Book Report

I've got lot's of time to read and brought a ton of books. Here're some of the ones I've been reading.

• Entering Space, Robert Zubrin.  This book, written by an astronomical engineer in the field, discusses the history of space exploration and describes his view of how we can and must move out into space.

• A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Mark Twain.  This is good old reliable Twain. Rather than colloquialisms and rural America in the 1800's, the story recounts a man from the 1800's who wakes up in King Arthur's time. I suppose I'm a Pennsylvania Jew in Mother India's Court. Twain is ruthless (appropriately so, in my opinion) towards the church.

One great quote he coins, in cursing someone who was using words in a particular way: "That son of a mongrel philologist."

 

[Here, a pause in my typing while Unni, my 18 year old host, runs in, "Do you want to see a snake?" We run out the front door in time to see a snake ("Cobra's Wife," I'm told is it's species.) chasing a frog across the front yard.  It was moving faster than you could run, two meters long, as big as your wrist.  We ran through the house (me remembering to duck my head in the doorways) and spotted it in the yard, now swallowing the frog.   I ran for the camera, because I'm sure you'd love to have seen the photo, but he was gone when I returned.]

• Journey Into Darkness, John Douglas. Kathy called this, correctly, my paranoia book. It's by the FBI profiler who worked on the Unabomber as well as the original case on which Silence of the Lambs was based.  He tells stories, all brutal, about sociopaths and how they were profiled a tracked down.  I vacillate on whether to read these literally morbid books or not, frequently figuratively covering my eyes, and peeking out between my fingers.

• Memoirs of a Geisha, Arthur Golden. One of the few fiction books I've brought to India. The Acknowledgements section begins, "Although the character Sayuri and her story are completely invented, the historical facts of a geisha's day-to-day life in the 1930s and 1940s are not."  Since it was accurate historically,, I read this, and, admittedly, enjoyed the story as well as the view into another time and culture!

• The Autobiography of Mark Twain, Charles Neider, Editor.  This required some wading through boring passages, skipping them, but was fun.  (Remember when you were in school and you couldn't just skip whole sections of books without jeopardizing your grades.  Well, welcome to being adults.  There're no exams!)

I enjoyed reading some of the stories aloud using the written dialect.  Some of them were very funny to the point  that I'm considering memorizing them.  Here are two quick blurbs:

Regarding an introduction made during a speaking tour:  

It was gravely made by a slouching and awkward big miner in the village of Red Dog. The house, very much against his will, forced him to ascend the platform and introduce me. He stood thinking a moment, then said: "I don't know anything about this man. At least I know only two things: one is, he hasn't been in the penitentiary, and the other is [after a pause, almost sadly], I don't know why." (Italics in the original.)

• The Whole Shebang, Timothy Ferris.  "A state-of-the-Universe(s) Report"  Very good cosmology overview, much of which is beyond my understanding.

• Thinking in Pictures, Temple Grandin. A high-functioning autistic, the subject of Oliver Sach's title essay in An Anthropologist from Mars, Grandin writes about the disease. I had hoped for some insight into the mental processes of autistics (a la Sachs), but this was more dry and informative than interesting. (I sometimes feel like an anthropologist here in India, trying to discern what's happening.)

• Great Short Works of Mark Twain. Still more Twain!   Fun, quick stuff.

• Before Their Time, Kotlowitz  A brief, true, first-hand account of a soldier's W.W.II experience. Touching.

• Cold Oceans, Adventures in Kayak, Rowboat, and Dogsled, Turk.  This fellow did solo and two-person trips around Cape Horn (southern tip of Africa), the Northwest Passage (southern tip of South America) and Greenland.  I'm not all that impressed with him, but adventurers of his sort are, I suppose, frequently oddballs and misfits. The desolation, the near catastrophes, and the encounters with ancient snow cultures are good reading.   Perhaps because I'm set here in India, I am especially intrigued by cultural differences as well as cultures he meets with in the Artic that are regretfully in the end of their days, being absorbed by the Pepsi-culture.

Here're two quotes:

I told him of a remarkable drawing that chronicled an encounter off the west coast of Greenland between British naval officers and a band of Inuit on August 10, 1818. The officers were dressed in ceremonial uniforms with tails and gold epaulets. They walked across the slushy, summer snow in shiny, buckled shoes. The Inuit were dressed in fur-hooded anoraks (jackets) with sealskin boots. The British ships lay moored against the ice with proud flags flying, while two fragile dogsleds appears behind the Inuit. As the two parties stared at each other, the startled stone age hunters asked, "Where do you come from, the sun or the moon?"

        Click here for a second, more lengthy quote.

• Guns, Germs, and Steel, Diamond.  This is a good book  Diamond is a recipient of a MacArthur Foundation fellowship and this book got the Pulitzer prize..  I've often wondered why is it that white, Pepsi-culture is dominating the planet. Do we really want a mono-culture? Why is entire planet's culture seemingly moving towards that of the West?  Why is Western culture replacing other, indigenous cultures? Is it racial superiority,  Judeo-Christan values for dominating nature and people, unique expansionist, colonialsm desires of the people of the West, a consumer society that depends on colonies and  inexpensive labor and raw materials, or what? I've often wondered if America's success in the marketplace was simply because we started consuming resources later, had more resources to start with, and we are more materially oriented  than other cultures.  My thinking is along these lines is fairly simplistic. I'd love to hear your thoughts.

This book doesn't answer all of the above questions, but is a stunning tour de force of anthropology, archeology, ethno-biology, even linguistics, etc.  The author himself, says,

Authors are regularly asked by journalists to summarize a long book in one sentence. For this book, here is such a sentence: "History followed different courses for different peoples because of differences among peoples' environments, not because of biological differences among people themselves."

Other quotes:

Far more Native Americans and other non-Eurasian peoples were killed by Eurasian germs than by Eurasian guns or steel weapons. Conversely, few or no distinctive lethal germs awaited would-be European conquerors in the New World.  Why was the germ exchange so unequal?  Here, the results of of recent molecular biological studies are illuminating in linking germs to the rise of food production.

And, although not a direct quote, he says:

Until the 20th century, the only thing that kept European cities going was the immigration into them from the farms.  People were dying from epidemics so quickly that otherwise, the cities would have collapsed.

The author focuses mostly on physical issues.  In a nutshell, the Fertile Crescent had the vast majority of wild crops and large animals that were domesticatable. So,  Europe/Asia was first to emerge from hunter-gatherer to farming communities leading to cities.. And, Eurasia has an East-West landmass orientation as opposed the North-South  of the Americas.  Because Eurasia is more or less is at one latitude,  initial domestication efforts (as well as new technology) could easily spread along the East-West latitude lines since the climate was similar and trade routes easy. But, in the Americans, the lack of domesticable crops or animals led to a lag in development. And, the Mexican and SW U.S. deserts and South American mountains prevented ideas from spreading. So, Eurasian city-states grew much more rapidly than those of the Americas. 

City-states have the high concentration of people and they share germs with their domesticated animals. (Think "Swine Flu," for example.) From the animals come all sorts of diseases which spread through the densely populated cities. Over time, the population gets more or less immune to the diseases.   But, for example, not having large cities or domesticated animals, the American Indians hadn't been exposed to or developed the immunity for these diseases.  This is why most of the native Americans were killed by diseases not arms.

I wonder, though, if  expansionist colonialism is a necessary attribute to societies.  It seems that over the past 25,000 years, the common pattern has been that more "advanced" cultures have absorbed or destroyed those less advanced.  Is this an always occuring situation?  Can a culture not be expansionist and survive? Maybe, though, even if there are non-invasive cultures, these cultures are doomed to have the expansionist ones over run them?  After all, memes (pronounced like gene, which it is related to) or ideas have lives of their own and propagate from mind to mind much like living organisms. (See Richard Dawkins' book: The Selfish Meme) Perhaps Western consumerist culture is just a more virulent and seductive meme that is sweeping the earth and with which other cultures can not co-exist?

Another quote:

The third chapter introduces us to collisions between peoples from different continents, by retelling through contemporary eyewitness accounts the most dramatic such encounter in history: the capture of the last independent Inca emperor, Atahuallpa, in the presence of his whole army, by Francisco Pizarro and his tiny band of conquistadors, at the Peruvian city of Cajamara.  We can identify the chain of proximate factors that ennobled Pizarro to capture Atahuallpa, and that operated in European conquest of other Native American societies as well. Those factors included Spanish germs, horses, literacy, political organization,and technology (especially ships and weapons). That analysis of proximate causes is the easy part of this book; the hard part is to identify the ultimate causes leading to them and the actual outcome, rather than the opposite possible outcome of Atahuallpa's coming to Madrid and capturing King Charles I of Spain. [Italics added because of the image of Atahuallpa coming to Madrid is so nonsensical that it really highlights the differential that existed between the two cultures at that time. I'm not saying that the Inca's wouldn't have invaded Madrid if they could, though. I think they were probably as violent and expansionist as Europeans were... ]

And, finally, I found the author's analysis of the dawn of writing facinating. He says that the written characters in Korean actually show what part of the mouth they're pronounced from. And, each syllable is written as a standalone box, containing the letters within.