Category Archives: B - READING - Page 38

READING – JUNE 2007

Posted by on June 30, 2007 No comments

(Fritz Leiber) Swords and Deviltry:
. . . . 15064. (Fritz Leiber) Intro­duc­tion [pref­ace]
. . . . 15065. (Fritz Leiber) Induc­tion [sto­ry]
. . . . 15066. (Fritz Leiber) The Snow Women [sto­ry]
. . . . 15067. (Fritz Leiber) The Unholy Grail [sto­ry]
. . . . 15068. [2] (Fritz Leiber) Ill Met In Lankhmar [sto­ry]
15069. (Robert Bench­ley) Hap­py Child­hood Tales [sto­ry] Read more »

15087. (Philip Zimbardo) The Lucifer Effect ― Understanding How Good People Turn Evil

Posted by on June 17, 2007 No comments

Psy­chol­o­gist Philip Zim­bardo devised and super­vised one of the most famous exper­i­ments in social dynam­ics, the Stan­ford Prison Exper­i­ment. A group of col­lege stu­dents were cast in the roles of “guards” and “inmates” in a mock prison. Intense abus­es spon­ta­neously devel­oped, as the “guards” quick­ly evolved into sadis­tic monsters.

But this book is not just about his land­mark exper­i­ment. Zim­bardo was asked to tes­tify as an expert wit­ness in abuse of pow­er and the psy­chol­ogy of tur­ture dur­ing the inves­ti­ga­tions of the abus­es in Abu Ghraib. It was this expe­ri­ence that prompt­ed him to put togeth­er a com­pre­hen­sive study of all the social psy­chol­ogy exper­i­ments, such as Mil­gram Exper­i­ment, which led up to his own work, and to blend it with a detailed analy­sis of Abu Ghraib. Read more »

(Fritz Leiber) Swords and Deviltry

Posted by on June 2, 2007 No comments

07-06-02 READ (Fritz Leiber) Swords and DeviltryGod only knows how much “sword & sor­cery” type fan­tasy is in print. But if, like me, you find very lit­tle of it appeal­ing to either your imag­i­na­tion or your intel­li­gence, then it’s nice to be remind­ed that some of the clas­sics of the field remain fresh and sat­is­fy­ing. Few peo­ple can claim to have writ­ten bet­ter hero­ic fan­tasy than Fritz Leiber, whose Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser sto­ries where writ­ten with wit and sophis­ti­ca­tion. He wrote with an adult sen­si­bil­ity, avoid­ing the prissi­ness and infan­tile repres­sion that were com­mon in the field. These sto­ries, which were writ­ten over sev­eral decades, were col­lected in sev­eral vol­umes, of which this is the first. The last sto­ry, “Ill Met In Lankhmar”, is just about as good as a sto­ry about a mus­cu­lar bar­bar­ian hero can get. Read more »

READING – MAY 2007

Posted by on May 31, 2007 No comments

15055. (Cap­tain Mar­ry­at) The Set­tlers In Canada
15056. (P. G. Wode­house) Aunts Aren’t Gentlemen
15057. (Agatha Christie) Three-Act Tragedy
15058. [6] (Edgar Pang­born) A Mir­ror for Observers
15059. (P. G. Wode­house) The Inim­itable Jeeves
15060. (Gyu­la Kristó) Ear­ly Tran­syl­va­nia, 895–13245
15062. (Jan Kulich) Kut­ná Hora, St. Bar­bara Cathe­dral and the Town
15063. (P. G. Wode­house) Jeeves in the Offing 

READING – APRIL 2007

Posted by on April 30, 2007 No comments

15036. (Simon Schama) Rough Cross­ings ― Britain, the Slaves, and the Amer­i­can Revolution
15037. (Tim­o­thy Finn) Three Men {Not} in a Boat and Most of the Time With­out a Dog
15038. (Don Aker) Stranger At Bay
15039. (George San­tayana) Clas­sic Lib­er­ty [arti­cle]
15040. (Tony Karon) Condi’s Free Ride: The Fan­ta­sy of Amer­i­can Diplo­ma­cy in the Middle 
. . . . . East [arti­cle]
15041. (Glen Green­wald) Your Mod­ern-day Repub­li­can Par­ty [arti­cle]
15042. (Neil McKen­na) The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde
Read more »

Ursula K.LeGuin’s Earthsea books

Posted by on April 4, 2007 No comments

07-04-04 READ Ursula K.LeGuin’s Earthsea booksI decid­ed to read through the well-known series of juve­nile fan­tasy that I nev­er got around to read­ing. Lequin’s Earth­sea books are wide­ly admired. Cer­tainly, the first vol­ume starts off well. The fan­tasy world is well-con­struct­ed, with the geog­ra­phy metic­u­lously thought out. Things move along quick­ly, because the prose style is very lean, with only the odd bit of con­crete, sen­sory descrip­tion thrown in judi­ciously. I would nev­er right that “thin” a prose myself, but LeGuin seems to be able to get away with it. The main char­ac­ter, Ged, is a bit of a stick of wood. I found myself pic­tur­ing him as Wes­ley Crush­er dressed up in a wiz­ard cloak. The drag­on is the best char­ac­ter. The sec­ond book was unfo­cused, the third was a good read, but recy­cled the themes of the first, and the fourth, writ­ten a full twen­ty-two years after the first, was down­right bor­ing. There was a fifth, pub­lished in 2001, which I haven’t even looked for. I would have to say that only the first vol­ume real­ly inspired me, and that it sup­plied all that I need­ed from the series.

READING – MARCH 2007

Posted by on March 31, 2007 No comments

15000. (Jerome K. Jerome) Three Men in a Boat, To Say Noth­ing of the Dog
15001. (John Markoff) What the Door­mouse Said ― How the 60s Counterculture
. . . . . Shaped the Per­son­al Com­put­er Industry
15002. (Gar­ry Wills) Invent­ing Amer­i­ca ― Jefferson’s Dec­la­ra­tion of Independence
15003. (Bill Pat­ter­son) One Diachron­ic Con­ver­sa­tion in the Odd Genre [arti­cle]
15004. (Chris Leslie) Space Cadets and Inter­stel­lar Cit­i­zens [arti­cle]
Read more »

READING – FEBRUARY 2007

Posted by on February 28, 2007 No comments

14940. (Thomas Jef­fer­son) Orig­i­nal Draft of the Dec­la­ra­tion of Inde­pen­dence [arti­cle]
14941. [4] (Thomas Jef­fer­son, et. al.) The Dec­la­ra­tion of Inde­pen­dence [arti­cle]
14942. (Orson Scott Card) Empire
14943. (Antho­ny Sha­did) With Iran Ascen­dant, U. S. is Seen At Fault ― Arab Allies in Region
. . . . . Feel­ing Pres­sure [arti­cle]
14944. (Gar­ry Wills) At Ease, Mr. Pres­i­dent [arti­cle]
(William Tenn) The Sev­en Sexes:
. . . . 14945. (William Tenn) Author’s Note [pref­ace]
. . . . 14946. (William Tenn) Child’s Play [sto­ry]
. . . . 14947. (William Tenn) The Malt­ed Milk Mon­ster [sto­ry]
. . . . 14948. [2](William Tenn) Errand Boy [sto­ry]
. . . . 14949. (William Tenn) The House Duti­ful [sto­ry]
. . . . 14950. (William Tenn) Mis­tress Sary [sto­ry]
. . . . 14951. (William Tenn) Sanc­tu­ary [sto­ry]
. . . . 14952. (William Tenn) Venus and the Sev­en Sex­es [sto­ry]
. . . . 14953. (William Tenn) Bernie the Faust [sto­ry]
14954. (William Irwin Thomp­son) Pas­sages About Earth [sto­ry]
14955. (Tony Tay­lor) See­ing the Writ­ing on the Wall Graf­fi­ti in His­to­ry — from Pom­peii to Belfast
14957. (Mervin Peake) Titus Alone
Read more »

14957. (Mervyn Peake) Titus Alone

Posted by on February 15, 2007 No comments

I got tremen­dous plea­sure fin­ish­ing Mervin Peake’s enig­matic fan­tasy series. I was warned that the last vol­ume would be a dis­ap­point­ment, but when I got around to it, I did not think it so. It’s true that it has a sig­nif­i­cantly dif­fer­ent “feel” from the first two, and shifts focus to oth­er mat­ters. Peake was near death, and quite ill, when he wrote it, so it con­tains some laps­es in style and inter­nal incon­sis­ten­cies. But it does not mer­it the scorn it faced on pub­li­ca­tion, or the dis­missal it gets from fans of Gor­meng­hast. Titus, who is more or less a place-mark­er in the imag­is­tic maze of the first vol­umes, acquires much more of an inter­nal voice Titus Alone. The issues and imagery of this vol­ume curi­ously antic­i­pate the cyber­punk and steam­punk styles of a half cen­tury later.

14940. [2] (Thomas Jefferson) Original Draft of the Declaration of Independence [article] 14941. [7] (Thomas Jefferson, et. al.) The Declaration of Independence [article]

Posted by on February 2, 2007 No comments

I have not yet seen Gary Wills’ renowned study of the Dec­la­ra­tion. But I did read Carl Becker’s work on the same sub­ject when I was a kid. I have made a small rep­u­ta­tion by try­ing to show the glob­al ori­gins of the demo­c­ra­tic idea, as opposed to the con­nect-the-dots Greece-Rome-Britain-Amer­i­ca sequence that is still a major com­po­nent of the cur­rently con­fused unde­rstand­ing of democ­racy. How­ever, that doesn’t mean that I con­sider doc­u­ments like the Dec­la­ra­tion to be unim­por­tant. Far from it. It was so impor­tant, in fact, that minor vari­a­tions in its phras­ing would have made a pro­found dif­fer­ence in the sub­se­quent his­tory, not only of the Unit­ed States, but of the world. Because the Dec­la­ra­tion was in the pock­et, so to speak, of every Amer­i­can, it could have reper­cus­sions, and util­ity, far beyond any philo­soph­i­cal essay. Fred­er­ick Dou­glas, whose char­ac­ter and intel­lect make most of the more famous thinkers of the 19th cen­tury seem puny by com­par­i­son, wrote mov­ingly of the impact its word­ing had on him. When you are a plan­ta­tion slave, as Dou­glas was, the words “We hold these truths to be self-evi­dent, that all men are cre­ated equal…” are not just a snap­py slo­gan. They are hope, enlight­en­ment, des­tiny, right­eous anger, human­ity, solace, and con­cil­i­a­tion com­pounded in a sin­gle sen­tence. That sen­tence is impor­tant to any­one who wish­es to free them­self from slav­ery, and is a pre­cious gem in humanity’s strong­box, not just for Americans.

So it’s inter­est­ing to com­pare Jefferson’s first draft with the final arti­cle. The first ver­sion fol­lows the con­ven­tions of mid-eigh­teenth-cen­tu­ry prose more close­ly. It is said that Thomas Paine had some influ­ence on the revi­sion, and it does shift to blunter, more Quak­erish phras­ing that would seem unusu­al in a cul­tured Vir­gin­ian like Jef­fer­son. But I think it more like­ly that Jef­fer­son real­ized he was think­ing in a new way, and that it had to be said in a new way. The first ver­sion is a prod­uct of a writer to be read in a book. The final ver­sion is a prod­uct of a man tap­ping a moral dimen­sion of the uni­verse. The sad thing is that Jef­fer­son him­self could not live up to his own inspi­ra­tion. The man who did more than any­one except John Wool­man to lay down the moral argu­ment against slav­ery him­self kept slaves. It is true that the Vir­ginia leg­is­la­ture, fear­ful of his exam­ple, had declared that if Jef­fer­son attempt­ed to free his slaves, they would be seized and sold to oth­er, doubt­less cru­el­er mas­ters, but Jef­fer­son, being an undoubt­ed genius, could sure­ly have devised some strat­a­gem to cir­cum­vent this. No, it was just anoth­er sad case of a bril­liant intel­lect capa­ble of imag­in­ing, but not of doing what rea­son demands.