"Most Recently Read Books" expanded

As a convenience to my readers, I've expanded my "Most Recently Read Books" feature page to include a description of each book and, for most entries, a link to a review.

Most links are to a New York Times book review.

1. 

   Christopher Hitchens

   Hitch-22: A Memoir (2010: Christopher Hitchens) [Over the course of his 60 years, Christopher Hitchens has been a citizen of both the United States and the United Kingdom. He has been both a socialist opposed to the war in Vietnam and a supporter of the U.S. war against Islamic extremism in Iraq. He has been both a foreign correspondent in some of the world's most dangerous places and a legendary bon vivant with an unquenchable thirst for alcohol and literature. He is a fervent atheist, raised as a Christian, by a mother whose Jewish heritage was not revealed to him until her suicide. In other words, Christopher Hitchens contains multitudes. He sees all sides of an argument. And he believes the personal is political. This is the story of his life, lived large] 8-2011
2. The Grand Design (2010: Stephen Hawking & Leonard Mlodinow) [This book gets into the deepest questions of modern cosmology without a single equation. The reader will be able to get through it without bogging down in a lot of technical detail and might have his or her appetite whetted for books with a deeper technical content. And who knows? Maybe in the end the whole multiverse idea will actually turn out to be right] 7-2011



Jonathan Franzen

3. Freedom (2010: Jonathan Franzen) [St. Paul, Minnesota. Liberal environmentalists Walter and Patty Berglund pioneer the gentrification of their neighborhood. But their seemingly perfect life disintegrates when their son moves in with Republican neighbors and Walter assists the coal industry. Walter's musician friend Richard and Patty's estranged family further complicate matters] 6&7-2011
4. Room: A Novel (2010: Emma Donoghue) [To five-year-old Jack, Room is the entire world. It is where he was born and grew up; it's where he lives with his Ma as they learn and read and eat and sleep and play. At night, his Ma shuts him safely in the wardrobe, where he is meant to be asleep when Old Nick visits.Room is home to Jack, but to Ma, it is the prison where Old Nick has held her captive for seven years] 7-2011
5. God's Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question—Why We Suffer (2008: Bart D. Ehrman) [Former minister and author of Misquoting Jesus examines the Old and New Testaments for answers to the problem of suffering in the world. Ehrman finds the Bible offers different viewpoints—suffering as punishment, as a redemptive process, and as a test of faith—and analyzes the answers] 5,6&7-2011

6. 

   Antonio R. Damasio

   Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain (2010: Antonio R. Damasio) [Goes against the long-standing idea that consciousness is somehow separate from the body, presenting compelling new scientific evidence that consciousness—what we think of as a mind with a self—is to begin with a biological process created by a living organism. Besides the three traditional perspectives used to study the mind (the introspective, the behavioral, and the neurological), Damasio introduces an evolutionary perspective that entails a radical change in the way the history of conscious minds is viewed and told] 5&6-2011
7. Rescue (2010: Anita Shreve) [Webster is raising his teenage daughter as a single parent; his wife and the daughter's mother left years ago when she couldn't conquer her alcoholism. Explores the story of how Webster and his wife met, when he was an EMT and she the victim of a drunk driver—herself] 6-2011
8. American Bloomsbury: Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau: Their Lives, Their Loves, Their Work (2006: Susan Cheever) [Novelist explores the relationships among five writers of the transcendentalist movement who clustered around the home of wealthy Ralph Waldo Emerson in Concord, Massachusetts, during 1840-1868. Highlights their intertwined families and the love affairs that contributed to the creation of their literary masterpieces] 5&6-2011
9. Stalin's Ghost: An Arkady Renko Novel (2007 Martin Cruz Smith) [Moscow detective Arkady Renko investigates mysterious nightly sightings of Stalin at metro stops. He also uncovers crimes committed by two colleagues, former members of the Black Berets who operated in Chechnya, one of whom is running for office and knows Renko's lover Eva] 5-2011



Sam Harris

10. The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values (2010: Sam Harris) [Promotes a science of morality and argues that many thinkers have long confused the relationship between morality, facts, and science. Aims to carve a third path between secularists who say morality is subjective (e.g., moral relativists), and religionists who say that morality is given by God and scripture. Harris contends that the only moral framework worth talking about is one where "morally good" things pertain to increases in the "well-being of conscious creatures"] 4&5-2011
11. Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (and Why We Don't Know about Them) (2009: Bart D. Ehrman) [In this companion to Misquoting Jesus, biblical historian Ehrman reveals the divergent views of scholars concerning the true nature of Jesus and the concept of salvation. Discusses the historical Jesus, the writers of the Bible, and the origins of Christianity] 4&5-2011

12. 

    Jonathan Safran Foer

    Eating Animals (2009: Jonathan Safron Foer) [Author of the novel Everything Is Illuminated investigates the meat production industry and his own family's food choices. Examines factory farming and aquaculture and exposes their connections to global warming and environmental degradation. Explores the philosophical and ethical issues of carnivorism while advocating a vegetarian diet] 3&4-2011
13. Worth Winning (1985: Dan Lewandowski) [A rollicking story about one man’s search for his ideal mate. Set in Washington DC. The hero, Taylor Worth, is a well-to-do, good-looking 30-something computer programmer. He is actively courted and pursued by women, but can’t seem to find that ideal girl] 2&3-2011
14. Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior (2005: Temple Grandin) [Grandin, author of Thinking in Pictures, theorizes that autistic individuals experience the world as animals do—through direct sensory perception rather than abstract thinking. Grandin, herself autistic, and Johnson combine insights about autistic people with animal facts and anecdotes to reinterpret the capabilities and strengths of both groups] 2&3-2011

15. 

    Stieg Larsson

    The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest (2009: Stieg Larsson) [Sweden. Computer hacker Lisbeth Salander, from The Girl Who Played with Fire, is hospitalized with a bullet in her head, accused of murder. Journalist Mikael Blomkvist investigates Swedish officials protecting Alexander Zalachenko, Lisbeth's attacker—and father] 3-2011
16. The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie (2009: Alan Bradley) [England, 1950. Eleven-year-old aspiring chemist Flavia de Luce overhears her father in a heated argument with a stranger, who turns up dead in the garden of the Luces' decaying estate. When Flavia's father is charged with murder, she seeks clues in their village and his past to exonerate him] 2-2011

17. 

    Richard Dawkins

    The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution (2010: Richard Dawkins) [Author of The God Delusion questions the theory of intelligent design and explains the scientific evidence for the theory of evolution. Discusses selective breeding, genetics, fossils, new species, land mass changes, and more] 1-2011
18. City of Tranquil Light (2010: Bo Caldwell) [Caldwell (The Distant Land of My Father) draws from the biographies of missionaries in northern China during the turbulent first half of the 20th century in this second novel. It traces the story of two young, hopeful Midwesterners—shy, bright Oklahoma farmer Will Kiehn and brave Cleveland deaconess Katherine Friesen—as they journey to the brink of China's civil war in the isolated town of Kuang P'ing Ch'eng: the "City of Tranquil Light"] 12-2010&1-2011
19. The Discomfort Zone: A Personal History (2006: Jonathan Franzen) [Author of National Book Award winner The Corrections reminisces about his conventional Midwestern childhood and New York adulthood. Discusses his participation in a Christian youth fellowship in the 1970s, bird-watching, and learning German. Provides revelations about his fiction's real-life basis] 12-2010&1-2011



Ayaan Hirsi Ali

20. Nomad: From Islam to America, A Personal Journey through the Clash of Civilizations (2010: Ayaan Hirsi Ali) [Somalian author discusses events that occurred after those related in Infidel, including her move to America from Holland and relationship with the dysfunctional family she left behind. Analyzes Muslim attitudes toward money, women, and violence and offers suggestions to the West on avoiding radical recruitment of immigrants] 11&12-2010
21. Nothing to Lose: A Jack Reacher Novel (2008: Lee Child) [Hitchhiking through Colorado, ex-military cop Jack Reacher comes upon the unfriendly town of Despair. After being told to leave, Reacher, with the help of a female cop from neighboring Hope, sneaks back in repeatedly to investigate a mysterious factory and missing young men] 12-2010

22. 

    John Le Carré

    Our Kind of Traitor (2010: John Le Carré) [After teacher Perry Makepiece and his lawyer girlfriend Gail Perkins meet Russian money launderer Dmitri "Dima" Krasnov at an Antigua tennis resort, Dima asks for help defecting. British agents Hector Meredith and Luke Weaver get the case, and all players reunite in Paris] 12-2010
23. The Caged Virgin: An Emancipation Proclamation for Women and Islam (2006: Ayaan Hirsi Ali) [Somali-born Muslim author who fled to Holland advocates women's rights in Islamic cultures and condemns such practices as forced marriages, genital mutilation, and honor killings. Describes her 2002 election to the Dutch Parliament and her controversial film Submission that led to the 2004 murder of filmmaker theo van Gogh] 11-2010

24. 

    Philip Roth

    Nemesis (2010: Philip Roth) [Set mostly in 1944 Newark, it tells the story of Bucky Cantor, at 23 a freshly minted phys ed teacher and summertime playground director. Life’s dealt him some blows: his mother died in childbirth; his father, a thief, exited the picture long ago. Worse, to his anguish and disgrace, Bucky’s poor vision keeps him from going to fight the Germans alongside his best buddies—alongside, for that matter, “all the able-bodied men his age”] 11-2010
25. The Lion (2010: Nelson DeMille) [2003. Asad "the Lion" Khalil, from The Lion's Game, returns to America seeking revenge for the 1986 air raid that killed his family in Libya. His targets: antiterrorist agent John Corey and Corey's wife, FBI investigator Kate Mayfield] 10&11-2010
     

26. 

    Martin Cruz Smith

    Three Stations (1010: Martin Cruz Smith) [Moscow senior investigator Arkady Renko labels a young woman's death a murder and continues searching for clues even after he's suspended from duty. Meanwhile, Renko's unofficially adopted son Zhenya befriends a runaway whose baby was snatched at the Three Stations railroad hub] 10-2010
27. Crossfire (2010: Dick Francis & Felix Francis) [After losing his foot during an explosion in Afghanistan, British captain Tom Forsyth returns home to Berkshire only to discover that someone is blackmailing his mother, Josephine Kauri, a famous horse trainer. Tom investigates to find the culprits] 10-2010
28. The Girl Who Played with Fire (2008: Stieg Larsson) [Stockholm. Computer hacker Lisbeth Salander, from The Girl with The Dragon Tattoo, stands accused of murdering two journalists who were researching sex trafficking. Lisbeth's former lover, magazine publisher Mikael Blomkvist, investigates to exonerate her. Violence, strong language, and explicit descriptions of sex] 9&10-2010
29. The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever (2007: Christopher Hitchens) [Author of god Is Not Great selects and introduces writings that refute the concept and existence of God. Features works by notables from science, literature, and philosophy, including Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein, Thomas Hobbes, Karl Marx, John Stuart Mill, and Mark Twain] 9&10-2010

30. 

    Daniel C. Dennett

    Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (2006: Daniel C. Dennett) [Argues for a scientific analysis of religion in order to predict the future of this phenomenon. Dennett implies that the spell he hopes to break is not religious belief itself, but the conviction that religion is off-limits to scientific inquiry] 8&9-2010

Cryptic quotes

This week's Cryptoquote solutions^* have included the following:

We do not know what to do with this short life, yet we want another which will be eternal.  –Anatole France (1844-1924)

    I suppose that Anatole France intended mainly to lampoon people who not only want—but believe that they are going to have—another, eternal life. (I could, of course, just be projecting that motive onto him.)
    Or did he, too, want that other life—but seriously doubt he'd get it? And did he himself perhaps not know, anymore than anyone else, what to do with his present, short life?
    At any rate, Anatole France seemed to believe that most people (if not all) did "not know what to do" with their lives.
    Is that true?

Walter Berglund, in the July 8 excerpt, commented that "Everybody just wants their [sic] normal life." Isn't "wanting your normal life" equivalent to "knowing what to do with your life"?
    In that case, it would seem that "wanting another which will be eternal" would be to want a whole lot of normal, for a very, very long time.
    [I don't actually believe that "wanting your normal life" is equivalent to "knowing what [you ought] to do with your life."]

But another cryptoquoted author seemed to view things differently:

Most people have never learned that one of the main aims of life is to enjoy it. –Samuel Butler (1612-1680 or 1835-1902?); the earlier Butler is credited with having said or written, "All animals, except man, know that the principal business of life is to enjoy it.")

    If Butler would have agreed with Walter that people want their normal life, he would seem to have thought that they mostly didn't enjoy it much, in which case they might not be too keen to want another, eternal life throughout which they'd have to endure a huge quantity of eventually extremely boring normality.
    Presumably Butler himself had learned to enjoy his life. Was he satisfied with its short-term enjoyment, or did he want another, eternal life to go on enjoying himself? Wouldn't eternal enjoyment of the same sort of thing eventually become excruciatingly boring?

If, as Ken supposes (for the sake of argument, I believe, in commenting on "In the sticks"), "Walter is seeing the world clearly and objectively," everybody's enjoying or not enjoying "their" normal life is leading to global disaster, in which case "they" might very well like to have another, eternal life in order to have another go at it.
    Would that normality go on literally forever, or would eternity, too, become a disaster? And would it forever remain a disaster, or somehow end and, presumably, not be eternal anymore?
    Oh, to be a theologian with some hope (however vain) of being able to figure this out!

I think, for now anyway, I'll just go about tending my garden—assuming that I have some choice in how to respond to this knowledge. But, as Sam Harris argues in his 2010 book, The Morale Landscape, such choice is a paradoxical thing, given that we are "manipulated by neurochemicals or childhood programming" [and other things]—which Ken supposes (for the sake of argument) that we aren't.
    Harris, in his blog essay, "Morality Without 'Free Will'," states that

In fact, the concept of free will is a non-starter, both philosophically and scientifically. There is simply no description of mental and physical causation that allows for this freedom that we habitually claim for ourselves and ascribe to others.

    The paradox is that, nevertheless,

Judgments of responsibility...depend upon the overall complexion of one’s mind, not on the metaphysics of mental cause and effect....Viewing human beings as forces of nature does not prevent us from thinking in terms of moral responsibility.

    That is, Harris seems to be implying, people are morally responsible for wanting their normal life, and responsible collectively for herding us toward global disaster, however un-free they may be to act otherwise.
_______________
* My wife quickly solved the Cryptoquote by recognizing the coded shape of Anatole France's name; with the codes for a, c, e, f, l, n, o, r, & t all "broken," decoding what he said was child's play—but probably not as much fun as playing around with some of the questions the quotation raises, especially in the context of Jonathan Franzen's character Walter Berglund, Samuel Butler (whichever one it was), commenter Ken, and Sam Harris.

In the sticks

Jonathan Franzen

Walter Berglund and his assistant Lalitha (introduced last Friday in the "Think globally, act locally" excerpt from Jonathan Franzen's 2010 novel, Freedom) are in West Virginia, where they have just presented documents needed to commence demolition to open up fourteen thousand acres of future warbler preserve. They've celebrated at a steakhouse down the road from the Day's Inn by Walter's having the very first drink of his life (he claims), a beer, and Lalitha's getting drunk on three gin martinis. They've talked perhaps a bit too loudly for rural West Virginia, and Walter has been verbally accosted in the men's room by a guy "an exact match of Walter's profile of the kind of driver who didn't believe in turn signals."
    "Like the dark meat, do you?" the guy says.
    "She's Asian," Walter protests.
    "Candy's dandy but liquor's quicker, ain't that right, pal?"
    Made better aware of where they've been conversing, Walter thinks they should leave and take their food back to their rooms.
    Lalitha topples over as soon as she is deposited on her bed and Walter tells her he's going to his room to eat.
    "No, don't," she says. "Stay and watch TV. I'll sober up and we can eat together."

In this, too, he indulged her, locating PBS on cable and watching the tail end of the NewsHour—some discussion of John Kerry's war record [it's 2004]....
    He himself had been under tremendous pressure....Walter now needed to...start work in earnest on his anti-population crusade—needed to get the intern program up and running before the nation's most liberal college kids all finalized their summer plans and went to work for the Kerry campaign instead.
    In the two and a half weeks since his meeting in Manhattan with Richard, the world population had increased by 7,500,000. A net gain of seven million human beings—the equivalent of New York City's population—to clear-cut forests and befoul streams and pave over grasslands and throw plastic garbage into the Pacific Ocean and burn gasoline and coal and exterminate other species and obey the fucking pope and pop out families of twelve. In Walter's view, there was no greater force for evil in the world, no more compelling cause for despair about humanity and the amazing planet it had been given, than the Catholic Church, although, admittedly, the Siamese-twin fundamentalisms of Bush and bin Laden were running a close second these days. He couldn't see a church or a real men love jesus sign or a fish symbol on a car without his chest tightening with anger. In a place like West Virginia, this meant that he got angry pretty much every time he ventured into daylight, which no doubt contributed to his road rage. And it wasn't just religion, and it wasn't just the jumbo everything to which his fellow Americans seemed to feel uniquely entitled, it wasn't just the Walmarts and the buckets of corn syrup and the high-clearance monster trucks; it was the feeling that nobody else in the country was giving even five seconds' thought to what it meant to be packing another 13,000,000 large primates onto the world's limited surface every month. The unclouded serenity of his countrymen's indifference made him wild with anger.
    Patty [his wife] had recently suggested, as an antidote to road rage, that he distract himself with radio whenever he was driving a car, but to Walter the message of every single radio station was that nobody else in America was thinking about the planet's ruination. The God stations and the country stations and the Limbaugh stations were all, of course, actively cheering the ruination; the classic-rock and news-network stations continually made much ado about absolutely nothing; and National Public Radio was, for Walter, even worse. Mountain Stage and A Prairie Home Companion: literally fiddling while the planet burned! And worst of all were Morning Edition and All Things Considered. The NPR news unit, once upon a time fairly liberal, had become just another voice of center-right free-market ideology, describing even the slightest slowing of the nation's economic growth rate as "bad news" and deliberately wasting precious minutes of airtime every morning and evening—minutes that could have been devoted to raising the alarm about overpopulation and mass extinctions—on fatuously earnest reviews of literary novels and quirky musical acts....
    And TV: TV was like radio, only ten times worse. The country that minutely followed every phony turn of American Idol while the world went up in flames seemed to Walter deserving of whatever nightmare future awaited it.
    He was aware, of course, that it was wrong to feel this way—if only because, for almost twenty years, in St. Paul, he hadn't. He was aware of the intimate connection between anger and depression, aware that it was mentally unhealthy to be so exclusively obsessed with apocalyptic scenarios.... [beginning at 12 hours, 14 minutes, 37 seconds in the digital recording, pp. 313-315]

I hadn't thought until the present chapter how much like Walter I might be, if not myself so comprehensively angry and sometimes depressed as this fictional character seems to be (and as his creator, perhaps, might be)....

Further discussion

Think globally, act locally

Jonathan Franzen
(born 1959)

It's 2004 in Jonathan Franzen 2010 novel, Freedom, and Walter Berglund and his assistant, Lalitha, are meeting with Walter's old college roommate Richard Katz about enlisting the latter's rock musical stardom to help a conservation cause.

"Listen, Richard," Walter said. "The conservatives won. They turned the Democrats into a center-right party. They got the entire country singing 'God Bless America,' stress on God, at every single major-league baseball game. They won on every fucking front, but they especially won culturally, and especially regarding babies. In 1970 it was cool to care about the planet's future and not have kids. Now the one thing everyone agrees on, right and left, is that it's beautiful to have a lot of babies. The more the better. Kate Winslett is pregnant, hooray hooray....
    "Kids are beautiful," Walter said. "Kids have always been the meaning of life. You fall in love, you reproduce, and then your kids grow up and fall in love and reproduce. That's what life was always for. For pregnancy. For more life. But the problem now is that more life is still beautiful and meaningful on the individual level, but for the world as a whole it only means more death. And not nice death, either. We're looking at losing half the world's species in the next hundred years. We're facing the biggest mass extinction since at least the Cretaceous-Tertiary. First we'll get the utter wipeout of the world's ecosystems, then mass starvation and/or disease and/or killings. What's still 'normal' at the individual level is heinous and unprecedented at the global level."
    "It's like the problem with Katz," it sounded like Lalitha said.
    "Moi?"
    "Kitty cats," she said. "C-A-T-S. Everybody loves their kitty cat and lets it run around outside. It's just one cat—how many birds can it kill? Well, every year in the U.S. one billion songbirds are murdered by domestic and feral cats. It's one of the leading causes of songbird decline in North America. But no one gives a shit because they love their own individual kitty cat."
    "Nobody wants to think about it," Walter said. "Everybody just wants their normal life." [beginning at 8 hours, 39 minutes, 35 seconds in the digital recording, pp. 221-222]

    Thus the novel I'd been finding hugely entertaining and rewarding for its sharply etched characters, its sardonic social commentary, the adult twists and turns of its plot, its masterful writing has turned profound as well. What a read!

July 12. Some critical comments on this article have convinced me that I needed to have said more about what I thought was "profound" about the passage from Freedom. The critic latched onto Lalitha's contention that "one billion songbirds are murdered by domestic and feral cats every year in the U.S." I told him that I wasn't concerned with the precise number (or with whether Franzen might or might not agree with what Lalitha was saying).
    I told him that, for me, the passage made the point that in going about our "normal lives," there can be significant unintended consequences. I wasn't concerned with the distinction between songbirds and other birds, which the critic also latched onto. The songbird issue is a single issue in the larger context of human over-population and species extinction.
    I take unintended consequences seriously as a matter of conscience. I worry about things like driving my car a mile when I could have walked with no ill effects (and possibly some healthful ones) and thereby contributing to the amount of greenhouse gases going into planet Earth's atmosphere, about eating animal flesh and thereby subsidizing factory farming of animals, about not being more watchful for the subsidized predator of a house cat who roams our neighborhood and stalks the birds for whom I put out various seeds and thistles in our feeders every morning of my life. I may have wished that my two children would have more than a total of one offspring, but I am abstractly glad that at least my line hasn't contributed to human population growth.
    Maybe the book had turned profound only to me. Maybe I worry too much. In however many years before Earth is barely habitable, it'll hardly matter what this lone individual here did or didn't do.
    It would matter enough to make a difference only if many more had worried.

The critic reported the shooting of a stray cat by someone his wife knows, which prompted my wife to send me a link to a December 2, 2007 article in The New York Times ("Kill the Cat That Kills the Bird?," by Bruce Barcott). The article tells a cat-shooting story that

went something like this: On the evening of Tuesday, Nov. 7, 2006, Jim Stevenson [a bearish, ruddy-faced 54-year-old former science teacher who is known as the ornithological guru of Galveston, Texas] took a break from watching the election returns to look at some birds at San Luis Pass, a ripply channel connecting Galveston Bay to the gulf. Stevenson parked his white Dodge van with “Galveston Ornithological Society” bannered on its side, near the end of the San Luis Pass bridge, a tollway that connects Galveston Island to Follets Island. He found a spot in the low grass-speckled dunes and waited. Soon enough, he saw a handful of piping plovers, a federally listed endangered species. Then he saw something else: a scraggly cat stalking the plovers. A colony of about a dozen feral cats had been sleeping under the bridge. The cats liked to wander into the dunes for the same reason Stevenson did: the birds....

    Stevenson was the cat killer. His trial lasted a week, but the jury was deadlocked, so the case was dismissed. The article concludes: "The war between cats and birds—and among their protectors—continues."
    Many of the protectors of birds (perhaps most) seem to be attempting to think globally, while protectors of cats (whose populations are not endangered) seem primarily to be "wanting their normal life," as Walter says.
    The larger continuing war, generally, is between people wanting to think globally and people wanting their normal life not to be indisposed. We all want our normal life, but are we willing to make some sacrifices for the larger, longer common good?

July 15: More thoughts of Walter.
_______________
Wikipedia:

"Think Globally, Act Locally" urges people to consider the health of the entire planet and to take action in their own communities and cities. Long before governments began enforcing environmental laws, individuals were coming together to protect habitats and the organisms that live within them. These efforts are referred to as grassroots efforts. They occur on a local level and are primarily run by volunteers and helpers.