Book Reviews: What I read in the first half of 2011 (Part 2)

I would have gotten this second part of my now traditional biannual book-review blog out of the way Friday but I had a what-turned-out-to-be-minor medical emergency: One of my older cats, Emma, who suffers from Irritable Bowel Disease, began spitting up blood so I rushed her to the vet. As she was otherwise fine, Dr. Dais thinks she may have ruptured a capillary in her gut when she threw up that day's breakfast (usually Emma can keep her food down but I have now decisively proven that "beef" should not be part of her diet).

But now back to my reading in 2011 (the nonfiction shelf):

The Rise of the Greeks, Michael Grant: This was the usual Grant - a well researched, readable synopsis. In this case, Greece prior to the Persian Wars and the dominance of Athens and Sparta, when the other city-states tended to fade into the background. I enjoyed the work as it filled in a gap in my understanding of ancient Greek history.

Truth and Fiction in the Da Vinci Code, Bart Ehrmann: I've been less and less satisfied with Ehrmann's recent books. They read like slightly altered versions of his earlier stuff, which is well written and interesting. Truth and Fiction's problem is that I've read this stuff before and better written in his earlier books like Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture & the Faiths We Never Knew or Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible & Why.

War Is Not Over When It's Over, Ann Jones: This book recounts stories of the effects of war and its aftermath on (primarily) women. It's very graphic and very depressing - human beings can be extraordinarily inhuman, and the situation grows worse as the only response we seem capable of giving to the myriad crises besetting us is violence.

The Atoms of Language, Mark Baker: Baker wants to begin looking at language in terms of the elements (atoms) that it's composed of rather than historically. To that end he proposes a Table of Language Elements, and makes some interesting points along the way.

The Poison King, Adrienne Mayor: This is a biography of Mithradates VI of Pontus, who was the last significant opponent to Roman expansion in the East. It's OK but Mayor has an annoying tendency (which is becoming too common in many biographies) of overspeculation, imagining the thoughts of her subject without any support. Which is a shame, because when she's capable of informed, reasonable and supportable speculation when she bothers.

I'd still recommend it for all its flaws because they are relatively minor and when Mayor sticks close to her sources, the book has valuable information.

The Languages of China, Robert Ramsey: Moderately dated (1987) but an interesting overview of (naturally) the languages of China.

Ill Fares the Land, Tony Judt: A collection of essays by the late Judt about the deterioration of the Left and the socialist and welfare-state policies of Europe and the US in the last 30 years. It's an indictment of the intellectual bankruptcy of the Left and a call to reorganzie and reaffirm the humanistic and Enlightenment theories that undergird socialism.

Endgame, vol. 1-2, Derrick Jensen: This book deserves a blog all its own (and it may get one eventually) but for now the interested can read my review on GoodReads. In a nutshell, Jensen argues that it was a major mistake for Paleolithic man to turn to agriculture. The only sustainable lifestyle is a hunting-gathering one, and the advent of civilization institutionalized and regularized exploitation and violence as the normal way of life; a way of life that is destroying life on this planet.

I followed this book up with Spencer Wells' Pandora's Seed, which essentially argues the same point, but from a decidedly more optimistic POV. It isn't on the "official list" only because I started it in July so I'll throw it up on the year-end book-review round up.

Book Review: The 2008 Year-End Roundup

All of the books below have received some sort of review on my GoodReads site so I'll confine myself to a few brief notes. Note, too, that this certainly doesn't exhaust the list of stuff I read between June and December 2008, this is the cream of the crop:

The Fiction Roll -
The January Dancer, Michael Flynn. Probably the best new SF I've read all year.
The Nature of Monsters and The Great Stink, Clare Clark.
Toll the Hounds, Steven Erikson. Book 8 in The Malazan Book of the Fallen.
Dark Sleeper and The House in the High Wood, Jeffrey Barlough. A mixture of Dickens and Lovecraft; the former predominates in Sleeper, the latter in House (whose ending is one of the most profoundly creepy I've ever read).
The Coroner's Lunch, Colin Cotterill. A mystery series that follows the adventures of a Laotian coroner under the Communist regime. I can also recommend the second in the series, 33 Teeth.
Un Lun Dun, China Mieville's stab at young-adult fiction. Very good.

The Nonfiction Roll -
The Horse, the Wheel & Language, David Anthony
Who's Been Sleeping in Your Head?, Brett Kahr. A look at "normal" people's sexual fantasies.
The Geese of Beaver Bog, Bernd Henrich. One of the best nature books I've ever read.
The Singing Neanderthals (Steve Mithen) and Inside the Neolithic Mind (David Lewis-Williams). I put these two together because they're complementary texts in my mind: The first looks at the origins of music and language; the second looks at the origins of spirituality and religion in modern homo sapiens.
The Ruin of the Roman Empire, James O'Donnell
How Fiction Works, James Wood
Barbarian Tides, Walter Goffart. A dense book, not for the faint hearted but well worth the effort.
The Suspicions of Mister Whicher, Kate Summerscale
Young Stalin, Simon Montefiore. Stalin's life before he became Stalin.

Hail, Caesar!

This post is for all those Roman history geeks like me.

While reading James O'Donnell's marvellous book, The Ruin of the Roman Empire (my review of which can be read here), I came across reference to a web site called De Imperatoribus Romanis, where the interested can read various imperial biographies, view genealogies and maps, and read up on the major battles of the Roman era.

Very cool.

Read the Nov/Dec 2008 issue of Archaeology

On a slightly less partisan note than my two other blogs today, I invite my readers to take a look at the Nov/Dec 2008 issue of Archaeology magazine (their website is here).

Now, any issue of Archaeology is interesting (almost by definition, in my opinion) but I particularly liked one in this month's issue about a 12,000-year-old complex of stone circles in Turkey that shows evidence of extensive and coordinated activity from hunter-gatherer societies 6 thousand years before the city of Ur arose on the plains of Sumer. It's tantalizing and frustrating evidence for a complex spiritual side to pre-urban civilization that we'll probably never understand. That and it also is evidence of just how much we'll never really know about our history, and why the people who think visitors from Zeta Reticuli or Atlanteans gave the Ancient World all of its technology will never go away.

There's another article in this issue about gladiators and their diet based on remains found in a cemetary at Ephesus (also in Turkey). Turns out, gladiators did not follow the Atkins diet plan - they ate lots of carbs and were definitely on the "beefy" side. On the plus side, however, they appear to have received the best in medical care: Bone fractures show very clean healing (unlike similar fractures found in the bones of the general population).

While I'm recommending stuff: If you're a fan of the B-movie horror genre, I recommend Dagon. Ostensibly it's based on H.P. Lovecraft's eponymous short story but it's more a retelling of "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" by the same author (the Spanish village where it takes place is called "Imboca" > "Innsmouth"). It's well plotted, has a reasonably intelligent script, and isn't too gory.

And, of course, you should read the originals as Lovecraft wrote them.

Book review: Discovering God

I just finished Rodney Stark's Discovering God. A wide ranging work that attempts to explain the emergence of "revealed" and/or "moralistic" religions beginning in the Axial Age of the 6th and 7th centuries BC, when many of the great religious figures and movements arose.

I really enjoyed his earlier book, On the Rise of Christianity, where he applied sociological techniques to explain the appeal and success of Christianity. Above and beyond that, his description of life in an ancient city (in this case Antioch) was breathtaking and horrifying. It's amazing the conditions in which human beings will consent to live.

Lately, alas, his books have tended to be Christian apologias that detract from the force of his objective arguments regarding why religions appeal to people and how they effect conversion, diluting the power of his insights.

This is true of the last third or so of Discovering God. The first two-thirds, where he deals with non-Christian/non-Islamic religions, argues persuasively for his theory that a "free market" of religious ideas creates a population that is more intensely religious and committed to "discovering God," however that concept may be defined since many East Asian traditions can dispense with god figures entirely, and that such situations occurred during the Axial Age, under Roman rule before Constantine, and in America. The last hundred pages of the book, focusing on Christ and Mohammad, clearly show his pro-Christian bias and are the weakest part of the book. In the conclusion, he drops all pretense of neutrality and asserts that what he's been chronicling is a "discovery" of God, not an "evolution" of the concept of deity. He even has the gall to dismiss all East Asian religions because they don't "reveal" god, and Islam is inferior because it's a regression from the Christian advances made in understanding God.

I'm with Stark when he argues that the concepts of "sin" and "salvation" successfully helped instill a superior form of social control during a violent era in world history (Karen Armstrong makes much the same argument in The Great Transformation, highly recommended) . I also agree that these concepts arose on the peripheries of the ancient civilizations (Egypt and Sumer) because all transformative movements start at the margins, in relatively "chaotic" environments. He makes the point nicely when he writes: "[b]ecause these once-great civilizations [Egypt and Sumer] took no part in this historical turning point, `we are infinitely closer [culturally and religiously] to the Chinese and Indians' than to Egyptians and Mesopotamian..." (p. 389)

On the other hand, Stark's cavalier dismissal of the Buddha's, Laozi's and Confucius' spiritual insights two pages later is insulting and uncalled for. Simply because Gautama, the Old Master and Master Kung may have dismissed the questions Stark considers important and appropriate doesn't render them irrelevant.

In the introduction, Stark says that his argument can be used by believers and nonbelievers alike since it "works" whether God actually exists and humans are simply discovering his nature or whether the idea of "God" is a human attempt to make sense of our world. This pretense is dropped when he argues that only a religion that can claim to be "inspired" has any claim to legitimacy. Thus, "truer" religions must satisfy three criteria:

1. They must be revelations
2. They must be logically compatible
3. They must be progressively complex

As to the first, there is no need for a conscious divinity to construct a morality. It appears to help immensely in getting people to accept it (after all, it's easier to believe "God" has more insight into what constitutes moral behavior than Joe Schmo, your neighbor) but from my perspective that's about all it does. My attraction to the more intellectually rigorous forms of Buddhism (i.e., Zen) arises from that severance of dependence upon an external source to enforce "right action."

The second criterion simply baffles me. If religions arise in response to perceived spiritual needs that are not being satisfied (which is what Stark argues for earlier in the book), then whether God or gods is invoked is irrelevant. Monotheism may ultimately be the most logical/rational explanation of any divine existence/plan for the universe but why is the "golden rule" any less legitimate if promulgated by an Olympian Council, Taoist Immortals, the Son of God or Islamic mullahs?

The third criterion also seems nonsensical. Islam may have begun as a relatively uncomplex revelation geared to the understanding of Bedouin tribesmen but many, many imams and philosophers have elaborated upon it in the interim. And the same is true of Christianity. The early Church Fathers turned somersaults developing Christian theology from the sketchy sayings of the Jewish carpenter. The first three centuries of the Christian era were a "Wild West" of competing and increasingly complex theologies. Even after it became Rome's state religion, the educated elites continued to dispute (viz., the controversy over "homoousias" vs. "homoiousias").

And, let's face it, only a small minority of any religious faith really get deeply involved in such disputes (at least on their merits, plenty can be convinced to spill blood if their leaders tell them to). Which is not to detract from the worth of nonacademic/nonelite spirituality -- just that it's not as well thought out and coherent as your typical Jesuit's or imam's or lama's. (Actually, one of Stark's strengths is his insistence that humans have always been intensely spiritual; it's just that, for much of history, that religious fervor has been private and unrecorded.)

Stark goes off the deep end starting on p. 394, where he asserts, with no proof (of course, since it's a matter of faith) that "Christianity epitomizes revealed religion and offers a substantially more complex and nuanced vision of God...." He condemns Islam for its support of theocracies, repression of innovation, and belief in an ultimately irrational and unpredictable God. Examples with which Christianity also abounds. But the faults he lays at Islam's feet seem to be endemic to the "human condition." Anytime a faith, or a polity or a corporation gets a monopoly or near-monopoly it then goes about stifling the competition. Democracy developed in the West despite Christianity, not because of it; we have the utterly pagan Athenians to thank for the seeds that eventually grew into the Western democracies.

As an afterthought (or so it seems to this reader), Stark tacks on a final argument for the existence of God by invoking the specious arguments of the Intelligent Design movement, whose theories about the irreducible complexity of organisms like the eye or wings have been demolished time after time in the scientific literature.

In sum, Dr. Stark reaches some very convincing insights in the development and propagation of religious ideas but his otherwise worthy effort is undermined by his obvious bias toward Christianity as the definitive answer to man's search for meaning in the universe.