Category: Books

Majikthise has posted a couple of pieces here and here providing useful links to discussions of Dan Dennett’s book and Wieseltier’s execrable review. She quotes from an email from Dennett to a physicist who had written to him about the review:

Look at it this way: I am running an experiment. The question is: can thoughtful religious people read my book without losing it? Some can; some can’t. That’s something worth knowing. I’m sure there will be many more data points in the coming months. It will be interesting to see what the pattern is. Ugly? Yes, but experimenters often have to endure gross things in order to get the evidence they need.

UPDATE: In reading through some of the blogs comenting on the Wieseltier review, I came across this letter to the editor of the NYTBR by the philosopher Owen Flanagan. Beautifully concise and crystal clear.

Over at brainstorms, oz and I are discussing the sophomoric review [login required] of Dennett’s new book in yesterday’s NYT by a pompous lit-crit idiot called Leon Wieseltier. As someone commented on an NYT forum, “I am dismayed to see that the NYTimes is continuing to ask literary critics to review philosophical books about science. It’s like asking a ballerina to review an auto show.”. But a ballerina is unlikely to be as graceless as Wieseltier….
UPDATE: Not everybody at the NYT is so dismissive of Dennett’s book. In this piece [login required], Edward Rothstein quotes from Dennett to introduce his thoughts on the concept of iconoclasm (“History Illuminates the Rage of Muslims”). It’s a nice little piece, although it looks as if it was edited down a bit clumsily.
On the other hand, Andrew Sullivan hails Wieseltier’s piece as a “superb dissection of scientism”. Since Dennett’s supposed “scientism” is a product of Wieseltier’s deranged mind, I have to assume that Sully hasn’t actually read the book. Surely he should know better than to rely on a review….

During my recent travels, I picked up a copy of Kate Fox’s Watching the English. I’ve just finished it, and I can heartily and enthusiastically recommend it. On second thoughts, since I’m English, I should probably moderate my language:

The understatement rule means that a debilitating and painful chronic illness must be described as “a bit of a nuisance”; a truly horrific experience is “well, not exactly what I would have chosen”; an outstanding performance or achievement is “not bad”; an act of abominable cruelty is “not very friendly”, and an unforgivably stupid misjudgement is “not very clever”

On this scale, Watching the English is not bad. Not bad at all. And by now you may have guessed that Kate Fox is an anthropologist, and her book is an attempt to understand what it means to be English; what’s different about the English.
I was thinking of trying to summarize Fox’s conclusions – her “definition of Englishness” – but on reflection the summary wouldn’t be very useful on its own. She covers so many areas of life: language, dress, food, drinking, the weather, queuing, cars, pets, houses, sex, sports, work, and rites of passage. Class is a factor of course, but humour emerges as much more important.
Coincidentally there was a piece in today’s Boston Globe entitled A struggle to redefine ‘Britishness’, which included the following paragraph:

Britons are famously ambivalent about patriotism, according to anthropologist Kate Fox, who wrote a book on English behavior and who says patriotism violates the values of moderation and modesty that are part of being British. ”The English have a horror of earnestness, especially the sort of heart-on-sleeve sentimentality and solemnity indulged in by other nations expressing patriotic pride,” she said, citing Americans as an example.

Exactly. I moved to the US in 1981, and I remember the first time I found myself at some event (probably at my children’s school) where everybody was expected to put their hand on their heart and recite the Pledge of Allegiance. I remember thinking, “Come off it! Don’t take yourselves so seriously!”, but of course I said nothing. In the chapter on Rites of passage, Fox observes:

At funerals, we are deprived of our primary social coping mechanism – our usual levels of humour and laughter being deemed inappropriate on such an officially sad occasion. […] This is fascinating but painful to watch, like some cruel vivisectionist’s animal behaviour experiment: observing the English at funerals feels like watching turtles deprived of their shells.

And for me, standing stiffly while those Americans around me are pledging allegiance feels remarkably like attending a funeral. Sorry, it always has done.
Oh, well, mustn’t grumble. How about a nice cup of tea?

The best gift this season came from Merry’s parents: a copy of The Illustrated Christmas Cracker by John Julius Norwich and Quentin Blake. It’s stuffed full of “quirky quotes”, of which my favourite is this book review from Field and Stream, November 1959:

Although written many years ago, Lady Chatterley’s Lover has just been re-issued by Grove Press, and this fictional account of the day-to-day life of an English game-keeper is still of considerable interest to outdoor minded readers, as it contains many passages on pheasant-raising, the apprehending of poachers, ways to control vermin, and other chores and duties of the professional game-keeper.
Unfortunately, one is obliged to wade through many pages of extraneous material in order to discover and savour these sidelights on the management of a Midland shooting estate, and in this reviewer’s opinion the book cannot take the place of J. R. Miller’s Practical Gamekeeper.

I just received an email from Amazon.com, apologizing profusely for the fact that a book I’d ordered would not, in fact, be delivered before Christmas. The new estimated delivery date is December 28.

We are sorry not to have met your expectations for this important order. We do value your business, and hope that you continue to favor Amazon.com for your online shopping needs.

That’s odd, because the book in question – Dan Dennett’s Breaking the Spell : Religion as a Natural Phenomenon is scheduled to be published on February 2…

I just posted a review of Richard Dawkins’ “The Ancestor’s Tale” to Amazon.com. I’m reproducing it here:

Dawkins has written more important books: “The Blind Watchmaker” and “The Selfish Gene” were essential reading for all. He’s written more academic books: “The Extended Phenotype” dots all the i’s and crosses every t. And he’s written more impassioned books: “A Devil’s Chaplain” contains wonderful, heartfelt essays.
But for me “The Ancestor’s Tale” beats them all. People joke about “the fundamental interconnectedness of all things”, but Dawkins shows how much we know about the truth of this. The scope is breath-taking – in time, in detail, and in the range of perspectives that he invites us to share. I read this book during a week-long business trip, and Dawkins’ device of a pilgrimage seemed particularly apt: I savoured every moment, and finished it just as I arrived home.
One of the most important stories in the book is “The Salamander’s Tale”, in which Dawkins considers what he calls “the tyranny of the discontinuous mind”. He starts out with the familiar account of “ring species” such as gulls and salamanders, and arrives, with Mayr, at the judgement that it took us so long to arrive at the idea of evolution because of Platonic essentialism. THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS ESSENCE. Dawkins doesn’t directly assert what seems obvious to me – that religious opposition to evolution arises from essentialism – but he makes clear just how destructively essentialism continues to bedevil science. And when I concluded that story, I was almost startled to realize that it comes less than half way through the book, at rendezvous 17 out of 39. After amphibians we still have to meet fishes, worms, cnidarians, fungi, plants, and so on, leading up to the Great Rendezvous and thence to Canterbury – the first replicator.
At the end, I found myself in awe of how much we humans know, how much we’ve discovered about life, how rich and multifaceted that knowledge is, and how much more there is to learn. “The Ancestor’s Tale” is without doubt the best book I’ve read in 2005; I expect that it’ll be one of those few books that I return to again and again.

[And thanks, Tom, for lending me your copy. I will have to buy my own, of course.]

I visited my local Barnes & Noble this evening to pick up a handful of work-related books – necessary stuff, but unexciting. To compensate (yeah, yeah – pathetic excuse), I decided to treat myself to a philosophy book: Simon Blackburn’s Truth: A Guide. Earlier this week I had read Andrew O’Hehir’s review in Salon, which I heartily recommend; it’s one of those delightful reviews that stays with you all the way to the bookshop. I got home and read the Introduction while steaming some asparagus.* By the time the stalks yielded to the tip of my knife, I was hooked. Partly it’s Blackburn’s stance – recognizing the strengths of the absolutist and relativist positions without sliding into the mushy ambivalence that he decries – but mostly it’s the economy and clarity of his writing. I can tell that I’m going to enjoy this.

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* The humidity has finally broken, and I was able to turn off the A/C and open the house up. Bliss! I usually avoid cooking techniques that produce steam when it’s really humid.

Zoomed up 880 to Oakland this evening to have dinner with Steve, Wendy, Chris and Celeste. We ate at a wonderful Vietnamese restaurant with the unlikely name of Le Cheval on Clay Street. (OK, I know, it’s the French colonial influence – but it still seems odd.) Just inside the door is a large bronze horse and a sign bearing the admonition noted above. The food was wonderful, from the firepot soup and the green mussels to the banana flambé desert. (Fire featured prominently, come to think of it.) And the wine list was varied, satisfying, and modestly priced. (Steve and I couldn’t resist the Solaris Pinot Noir, for obvious reasons.) Highly recommended.

Before we ate, there was much trading of goodies. I’d recently completed Stephen Baxter’s novel Evolution (B+ for science, B- for narrative, C for character development) and I traded it to Steve for Franklin Foer’s How soccer explains the world. (Of course it does!) The “confusion” refers to an item that Chris had picked up for me: a royal blue, long-sleeved polo shirt proudly bearing the name of the Church Divinity School of the Pacific in gold script. (There was also a Graduate Theological Union t-shirt for Merry.) So let’s see, I wonder when Carson Kressley would recommend that a hard-core atheist should wear a Divinity School shirt?

A thoroughly enjoyable evening, to be repeated at the next opportunity. (Perhaps the end of September?) There was talk of sushi in Berkeley….

A few days ago I picked up a copy of Roger Housden’s anthology Risking Everything: 110 Poems of Love and Revelation. Today I opened it at a random page, and suddenly felt compelled to start reading the poem out loud. It was D. H. Lawrence’s Deeper Than Love, and I found myself reading it slowly, lingering over the words, tasting them, feeling their weight on my tongue.

Love, like the flowers, is life, growing.
But underneath are the deep rocks, the living rock that lives alone
and deeper still the unknown fire, unknown and heavy, heavy and alone.

The noise of the air conditioner in the kitchen drowned my speech (it’s a miserable night, dew point around 75, no central air) which was good: I was only reading for myself. I finished the Lawrence, and opened again at random: Billy Collins’ This Much I Do Remember. Not a poem to read out loud, this one, but one to close your eyes and see what the poet had seen:

that I could feel it being painted within me
brushed on the wall of my skull

And of course all of Housden’s favourites are here, like old familiar friends: Rumi, Bly, and above all Mary Oliver. What a glorious collection.

Following The Rotters’ Club, I’ve now finished Jonathan Coe’s The Closed Circle. Excellent. So many circles: of understanding, of relationship, of power. Circles to get trapped inside, impotently, and circles to carry you inexorably forward, like great wheels. [OK, that’s enough of that. – Ed.]

Anyway, it’s a wonderful two-part novel. Even though Coe includes a synopsis of The Rotter’s Club at the end of The Closed Circle (“just in case you’ve forgotten it”), the two books really have to be read as a single work. For those who bought the first book two or three years ago, the wait must have been unbearable….

What next? Based on Amazon.com reviews, I think I’ll try The Winshaw Legacy next. (Mind you, I’m supposed to be reading up on M&A practices and storage virtualization….)