political theme. In short, the series is entertaining adult fantasy but nothing beyond; good if you're looking for something to relax with or fill up time, but not if you feel overwhelmed by how much worthwhile literature you haven't gotten to yet.
March 4Kathleen Grissom, Kitchen House [2010] [abandoned after 207 pages, plus the last 18, out of 365]
I almost never abandon a book once I seriously start it (I think this is only the fourth in over seven years that I've been writing reviews); I tried to force myself to finish it because it was the book for the library discussion group, but after over a week and less than two-thirds finished I decided I just didn't want to waste any more time on it. I did skip ahead and read the last two chapters for the sake of the discussion. Reading this did have the good effect that to see whether it was as flawed a description as I thought I read a few (much more worthwhile) nonfiction books about slavery for the discussion.
Despite having given it up, I won't say that this is a completely bad novel, or all that badly written; but it just isn't a good book either. The basic idea, a friendship between an Irish indentured servant and the Black slaves on a plantation, is just implausible (to make it even halfway believable, the author has to make her an orphan whose parents died on shipboard) and not wholly original either (there was a 2006 Young Adult novel by Sharon Draper called Copper Sun with a similar situation). Having a white girl living with the slaves and treated essentially in the same way is false to the realities of the period, as I understand them from reading slave narratives and other historical sources (there were actual Irish slaves in the Caribbean, but indentured servants in the United States were in a totally different situation from slavery; and many references in the slave narratives suggest that the Irish, having no claim to status except being white, tended to be among the most racist groups.)
The recent spate of novels about slavery and Jim Crow, as with many recent novels about the Holocaust, show I think that it is now considered far enough in the past to be a "safe" subject, at least if it is dealt with in a "safe" manner, and Grissom has made all the "safe" choices: the novel is set at the very beginning of the nineteenth century, in the "Old" tobacco planting South, rather than farther south and west in the Cotton era, and focuses on "house" rather than "field" slaves, so slavery is presented as a kind of domestic service rather than an economically important and highly profitable method of producing an important commodity. The horrors of slavery are not downplayed, but they are presented as being a result of "evil" people rather than the inevitable product of the economic system itself. The cliché of the kind but weak master versus the cruel overseer is at the center of the events. The fact that many of the horrors of this novel are visited on the white owner's family as well as the slaves is also an implausible feature. I won't go into detail to avoid "spoilers" but the farther I read, the less believable the events -- and the more predictable. The last two chapters convinced me I was right not to keep going; the ending was definitely not believable as historical reality. I suppose, like the other "safe" novels about Jim Crow and the Holocaust, this book could be useful for someone who has absolutely no idea how terrible these things were, but for anyone with the least knowledge it is not going to be worthwhile from a historical viewpoint.
As to specific problems: although set in one of the most important formative periods of American history, there is no politics in the novel; the white characters never discuss anything that is happening in the country in general; there is for instance no mention of Jefferson or the struggles between the Northern and Southern politicians, the Louisiana Purchase, etc.
So what about it simply as a novel? The style as I said is not terrible, but neither is it good enough to redeem the problems with the plot. The tragic situations are too dense, without any relaxation of the tension, making it a difficult read, and eventually it just reaches a saturation point where it actually seems boring, especially as all the situations are predictable. The novel is written in the first person, alternating the viewpoints of the indentured servant, Lavinia, and the slave girl Belle. The author took some care in trying to make the voice of Belle sound realistic, with some light dialect; the longer sections by Lavinia were written in a neutral present-day English (although there were no contemporary slang expressions or jarring anachronisms) and did not seem to fit with the young age of the character in most of the book.
March 923. Sean Carroll, From Eternity to Here: The quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time [2010] 438 pages
This is one of the better popular science books I have read, at the non-mathematical level. The book is well-written and well-organized, without a lot of "gosh-wow", and clearly distinguishes what is accepted by most scientists from what is speculative or personal opinion. Carroll presents a wide-ranging view of modern cosmology organized around the concept of the "arrow of time". Understanding, as many popular science writers seem not to, that the audience for a book of this type is not primarily readers with no prior knowledge of science, but readers who have read many other books of the same type and level, he minimizes the space given to the standard simple explanations of relativity, quantum theory and the Big Bang (although enough is included for a "new" reader to follow his discussions) in favor of a more comprehensive and very clear, but mostly non-mathematical presentation of the basic concepts of thermodynamics, particularly entropy, which is the main theme of the book. (The only mathematics really needed is a high school undertanding of exponents and logarithms, and the author gives a brief review of them in an appendix.)
The central problem of the book is the paradox (emphasized also by Penrose) that entropy always remains constant or increases in any closed system, so that the universe considered as a closed system must have begun at a much lower level of entropy; yet the very reasons why entropy tends to increase make it hard to understand why the universe did not start out at a very high level of entropy to begin with -- in other words, if we were to assume a random initial condition for the universe, it would not resemble the actual beginnings of the real universe. In pursuing this question, he touches on many of the same ideas that are in many of the other books I have read, especially Susskind's The Black Hole War which I read earlier in the year, but from a different perspective and at a less technical level. (If you have read the Susskind book and understood it, there isn't a lot new here, but if you haven't read it or found it difficult, this book discusses the same issues, such as black hole entropy, conservation of information, and the holographic principle, very clearly.) In the end, he suggests that the solution may be a "multiverse" which is a mainly empty, high entropy de Sitter space, producing low entropy "baby universes" through quantum fluctuations. The book however is mainly a presentation of the problem, rather than pushing hard for a particular solution.
There are a few mentions of string theory, as one possible avenue to understanding quantum gravity, but it is not described in detail; that is not one of the concerns of the book. Rather, it emphasizes thermodynamics throughout, with some general relativity and some quantum field theory, as the main clues to understanding the context of the Big Bang. Although more favorable than Penrose to the Inflationary theory, he agrees with him that by itself it makes the entropy problem worse rather than solving it.
Altogether a very interesting book, and the most recent work in my chronological reading of my library's popular cosmology books.
March 1224. Stanislaw Lem, Solaris [1960, tr. 2013] 223 pages [Kindle]
Solaris is a classic work of literary science fiction, written in Polish in 1960; it was the first of Lem's novels to be translated into English (rather poorly, from the French translation) and has been made into films three times, twice in the U.S.S.R. (1968, and the classic Tarkovsky version of 1972) and more recently by Soderberg in the U.S. I had read the original translation a long time ago, and began reading it again, but discovered that there is a newer (2013) e-book version by Bill Johnston which is (marginally) better and directly from Polish, so I read that instead.
The initial setup: Solaris is a planet with a unique ocean; for hundreds of years scientists and explorers have debated whether it is inorganic, living, or even a sentient organism. Kris Kelvin arrives on the planet to find that recent experiments have created a very strange situation.
This novel, which made Lem's reputation in the west, considers questions of human identity, ethics, and metaphysics, as well as being a great story.
March 1425. Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, The Grand Design [2010] 198 pages
The blurb calls this a major work. It's not. I know I'm in a minority, but I am not a fan of Stephen Hawking as a popularizer. Undeniably, he is a major physicist, and I remember liking his Brief History of Time, but I read that a long time ago. His popular works since are all very oversimplified, and this one could almost be considered as a children's or YA book -- I would have no problem with it if it were marketed as such. But as an adult book, it covers no new ground which is not covered in more depth in many other popular science books.
He begins by saying that "philosophy is dead", replaced by science. Okay, as someone with a degree in philosophy that may have prejudiced me to begin with. He then spends about 15% of this very short book giving a lightweight history of philosophy, not only oversimplified but full of errors. For example, he calls Thomas Aquinas an "early Christian philosopher" -- even if we consider modern philosophers who happen to be Christians as "Christian philosophers", he was past the middle, closer to today in time than to the real "early Christian" philosophers like Tertullian, Origen and Augustine. He calls Aristotle the leader in rejecting observational science -- actually he was probably the best observational scientist in antiquity, especially in his specialty of marine biology. He contrasts him to Galileo on the question of falling bodies -- probably it was Aristotle who actually experimented on this, dropping objects in liquid to slow them down and thereby discovering the laws of bodies at final velocity; while Galileo certainly never dropped the balls from the tower of Pisa -- he didn't have the instruments to prove anything that way anyway -- and whether he did the experiment with inclined planes is open to doubt (his first edition talks about rolling balls, which would have given very different results than he claimed; the later editions correct it to sliding blocks.)
Hawking then moves to physics "lite", and while I'm not presumptuous enough to claim there were errors, it was certainly very oversimplified. His "philosophy" of "model-dependent realism" is presented very simplistically, without any consideration of the philosophical issues it raises. He gives very briefly all the standard analogies and examples which are in every book on relativity and quantum theory, from the two-slit experiment to the inflating balloon, and almost nothing which is not found everywhere else. The book is very short; the actual text, excluding the glossary, acknowledgements and index (there is no bibliography at all), is about 180 pages, of which 30 are either just chapter titles, blank, or ornamental illustrations. The font size is very large, and there are unnecessary large illustrations throughout, giving it the appearance of a children's book -- I know he has physical limitations on writing long books, and has more important things to work on, but it would have been more honest to write a short book than to pad it out to look longer than it is.
Only the last ten or fifteen pages have anything which might be new to some people (but it's all in his earlier books) -- the no-boundary condition as a basis for the multiverse, very lightly explained. I was very disappointed in this book.
March 2026. Frederick Copleston, S.J., A History of Philosophy, Volume 5: Hobbes to Hume [1959] 440 pages
Up to volume 5 in my re-reading of Copleston (one volume left to catch up to where I stopped the first time in college). This volume treated the British/Scottish empiricists; two chapters on Hobbes, four chapters on Locke, three on Berkeley, four on Hume, with shorter single chapters interspersed on the Cambridge Platonists, Newton, and the Common Sense philosophers. As with the other volumes, Father Copleston is factually accurate and usually fair in his analysis of what the philosophers wrote; he's overly concerned with what they thought about God, but the Catholic bias is not usually too intrusive. I will resist the temptation to review the philosophers rather than the book, but I appreciate his coverage of the minor figures who don't always figure in other histories.
March 2827-29. Georg Brandes, Shakespeare: A Critical Study [3 volumes, 1897-98; tr. 1902 by William Archer] 849 pages
One of the most influential studies of Shakespeare by a non-English critic, this was written originally in Danish; it dates from about two decades after the books by Dowden and Swinburne which I read a couple years ago. While he mentions both, he seems to be very much influenced by Dowden's book; this study follows the same pattern, mixing biography and somewhat subjective criticism and trying to find traces of Shakespeare's life in the plays. Brandes goes somewhat farther along these lines and the book sometimes seems more like a novel than a biography.
The criticism is often very interesting and worthwhile, but never as detailed or objective as we are used to from contemporary scholars (or even his contemporary Moulton). He covers all the plays and the poems. Although critical of the philistinism and prudery of some other critics, he himself does not entirely escape from the "modern taste" (his words) which we refer to as "Victorian" (though hardly limited to England.) That, and his criticism that Shakespeare doesn't appreciate the "greatness" of Caesar makes him sound much less modern than Shakespeare himself. In the end, I'm not really convinced by the "romantic" idea that Shakespeare must have been in a tragic, despairing mood when he wrote his tragedies and very happy when he wrote his comedies, or deeply in love -- and betrayed, when he wrote the Sonnets (Brandes argues that the "dark lady" was Mary Fitton); it seems to me that that detracts from his ability as an artist.
In seeking psychological explanations for the plays, Brandes does include a good deal of material on Elizabethan and Jacobean politics (or rather, personal anecdotes about political figures) which is very interesting but not necessarily as relevant as he considers it.
[There seems to be a discrepancy on the date of this; the above dates were in the e-book, but Lee's A Life of Shakespeare, published in 1899 (which I read in the 1899 printed copy) lists it in his bibliography as written in 1895 in Danish and translated in 1898. The 1902 for the translation at least has to be wrong if it was mentioned as existing in a book printed in 1899.]
March 3130. Stendhal, Vanina Vanini [1829] 32 pages [in French; Kindle]
This short story (32 pages in the Kindle edition I read) was written in 1829, a year before Le rouge et le noir. Set in contemporary Italy, it tells the story of a wealthy young girl who falls in love with a Carbonaro, a nationalist revolutionary against Austrian and Papal domination of Italy. The story shows Stendhal approaching his mature works; it is romantic and melodramatic but well-written and well-constructed, and with a certain amount of psychological realism. The title character is more independently active than most female characters in early Romantic literature but still dominated by her love relationship. Although written as a separate story, many editors have combined it with the later collection of Chroniques italiens. Rossellini made a film version in 1961 which I haven't yet seen.
April 131. Lisa Randall, Knocking on Heaven's Door: How Physics and Scientific Thinking Illuminate the Universe and the Modern World [2011] 445 pages
This is really a combination of two books; one is a simple explanation of scientific method and worldview and the other is a description of the Large Hadron Collider and what it may find. The explanation of how science works is good if fairly basic; the most important part is discussing scales and effective theories. Unfortunately she mixes it with a weak-kneed criticism of religion, which annoys me in books of popular science -- I haven't taken religion seriously since I was eleven, and I doubt if many people past high school are actually undecided on the question, while those who believe by faith will not be convinced by rational argument -- they have to stop wanting to believe first, so why waste space on this?
The material on the LHC on the other hand is fascinating, and I wish she had focused just on this. It is the largest and most expensive (and every other superlative) facility ever built, and it is interesting that it was built for pure scientific research. If aliens should visit Earth some time after we destroy ourselves and our environment with politics and greed, this is one of the few artifacts that might impress them with our species. It also marks the return of scientific supremacy to Europe after decades of American domination. But mainly, the design and instrumentation is very fascinating.
She then goes on to explain the science that the LHC is designed to explore -- first of all, the Higgs boson (which she points out in the preface, added in 2012, may have been discovered, although the interpretation is controversial.) She explains something of the Higgs mechanism and why it is important if it is verified. She then goes into cosmology, to explain dark matter, which may also be found in the LHC if it is in the form of WIMPS (weakly interacting massive particles) and their energy is in the right range, as some theories predict.
There was a lot in the book that I found interesting. Unfortunately, she is not always the clearest writer. She says that this book was intended as a "prequel" to her earlier book Warped Passages, so I may look for that later.
April 432. Sydney Lee, A Life of William Shakespeare [1899] 475 pages
Written four years after Brandes' book which I read last week (there seems to be a discrepancy in the dates, but since I read this in the original 1899 print edition I would trust Lee's bibliography over the notice in the e-book of Brandes), this is the polar opposite. While the speculation in that work made it seem like a historical novel, this is a very sober and skeptical biography (perhaps the first?) of the dramatist. It makes no pretensions to literary criticism, but deals with the facts that are known or reasonably inferred about his life.
Lee debunks easily the argument that the Sonnets were addressed to the Earl of Pembroke, or that Shakespeare had any real association with him (and the corollary that the "dark woman" was Mary Fitton); more importantly he shows that they were not autobiographical at all, but conventional fictions which differed from the hundreds of contemporary sonnets and sonnet sequences in England (mostly imitations of Italian and French originals) only in quality but not in purpose or nature. This pretty much disposes of most of what Brandes (and his predecessors) imagined about Shakespeare's life. He also protests strongly against the whole project of trying to fit Shakespeare's life to the moods of the plays; he was an artist who was capable of imagining emotions he was not directly experiencing at the time he wrote them.
Of course, in the last hundred and sixteen years there have undoubtedly been new discoveries made and ideas put forth, so I'm sure this is outdated in many ways, but it is one of the best biographies of Shakespeare I have yet read.
April 1233. M. L Stedman, The Light Between Oceans [2012] 345 pages
A boat washes up on an island with an apparently orphaned baby girl and the lighthouse keeper and his wife decide to raise her . . . but this isn't the Shirley Temple musical, and the consequences turn out to be tragic for everyone involved. I was of two minds about this novel, which I read for the library's book discussion group. The strengths are the writing style, which is very good; the characterization of the important and many of the supporting figures; and especially the background theme of the effects of World War I on the survivors and society in general -- as Remarque says in All Quiet on the Western Front, it destroyed an entire generation, those who came back as well as those who died. From this perspective, the novel could be considered literary fiction of a high quality, even comparable to great writers such as Lessing. On the other hand, the vehicle, the foreground plot about the lighthouse keeper and his wife, seems very contrived and melodramatic, and it is treated in the most sentimental style possible, which makes the book seem more like a popular, genre type tear-jerker. So I kept going back and forth, is this a serious novel or a "best-seller"? In the end, I had to say "both"; it had potential but dissipated it with easy emotional effects. It is Stedman's first novel, and the faults are common in first novels; I think that she could become a major writer if she chooses the right subjects and finds the self-discipline to avoid the obvious sentimental pathways, or she could end up as a popular but lightweight author.
April 1434. Frederick Copleston, S.J., A History of Philosophy, v.6: Wolff to Kant [1960] 509 pages
The sixth volume of Copleston's history, and the last one I finished the first time I read these in college, so the last three will be for the first time. This volume covers the Enlightenment/Aufklärung (about 40% of the book, or part one in the old paperback edition which divided it into two books) with particular emphasis on Rousseau, and the philosophy of Kant (about 60%). The treatment of the Enlightenment was as fair as one could hope for from a Catholic priest who is obviously not sympathetic to their project, and the section of Kant was as clear as possible given that it was about Kant. When I read this the first time around, I hadn't yet read a lot of any of these philosophers, except Rousseau on the Social Contract and Kant's Prolegomena; since then I've read quite a bit, including Voltaire, Diderot, Lessing, most of Rousseau and all three of Kant's Critiques, as well as having taken a course that focused on the Critique of Pure Reason. The more I know about these figures the more impressed I am with Copleston's ability to summarize their positions. Otherwise, I won't repeat what I've said in my reviews of the first five books. No substitute for reading the actual philosophers, or even the more specialized secondary works, but still the best general history in English.
April 1535. Leo Tolstoy, Tolstoy on Shakespeare: A critical essay on Shakespeare; followed by Ernest Crosby, "Shakespeare's attitude to the working classes" and a letter from George Bernard Shaw" [tr. 1906] 95 pages [Kindle]
This book contains Tolstoy's famous essay on Shakespeare, the article by Ernest Crosby which inspired it, and a letter by George Bernard Shaw commenting on Shakespeare and Tolstoy. (I also read a short reply to Tolstoy's article by George Orwell, which is not in this book.) Apparently, Browning (I assume Robert, the poet) listed a group of famous writers whom he considered as politically liberal, and included Shakespeare; Crosby's article replied to this, giving quotations (mostly out of context) to show what no one should ever have doubted anyway, that Shakespeare was politically conservative and supported the monarchy and aristocracy of his time. Count Leo Tolstoy decided to write an introduction to this -- much longer than Crosby's article itself -- which he then published as this essay (1903). Shaw wrote the letter which is included here in support of Tolstoy's position, before having read the essay. All three are very anti-Shakespeare.
Tolstoy does not actually talk about the political aspects of Shakespeare; instead, he gives two other, separate arguments; first, he tries to show that Shakespeare was a poor writer who simply ruined the stories he used as sources, and secondly, he attacks him for not writing Christian religious plays, which according to Tolstoy are the only worthwhile form of drama. It is obvious from the latter statement that this is the late Tolstoy who judged all literature from a religious and moral standpoint, and condemned most of it (including much of his own writing.) I won't bother with that, beyond noting that Shakespeare is in fact a very Christian writer (see any of Paul Siegel's books, for example) and that morality (or politics for that matter) is not the only or even primary consideration in aesthetic criticism in any case. Tolstoy says, however, that he has always considered Shakespeare a bad writer, and it is the first argument that became famous and that I will review.
The essay reminds me of many reviews of serious, particularly non-realist literature I have read on Amazon.com by people who don't understand a book and therefore think the five star reviews must be by pretentious people who are putting them on. In the same way, this essay basically assumes that because Tolstoy does not see what is great about Shakespeare, there must be a conspiracy (in this case a conspiracy of German critics initiated by Goethe) to convince people that he was a great author, which people then follow by "suggestion" because they are incapable of making their own judgements (otherwise they would of course agree with Tolstoy.)
It's actually easy, of course, to see why Tolstoy does not appreciate Shakespeare. Tolstoy was among the greatest writers of realistic fiction, and it is understandable that a great artist (as he was) should consider his own way of writing to be the only true kind of art. (An ordinary person can enjoy say the music of both Brahms and Wagner, but they can't possibly accept each other's music as worthwhile art.) Throughout the essay, Tolstoy simply makes fun of Shakespeare's King Lear because the plot is not realistic, the language is not the way people would naturally speak, etc. and he continually sets up as the ideal that a play must create an "illusion of reality", that it is a fault if we perceive the author's invention rather than believing the action is really happening the way it would in real life. However, despite what some critics write about his "truth to nature", Shakespeare is not a realist writer in that sense; his plays are all conventional. (Not in the sense of being unoriginal, but in the literal sense of based on conventions.) His drama is a drama of ideas, not simple mimesis, and presents ideas and character through a kind of symbolic representation that requires the spectator or reader to interpret through those conventions. This is what Tolstoy does not understand or appreciate.
As for Shaw, I think he agrees with Tolstoy (if he does agree, given that he hadn't actually read Tolstoy's essay when he wrote agreeing with it) out of contrarianism (which is his leading character) and in reaction to the Shakespeare-olatry of many of the critics of the time.
April 2236. Leonard Susskind and George Hrabovsky, The Theoretical Minimum: What you need to know to start doing physics [2013] 238 pages
This is definitely not all that you need to know to do physics, but it helps in understanding it. It is based on an online video course, which I haven't looked at; this is just about the book as it is in print. The premise is the same as that of Penrose's The Road to Reality which I finished a few months ago, to teach enough math along the way to actually understand the physics rather than just some quantitative concepts as in most "popular" science books. This book is much less technical than Penrose (although to be fair this is only the "classical" volume and the quantum physics volume will undoubtedly be more technical), and explains things in a more step by step way; where to really understand Penrose you need to already know a lot of the math, this really starts from what most people already have, high school algebra and trig and explains what you need -- the minimum of derivatives, integrals, and partial derivatives, then explaining the physics. Only the last few chapters went a little too fast for me -- from vector spaces through gradients, divergence and curl. Perhaps because my college calculus course rushed through these at the very end and so they were basically new, where the rest was more review.
When I took first year (classical) physics in college, there was one older student in the class who kept complaining that the course was described as "calculus-based" and really wasn't; I didn't understand at the time what he meant, because compared to my non-calculus high school physics class it was using derivatives and integrals and even partial derivatives toward the end. But after reading this, I understand the difference -- he meant there were no Lagrangians, no Hamiltonians, no concept of Action. This is a whole different way of looking at physics than I was taught. Unlike after reading the Penrose book, after reading this I feel that I (mostly) got it. I intend to go on to read the second book on quantum physics (there doesn't seem to be a printed book covering the lectures on relativity.) I would suggest reading these first, then trying Penrose. But as with the Penrose book, it mainly inspired me to get on with the project of reviewing my math and trying to teach myself more from actual textbooks -- from these books I think I have some idea of what pathway to follow. (I'm thinking: review college calculus; real analysis; complex analysis; topology; vector calculus; [start physics here]; group theory; tensor calculus; calculus of variations . . . if someone who has majored in math or science could correct me before I get too far down the wrong path, it would be appreciated!!) Of course, at my age I probably won't get to the physics at all, but it may help stave off the mental decline for a few years.
April 2437. Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See [2014] 531 pages
I read this because it was the selection for the Utah State Library/Utah Library for the Blind book discussion this month. It was a very well written and absorbing novel set during the Second World War in Europe; the main characters are a blind French girl, her father and uncle, and a young German soldier. I enjoyed reading it. It was not exactly what I expected; despite winning the Pulitzer Prize (undoubtedly for the excellent style of writing) it was definitely a genre war story rather than a serious historical novel. The plot was exciting if not always entirely credible, and the characters were interesting and sympathetic. The author is American, and although there are no American characters, the novel reflects the American view of the war -- the tragedy of the war for both soldiers and civilians, the evil Nazi brutality (as a psychological aberration), a few good Germans who secretly oppose Hitler but cooperate out of fear, brave French men and women who join the Resistance individually out of patriotism, a few weak or greedy individuals who collaborate out of fear or opportunism: in short a war between nations, with all the internal politics left out. No mention that the Resistance was largely based on left wing workers organizations; no mention that the collaborators were largely rightists; no mention of the official collaboration of the French authorities. The claim that the Russian Army carried out mass rapes in Berlin at the end of the war (which is based entirely on underground Nazi newspapers). I couldn't imagine a European author writing about the Resistance in this basically nonpolitical way. As a genre war thriller, it was probably above average, although I don't read that genre so I don't have much to compare it with; I have higher standards for historical fiction.
April 2538. Stanislaw Lem, The Invincible [1963; tr. by Bill Johnson, 2014] 162 pages [Kindle}
Another great science fiction novel by Stanislaw Lem. The basic premise is similar to that of Solaris: an exploration ship, The Condor, is lost soon after landing on a seemingly desert planet, and another ship, The Invincible, is sent to investigate the disappearance. Like Solaris, the novel is told from the perspective of one member of The Invincible's crew, the first officer Rohan, and is essentially a puzzle novel investigating another phenomenon which may or may not be a radically different kind of sentient life. While Solaris, like many of Lem's novels, transcends the borders of the science fiction genre, The Invincible stays within the tradition; but it is still an excellent novel of the type.
April 3039. Bettany Hughes, Helen of Troy: Goddess, Princess, Whore [2005] 458 pages
The Trojan War was almost certainly a historic event; but it is uncertain, to say the least, that it was caused by the abduction of Menelaus' wife, Helen. I'm not sure after reading this book whether the author, a popular British historian, actually believes Homer's story or not; she does at least make it seem less implausible than it appears at first sight, by showing historical parallels from the same time and region where there were diplomatic (though not actually military) crises over royal marriages. At any event, she uses a "biography" of Helen as an organizing principle for a wide-ranging discussion of Mycenaean and Anatolian archaeology and art, focusing on what can be learned or plausibly inferred about the role of women in Mycenaean culture, the Hittite documents which may refer to Troy or to Greece or otherwise have some relevance to the Trojan War, the ancient religious and literary traditions relating to Helen (she was a figure in later cult), and the ways in which Helen has been represented in literature and art from classical Athens through modern times. She presents a mass of material, much of which I was unfamiliar with, some only discovered since I studied the Iliad in my college Greek classes at Columbia in the 1970's. Not everything she says is convincing to me; I think she sometimes blurred the lines between the historical and the mythical or folklore elements. Her interpretations are sometimes rather subjective; she writes from a very feminist perspective, and although I generally agree with her viewpoint she occasionally becomes too rhetorical and repetitious in making her points; and the material especially in the later chapters on the "reception history" of the Helen story is not well-organized, although it may not have been possible to organize such miscellaneous material in any definite way. The writing is generally good, but occasionally too colloquial for a non-fiction book on a serious topic. On the whole, I learned a lot from the book, and I would recommend it to anyone who is reading Homer and looking for background material.
May 540. Edward Frenkel, Love and Math [2013] 306 pages [Kindle]
I read this amazing book more or less by accident; I was testing the direct download link in the library catalogue and this is the book I happened to download to my Kindle. I started looking through it and the preface convinced me to read it. Frenkel is a mathematician, born in the U.S.S.R. and now at Berkeley, who is working on something called the "Langlands Project". He begins by discussing the fact that otherwise well-educated people who would never brag that they hated literature or art or music seem proud to say they "hate math", and admit they know nothing about it; and he suggests that the reason is the way it is taught. He uses the analogy, suppose you took a course in Art, and instead of showing you the works of Rembrandt and Van Gogh they spent the entire class teaching you to paint -- fences. Would you be interested in pursuing art? But this is the way that math is generally taught -- as a practical collection of tools for doing other (mostly boring) things. The "masterpieces" of math are never mentioned. He also points out that most of the math which is taught in high school and even the early years of college dates from the ancient Greeks or the early modern period -- current work is never mentioned; it's as if a physics course ended with the work of Galileo and Newton, and gave the impression that everything in physics was already discovered and all that was left was to use it for practical engineering. Then he goes on to talk about popular science writers, such as Stephen Hawking or Brian Greene, who present the exciting developments of contemporary work in physics for the layperson, and asks why there are so few if any popularizations of work at the frontiers of contemporary math. He warns of the political dangers of allowing a small elite to monopolize knowledge of mathematics in an age when all our lives depend more than ever before on applications of math, from the Internet to Wall Street; he suggests that a mathematically literate population would not be so easily taken in by the doubletalk of the bankers and politicians.
That is the gap he is trying to fill with this book. The focus is on his own work on the Langlands Project, and like the physics books of Kip Thorne or Leonard Susskind, he includes much of his own experiences. In the first few chapters, he explains how he became interested in math as a high school student; how he was denied entry into the more prestigious schools because he was Jewish, and the official academic world in the era of the final decay of the Soviet bureaucracy was highly anti-Semitic; how he was privately mentored by some of the great Soviet mathematicians, who were opposed to anti-Semitism, including the legendary Israel Gelfand, who was himself Jewish; how he worked in private and more or less secretly on group theory, and sent his first papers abroad; how he was invited to Harvard in the first months of perestroika under Gorbachev, where he became a Visiting Professor before he had even become a grad student; and how he came in contact with the Langlands Project. After that, the book is largely a popular account of the Langlands Project itself.
While popular physics books try to avoid math, a popular math book of course has to be about math, and I learned much from this book. At the beginning, his explanations are very clear, and make ideas like modulo arithmetic, finite fields, Lie groups and Riemann surfaces understandable (some of the very subjects I had trouble with in reading Penrose's The Road to Reality). Later on, the book becomes more difficult to follow and his explanations of vector spaces and representations were briefer and less clear; by the end he is mentioning things like fiber bundles and automorphic functions without any explanation at all. If we keep in mind the comparison to someone like Brian Greene, though, it is hard to fault this too much; no one expects to actually learn quantum theory or string theory from a popular science book, and we shouldn't expect to learn advanced math from a book like this -- what we want to learn is what in general it is about, what the questions are and what sort of research is going on, and he is very good at that. His observations that sets, functions and numbers have been left behind for categories, sheaves and vector spaces was interesting; something like the way classical physics gave way to quantum theory. Quantum theory and string theory are here, as the "fourth column" of the Langlands Program; the author has collaborated with physicist-mathematicians such as Edward Witten on the connections between the two fields.
So what is the Langlands Program? Essentially, it is a program to discover patterns common to various seemingly unrelated branches of mathematics (and recently physics), in particular to relate group theory and curves over finite fields to subjects like harmonic analysis and Riemann surfaces. If you don't know what these things are -- that's evidence for his thesis.
May 841. Barry Strauss, The Trojan War: A New History [2006] 258 pages
Although there are (and ought to be) skeptics, it seems fairly well accepted today that the Trojan War in some sense was a real event (or conflation of real events). The previous book I read, Bettany Hughes' Helen of Troy, I thought went too far in suggesting that the war might actually have been fought over an abducted queen and trying to give her a "biography" -- although that may have been only an organizing principle. This book however (which cites hers in the first paragraph of the "Note on Sources") goes even further -- essentially, it treats Homer's Iliad as a work of history rather than fiction. While the author does admit that there are "exaggerations" , such as the ten-year duration and the numbers involved, and occasional intrusions of Iron Age customs, he basically retells the Iliad episode by episode -- together with some non-Homeric traditions from the other epics of the cycle such as the sacrifice of Iphigeneia and the Trojan Horse -- trying to show that archaeology confirms the traditional account -- reminiscent of the way someone like William Albright claimed that archaeology confirmed the Bible. He does find archaeological and textual parallels to many of the episodes, which shows that, taken individually, any of them could have occurred in the Bronze Age, and that much of the epic definitely reflects Bronze Age and even actual Anatolian customs, rather than the Iron Age Greece in which the epics received their final form. The author is not a crank, but a professor of history at Cornell, and some of the material and explanations of Bronze Age and Anatolian customs, warfare, etc. are very interesting. But there is a big difference between what could have happened and what did happen; to make an analogy, consider a historical novel about World War II or the American Civil War. If it is realistic, it will not have the Nazis or the Confederates win the war; it will mention real figures like Hitler, Roosevelt, Eisenhower or Lincoln, Grant, Stonewall Jackson, and so forth; the wars will be fought with the weapons of those wars and not with bows and arrows or disintegrator rays; and the geography and topography will be reasonably accurate. But this does not make it history, or prove that the characters and detailed events of the novel were real. They just need to be possible, i.e. believable, and in accord with what could have happened at those times. Likewise, "Homer" (or the tradition which probably began in the Mycenaean period and culminated centuries later in Homer) needed to follow the outlines of the real war, describe the customs and warfare of the time, get the geography right, and so forth; but this is just the background for an imaginative recreation. I would suggest that the Bronze Age bards who first told the story of the Trojan War began by taking the war for granted and telling stories about the heroes; later in the tradition, when the war was no longer a recent memory, they would need to provide a reason for it (Helen) and fit the details together. I doubt very much that all the events Homer narrates took place, much less that they took place in a four day period in the last year of the war (much in the first few books seems as though it may originally belong to a description of the beginning of the war) -- he rearranged and combined, expanded and abridged to make a good narrative, because he was a poet, not a historian. In short, this book could better be considered as an archaeologically oriented commentary on the Iliad, showing Homer's knowledge of the Bronze Age, than as a history of the actual events of ca. 1220-1180 BCE. The book does have a very good annotated bibliography.
May 1442. Hugh Macdonald, Berlioz [1982] 261 pages
The volume on Berlioz in the excellent Master Musicians series. There's not much to say reviewing a book like this; it was a brief but solid biography and a short discussion of each of his works. I listened to some of his works while reading it. The next book in my lately much-neglected music project will be the two volume biography by Cairns, probably in a few months.
May 1843. Leonard Susskind & Art Friedman, Quantum Mechanics: The Theoretical Minimum [2014] 364 pages
The sequel to The Theoretical Minimum, which dealt with classical physics, this book explains the basics of quantum theory in a simple (but not oversimplified) way beginning with spin states and working through the Schrödinger equation, combinations of states, entanglement, and the uncertainty principle. The first half of the book introduces the mathematics of complex vector spaces in a very understandable way (I had never studied linear algebra at all, even with real vectors, and I had no trouble following the authors' explanations of eigenvectors, Hermitean operators, and so forth.) As with the first book, however, the second half seems much more rushed; the explanation of combining operators with tensor products and outer products wasn't nearly as clear and detailed as I needed to follow the argument (they rely a lot on the notation making things obvious, but this only works for HOW to do the calculations, not WHY the equations work), and they assume some things that they haven't explained at all, such as methods of solving certain differential equations. I suppose it is hard for physicists writing for a lay audience to remember that math that seems obvious to them hasn't actually been covered. In any case, they do better in this regard than Penrose. I was struck by how much more sense quantum theory makes with the equations than trying to visualize it with analogies.
May 2144. Brian Greene, The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos [2011] 370 pages
This book focuses on the description of various scientific and philosophical trains of argument which lead to "parallel universes" or a "multiverse". Like Brian Greene's earlier books, The Elegant Universe and The Fabric of the Cosmos, it is full of interesting ideas; but I was not as impressed by this one. Where those books each followed out a single line of development wherever it seemed to lead (although for Greene it always seemed to lead to string theory), this book begins with a conclusion and then looks for all the many different possible arguments which might lead to it; and given the nature of the conclusion (the Multiverse) it has the feel of a "gosh-wow" book, concentrating on just those aspects of contemporary physics that seem counter-intuitive or astonishing and leaving out everything else -- I felt at times I was reading a book by Michio Kaku rather than Brian Greene.
The arguments were uneven and did not seem all that convincing. Perhaps it was just that having recently read the more mathematical books by Penrose and Susskind I am more critical or at least less accepting of the simple analogies; but I just didn't think they "worked" as well as in the earlier books. For instance, he argues in the first chapter that if the universe is infinite and there are finitely many possible patterns of particles, each and every pattern must repeat exactly infinitely many times -- infinitely many Earths and infinitely many Brian Greenes writing infinitely many books . . . He uses the example of Imelda's shoes and outfits. (The reader under fifty may not get the allusion.) Eventually, if the number of outfits is finite, in infinite time (or infinite space) Imelda has to repeat her outfits. But it may as well be that she keeps wearing the last outfit, or chooses her outfits among the ones that had the most impact the first time she wore them, and avoids the horrible combination she vowed never to wear again. (One could imagine physical equivalents.) So the analogy doesn't prove that any combination must repeat infinitely many times, or even once. (Whatever may be the case with the particles.) The second analogy, with decks of cards, is based on an example where the probabilities are all equal, which begs the question. There are just too many cases like this throughout the book, where he may be right but his analogies don't support the conclusion.
It may also be that while in the earlier books, he begins with accepted theories like quantum mechanics and general relativity and works up to the more speculative ideas like string theory, here he starts with speculative ideas from the beginning and ends up with more speculative metaphysics than physics. (Having majored in philosophy, I have no problem with a philosophical discussion of metaphysics, but physics and metaphysics are two different things, and if one wants to cross the boundaries, one needs to take into account the current technical arguments from both fields, not just combine modern advanced physics with Plato or a first year philosophy class.)
The biggest problem, though, was that there just didn't seem to be all that much new here, except for the chapter on how string theory might be related to the cosmological constant (and even then, the cosmological constant just seems to replace other constants from earlier arguments.) If you've read his earlier books, and a few other recent popular books (Susskind's The Black Hole War and The Cosmic Landscape or Carroll's From Eternity to Here for example) there's no real reason to read this one. On the other hand, if this is the first book you've read on the subject you probably wouldn't follow it.
May 2245. N. Scott Momaday, The Way to Rainy Mountain [1969] 89 pages
Momaday is a Kiowa author, perhaps best known for his novel House Made of Dawn, which is on my list to read. The present small book consists of 24 short chapters, sandwiched between opening poem and introduction, epilogue and concluding poem. Each chapter has a one page selection from Kiowa myth or legend, a paragraph or two of history, and a short reminiscence from the author's life, and most also have an illustration drawn by his father in the style of Kiowa art. Essentially, it is a series of meditations on Kiowa life as the author travels to his grandmother's grave on Rainy Mountain.
The book has the feel of a book of poetry, with a style relying on images to convey the rise, glorious period, and destruction of Kiowa culture from the 1740's when they migrated from the Northern mountains to the Southern Plains, where they were dominant in alliance with the Comanche, until the 1870's when their culture was essentially destroyed along with the buffalo herds it was based on.
May 2246. Stanislaw Lem, The Chain of Chance [1975] 189 pages
Another good novel by Stanislaw Lem; as with his earlier novel The Investigation this is more a mystery than science fiction, and basically set in the present although there has been an expedition to Mars (which plays no real role in the plot). A former astronaut-turned-detective investigates the mysterious deaths of a number of tourists at a spa in Naples -- murder or coincidence? Unlike many of his other novels, this one actually reveals the answer.
May 2947. W. W. Rouse Ball, A Short Account of the History of Mathematics [repr. of 4th ed., 1908] 522 pages
I like to approach subjects from a historical viewpoint, and since I'm currently trying to improve my knowledge of mathematics, I decided to read some books on the history of mathematics. This was the first, and probably not a great choice. The Dover reprint of the 1908 edition (and with some footnotes obviously added later), it is as the author says in the preface essentially the same as the 2nd edition of 1893 except for some corrections of errors. This has a number of problems; first and most obviously it doesn't cover any recent developments, but the scope is even less than I expected. There is virtually no coverage of pre-Greek mathematics except for a mention of the Rhind papyrus (not much was known then, I suppose), there is no discussion of non-Western mathematics apart from the Hindu mathematicians (the author denies that any "race" other than the "Aryan" and "Semitic" has any real mathematics; other groups are called "tribes"; he says that the Hindus made progress in mathematics for a short time while they kept their "Aryan blood pure" but then "degenerated"), and the nineteenth century is basically represented by a list of names and what areas they worked on, with little or nothing about the actual developments. Even where the coverage of the later mathematics is a bit fuller, the choice of what to include and what to omit seems rather strange from a modern perspective, perhaps because the things I expected to see covered only became important in hindsight because they were used in twentieth century physics. There was also a problem with the terminology; it took me a while to catch on that "differential quotients" were just derivatives, and probably there were other things mentioned that I didn't recognize just because I know them by a more recent name. The book does give a fairly accurate and understandable account of European mathematics from Pythagoras to roughly Gauss, and the material on the Renaissance mathematicians was interesting and mainly new to me; but not a book I would recommend. I'll be looking at the books by Bell and Smith (also old, but at least twentieth century) and some on more specific topics, side by side with my reading in the actual math.
May 3048. Stanislaw Lem, Highcastle: A Reminiscence [1966] 102 pages
A short memoir by Polish science fiction writer Stanislaw Lem, whose novels I have been reading recently. It was not what I expected, an autobiography about the period when he was writing his novels, but rather about his childhood, ending with his graduation from high school in 1939, on the eve of the German invasion. The memories are sometimes humorous, and very frank -- Lem as he represents himself was a spoiled and destructive child, or as he puts it "a monster". However, the book also has very insightful comments on memory, on schooling, and on the nature of art. Many of the themes of his novels appear in his childhood activities; in reading about his "authorities" I couldn't help but think of Memoirs found in a bathtub.
June 449. Laura Dassow Walls, The Passage to Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and the Shaping of America [2009] 404 pages
Walls gives an analysis of the work, ideas and influence of Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859), organized around the concept of Kosmos. Essentially, the idea of von Humboldt was that science should not be simply about finding laws or principles from which phenomena could be derived, but should be about studying the phenomena themselves in their multiplicity, historical development and interconnections; in other words, a view of science that is more modeled on historical geology, palaeontology or linguistics than on physics. The modern science of ecology is basically Humboldtian. What is perhaps more interesting was his advanced social thought. von Humboldt was not only a consistent abolitionist who took every opportunity to attack slavery at a time when there was almost no abolitionist movement, but went farther than most abolitionists and argued for the equality of all nations and peoples -- he rejected the concept of "race" in a biological sense. Even more unusually, he argued for the rights of native Americans in both North and South America; he supported the Creole revolutions against Spain, and was an influence on Bolivar, but also predicted correctly that the independent nations of South America would not succeed unless they incorporated the Indian populations on a basis of equality. He was the first to point to the dangers of deforestation and warn about human induced climate change. (I mentioned these aspects in my review of the Personal Narrative last year, but Walls documents them throughout his work.) He was an important influence not only on scientists and explorers, but also on literature and art -- Walls discusses his influence on Emerson, Thoreau, Melville, Poe and Whitman, and the painter Frederick Church, among others. She then asks why he has been so forgotten in the U.S. (though not in South America); she identifies a number of possible causes, beginning with the conscious or unconscious falsification of his legacy by followers who were racists (e.g. Louis Agassiz) or who misinterpreted the idea of Kosmos in a religious sense; the growing specialization and positivism of later nineteenth century science, which was the opposite of his approach; the fact that he was overshadowed by Darwin (who was highly influenced by von Humboldt) and so forth. She argues that the most important factor though was the xenophobia of Americans toward Germans after German unification and especially during and after World War I. She discusses the rediscovery of Humboldtian science by Franz Boas in anthropology and later by the ecology movement. This book covers a lot of material; my only criticism would be that it goes into too much detail on some figures who were only marginally influenced by von Humboldt.
June 2050. Charles Dickens, Great Expectations [1885 ed., repr. 1999] 442 pages
An elderly, rather wealthy woman is nearing the end of her life, and her greedy relatives are intriguing to inherit her house and property. She summons a young orphan boy to play with her adopted daughter. The said orphan, "Pip", is the main character as well as the first-person narrator of the book. Somewhat later, Pip is given almost unlimited money by an "anonymous benefactor". The implication is so obvious that the wealthy woman, Miss Haversham, is the benefactor, that we suspect there will be a surprise twist at the end, and there is. And I guessed it from the beginning.
Of all the so-called "classics" of the "Western canon", Charles Dickens is the one I have never been able to appreciate. This is the fifth Dickens novel I have read since I had to read A Tale of Two Cities long ago in high school; it is supposed to be one of his best; but it has the same faults as all the others: the plot is totally lacking in credibility, with characters just happening by chance to have multiple unconnected relationships to all the other characters and everyone acting on bizarre motives, with many characters so reduced to a single trait as to be caricatures; the novel hammers you over the head with a "moral", which is always something superficial like "be grateful", "don't be a snob", "husbands should control their wives". Taken as light fiction, this is a fairly entertaining story, but I have no idea why it is considered as "literature."
June 2651. Jonathan Franzen, Purity [2015] 563 pages
I liked this novel much more than I expected to. It is very complex, and I think it is easy with a book like this to isolate one thread and treat it as if it is what the book is really about; whether the political aspects (my usual tendency), the sexual/relationship dynamics (which most of the reviews I've read focus on), or the literary allusions.
To begin with the last, this is obviously based on Dickens' Great Expectations; not only in the main character's nickname "Pip" and the few direct references, but in the structure of many of the episodes. It's not one-to-one in any sense, and this is not a simple pastiche; Pip is obviously Pip but also a blend with Estella, as Penelope is Miss Havisham, but also as Anabel Joe's sister or Mrs. Pocket in relation to Tom. The criminal as father/benefactor shows up as Andreas, Andreas' father(s), and Anabel's father. It was interesting tracing the Dickensian themes as they are mixed and distorted in Franzen. At times he even tries to write like Dickens, but he never manages to be quite that bad. I was relieved that Pip's recruitment wasn't a coincidence as it would probably have been in Dickens. (By the way, I can't stand Dickens.)
Some of the reviews I read describe the novel as anti-feminist or even misogynist, but if so that's also taken from Dickens -- in both novels we have marriages which are disasters because the husband doesn't take control over his wife, but weakly gives in to her craziness; Tom and Anabel, and Tom's parents, both reminded me of Joe and Pip's sister or the Pockets (Clelia's conservatism and feeling betrayed because Chuck wasn't as rich as she expected compared with Mrs. Pocket's obsession with her being "cheated" out of a title). If anything, Franzen is more nuanced, and makes the wives' behavior seem more justified, although Tom and Anabel's marriage is depicted at much greater length from Tom's point of view (as many people have noted, this chapter is disproportionately long in any case). One might say it is Dickens after Freud and feminism.
The political theme of Purity vs. Compromise is somewhat underplayed, but definitely present; this is obviously an important subject (I see it discussed in about half the posts of my facebook friends, in one aspect or another -- should people vote for a left candidate like Alyson Kennedy or Jeff Mackler, or compromise on Jill Stein? Or vote in the Democratic primary for Bernie Sanders? Or go all the way and vote for Hillary Clinton to stop Trump? How much purity is sectarianism, and how much compromise is selling out?) In the novel, the question is whether Anabel is too pure, when she rejects her father's money; whether Leila is too pure when she attacks the Sunshine Project; and of course the whole question of purity and corruption in East Germany. There is a lot to think about and discuss in this novel, and if the answers are not always the ones I would agree with the questions are worth discussing, which as Lukacs says is the real test of a worthwhile novel.
July 152. Karl Jaspers, Anaximander, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Plotinus, Lao-Tzu, Nagarjuna [1957, tr.1966] 138 pages
While reorganizing my philosophy books I noticed this one I hadn't read, and decided because of the first three names to read it. Unfortunately, the book is almost all about Plotinus (40%) and Lao-Tzu (25%) with the three pre-Socratics mainly as background. I suppose it may be unfair to review a book which is a volume II part 2 of a four volume work (The Great Philosophers) but it did seem to be a self-contained unit . Jaspers writes not as a historian but as a philosopher, which is to say he finds his own ideas of "transcendance" or parts of it in the philosophers he's writing about; otherwise it would be hard to explain how he makes Anaximander, the archetypical materialist, into a metaphysical theologian. I'm not convinced that Heraclitus' logos was intended as transcendental, whatever the Stoics made of it, and while Parmenides' One obviously started the whole thing, I think for him it was more a logical paradox than a religious metaphysics. The others do more or less fit into the ultra-idealist mode, though I haven't read any of their own works. I didn't know much about Jaspers, beyond the label "religious existentialism" -- not a tradition that was taken very seriously in my philosophy classes -- but essentially I find writing about inexpressible being beyond being and non-being which is one and not one, caused and uncaused, free and determined, and can only be arrived at by thinking nonthought, to be rather incomprehensible, whether at first or second hand. Another philosopher I won't be spending much time on.
July 453. Stendhal, Lucien Leeuwen [unfinished, written ca. 1834, published 1894] 596 pages [Kindle, in French]
Stendhal wrote two novels which are considered "classics", Le rouge et le noir and La Chartreuse de Parme. The first is one of my favorite nineteenth century novels; the second is on my reading list for this fall. In between, he worked on Lucien Leeuwen. The novel was never finished; not only did he not carry it to the end (there would probably have been another volume) but it was also unfinished in the sense that it was a rough draft, with many gaps, repetitions, inconsistencies, episodes which belong to incompatible alternative treatments, and notes to add or rearrange various episodes. Had it been finished, it might well have been a third classic; the style is similar to Le rouge et le noir, with its combination of psychological and social realism and romantic spirit. In a way, it is sort of a sequel; not that the plot is continued or the characters are the same (although Lucien's character is in some ways similar to that of Julien Sorel -- and Stendhal himself, he belongs to a different social class) but that just as the first novel is a study of French society during the Restoration, this is a study of French society under the bourgeois monarchy of Louis Philippe. Lucien Leeuwen is more comic, or satirical; although the subtle humor is not always evident in a different culture and after almost two centuries, some scenes are quite funny. The varieties of hypocrisy and stupidity are endless. In its present condition, I wouldn't recommend this to someone looking for an entertaining novel -- at times it's rather difficult because of its unfinished nature -- but to anyone interested in French history and the conditions which led up to 1848, it is well worth the effort.
July 954. Stendhal, Le coffre et le revenant [1830] 29 pages [Kindle, in French]
A short, rather melodramatic work of Stendhal, set in Grenada. This has to be my shortest review ever.
July 1555. Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life [1912, tr. 1915] 507 pages
One of my current reading projects is on Archaic Greece, and on my reading list are several books by Walter Burkert. In skimming through them, I noticed that they were rather dense and would require some background, so I looked at the bibliographies and notes, and then at the bibliographies and notes of the books they were based on, and then . . . my usual infinite regress. What I realized was that all the different paths seemed to converge on Durkheim's Elementary Forms, so I decided to start with this. Of course, Durkheim was hardly the first writer to deal with the origin of religions. The question goes back to the eighteenth and especially the nineteenth centuries; Durkheim himself begins by summarizing and polemicizing against the theories of Tylor (animism) and Max Müller (naturism), but since he does summarize them and I need to start somewhere, I'm not going any further back than this (and I have already read many of the authors he refers to such as Fustel de Coulanges, Lewis Henry Morgan, and Frazer's The Golden Bough -- I have to admit my reading in the social sciences is mostly a century or more out of date.) I'm reading it in the 1915 translation by Joseph Ward Swain, which I bought from a sale at the library; I know there are at least two recent translations which may be better, but I didn't find any passages that didn't make sense because of translation problems (although for a print book there were a lot of typos).
Durkheim begins by defining religion as the division of the world into the categories of the sacred and the profane. He makes a further distinction, which I did not find very satisfactory, between religion as social and magic as private. He simply assumes, like the earlier writers, that there had to be one single origin for religion, either it originated once very early or if it originated in many places, it had the same cause and form everywhere, and went through the same stages. (Actually, he does say that a single effect can only be due to a single cause, which is simply bad logic.) While there are enough similarities between the religions of different parts of the world that I can't accept the postmodernist claim that there are no regularities, I think the situation is probably more complex than these early anthropologists assumed. His preferred version of religious origin -- the "elementary forms" of the title -- is totemism. There is a major problem with his method, which is to try to find the earliest form of religion by looking at the most "primitive" contemporary peoples known to ethnography (he explains that by "primitive" he means essentially close to the origins), which he takes to be the native people of Australia. The premise here is that "primitive" people today were somehow stalled at an early level of development while other peoples evolved pastoralism and agriculture, and maintained the same culture as they had at the beginning. Now, even a little bit of reflexion should show that a people with a rudimentary hunter-gatherer culture such as that of the native Australians could never have reached Australia to begin with; it's basically a big island, and a culture like that would have neither the technology nor the motivation for long sea voyages. So it seems that the culture of the Australians must be a secondary adaptation to the environment there on the part of people whose ancestors were at a different stage of development; and thus there is no reason to suppose that their culture, and particularly their religious ideas, had any continuity or bear any close resemblance to the original hunter-gatherers of the Paleolithic. It's as though someone were to assume that because dolphins and whales live in the ocean, they represent the primitive form of animals before the first amphibians arrived on land. The same would be true for other hunter-gatherers today; they all live in marginal environments which would not have been the choice of the original hunter-gatherers, and were probably forced into those environments by movements of other peoples. The Amazon Basin for example has many small groups with some of the most rudimentary technologies known, yet there is evidence that before European diseases and conquest, the area was heavily populated and had specialized agriculture and trade. If any culture today represents the primary hunter-gatherer culture, we have no way of identifying it, or any reason for assuming that it would have remained unchanged for tens of thousands of years or had no outside contacts and influence.
The general theory he presents is that the distinction between the sacred and the profane -- i.e. for him the origin of religion -- was derived from the experience of assemblies of the clans; where the ordinary "profane" life of the Australians was in separate family groups searching for food, the periodic assemblies were a very different type of experience, and thus became "sacred". The feeling of sacredness of the clan became attached first to its name and emblem, then secondarily to the totem species which the name and emblem represented. The totem, and other entities related to it, became considered as a part of the clan. The sacredness of the totem and the clan became considered as a special, impersonal power -- "mana" -- which was distributed in varying intensities to all the clan members, totem animals, and symbolic items, or in short to everything which was considered sacred. The portion of the "mana" in the individual gave rise to the notion of the soul; the idea of ancestral souls gave rise to spirits; the spirits tended to become spirits of various topological features which were sacred to the clan; and these local spirits, having powers over various natural phenomena, were then generalized into gods. In other words, the stages in Australia -- and presumably everywhere else -- were totemism, pre-animism, animism, "higher religion." He does state that these were logical rather than chronological stages and probably the belief in souls was not later than totemism but merely logically derived from it. In all this evolution, the real essence of the sacred was society itself, the power of the group considered under the various forms of totems, souls, and spirits, because it was a power which was outside the individual. In the second part of the book, he discusses various rituals and explains them on the basis of this theory, including the origins of sacrifice in the double form of communion and oblation.
It is easy to see why this book had such influence. Its major thesis is that religion originated, not from misunderstandings of psychic or cosmic phenomena as others had theorized, but from social structures; that in fact religion was, and still is, a social construct reflecting the organization of a given society. Leaving aside the methodological problems, and the particular theory of the various "stages", this is certainly a major insight into the nature of religion. Of course others, in particular Karl Marx, had much earlier considered religion, like all intellectual activity, as a superstructure based on socio-economic relations, but Durkheim and his "sociological" school were among the first to introduce the idea that religion is a reflection of social categories into academic sociology and try to establish it in detail. One might have expected from his thesis that he, like Marx, would have developed a materialist analysis, but in fact he explicitly defines his theory as "idealist" and claims that it refutes materialism. Essentially, rather than going on to consider the origin of the social order itself, he sometimes claims in circular fashion that it is derived from the totemist beliefs themselves, but more often he treats it simply as a given absolute, which is independent of the conditions which gave rise to it; he then emphasizes that the rites and behaviors of the clan members is determined by the "idea" of the totem and related "ideas". However, when he's not trying to philosophize -- and justify religion rather than exlain it -- he emphasizes just the opposite point, that the ideas or beliefs of religion are secondary to the rituals themselves, which is another concept that has become influential in later theories of religion.
There is much of interest in the book; I was especially impressed by his discussion of early systems of classification, which classify all phenomena into categories based on phratries and clans on the criterion of opposition; i.e. if a black cockatoo belongs to one group, a white cockatoo has to be in the other. This to me cast a new light on the similar classifications in the Presocratic philosophers, which always seemed to me to be totally random. He suggests that a modern survival of this classification system is to be found in the languages which have grammatical gender. His explanation of taboo and asceticism as basically ways of isolating the sacred from the profane is also interesting. He doesn't consider in this book the marriage system and thus deliberately excludes sexual taboos, which might be difficult to explain on this theory; or perhaps the origins could be explained, but they certainly serve other social purposes as well.
Obviously, however, a more than a century-old book is mainly of interest for understanding the later theories and books which it influenced, and that is the purpose for which I am reading it and would recommend it.
I will try to finish the project in Popular Cosmology, Music at least through Berlioz, and get back to my other projects such as Philosophy, History of Geology, French Literature (finish Stendhal, get through Lamartine and Vigny and start Balzac), Shakespeare Criticism and the Nobel Prize winners in Literature going backwards (at least most of Mario Vargas Llosa). New projects I will start include the Ancient Near East, Greek Literature and Philosophy, and Math (History to begin with). I will also try to do all the challenges here, in my one Goodreads group, and whatever interests me in the Utah and Lehi Library book discussions.
January 1
1. Roger Penrose, The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe [2004] 1099 pages
For the past year and a half I have been reading heavily in popular works on physics and astronomy, at various levels ranging from the superficial gosh-wow (Michel Kaku) through total beginner level to the somewhat more sophisticated (Brian Greene, Kip Thorne, Lee Smolin); but almost always I have been frustrated in my understanding by the lack of any mathematics to support the often metaphorical discussions. At the same time, I understood that the real mathematics of relativity, let alone quantum and string theory, would be way over my head (as when I borrowed, and immediately returned, one or two books by Penrose himself, as well as books by Wald, Susskind, etc.) So when I saw the description of this book, that Penrose intended to supply the necessary mathematics to understand the physics as he went along, I thought that it would be just what I wanted -- if it were possible. I was also rather skeptical, whether in fact it was possible, in something under 1100 pages; and as it proved, rightly so. Penrose does not succeed in making the math understandable; he explains something at a very simple level and then assumes that the reader understands far more than the author has actually explained, and when he gets to something especially difficult to comprehend, that's when he gives a footnote: show why this works. At the beginning, I read this pencil in hand, but it soon exceeded my abilities to work out the problems.
I am not totally unmathematical (I say this because it is relevant to understanding the level of this book): I minored in math in college, and beyond the usual background in high school algebra and geometry, and physics (before the dumbing down of high school math and science circa 1970), I have taken two years of college calculus, a semester of calculus-based probability and statistics, several "fundamentals" courses, and a calculus-based (but entirely "classical") first-year physics course. Not a lot, really, but probably more than most non-math/science majors. And I have tutored high school and college students in math through early calculus for over ten years. So what did I understand of this book, with that background? The first six and a half chapters. Chapter six explains calculus in nineteen pages, and I'm fairly sure most of what he talks about was never included in my two years of calculus (maybe in a real analysis course?) Chapter seven was on complex analysis, and I understood about the first half. This was the model for the rest of the book -- I understood about the first half of each chapter, where he explains the basic concepts, and got lost when he tried to "make it clearer" through "the magic of complex numbers" (his favorite expression.) The same was true when he passed over into the physics of relativity, quantum theory, and the modern speculations about strings, twistors, etc. -- I understood about half of each chapter. (Actually the chapters on loop quantum gravity and twistors were totally out of my range from the beginning.) I would say that the minimum for really following him would be to already have taken at least a complex analysis course.
Was the book a total loss, then? No. If I didn't learn the various fields of math he covers (vector and tensor calculus, some projective geometry and topology, etc.) I did learn what those fields deal with; if I didn't learn what I needed to understand the physics, I did learn what I would need to study to learn it, and perhaps most important to an autodidact who will never be able to afford any more formal education, what order I would need to study the various fields in. In short, for me (and probably for most readers who don't have a strong math/science background) this was not the "Road" but more of a roadmap; I didn't make the trip, but I got a feel for where the route passes through. At the least, I was inspired to review my high school and college math, and perhaps to try to go a little beyond where I stopped. At my age (nearing retirement) I will never get all the way to an understanding of the physics, but maybe I will keep my mind working a little longer for having read this.
I should give a brief summary of what he is saying about the questions I have been reading about in other books: he is very skeptical of string theory, because of the higher dimensions (the problem of degrees of freedom, especially); he is somewhat more friendly to quantum loops and other alternatives; he is naturally most interested in his own theory of twistors, but admits that at present it doesn't have the solution either. He argues that to be consistent with general relativity, there must be significant modifications to standard quantum theory. I'm obviously not sufficiently informed to evaluate any of this.
I would recommend the book for what it is, but not for what it claims to be, unless the reader has a real background in mathematics and physics.
January 2
2. Melanie Benjamin, The Aviator's Wife [2013] 402 pages
I read this for a book club; last year was my year for reading historical novels (accidentally, mostly for book clubs and challenges) and that trend seems to be continuing. The Aviator's Wife is a fictionalized biography of Anne Morrow Lindbergh, the author and wife of Charles Lindbergh. Originally, Benjamin planned this as a more fictional book based on Lindbergh but with the names and events changed, and later decided to make it a straight historical novel. Unfortunately, it didn't really work for me. A historical novel needs to have a certain verisimilitude, to make me think, yes, this is how it really happened, and why it happened this way -- even where I know that certain things have been changed to make the underlying motivations more clear. In this case, I simply didn't find the author's "take" on Lindbergh very convincing.
In the Author's Note at the end of the book, Benjamin writes: "But while this is the story of a marriage, it's primarily the story of a woman; a deeply intelligent, courageous, resilient woman . . . she was fearless; as the first American woman to earn a glider pilot's license, she allowed her husband to hurl her off the edge of a mountain like a slingshot. Through sheer determination, she became a confident navigator, one the first licensed radio operators; she also became her husband's copilot . . . This was the Anne whose story needed to be told, for few people today know anything about the pioneering aviatrix Anne."
The problem is, that paragraph contains almost ALL the novel says about her as an aviatrix! It gives at most fifty pages out of four hundred to that period of her life, and nearly all of that is gushing romantic prose about her relationship with Charles. The only "fearless" thing she does is jump out of the window of a plane which is sinking in a river -- because Charles tells her to.
The book, written in the first person, is supposedly the memories of Anne herself; this is the first thing that put me off, because Lindbergh was a well-respected writer and Benjamin's prose sounds more like (as several reviewers on Amazon commented) a romance novel or a book for Young Adults -- not the voice of a good writer. It begins with her accompanying her dying husband to Hawaii in 1974, which comes back in occasional chapters within the book; the rest is a kind of flashback, starting with their first meeting in Mexico and eventually reaching the period it starts with. The premise is that she has just learned of her husband's three other families. (Actually, there is no evidence that Anne ever learned about them, as they were only revealed in 2003, two years after her death.)
The real problem is that the book portrays Anne as a weak person who simply subordinates herself totally to her husband until he virtually abandons her in the fifties, at which time she suddenly becomes the strong, rather feminist writer she is known as. This simply does not seem to me to be believable, and contradicts what Benjamin says she wants to portray.
Of course, in any discussion of the Lindberghs, one has to come to grips in some way with their support to Naziism in the period before Pearl Harbor. While Benjamin does not suppress this, she somewhat whitewashes it; her view seems to be that Charles Lindbergh was just "naive" and motivated by antiwar sentiment, and that Anne didn't really agree with his views anyway but only went along because he dominated her. While many in the amorphous "America First Committee", such as socialist Norman Thomas, were in fact motivated simply by antiwar sentiment, the case with the Lindberghs seems to have been different; they both spoke favorably about Hitler and the Nazi regime, and they seem to have known about (and disregarded) many of the earlier atrocities of the regime. In any case, I think it is a failure of the book (and insulting to Lindbergh) to suggest that her opinions were not actually her own. Better to honestly have a bad position than to be dishonest in addition.
Perhaps the book would have been stronger had it not come out before the recent publication of the latest part of Anne's diaries (Against Wind and Tide) where she discusses her relationship to Charles more honestly than in her earlier published writings; less would have needed to be imagined.
In short, not one of the better historical novels I have read.
January 6
3. Leonard Susskind, The Cosmic Landscape: String Theory and the Illusion of Intelligent Design [2005] 403 pages
Leonard Susskind is the co-discoverer of string theory, and has many other physics accomplishments to his credit. Unfortunately, being a good popular writer does not seem to be one of them. This book is somewhat rambling and repetitive; it does not explain string theory as understandably to the layman as Brian Greene, or the Anthropic Principle as well as Lee Smolin. There was very little new in this book that I hadn't read before. To be fair, though, the book was not intended simply as a popularization of physics, but as a discussion of how the concept of the Landscape affects the meaning of the Anthropic Principle as a philosophical concept -- how it answers the problem of "the illusion of intelligent design." On the positive side, the book was very straightforward and focused on the science -- none of the "gosh-wow" that turns me off to some popularizers -- and it was interesting to see how a leader in the field interprets some of the ideas that I have read about by other authors. The final chapter deals with his dispute with Steve Hawking on Black Holes and information; I will be reading his book on that subject next.