Where We Meet the World: The Story of the Senses by Ashley Ward
My rating: 4 of 5 stars You Can’t Taste Soy Sauce with Your Testicles! *There is no such thing as color. *Our pupils dilate when we’re moved, so we find big pupils warm and compelling, which is why Renaissance women used nightshade (belladonna!) to dilate their pupils. *The key part of our hearing apparatus mediating between the inner and outer ears evolved from the gills of fish. *We lift our hands to our faces once every two minutes of the day, partly to smell them and what they’ve touched. *Coffee has eight hundred different odor releasing molecules, but the brain turns them into one thing, coffee. *Garlic improves our body odor. *We tend to prefer the smell of t-shirts worn a few days by people from our own university to that of people worn by other universities. *Catfish taste with their bodies, flies with their feet. *Our fingers have two hundred nerve fibers per centimeter, our back nine. *When dogs defecate and cattle graze, they tend to line up north to south. *A tick has a limited sensory experience of the world compared to us, but it’s rich to the tick! Those are some of the many savory items in Ashley Ward’s Where We Meet the World: The Story of the Senses (2023), an engaging and stimulating book about how we perceive the world via our five (or fifty-three!?) senses (faculties that detect specific stimuli by means of receptors dedicated to those stimuli). Ward explains how we sense and why and how our senses have shaped us individually and as a species. His first five chapters cover the five main senses, the sixth introduces unappreciated senses, and the last explores how perception works. Throughout, Ward uses easy vocabulary, defines the occasional scientific jargon, provides plenty of compelling examples (from human and animal and plant life), cites plenty of interesting scientific studies, and generally entertainingly illuminates perception and the senses. Here are some of the things that I should remember from the book: *Our senses are all interconnected with each other. *There is no universal human hierarchy of the senses (European cultures prioritize sight, other cultures taste or smell, etc.). *We have more than the five basic senses. *Everything about our perception of the world is influenced by our biology, experiences, personality, mood, health, and cultural biases. *Each of us perceives the world uniquely (no one’s “red, bread, or Beethoven” are the same as anyone else’s). *The brain is miraculous in the vast amount of data it processes and interprets and uses to predict and fill in gaps and coordinate based on our different sense receptors and our interior and exterior conditions. *To study perception and the senses effectively, multiple fields are needed, including biology, psychology, economics, and medicine. *We still can’t figure out the relationship between the objective reality of the world and our subjective experience of it. Audiobook reader David Morley Hale is deliberate and clear and has an appealing, vivid north England accent, pronouncing the u sound in words like some, up, us, come, study, just, much, etc. like the oa in soap. I’m grateful to Nataliya for reading and reviewing this book so as to make me want to read it! View all my reviews
0 Comments
The Accursed Tower: The Fall of Acre and the End of the Crusades by Roger Crowley
My rating: 3 of 5 stars If only-- If only the self-serving Genoese, Venetians, and Pisans weren’t always fighting each other and trading vital martial slaves and material to the Mamluks. If only the military orders (Templars and Hospitallers etc.) weren’t always treating each other like rivals. If only the heads of the Crusader states could all get on the same page. If only the European countries were not always at loggerheads with each other and or the different Popes. If only the Mamluks were (finally) less organized, less united, and less proficient at treaty loopholes, military logistics, and drum and trumpet walls of sound. Then maybe Acre might've carried on Christian for a few more years (but THEN what?). The catchy main title of Roger Crowley’s The Accursed Tower: The Fall of Acre and the End of the Crusades (2019) conjures up images of repeated foiled Muslim attempts to take a particularly stubborn and vital tower, but actually the final siege of Acre, the last Christian stronghold in the Holy Land does not really hinge on this one tower among the many defenses of the city, and the “accursed” appellation doesn’t really have any particular application to the history Crowley relates. Really the book is about its subtitle. The first seven chapters—occurring from 1200 to 1290—set the historical and cultural context for the siege, including Crusader debacles in Egypt, the influential advent of the Mongols, and the increasing importance of the Mamluks of Egypt, with the Outremer Christian cities and castles getting captured or sacked one after the other in the thirteenth century, till the siege of Acre ends the two-hundred-or-so-year Crusader attempt to maintain a Western Christian presence in the Holy Land. The next six chapters relate the last siege of Acre led by the Mamluks from about April 10 till May 28 of 1291. The fourteenth chapter cleans up the last loose Crusader ends thereabouts, and the Epilogue gives a glimpse at the Acre of today superimposed over the Acre of a thousand and more years ago. I found this book less suspenseful, absorbing, detailed, and informative than Ernle Bradford’s The Great Siege: Malta 1565 (1961), but I did get some interesting points from it: --The disastrous disunity among the Christians. Through much Crusader history, the Muslims were not much more unified, but they got their act together in the latter half of the thirteenth century under Mamluk sultans like Baybars. --The effective use by the Mamluks of religious fervor, booty lust, defenses mining, trebuchet engineering, Greek fire, kettle drums (mounted on camels!), and treaty loopholes. --“A sixty-day siege [by an army of 25,000 men] would need the removal of a million gallons of human and animal waste and 4,000 tons of solid biological waste,” which is probably one reason the Mamluks catapulted their waste into Acre! --The inherent unsustainability of Crusader satellite states so far away from Europe, and the precarious way they lasted as long as they did via trade with Muslim states. I appreciated that Crowley quotes from a fair number of Muslim sources and seems even-handed in his depiction of the attackers and the defenders of Acre. His Epilogue made me want some day to visit Acre (in today’s Israel…) About the audiobook… If only a better reader than Matt Kugler read it! Although he reads clearly, he also reads like a sensational documentary narrator, too often overly dramatically emphasizing what he sees to be key words or syllables, such that he numbed me to the impact of the truly important key words: “the Sultan’s SENior engineer” (why is it so important that we know this is “the Sultan’s SENior engineer”?) “the equally imposing COMpound of the Knights Hospitallers.” (why is that syllable stressed so much there?) Etc. In short, Kugler is no Simon Vance! (Vance intelligently reads The Great Siege: Malta 1565, which must be one reason why I so prefer it to Crowley’s book.) I’m not sorry to have listened to The Accursed Tower, but I didn’t learn enough or have a good enough time to recommend it highly, and probably other books by Crowley like 1453 and Empires of the Sea (read by better readers) would be better. View all my reviews
The Dawn of Political History: Thucydides and the Peloponnesian Wars by Fred Baumann
My rating: 4 of 5 stars The Devastating Fruits of Ignorance, Fear, and Honor I should say first that although I enjoyed and learned from Professor Fred Baumann’s The Dawn of Political History: Thucydides and the Peloponnesian Wars (2012), a compact series of eight roughly 30-minute lectures about Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War (which lasted for 27 years in the 5th century BC), and it did make me WANT to read Thucydides, Baumann felt so concisely complete that he made me not want to HURRY to read Thucydides… The audiobook belongs to The Modern Scholar series of lectures by various professors of various fields. Dr. Baumann, a professor of political philosophy at Kenyon College, speaks well, with much (but not too much) enthusiasm, clear pronunciation, good pace, and few distracting mannerisms (apart from an occasional confirming, “Yeah?”). Unlike with the Great Courses series, the Modern Scholar lectures don’t impose catchy music or canned applause to start or end each lecture. Really, anyone interested in the war between Sparta and Athens or ancient Greek culture should find a lot of enrichment here. Dr. Baumann begins by telling us that Thucydides’ history of the Peloponnesian War—written some 2000 years ago—is the best book on politics he knows and that he’ll be using the Crawley English translation of the Greek original. He’ll analyze Thucydides as a work of political philosophy rather than as a work of art or military strategy. Then he leads us through Thucydides’ history book by book, pointing out important events, elements, ideas, and figures. One of the high points for me was Dr. Baumann covering the spectacular debacle that was the Athenian “invasion” of Sicily and saying that at times reading Thucydides is like reading or watching a horror story, where the characters do something REALLY stupid, so, because you care what happens to them, you’re (internally) shouting, “Don’t go in that house again!” Only in the case of Thucydides, you’re shouting at the Athenians, “Don’t put all your ships in the harbor!” and “Go home now while you still can!” Another high point was learning about Alcibaides, the most fascinating figure, a celebrity athlete, friend-student of Socrates, purely ambitious, prodigiously charismatic, consummately conning, a supreme manipulator-schemer who defected from Athens to Sparta, from Sparta almost back to Athens but then to Persia, always getting in good with the powers that be and getting them to follow his advice. One wonders how he got away with as much as he did and yearns for a book or movie about him. Here are a few of the other interesting things I learned from these lectures: *Athenian Thucydides approaches his history (much of which he was a participant of or witness to) objectively, almost never giving his opinion about events or people, so you have to get at what he thinks by looking at which events he chooses to relate and at which events he chooses to juxtapose them with. For example, after he relates Pericles’ famous funeral oration featuring an almost utopic Athens, he covers in vivid detail the terrible plague that soon killed Pericles shortly after his famous speech and helped doom Athens. *Thucydides’ work is a political history because it teaches us about how people behave in a crisis. *Athens and Sparta were prodigiously contrasting cultures: Athens cosmopolitan, innovative, democratic, outward looking, nautical, expansive, etc., and Sparta provincial, conservative, oligarchic, inward looking, land-based, stable, etc. Athens on the surface had a “realistic” view of human nature that let them treat treaties flexibly, whereas Sparta on the surface had an ideal view that made them act “honorably.” In fact, Athens did act for honor, while Sparta could be flexible with treaties. And finally both were alike in going to war from fear, Athens fearing that if they didn’t continue expanding their empire their colonies would rebel, Sparta fearing that an expanding Athens would swallow them. *People are crazy, acting against their own self-interest, especially when subject to fear or honor. *Pericles’s successor Cleon was (for Thucydides) a demagogue, appealing to and fanning the fear of the Athenian people, and saying that only he could save them and that every other politician except him would lie to them so they should trust only him. Not unlike certain thug politicians of our present time… *Athens had numerous chances to end the war but repeatedly rejected Spartan overtures. *The war devastated both cultures (and probably helped prepare the way for Alexander the Great). *Problems with democracy (overreach, martial folly, etc.) happen especially in GOOD times. Baumann closes by explaining why we should read Thucydides: 1) Lessons on statesmanship and the relations of political reality to morality and of international to domestic politics. 2) Exploration of what it is to be a democracy. (Thucydides was an honest critic of democracy and therefore a true friend of it.) 3) Lessons on how to be and how people are, without any Christian salvation. View all my reviews
Classical Archaeology of Ancient Greece and Rome by John R. Hale
My rating: 5 of 5 stars Everything You Wanted to Know about Ancient Greek and Roman Archeology I fully enjoyed all of Classical Archaeology of Ancient Greece and Rome (2006) by John R. Hale, the first Great Courses audiobook I’ve listened to. It consists of thirty-six thirty-minute lectures: twelve about the history, development, and current state of archeology as a “mature science,” including things like site finding, dig organizing, and artifact dating, preserving, and displaying, as well as profiles of important figures in the history of archeology (I loved Harriet “I was never a collector—only a detective” Boyd) and explanations of key branches of it like battlefield archeology, underwater archeology, and experimental archeology; twelve about seminal, stunning, and still ongoing discoveries and sites and wrecks and digs etc., from the Bronze age to the Roman age; and twelve about archeological answers to larger questions about classical civilization like what is unique and original about ancient Greek culture, what happened to the Roman Empire, and why we should study the past. Throughout, Professor Hale is refreshingly unpretentious, explaining his preference for saying “tree ring dating” instead of “dendrology,” occasionally tossing in references to popular culture like Mordor, Madonna, and Yogi Berra, clearly and concisely defining technical words (like stratigraphy) or difficult words (like adumbrated), making regular spicy or witty asides, like “There’s nothing that the archeological mind loves more than a status symbol” (like ancient pots decorated for public display rather than for private use), using plenty of demotic English like “A pile of flour in a baker's shop [in Pompeii] was found--I can't imagine the care with which this stuff was hacked away to leave this kind of stuff visible,” and quoting here and there great literary sources, like Tolstoy (War and Peace), Gibbon (Decline and Fall), Shelley (Ode to Naples), Homer (the Iliad), etc. I liked his clear delivery and contagious enthusiasm, as when he says something like, “the humble implements, tools, carpenter’s saws, weapons, jewelry, these small finds, these little bits of people's lives revealing an ancient world that nobody thought existed... We could feel that we were present at the time and the place where archaeology was born.” Or like, “Go to the Reggio museum! Throughout, he provides interesting touches on things like the differences from and convergences among archeology and geology, anthropology, history, literature, mythology and other disciplines; the etymologies of words like village, capital, palace, martyr, rostrum, pornography, and aqueduct; the links between ancient peoples and us; and the exciting or funny or amazing stories and anecdotes he has accumulated and told his students in his classes (e.g., “You can do this at home: take off your clothes and stand in front of a full length mirror in contrapposto like the Riace bronzes”). His lectures are chock full of cool information, like pagans had outdoor altars for their temples (cause they sacrificed and burnt meat etc.), while Christians put their altars inside their churches, or the Pythagorean theorem was in use 1000 years before Pythagoras, or that ancient Greeks and Romans colorfully painted their statues, or why tripods were so popular for ancient Greeks and Romans, or that many of the Pompeii houses frozen by lava were already 200 years old (belonging to pre-Roman civ) when Vesuvius erupted, or that the Pompeii plaster casts of dead body spaces revealed trimmed pubic hair, or that Socrates probably ate bread made from grain imported from Ukraine, or that if you imagine our own tea, coffee, chocolate, alcohol, medicine, and drugs all combined into ONE thing, it still wouldn’t come close to what wine was for Greeks and Romans, and how the Greeks (on pottery) and Romans (on frescoes) glorified everyday life. The Course Guidebook pdf accompanying the audiobook is a detailed 276-page outline of all the lectures, followed by historical and archeological timelines, a glossary of key terms, biographical notes on important archeologists, and an annotated bibliography. Note that this is not really an audiobook but a series of lectures, so that Professor Hale makes occasional mistakes in speaking that he corrects on the fly, like “Out there on the Thames—sorry—out there on the Seine.” There are about one or two per lecture. He begins each lecture after the first by saying, “Welcome back,” and each lecture is introduced by a brief loop of peppy baroque music and is concluded by audience clapping. Despite it being a lecture series audiobook, apart from clapping, you can only hear Professor Hale during each lecture, which is a little odd because you’d expect to hear people laughing at his occasional witty asides (like “This is what graduate students are for”), all of which leads me to suspect that he is reading his lectures in a studio after which the producers overlay canned clapping. I would like it better without the music and clapping. It’s an enriching, entertaining, and stimulating series of lectures, and now I am looking forward to Professor Hale’s lectures on the Greek and Persian wars. View all my reviews
From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death by Caitlin Doughty
My rating: 4 of 5 stars How People Around the World and in the US Do Death The funerals and cremations of my Japanese wife’s parents were unforgettable experiences that forcibly remind me that Japan is—even after I’ve lived here for thirty years—a foreign country. My in-laws’ last rites were smoothly managed by funeral home companies but also incorporated plenty of family participation: we helped to prepare and view her parents’ bodies, touched their calm cold faces, put drops of water on their lips via a leaf, covered them with fragrant flowers in their coffins, burnt incense and prayed and listened to Buddhist monks chanting while periodically ringing brass bowl bells, went to the crematorium together, said good bye to her father and mother before their ovens, and finally used chopsticks to choose the bones we wanted to keep. Nothing like a funeral to show you the culture where it takes place! So I was keen to read mortician Caintin Doughty’s book, From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death (2017), to see what she’d make of death in Japan and other countries. Because the “corporatization and the commercialization of death” has made America fall behind other countries in the handling and processing of death, Doughty wants us to rethink it by showing how people in other countries and or special situations treat it. She organizes her compact, absorbing, moving, and funny book into chapters depicting her travels to communities and countries like-- Colorado, Crestone The history and operation of a unique open-air crematorium in a rural Colorado community; some history of cremation (including 42,000-year-old cremated bones found in Australia); and details on how difficult it is to try new (cheaper) ways of treating death in America because of the powerful funeral home industry. One of the interesting facts she presents is that cremation has become the most common way to deal with the dead in the USA. Indonesia: South Sulawesi A remote region in Indonesia: the Holy Grail of corpse interaction, where families live with their mummified “deceased” loved ones for months or years, sleeping with them, dressing them, standing them against the wall, and so on, and then after the dead go into grave houses, families annually undress them, clean them, dress them in new clothes, and celebrate them. Mexico: Michoacan How compared to Americans Mexicans have a “gay familiarity” with death and the history and description of their Day of the Dead festival. Painful digressions on the dispossession of Mexican American families from their homes in Chavez Ravine to make room for Dodger Stadium and her friend Sarah’s finally coming to some terms with the death of her unborn son by getting in touch with her Mexican heritage with Frido Khalo as gateway. North Carolina: Cullowhee Recomposition, the new green alternative. Put a body in high carbon setting and let its nitrogen molecules transform as it decomposes until ideally after 4-6 weeks all that’s left is a rich soil the family can use in their garden! Details on how bodies (even a dead whale) and a conclusion pointing out that most of the drivers of this new method are female, after men pushed women out of death by industrializing it at the start of the 20th century. Spain: Barcelona A cutting-edge funeral home, where families come to be with their deceased and watch the cremations, but always with layers of protective glass separating living from dead; details on the little embalming done in Spain (or Europe) and on cemetery plots being rented for five or so years to permit decomposition, after which bones are put in mass communal graves. Japan: Tokyo A corpse hotel where families spend time with their deceased before cremation; stats like 99.9% of Japanese funerals ending with cremation; a typical cremation with family members using chopsticks to pick up bones and deposit them in an urn; the Japanese mix of new tech and respect and love for the dead getting people to love the body and to spend enough time with it to process grief, unlike in the US where the funeral industry is ever reducing the time families spend with the deceased, the fear of the body in America increasing with the rate of cremation. Boliva: La Paz “Natitas,” sacred-magical more or less mummified skulls that people keep to use as intermediaries between the living and the dead, so that the living can consult them about problems about health, education, finance, lost pets, and the like. The skulls are celebrated each November 8, the Festival of the Skulls, and the Catholic Church has to grin and bear it and even bless them. Doughty sees women getting some power in the face of the Catholic Church. “Skulls are technology for disadvantaged people… no person is left behind.” California: Joshua Tree Natural burials in a tiny area of the National Park in the desert, and Doughty’s desire (which she knows can’t be fulfilled, given California’s conservative laws re death) to have an air burial for her corpse, with birds eating it. “I spent the first 30 years of my life devouring animals, so why, when I die, should they not have their turn with me? Am I not an animal?” In the Epilogue, Doughty urges us “to create a protective ring around the family and friends of the dead, providing a place where they can grieve openly and honestly, without fear of being judged.” We as family members have to “show up” by going to the cremation, going to the burial, applying lipstick to and cutting a locket of hair from the deceased. “Do not be afraid. These are human acts, acts of bravery and love in the face of death and loss.” In addition to being engaged with death, Doughty is witty about it, as in lines like “It makes you uneasy when you see a body where it's not supposed to be, like seeing your chemistry teacher at the supermarket.” Perhaps in her desire to shock us into rethinking death, Doughty may over-emphasize the sensational aspects of the different cultures she’s visited and de-emphasize the quiet ones. In her Japan chapter, although she does mention the post-cremation chopsticks custom, she spends way more time on rare and quirky aspects (like the LED Buddha columbarium light show) and doesn’t mention less entertaining things about the Japanese funeral like Buddhist monk chanting, money giving (to the family), and gift giving (to the attendees). That makes me wonder if similar highlighting and downplaying is going on in other chapters in the book. As for the audiobook, it’s a pity that it’s missing the enticing appendices of the physical book, like “How to Be a Good Thanotourist” and “Fill-In Fun: Your Death Plan!” At least Doughty is a clear and enthusiastic reader. My only kvetch is that at times she uses the currently all-pervasive valley girl question intonation, as in “If I were the westerner? with the telephoto lens? who scared off the vultures? I'd have to leave myself out for the birds as well.” I recommend this book to anyone interested in or afraid of death. View all my reviews The Math of Life & Death: 7 Mathematical Principles that Shape Our Lives (2019) by Kit Yates9/6/2022
The Math of Life and Death: 7 Mathematical Principles That Shape Our Lives by Kit Yates
My rating: 4 of 5 stars Human Math Stories I’m a math dunce—I got a C in basic algebra only because my friends coached me—so it was daunting to start The Math of Life & Death: 7 Mathematical Principles that Shape Our Lives (2019) by Kit Yates. Luckily, the mathematical biologist’s book was entertaining, informative, and much more comprehensible than I’d feared it’d be. Yates wants to “emancipate” us from our phobias about math and to show us that math is for everyone. Although he didn’t mathematically emancipate this lazy reader, Yates is a clear writer, and his many real-life examples (human stories) of the power of math to affect every aspect of our daily lives (and deaths!) are compelling, so I’m glad to have listened to his book. Here follow summaries of its seven chapters. Chapter 1: Thinking Exponentially: The Sobering Limits of Power Covers exponential growth and exponential decay via examples like pyramid schemes, viral marketing, Internet memes, the atomic bomb (harrowing), population, and technological advances. Luckily, exponential growth phenomena tend to reach a point of unsustainability where they collapse due to lack of resources. Chapter 2: Sensitivity, Specificity, and Second Opinions: How Math Makes Medicine Manageable Introduces the limits on accuracy of screening tests for conditions like pregnancy, breast cancer, HIV, etc., including false positive and false negative results, the false alarm problem in ICUs, and the calculations determining who gets meds and who has to pay for them, etc. The moral is: always get at least a second test/opinion! Chapter 3: The Laws of Mathematics: Investigating the Role of Mathematics in the Law Covers the way that math (statistics, probability analysis, etc.) is (mis)used in legal cases; explains median vs. mean; variables like gender, age, and wealth that warp test results; how DNA evidence may be misused or misinterpreted; and the Prosecutor’s and the Defenders’ Fallacies (looking at statistics only in the light they favor one’s case). Chapter 4: Don't Believe the Truth: Debunking Media Statistics Shows how to understand and assess numerical “proof” and how ads use numbers misleadingly; explains flaws in statistics like small sample sizes, selection and confirmation bias, and cherry picked, framed, and fake statistics; explains regression to the mean; details the Birthday Problem (how likely it is in a group of people that two will share the same birthday); assesses whether concealed carry gun laws reduce or increase gun violence; reveals which container of jellybeans to choose from if you want to get a minority red among the majority whites. Yates’ says that we need the context and source for data if we're going to believe it. Chapter 5: Wrong Place, Wrong Time: When Our Number Systems Let Us Down Says interesting things about different number systems, like the Sumerians’ base 60 (!), computer programming’s base 2, and our base 10, including how errors in decimal places may have devastating effects; also covers the history of time zones (normalized for train schedules etc.), the metric system (the US being the only industrial country not to adopt it). His conclusion is that we should try to avoid our (almost) innate binary decision making. Chapter 6: Relentless Optimization: From Evolution to E-commerce, Life is an Algorithm Covers the history and nature of algorithms (rules to produce certain outputs); explains the use of algorithms for different situations like organizing record collections, making routes for deliveries, packing for trips, and using car navigation; urges us to scrutinize algorithms with our human judgment, especially how their outputs are used and how their often biased inputs are set up; says interesting things about algorithms in nature, like the swarming of ants and fish and evolution generally. And—hey—Yates shares his system for choosing the best restaurant, train carriage, or checkout counter, etc. from a set of options, advising us to reject the first 37% before choosing the next best one relative to the earlier rejected ones. *I thought that in chapter 3 about math and law or here in chapter 6 about algorithms, he’d touch on “predictive policing,” but he’s silent about it.* Chapter 7: Susceptible, Infective, Removed: How to Stop an Epidemic Relates the history and nature of infectious diseases (e.g., measles, Ebola, HIV, chickenpox, gonorrhea, etc.) and the use of mathematical models (e.g., Susceptible Infective Removed [SIR] and Basic Reproduction Number) to track, predict, avoid, eliminate, and make policy for them. Covers contact tracing, quarantining, herd immunity, vaccinating, and anti-vaxxing, etc. This chapter has extra resonance for our coronavirus era, which began shortly after Yates published his book. Epilogue: Mathematical Emancipation Yates closes by highlighting how the current of math runs below the way we communicate, navigate, shop, relax, get medical care, find answers to questions, and so on. He points out that math can save or end lives, is only as useful as the people using it, and is in some situations inferior compared to human judgment. And he urges us to check math, bias, and sources, and generally to take the power of math into our own hands. One good way to do all that is through human stories which reveal or reflect mathematical models and help us understand them. I confess that Yates lost me most every time he embarked on a nuts and bolts explanation of some mathematical principle or method, partly because I listened to the audiobook. He reads speedily, so before I could absorb a given point, he’d already be running on to the next one, so I had trouble remembering many of his explanations after hearing them in real time. A minor kvetch is that, although Yates’ Manchester accent is appealing, he likes attempting accents for quotations from French, Belgian, Italian, or American figures (including Texans, Trump, and Obama), but he doesn't do them well. An unnecessary distraction. View all my reviews The Year 1000: When Explorers Connected the World and Globalization Began (2020) by Valerie Hansen8/25/2022
The Year 1000: When Explorers Connected the World—and Globalization Began by Valerie Hansen
My rating: 3 of 5 stars Is That All There Is? Or, Why the Year 1000? In The Year 1000: When Explorers Connected the World and Globalization Began (2020), Valerie Hansen is out to prove that “The year 1000 marked the start of globalization. This is when trade routes took shape all around the world that allowed goods, technologies, religions, and people to leave home and go somewhere new.” She also wants to connect how cultures strategized globalization around 1000 with how we are dealing with it today: “living in a world shaped by the events of the year 1000, we are wrestling with exactly the same challenges that people faced for the first time then: should we cooperate with our neighbors, trade with them, allow them to settle in our countries, and grant them freedom of worship when they live in our society? Should we try to keep them out? Should we retaliate against the people who become wealthy through trade? Should we try to make new products that copy technologies we haven't yet mastered? Finally, will globalization make us more aware of who we are, or will it destroy our identity?” But although her book is mostly interesting, it is a little short and thin and doesn’t fully fulfill its “goal … to address those questions.” Hansen starts with an overview of the world in the year 1000, and then writes chapters on the Norse in North America (“Go West, Young Viking”), central, south, and north American cultures (“The Pan American Highways of 1000”), the Rus in eastern Europe (“European Slaves”), African and Islamic traders and cultures (“The World's Richest Man”), Muslims and Buddhists in Asia (“Central Asia Splits in Two”), and 11th-century China (“The Most Globalized Place on Earth”). Throughout, she relates interesting details, for example: On the need for blood to be given to the Mayan gods, for which leaders drew stingray stingers through their penises. (Ouch!) On the importance of coins found in shipwrecks and burial mounds etc. when no written documentation exists, because coins reveal who was trading with whom and how much they traded with them. (Duh!) On the Tale of Genji revealing the importance of aromatics from Arabia and Southeast Asia to the Song Empire and to Heian-era Japanese aristocrats like Genji, who made his own scents by combining different elements, was famed for his particular fragrance which could be smelt long after he left a room, and held a fragrance making contest at the birthday party of his princess daughter. (Cool!) On the 100-meter-long Chinese kilns like dragons rising up mountain sides, the hottest kilns in the world, using up to 1000 workers and making 20,000 or more pieces of ceramics per firing. (Wow!) Here is an example of Hansen’s straightforward (not wholly stirring) writing and her connecting approach to history: “Like Wikipedia entries today, the Chinese descriptions of foreign lands followed a set formula, which included the country’s most important products, the local currency system... and a chronological account of the most important events in the history of that place.” Some of Hansen’s connections between then and now seem a bit forced, like when she says that the conflict between the Venetian, Genoese, and Pisan merchants of Constantinople and the locals of that city were like that between the haves and have nots of today (the 1% and everyone else). Surely much of the conflict in Constantinople back then was because the Latins were not Greek and were not Eastern Orthodox and not just because they had more wealth? Anyway, it is a short book, and I wished for more depth and detail. I didn’t learn as much from it as I’d hoped I would. She gives etymologies that I’d learned from other history books, like slaves coming from the word Slav, because so many of them were enslaved back then. One was new to me: Blue Tooth connectivity deriving from King Harold Bluetooth because he united Denmark and Norway. Her thesis—that people were trading globally well before the 1500s and that many of the trade routes and religious cultural blocks and dynamics of today’s globalized world started by the year 1000 is convincing, but… but then what? A question: Why the year 1000? Given the varying calendars and methods of counting years in the different cultures back then, why not start with, say, 900? In her chapters Hansen often travels hundreds of years before or after 1000. I think it’s OK when she mentions the 1500s and European exploration/exploitation etc., because she’s explaining that they used preexisting trade routes from hundreds of years earlier while cutting out local middlemen and generally imposing their wills on locals, but sometimes one suspects that you could say globalization started much earlier than 1000. Referring at one point to ceramic competition between Arab and Chinese makers circa the year 726, Hansen herself says, “Globalization operated then just as it does now.” Another question: Is that all there is? OK, so globalization started say, in the year 1000, much earlier than we usually imagine, but I don’t think Hansen answers the questions she poses in her Prologue about what early globalization has to tell us about contemporary globalization. In her Epilogue, she concludes that the most important lesson we can get from looking at globalization in the year 1000 is how to react to the unfamiliar: do you open to and learn from it or do you close to and attack it? Doing the former is more likely to bring beneficial results for your culture than doing the latter. That conclusion is underwhelming. The reader Cynthia Farrell speaks clearly but has some dodgy pronunciations: as of products (produx), objects (objex), Kyoto (Ki-oto), Iraq and Iran (Eye-raq and Eye-ran). Even if we don’t mind that kind of thing, her delivery is rather monotonous, rendering Hansen’s prose rather bland. When Hansen starts a sentence with “Interestingly,” or “Curiously,” Farrell doesn't express interest or curiosity. View all my reviews
The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X
My rating: 4 of 5 stars “And if I can die having brought any light…” The Autobiography of Malcolm X As Told to Alex Haley (1965) was absorbing and illuminating. At times it made me uncomfortable: Am I a white devil? It often moved me. Because I knew that Malcolm X was assassinated shortly before the book was published, for example, it’s poignant when, only about 39, he tells us in the first chapter that “It has always been my belief that I, too, will die by violence” and in the last chapter that he’s learning Arabic and hoping to learn African languages and Chinese, but that “I live like a man who is dead already.” His autobiography recounts growing up early as Malcom Little in Lansing after the brutal murder of his father and the psychological decline of his mother, becoming the “mascot” of his all white junior high school, moving to Boston and getting involved in the night and dance scene and conking his hair with lye and wearing loud zoot suits, moving to Harlem and hustling as Detroit Red (e.g., numbers, drugs, and “steering” men to prostitutes), returning to Boston and starting a burglary team, being arrested and sentenced the full ten years because of the involvement of his white girlfriend and her sister, being called Satan in prison but then discovering the dictionary and books and the Nation of Islam and its leader Elijah Mohammed, leaving prison and joining the Nation of Islam (as Malcom X), becoming its most prominent spokesperson and preacher and promoter, becoming envied by other NOI officers, learning of Elijah Mohammed’s several illegitimate children, becoming friends with Cassius Clay, getting exiled from and or leaving the NOI, going to Mecca and having his eyes opened as to the cross-cultural cross-racial brotherhood of international Islam, returning to the USA and being accused by the media of hate-mongering after having realized that it’s not white people who are universally racist but the American political, economic, and cultural system. At the end of his autobiography, Malcom X expresses his hope that if his book could be “read objectively it might prove to be a testimony of some social value.” I’ll say! I wish I had read it forty years ago. And I’m struck by how many things he said still ring true today, for example, about “the malignant cancer of racism in American culture,” as in the never ending killing of unarmed black people by white police. Malcolm X’s argument that Christianity has been used to keep black people in their places by promising them pie in the sky in heaven hit home to me. But (being an atheist) I had to ask, Why did he need to replace Christian “brainwashing” with another religion’s brainwashing? Especially one like NOI that used a bizarre pulp-sf novelesque “history” to explain racial differences and white evil. He did come to realize that NOI wasn’t where it’s at, with too much worship of a flawed human leader, but he still needed Islam. I found his defense of racial separation (chosen by a group to survive) as opposed to segregation (imposed on a group to exploit them) interesting, though I think (hope?) it’s more feasible and desirable to aim for true integration. I found his explanation of Kennedy’s assassination convincing: the violence and hatred “generated and nourished” by whites against blacks ended up getting out of control and turning on white people, even their own leaders. C.f. the January 6 assault on the Capitol. I found admirable his lack of personal enrichment through his many speaking engagements, such that he had to borrow money from his half-sister to go to Mecca. I loved his direct, vivid, vernacular English with powerful similes and flourishes, like: “If you see somebody winning all the time, he isn't gambling, he's cheating... It's like the Negro in America seeing the white man win all the time. He's a professional gambler; he has all the cards and the odds stacked on his side, and he has always dealt to our people from the bottom of the deck.” “The woman who had brought me into the world, and nursed me, and advised me, and chastised me, and loved me, didn't know me. It was as if I was trying to walk up the side of a hill of feathers.” “This was my first really big step toward self-degradation: when I endured all of that pain, literally burning my flesh to have it look like a white man's hair. I had joined that multitude of Negro men and women in America who are brainwashed into believing that the black people are “inferior”--and white people “superior”--that they will even violate and mutilate their God-created bodies to try to look “pretty” by white standards.” “You know what my life had been. Picking a lock to rob someone's house was the only way my knees had ever been bent before.” “They wore that ‘troublesome nigger’ expression. And I looked ‘white devil’ back into their eyes.” “I remember one night at Muzdalifa with nothing but the sky overhead I lay awake amid sleeping Muslim brothers and I learned that pilgrims from every land--every color, and class, and rank; high officials and the beggar alike--all snored in the same language.” Laurence Fishburne’s reading of the audiobook made me imagine Malcolm X talking to me, though he may at times inject more emotion and energy into the already potent words than they need. I regret that the audiobook excludes the physical book’s “Foreword” by Attallah Shabazz, “Epilogue” by Alex Haley, or “On Malcom X” by Aussie Davis. Reading the autobiography, I admire what Malcolm X achieved in his 39 years (given the deck stacked against him) and grieve that he didn’t live longer to achieve more. When he says that he might not be alive to read his book when it's published and that “the white man will use me as a symbol of hatred,” I have to admit that, in my ignorance, my image of Malcolm X had been an intelligent, articulate, charismatic, fiery, and scary teller of uncomfortable truths, especially for me as a white man. Yet his book ends with him saying, “I'm for truth, no matter who tells it. I'm for justice, no matter who it is for or against. I'm a human being, first and foremost, and as such I'm for whoever and whatever benefits humanity as a whole.” And “But it is only after the deepest darkness that the greatest joy can come; it is only after slavery and prison that the sweetest appreciation of freedom can come.” View all my reviews
The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton
My rating: 5 of 5 stars “all the world must . . . graze on Hellebore” The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) by Robert Burton (1577-1640) is an epic, encyclopedic exploration of melancholy that covers, as its subtitle explains, What it is: With All the Kinds, Causes, Symptomes, Prognostickes, and Several Cures of It. In Three Maine Partitions with their Several Sections, Members, and Subsections. Philosophically, Medicinally, Historically, Opened and Cut Up. After a 100+ page introduction in which Burton gives an overview of melancholy and his approach to it, the first “Partition” covers the causes and symptoms of melancholy, the second details the cures of melancholy, and the third explores a particular branch of it, love melancholy, followed by a section on religious melancholy. Burton says that he wrote his book because 1) everyone in the world suffers from melancholy at some point, and 2) he would like to relieve his own melancholy by writing about it. His basic advice is to live with moderation in all things, including eating, drinking, fasting, dancing, exercising, studying, physic taking, love, marriage, venery, and chastity. Why should you read The Anatomy of Melancholy, which runs for fifty-five hours of Elizabethan prose in the Ukemi audiobook? Well, here are five reasons: 1. You’ll learn something of the history of medicine and science, philosophy, and literature etc. 2. You’ll savor the absurd things people have believed for thousands of years and nod at the fundamental, persisting human truths. 3. You’ll confirm the value of moderation. 4. You’ll marvel at the melancholic obsession of Burton, an Oxford university divine who was a voracious reader endowed with a superhuman memory. 5. You’ll enjoy Burton’s Elizabethan writing, his wit, style, digressions, lists, long sentences, and language. Burton is perhaps more of a compiler, summarizer, and assessor than an original thinker, modestly saying of his MANY sources, “I light my candle from their torches.” He writes his book around quotations from and references to the likes of Homer, Euripides, Aristophanes, Xenophon, Aristotle, Plato, Plutarch, Apollonius, Herodotus, Ptolemy, Horace, Pliny, Livy, Petrarch, Virgil, Tacitus, Ovid, Suetonius, the Bible, Hercules de Saxonia, Melancthon, Galen, Heraclitus, Paracelsus, Augustine, Avicenna, Boethius, Bacon, Savonarola, St Jerome, Machiavelli, Boccaccio, Kepler, Copernicus, Galileo, Ariosto, Chaucer, More, Spenser, Marlowe, and Shakespeare, a who's who of scholars, philosophers, historians, astronomers, scientists, church leaders, and writers from ancient till Elizabethan times. Burton was an omnivorous reader, his approach exhaustive: “I had rather repeat things ten times than omit anything of value.” Indeed, because the causes and symptoms of melancholy are often the same, as in fear or sorrow, he does repeat ideas and examples. As he goes about citing ancients, Muslims, various types of Christians, and so on, he seems to believe almost anything he’s read or at least is willing to entertain its possibility. He treats literary, mythological, biblical, legendary, historical, and contemporary figures and examples with equal attention, almost as if they’re all part of the same world with the same ontological status--though he sure often remembers that he’s an Anglican Christian. All that makes his book an interesting window on beliefs and knowledge of the Elizabethan age. Some causes of melancholy (e.g., witches and magicians) and some cures (e.g., anointing your teeth with the earwax of a dog) that he cites are absurd today, but the symptoms he explains and the sympathy he evinces for them, as well as his immersion in the infinite and diverse field and his heroic attempt to categorize it are all impressive and enriching. There is common sense (e.g., “corrupt fantasy” in imagination, fear and sorrow may lead to melancholy) to go with the nonsense (e.g., melancholy may be cured by bleeding with strategically applied cuts or leeches). And much of the nonsense is entertaining, as when he explains the short lives of sparrows by their salacity or gives an instance of a man "that went reeling and staggering all the days of his life . . . because his mother being great with child saw a drunken man reeling in the street." He is prey to many of the prejudices and stereotypes of his era and culture, as when he says that the (native) “Americans” are devil worshipers or that “Germany hath not so many drunkards, England tobacconists, France dancers, Holland mariners, as Italy alone hath jealous husbands.” He has his pet bête noires, like litigious lawyers, mountebank doctors, greedy apothecaries, trencher chaplains, carpet knights, counterfeiting politicians, epicures, atheists, idolaters, popes, monks, spendthrifts, prodigals, ambidexters, cooks, and onions. Although susceptible to the misogynistic bent of his era, he realizes that if women are bad, men are worse. I LOVE Burton’s lists! When he gets rolling and riffing on something, I start by smiling, end by chortling, and marvel at the fecundity of his pen. For example, when he heads off criticism of his book by listing his writerly flaws: “And for those other faults of barbarism, Doric dialect, extemporanean style, tautologies, apish imitation, a rhapsody of rags gathered together from several dung-hills, excrements of authors, toys and fopperies confusedly tumbled out, without art, invention, judgment, wit, learning, harsh, raw, rude, fantastical, absurd, insolent, indiscreet, ill-composed, indigested, vain, scurrile, idle, dull, and dry; I confess all ('tis partly affected), thou canst not think worse of me than I do of myself.” Or when he riffs on how melancholic we become if anyone messes with our stuff: “If our pleasures be interrupt, we can tolerate it: our bodies hurt, we can put it up and be reconciled: but touch our commodities, we are most impatient: fair becomes foul, the graces are turned to harpies, friendly salutations to bitter imprecations, mutual feastings to plotting villainies, minings and counterminings; good words to satires and invectives, we revile e contra, nought but his imperfections are in our eyes, he is a base knave, a devil, a monster, a caterpillar, a viper, a hog-rubber, &c.” Or when he rolls on the difficulties of living happily in the world: “In a word, the world itself is a maze, a labyrinth of errors, a desert, a wilderness, a den of thieves, cheaters, &c., full of filthy puddles, horrid rocks, precipitiums, an ocean of adversity, an heavy yoke, wherein infirmities and calamities overtake, and follow one another, as the sea waves; and if we scape Scylla, we fall foul on Charybdis, and so in perpetual fear, labour, anguish, we run from one plague, one mischief, one burden to another, duram servientes servitutem, and you may as soon separate weight from lead, heat from fire, moistness from water, brightness from the sun, as misery, discontent, care, calamity, danger, from a man.” I enjoyed Burton's evident pleasure in talking about love. He gets excited while citing seduction scenarios featuring age gaps, incest, beauty, fashion, conversation, nudity, eye-contact, kissing (lip-biting and mouth sucking!), touching (pap caressing!), singing, dancing (the engine of burning lust!), gift giving/promising, lying, crying, etc. He relishes declaiming “farewell!” etc. while channeling lovesick lovers, whether fearful or sorrowful, joyful or tragic, male or female, old or young, mortal or divine, Biblical or classical, historical or contemporary, fictional or real. In addition to being an incredibly well-read bachelor scholar and divine, he was, after all, a man. When he criticizes war and “heroes,” I sense a kindred spirit: "They commonly call the most hair-brain blood-suckers, strongest thieves, the most desperate villains, treacherous rogues, inhuman murderers, rash, cruel and dissolute caitiffs, courageous and generous spirits, heroical and worthy captains, brave men at arms, valiant and renowned soldiers, possessed with a brute persuasion of false honour." Some words about the Ukemi audiobook. First, it’s superbly read by the John Geilgud-esque Peter Wickham, who reads everything with understanding, pleasure, and wit. Second, the audiobook translates into English Burton’s MANY Greek and Latin phrases and quotations, which makes it much easier to “read” what he wrote by listening to the book than by reading it in a physical form. When Burton inserts into an English sentence, “insanum bellum?” the audiobook translates it as “is not war madness?” When he writes, “novices, illiterate, Eunuchi sapientiæ,” the audiobook replaces the Latin with “eunuchs of wisdom.” Experts in Greek or Latin may be irritated by this aid to the average reader, but I appreciate it. Actually, Burton himself often adds an English translation for his Latin phrases (e.g., “Besides, I might not well refrain, for ubi dolor, ibi digitus, one must needs scratch where it itches”). Other times, as when he gains momentum on a list in the “vulgar” English tongue, he tends to insert a Latin element or two, so you can kind of understand what he means from the context. Finally, the audiobook begins with two scholarly introductions about the book and its author. Paul Jordan Smith calls The Anatomy an entertaining masterpiece that influenced writers like Johnson, Milton, Sterne, and Keats, and says, “It's a bit of a cosmos, a compendium of poetry, medicine, philosophy, philology, theology, climatology, old wives tales, politics, utopia, satire, magic, and more. It celebrates all of the earth and all of the human moods as it anatomizes melancholy.” Floyd Dell then describes the book as “an analysis of morbid psychology, with an artistic interest, by a reclusive bookworm” who “grew up in the age of Shakespeare, and … was interested in our eccentricities” and “unreason.” You really should read it! View all my reviews
Vincent and Theo: The Van Gogh Brothers by Deborah Heiligman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars informative, suspenseful, absorbing, and moving--but oh, the present tense and short sentences! To write Vincent and Theo: The Van Gogh Brothers (2017), Deborah Heiligman read the letters between the brothers and their family members and friends and spent years researching and thinking about her subjects until she was ready to write her book. And it is excellent: informative, absorbing, suspenseful, and moving. Heiligman tells the story in fourteen parts called Galleries, beginning with a Threshold and an Entresol and ending with an Exit, as if in reading her book we are walking through an exhibition of Vincent's paintings and the life that produced them. The Galleries range from Beginnings (1852-1872), move through topics like Missteps, Stumbles (1875-1879), The Quest (1880-1882), An Expanded Palette (1885-1887), and A Sense of the Finite (1890) and end with Remains (1890-1891). Each Gallery is made up of multiple chapters with titles like The Rose and the Thorn, Vincent and Theo Walking, Sorrow, Uncle Vincent’s Paintings, A Happy Visit, and Theo Alone. There are plenty of epigraphs from letters. Each Gallery begins with a two-page monochrome reproduction of a relevant sketch or a painting by Vincent. In the middle of the book, there is a set of eleven color reproductions of important paintings. After the book come useful appendices: People (family, friends, colleagues); Vincent and Theo's Journey (a chronology); Author’s Note (why and how Heiligman wrote the book); a Bibliography (books and articles); Endnotes (supplemental information and citations of letters); and Index. Through the course of the book, Heiligman provides many interesting details about Vincent’s family, childhood, failed attempts to become an art dealer and a missionary, painstaking efforts to learn how to become a painter, early dark sober works, discovery of vibrant color, artistic theories, techniques, and media, struggle with mental illness, friendships with other artists, relationship with Theo, and so on. As for Theo, there are interesting details on his successful career as an art dealer in the Netherlands and Paris, his relationship with his beloved (but difficult) older brother, his long pursuit of an initially uninterested woman and eventual marriage to her, his syphilis, and so on. If, as Heiligman says before her book begins, “The world would not have Vincent without Theo,” she also demonstrates that the world would not have Theo without his wife Jo. Not only did Theo support Vincent financially and emotionally and believe in his art and make possible the many paintings by his brother that we love today, but his wife Jo indispensably supported Theo in his support of Vincent and also believed in his art. I had known nothing about her before reading this book. In Vincent’s watercolor painting of a windmill near the Hague, two male figures face each other, one looking taller than the other but also slumped, rumpled, and importunate, and although it rarely shows up in books about Van Gogh, according to Heiligman it should be one of his most famous works. In their letters, the brothers mentioned meeting at that windmill and drinking milk there and talking, and the author’s analysis and description of that encounter and of the painting and of its significance to the relationship between the brothers and her belief that “it makes sense to see the men as Vincent and Theo,” make reading this book worthwhile. I learned many other interesting things from this book. For example-- --Vincent’s difficult childhood, including his awareness that a year before he was born his mother gave birth to a stillborn son who was also called Vincent, and his tendency to destroy his youthful attempts at art if his family praised them. --Vincent’s guilt over being such a financial burden on his brother, and Theo’s saintly generosity and assurances, as in one letter that's excerpted for an epigraph to a chapter: “Your work and... brotherly affection... is worth more than all the money I'll ever possess.” --it’s possible that just as Van Gogh perhaps did not cut off his own ear (did Gauguin do it, and Van Gogh cover up for him?), Van Gogh did not shoot himself (did a boy playing with a gun do it?). -- Theo suffered from syphilis and died horribly from it barely one year after his brother’s death. That Theo accomplished as much as he did for his brother and for the world of art while declining in health is miraculous. That he managed to avoid giving the disease to his wife is as well. Chapter 101, Vincent’s Paintings, is remarkable. For it Heiligman selects some titles from the almost 150 paintings he made during a year in an asylum and arranges them in a two-page spread. The selected titles swirl around the pages like the clouds in the sky in the famous Starry Night painting, and the title of that painting appears on the two-page spread larger than those of the other titles and is placed in the center of a swirl just like the moon in the original painting. Another remarkable chapter is 120, Vincent’s Brother, January 25, 1891, which consists of but two potent paragraphs of one sentence each: Vincent died in Theo’s arms. Theo dies alone. The main flaw I find in the book is that Heiligman writes in the currently trendy style of so much young adult American literature: present tense (which feels affected in a biography) and short sentences, paragraphs, and chapters. I'm not against those things per se, but I do think they are overused in too many books these days and in this one in particular. The 409-page book consists of 121 chapters. The extreme brevity of Chapter 120 increases the tragic power of its contents, but because there are similarly short sentences and paragraphs everywhere in the book, the emotional impact of that chapter and of short sentences and paragraphs anywhere else in the book are attenuated. There are MANY places like the following: Vincent and Gauguin are both prolific, and Theo is having success selling Gauguin’s work. Soon, Vincent is sure, Theo will sell more of his, too. The brothers’ hard work is paying off. Vincent is realizing his dream of the studio in the South. Although he and Gauguin are not the easiest of companions and the arguments continue, it all really does seem to be working. Until it isn't. Anyway, I learned from this book so many interesting things about Vincent and his paintings, Theo, Jo, love, and the art world of the late 19th century in Europe. View all my reviews |
Jefferson Peters
This blog is for book reviews. Please feel free to comment on any of the reviews! Categories
All
Archives
April 2024
Jefferson's books
by Sabaa Tahir
A Young Adult Epic Fantasy with Lots of Violence & Romance
Elias is an elite Martial soldier, Laia a naïve Scholar slave. As they alternate telling their stories (in trendy Young Adult first person, present tense narration), we soon rea...
"It must be due to some fault in ourselves"--
George Orwell's Animal Farm (1945) is an anti-totalitarian-communist allegory in which the exploited animals of the Manor Farm kick Farmer Jones out and set about running the farm. At first...
by Lu Xun
Perfect Stories of Life in Early 20th Century China
Chinese Classic Stories (1998) by Xun Lu is an excellent collection of seven short stories by perhaps the most important 20th century Chinese writer of fiction. Lu Xun (1881-1936) stu...
Fine Writing, Great Characters, Immersive World
The Surgeon's Mate (1980) is the 7th novel in Patrick O'Brian's addicting series of age of sail novels about the lives, loves, and careers of the British navy captain Jack Aubrey and the ...
An Overwritten, Oddly Compelling Gothic Father
Matthew Lewis' notorious and influential Gothic novel The Monk (1796) takes place during the heyday of the Spanish Inquisition. Ambrosio, the monk/friar/abbot/idol of Madrid, is nicknamed ...
|
My Fukuoka University