- Minogue, Kenneth.
Alien Powers.
New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, [1985] 2007.
ISBN 978-0-7658-0365-8.
-
No, this isn't a book about Roswell. Subtitled
“The Pure Theory of Ideology”, it is a
challenging philosophical exploration of ideology,
ideological politics, and ideological arguments and
strategies in academia and the public arena. By
“pure theory”, the author means to
explore what is common to all ideologies, regardless
of their specifics. (I should note here, as does the
author, that in sloppy contemporary discourse
“ideology” is often used simply to denote
a political viewpoint. In this work, the author restricts
it to closed intellectual systems which ascribe a structural
cause to events in the world, posit a mystification which
prevents people from understanding what is revealed
to the ideologue, and predict an inevitable historical
momentum [“progress”] toward liberation from
the unperceived oppression of the present.)
Despite the goal of seeking a pure theory, independent of
any specific ideology, a great deal of time is necessarily
spent on Marxism, since although the roots of modern
ideology can be traced (like so many other pernicious things)
to Rousseau and the French Revolution, it was Marx and Engels
who elaborated the first complete ideological system, providing
the intellectual framework for those that followed. Marxism,
Fascism, Nazism, racism, nationalism, feminism,
environmentalism, and many other belief systems are seen as
instantiations of a common structure of ideology. In essence,
this book can be seen as a “Content Wizard”
for cranking out ideological creeds: plug in the oppressor and
oppressed, the supposed means of mystification and path to
liberation, and out pops a complete ideological belief system
ready for an enterprising demagogue to start peddling. The
author shows how ideological arguments, while masquerading as
science, are the cuckoo's egg in the nest of academia, as they
subvert and shortcut the adversarial process of inquiry and
criticism with a revelation not subject to scrutiny. The
attractiveness of such bogus enlightenment to second-rate
minds and indolent intellects goes a long way to explaining
the contemporary prevalence in the academy of ideologies
so absurd that only an intellectual could believe
them.
The author writes clearly, and often with wit and irony so dry it may
go right past unless you're paying attention. But this is nonetheless
a difficult book: it is written at such a level of philosophical
abstraction and with so many historical and literary references that
many readers, including this one, find it heavy going indeed. I
can't recall any book on a similar topic this formidable since
chapters two through the end of Allan Bloom's
The Closing of the American Mind.
If you want to really understand the attractiveness of ideology to
otherwise intelligent and rational people, and how ideology corrupts
the academic and political spheres (with numerous examples of
how slippery ideological arguments can be), this is an
enlightening read, but you're going to have to work to make the
most of it.
This book was originally published in 1985. This edition includes a
new introduction by the author, and two critical essays reflecting
upon the influence of the book and its message from a contemporary
perspective where the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the
Cold War have largely discredited Marxism in the political arena, yet
left its grip and that of other ideologies upon humanities and the
social sciences in Western universities, if anything, only stronger.
-
Twain, Mark [Samuel Langhorne Clemens].
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.
(Audiobook, Unabridged).
Auburn, CA: Audio Partners, [1876] 1995.
ISBN 978-1-57270-307-0.
-
Having read this book as a kid, I never imagined how much
more there was to it, both because of the depth of Mark Twain's
prose as perceived by an adult, and due to reading his actual words,
free of abridgement for a “juvenile edition”. (Note that
the author, in the introduction, explicitly states that he is
writing for young people and hence expects his words to reach them
unexpurgated, and that they will understand them. I've no doubt
that in the epoch in which he wrote them they would. Today, I
have my doubts, but there's no question that the more people who
are exposed to this self-reliant and enterprising view of childhood,
the brighter the future will be for the children of the kids
who experience the freedom of a childhood like Tom's, as opposed
to those I frequently see wearing crash helmets when riding
bicycles with training wheels.)
There is nothing I can possibly add to the existing corpus of commentary
on one of the greatest of American novels. Well, maybe this:
if you've read an abridged version (and if you read it in grade
school, you probably did), then give the original a try. There's
a lot of material here which can be easily cut by somebody
seeking the “essence” with no sense of the art of
story-telling. You may remember the proper way to get rid of
warts given a dead cat and a graveyard at midnight, but do you
remember all of the other ways of getting rid of warts, their
respective incantations, and their merits and demerits? Savour
the folklore.
This audiobook is produced and performed by voice actor
Patrick Fraley,
who adopts a different timbre and dialect for each of the
characters in the novel.
The audio programme is distributed as a single file, running
7 hours and 42 minutes, with original music between the
chapters.
Audio CD
and numerous print editions are
available, of which this one
looks like a good choice.
- Ferrigno, Robert.
Sins of the Assassin.
New York: Scribner, 2008.
ISBN 978-1-4165-3765-6.
-
Here we have the eagerly awaited sequel to the author's
compelling thriller
Prayers for the Assassin
(March 2006), now billed as the second volume in
the eventual Assassin Trilogy. The book in the middle of a
trilogy is often the most difficult to write. Readers are
already acquainted with the setting, scenario, and many of the
main characters, and aren't engaged by the novelty of discovering
something entirely new. The plot usually involves
ramifying the events of the first installment, while
further developing characters and introducing new ones, but
the reader knows at the outset that, while there may be
subplots which are resolved, the book will end with the
true climax of the story reserved for the final volume.
These considerations tend to box in an author, and pulling
off a volume two which is satisfying even when you know you're
probably going to have to wait another two years to see how
it all comes out is a demanding task, and one which Robert
Ferrigno accomplishes magnificently in this novel.
Set three years after Prayers, the former United
States remains divided into a coast-to-coast Islamic
Republic, with the Christian fundamentalist Bible Belt
in Texas and the old South, Mormon Territories and
the Nevada Free State in the West, and the independent
Nuevo Florida in the southeast, with low intensity warfare
and intrigue at the borders. Both northern
and southern frontiers are under pressure from green
technology secular Canada and the expansionist
Aztlán Empire, which is chipping away at the
former U.S. southwest.
Something is up in the Bible Belt, and retired Fedayeen
shadow warrior Rakkim Epps returns to his old haunts
in the Belt to find out what's going on and prevent
a potentially destabilising discovery from shifting the
balance of power on the continent. He is accompanied by
one of the most unlikely secret agents ever, whose story of
self-discovery and growth is a delightful theme
throughout. This may be a dystopian future, but it
is populated by genuine heroes and villains, all of whom are
believable human beings whose character and lives have made them who
they are. There are foul and despicable characters to be sure, but
also those you're inclined to initially dismiss as evil but discover
through their honour and courage to be good people making the best of
bad circumstances.
This novel is substantially more “science fiction-y”
than Prayers—a number of technological
prodigies figure in the tale, some of which strike this
reader as implausible for a world less than forty years
from the present, absent a
technological singularity
(which has not happened in this timeline), and
especially with the former United States and Europe having
turned into technological backwaters. I am not, however,
going to engage in my usual quibbling: most of the items
in question are central to the plot and mysteries the
reader discovers as the story unfolds, and simply to
cite them would be major spoilers. Even if I put them inside
a spoiler warning, you'd be tempted to read them anyway,
which would detract from your enjoyment of the book, which
I don't want to do, given how much I enjoyed it. I will say
that one particular character has what may be potentially
the most itchy bioenhancement in all of modern fiction, and perhaps
that contributes to his extravagantly foul disposition.
In addition to the science fictional aspects, the supernatural
appears to enter the story on several occasions—or maybe
not—we'll have to wait until the next book to know for sure.
One thing you don't want to do is to read this book
before first reading
Prayers for the Assassin.
There is sufficient background information mentioned in passing
for the story to be comprehensible and enjoyable stand-alone, but
if you don't understand the character and history of Redbeard,
the dynamics of the various power centres in the Islamic
Republic, or the fragile social equilibrium among the various
communities within it, you'll miss a great deal of the richness
of this future history. Fortunately, a
mass market paperback edition of the
first volume is now available.
You can read the first chapter of this book online at the
author's Web site.
- D'Souza, Dinesh.
What's So Great About Christianity.
Washington: Regnery Publishing, 2007.
ISBN 978-1-59698-517-9.
-
I would almost certainly never have picked up a book with this
title had I not happened to listen to a
podcast
interview with the author last October. In it, he says that
his goal in writing the book was to engage the contemporary
intellectually militant atheists such as
Richard Dawkins,
Sam Harris,
Christopher Hitchens,
Daniel Dennett, and
Victor Stenger
on their own turf, mounting a rational argument
in favour of faith in general and Christianity in
particular, demonstrating that there are no serious
incompatibilities between the Bible and scientific
theories such as evolution and the big bang,
debunking overblown accounts of wrongs perpetrated in
the name of religion such as the crusades, the inquisition,
the persecution of Galileo, witch hunts, and religious wars in
Europe, and arguing that the great mass murders of the
twentieth century can be laid at the feet not of religion, but
atheist regimes bent on building heaven on Earth. All this is
a pretty tall order, especially for a book of just 304 pages
of main text, but the author does a remarkably effective job
of it. While I doubt the arguments presented here will sway
those who have made a belligerent atheism central to their
self esteem, many readers may be surprised to discover that
the arguments of the atheists are nowhere near as one sided as
their propaganda would suggest.
Another main theme of the book is identifying how many
of the central components of Western civilisation:
limited government, religious toleration, individualism,
separation of church and state, respect for individual
human rights, and the scientific method, all have their
roots in the Judeo-Christian tradition, and how atheism
and materialism can corrode these pillars supporting the
culture which (rightly) allows the atheists the freedom
to attack it. The author is neither a fundamentalist
nor one who believes the Bible is true in a literal sense:
he argues that when the scriptures are read, as most
Christian scholars have understood them over two millennia,
as using a variety of literary techniques to convey
their message, there is no conflict between biblical
accounts and modern science and, in some cases, the
Bible seems to have anticipated recent discoveries.
D'Souza believes that Darwinian evolution is not in
conflict with the Bible and, while respectful of supporters
of intelligent design, sees no need to invoke it. He
zeroes in precisely on the key issue: that evolution cannot
explain the origin of life since evolution can only operate
on already living organisms upon which variation and selection
can occur.
A good deal of the book can be read as a defence of
religion in general against the arguments of atheism.
Only in the last two chapters does he specifically make the
case for the exceptionalism of Christianity. While
polemicists such as Dawkins and Hitchens come across as angry,
this book is written in a calm, self-confident tone and with
such a limpid clarity that it is a joy to read. As one who
has spent a good deal of time pondering the possibility that
we may be
living in a simulation created by an intelligent
designer (“it isn't a universe; it's a science fair
project”), this book surprised me as being 100%
compatible with that view and provided several additional
insights to expand my work in progress on the topic.
- Abadzis, Nick.
Laika.
New York: First Second, 2007.
ISBN 978-1-59643-101-0.
-
The first living creature to orbit the Earth (apart,
perhaps, from bacterial stowaways aboard Sputnik 1) was a tough,
even-tempered, former stray dog from the streets of
Moscow, named Kudryavka (Little Curly), who was renamed
Laika
(Barker) shortly before being sent on a one-way mission
largely motivated by propaganda concerns and with only the
most rudimentary biomedical monitoring in a slapdash capsule
thrown together in less than a month.
This comic book (or graphic novel, if you prefer) tells
the story through parallel narratives of the lives of
Sergei
Korolev, a former inmate of Stalin's gulag in Siberia who
rose to be Chief Designer of the Soviet space program,
and Kudryavka, a female part-Samoyed stray who was
captured and consigned to the animal research section of the
Soviet Institute of Aviation Medicine (IMBP). While
obviously part of the story is fictionalised, for example
Kudryavka's origin and life on the street, those parts of
the narrative which are recorded in history are presented
with scrupulous attention to detail. The author goes so
far as to show the Moon in the correct phase in events
whose dates are known precisely (although he does admit
frankly to playing fast and loose with the time of
moonrise and moonset for dramatic effect). This is a
story of survival, destiny, ambition, love, trust,
betrayal, empathy, cruelty, and politics, for which
the graphic format works superbly—often telling
the story entirely without words. For decades
Soviet propaganda spread deception and confusion about Laika's
fate. It was only in 2002 that Russian sources became
available which revealed what actually happened, and
the account here presents the contemporary consensus
based upon that information.