Posts Tagged ‘Books’

And another thing…

October 23rd, 2009
And another thing

And another thing

On 11 May 2001 Douglas Adams, author of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, passed away. He was my favourite author and is probably much to blame for how my sense of humour turned out. One unfinished book, the Salmon of Doubt, was published posthumously along with a collection of essays Adams had written.  Arthur Dent and Dirk Gently were gone, or so I thought.

Earlier this week the words “Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” caught my eye in the new releases section in a city bookshop. It seems that Adams’s estate decided that the 30th anniversary of the original was a good time for the sixth book in the Hitchhiker’s trilogy¹ to be released.

Children’s author Eoin Colfer, whose works include the Artemis Fowl series, was invited to turn his hand to writing for adults, and so we now see And Another Thing on the shelves. I’m sure that Adams’s wife, Jane Belson, and others took a great deal of care in selecting the author they felt best able to step into Adams’s shoes – large both metaphorically and literally – but I felt a little odd about a Hitchhiker’s book by anyone other than Adams. I’m sure a lot of his fans will feel similarly².

Today I decided to get past that, and picked up a copy. While I’m sure Colfer can’t fill Adams’s shoes, I’m hoping that at least the footsteps will sound nicely familiar. The book I’m currently reading is a book of essays, so I’ll interrupt that and delve into Life, the Universe and Everything once more this weekend.

1. Yes, a trilogy in six parts. If you were a fan you wouldn’t need to be assured it is correct.
2. This is a gratuitous footnote.

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Liberty in the age of terror – A.C. Grayling

August 23rd, 2009

A.C. Grayling's new book

Free speech is the fundamental civil liberty. Without it none of the others can even be claimed or defended without it. That is one reason why there has to be a refusal to allow ‘feeling offended’ to serve as a license to censor the freedom to criticise or satirise.

‘Taking offence’ is a major technique of censorship employed especially by religious organisations and groups. Yet every religion, even the largest, is in a minority in the world at large; most people do not accept or share the sensitivities of any but one of them. If a religion is mature and self-confident, it should be able to bear with the disagreements, opposition, criticism and even ridicule of outsiders. The hysterical and disproportionate Muslim response to the Danish newspaper cartoons, for one example, suggests a profound lack of both those characteristics.

Social and political satire is one of the healthy features of debate in liberal democracies, and so is challenge and criticism. Efforts to silence people who say things you do not like to hear are regressive and unacceptable. Everyone who believes in a free, open and grown-up society should reject attempts to bully others into silence: free speech is imply too important to be compromised by anything other than the very best and most urgent of considerations.

From A.C. Grayling’s Liberty in the age of terror

A.C. Grayling’s collections of essays have been favourites of mine in the past. The essays range across everything from religion to architecture to modern dance, drawing on history and philosophy to illuminate the subject matter. He’s just released a new book, Liberty in the age of terror, a call to defend liberty in an age when Western democracies are stripping it from their citizens in reponse to terrorism. Grayling writes in a wonderfully readable style, unlike many philosophers who seem to think impenetrable text is a sign of a good philosopher. The discussion of the paradox of tolerance, including the distinction between tolerance and indifference, has been the high point for me so far, as I get to the half way point of the book.

This is the sixth bgook by Grayling that I’ve read. I have enjoyed them all, and certainly intend to get more. Any of his books would be a great addition to your reading list and, in the present world, this newest one would be a good place to start.

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Andrew Parker sells his soul

August 4th, 2009
Why?

Why?

Today I stopped in at Collins Books at Smithfield to see if anything new and interesting had hit the shelves. The name Andrew Parker caught my eye, as I had enjoyed his previous books, In the blink of an eye and Seven deadly colours. His latest book is the Genesis Enigma. The title had me thinking “What the ****?” I read the jacket, and then had a skim. I found myself greatly disappointed.

There’s a long history of people trying to reconcile the Bible (or the Quran) with reality, and they fall into two camps. Those that distort reality to make it fit the Bible (Creationists), and those that distort the Bible to make it fit reality. Parker has decided to join the latter camp. His book claims that the Book of Genesis describes the order of events in evolution. An example of the shoddiness of this book is Parker’s suggestion that the Bible’s “Let there be light” is a reference to the evolution of the eye… Seriously, it’s that bad. Parker desperately twists and contorts the Bible in an attempt to shoehorn it into evolutionary history.

I wondered to myself “Why has he done this? He’s done good science books in the past, why write such crap?”. When I got home I turned to Google to see if I could find some clues. I found the text “Andrew Parker is a Honorary Research Fellow of Green Templeton College at Oxford University.” Argh! Templeton! I went to the Green Templeton College website, and confirmed that it was indeed THAT Templeton.

The Templeton Foundation is an attempt by a now deceased rich conservative Evangelical Christian to buy scientists that say that religion is good and that there is a god, and use sciencey sounding stuff to do so. While the Templeton Foundation is not Creationist and does not support Intelligent Design, and deserves some credit for that, it’s really just a desperate attempt to try to rationalise religion. The Templeton Foundation rewards the sell outs with large sums of money including the Templeton Prize, the monetary component of which he deliberately set just that little bit higher than the Nobel Prize.

If you see the Genesis Enigma in the shops, save your money. It’s crap. Certainly his other books are well worth reading, but Parker should be ashamed of his latest effort.

Andrew Parker has sold his soul to the Templeton Foundation. I wonder how much he got.

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Trick or Treatment

July 11th, 2009

This morning I dropped in to Collins Books at Smithfield, like I do most Saturdays, to see if there were any new titles on the shelves I might like to read. I’ve found that they tend to have the best selection of science and philosophy/religion books in town. I was pleasantly surprised to find Simon Singh and Edzard Ernst’s Trick or Treatment, which I’ve been planning to order for a couple of weeks, and grabbed a copy.

Singh is in the news at the moment as he is being sued by the British Chiropractic Association over an article he wrote for the Guardian in which he criticised chiropractic treatment of childhood illnesses such as colic. The case has attracted a lot of publicity, with Singh even being interviewed on ABC’s Lateline here in Australia. I’m pretty sure that the BCA case is the reason the book is starting to appear on the shelves.

As many organisations have learned in the past, the worst way to silence a critic is to sue them in the digital age. It just gets your critic publicity, and the backlash can be quite stunning. The BCA and chiropractors in general are now feeling this effect, with light being cast upon the shadow they dwell in, and complaints being lodged with health standards organisations. The criticism is well deserved.

Trick or Treatment consists of dedicated chapters on how science tests treatments, acupuncture, homeopathy, chiropractic and herbal medicine. It closes with a “rapid guide to alternative therapies” which briefly covers many other claimed therapies. Collins Smithfield still had one copy in stock after my visit. I hope they’ll need to order more.

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Existential vs spiritual

April 30th, 2009

Whenever you have an experience of a certian sort, you get to name it. If an experience puts you in mind of your own humanness, your connection to a vast network of natural phenomena, and to mysteries that can’t be solved, you can call that an existential experience, or you can call it a spiritual experience. Both of these wrods are available to you. The first returns you to your path of personal responsibility, meaning-making, ethics-making, and authenticity. The second leads you down the primrose path to supernatural enthusiasm.

This is the difference between staring at the Ganges River, feeling something powerful arise in you, and returning to your fight against dysentery, on the one hand, or carving a totem to Ganga, the Hindu goddess of the river, on the other. If you call your powerful experience existential, you are likely to return to your meaningful work as a research biologist. If you call it spiritual, you are likely to fall to your knees and perpetuate mythology. The experience is the sane in each case: rich, powerful, human and motivating. But how you interpret it and what it motivates you to do are completely up to you.

from The Atheist’s Way by Eric Maisel

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Judging a book by its cover

April 8th, 2009
this-book-has-issues

This book has issues

A little while ago I was browsing the shelves of Collins Booksellers at Smithfield, which I find the best bookshop in Cairns for someone with a preference for non-fiction, and the cover of a book in the philosophy and psychology section caught my attention. The book was This book has issues by Christian Jarrett and Joannah Ginsburg. I had a quick look in, and found it to be a nice little set of short passages on various ideas in psychology. I bought a copy and found it an enjoyable read. I had encountered quite a bit of the material it covered before, but there were a lot of ideas that were new to me. It’s a nice easy introduction to many ideas in psychology, and I’d recommend it to people new to the subject.

This is not a book

This is not a book

Today I was back in Collins looking for some more reading material. My eye passed briefly over a book thinking it was the above mentioned title, then it clicked that it was a new book in what I assume is becoming a series. It has the same format and style, again with a rather eye catching cover. This is not a book by Michael Picard is a brief introduction to basic ideas in philosophy. It’s set out in the same short sections as This book has issues, allowing you to just dive in briefly while having coffee, sitting on a bus, or, um… being temporarily indisposed. The cover is a play on Magritte’s famous painting Ceci n’est pas une pipe, which emphasized the difference between an object and an image of that object. It’s an image that I first found in Desmond Morris’s the Human Animal, and it has always resonated with me. I have often thought about getting a framed print for the lounge room. Magritte once said of his painting, “The famous pipe. How people reproached me for it! And yet, could you stuff my pipe? No, it’s just a representation, is it not? So if I had written on my picture ‘This is a pipe,’ I’d have been lying!”

This is not a book is now in my little pile of books to be read.

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The Shock Doctrine

October 6th, 2008

“We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn’t do it, but God did.” – Republican Congressman Richard Baker following Hurricane Katrina, from Naomi Klein’s the Shock Doctrine. In her book, Naomi Klein discusses the way in which corporations and politicians take advantage of, and even engineer, crises in order to pave the way for introduction of Milton Friedman’s free market fundamentalism. She talks about her book in the video below.

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