Independence Days and Eternities of Thanksgiving

This post contains some older material adapted for today's holiday.  Thanks to all my readers for your patience as I get this new blog debugged, unsnarled, and running.

Mission statement: “I read and review Amazon's stingy free samples of books, saving you the need to read either one, and in some cases will do a better job in a couple of paragraphs conveying ideas than the author in 300 pages. I also freely admit to laziness and irresponsibility in not reading the entire book, but I've personally met “book reviewers” for prominent papers and journals who only read book jackets and press packets before writing their reviews. Besides, you don't have the time and should be thanking me."

As a responsible blogger, it behooves (I've always wanted to use that word) me to take a look back at my review choices and what they might say about my attempt to direct readers' thinking and my own predilections. A quick glance reveals an obsessive concern with religious encroachment on the secular republic of America, a keen interest in evolution and the assault upon it by creationists, and the blessedly nascent field of neuroscience. I say “blessedly” because it's a branch of science still in its infancy, perhaps even its embryonic stage, as ingenious brain-scanning technology improves and the vistas of possibilities for understanding the universe inside peoples' skulls grows ever larger and more exciting. Decide for yourself as I examine these samples' Best Part (s), Main Ideas (s), and present provocative and haunting post-reading Also ruminations asking, are the above themes intimately related and urgent (I think they are) or just show an obsessive eccentric doodling around (Or both)?

Freethinkers by Susan Jacoby. This sample is a fairly meaty one as free samples go (the amount Amazon decides to give you seems completely arbitrary; and let me tell you that the free samples of audio books are a real rip-off because you often just get a minute or so of the introduction, read by somebody who doesn't even read the rest of the book). The weightiness also might have to do with Jacoby's excellent style and firm grasp of her theme, the efforts of “the apostles of religious correctness to infuse every public issue, from the quality of education to capital punishment, with their theological values.” 

Best Part: The account of the centennial anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence and great but now largely forgotten champion of free thought Robert Ingersoll's tribute in his hometown of Peoria, Illinois to the wisdom and courage of the framers of the Constitution in omitting any mention of God in the foundational document, thereby creating the world's first secular government. Jacoby highlights the impossibility of such a celebration in today's increasing theocratic political environment. In addition, Jacoby contrasts George W. Bush and his post-9/11 address from Washington's National Cathedral, “indistinguishable from a sermon” and “a gross violation of the respect for separation of church and state” with Franklin D. Roosevelt, who did not use an altar as a “backdrop” for his declaration of war after Pearl Harbor and Abraham Lincoln, a non-church-goer, who delivered the Gettysburg Address on the field of battle.

Main Idea: Being a Freethinker, an agnostic, atheist, doubter, skeptic, or just curmudgeonly questioner used to be an honorable thing in America, but now such troublemakers and “hepcats” and bongo banging “beatniks” are relegated to a tightening “kook's corner”--Jacoby's phrase—by the Religious Right.

Also, keeping religion out of the public sphere is the best way to protect religion. Inside lovely old hilltop chapels and dentist's offices converted to Blinding Glow Ministries, religious believers can do and say anything they want without fear of stomping boots and fast-moving metal contrivances splintering the sanctuary doors and walls. In the public sphere, in politics, schools, medicine, and law, the inevitable divisiveness and chaos hurts and weakens religion. Too bad that too few can grasp this urgent truth.

The Fallacy of Fine-Tuning: Why the Universe is not Designed for Us by Victor J. Stenger. Recently physicist Stenger (it's always a good sign when a scientist doesn't put the Ph.D. after his name on the cover) has released a seeming fusillade of books with daring titles like God: The Failed Hypothesis, and makes bold claims that we can now state with confidence that Gods like the one of the Judeo-Christian tradition simply don't exist. Facts in science are really statements that have a probability so close to “one” that we carry them about in our daily quotidian puttering as provisional truths. They may change, but why waste time trying to walk, chew gum, and juggle chainsaws at the same time?

There's just nothing for that kind of God to do anymore, unless you want to believe he's fiddling about with things on the quantum level to get you to the yard sale before the Tasmanian Devil Pez dispenser you need for your collection is sold.     In recent years believers, having accepted an ancient earth, evolution through natural selection, and witnessed mind-boggling feats like the possible discovery of the science-predicted Higgs-Boson particle, have been forced to retreat to a question that goes something like this: “Okay then. It happened naturally according to natural laws but who made those laws in the first place, huh?”(This question, it's never acknowledged, makes Christians into Deists, almost by definition) 

Believers continue, “and what about the fine-tuning of constants?"  This last question refers to the fact that our universe contains about fifty physical quantities or constants fixed at the time of the Big Bang.  If any one of these constants were  changed even slightly, it is claimed, life would be impossible in this universe.  One example is the strength of gravity which, were it changed by only one part in 10 to the 100th power, would forbid life's existence.  One way scientists have gotten around this is by positing a multiverse--trillions and trillions of parallel universes, most of which don't contain life.  We just happen to be in one that allows our kind of party.  While more and more scientists are taking the multiverse idea seriously, opponents and believers are quite right to point out that it's outrageously unparsimonious, violating the principle of Occam's Razor (don't multiply variables unnecessarily). However, Stenger's proposed strategy for his book is this sample's best part: 

Best Part:  Stenger claims he doesn't even have to resort to the multiverse move and claims he will show in the rest of the book that life could indeed develop with lots of constant fiddling and that nothing about this universe is particularly designed for us.  But the sample doesn't go that far. 

Main Idea:  Stop trying to find God in numbers.  It won't work and it's a little pathetic, betraying an insecurity about faith.   As Martin Gardner once said, "God is the Great Magician," who is too good at misdirection to leave traces in niggling figures and quantities.

Also:  I don't like the multiverse idea even though Family Guy had a great episode with Brian and Stewie hopping around different universes.  This universe is already too big, in my opinion, and it was really mean of God to induce hideous existential vertigo in the contemplation of something as simple as the distance to the nearest star.  

Who's In Charge? Free Will and the Science of the Brain by Michael S. Gazzaniga.  In a previous sample review I was pretty impressed by neuroscientist Sam Harris's Free Will, a short, vigorous argument that we have no such thing, that we are completely determined creatures.  Here Gazzaniga, another brain guy perhaps most famous for his work with split-brain patients, agrees with Harris up to a point.  But then he claims that the physically determined brain creates the mind, which in the context of social interaction exerts a measure of control over the brain and its creation of behaviors.  In other words, the individual is the wrong hierarchical level at which to look for freedom of choice.  Such freedom emerges only in the realm of social constraints, just as games emerge in part from components like nets and borderlines.   I think that where he's going.

Best Part: Gazzaniga has a warm, reassuring tone, in contrast to some people who write about our alleged lack of free will with a "you've got to be joking, you dolt" tone. 

Main Idea: We have free will after all.

Also: It says something really pathetic about me that this week, after my employer lost my paycheck and is claiming I lost it and I really did lose both my cell phone and my wallet, I fervently hope there's no such thing as free will and that these stupid things aren't my fault but were determined billions of years ago;  and it's equally pathetic that when things inevitably start going a little better for me, I'll take full credit for my great choices and brilliant insights.  Thanks to all my parts, brain and body.

Enjoy!

Some Kindle Samples of Books about the Homeless

Because I write a "homeless" blog--whatever that is--I thought I'd peek in on what other writers were doing along the same general lines.

A Gift of Hope by Danielle Steele

In this book, Danielle Steele, who is line-by-line the worst writer of popular novels of all time (any one of her books is a great help to any struggling writer of fiction: look at what she does, then at all costs avoid doing the same thing), reveals that for eleven years she and a team of ten helpers went out "night after night" and "dealt with whatever we found, served three hundred people a night, three or four thousand a year," giving them high-quality clothes, umbrellas, and healthy food.   Main Idea:  Danielle and her van-driving team stopped a lot, jumped out, and handed enough bags of supplies and goodies to last "for weeks or even months."   Best Part:  Danielle claims that "for one shining instant, [the homeless] knew with total certainty that someone cared, and fell out of the sky [my emphasis] to help them" immediately after writing that she and her team jumped out of vans.  Also Danielle claims that her acts led the homeless to believe that things like this would happen again.  Maybe so.

Under the Overpass: A Journey of Faith on the Streets of America by Mike Yankoski

First off, Mike tells his readers that even though street people use four letter words frequently and in creative ways, he won't include them in his book.  After much prayer and pondering, Christian Mike and his friend Sam  decide to take a sermon's challenge to "Be the Christian you say you are" and voluntarily go on a grand six city, six month tour across America living as homeless men.  Best Part: to their credit, Mike and Sam admit at the outset that they "would not actually be homeless.[emphasis in original]  Any time things get too hairy they can hightail it home for more church and ice cream socials.  Main Idea:  Mike and Sam realize there are more ruined and hopeless people out there than most people can imagine, but this gives them hope because that gives God that much more work of redemption to do and makes him an even greater God.  Also:  While these guys set themselves strict rules--no credit card, bus fees only from pan-handling--all the talk of God and hope and redemption and miracles is just a smokescreen for an elaborate stunt.

Breakfast at Sally's: One Homeless Man's Inspirational Journey  by Richard LeMieux

Right off the bat, Richard tells a man he meets in a park that he's writing a book about "Homeless people . . . People I've met--interesting people.  People living, laughing, crying, struggling--people dying."   He's writing the book on a manual Underwood typewriter a kind man in a secondhand store gave him--along with some paper--free of charge when he told the man his dream of writing his story.  Best Part: After Richard ruins his typewriter by leaving it out in the rain, the very same man he met in the park surprises him at a church charity meal with another typewriter and some paper.  Richard takes this seeming coincidence as a sign that he must keep writing.  Main Idea:  As a general rule, being homeless (actually, so far in the sample this guy has a van, money to keep it rolling, and a dog for company) brings out the cliche'd worst in people's style, a kind of vacuous, slack-faced smiling trudge through the banal with plenty of unnecessary adverbs and exclamation marks.  Also:  Any book that opens with a hitchhiker called "C" pulling a book by Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers out of his rucksack and reading from it aloud is off to a wretched start.

Of course, I need to sample more of this stuff, but it doesn't look promising.

The Enjoying the End: A Sampler

(Note: These Amazon Kindle Sample Reviews, ideal for the busy homeless (contrary to popular imagery of the homeless as parsitic slugs and sloth-like hangers-on, street people are busy as hell riding buses, filling out forms, running to government offices and labor exchanges before the work is gone, getting up at 3:30 AM to stand a bare chance of beating the recycling competition, standing in endless lines with dangerously impatient predators and hustlers.  My sample reviews are also ideal for readers at any societal stratum rushed for time and in need of cocktail party chit-chat and one-up-manship.  I'm proud to provide this service. Each review clusters around three deliberately simple--if not simplistic-- cheery "book report" devices, nostalic reminders of grade school assignments: Main Idea, My Best Part and an Also afterthought for bedtime contemplation)

                           "The best lack all conviction while the worst
                    Are full of passionate intensity."

                                             --William Butler Yeats, "The Second Coming"

Recently  I entered the darkened apartment of a friend to find him lying on the couch, visible only in the blue light of his laptop's power indicator, listening to Jim Morrison and the Doors performing "The End."  My friend and I had compared notes many years ago and discovered that our first exposure to this doleful epic of percussive jangles and down-spiraling guitar riffs had been during the opening scene of Apocalypse Now.   Francis Ford Coppola did some of his best work with the opening montage of napalm blossoming in the jungle, Martin Sheen melting down in a Saigon hotel, and wraith-like helicopters drifting across the screen--all of it given gravitas by Morrison's groaning but commanding vocals.  It all seemed tremendously profound at the time, but now seems slightly forced or sophomoric, and I wondered what what my friend was thinking or feeling having deliberately pulled up the song on his computer.

I sat down and waited for the song's conclusion before saying, "Mood music?"

"Naw," said my friend.  "Sometimes you just want a little bit of Jim and a little bit of downer, tiny taste of world-ending, all that shit."

Then he turned on the TV, took a couple beers out of the fridge, and we settled in for a World Series game.

I know just what he means about a "little bit" of apocalypse, the short, sharp pleasures of brief yet languid contemplation of collapse.   What better way to share the feeling than a selection of the many Kindle samples I've read lately that fervently wish for and revel in (no matter what the authors say to the contrary, no matter how tear-stained their tone) the End of All Things.  Get ready to wallow . . .

City of Quartz by Mike Davis.  A beautifully written, essentially socialist-social justice-oriented crystallization of Los Angeles in all its decadent/dynamic glory on the edge of the millennium, generously morbid and obsessive with detail.  Pharonic building projects and monster mansions and museums overshadowing a growing homeless population systematically driven from Downtown by formerly a formerly radical mayor;  Uzi-powered gang warfare on a nation-state scale and rookie policeman babbling about the coming Final Conflict; cops who gun down a crazy woman on the street with 18 powerful rifles after she steals an ice cream sandwich; an entertainment industry psychotically bloated and run by near homicidal maniacs; miles of crab-grass choked, doggy do-strewn suburbs with endless miles of chain link fences . . .it goes wonderfully on and on even in relatively short space of the sample.   Best part: the  hilarious account of L.A. hipsters, pundits, and celebrities  deciding that a new wave of "intellectualism" is sweeping the city starting about 1989, the primary signs of which are slavering commodity booms like slick business sharks and ditsy models pouring into bookstores acquiring ziggurats of high-brow books they'll never read and "armfuls of 'smart-looking' eyeglasses. Main Idea: LA is ground zero for visionary techno freaks and wizardly image conjurers but also the locus of a nation-wide fact: we live in rich world containing millions of poor hungry children.  "That should be intolerable," writes Davis.  Also: L.A. may be perpetually on the edge of apocalyptic collapses but paradoxically derives much of its galvanising power and creative energy from that grim fact.

A History of the End of the World by Jonathan Kirsch takes on the Book of Revelation, notorious last book of the Bible, almost not included in the official canon and still reviled by many Christians, disconcerting in its acid-tinged, phantasmagorical, multi-eyed smoking glory.  Tracing its vision of the  influence on our culture,  indelibly marking, as if with the Sign of the Beast,  novels, poetry, songs, movies, and even political decisions by powerful world leaders with missile launch codes at the ready and fingers on the buttons.  A text of Apocalypse, Revelation is merely one of many previous apocalyptic books the author drew on freely to create his nightmare.  Main Idea: For believers, diviners, interpreters, and even skeptics, the Book of Revelation is an indispensable code book for deciphering who we are and how we conceive our place and destiny on the Earth.  Best Part:  This cool list: The Battle of Armageddon, the Four Horseman of the Apocalypse, he Seventh Seal, the Great Whore of Babylon (I had a date with her once!), the Antichrist, the Grim Reaper, the Grapes of Wrath, and Also:  best of all, coming to you soon via vaccines, TB tests, HIV screenings, blood drives, suppositories and mini robot vampires, the indelible and irremovable Number of the Beast.

The Complete Short Stories of J.G. Ballard  This free sample is pretty meaty, as it contains 3 or 4 complete short stories by "the shaman of Shepperton," as Angela Carter called Ballard, referring to his somewhat reclusive residence in the English town of Shepperton,  after his young wife died unexpectedly, where he lived and worked in a small, nearly invisible house, writing and caring for his three young children  The whole collection contains 100 stories but the depth and beauty of the opening pieces will give the flavor of this radical and unique author.   It also includes an author's introduction, and of course you can follow the links to Ballard's radical novels about the merging of external world disaster and techno-collapse with the endlessly fecund death-seeking psyche--the imaginative realm Ballard called "inner space."

Main Idea: Ballard took a beating from many of his SF colleagues for writing disaster and dystopian novels in which the protagonist, rather than marshaling plucky resources to defeat the catastrophe--wind, drought, flood, or disconcerting crystallization of time and human flesh- the hero instead triumphs through acceptance of the "logic of disaster" and somehow merges mentally and spiritually with the societal and natural breakdown.  Ballard took this approach to the extreme in Crash, a fixed, unwavering, and baleful glare at the erotic possibilities offered in modern men and women's faithful marriage to the automobile accident and its mangled products.  Best part: This sample gives you enough to get a taste--an acquired on, for certain, but one worth acquiring.   Also:  As Martin Amis points out in his introduction, Ballard invented a new genre, the J.G . Ballard story.  "He was impregnably sui generis," and contra Ecclesiastes, something new under the sun.

The Watchman's Rattle by Rebecca Watson.  This book claims, with the help of a cheerleading introduction by Edward O. Wilson--"Darwin 2.0," as Tom Wolfe calls him--to be a "radical" analysis of humanity's inability to heal the  dysfunctions that beset the world, a book that presents a new hypothesis explaining our willful steering right for the lake of fire.   Ready for it?  The complexity of the world we've created outraces our cognitive abilities.  The brain didn't evolve to solve the massive, slow-motion disasters we've created like climate change and species extinction.   What's new about this?  I'm flabbergasted to see this obvious old chestnut from science fiction novels and plenty of popular science books over the last 30 years touted as a startling new analysis.   Something fishy is going on here, and it might have something to do with rah rah mentor E. O. Wilson's late incarnation in recent books as a Prospero-like magus who will weave all the strands of human knowledge into a single grand tapestry of bio-beauty and salvation.  Some, including Richard Dawkins and me, think it's time Wilson was put out to pasture.

Best Part:  Watson's observation that great civilizations--her main fascinating example in this sample concerns the death of the Mayans-- give off smoke-cloud warnings of impending collapse when they make an obsessive fetish out unjustified beliefs rather than observable, testable facts.
Main Idea:  We need to bolt new ways thinking on to our inadequate brains, perhaps (my thought) the way we've painstakingly attached reading skills to a brain that didn't evolve for that purpose.
Also:  The above point is something educators still haven't acknowledged or understood from an evolutionary standpoint.   Reading is not a natural activity of the brain, which is why most people fail to acquire the skill or become very good at it.  But understanding this is the first step in devising solutions that work around the handicap or even enlist it.

Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut.    Our big brains--"totally useless" and the cause of all our problems, have created a techo-economic-media-sphere that is too complex for us to understand and essentially foreign to our natures.  This satire is wacky tale of human devolution in the Galapagos islands and the slapstick historical coincidences and chance meetings of sad and sharply drawn characters that lead to the End.  Funny and extremely perspicacious regarding evolution.  Best Part:  A world-wide financial crisis leads to humans giving up the concept of money as a real thing, which it's not, of course.  Main Idea:  You've got to laugh at the irony of evolution producing big brains that lead to men like Beethoven and Feynman but ultimately prove a deficit--a grimly funny one at that.  Also: Vonnegut said everything Watson and Wilson lumber toward in the book above  nearly 30 years ago and much more entertainingly.  (By the way, this review is something of a cheat because I read the entire book years ago, but I did reread the sample to ensure that everything I touch on here is in the free chunk.  So rest assured you need to read neither the sample nor the book now because of me)

The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future(Or, Don't Trust Anyone Under 30)  by Mark Bauerlein

The title says it all.  Why sample it?  Why review the sample?  Besides, anyone likely to read the book will already agree with its thesis:  today's youth, even those on fast track to good colleges, are dumber than mud.   I saw it all happen in over a quarter century of college teaching: the already monumental task of reading and writing stops developing around 4th grade if the booster rockets of good teaching, parental motivation, and avoidance of TV and computer imagery don't fire.  Most often they don't, and the kids reach college able only to text, grunt in sentence fragments, spew what Tom Wolfe termed the "Fuck Patois,"  and--sometimes-- fill in the allotted word space on a Powerpoint field for a class "project."   And it's actually 100 times worse than than, but nobody will believe me.

Main idea:  Kids under thirty are ignorant dumbasses addicted to ugly non-music, drugs, sex, profanity, Facebook, web camera jerk-offs . . .Yeah, yeah, yeah: every generation's old fogies have apolexy and attacks of the vapors over the young 'uns and their ignorance, but really, now, that's coming from people who've never been in a high school or freshman classroom, don't ride public transportation, or just sit down for a nice chat with these friendly, cheerful but frighteningly self-absorbed and ignorant kids.   Best Part: Bauerlein doesn't give a microsecond's credence to the liberal complaint that today's kids are overloaded with homework or pressured to score astromically high on admssions tests to the point of nervous breakdown.  Also:  The problem is getting worse by the day, as information technology slides inexorably into the ambient background and into our very body spaces, even soon beneath our skins, thus making the structure of knowledge--its composition and architecture, it's labrinithyn arrangement, and the epistemological navigation skills needed in its deeps, shallows, narrow passages, and rapids-ever more invisible and unattainable.  Tomorrow's youth will instantly access anything they want, will feel its rightness in their hands, see its "correctness," and smell  its "truthyness,"  but they won't know what it means

Grab Bag

Because most non-fiction books published today, and even lots of novels, are simply bloated, feculent, and endless restatements of an initial theme or "main idea" (remember picking that out in high school or the SAT?) presented in the preface, introduction, or first chapter, I've decided to offer a valuable service by reviewing Amazon Kindle Samples, which are almost always the first 5% or so of the book (I hasten to add that my harsh judgement of many books as repetitive may not apply to the works reviewed in this blog, but I can't know that since I only read the samples). If you check in on my blog often enough, (hint) you won't even have to read the samples of what might be good books.

In today's "rush rush" society and for the homeless person "on the go," Kindle Samples are the ideal solution for the multitasking demands of this crazy old spinning ball we call Planet Earth! Not to mention they're free. The following review refers to samples I read today on the bus traveling to a 3rd grade sub job, during recess, lunch, and an hour-long National Geographic video on Volcanoes that was pretty good (kids love lava) and a nice filler-gift from the teacher. Ready? Let's go!

The Hunt for KSM, by Terry McDermott and Josh Meyer was recommended by my attorney and concerns the pursuit and capture of the 9/11 mastermind Kalid Sheikh Mohammed. Best parts: A massive CIA/Pakistani raid on a house to capture a high-level terrorist known as Abu Zubaydah, and the FBI's Keystone Cops-like attempt to muscle on on the CIA and fingerprint Zubaydah before he's loaded onto a plane. At one point they actually drop the still-living, bullet-mangled terrorist onto the tarmac where he writhes in agony. Main Idea: The CIA and the FBI clashed a lot and hated each other while hunting terrorists. Also, the FBI seem to be resentful bunglers.

Among the Creationists by Jason Rosenhouse. Jason is a math professor who has an excellent blog called EvolutionBlog. Baffled by the persistent and widespread opposition to evolution in America, he spent a year or so attending as many creationist conferences as possible and talking to as many evolution opponents as he could handle. Best part: Jason stands in line at Subway with about 100 creationists on break for lunch and gets into a theological/philosophical/scientific wrangle with some Christians, one of whom grabs his hands and claims him for Jesus. Main idea: Creationists are insular, breathtakingly ignorant of science, trapped in circular reasoning regarding the truth of the Bible, but are basically nice, well-intentioned people. Also, they are wrong.

Free Will by Sam Harris. Okay, I'm cheating a bit here because this is actually a short Kindle "Single" (about 40 pages) that you have to pay a couple bucks for, but the brevity, compression, and blinding clarity of neuroscientist Harris's assault on the idea of free will makes it just about worth it. Best part: the argument that a seemingly bleak deterministic view of human nature actually generates more compassion and good works, once you accept the Main Idea: Not only do we not have free will, we are mistaken in our traditional subjective sense that we have free will. Also, you can't say you could have done otherwise than eat the whole pizza, because there's no way to test this counterfactual empirically.

The Emotional Life of Your Brain by Richard J. Davidson, Ph.D. with Sharon Begley. Davidson is a neuroscientist who claims to have discovered via 30 years of brain-research 6 dimensions of Emotional Style. They are Resilience, Outlook, Social Intuition, Self-Awareness, Sensitivity to Context, and Attention. He claims also that the ordinary fellow wouldn't have thought of these things if not for his research. Best part: He promises his book will show you how to change your Emotional Style and transform your wretched life. Main Idea: Understanding Emotional Style and how its Six Dimensions are encoded in the brain is the key to success and happiness. Also, nobody would ever know these things without this book.

The Death and Life of the Great American School System by Diane Ravitch. I plan to read the rest of this book because it seems honest and because of the Main Idea(s): The Bush administration's No Child Left Behind program was/is an inhuman and inhumane elevation of standardized testing to a end in itself, and charter schools are generally a bad idea. Also, it's bracing to read a book by someone who once held opinions opposite to those expressed here and who agrees with me.