I’m not an insatiable book-eater like some bloggers (cough, Josh Marshall) but most of my life I have had something or other beside the bed. Lately I’ve read a few things which seemed worth passing on:
Jared Diamond’s book Guns, Germs and Steel came out some years back and promptly blew the minds of many who read it. Diamond’s writing reminded me of the long early-morning bus ride during freshman year in high school when I knew exactly nobody. To pass the time I’d casually observe something and ask, why. Ususally I could figure that our after thinking about it for a while, like why it was dark before the sun came up and why people wait at stoplights. Then I’d ask why again. After a while the going would get tougher and I’d bump up against either a faith in science (because little molecules that I don’t know about yet make it that way) or a faith in God (because some force that I don’t understand willed it to be that way). Reading Jared Diamond is like finding somebody who played that game as if I was the last pick for a sandlot softball game and he batted third for the Yankees. He’s scary good. Similar to my old game Guns gets its start when a New Guinean friend looks at all of the stuff (cargo) that white people carried around that New Guineans generally didn’t have and asks Diamond why. Three hundred plus pages after posing the question the author answers his friend by way of a delirious journey through the livestock origin of human plagues, latitudinal versus longitudinal transfers of technology and why Columbus discovered and subjugated the New World rather than vice-versa, with time in the middle for a memorably good digression that reconstitutes the Bantu expansion through Africa using linguistics. Short version, when you look at a map of the world Eurasia is long while the Americas are tall. It makes sense when you read it.
Diamond’s latest book, Collapse, asks the corollary question to the problem he addressed in Guns. Why is it that some societies collapse and disappear like Ozymandias into the mists of history while others make it to present day? For all the books that have been written by, about and for the environmental movement this one hits the nail right in the sweet spot. For one thing it wins the framing wars by stripping environmentalism of the anti-progress new-age baggage that it has picked up in the decades since the first Earth Day. If everybody cares about keeping our society from collapsing into chaos, and it seems like we all at least pretend like we do, then we’re all environmentalists. We just need to know how to keep the negative outcome from happening. Diamond attacks the problem of historical collapses with a scientist’s enthusiasm, creating a correlated matrix of risk factors and teasing out the critical variables in the various collapses of Vikings in Greenland, Polynesians on a few separate Pacific islands, the Maya in the Yucatan and the Anasazi in the American southwest.
In the end Diamond distills three main threats to a society’s survival. Assuming that it stands on risky ground a society can fail to anticipate a likely problem (should Easter Islanders cut down their slow-growing palms?), it can fail to perceive when a problem has arrived (the palms disappeared from Easter Island too gradually to notice) and it can fail to act once they perceive a problem (segmented land ownership and a mania for competitive monument building allowed Easter Islanders to cut the few remaining trees).
You can read Diamond’s book for its academic look at dead cultures, but for most of us the real meat of the book comes at the end when he looks at industries that simultaneously sustain society and threaten its survival. Diamond gives an accessible overview of the specific risks from such industries which include logging, hardrock mining, fisheries and petroleum, and he makes a good case for why unique structural incentives make some easier to bring into harmony with the local environment than others. Environmentalists will hate the part of the book where Diamond enthusiastically endorses progress made by some long-hated industries but that’s simply not a serious attitude. We need wood, oil, coal and metals and until we have alternatives fully online we’ll go on needing them, so the best thing that we can do for the world is to find out how to make do with what we have rather than getting in the way and shouting. Anti-environmentalists will call it pointless fear-mongering. In the end activists on both sides should bite their tongue and pick up Collapse.
Coming soon: this looks like a cool read. Expect a review whenever I get around to finishing it.
Steve
Well, it sounds like a good book, but now that you ruined the ending…
Last year I read David McCullough’s seminal biography of John Adams. I found it very interesting for the reason that it reminds us just how ugly and gutter politics were back in the day, even when it was those intellectual giants, the Founding Fathers, running against one another. It reminds us that the current partisan atmosphere, by historical standards, really isn’t any big deal at all.
Bob In Pacifica
I’ve read both books. Well, actually I got depressed about it all about two-thirds of the way through, but I got the message. I’ve read Guns, Germs and Steel two times, though.
Bob In Pacifica
I picked up a copy of Flannery O’Connor’s complete short stories yesterday at City Lights Books. I had to go into town to the dentist, who was in Chinatown, so I walked up to Columbus. Great bookstore.
CaseyL
I’m still making my way through 1491, which addresses some of the same issues. It’s a fascinating read, but I wonder about its essentially reductionist argument (that disease wiped out most of the indigenous populations in the Americas long before colonizers arrived by the boatload). Reductionism has its attractions, but it offends me on principle, like saying the “real” reason Rome fell was because of lead poisoning. I’m not sure if my caveat is just, and I should really finish the book before I talk more about it. And I should definitely read the Diamond books.
I got about halfway through 1491 when I was home ill and had to stay in bed – and since then, other books have claimed my attention:
Pretender: the latest book in CJ Cherryh’s atevi series! Not the strongest entry, but even less-than-stellar Cherryh is better than most anyone else. This has the usual fine invention/description of a truly alien world, with a truly alien culture and politics. This is a world in which humans are a minority and confined to one island-continent – except for the main character, Bren Cameron, who was supposed to be the latest in a long line of translators, nothing more, but who got embroiled in ateva politics and went native.
Gilead: Not my usual run of book at all, being the fictional reminiscence of an elderly preacher in rural America circa 1940-ish. It’s an interesting read, a glimpse into what might as well be as alien a mind as Cherryh’s atevi, but thus far not particularly mind-shaking.
Broken for You: Again, not my usual choice; this one a friend at work practically begged me to read, so I did. And it was an absolute delight, a source of wonder with every turned page, where hardly anything or anyone was predictable. It’s hard to try boiling down to a brief description: a young girl recovering from a bad love affair comes to Seattle and takes a room in a huge old house owned by an elderly, reclusive woman who seems a bit crazy. Chaos, tragedy, hilarity, romance, and revelation ensue; along with broken-crockery artwork. I recommend it highly.
Still on the pile waiting: Antartica, by Kim Stanley Robinson (to keep me happy while awaiting his 3rd book in the GCC series); and The Subtle Knife, the second book in Philip Pullman’s Dark Materials trilogy.
rilkefan
The Goodman book got panned by someone I trust, can’t recall who – will be sure to check out your review though.
KSR’s Antarctica is an excellent novel.
Reading the ’05 Best American Mystery Stories, full of strong stuff, and Kelly Link’s Stranger Things Happen (freely available here), which is probably very good if you like what it’s like (itself and nothing else).
The Other Steve
I’m reading ‘Misquoting Jesus : The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why’ by Bart Ehrman. I also bought ‘What Jesus Meant’ by Garry Wills which will be next.
It started when I heard Wills on MPR one morning.
The Ehrman book is interesting so far. He’s one of the top biblical scholars in the country, and started out as a fundie. I mean a real honest to goodness 100% grade-A wingnut. But he describes as he learned more, he started to understand that they are terribly misguided in their understanding of the Bible and where it comes from. So this book is basically his detailing that journey to enlightenment.
feral1
Guns, Germs, and Steel is one of the most important books I’ve ever read. Very convincing explanation for why societies evolved in the way they have. I’m reading Collapse now.
Sam Hutcheson
The Ehrman book is interesting so far. He’s one of the top biblical scholars in the country, and started out as a fundie. I mean a real honest to goodness 100% grade-A wingnut. But he describes as he learned more, he started to understand that they are terribly misguided in their understanding of the Bible and where it comes from. So this book is basically his detailing that journey to enlightenment.
Not to pick nits, but my understanding of Ehrman’s unconversion is that he came to doubt, more and more, the message of omnipotence and benevolence due to human suffering throughout the world, and that’s what led him “out” of fundie land. The fact that fundies don’t understand Biblical scholarship is just icing on the cake.
Again, probably picking nits, but I don’t think he lost his faith due to scholarly understanding of biblical manuscripts. Rather, he lost his faith due to the preponderance of suffering throughout a supposedly just and good creation, and his scholarship simply furthered that loss.
CaptainComeback
I’ve read Collapse, and have Guns Germs and & Steel, but haven’t read it yet. Collapse was thoroughly interesting and thought provoking. It’s always amazing how, in nature everything is connected, so each action typically as some type of cascading reactions that affects more than you thought. Jarred Diamond is great.
In the past few months I have read, Gorgon, Feakonomics, Contempt, The History of American Secularism, Ancient Man in Briton, and a few other computer books.
Andrew
If you like Jared Diamond’s book I also suggest you read The Third Chimpanzee and Why is Sex Fun. They are both very interesting. If you enjoy them, also read Darwin’s Ghost by Steve Jones.
ET
I will throw my suggestion in for whatever it’s worth. It got some press recently because of Katrina. Goes into the history of the Corps’ management of the Mississippi River, the rise of Herbert Hoover, and it it a good story. I have his The Great Influenza but haven’t gotten to it yet.
Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America
John M. Barry
SeesThroughIt
I really want to read this book. It sounds fascinating–and very important.
Being a hardcore music nerd, I’m a big fan of Beethoven’s Anvil by William Benzon. It’s about music, the brain, and intellectual development and argues–scientifically–that music is not so much a pleasurable diversion as it is a remarkably important part of human development, lagging somewhat behind but still in the same echelon as things like language.
Retief
I’m not a fan of Jared Diamond, and his argument about longitude versus latitude offends me. We don’t see a big horizontal band of rice cultivation streching from lisbon to shanghai, and we don’t see a big band of bok choi cultivation stretching from beijing to berlin. And we do see maize beans and squash cultivated throughout the americas, just as we see similar foods in vertical cluster from Pyoung-yang to Singapore, His theory doesn’t match reality. And even if it did, explaining Eurasia’s advantages does nothing to explain the domination of the one little corner of that landmass called Europe. He claims to want to discover why wealth and power became distributed as they now are. They became thus distributed when Europeans took over the world. But he immediately muddies the waters by explaining why Eurasians dominated not why Europeans did. Yali is convenient because he is on an island. If a local brown politician had asked the question in Shanghai, Seoul, Hanoi, Bangkok, Tashkent, Mumbai, Peshawar, Damascus, Grozny, Cairo, or Istanbul, Diamond’s answer about the inherent advantages of the Eurasian continent becomes a lot less interesting.
The Other Steve
Could be. That’s not what the book really says, at least not thus far… and I’m only about half way through it.
His argument has basically been that the fundies consider it the inerrant divine word of God, but through his scholarship he’s found it’s chock full of errors, most of them placed in ther by men either by accident or purpose.
What’s fundamental to this, I think, is that even though scholars have found these errors, they do not argue that negates the importance of the word. Taht’s where the fundies get into trouble.
Steve
I read an excellent book last year entitled Contempt of Court : The Turn-of-the-Century Lynching That Launched a Hundred Years of Federalism. It’s really good.
MattM
Seconding the recommendation for Diamond’s “The Third Chimpanzee.” Probably the most readable account of evolutionary action on human behaviors.
Steven Donegal
I’m currently reading Ray Kurzweil’s “The Singularity is Near.” Fascinating hypothesis about the future (and frankly quite disturbing to this neo-Luddite).
MAX HATS
Diamond offers a compelling theory, but his outlook is absurdly reductionist.
jg
Still working on Phillip K Dick short stories and novels. I need a break from politics when I read.
Eural
OK, my current favorite is Love, Sex, Tragedy: How the Ancient World Shapes Our Lives by Simon Goldhill. He’s got a fantastic writing style and really spans the spectrum of our culture from sex to religion to language to politics. Fascinating stuff about the classical Greek version of these with constant comparisons to our current views.
Speaking of Jesus being “misquoted” he has an interesting little story comparing Jesus’ words in Mark 4 vs. Matthew 13. It really does raise many an interesting issue. Ask yourself this question: why did Jesus teach in parables? Come up with your own answer and then read Mark 4:12-14 and compare with the answer in Matthew 13. Mindblowing stuff and beautifully, entertainingly written.
He also has a great essay comparing the attitudes of the Athenian citizens to their democracy versus our modern conception. Quite a bit of difference. “Modern democracies talk obsessively about rights. Ancient democracy thought of citizenship more as an issue of duties and activities.”
srv
Here’s a story that’ll make a great book on the WoT – The Lodi California “terrorist” trial. So far, the latest from the FBI informant (who was paid $250K to spy on a domestic “terrorist” with diminshed mental capacity):
Once again, the G-men have our backs… Cuckoo! Cuckoo!
Bob In Pacifica
I bought the O’Connor collection specifically to read “A Good Man Is Hard To Find,” a story for our times. If you know the story I see George Bush as The Misfit, only with less clarity and self-awareness.
My book of the moment now is BARRY & THE BOYS by Daniel Hopsicker, about Barry Seal. Or “The CIA, The Mob and America’s Secret History.” I’m only fifty pages in and already it turns out that Barry Seal, Lee Harvey Oswald and David Ferrie were all together in the Civil Air Patrol down in Louisiana in the 1950s.
Anyone have a good recipe for gumbo?
Bob In Pacifica
rilkefan, I was a big fan of the Matt Scudder series by Lawrence Block. You familiar with it? Any suggestions for mystery stories along that line, or otherwise?
Paddy O'Shea
Currently enjoying “Imposter: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America And Betrayed The Reagan Legacy.” Author is Bruce Bartlett, former Reagan staffer and a man trying to keep the conservative flame alive now that Hurricane George has leveled the right half of the countryside.
Conservatives writing books trashing Bush seems to be quite an industry these days. But then again, it does make sense. How do you keep the conservative dream alive after the collapse of Emperor Georgie? Convince the ideologically inclined that Bush really wasn’t a conservative after all, but rather a charlatan he used the hopes and aspirations of good people to put forward an agenda that in the end sold them all out.
You gotta laugh.
Also reading Athol Fugard’s “Tsotsi.” Dug the movie, figured I should pick up the book and see what the differences might be.
Next in the pile is Dana Spiotta’s “Eat the Document.” Recommended by a friend.
CaseyL
Bob, have you ever read Thomas Perry’s books? If you like Block, you might like Perry. Esp. “The Butcher’s Boy” and its sequel, “Sleeping Dogs,” where the main character is a sympathetic hitman. The humor is as dry as Block, and the characters as quirky.
Callimachus
The Easter Island model in your book might not be right after all:
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18925434.300&feedId=being-human_rss20
Jess
Let me toss in two books that are making me rethink a lot of what I believed–I don’t always agree with the authors’ arguments, but I think they should be required reading for anyone who thinks of him/herself as a moderate:
“The Blank Slate” by Steven Pinker
“The Silent Takeover: Global Capitalism and the Death of Democracy” by Noreena Hertz
Both are well written, well argued, and I think pretty fair despite their provokative arguments. I occasionally bring them into the classroom, and they always generate some very good discussions.
Thanks for your review of “Collapse,” Tim–I’ve been looking forward to reading it for some time.
rilkefan
‘Fraid I don’t know this person. People have no idea what books to get me so I read random stuff post-birthday. I reread all of Raymond Chandler’s work compulsively, and I’m working my way through the Dortmunder series by Westlake. Bank Shot for example is inspired.
I for one found The 3rd Chimpanzee weak.
Flannery O’Connor is frighteningly strong. “Good Country People” and “Everything That Rises Must Converge” and “Revelation” are painful and amazing.
Synuclein
My best read lately is “Beyond Fear” by Bruce Schneier — a preeminent IT security/crypto guy who can easily carry his skillset over to the rest of his life. He gives some simple, straightforward models for “good” versus “bad” security and does it in a way that a layman (non-programmer) can easily understand.
In this book, he explains why its no more risky to use your credit card online than over the phone (or even in a store), and why “profiling” can work when applied properly — NOT doing the DWB/FWM (flying while muslim) kind of thing, but using well-trained human resources to look for irregular behaviour patterns. This is the kind of thing that the Israelis do very well in protecting their airline passengers, etc.
What’s also interesting is that he also accurately and concisely explains why a lot of the “security” measures the gov’t has been taking are largely going to be ineffective — mainly because they are “static” (i.e. increased airport screening security provides no protection against a truck bomb at a mall) rather than “dynamic”.
BTW, he also has a great blog with regular updates on security issues and a weekly squid posting.