After years of work by many people, we’ve finally published my mother’s memoirs. “My Short Century” by Lorna Arnold is now available from Lulu. A Kindle version is on the way, and both of them should show up on Amazon quite soon.

Here’s my Amazon review of Ernest Cline’s “Ready Player One”:

Simple Wonderful (five stars)
The 80s were an interesting decade: the first personal computers, the first video games (in arcades and in the home), the first music videos, and a string of wonderful movies that brought together teenage angst, over-the-top technology, exuberant fantasy, and epic quests. So what would seem more natural than to wrap up all of these themes into the ultimate epic video game quest of all time? What better distraction could we have from the dystopia of The Decline And Fall Of Just About Everything?
Read it. Just read it. I wish Douglas Adams was around to endorse it. And I hope you feel the same guilty pleasure that I experienced each time I worked out a puzzle before the protagonist had got there. (Isn’t being competitive what this is all about?)
And now I have to go and dust off my PS3 and kick some zombie butt….

Actually I have just acquired a PS3, but my game of choice is Soul Calibur IV. So rather than hacking zombies, I’ll be chasing sword-fighting maidens in skimpy clothing and High German knights in blood-stained armour…

I just received my copy of Iain M. Banks’ “Surface Detail” from Amazon. A new Culture novel. 626 pages. Mmmmm!

David Chalmers just blogged that his collection of papers, The Character of Consciousness, has finally been published. It first showed up on Amazon back in 2007, and my email inbox includes a slightly testy exchange with David about the ever-changing publication date. Never mind. My copy should be here on Wednesday, and I’m looking forward to reading and reviewing it. I don’t agree with his somewhat “mysterian” views, but I’ve always felt that the best way to understand one’s own position is to read the best of the opposition, and David certainly represents this.
While I was ordering this book, I checked to see if Chalmers showed up anywhere else. He did: as an author of Mind and Consciousness: 5 Questions. This is a collection of essays by many leading lights in the philosophy of mind, edited by Patrick Grim. I hadn’t heard of it before, but ordered it immediately. Even if one has read some of the pieces before, a well-edited anthology can be an invaluable way of capturing the state of an academic debate.

Back in April I reviewed Christopher Hitchens’ memoir, “Hitch 22”. In my remarks, I focussed on the literary style and the content of the work, without offering any opinions about the positions which Hitchens has endorsed. Regular readers of my blog will know that I generally agree with him on the topic of religion, and strongly disagree with him when it comes to the United States’ disastrous policies of regime change, nation building, and other military adventures. One thing that I did not do, however, was to discuss how Hitchens thinks. In a recent review in the New York Review of Books, Ian Buruma does exactly that. The result is a powerful indictment of the way in which Hitchens abandoned skepticism and irony in favor of simplistic emotion.

Another typical word in Hitchens’s lexicon is “intoxication.” This can literally mean drunk. But that is not what Hitchens means. Writing about his early political awakening, when he shared with his fellow International Socialists a “consciousness of rectitude,” he claims:

If you have never yourself had the experience of feeling that you are yoked to the great steam engine of history, then allow me to inform you that the conviction is a very intoxicating one.

This must be true. When Hitchens became a journalist for the New Statesman, after graduating from Oxford, he adopted a pleasing kind of double life, part reporter, part revolutionary activist, imagining how he might help an IRA terrorist hide from the law. He found this double life “more than just figuratively intoxicating.” One can only assume that intoxication again played a part when he took the view that yoking himself to George W. Bush’s war was to hitch a ride on the great steam engine of history.
The trouble with intoxication, figurative or not, is that it stands in the way of reason. It simplifies things too much, as does seeing the world in terms of heroes and villains. Or, indeed, the dogmatic notion that all religion is bad, and secularism always on the right side of history.

(My emphasis.)
The biggest challenge for a soi-disant skeptic is to hold his or her own thinking – and that of one’s comrades – to the standard applied to others. And in this Hitchens has generally failed:

Again, the narcissism, the narrow scale of characters, and the parochial perspective are startling: “We were the only ones to see 1968 coming.” It is as if the central focus of the Iraq war was about scores to be settled between Hitchens and Noam Chomsky or Edward Said. It is odd that in all his lengthy accounts of the war, the name of Dick Cheney is mentioned only once (because he happened to share the same dentist with Hitchens). What is utterly missing is a sense of perspective, and of the two qualities Hitchens claims to prize above all: skepticism and irony. A skeptic would not answer the question whether he blamed his former leftist friends for criticizing the war with: “Yes, absolutely. I was right, and they were wrong, that’s pretty much it in a nutshell.” Asked about his literary influences, Hitchens mentioned Arthur Koestler. He was right on the mark. Koestler, too, lurched from cause to cause, always with the same unshakable conviction.

I love Hitchens’ writing, and his bravura performances of rhetoric. I do not believe that they would be diminished by a modicum of reflection and humility. I would love to read his thoughtful response to this insightful review by Buruma.

Here’s my review at Amazon.com of the new novel by Iain M. Banks, Transition:

Insidiously exquisite, ultimately essential (5 stars)
I’ve always loved Iain M. Banks’ science fiction novels, especially his “Culture” books with their huge sentient spaceships and breathtaking worlds. The Player of Games is a particular favourite. And Ive also enjoyed what I think of as his various experiments: The Algebraist, and Matter.
This isn’t a “Culture” book. There are worlds – or at least a multiverse – but no spaceships. Bits of it are about the present. The characters are all recognizably human (there are no aliens or sentient machines), which doesn’t say as much as you might think. But it’s unmistakably by Iain M. Banks.
I’ve never been able to get into Iain Banks stark and gritty fiction, like The Wasp Factory or Whit. “Dark“, “twisted” novels are just fine, up to a point, but I’ve always found that Banks goes just past that point. Friends tell me I ought to try The Crow Road, which is supposedly dark, twisted, and funny. Maybe.
This isn’t dark. It’s twisted, in many ways. The characters are all recognizable to the modern eye, which doesn’t say as much as you might think. But it’s unmistakably by Iain Banks.
At least one reviewer said that he(?) couldn’t be bothered with this, and gave up after about 100 pages. In my case, I started it on a plane, got distracted, and tentatively decided that I would wait until I got home from my present business trip to finish it. But after a couple of days I found that I couldn’t stay away. It was as though the skein of this odd book had got snagged on a hangnail, and I couldn’t shake it off. (Ugh. Try another mixed metaphor.) I found myself reading it (on my iPad, using the Kindle reader) at every opportunity I got. Over breakfast. In between meetings. In my favourite cocktail bar here in Shenzhen.
Part of me wants to proclaim that it’s the best thing I’ve read in years. Other bits of me are still confused. I think that this is a very commendable thing. More books should have these effects.
I think that will suffice. I recommend it to the curious and the flexible among you.

I just posted my review of Christopher Hitchens’ new book “Hitch 22” over at Amazon.com. This is what I wrote:

Must read. No excuses.
Let’s get the most important bit out of the way first. You ought to read this book. If you love good, insightful, literate, compelling writing then you must read it. You will not agree with all of it, maybe not even most of it. That’s OK. Echo chambers are sterile places: creativity and energy comes from conflict.
It’s tempting to adopt a personal approach to this book. After all, there are a number of points of commonality between Hitchens’ life and mine – our origins in post-war England, our youthful socialism, our migrations to the United States at the beginning on the 1980s, our uncompromising atheism, and anger at institutionalized mumbo-jumbo. But it would be a mistake for me to try to take this too far. At our cores, we are very different. Hitchens is an actor, a performance artist, a painter. He paints with words. He’s a passionate romantic, with the creative energy and curious myopia which this engenders.
Above all – and even though he is ambivalent about the term – he is a contrarian. He is defined by his oppositions, his targets. Mother Teresa. Henry Kissinger. Bill Clinton. Saddam Hussein. Ayatollah Kohmeini The Pope, and religion in general. And his opponents have to be big, controversial, and deserving of his attention. I searched the book in vain for any opinions of George W. Bush, and eventually concluded that Hitchens didn’t consider him worth comment. (And Hitchens chooses his targets because they trigger his passions – he feels no obligation to be even-handed or consistent.)
This is also an account of friendships of various kinds: the mentor, the partner in crime, the defender and advocate. I came away with the strong impression that for Hitchens, friendship is more important than love, which is an old idea that is rather out of fashion. It is not about intimacy, unless this is taken to include the intellect.
At the end, both I and the author seemed to come to the same conclusion: the memoir is not exactly a natural vehicle for Hitchens’ extraordinary literary talents. How does one end such a work? In my case, I set aside “Hitch 22” and turned to what I regard as his best work: his slim volume on Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man.

Before my last overseas trip, I loaded Simon Schama’s book “The American Future” onto my Kindle.
I enjoyed it immensely: a witty ramble across the history and geography of the United States, neatly linked to the momentous political events of late 2008. Highly recommended. Soon afterwards, Kate got it out of the library, and she too enjoyed it. And then we wondered. We’d enjoyed several of Schama’s earlier TV series – on art, and British history – and it seemed plausible that the book of “The American Future” might be tied to a BBC TV series. That’s the way the media business seems to work these days. We checked, and indeed it was, and the DVDs were available. So we ordered them from Netflix. They arrived a couple of days ago.
Oh dear.
Well, there was some beautiful photography. Lots of shots of American landscapes, often with Simon Schama gazing thoughtfully out across the prairie, or the river, or the mountain. But the narrative was slow, and the editing repetitive, and the whole thing was simply dull. Deadly dull. Tedious.
So skip the DVD, but get the book. It’s magnificent. And it’s cheaper.

Here’s my latest Amazon review, for “Bozo Sapiens” by Michael Kaplan and Ellen Kaplan:

Explaining ourselves
Why are humans the way they are? Why do we make such stupid (and obvious) mistakes all the time? Why are we so bad at estimating probability? Why do we fall for scams? As the Kaplans ask, “Is it instinctive for people – our doltish enemies, our spontaneous selves – to get things wrong?”
Yes, this is another book about evolutionary psychology, and one of the most approachable that I’ve encountered. It casts its net wide; after a brief introduction, we get four chapters on topics as diverse as economics; perception, language and thinking; error in action; and social structures and relations. The penultimate chapter, “Fresh off the Pleistocene Bus”, considers the difference and (more important) continuity between us and our ancestors from 70,000 years ago. The authors close with “Living Right”: the origins of our sense of what is right, civil, moral, and just, and the way in which “we accommodate the tensions between our simple primate emotions and our bewildering world through the connective tissue of culture.”
This is a delightful book. It nicely complements and extends Dennis Dutton’s outstanding The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution. As I was reading it, I worried slightly that the Kaplans had spread themselves too thin, and were attempting to bring in too many topics. By the time I finished, those fears had disappeared. I think they’ve struck just the right balance.
The advance reading copy that I had did not include an index; I’m not sure if one is planned. It did, however, include copious end-notes, and they are uniformly good. Perhaps footnotes would have been better, simply because they’re less easily overlooked. But this is a minor point.
Highly recommended.

I’ve just finished reading the latest collection of Edge essays: What Have You Changed Your Mind About? Here’s my Amazon review:

Of course it’s mixed… isn’t that the point?
Most non-fiction books are written to advance a thesis; to present a conclusion, a theory which explains the facts. When you realize that you’ve got something wrong, that you have to change your mind, it’s natural to be somewhat restrained about the fact. After all, we live in a society that demands certainty – however absurd that expectation may be – and castigates people as “flip-floppers”. I think that we could all benefit from reading about how thoughtful men and women were humble and open enough to admit that they were wrong.
Oh sure, this is a mixed bag. There are a few essays where you get to the end and scratch your head, wondering whatever happened to the purported change. But most are excellent. There are some obvious common themes: cosmology, evolution, climate change, science and religion, gender, consciousness. It seems intuitively obvious that these big questions which have both a scientific and a societal dimension will be associated with skepticism and revision.
Any reader of a book like this is going to be faced with the personal question: what have I changed my mind about? Well, 10 years ago I was in the computational neuroscience camp: I thought that the Churchlands had got most of it right. Somewhere along the way, I realized that biology, from the simplest plants to the most cerebral animals, was actually based on information systems. I’m not talking about computers as metaphors for brains, or anything like that; I mean that at some, very early point, the self-replicating information patterns co-opted and started to organize the material substrates of life.

And just for the record, this blog entry was composed in a copy of Firefox running on OpenSolaris 2008.11, hosted on my Mac Mini using VirtualBox.