- Lewis, Bernard.
What Went Wrong?
New York: Perennial, 2002. ISBN 0-06-051605-4.
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Bernard Lewis is the preeminent Western historian of
Islam and the Middle East. In his long career, he has
written
more than twenty volumes (the list includes
those currently in print) on the subject. In this book he
discusses the causes of the centuries-long decline of Islamic
civilisation from a once preeminent empire and culture to
the present day. The hardcover edition was in press when the
September 2001 terrorist attacks took place. So thoroughly does Lewis
cover the subject matter that a three page Afterword added in October
2002 suffices to discuss their causes and consequences. This is an
excellent place for anybody interested in the “clash of
civilisations” to discover the historical context of Islam's
confrontation with modernity. Lewis writes with a wit which is so
dry you can easily miss it if you aren't looking. For example, “Even
when the Ottoman Turks were advancing into southeastern Europe, they
were always able to buy much needed equipment for their fleets and
armies from Christian European suppliers, to recruit European
experts, and even to obtain financial cover from Christian European
banks. What is nowadays known as ‘constructive engagement’ has a
long history.” (p. 13).
- Scalzi, John.
Old Man's War.
New York: Tor, 2005.
ISBN 0-7653-0940-8.
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I don't read a lot of contemporary science fiction, but the
review by Glenn
Reynolds and those of other bloggers he cited
on Instapundit motivated
me to do the almost unthinkable—buy a just-out science
fiction first novel in hardback—and I'm glad I did.
It's been a long time since I last devoured a three hundred
page novel in less than 36 hours in three big gulps, but
this is that kind of page-turner. It will inevitably be
compared to Heinlein's
Starship Troopers.
Remarkably, it stands up well beside the work of the Master, and also
explores the kinds of questions of human identity which run through
much of Heinlein's later work. The story is in no way derivative,
however; this is a thoroughly original work, and even more
significant for being the author's first novel in print. Here's a
writer to watch.
- Healy, Gene, ed.
Go Directly to Jail.
Washington: Cato Institute, 2004.
ISBN 1-930865-63-5.
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Once upon a time, when somebody in the U.S. got carried away and
started blowing something out of proportion, people would chide
them, “Don't make a federal case out of it.” For most of U.S. history,
“federal cases”—criminal prosecutions by the federal government—were
a big deal because they were about big things: treason,
piracy, counterfeiting, bribery of federal officials, and offences
against the law of nations. With the exception of crimes committed
in areas of exclusive federal jurisdiction such as the District of
Columbia, Indian reservations, territories, and military bases, all
other criminal matters were the concern of the states. Well, times
have changed. From the 17 original federal crimes defined by
Congress in 1790, the list of federal criminal offences has exploded
to more than 4,000 today, occupying 27,000 pages of the U.S. Code,
the vast majority added since 1960. But it's worse than that—many
of these “crimes” consist of violations of federal regulations, which
are promulgated by executive agencies without approval by Congress,
constantly changing, often vague and conflicting, and sprawling through
three hundred thousand or so pages of the Code of Federal Regulations.
This creates a legal environment in which the ordinary citizen or,
for that matter, even a professional expert in an area of regulation
cannot know for certain what is legal and what is not. And since these
are criminal penalties and prosecutors have broad discretion
in charging violators, running afoul of an obscure regulation can
lead not just to a fine but serious
downtime at Club Fed, such as the
seafood dealers facing eight years in the pen for
selling lobster tails which
violated no U.S. law. And don't talk back to the Eagle—a
maintenance supervisor who refused to plead guilty to having a work
crew bury some waste paint cans found himself indicted on 43 federal
criminal counts (United States v. Carr, 880 F.2d 1550 (1989)).
Stir in enforcement programs which are self-funded by the penalties
and asset seizures they generate, and you have a recipe for
entrepreneurial prosecution at the expense of liberty.
This collection of essays is frightening look at criminalisation
run amok, trampling common law principles such as protection
against self-incrimination, unlawful search and seizure, and
double jeopardy, plus a watering down of the rules of evidence,
standard of proof, and need to prove both criminal intent
(mens rea) and a criminal act
(actus reus). You may also be amazed and appalled
at how the traditional discretion accorded trial judges in
sentencing has been replaced by what amount to a “spreadsheet
of damnation” of 258 cells which, for example, ranks possession of
150 grams of crack cocaine a more serious offence than second-degree
murder (p. 137). Each essay concludes with a set of suggestions
as to how the trend can be turned around and something resembling
the rule of law re-established, but that's not the way to bet.
Once the ball of tyranny starts to roll, even in the early
stage of the soft tyranny of implied intimidation, it gains momentum
all by itself. I suppose we should at be glad they aren't
torturing people. Oh, right….
- Sinclair, Upton.
The Jungle.
Tucson, AZ: See Sharp Press, [1905] 2003.
ISBN 1-884365-30-2.
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A century ago, in 1905, the socialist weekly The Appeal to
Reason began to run Upton Sinclair's novel The
Jungle in serial form. The editors of the paper had
commissioned the work, giving the author $500 to investigate the
Chicago meat packing industry and conditions of its immigrant
workers. After lengthy negotiations, Macmillan rejected the novel,
and Sinclair took the book to Doubleday, which published it in 1906.
The book became an immediate bestseller, has remained in print ever
since, spurred the passage of the federal Pure Food and Drug Act in
the very year of its publication, and launched Sinclair's career as
the foremost American muckraker. The book edition published in 1906
was cut substantially from the original serial in The Appeal to
Reason, which remained out of print until 1988 and the
2003 publication of this slightly different version based upon a
subsequent serialisation in another socialist periodical.
Five chapters and about one third of the text of the original edition
presented here were cut in the 1906 Doubleday version, which is
considered the canonical text.
This volume contains an introduction
written by a professor of American Literature at that august
institution of higher learning, the Pittsburg State University of
Pittsburg, Kansas, which inarticulately thrashes about trying to gin
up a conspiracy theory behind the elisions and changes in the book
edition. The only problem with this theory is, as is so often the
case with postmodern analyses by Literature professors (even those who
are not “anti-corporate, feminist” novelists), the facts.
It's hard to make a case for “censorship”, when the changes to the
text were made by the author himself, who insisted over the rest of
his long and hugely successful career that the changes were not
significant to the message of the book. Given that The Appeal
to Reason, which had funded the project, stopped running the
novel two thirds of the way through due to reader complaints demanding news
instead of fiction, one could argue persuasively that cutting
one third was responding to reader feedback from an audience highly
receptive to the subject matter. Besides, what does it mean to
“censor” a work of fiction, anyway?
One often encounters mentions of The Jungle which
suggest those making them aren't aware it's a novel as opposed to
factual reportage, which probably indicates the writer hasn't
read the book, or only encountered excerpts years ago in some
college course. While there's no doubt the horrors Sinclair
describes are genuine, he uses the story of the protagonist, Jurgis
Rudkos, as a
Pilgrim's Progress to illustrate
them, often with implausible coincidences and other story
devices to tell the tale. Chapters 32 through the conclusion are
rather jarring. What was up until that point a gritty tale of
life on the streets and in the stockyards of Chicago suddenly
mutates into a thinly disguised socialist polemic written in
highfalutin English which would almost certainly go right past
an uneducated immigrant just a few years off the boat; it
reminded me of nothing so much as John Galt's speech near
the end of Atlas Shrugged.
It does, however, provide insight into the utopian socialism
of the early 1900s which, notwithstanding many present-day
treatments, was directed as much against government corruption as
the depredations of big business.
- Orsenna, Erik.
Les Chevaliers du Subjonctif.
Paris: Stock, 2004.
ISBN 2-234-05698-5.
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Two years have passed since Jeanne and her brother Thomas were marooned
on the enchanted island of words in
La grammaire est une chanson douce
(January 2005). In this sequel, Jeanne
takes to the air in a glider with a diminutive cartographer to map
the Archipelago of Conjugation and search for her brother who has
vanished. Jeanne's luck with voyages hasn't changed—the glider
crashes on the Island of the Subjunctives, where Jeanne encounters
its strange inhabitants, guardians of the verbs which speak of what
may be, or may not—the mode of dreams and love (for what is love if
not hope and doubt?), the domain of the subjunctive. To employ a
subjunctive survival from old French, oft-spoken but rarely thought of as
such, « Vive le
subjonctif ! ».
The author has been a member of the French
Conseil d'État
since 1985, has written more than a dozen works of fiction
and nonfiction, is an accomplished sailor and president
of the Centre de la mer,
and was elected to
l'Académie française
in 1998. For additional information, visit his
beautiful and creatively designed
Web site,
where you will find a map of the Archipelago of Conjugation
and the first chapter of the book in both text and
audio editions.
Can you spot the perspective error made by the artist on the front
cover? (Hint: the same goof occurs in the opening title sequence of
Star Trek: Voyager.)
- Pais, Abraham.
The Genius of Science.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
ISBN 0-19-850614-7.
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In this volume Abraham Pais, distinguished physicist and author of
Subtle Is the Lord,
the definitive scientific biography of Einstein, presents a “portrait
gallery” of eminent twentieth century physicists, including Bohr,
Dirac, Pauli, von Neumann, Rabi, and others. If you skip the
introduction, you may be puzzled at some of the omissions:
Heisenberg, Fermi, and Feynman, among others. Pais wanted to look
behind the physics to the physicist, and thus restricted his
biographies to scientists he personally knew; those not included
simply didn't cross his career path sufficiently to permit sketching
them in adequate detail. Many of the chapters were originally
written for publication in other venues and revised for this book;
consequently the balance of scientific and personal biography varies
substantially among them, as does the length of the pieces: the
chapter on Victor Weisskopf, adapted from an honorary degree
presentation, is a mere two and half pages, while that on George
Eugene Uhlenbeck, based on a lecture from a memorial symposium, is 33
pages long. The scientific focus is very much on quantum theory and
particle physics, and the collected biographies provide an excellent
view of the extent to which researchers groped in the dark before
discovering phenomena which, presented in a modern textbook, seem
obvious in retrospect. One wonders whether the mysteries of
present-day physics will seem as straightforward a century from now.
- Rand, Ayn.
We the Living.
New York: Signet, [1936] 1959.
ISBN 0-451-18784-9.
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This is Ayn Rand's first novel, which she described
to be “as near to an autobiography as I will ever write”. It is a dark
story of life in the Soviet Union in 1925, a year after the death of Lenin
and a year before Ayn Rand's own emigration to the United States from
St. Petersburg / Petrograd / Leningrad, the city in which
the story is set. Originally published in 1936, this edition was revised
by Rand in 1958, shortly after finishing
Atlas Shrugged. Somehow, I had
never gotten around to reading this novel before, and was surprised to
discover that the characters were, in many ways, more complex and
believable and the story less preachy than her later work.
Despite the supposedly diametrically opposed societies in which they
are set and the ideologies of their authors, this story and Upton
Sinclair's
The Jungle
bear remarkable similarities and are worth reading together
for an appreciation of how horribly things can go wrong in any
society in which, regardless of labels, ideals, and lofty
rhetoric, people do not truly own their own lives.
- Goscinny, René and Albert Uderzo.
Astérix chez les Helvètes.
Paris: Hachette, [1970] 2004.
ISBN 2-01-210016-3.
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