Sinclair Lewis: Arrowsmith
I'm not enjoying this. Power through it, man!
Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle: The Mote in God's Eye
(8/8/2021) (****)
Asimov, Isaac: The Gods Themselves
(8/2/2020) ‘Against stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain.’ Awesome! (*****)
Oscar Wilde: The Importance of Being Earnest
(7/11/2020) ‘A Trivial Comedy for Serious People.’ Well, that's about half right. It is trivial, but occasionally funny, especially toward the end. It's also frequently nihilist. (G.B. Shaw panned it as ‘heartless’, which is also true.) Serious people will spit. (***)
Kagan, Donald: The Peloponnesian War
(6/21/2020) (****)
Dan Barker: God: The Most Unpleasant Character in All Fiction
(1/12/2019) In the second chapter of his book The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins says that:
‘The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all of fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomanical, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully. Those of us schooled from infancy in his ways can become desensitized to their horror.’
Barker provides hundreds of citations, using the best available biblical translation (NRSV). They are devastating to the case for a loving, moral God, but for some reason Barker sometimes (quite unnecessarily!) reads more into the text than is justified. Let the reader beware (Think for yourself!), but this is essential reading all the same.
And yes, the ‘offering’ of Isaac was understood to be burnt, English-language euphemism notwithstanding. Isaac wasn't the only Old Testament child ‘offered’ to God in this way, but he was was luckier than most. (****)
Daniel C. Dennett: Freedom Evolves
(11/5/2019) I didn't always follow his argument (maybe his fault, maybe mine), so I'll need to read this again. (****)
Robert Louis Stevenson: The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
(09/25/2019) No, Amazon, this is not about multiple personality disorder or whatever you want to call it. (!) Maroons. (****)
Frederick Douglass: Life and Times of Frederick Douglass
(8/30/2019) (*****)
Alexandre Dumas: The Three Musketeers
(08/06/2019) (***)
Bernard Lewis: What Went Wrong?: Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response
(07/13/2019) (****)
Larry Niven: Footfall
(06/22/2019) Lost it's chance at five stars due to an unreasonable implausibility at the end.
But Project Orion? Really? (****)
Barbara W. Tuchman: Bible and Sword: England and Palestine from the Bronze Age to Balfour
(06/13/2019) ‘As regards the fortunes of the Jews, and of Israel, I am not detached but emotionally involved. That may be permissible or unavoidable to a journalist who tends to become advocate or adversary on strongly-felt issues, but it invalidates the work of a historian. I found this out when at the request of the original publisher I tried indeed to carry the narrative through 1948. It turned into polemic. The British betrayal of their own impulse in establishing the national home; the White Paper policy; the collusion with the Arabs; the ramming of the Exodus and detention of Jewish refugees from Hitler in new concentration camps on Cyprus; and, finally, the encouragement of the Arab offensive on the heels of the Britain's departure was all impossible to relate without outrage. This is not a suitable condition for a historian. The pages I produced were out of keeping with the rest of the book and would have impaired its value. I tore them up and let the book terminate, as originally planned, in 1918.’ (****)
Manfred von Richthofen: The Red Fighter Pilot: The Autobiography of the Red Baron
(4/18/2019) (***)
Ernest Hemingway: For Whom the Bell Tolls
(4/3/2019) (****)
Voltaire: Candide
(3/31/2019) Bwahahahaha! (****)
Daniel C. Dennett: Intuition Pumps And Other Tools for Thinking
(3/29/2019) (****)
H.G. Wells: The Time Machine
(3/21/2019) (****)
Justin Pollard and Howard Reid: The Rise and Fall of Alexandria: Birthplace of the Modern World
(3/18/2019) Very good, but it's very hard to keep track of all the Ptolemys! (****)
Robert A. Heinlein: The Puppet Masters
(3/12/2019) (****)
Ayn Rand: The Fountainhead
(3/11/2019) I've read this before, but missed a lot of the jokes. There's a lot going on here, you know? (*****)
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