A majestic sweep over 500 years of Western Civilization. Barzun charts the rises and falls of the West in the arts, philosophy, politics, literature, and science. His writing is lively and conversational, a must for a book of this size.
He largely avoids moralizing and presents the passing centuries in their own context and shows how judgements of the past by the present are often ill-considered and unfair.
He is the least compassionate for our most recent century, and concludes that the 20th has seen the decline of the West since the early 1900’s. The book thus ends on a bit of melancholy.
Dennett presents a splendid defense of free will in the face of materialism and Darwinism. He also puts to bed the notion that quantum mechanics could somehow “save” free will from determinism. This book is an excellent antidote to a lot of muddled thinking about free will including Blackmore’s The Meme Machine.
Blackmore presents her theory of the meme, the cultural and mental equivalent of the gene. Her approach is quite similar to Dawkin’s The Selfish Gene and emphasizes the “meme’s eye view” to develop theories on the origin of language, religion, and altruism, among other things.
Dawkins himself wrote the foreword for the book and he is careful to avoid endorsing the theory directly. I suspect he does not fully embrace it. Neither do I; though many of the arguments are compelling, Blackmore confuses, as Dennett likes to say, “explaining” with “explaining away” and ends up denying human free will. The book concludes with a rather fuzzy and shallow Zen Buddhism as a substitute.
I had never read Pinkwater before – it was a real treat. Most of the novels start out quite ordinarily and gradualy become stranger and funnier as they proceed. Great fun.
An economist and a writer investigate novel problems using the numerical tools of economics. The findings are fascinating, but the non-numerical analysis of the results often seems shallow.
A humane but honest portrait of an Afghani patriarch and his family after the fall of the Taliban. Seierstad shows the struggles of the Afghan people to emerge from the chaos of their history, the joys and sorrows of their daily lives, and, especially, the plight of women under conservative Islam.
A brisk overview of humankind’s first few hundred thousand years taking us right up to the present. Given the scope Cook has to tread lightly but he does sprinkle in observations from all parts of the globe.
