Reviews by Evelyn C. Leeper

All reviews copyright 1984-2012 Evelyn C. Leeper.

EYE OF THE STORM: CHANUTE CLOSES by Katy Podagrosi:

[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 08/06/2004]

Katy Podagrosi's EYE OF THE STORM: CHANUTE CLOSES is such a small- press book that I don't expect anyone to be interested, but I will comment that it is a good history of one of the base closings in the 1990s, and lays out just how badly the United States government handled it. The book may be a bit over-board in lauding how well the town handled it all and how it recovered and how it is thriving (the author was the mayor at the time), but its recounting of the inaccurate information on which the closing was based (e.g., the committee was told that the base hospital had only twenty beds, when it had 350) resonated for me with current discussions of just how accurate the information is upon which Congress is basing its decisions these days.

stories by Edgar Allan Poe:

[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 10/23/2009]

In honor of Edgar Allan Poe's 200th birthday this year, our book discussion groups both read several Poe stories. The non-SF group read "Murders in the Rue Morgue", "The Gold Bug", "The Purloined Letter", "The Masque of the Red Death", "Hop-Frog", "A Predicament", and "The Philosophy of Composition". Conveniently, I had also just read Hillary Waugh's GUIDE TO MYSTERIES & MYSTERY WRITING, which was more the former than the latter and devoted a full quarter of the book to Poe and his creation of the detective story.

Waugh analyzes the various elements that Poe brought together. These include "the transcendent and eccentric detective"; "the admiring and slightly stupid foil"; "the well-intentioned, blundering officials"; "the locked-room convention"; "the pointing finger of unjust suspicion"; "the solution by surprise", "solution by putting one's self in another's position"; "concealment by means of the ultra-obvious"; "the staged ruse to force the culprit's hand"; and "even the expansive and condescending explanation when the chase is done."

Not every detective story has all of these, of course. "Murders in the Rue Morgue" has the first six elements; "The Purloined Letter" has the first two and the last four. True, Holmes had his Watson for all but one story (and that is considered the weakest of the batch). But Poirot did not have his Hastings for many of his stories, and Jane Marple had no "admiring and slightly stupid foil" at all. Not every story uses a locked-room, and so on. But all these are standard tropes of detective fiction, and all were invented by Poe. Well, one could argue that "the transcendent and eccentric detective" and "the admiring and slightly stupid foil" are really just variants on the hero and his sidekick, a pair of characters who have been around considerably longer. In fact, one could argue that they were so stock by the 17th century that Cervantes could satirize them by making the sidekick the smarter of the two. (And P. G. Wodehouse followed in his footsteps.)

And Dupin's reconstruction of the narrator's train of thought at the beginning seems incredibly forced and makes the narrator seem somewhat more than "slightly stupid." If indeed, walking on a pavement of "overlapping and riveted blocks" must bring to the narrator's mind the term "stereotomy", and that in turn forces him to "atomies", hence Epicurus, hence nebulae, hence Orion, then the narrator is a very dim fellow indeed, to have such a constrained mind.

That Poe at least somewhat identified himself with his detective Dupin is fairly clear from the following exchange in "The Purloined Letter":

"You might have spared yourself this trouble," said Dupin. "D--, I presume, is not altogether a fool, and, if not, must have anticipated these waylayings, as a matter of course."

"Not altogether a fool," said G., "but then he's a poet, which I take to be only one remove from a fool."

"True," said Dupin, after a long and thoughtful whiff from his meerschaum, "although I have been guilty of certain doggerel myself."

THE BEST OF FREDERIK POHL by Frederik Pohl:

Our discussion chose THE BEST OF FREDERIK POHL (ISBN-13 978-0-345-24507-6, ISBN-10 0-345-24507-5) for the August meeting. This book was published in 1975, but as someone observed, if a "Best of Frederik Pohl" were published today, it would still have most of the same stories.

I don't normally comment on every story in a collection, but doing so will help me remember my impressions for the discussion, so here goes.

"The Tunnel Under the World": Classic Pohl story that everyone remembers--"Buy a Feckle Freezer!" It seems to have been the precursor to several films and stories: DARK CITY, GROUNDHOG DAY, perhaps even BLADERUNNER in part. (Someone at the meeting mentioned THE TRUMAN SHOW, an even better parallel.) Pohl had worked in the advertising field, so the basic premise probably came from that. The structure is interesting--you follow the protagonist through some very confusing events, wondering what is going on. Then you find out the big secret. Then you find out that is not the big secret, something else is. No, wait, there's an even bigger secret. No, wait, .... through five revelations.

"Punch": This seems very similar to another story with a time traveler who arrives right before an atomic war in which everyone is going to die, or one in which it turns out that the time traveler has destroyed the world when he jumps back in time (because of the energy use)--and he's jumped back from five minutes in the future. The traveler here isn't a time traveler, though.

"Three Portraits and a Prayer": This made no impression on me; I have no idea why not.

"Day Million": At the time (forty years ago) it was daring. Now it is topical. In another forty years it will be quaint, relegated to the same museum as "South Pacific" and "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner".

"Happy Birthday, Dear Jesus": If "Day Million" seems to have a lot of its ideas fixed in the past, "Happy Birthday, Dear Jesus" seems depressingly prescient, with the commercialization of Christmas gone amuck. All those people who keep telling us that everyone should have the Christmas spirit and *love* all the store decorations et al should read this. I mentioned this a few years ago in conjunction with China Miéville's "'Tis the Season". In the latter, I wrote, "The worst fears of the Religious Right have come to pass, and the celebration of Christmas is prohibited. No parties, no holly, no mistletoe, no trees, .... But it is not political correctness gone wild. And it has nothing to do with the First Amendment and the separation of church and state (in part because Miéville is British, writing for a British audience). No, it's because all of these things have been trademarked and so you can't have a Christmas tree, you must have a Christmas Tree(tm) and pay a license fee for it. The same with Holly(tm), Mistletoe(tm), and so on. 'It felt so forlorn, putting my newspaper-wrapped presents next to the aspidistra, but ever since YuleCo bought the right to coloured paper and under-tree storage, the inspectors had clamped down on Subarboreal Giftery.' Frankly, Miéville's 'nightmare future' seems far more likely to me than the nightmare future of Christmas being forbidden because of political correctness. After all, one cannot now sing 'Happy Birthday to You' in public without owing royalties on it! The Miéville and the Pohl get added to 'Newton's Mass' by Timothy Esaias in my mental list of stories that *I* would put in a Christmas anthology, were I ever to undertake such an unlikely task.

"We Never Mention Aunt Nora": This reads like a typical "Twilight Zone" story, though written a year before that show went on the air.

"Father of the Stars": Is this 1964 story the first instance of the idea that technology overtakes itself? In this case, the interstellar colonists who went out in cold sleep and relativistic speeds are met near the end of their voyage by earthmen in a faster-than-light ship that had been invented after they left. We actually live this now in a way--many people put off buying a new electronic gadget because in six months there will be a better, cheaper one.

"The Day the Martians Came": It may be true that supposed antagonists will unite against a common threat, but whether that would apply to aliens who are not threats is unclear. Then again, as someone says in LONE STAR, "It's always heartwarming to see a prejudice defeated by a deeper prejudice."

"The Midas Plague": It is a clever idea and all, but of course it makes no sense. I cannot help but feel, though, that it at least somewhat the inspiration for David Brin's THE PRACTICE EFFECT. And both of them seem to have their roots in the notion that we must have an ever-increasing gross product, that the only way to maintain a healthy economy is to produce more and more, to build more houses, to manufacture more cars. The "Planet Money" podcast had a show about the problems of the car manufacturers, and one problem is that there are about a third more cars being manufactured worldwide than are actually needed. So either people have to keep buying new cars when they do not need them, or the automobile companies have to close a quarter of their factories.

(According to the notes by Pohl at the end, this idea was suggested by Horace Gold, it is Pohl's most reprinted piece of short fiction, and it has even shown up in economics courses.)

"The Snowmen": I suppose that this is interesting in the context of global climate change, but it spends too much time on characters that seem very outdated and not enough time on the idea. There's something about these stock characters of the era--the gold-digging night-club-singer type, the small-time con-artist, and so on--that make so many stories or movies from the 1950s and earlier seem very dated. (Consider the Phil Foster character and his girlfriend in THE CONQUEST OF SPACE.)

"How to Count on Your Fingers": This is an article, not a story, and included primarily because Lester Del Rey (the editor of the book) wanted to give an example of Pohl's science writing.

"Grandy Devil": Okay, it did not quite go where I thought it was going, but it ending was one of those surprise endings that seems utterly predictable after you hear it.

"Speed Trap": "I honestly think we can do four times as much work as we do. And I honestly think that this means we can land on Mars in five years instead of twenty, cure leukemia in twelve years instead of fifty, and so on." Yeah, and have a baby in a little over two months instead of nine.

"The Richest Man in Levittown": This is one of those humorous science fiction stories that were popular in the 1950s. The characters have the same sort of mannerisms that make them seem dated as the ones in "The Snowmen". It is not that it couldn't be written with a more current feel, but it does seem as though humor often relies on stereotypes for the jokes, and stereotypes are more prone to becoming outdated.

Okay, I lied. I ran out of steam and either did not read, or had nothing to say about "The Day the Icicle Works Closed", "The Hated" (close-quarters space travel), "The Martian in the Attic", "The Census Takers", or "The Children of Night"

To order The Best of Frederik Pohl from amazon.com, click here.

THE SPACE MERCHANTS by Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth

and

THE MERCHANTS' WAR by Frederik Pohl:

[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 11/09/2007]

Our science fiction discussion group read THE SPACE MERCHANTS by Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth (ISBN-13 978-0-575-07528-3, ISBN-10 0-575-07528-7) for October. Though written over a half a century ago, much of Pohl and Kornbluth projected is distressingly true today (particularly the aspects of big corporations' control of government). The book does not appear dated, except perhaps in the relations between the sexes, and even there it does have a woman doctor, written when this was not a commonplace. I can even offer as evidence the agreement of a high schooler in our group that the book still read well and understandably as a science fiction book, even though written so long ago.

The original publication of THE SPACE MERCHANTS was as GRAVY PLANET serialized in three parts in GALAXY magazine in 1952. This included a couple of chapters at the end set on Venus, which seemed to me out of keeping with the tone of the rest of the novel, and were dropped when the book was published. Also, the Conservationists were called "Connies" in the serialization, but "Consies" in the novel, which perhaps make the parallel to "Commies" a tiny bit more subtle and also makes more sense in terms of how these nicknames are formed.

THE MERCHANTS' WAR by Frederik Pohl (ISBN-13 978-0-312-90240-7, ISBN-10 0-312-90240-9) is a 1984 sequel to THE SPACE MERCHANTS by Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth (and not to be confused with the fourth book of the Charles Stross series). This takes place initially on Venus, a world populated (at the end of THE SPACE MERCHANTS) by "Consies" and hence extremely negative towards advertising in any form. Consider the lengths to which Venerians will go to avoid the sin of advertising, as evidenced by this sign at Russian Hills:

"If for any reason you do not want to bring your own refreshments while visiting Russian Hills, some items like hamburgers, hot dogs and soy sandwiches are available in the Venera Lounge. They're inspected by the Planetary Health Service, but the quality is mediocre. Beer and other drinks can also be purchased, at about twice the cost of the same things in town."

Compare this to what one finds in James Morrow's 1990 novella CITY OF TRUTH (ISBN-13 978-0-156-18042-9, ISBN-10 0-156-18042-1):

"No Great Shakes ... day's special: MURDERED COW SANDWICH, WILTED HEARTS OF LETTUCE, HIGH-CHOLESTEROL FRIES--A QUITE REASONABLE $5.99."

Whether there is a direct influence, or just two independent instances of taking "truth in advertising" to its logical conclusion, I cannot say.

THE SPACE MERCHANTS and THE MERCHANTS' WAR were also issued in an omnibus volume by the Science Fiction Book Club called "VENUS, INC."

To order The Space Merchants from amazon.com, click here.

To order The Merchants' War from amazon.com, click here.

To order City of Truth from amazon.com, click here.

FOOD RULES: AN EATER'S MANUAL by Michael Pollan:

[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 06/18/2010]

FOOD RULES: AN EATER'S MANUAL by Michael Pollan (ISBN-13 978-0-14-311638-7) is basically a condensation/reworking of his previous IN DEFENSE OF FOOD. In that he proposed the following basic guideline: "Eat food. Mostly plants. Not too much." This is so succinct that one would have to get even a haiku, such as:

	"Eat food.  Mostly plants.
	Not too much."  And this advice
	Is what Pollan writes.

Anyway, in FOOD RULES Pollan expands this into 64 rules, many of which were in the earlier book, e.g. "Don't eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food." (One problem with this rule is portrayed in MATEWAN, where one of the Appalachian miners' wives is talking about the Italian miners' wives and complains that when they are given corn meal, they "ruin" it by turning it into polenta instead of cornbread.)

Many of the rules in this book seem repetitive or redundant. "Avoid food products containing ingredients that no ordinary human would keep in the pantry" would seem to encompass "Avoid food products that contain high-fructose corn syrup." "Avoid food products that contain ingredients that a third-grader cannot pronounce" is only as valid as the quality of education in our schools? (For that matter, how many third-graders can correctly pronounce "thyme"? My father used to tell of when he had first arrived in New York from Puerto Rico and was working in a grocery when a woman asked him for the thyme. He told her the time, but somehow this did not satisfy her. :-) )

Even Pollan admits that "Eat only foods that will eventually rot" has a few exceptions (e.g., honey). "Buy your snacks at the farmers' market" assumes you have access to a farmers' market. "Eat only foods that have been cooked by humans," "Don't ingest foods made in places where everyone is required to wear a surgical cap," and "If it came from a plant, eat it; if it was made in a plant, don't" all seem very similar.

This seems like a "gimmick" book--a condensation of his previous book in a mass-market size (but at a trade paperback price).

To order Food Rules from amazon.com, click here.

IN DEFENSE OF FOOD: AN EATER'S MANIFESTO by Michael Pollan:

[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 05/02/2008]

IN DEFENSE OF FOOD: AN EATER'S MANIFESTO by Michael Pollan (ISBN-13 978-1-594-20145-5, ISBN-10 1-594-20145-5) is a plan for an intelligent diet and is in some ways a continuation of his OMNIVORE'S DILEMMA. Pollan again talks about "nutritionism"--the change from emphasis on foods themselves to an emphasis of components of foods (e.g., vitamins, Omega-3 oils). It all builds to Pollan's final section, devoted to the mantra: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."

Pollan has several "rules of thumb" for determining what "food" is:

• "Don't eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food."
• "Avoid food products containing ingredients that are a) unfamiliar, b) unpronounceable, c) more than five in number, or that include d) high-fructose corn syrup."
• "Avoid food products that make health claims."
• "Shop the peripheries of the supermarket and stay out of the middle."
• "Get out of the supermarket whenever possible."

The rationale for the third one is that only the big food companies can manage to get the FDA or American Heart Association to approve their claims; it's difficult for the local potato grower to get FDA or AHA approval for health claims for potatoes (and harder still to figure out how to put them on each potato!).

The last rule is meant to encourage people to buy from farmers' markets. I'm all for this, but it just doesn't not seem very practical around here. There are produce stores *called* "Farmers Market" and such, but they are not true farmers' markets in the sense of selling locally grown produce directly from the farmer to the consumer(*). In the summer, one can find some stands with very limited supplies, but if one is supposed to eat "mostly plants," this is not a shopping plan that will achieve that goal in New Jersey.

(*) At my local produce store, I saw some tomatoes once where the sign above them said "Jersey tomatoes", the printed weight label said "Israeli tomatoes", and the sticker on the tomatoes themselves said "Canada"! [-ecl]

To order In Defense of Food from amazon.com, click here.

THE OMNIVORE'S DILEMMA: A NATURAL HISTORY OF FOUR MEALS by Michael Pollan:

[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 03/02/2007]

THE OMNIVORE'S DILEMMA: A NATURAL HISTORY OF FOUR MEALS by Michael Pollan (ISBN-10 1-59420-082-3, ISBN-13 978-1-594-20082-3) started with an interesting idea. Pollan was going to trace four different meals from their origins to his mouth. The meals were a fast-food meal, two different "organic" meals, and a hunter- gatherer meal. The problem I had with most of the book was that it jumped around a lot, and introduced too many people to keep track of. (For example, Pollan would talk about Joe Smith's small farm, and then fifty pages later say something like, "Smith would not have agreed.")

The part that I do recommend is the middle section. Yes, a book about four meals has a middle section, because it started as three meals. Then Pollan discovered that "organic" was too broad a term. There are what people think of when they hear the word "organic": a small farm that doesn't use any chemical fertilizer or insecticides and lets its chickens roam around the farm yard. However, the government's definition of "organic" means that 1) there are a lot of mega-farms that can call their product "organic", and 2) there are a lot of small farms that the average consumer would consider "organic" that aren't. The mega-farm can claim its chickens are "free-range" if they "have access to the outdoors," which could be a small door at the end of a large chicken coop that is unlatched an hour a week, and then only for the last two weeks of the chicken's life. The small farm may be ecologically sound and humanely run, but if the feed they buy for the chickens is not certified as organic, they cannot call their products organic either.

Pollan uses Whole Foods Market as an example of the "mega- organic" food chain. He points out that a large chain cannot survive buying small amounts from a lot of small farmers, and so drives the mega-farm production. The mega-farms, in turn, have lobbied the government to define "organic", "free-range", etc., in terms that are most favorable to them. Pollan says if you want "traditionally organic" (my term, not his), you need to shop at local farms or farmers' markets. This is nice in theory, but since the "farmers' markets" around here seem to carry all sorts of packaged goods as well as produce clearly grown elsewhere (New Jersey is not known for its oranges), this is not always practical.

And in addition to the food itself, one must consider the cost to the environment in getting it to market. Pollan gives examples of how much petroleum is used to transport a steer, for example, from the farm to the slaughterhouse to the store. Which brings me to my Whole Foods Market experience. A few days after reading the book, I stopped in a Whole Foods Market to buy two habanero peppers. (No one else around here carries them.) First of all, they are clearly not a local New Jersey product, especially in February. (There is not enough market to operate a hothouse for them.) And to buy them, first I needed to put them in a plastic produce bag designed to hold a half dozen apples, rather than a smaller, less wasteful bag. And after I paid for them (all of twenty cents!) the cashier asked if I wanted a bag to put them in. I suppose they have to ask, but talk about how wasteful!

Oh, and what is the omnivore's dilemma? Well, as Pollan notes, the koala has no dilemma about food--if it looks and smells like a eucalyptus leaf, it's food; if it doesn't, it's not. But an omnivore has so many choices for food, what to eat becomes a dilemma.

[And after I wrote this column, the "New York Times" ran an article, "Is Whole Foods Straying From Its Roots?", which can be found at http://tinyurl.com/ytmxe6, registration necessary, but you can usually find passwords at http://www.bugmenot.com/view/www.nytimes.com.]

To order The Omnivore's Dilemma from amazon.com, click here.

THE OPEN SOCIETY AND ITS ENEMIES by Karl R. Popper:

[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 10/19/2007]

THE OPEN SOCIETY AND ITS ENEMIES by Karl R. Popper is in two volumes (ISBN-13 978-0-691-01968-0, ISBN-10 0-691-01968-1 and ISBN-13 978-0-691-01972-7, ISBN-10 0-691-01972-X). The first volume is devoted to "debunking" Plato, particularly his "Republic", while the second concentrates on Hegel and Marx. In his introduction, Popper takes aim at what he calls "historicism", which seems to be very similar to Hari Selden's "psychohistory". Popper describes "historicism" as the belief that, just as science has laws and can make predictions, "the task of the social sciences [is] to furnish us with long-term historical prophecies. They also believe that they have discovered laws of history which enable them to prophesy the course of historical events."

Popper also uses the terms "open society" and "closed society". Briefly, an open society is one in which individuals are confronted with personal decisions, while a closed society is one which is "magical or tribal or collectivist."

I talked about Popper at length in my review of WITTGENSTEIN'S POKER by David Edmonds and John Eidinow. Briefly, Wittgenstein may or may not have threatened Popper with a fireplace poker as part of a philosophical argument over whether there are true philosophical arguments, or only problems of language. Popper also gave the coup-de-grace to the statement of "the Vienna Circle" that only two kinds of statements were meaningful: those "inherently" true (either by definition or as syllogisms), and those which are empirical and verifiable. All other statements were meaningless. Popper pointed out that the claim of the Vienna Circle was neither inherently true, nor empirical and verifiable. Hence it was meaningless, so why were they wasting their time on it?!

One of the great things about retirement is that while reading Popper, I can decide to re-read Plato's "Republic"--and have the time to do it. Which in turn means that I can say things like, "When I was re-reading Plato's "Republic" the other day...." And when I was re-reading Plato's "Republic", I was struck with how at least one 20th century author used "The Republic" as inspiration--Aldous Huxley. BRAVE NEW WORLD implements so many of Plato's ideas--strict division between classes, use of education, sexual partners in common, children raised collectively without knowledge of who their parents are--that it cannot be mere coincidence.

Popper also comments on Plato's suggestion that, for the duration of a war, no one may reject the advances of a soldier (cited as "468c", but more easily found by noting it is in Book 5). I knew that there was a science fiction story that used this premise (ending with an ordinary young soldier walking into his neighbor's home and up the stairs to the room of their thirteen- year-old daughter, and they cannot do anything to stop him), but for the life of me I could remember neither title nor author. So at 12:25 PM I posted a "YASID" ("Yet Another Story Identification [Request]") to rec.arts.sf.written; by 14:35 PM *the same day* I had an answer: "The Survivor" by Walter F. Moudy.

I have finished just volume one; I may have more to say after I read volume two.

To order The Open Society and Its Enemies from amazon.com, click here.

UNCLE ABNER: MASTER OF MYSTERIES by Melville Davisson Post:

[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 10/01/2004]

Melville Davisson Post's UNCLE ABNER: MASTER OF MYSTERIES (ISBN 0-486-23202-6) is yet another in Dover's reprints of classic mysteries. And like most of the rest, it is now out of print. Apparently the line did not appeal to enough readers, though given some of what Dover publishes, it's hard to imagine that at least some of the works included didn't reach the same level of interest/sales as an obscure tract by Leon Trotsky on why Communism was failing in Russia, or a book on the physics of soap bubbles. However, I can see why this particular volume might be discontinued. The "Uncle Abner" stories were written in the 1910s and are set in the Appalachian frontier in the 1840s and 1850s, and the setting and characters are the main appeal of the stories, rather than the mysteries themselves, which turn out to be fairly mundane.

To order (a used copy of) Uncle Abner: Master of Mysteries from amazon.com, click here.

GAMING THE VOTE: WHY ELECTIONS AREN'T FAIR (AND WHAT WE CAN DO ABOUT IT) by William Poundstone:

[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 10/22/2010]

I also read GAMING THE VOTE: WHY ELECTIONS AREN'T FAIR (AND WHAT WE CAN DO ABOUT IT) by William Poundstone (ISBN 978-0-809-04892-2). Many people know about Arrow's Theorem, which proves that given a set of "self-evident" rules, it is impossible to devise a ranked voting system (a.k.a. preferential voting system) that follows all the rules. Briefly, it states:

General Possibility Theorem: It is impossible to formulate a social preference ordering that satisfies all of the following conditions:

1. Nondictatorship: The preferences of an individual should not become the group ranking without considering the preferences of others.
2. Individual Sovereignty: each individual should be able to order the choices in any way and indicate ties
3. Unanimity: If every individual prefers one choice to another, then the group ranking should do the same
4. Freedom From Irrelevant Alternatives: If a choice is removed, then the others order should not change
5. Uniqueness of Group Rank: The method should yield the same result whenever applied to a set of preferences. The group ranking should be transitive.

In GAMING THE VOTE, Poundstone details all of the major variants of ranked voting, and gives examples in each one of how this is true. He also proposes a solution that does not have any of these flaws-- and not a brand-new one, but one that has been used on the Internet in many applications for years now--range voting. (It does not violate Arrow's Theorem, because it is not ranked voting.)

To order Gaming the Vote from amazon.com, click here.

LABYRINTHS OF REASON: PARADOX, PUZZLES AND THE FRAILITY OF KNOWLEDGE by William Poundstone:

[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 01/13/2012]

LABYRINTHS OF REASON: PARADOX, PUZZLES AND THE FRAILITY OF KNOWLEDGE by William Poundstone (ISBN 978-0-385-24261-5) is a reasonable overview of epistemology, paradoxes, and the quest for knowledge. The problem is that if you have read anything on the topic, most of what is in it will be very familiar. Poundstone covers Hempel's Raven, grue and bleen, liars and truth-tellers, and "last Tuesday-ism" (though not by that name), among others.

The one new tweak that Poundstone provides is an explanation for why grue and bleen are not concepts as justifiable as blue and green. Briefly, grue is anything green until December 31, 1999, and blue afterwards. (It's an old paradox; you should probably substitute another future date.) Bleen is blue until that date, and green afterwards.

The paradox of why these terms seem less valid than blue and green is that one could just as easily define blue as something that is bleen until December 31, 1999, and grue afterwards, and similarly for green. So why does blue/green seem more valid than bleen/grue? Poundstone goes through several other false arguments, but the convincing one is that children learning the Gruebleen language will not learn these colors as easily as blue and green. We can point to the sky and tell a child it is blue, and point to the grass and say it is green, and the child understands. But if we point to the sky and say it is bleen, the child will not understand that this means it will (supposedly) change color on a specific future date. This asymmetry is what makes blue-green more basic than bleen-grue.

Other than this (which may well have appeared elsewhere), there is nothing new here, but if you're looking for a good book to start someone out on the topic, you could do worse.

As an aside, I find it interesting that of all the authors--not philosophers or scientists--that Poundstone references, Jorge Luis Borges gets the most mentions, six. They are:

• the nine copper coins in "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius"
• the classification system in "The Analytical Language of John Wilkins"
• the unreality of the world in "Avatars of the Tortoise"
• the labyrinth in "The Garden of Forking Paths"
• the Tlönian encyclopedia in "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius"
• the map in "Extraordinary Tales"

To order Labyrinths of Reason from amazon.com, click here.

A PASSION FOR BOOKS by Lawrence Clark Powell:

[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 02/16/2007]

A PASSION FOR BOOKS by Lawrence Clark Powell (ISBN-10 0-837-16783-3 ISBN-13 978-0-837-16783-1) is one of Powell's several collections of essays and speeches on books, book collecting, and libraries. Powell was an early critic of the displacement of books as the focus of libraries: "Thus I view with alarm the invasion of the book world by barbarians who neither believe in books for their totality of being, their fusion and content, nor have any sentimental feelings toward the book as a thing-in-itself. ... [When] library school prospectuses are issued which run to thousands of words without once mentioning the word 'book', then the bounds of propriety have been exceeded. The appeal is to would-be housekeepers, analysts, probers, and planners, to unsocial scientists who can be led to literature but not made to read and who long to de-emphasize books, mechanize the library, and the name to 'materials center,' a term more properly applied by anatomists to the dissecting room." (from a 1956 article)

Powell is definitely a bookaholic. He writes, "On trips to New York my time is usually divided between bookshops and libraries. Only once was I foolish enough to go to a musical comedy. Halfway through the production--which I found neither musical nor comic--I came to my senses and asked myself, What am I wasting my time here for, when New York is stacked with millions of books for sale? I rushed out the theater and made a 'bookline' for the shops of Fourth Avenue."

Yet another example of synchronicity: Powell mentioned a "17th century treatise on human engineering, a manual for conduct for public people written by a Spanish Jesuit." Even before he named it, I immediately knew that Powell was talking about Balthasar Gracian's A TRUTHTELLING MANUAL AND THE ART OF WORLDLY WISDOM--a book I am currently reading.

To order A Passion for Books from amazon.com, click here.

THE ANUBIS GATES by Tim Powers:

[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 08/20/2004]

Tim Powers's THE ANUBIS GATES (ISBN 0-441-00401-6) is a classic that I had never gotten around to reading. Its macguffin is a poet named William Ashbless, who does not exist in the (our) real world. I mention this because, like FARGO, this story has convinced many people of the reality of something which is not real. ("William Ashbless" was a pen name used by Tim Powers and James Blaylock for their jointly written poetry in college. Both authors now use the character.) Powers's style reminds me of Ray Bradbury's. I have no idea why, and I'm sure everyone now thinks I'm nuts for saying so. But there you have it. Maybe it is just a highly poetic style with the sort of imagery that Bradbury might use.

This book was a reprint by Orb, and one quibble I have is that what I assume were errors in the original printing were not corrected. For example, on page 47, the characters talk about October 1, 1810, as a Saturday; it was a Monday. (Earlier on page 29, they spoke of September 1 of that year as a Saturday, and on page 132 they are only up to September 11, so the typo is obvious--and should have been fixed.)

To order The Anubis Gates from amazon.com, click here.

NATION by Terry Pratchett:

[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 11/21/2008]

NATION by Terry Pratchett (ISBN-13 978-0-06-143301-6, ISBN-10 0-06-143301-2) is *not* a Discworld novel. It is an alternate history novel, though most of it is a pretty straightforward survival-after-disaster-and-shipwreck novel, and the alternate history is really only important to the final chapter or so. What is notable is that to some extent Pratchett is following in Philip Pullman's footsteps, and writing a young adult novel that has at its heart the questioning of established religion. (They are both, I will note, British.) Pratchett is more subtle, with most of the questioning being of a Polynesian belief system rather than any of the monotheistic religions--but with a heavy emphasis on the question of the meaning of suffering in a world supposedly controlled by a beneficent god, the application to the monotheistic faiths is obvious.

To order Nation from amazon.com, click here.

THE TRUTH by Terry Pratchett:

[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 06/22/2007]

Completely coincidentally, the same week I read EYEWITNESS TO HISTORY and THE TIN MEN, I picked up THE TRUTH by Terry Pretchett (ISBN-10 0-380-81819-1, ISBN-13 978-0-380-81819-8), a book about the invention of the newspaper and the whole reporting industry in Ankh-Morpork. One suspects that Pratchett's opinions on the press is summed up by one character's statement: "People like to be told what they already know. Remember that. They get uncomfortably when you tell them *new* things. New things . . . well, new things aren't what they expect. They like to know that, say, a dog will bite a man. That is what dogs do. They don't want to know that a man bites a dog, because the world is not supposed to happen like that. In short, what people *think* they want is news, but what they really crave is *olds*."

But Pratchett also has a more philosophical turn occasionally, as when he muses on movable type :"The ban on movable type wasn't *exactly* a law. . . . [The] wizards and priests didn't like it because words were important. An engraved page was an engraved page, complete and unique. But if you took the leaden letters that had previously been used to set the words of a god, and then used them to set a cookery book, what did that do to the holy wisdom?"

To order The Truth from amazon.com, click here.

"Impossible Dreams" by Tim Pratt:

[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 06/16/2006]

One more thing: If you are a film fan, run, do not walk, to read Tim Pratt's "Impossible Dreams" in the July 2006 issue of ASIMOV'S SCIENCE FICTION MAGAZINE.

GOD IS NOT ONE by Stephen Prothero:

[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 07/22/2011]

GOD IS NOT ONE: THE EIGHT RIVAL RELIGIONS THAT RUN THE WORLD--AND WHY THEIR DIFFERENCES MATTER by Stephen Prothero (ISBN 978-0-06- 157127-5) gives you the premise--that contrary to popular talk these days, all religions are *not* the same underneath--in the introduction, then spends eight chapters giving the reader the basics of what Prothero has decided are the eight religions Prothero thinks are most important, either because of influence or because of number of adherents: Islam, Christianity, Confucianism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Yoruba religion, Judaism, and Daoism. (Prothero bases the order on contemporary impact.) For some of the religions, I cannot say whether Prothero got all the details right, but he did make at least one error on Judaism. He writes, "Like the term Torah in Judaism, which refers in a narrow sense to the five books of Moses ... and in a more expansive to the entire Hebrew Bible..." The "entire Hebrew Bible" is not called the Torah, it is called the Tanakh, an acronym for Torah, Nviim (prophets), and Ketuvim (writings). (It is an acronym because most vowels are not written in Hebrew.) And in addition to the Tanakh, there are also the Mishnah and the Talmud(s), which Prothero later also includes in the Torah. Overall what is missing, I think, is a table highlighting the key differences among the religions: whether they believe in a God or gods (or no god), whether the god(s) have a body, whether humans have souls, whether sin exists, whether there is a self, whether existence is circular or linear, and so on.

To order God Is Not One from amazon.com, click here.

RELIGIOUS LITERACY: WHAT EVERY AMERICAN NEEDS TO KNOW--AND DOESN'T by Stephen Prothero:

[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 09/14/2007]

While I agree with the basic premise of RELIGIOUS LITERACY: WHAT EVERY AMERICAN NEEDS TO KNOW--AND DOESN'T by Stephen Prothero (ISBN-13 978-0-06-084670-1, ISBN-10 0-06-084670-4), I have several complaints about his claims.

First, while I agree Americans are not as religiously literate as they should be, I question the statistics he quotes. I find it hard to believe, for example, that ten percent of Americans think that Joan of Arc is Noah's wife; I think it more likely that ten percent of the responders thought they would have a joke at the surveyor's expense. And if less than half of Americans can name even one of the four gospels, how does that sync up with the claim that 75% to 85% of Americans claim to be Christian?

I also think that Prothero's coverage is spotty. He talks about some of the differences between Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox, but does not mention the calendar differences (which result in Easter and Christmas falling on different days for the two groups). Nor does he say that the Islamic calendar is a strictly lunar calendar, so that the holidays cycle through all the seasons. He does not even mention Wicca or Jews for Jesus.

Prothero spends a lot of time on different versions of the Ten Commandments, but none on the differences in the Lord's Prayer, which is at least as important when it comes to the notion of a non-sectarian prayer.

He defines polytheism as "Belief in multiple gods. Hinduism is typically described as polytheistic, though many Hindus insist that behind the myriad manifestations of divinity is one Absolute Reality.". Why doesn't he add, "Sort of like the Trinity"? :-) (Admittedly, in his definition of the Trinity, he does say that "some outsiders see at least a hint of polytheism in this belief.")

Of fundamentalism, he says, "Some scholars have tried to apply this term to other modes of religiously inspired antimodernism... But fundamentalism proper is a Protestant impulse that bears only superficial similarities to such movements." Well, maybe in his opinion, but his definition does not require that.

Second, while I agree that Americans should be better educated in world religions, I think Prothero underestimates the difficulty of finding someone to teach an unbiased course in world religions at the high school level. His examples of where this has been successful are all from multi-ethnic urban areas; he does not explain where in a small town where every belongs to the same church, or possibly two or three different Christian churches, one will find someone who can teach his proposed course effectively.

And lastly, when asked where the time for this course on world religions will come from, Prothero quotes Warren Nord as saying, "Why require the study of trigonometry or calculus, which the great majority of students will never use or need, and ignore religion, a matter of profound and universal significance?" Well, overlooking the question of why mathematics is always what people propose cutting back, this will only provide time for students in a college-preparatory program. I suspect that a lot of students are already not taking trigonometry or calculus, so unless Prothero thinks religion is of importance only to the college-bound, he needs to come up with something else.

One of Prothero's targets is Karen Armstrong, and in particular, her book THE GREAT TRANSFORMATION, of which he says, "To the Buddha, Confucius, and other founders of these faiths, Armstrong writes, 'what matters was not what you believed but how you behaved. ... 'For them, religion *was* the Golden Rule.' What we have here is yet another effort to turn religion into a water boy for morality." I suppose he would have said the same of Hillel, who was asked to summarize the Torah while standing on one leg and said, "What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. That is the whole Torah; the rest is commentary. Go and study it." And Prothero even cites this story in his dictionary of religious literacy.

And of course, many religions emphasize orthopraxy rather than orthodoxy, for example, the ancient Roman religion, or (arguably) Orthodox Judaism.

(Coincidentally, at the same time I had checked out RELIGIOUS LITERACY, I had also checked out THE GREAT TRANSFORMATION. I did not get very far in it though--either Armstrong's writing has gotten more dense since her book THE HISTORY OF GOD, or I have. What I did read seemed to indicate that she believes that the very early Aryans lived in a very idyllic society, at one with nature and all that. I am not sure I believe that.

Here's the religious literacy test Prothero gives his religion classes at the beginning of the term. Add up your points and double the result to get a 100-point-based score. The answer will appear next week.

1. Name the Four Gospels. (1 point each)
2. Name a sacred text of Hinduism. (1 point)
3. What is the name of the holy book of Islam? (1 point)
4. Where, according to the Bible, was Jesus born? (1 point)
5. President George W. Bush spoke in his first inaugural address of the Jericho road. What Bible story was he invoking?
6. What are the first five books of the Hebrew Bible or the Christian Old Testament? (1 point each)
7. What is the Golden Rule? (1 point)
8. "God helps those who help themselves." Is this in the Bible? If so, where? (2 points)
9. "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of Heaven." Does this appear in the Bible? (2 points)
10. Name the Ten Commandments. (1 point each)
11. Name the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism. (1 point each)
12. What are the Seven Sacraments of Catholicism? (1 point each)
13. The First Amendment says two things about religion, each in its own "clause." What are its two religion clauses? (1 point each)
14. What is Ramadan? In what religion is it celebrated? (1 point each)
15. Match the Bible characters with the stories in which they appear. Some characters may be matched with more than one story or vice versa.
    Characters: Adam and Eve, Noah, Paul, Moses, Jesus, Abraham, Serpent.
    Stories: Exodus, Binding of Isaac, Olive Branch, Garden of Eden, Parting of the Red Sea, Road to Damascus, Garden of Gethsemane. (1 point each)

Answers:

1. Matthew, Mark, Luke, John
2. Vedas, Brahmanas, Aranyakas, Upanishads, Puranas, Mahabharata, Bhagavad Gita, Ramayana, Yoga Sutras, Laws of Manu, or Kama Sutra
3. Quran
4. Bethlehem
5. Good Samaritan
6. Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy
7. "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." (Matthew 7:12), or a similar statement from Rabbi Hillel or Confucius. "Love your neighbor as yourself" is not the Golden Rule.
8. No, this is not in the Bible. In fact, it is contradicted in Proverbs 28:26. "He who trusts in himself is a fool." The words are Ben Franklin's.
9. Yes, in the Beatitudes of Jesus' Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:3).
10. No other gods before me; you shall not make yourself a graven image; you shall not take the name of the Lord in vain; remember the Sabbath and keep it holy; honor your father and mother; you shall not murder; you shall not commit adultery; you shall not steal; you shall not bear false witness against your neighbor; you shall not covet.
11. Life is suffering; suffering has an origin; suffering can be overcome (nirvana); the path to overcoming suffering is the Noble Eightfold Path.
12. baptism, eucharist/mass, reconciliation/confession/penance, confirmation, marriage, holy orders, anointing of the sick/last rites
13. "Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof"; the words before the comma are the Establishment Clause, the words that follow are the Free Exercise Clause.
14. Ramadan is a Muslim holiday characterized by a month of fasting.
15. Adam and Eve + Garden of Eden; Serpent + Garden of Eden; Abraham + Binding of Isaac; Moses + Exodus/Parting of the Red Sea; Noah + Olive Branch; Jesus + Garden of Gethsemane; Paul + Road to Damascus.

To order Religious Literacy from amazon.com, click here.

ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE NORTH by Philip Pullman:

[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 10/24/2008]

ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE NORTH by Philip Pullman (ISBN-13 978-0-375-84510-9, ISBN-10 0-375-84510-0) is a "sort of" alternate history. It is set in Pullman's "His Dark Materials" universe, which has a fairly substantial alternate history basis, but ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE NORTH itself uses very little of that. It is basically a Wild West (or perhaps Northwest) story, with some fantasy elements added (e.g., armored talking bears, balloons), and tells an early story in the life of Lee Scoresby. It is mostly notable, I think, for the engravings by John Lawrence, and the letters, book extracts, newspaper clippings, bills of lading, and so forth, reproduced as informational illustrations, and also for the general quality of the physical book itself. Though issued as a book, it is really only novella-length (I estimate about 20,000 words). As such, it is similar to the previously published LYRA'S OXFORD. Either of these would be a nice present for a teenager who enjoyed the trilogy; I'm not sure there is enough depth for adult readers.

To order Once Upon a Time in the North from amazon.com, click here.

THE CRYING OF LOT 49 by Thomas Pynchon:

[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 12/23/2005]

The good thing about THE CRYING OF LOT 49 by Thomas Pynchon (ISBN 0-060-93167-1) is that it is short. The bad thing is that it is incomprehensible, and does not even have a real ending. Having slogged my way through this for our reading group, I now know I can skip all the rest of Pynchon's works. Oh, there is one other good thing--according to Charles Harris, Pynchon got all the philately correct, or at least wrong in an explainable way. (For example, the ink on some of the stamps seems to react to chemicals incorrectly--but since the stamps are forgeries, that is excusable.)

To order The Crying of Lot 49 from amazon.com, click here.