|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
my rating |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0271019670
| 9780271019673
| 0271019670
| 4.35
| 82
| Jan 01, 1999
| Sep 15, 1999
|
really liked it
|
Whether I appropriately tagged this "nonfiction" is left as an exercise for the reader. The Bathhouse at Midnight I think was recommended on a podcast, Whether I appropriately tagged this "nonfiction" is left as an exercise for the reader. The Bathhouse at Midnight I think was recommended on a podcast, and I had to have a friend track it down because it's an academic reference work, not really a book for light reading. It's organized into different sections relating to different magical practices--books, amulets, astrology, and so on--and collects hundreds of specific textual references and stories. It's incredibly dense, not something you can read through in a single sitting, and not really what I expected at all. But I loved it. Modern American culture is mostly anti-ritual except for a few small remnants like knocking on wood and saying "bless you!" after sneezing, but there's a lot more in here. The ritual significance of wearing belts and the extreme distrust for anyone who doesn't. The admonitions to Orthodox priests not to allow the serfs to leave any items on the church altar for six weeks in the hopes that it would gain protective or magical powers, under pain of condemnation. The bewildering variety of magical divinations relating to one's future spouse and similar practices of making sure a spouse remained faithful, my favorite of which involves stealing a piece of the husband's clothes, burning them, and mixing the ashes into food while saying "As the clothes are on the man, so may the husband be on the wife." The way diseases are often personified as "The daughters of Herod" with specific rituals to keep them away. And of course, the repeated reference to the bathhouse, a liminal place so dangerous that women were not supposed to go there alone and no one was supposed to go after dark. Magic was often thought to be demonic, or at least ungodly, and a lot of rituals recorded here require that the user take off their cross (and sometimes even step on it), or turn their icons to face the wall, or symbolically leave civilizations and go out into the forest--my favorite version of this requires that the user throw an axe handle over their shoulder, symbolically discarding their ability to bring order to the wilderness. Despite that, historically the condemnation of magic from the government was primarily due to political concerns--magical power was a threat the throne that allowed even lower-ranking peasants to strike at the tsar. It was often conflated with poison, and there are many examples of attendants being arrested for treason and conspiracy with magic as the means. There's far more than I can include here and if you're interested in folk culture, this book is a treasure trove. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
May 17, 2022
|
Jun 16, 2022
|
May 17, 2022
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0393058247
| 9780393058246
| 0393058247
| 4.30
| 372
| Feb 04, 2013
| Feb 04, 2013
|
it was amazing
| "The righteous Law of Moses "The righteous Law of MosesThis was probably the hardest book to get through I've read in the last couple years. The basic thesis of Anti-Judaism is that antisemitism is not a weird pathology or a bigotry that flares up occasionally and then dies down, it is a fundamental building block of European civilization, as impossible to separate from European history and intellectual thought as the Roman Empire or Christianity itself. The reason that the book is entitled "Anti-Judaism" rather than "Anti-Semitism" is because Judaism is, for Europe, a kind of category that doesn't actually require any association with real Jews or our religious practices. Even from the earliest moments of Christian civilization, Judaism was being used as an intellectual category into which everything undesirable or unseemly was placed. For example, early on in Christian history, there was a conflict between various factions over what Christianity was, and one of the major ways it defined itself was as "not Judaism." After all, Jews and Christians drew on the same scriptures but interpret them in very different ways, and Christians needed a way to distinguish themselves from those who went even further afield such as Marcion, and they settled on Jews as deceitful snakes. Judaism, in its devotion to the "Law" rather than the "Spirit," had misinterpreted G-d's messages through his prophets, leading to their rejection and murder of Jesus. We could be kept alive, but in misery, as an abject lesson of the proper state of the non-Christian word and as a punishment for our murder of Jesus. Over time, this reduced contact between most Christians and Jews, but it didn't reduce the place of Judaism in Christian thought. Because Christianity defined itself in opposition to Judaism, Judaism became whatever was necessary to smear one's opponents. In early religious arguments, "Judaism" was a devotion to the letter of the law rather than the spirit, a care for this world rather than the next, empty ritual rather than faith, and greed rather than Christian charity, and Christians who had never met one of us would freely call their fellow Christians "Judaizers" based on their perceived lack of Christian characteristics. And then after centuries of this, during the European Enlightenment, everything flipped on its head--since the Enlightenment valued the power of reason and human rationality, "Judaism" was a devotion to priests and G-d rather than natural reason and Enlightenment writers accused others of "Judaism" to indicate they were too devoted to their traditional Christian faith rather than what reason could reveal. I use Judaism in quotes here because at this point, most of the Jews in Western Europe had either been forcibly converted, expelled, or murdered, so the comparisons to Judaism had nothing to do with living Jews. It drew on the ancient European traditional of Judaism as the eternal outsider, the rebel, the liar and deceiver, the obstinate and blind fool, scorned by all. The French Revolution took up the question of "can Jews be citizens of the Republic?" thirty-two times even though barely any Jews lived in Revolutionary France, because "Jews" here were a stand-in for everything that wasn't French or, more broadly, Christian European. Because of all this, Anti-Judaism barely touches on the Holocaust. Nirenberg's contention is that it wasn't a uniquely German or modern or industrial phenomenon--after all, the Pogroms of 1391 in Spain killed or forcibly converted between half and three-quarters of the Jews there, and some of the first racist legislation in European history was written to prevent formerly Jewish converts to Christianity from holding positions of power over "natural Christians"--but rather a particularly strong expression of the traditional European opposition to the Jews. As he writes, a German soldier who fell into a coma in 1915 and awoke thirty years later, on being told that a European power had fallen to totalitarianism, attempted to conquer the continent, and tried to exterminate the Jews, could reasonably have exclaimed, "Aha! I knew those French dogs could not be trusted!" As the Holocaust ramped up in Europe, the vast majority of Americans thought that America should keep Jewish refugees out. Even after Kristallnacht, these numbers held. The tradition of Judaism as the opposite, the other, all that was undesirable, still held in the new world. In a way, Anti-Judaism: the Western Tradition read to me as another Capital in the Twenty-First Century. The latter book makes the argument that the modern economic conditions of a strong middle class, a widespread consumer culture, and high class mobility are all the product of very particular circumstances and, absent government policy to maintain them, the usual state of human history--a tiny elite owning everything, a small artisan and managerial class below them, and everyone else in abject poverty--will reassert itself. Similarly, when I read this book I couldn't help but think about the spike in antisemitism lately as the natural state of European civilization reasserting itself as the memories of the Holocaust slowly fade. In this context, it's a little harder to dismiss the comments from some of the people I've heard say, "Who cares about [non-Jews]? They've always hated us and they always will." ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Dec 27, 2019
|
Feb 06, 2020
|
Dec 27, 2019
|
Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 1620972611
| 9781620972618
| 1620972611
| 3.54
| 85
| unknown
| Nov 01, 2016
|
really liked it
|
Sometimes, I think about how likely it was that the world would have ended when I was a baby. I knew about Stanislav Petrov, of course, and how he ess
Sometimes, I think about how likely it was that the world would have ended when I was a baby. I knew about Stanislav Petrov, of course, and how he essentially saved the world when he decided that the missile launches the computer was reporting to him were in error. He has always maintained that there was no proximate danger, that the Soviets had failsafes in place that would have prevented a full-scale war, but reading Able Archer 83 I'm not so sure. The Soviet command was on high alert due to NATO exercises which they thought might be a preamble to a pre-emptive strike. In this book, there are repeated references to unprecedented actions taken by the Soviets like keeping short-game missiles deployed and moving so they couldn't be destroyed on the ground. In that atmosphere, if Petrov had reported a possible American surprise attack, would the Soviets, knowing they only had a few minutes to decide, have waited for further information? Would they have waited for ground radar, or thought about how only a handful of missiles was odd for an American first strike? Or would they have retaliated against what they thought was an unprovoked attack, and then America would have done the same, and civilization would have burned to ash. "The princes, putting the words of their wise men to naught, thought each to himself: If I but strike quickly enough, and in secret, I shall destroy these others in their sleep, and there will be none to fight back; the earth shall be mine.I would have been fifteen months old. There's a short section at the beginning of this book that makes that point. That the USSR didn't have perfect insight into America's actions and so when they put together Reagan's inflammatory speeches with the changes in the NATO exercises designed to simulate conditions of nuclear war, they could only assume that America might be preparing to execute a decapitating strike under the premise of a war game. And to his credit, when Reagan realized how dangerous the rhetoric was and how close the world had come to doom--how much his reckless warmongering was inflaming the Soviets because they didn't have perfect access to his reasoning--he toned it down. It's hard to even write a review of this, because other than that section, Able Archer 83 is a collection of declassified documents. How do I review a CIA report that indicates that the USSR isn't really that worried by the NATO exercises (oops), or a primary source in Russian? I can't, obviously--that's not their point. But as a book, this is a valuable reminder of how brinksmanship can almost lead to disaster, as does assuming the other side knows your threats are just posturing. I'm alive--we're all alive--because some people made the conscious decision to take a step back. There's a moment when Reagan realizes that technological developments means that on news of a launch, he'll have six minutes to decided what to do. One man, six minutes, and the end of the world. No one should have that power, and the documents collected here are a good explanation of why. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Dec 04, 2019
|
Dec 12, 2019
|
Dec 04, 2019
|
Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 0140184325
| 9780140184327
| 0140184325
| 3.80
| 1,015
| 1907
| Nov 03, 1992
|
liked it
|
I first read The Aran Islands when I spent the first semester of my senior year of university in Ireland. I went over in August but the Irish term doe
I first read The Aran Islands when I spent the first semester of my senior year of university in Ireland. I went over in August but the Irish term doesn't begin until September, so for the first month we were there, University College Cork organized a special program for the foreign students. The literature students all read the same books and took the same classes, and in the midst of reading The Aran Islands, we packed up for a trip. After lunch at Ballymaloe and a visit to Coole Park, we stopped in Galway and took a ferry over to Inis Meáin where we would spend four days. We had class in Dún Chonchúir, sitting on the terraces inside as our professor lectured as we discussed the book, and then spent hours wandering around the low stone walls and paths of the island. Finding Leaba Dhiarmada agus Ghráinne, the bed of Diarmuid and Gráinne as they fled across Ireland, suddenly after talking to a friend who had been looking for hours and never found it. Visiting the knitwear shop and buying a sweater made from the wool of the sheep we had seen wandering in the island's fields. Staying in a bed and breakfast and listening to the owners speak English to us and Irish to each other. And standing next to Cathaoir Synge, "Synge's Chair," hundreds of feet above the sea, and watching the sun sink down into the ocean in the West. I could well understand what it was that Synge saw in the island and why he wrote so approvingly about it. When I opened the book, a business card fell out for the gentleman at the Bank of Ireland who got me my bank account. Now when I read The Aran Islands, though, I can't help me feel how condescending it seems. Synge views the people of Inis Meáin as living a pure pastoral life, unspoiled by modernity, with a kind of innate arcadian nobility. Not even the other Aran Islands get as much praise as Inis Meáin does. But I can't help but notice that the lives of the islanders sound terrible, full of death and grinding poverty. There's one incident where some police from the mainland come over in the service of absentee landlords to perform evictions, and while Synge watches and writes in his notebook about it, the police turn old women out of their homes and the villages laugh as the police try to round up pigs. I couldn't help but imagine Synge, a man who had studied in France and been to Germany, sitting and writing impassively while the people of Inis Meáin suffered after having been dispossessed of the island that they had lived for generations on. He keeps delivering backhanded insults even while he's trying to complement the people. After one description of a man who knew both Irish and English and took issue with a translation of Moore's Irish Melodies, and was able to quote both the Irish original and the English translation in order to explain his argument, Synge writes: In spite of his singular intelligence and minute observation, his reasoning was medieval.in reference to the man's belief that Irish wouldn't die out on the Aran Islands because of its use in daily industry. Well, the man was right. I've been to Inis Meáin and passed groups of teenagers speaking Irish amongst themselves, so shows what Synge knows about his reasoning. Later, Synge writes: Although these people are kindly towards each other and to their children, they have no feeling for the sufferings of animals, and little sympathy for pain when the person who feels it is not in danger. I have sometimes seen a girl writhing and howling with toothache while her mother sat at the other side of the fireplace pointing at her and laughing at her as if amused by the sight.Ah, humanity unspoiled by European civilization. It's not that I think Synge is lying here, it's that I think he wants the people of Inis Meáin to exist as some kind of museum monument to what was. The ancient practices of rural Ireland, still alive on the shores of Atlantic, no matter the cost in men lost at sea, women turned out of their homes, and endless stories about people that Synge doesn't even deign to give a name to in his writings. I'm glad I read this while I was on Inis Meáin and have those memories to carry me through this reading. I think I would have found it pretty dire otherwise. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Jan 22, 2018
|
Jan 24, 2018
|
Jan 22, 2018
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 1555601995
| 9781555601997
| 1555601995
| 3.35
| 31
| Mar 01, 1993
| Jan 01, 1993
|
really liked it
|
As the name indicates, this is pretty much the same as Paranormal Animals of North America except for the location change. It has the same format, wit
As the name indicates, this is pretty much the same as Paranormal Animals of North America except for the location change. It has the same format, with various Shadowland posters talking about the animals and other creatures depicted within a base text written like a field guide. I saw "other creatures" because Europe has a specific subset of beings called "faerie creatures" that taxonomists have a hard time identifying, even under Awakened genera like anima or umbra. Creatures like the each-uisge, which appears pretty much as its mythological counterpart and so is an aquatic horse that convinces people to ride it, after which they stick to its back and it rides them into the water to drown; or Blackberry cats, which are cats that have mind control powers; or sprites, which are basically what they sound like--tiny elf-looking people with wings; or the bean sidhe, a spirit that attaches itself to a particular family (rather than a terrain as with nature spirits) and follows their fate. Even the Wild Hunt is written up. I appreciate that the designers committed to including creatures from European mythology and fitting them into an ecosystem where they could actually exist as natural animals (albeit animals that can use magic). Satyrs are in here as an Awakened form of goat, with their resemblance to humans derived from their ability to walk on their hide legs for brief periods of time. Minotaurs exist as well, though apparently as Awakened aurochs, the last of which died in Poland in the 17th century, and an Awakened aurochs whose preferred diet is metahuman flesh at that. The afanc, from Welsh mythology, shows up as a lake monster that gene typing establishes as deriving from a crocodile base despite crocodiles not being native to Europe. Goblins are pretty much like they are in generic fantasy, as tribal creatures who live in forests or underground, but in Shadowrun they're derived from dwarves infected with a strain of HMHVV. There are a lot of bounties on creatures in here, possibly because some of the creatures like the gorgon or the minotaur are so unrelentingly hostile, but also as a way to provide Shadowrunners a reason to interact with them. When storm dolphins are written as attacking oil platforms in the North Sea, that provides a hook for runners to get hired to stop them and a moral dilemma. Do the runners take the job, knowing that they're killing animals who are simply reacting to the pollutants dumped into the ocean that are causing an extraordinary high stillbirth rate? The dolphins can't pay them, but how far do their consciences allow them to go? This is mirrored in the in-universe commentary as well, with a poster named Rabid who keeps talking about the runs he's been on to kill various animals and other posters reacting with horror to his stories. It provides a good illustration of the moral dilemma and a wide variety of situations where the runners could encounter the animals herein during the course of their work. Like Paranormal Animals of North America, this provides a good reason to get runners out of the urban sprawl and into the wild, and I really like the scientific presentation of magical creatures. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
2
|
Jan 11, 2018
not set
|
Jan 16, 2018
not set
|
Jan 11, 2018
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0531056333
| 9780531056332
| 0531056333
| 4.08
| 1,153
| 1965
| Jan 01, 1984
|
it was amazing
|
There is a human cognitive flaw called hindsight bias, where actions that were in flux at the time seem obvious in hindsight. This often comes up in s
There is a human cognitive flaw called hindsight bias, where actions that were in flux at the time seem obvious in hindsight. This often comes up in studies in history, where moderns are boggled that events in the past played out how they did. How did the Nazis come to power? Didn't everyone know they were murderous thugs? Why didn't people stop them? The Nazi Seizure of Power is about how some people knew, and they tried and failed to stop them in one town. Northeim, the subject of the book, was not necessarily an archetypal German town. It had an inordinate number of civil servants, and the railroad workers were more representative than elsewhere. But it's a good microcosm of German society at the time of the Weimar Republic, and its failings should be instructive in our own efforts to fight resurgent Nazism in the modern world. For example, the town failed to unify against the Nazis. The Right had no interest in allying with the Left, and in fact welcomed the Nazis as a way to finally crush the Social Democratic Party once and for all: The victory of Nazism can be explained to a large extent by the desire on the part of Northeim’s middle class to suppress the lower class and especially its political representatives, the Social Democratic Party. Nazism was the first effective instrument for this.The Social Democrats pretended to a revolution that they had no desire to actually effect, and that led the town's middle class to lump them in with the Communists. The SPD, for their part, didn't like the Communists either and had no desire to work with them, so the Left didn't unify. The Right did--the Nazis joined with the Nationalists, exploiting the militarism and patriotism of the middle class and existing social structures. Of course, all that was swept away when the Nazis took power. The SPD fought back in a series of street battles in the early 1930s, but the Nazis were also willing to fight and the constant warring in the streets combined with the Depression made the middle class desperate for something--anything--that would solve the situation. The Nazis held meetings weekly, with large attendance. They held parades through the streets. They promised that they would bring back Germany's glory. They promised that they would solve unemployment. They were vague on how all this would be accomplished, but the promises were enough. They did solve unemployment by putting people to work in the stone quarry or on the railroads. As the book states, it was the only real accomplishment they had. Once the Nazis were voted in--with two-thirds of the vote, much higher than the German average--they consolidated power over the span of a few months. The city council was packed with Nazis, organizations were required to have Nazi-majority boards or be subsidiaries of the Nazi party, and competing organizations were dissolved. There were spies everywhere and the local Nazi leader was blatant in his reprisal against anyone who crossed him, so social ties dried up as the people of Northeim became more and more isolated. As the book states: What was the value of getting together with others to talk if you had to be careful what you said?Or, perhaps more chillingly on the Nazi goal: Whenever two or three were gathered, the Fuhrer would also be present.By removing the old class distinctions and the organizations that were largely based on class lines, the Nazis prevented any effective resistance from gaining a foothold. There was no organized opposition because there was no way to organize. While the book is mostly focused on politics, there are some mentions of the Nazis' antisemitism. Jews were about 1% of the town's population and were well-integrated, but subject to a low level of pervasive antisemitism. The town's Christian middle class larger thought that the Nazis' diatribes against Jews were an election tactic, or an exuberance of Hitler that would be tempered by the realities of power, or any number of excuses. They never considered that the Nazis were serious and would actually do what they said, especially because propaganda changed when the early strong antisemitism put off some voters: So there were strong reasons for the Nazis to change the targets and content of their propaganda by the end of 1928, and on Hitler's orders they did. Though there would be a continued attempt to win workers, and though anti-Semitism would not be abandoned, the new emphasis would be on groups that were responding to Nazism and on propaganda themes that produced results.. That meant primarily appeals to small businessmen, shop clerks, and the rural population, with a primary content of anti-Marxism plus attacks on the economic policies of the Weimar Republic.But once there are no more votes, there is no need to appeal to voters. It's easy to say that people who do things are evil, somehow categorically different than us. But it's wrong. Northeim was an ordinary town, with ordinary Germans, and it fell apart into a totalitarian Nazi fiefdom in only a few years. It could happen anywhere, and it could happen again. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Oct 03, 2017
|
Oct 11, 2017
|
Oct 03, 2017
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0195139410
| 9780195139419
| 0195139410
| 3.86
| 404
| 1998
| Jul 27, 2000
|
liked it
|
I'm pretty sure I first bought this book for a survey-level Judaic Studies course that I took at Penn, and that's exactly what it is. There's no other
I'm pretty sure I first bought this book for a survey-level Judaic Studies course that I took at Penn, and that's exactly what it is. There's no other way that a millennia-long history can be condensed into 250 pages without only touching on the highlights. It's been sitting on our bookshelf for over a decade and I assumed that someday, I would go back and reread it, and since we recently cleaned out our bookshelves and I specifically saved it from the old books bag, I bumped it up the reading list. And having done so, I'll going to drop it into the corner little library and forget about it. It's not that it's bad, it's that it's passable. The format simply doesn't permit the exploration of any particular topic I wanted to read about with any depth, so often events were touched on and then the narrative passed on while I was still wanting to hear more. Like, Khazaria is mentioned briefly, but for a kingdom that [probably] had a couple centuries of rule by Jewish royalty and possibly nobility, it gets less mention than Adiabene, which was Jewish for a few decades only. The only note about the Jews of Ethiopia or India or China is a note lamenting that there is no space for their inclusion, which I suppose is better than nothing. And now I really want to read an entire book about the "Dutch Jerusalem," or the aftereffects effects of Napolean defining Judaism as a religious category, rather than Jews as an ethnic category, especially considering World War II swung the pendulum back the other way so that conversion, the traditional escape hatch (such as it was) from anti-semitic persecution was no longer an option. The book also defines itself as a secular history, not a religious history, and it mostly succeeds to the degree that it's possible to separate developments in Judaism from the history of the Jews as a people. This is more true in later sections than in earlier ones, though, when it relies too much on uncritical Biblical accounts of history. For example, early Israelite religion, pre-Josiah, is something I'm very interested in. A Short History of the Jewish People assumes that at least some of the Children of Israel were in Egypt--the oft-commented on "Apiru" or "Habiru"--and made their way to Canaan. There's no evidence we have for this happening, and certainly no evidence for the Biblical Exodus account. He treats claims of pre-Exilic religion being essentially monotheistic and any polytheism as a deviation as true, even though there's some evidence that this was all Josiah rewriting history and I read a whole book, יה and the Gods and Goddesses of Canaan, about linguistic similarities between G-d and the other native gods and goddesses of Canaan. Those were just the two areas where I spotted errors, and it made me wonder if Scheindlin was credulous elsewhere when writing down poorly-sourced accounts or particularly-strong mythology that doesn't necessarily have a basis in fact. It could be anywhere and I wouldn't have the historical background to know. The end of the book also comes off almost as Israeli propaganda, with the noble sabras making the desert bloom in the face of implacable Arab intransigence. There's some effort to add nuance, like mentioning Irgun, but the movement of Palestinians (voluntary and otherwise) from Israeli territory is given a single sentence, and there's no mention of Jews from other Middle Eastern countries coming to Israel except when it later mentions the dominance of the Ashkenazim in Israeli politics in the 60s. Again, when it comes to something that I know about, I notice the cracks. This isn't a bad book, it's just a survey book. As with any survey, the proper response to any interesting information is to track down something devoted specifically to that topic to find the nuance. That's what I'll do with some of what I read in this book, but there's no reason for me to keep it around anymore. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Apr 27, 2017
|
May 2017
|
Apr 27, 2017
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0465002390
| 9780465002399
| 0465002390
| 4.38
| 17,294
| Aug 2010
| Oct 12, 2010
|
it was amazing
| Each of the living bore a name.I knew a lot of the history of the bloodlands already, that part of Europe comprising Poland, Belarus, the Baltic state Each of the living bore a name.I knew a lot of the history of the bloodlands already, that part of Europe comprising Poland, Belarus, the Baltic states, Ukraine, and the other areas between the USSR and the Reich during World War II. The famine in Soviet Ukraine, the organized anti-semitism of post-war Soviet policy, the Warsaw Uprising, the Shoah, of course...all of that was familiar to me. But not the details, and not all put together in the way that Snyder does. For instance, I knew about the famine and that it was deliberate policy of Stalin, but not the extent of Stalin's rationalizations. The quotas for wheat harvest were based on a bumper crop year, and so normal years' harvests fell short. Stalin deliberately prevented any loosening of the quotas, sending people to the villages to seize seed corn if necessary. Furthermore, the USSR often blockaded the countryside to prevent starving peasants from going to the cities to beg for bread. Peasant starvation was seen in a political light--as the revolution moved further toward its ultimate completion, the enemies of the revolution would grow correspondingly more desparate and willing to resort to more vile tricks. Starving peasants were thus the most committed revolutionaries, willing to deny even themselves food in order to prevent food from getting to Russia. It's like those stupid [Paranoia] jokes about how Friend Computer wants the people to be healthy and happy so injury is treason, except it was deliberate Russian policy. Somewhere between three and four million people died. When Stalin took over Poland, he wanted to prevent any Polish nationalism from taking root and undermining the progress of Communism. In the 30s, before the pact with Hitler, Stalin had most been worried about a Polish-German-Japanese alliance against him, and when he invaded Poland this was still in his thoughts. Hundreds of thouands were deported to the Soviet Union, either displaced or sent the gulag. Tens of thousands, including members of the Polish army, were kept in camps. They were not prisoners of war, to the Soviet mind, but "counterrevolutionaries" who resisted the rightful progress of communism and so did not deserve any POW protections. This came to its ultimate end at Katyn Forest, at the end of guns held by men from the NKVD. Tens of thousands of people died. As I said, I'm familiar the Shoah, and my choice of words probably indicates why. But a point the book repeatedly returns to is that despite all the mythmaking that has taken place later, the idea of the Shoah as the ultimate crime which must never be repeated...no government at the time cared at all. None of the allies made any special effort to aid the people in the death camps, and in at least one case, the aforementioned Warsaw Uprising, Stalin deliberately did not aid them because the Home Army was filled with Polish nationalists and it served his political ends for them to get killed off so as to make his planned goal of incorporating Poland into the USSR after the war easier. The Home Army wasn't in service to the Communist Party, and that meant they were reactionaries, barely better than the Nazis they were fighting. The West tells itself that it stopped the Shoah and liberated the camps, but that's a lie. Most of the death camps were in the east, where the Jews were. Pre-war Poland's Jewish population was a double-digit percentage of the country. Until Stalin purged it, the USSR's upper ranks contained numerous Jews as well, which Hitler used--and antisemites still use--to claim that communism was a secret plot of "World Jewry" to undermine everyone else. After the war, Jewish life in the bloodlands was essentially extinguished and centuries of tradition were gone. Am Israel Chai, but not there, and there are still fewer Jews alive now than there were before the Shoah. Six million Jews died, along with five million others. After the war, Germans citizens in the now Soviet territories were expelled, mostly deported back to Germany, but occasionally sent to the gulags. In addition, Stalin instituted a plan of ethnic homogeneity in the new countries under Soviety influence, resulting in the deportation and movement of Poles, Ukrainians, Belorussians, Jews, and other groups. Tens of millions were uprooted from what they would have considered their ancestral home but under which the new racial understanding of origin they would be forever aliens and so must leave. At least five hundred thousand people died, most of them Germans. After the war, the USSR developed a national mythology based on the unique suffering of the Russian people at the hands of the fascist and capitalist oppressors. This ideology did not have any place for the Shoah or the very real cruelty of Nazi policy toward the Jews, and in places the "official" death tolls were adjusted to make sure that Jews did not take an "undue" amount of suffering. Over time and with the establishment of Israel, the familiar antisemitic tropes became official policy. Jews were rootless cosmopolitans without true loyalty to the Soviet cause, and were also probably spies for America due to their allegiance to Israel. This went so far as to accuse Jewish doctors of arranging the deaths of Soviet officials and set up show trials to discourage any further Jewish treachery, as it was seen. Very few people died, fortunately, due to Stalin's death in 1953. I started this review with a quote about the living, and in the conclusion, Snyder deals with some of the living who died, and who had names. But the humanity of the dead is not his entire point. The killers were also human. They had names, and reasons for what they did, and arrived at them through the same thought processes that we all do. To assume that the perpetrators of the Holodomor or the Shoah were inhuman monster is to abrogate our own moral responsibilities by claiming that we are categorically different from them. We are not. We are all human, and who knows under such circumstances, what we would do? It is only by keeping that in mind, that the bloodlands were created out of people pursuing specific policy goals and taking the rational--which is not to say moral--steps to enact them, that the words "Never again" can actually have any power. The identification with the victim affirms a radical separation from the perpetrator. The Treblinka guard who starts the engine or the NKVD officer who pulls the trigger is not me, he is the person who kills someone like myself. Yet it is unclear whether this identification with victims brings much knowledge, or whether this kind of alienation from the murderer is an ethical stance. It is not at all obvious that reducing history to morality plays makes anyone moral....more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Feb 24, 2017
|
Mar 02, 2017
|
Feb 24, 2017
|
Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 4.02
| 161
| Apr 05, 2016
| Jun 21, 2016
|
liked it
|
I was a big fan of the original 7th Sea. I got into it thanks to my wife, then my girlfriend, who owned a bunch of the books and ran a few games when
I was a big fan of the original 7th Sea. I got into it thanks to my wife, then my girlfriend, who owned a bunch of the books and ran a few games when she was in university. Then it went out of print, and other games occupied our time, but when I heard that John Wick was planning to kickstart a second edition, I told her and she was ecstatic. I was a little leery of the new game based on what I read on the kickstarter page, but we jumped in--her for second edition, and me for the complete collection of first edition PDFs. And now she's decided to run another game and so I'm reading the whole book cover to cover, and, well... I kind of don't like it. Setting The setting changes are my favorite part. Most of the new edition is the same as the old edition, with all the same countries we know and love based on literary version of European countries with some light fantasy elements sprinkled in. Avalon is still Elizabethan England mixed with King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. Montaigne is still Ancien Regime France under the rule of the Sun King. Eisen is still The Complete Grimm's Fairy Tales just after the Thirty Years' War. And Vodacce is still Italy, but where everyone sleeps with a copy of The Prince under their pillow. But there are a lot of changes for the better. The largest is the addition of an entirely new country--the Sarmatian Commonwealth, Théah's first major democracy. The sejm, a parliament of sixteen nobles, was paralyzed by overuse of the liberum veto, crippling the country, so on his deathbed the king used one of his few remaining powers and granted nobility to every adult in the country. In a panic, the sejm unanimously eliminated the liberum veto before any unwashed peasant garbage could use it to overturn legislation, and now a democracy is forming, with professional politicians and people paid to sit in the sejm and run out to ring bells in case anyone tries to sneak a vote in the middle of the night. It's fantastic and helps remedy the complete lack of Eastern European countries with Théan analogues. There are several minor changes as well. Castille is less Mexico and more Spain, with fewer rancheros and Zorro. Ussura, the Russia expy, now has two rulers, versions of Ivan the Terrible and Catherine the Great, who are both fighting to be acknowledged, though it has not quite progressed into civil war. Vestenmannavnjar is no longer two nations--two generations ago they were raiders who went a-viking, and then they discovered that it was easier to steal people's money through buying cheap and selling dear, so they founded the Vendel League and became master merchants, though they sometime still go a-viking for old times' sake. And Avalon is now more explicitly separate countries with one crown, with Inishmore and the Highland Marches getting their own separate sections. I also liked how there's more religious diversity. The Church of the Prophets is still highly important, but places like Inishmore and Ussura and Vestenmannavnjar or the Sarmatian Commonwealth have their own faiths that exist either alongside or mostly in place of the Vacitine Church. And Sorcery changed as well, with some sorcery expanded--Pyeryem is now "Dar Matushki," which includes turning into animals but isn't solely defined by it--and others limited. Eisen gets hexenwerk, the art of making poultices out of dead bodies with which to fight monsters. The Sarmatian Commonwealth has losejas making deals to trick power from demonic spirits called dievas. And rune magic still exists, though it's not defined. Which gets to a major problem I have with the new edition. There's a lot more ambiguity and empty spaces, and I'm not sure if I should bring my old assumptions in or what new players are supposed to think. I know that Numa is Rome, and the references to the Old Empire and Old Republic are referring to it, but would a new player? In the first edition, some forms of magic were based on Numan senators striking a bargain with inhuman entities, and in the section on Sorte, Vodacce's female-only fate magic, reference is made to a "bargain." But is it the same bargain? The Syrneth exist, left ruins behind, and went extinct (or maybe they didn't), but that's everything that the book explains about them. I understand the dislike for the old Syrneth, which put a lot of cosmic horror into people's swashbuckling and sorcery game, but I would have preferred at least some mention of major ruins other than the catacombs under Charouse and the Thalusian isles in the west. References are made to other continents--the New World, which is obvious, and Ifri, the analogue to Africa--and these are good additions, but there isn't even enough information to answer player questions about what is there. If the PCs are sailors and want to go to Ifri, all the GM has to draw on are that it exists and whatever they know about African history. Returning to the religious diversity, Vestenmannavnjar has a pantheon that's clearly supposed to be the Norse pantheon, with the "Allfather" at the head and his two sons, the trickster and the somewhat-dumb warrior, but no names are provided. No names of Inish gods are provided. No Vacitine saints are named and barely anything is mentioned about the prophets. 7th Sea is interesting because it allows a Europe-like (and later in the line, Africa-like, East Asia-like, and Americas-like) experience without actually being bound by real history, but without a more explicit enumeration of the differences, the place that GMs have to draw on is...real history, removing one of the benefits of the setting. There's obviously only so many pages in the book, but I really would have preferred more information about the rest of the world. There isn't even a "the rest of the world" section! The changes are mostly good. The omissions are not. System 7th Sea First Edition used the same dice system as Legend of the Five Rings, though with different traits and skills. The second edition keeps those traits but changes the dice system and underlying assumptions completely. Tasks that can't automatically be accomplished are called Risks, and the GM sets out the Risk, the Consequences that result from it, like taking damage or attracting attention, the Opportunities that the PC can gain, such as extra information or an advantage later, and then the player rolls Trait + Skill, trying to make sets of 10. Every 10 is one Raise, and each Raise past the first avoids one Consequence or achieves one Risk. I'm not a huge fan of this, but it's mostly a personal preference. Some people like this explicit enumeration of the results of their rolls, and that's fine, but it earns an immediate side-eye from me. And I'm also not fond of how all actions are equally difficult to do, they're just more or less dangerous. Except, for some reason, reloading a gun during an action scene, which has a flat surcharge of five Raises. The major problem I have is that changing the Skill one is using in the middle costs one Raise, explained as the cognitive load of changing one's mind. Okay, sure. But the example of play has the player picking their approach first, using the Convince skill, before hearing more than a cursory description of the scene. Once the GM lays the situation out and she decides that using Hide or Theft would be better, she's penalized for wanting to change her mind in response to new information. I think this is complete garbage, and I wouldn't be so annoyed except its in the example, so screwing the players by not telling them everything before they decide how to deal with it is apparently the expected mode of play! The GM is the player's window into the world, and barring mechanics that allow them to change it, the GM is the way they learn information about what is around them. Unless the PC's senses are explicitly lying to them, they should always have all the information that would be available to allow them to make informed decisions. I mean, I can already see a player saying they want to fight their way in using Weaponry and then, when confronted with a hostage situation, having to spend a Raise not to charge the hostage-taker with sword raised. It's true this is handed by the combat system, but that's the kind of circumstances that rule creates. Yuck. I mentioned mechanics for changing the world, and there are a lot of them. Most of them are Advantages powered by Hero Points, a metacurrency that allows players to add bonuses to their rolls, triple that bonus to other player's rolls--this is a great mechanic, encouraging in-game cooperation--power sorcery, and activate Advantages. Like Disarming Smile, which allows a PC to prevent someone else from resorting to violence, or Friend At Court, through which a PC reveals that they know someone else at a high society event. Each session starts with one Hero Point, and players can earn more through falling prey to their Hubris, through the GM "buying back" extra Raises that aren't used on their rolls--though this also gives the GM Danger Points they can use against the PCs--and through the player saying "I fail" when confronted with a Risk. Since PCs only start with one Hero Point and are unlikely to have many Risks with a lot of extra Raises, the main way they are supposed to gain Hero Points is through failure. I'm ambivalent on this. It's set up to allow players to fail when they want so they have the resources to succeed when it matters, and in fact requiring it by limiting player resources at the beginning. It's heavily dependent on how the GM determines Risks and how much they're willing to buy extra Raises, but every RPG is heavily dependent on GM input. It could go either way. I like that Villains have their own system that doesn't require a full character sheet, but I couldn't help but notice the best way to stop a Villain is to shoot them. Players have a standardized health track, with four Wounds then a Dramatic Wound, until at the fourth Dramatic Wound they become helpless. Villains have four Dramatic Wounds, but a number of Wounds between them equal to their Strength, which is probably 3-8 or so but can be up to 20. But firearms 1) always cause a Dramatic Wound and 2) can't be bought off by the opponent's Raises, so the best thing to do in battle is for the PCs to carry a brace of pistols and just keep drawing and firing when faced with a Villain to bypass the larger-than-normal number of Wounds completely. This only fails if the Villain has minions with the Guard subtype, allowing the GM to spend a Danger Point and take the damage intended for the Villain. Otherwise, swashbuckling falls before firearms. Which is true to life, I suppose. And finally, one the parts of the new system I like the least is the experience system. Called Stories, each is a freeform goal that the character wants to accomplish--get revenge on a hated villain, achieve some life goal, and so on. The player writes the ultimate goal and the first Step, and each Story is a series of Steps that are checked off as they are accomplished. Gaining new abilities often has a minimum number of steps--a new skill requires a Story with a number of Steps equal to the new skill's rating, for example. On top of this, the GM has their own Story that applies to all of the players. This is one of the worst experience systems I've seen. The subjectivity means that a mechanically-minded player can easily optimize their Stories in order to gain the maximum possible amount of new traits and pull past the other players. Sure, the GM can police it, but it adds a one extra group of pitfalls they have to watch out for. And again, the examples aren't helpful. One example story has as its final goal that the character be married for two years, so I hope that player likes no character improvement that whole time while other characters pull ahead. Another example goal is "My Hero is happily married and retires from his life of adventure," so I hope that Convince 4 is helpful in his new life as a farmer. If 7th Sea characters were supposed to be seasoned heroes and mechanical growth wasn't the focus then I wouldn't mind so much, but the inability to start with skills higher than 4 implies that there is, if not a zero-to-hero progression implied, at least a four- or five-to-hero. I admit, I'm guilty of this in the game my wife is running. I could have picked "Fulfill Matushka's plan for me" as my Story, but since I had already established that my character wasn't sure what Matushka wanted of him, why do that when I can have "Discover Matushka's plan for me" as the start and get another Story out of it? Edit: And having played a bit, the GM-chosen Stories are not a balm on this, since they have a GM-determined number of steps that may or may not match anything you want to buy. It's possible that you'll have to buy some random advance to avoid losing XP, as I did in the last session we played. This entire system is awful and even the old turn-Drama-Dice-in-for-XP system would be better, which is quite a feat. There's more, like how I disagree with most of the GM advice chapter and don't like how all the conflict is personified in the forms of specific Villains the Heroes can buckle swashes with, but I've already written enough. I love the setting updates, even if they're a bit sparse, but I'd much rather run it using a conversion to Chronicles of Darkness or some other system that doesn't have much cognitive load for me and is still a bit narrative-focused while without trying to completely emulate swashbuckling fiction. I'm looking forward to future releases in the line, but only for the new setting info. As a game, I'm not at all a fan. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Feb 10, 2017
|
Feb 18, 2017
|
Feb 10, 2017
|
ebook
| |||||||||||||||||
| 0753804387
| 9780753804384
| 0753804387
| unknown
| 4.24
| 17
| Jan 01, 1997
| Jan 01, 1998
|
it was amazing
|
I have the good fortune to have lived abroad for an extended period not once, but twice. Living in Japan is the one that had the most effect on my lif
I have the good fortune to have lived abroad for an extended period not once, but twice. Living in Japan is the one that had the most effect on my life, but when I was a university student, I spent the first semester of my senior year attending University College Cork, living for Ireland in four months. I didn't travel as much as I might have wanted to, being a poor college student, but I did go on some trips organized by the international students program, since we arrived over a month before the term officially began. The trip I remember best is the three days we spent in Inis Meáin, the middle of the Aran Islands off the coast of Galway. Wandering through the waist-high walls and seeing the sheep, tagged with a bit of spray paint to mark their owner, visiting Synge's Chair on the cliffs, and taking this picture with our feet danging over the edge, a hundred meters or more over the waves:
[image]
It's not quite aerial photography, but it seemed like it at the time. My parents bought this book for me when I returned home and over the intervening decade I'm not sure I've even glanced at it. But now seemed like a nice time to finally take it off the shelf and look at it, and it brought back some fond memories. My favorite part was, of course, the section on Munster. Each of the four traditional divisions of Ireland has its own section, with a relatively length introduction to some of the history and feel of the place. Munster talks mostly about the sea, and the harbors built by the Vikings when they decided that settling was preferable to scattered raids. The best photo was the aerial view of Cork's downtown on page 62, where I confess I got to feel superior to Somerville-Large--he says he can't identify the street, and when this book was first published in the late 90s research from a simple picture would have been harder, but I recognized it immediately. It's looking southwest over St Patrick Street, Cork's main shopping street. The following pages have pictures of St. Finn Barre's Cathedral, (in)famous for being taller than it is long, and the River Lee, but I didn't spend as much time there as I did on St Patrick Street. My second-favorite picture is on page 102, of Inis Oírr, the smallest of the Aran Islands. The text mentions that it's less tourist-haunted that the other islands, and the image certainly makes it seem that way. Roads with no one on them, bare wind-swept rock, and green fields with waist-high walls of stone criss-crossing them endlessly. There's a lot of city shots, but I like the countryside better. Part of that is because city pictures often blend together--they all have that kind of "modern European city" look that makes them hard to distinguish from each other. Ireland's countryside is much more distinctive, both because it really does have a surprisingly large number of shades of green and because it has fewer trees than one might expect, so there are very few pictures of forests. It's mostly scattered trees in small groves, clear waters, and fields of green. It reminds me of when I arrived in Ireland and took the train to Cork, half-asleep and looking out the window, astonished at just how green the landscape was. Skipping the city pictures, there's still plenty of land, water, and ruins that make Ireland from the Air a great read. It's not as good as Ireland from the ground, but few things are. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Dec 20, 2016
|
Dec 20, 2016
|
Dec 20, 2016
|
Paperback
| |||||||||||||
| 0713999349
| 9780713999341
| 0713999349
| 3.96
| 2,217
| May 17, 2011
| May 17, 2011
|
liked it
|
My three-star rating isn't strictly fair to the content of The Great Sea, which is very good, but rather with the difficulty I had in reading it. It t
My three-star rating isn't strictly fair to the content of The Great Sea, which is very good, but rather with the difficulty I had in reading it. It took me two weeks because I would repeatedly lose focus and have my mind wander only to realize that I'd been reading and rereading the same section multiple times without ever really taking it in, and I'd either switch what I was reading or give up. Maybe it's because of the book's format. It's simultaneously dense and choppy--full of citations and quotes and statistics about the various areas and periods it covers, but nothing is covered for more than a few pages at a time before a chapter break and a slight shift in focus. Despite the quality of the information I had a hard time sticking with it for an extended period of time. The book is divided into five sections covering five different periods of Mediterranean history, delineated like so: I have identified five distinct periods: a First Mediterranean that descended into chaos after 1200 BC, that is, around the time Troy is said to have fallen; a Second Mediterranean that survived until about AD 500; a Third Mediterranean that emerged slowly and then experienced a great crisis at the time of the Black Death (1347); a Fourth Mediterranean that had to cope with increasing competition from the Atlantic, and domination by Atlantic powers, ending around the time of the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869; finally, a Fifth Mediterranean that became a passage-way to the Indian Ocean, and found a surprising new identity in the second half of the twentieth century.Of these, my favorite was the First Mediterranean, both because the popular image of history before the Roman Empire is of a very atomized society without much long-range connection, which The Great Sea does a great job of countering; and the fact that the Bronze Age Collapse is one of the most interesting periods in history. I mean, trade networks throughout the eastern Mediterranean, and then they started falling silent one by one. The Mycenaean civilization was destroyed so thoroughly that the Greeks forgot how to write, the king of Ugarit wrote a frantic letter for aid on a clay tablet but the city was crushed into dust before it could be fired and delivered, the Hittite Empire collapsed and its capital was burned to the ground and never reoccupied, Troy was burned twice, and in Egypt the Pharaoh wrote about previously unknown "Sea Peoples" which had attacked Egypt and were defeated in battle...until they attacked again and the Egyptian Empire collapsed in on itself to the territory around the Nile. I really want to read a book just about that, and the first part of this book was the part that held my attention the best. Other than that, I liked the point Abulafia made about the Mediterranean port being a distinct category of city for much of the Mediterranean's history. Medieval ports were often a wildly varied melting pot of peoples from all across Europe, the Middle East, and Northern Africa, with Turks, Arabs, Jews, Italians, Greeks, and others all rubbing shoulders together and keeping the lines of trade flowing across the waters. In the great population displacements after World War II, this almost entirely vanished. The Jewish trade networks maintained with their co-religionists across multiple cultures failed as Jews were expelled from Arab countries and fled Europe in favor of Israel, the European decolonization process led to people from the colonizing country leaving for their newly-free home and colonizers returning to the mother country, and rising nationalism led to movements to expell the "other" from the shores of the glorious $COUNTRY. It's only with the modern rise of tourism and the reinvention of much of the Mediterranean coast as a tourism and retirement destination that the old melting pot has returned, though now at great environmental and quality-of-life cost. Venice itself is dying under the flood of tourists, a sad fate for what was one of the most powerful cities in the Mediterranean only a few centuries ago. The book also does a good job of showing how the Mediterranean remained connected even during periods of change, though the volume of trade may have been reduced. The collapse of the Roman Empire and the end of Mare Nostrum did reduce the shipping in the western half, but the Eastern Roman Empire survived. The Black Death allows for Atlantic merchant powers like the Dutch and the British to find a foothold in Mediterranean trade. Traders would buy shares in shipping ventures down to 1/64 of a ship so that any individual ship foundering wouldn't necessarily ruin the backers. The pre-modern world was more modern than we often think. Based entirely on the information I'd have given this four stars, and I really liked reading the book when I could pay attention to it. It's a good historical survey that makes me want to track down other more specific books to learn more. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Sep 2016
|
Sep 16, 2016
|
Sep 01, 2016
|
Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 0380713802
| 9780380713806
| B002A7LJ1K
| 3.86
| 76,155
| 1991
| Mar 28, 1993
|
did not like it
|
Ignore that Bryson comes off like the worst kind of tourist, always complaining about the food, about how hotels are too expensive, how waiters are su
Ignore that Bryson comes off like the worst kind of tourist, always complaining about the food, about how hotels are too expensive, how waiters are surly, how trains are slow, how people don't speak English, and every other stereotype of the pampered American tourist unwilling to make any effort to fit in. Ignore that the only parts of Europe that seem to spark any excitement are the landscapes or some of the architecture. Ignore the constant needling of European bureaucracy. Ignore all that, and what's left? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nationa... The French have good food, but are rude and dislike "us" (whether British people or Americans was unclear). Americans can't make good electronics. The Japanese can, but can't name them. The Germans are industrious and efficient. The Bulgarians are poor but happy with the little that they have. The Italians talk with their hands and are terrible drivers. The Dutch are weed-smoking hippies. The Scandinavians are rule-obsessed and try to lock life down into predictability. All Europeans are obsessed with sex. This is garbage. There are no memorable characters in this book other than Bryson, and I never once got the sense that he even thought of any of the people he met as a person other than as just a Frenchman or a Japanese tourist (with camera, naturally). The only connection he seems to have is when he finds a beautiful woman and thinks about making a more personal connection, but there's almost nothing else that lets anyone stand out in his mind. The only other character I can think of is the Bulgarian bus driver, I have no sense of his personality, and the taxi driver is later compared directly to him so he's just another archetype anyway. In The Roads to Sata, there's a quote that sums up what's best in travel writing: "Do you like the Japanese?"Neither Here nor There is the worst in travel writing. Avoid it at all costs. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Jul 05, 2017
|
Jul 10, 2017
|
Dec 08, 2015
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 1941815146
| 9781941815144
| 1941815146
| 4.12
| 73
| Mar 03, 2015
| Mar 03, 2015
|
really liked it
|
I don't really have any kind of entrepreneurial spirit at all. And I'm not even talking about a formal business endeavor, either. Even on juvenile eff
I don't really have any kind of entrepreneurial spirit at all. And I'm not even talking about a formal business endeavor, either. Even on juvenile efforts like selling hoagies for the band fundraiser every year, my performance was below average at best, so I wasn't sure how much I would find of interest in this issue. And it's true that I didn't find as much as I have in some past issues, such as issue #8, but there was still plenty of interest to me. "The Psychology of List Making" (no link) really resonated with me, because I have a habit of making lists for everything. I mean, start with my list of books to read here, and then I have TV shows to watch, video games to play, chores to do, groceries to buy, tasks to accomplish for planned events, and on and on. If there's a possibility to keep track of it, I do. And while this runs afoul of Thoreau's advice to keep lists to a thumbnail's size, it certainly does help me to get things done. Or at the very least, to know what I'm putting off until tomorrow. I don't like coffee at all, but I have been known to like the occasional coffee-flavored treat. I love tiramisu, for example, so when I saw the recipe for chocolate-covered espresso bean brownies my ears perked right up. Desserts, especially chocolate ones, seem to be the place where I can best get the taste of coffee without actually having to taste it, and anything with a 1.25:1:1 ratio of flour to butter to chocolate has to be great. I'm definitely going to have to try these. I do a lot of creating, mostly in the concept of fictional worldbuilding, and the article about creative constraints is definitely something I've encountered myself. As any writer knows, a blank page is one of the most intimidating things in the world. Even when I come to a page with an idea of what I want to write, it can still be very difficult to find a starting place. I'm always surprised at people who ask writers where they get their ideas, because ideas are easy. I have dozens of them! Most of them are a single-line concept in my head, or maybe a couple paragraphs, and if I had to actually try to expand on them to any great degree it would take an enormous amount of work. As it mentions, generally it's better to try for incremental work. Don't try to come up with the totality of a work at once. Work on a small part and expand from there. Don't try to write the entire novel, write a single scene very well. Start small, and expand. That works for businesses too, even with the focus to be "the Uber of [...]" I really wish we had Mochi Kitchen in Chicago. There doesn't seem to be any bakeries that make it in the city (though Mitsuwa has some), and while the Midwest Buddhist Temple has a 餅つき event next weekend, that's not going to help for the rest of the year. If I could get fresh mochi to make 善哉 with, and eat it the weekend after the new year the way I did in 千代田...いいな。。。 And now I'm doing that thing I complain about other people doing, so let's move on. The interview with Carl Honoré was very interesting. I haven't heard of him before and have never read any of his books, but I'm very familiar with the research about how crunch time in software development is actively counterproductive, how much knowledge workers' productivity tops out at around six hours of work per day (or how workers spend a quarter of their day slacking off, if you prefer), and so on. I've turned down several possible promotions before because they'd require me to spend more time at work and I just don't care. I make enough money, my wife makes the rest of the money, and we have enough for our needs. I'm lucky in that I still have a defined work time, though. I have a lot of friends who freelance, and I know there's a huge temptation to think that every moment you're not working is actively stealing money from your future self. And there are people out there who will work insane hours to make that money, so it's all a lovely race to the bottom. Capitalism! Depave is another company that I wish was located in Chicago. Not just because the winters are already doing a great job of destroying our pavement so their workload would be cut down enormously, but because as an inveterate pedestrian and mass-transit user, every road out there is a obstacle to me that only serves to bar my path. And yes, I know that even if everyone walked everywhere we'd still need roads to ship goods to places so I could eat, but we could do with better mass transit and narrower roads so we could stop destroying the planet. Or "bringing nature into urban environments." That's cool too. I know I complained a bit about the new format in my review of issue #14, but the bits in here like the interviews show that allowing for a greater variety of article lengths actually leads to a better overall experience. I was worried that I wouldn't like the new Kinfolk, but it seems I don't need to worry. Which is good, because I have three more issues that I need to read. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Dec 05, 2015
|
Dec 05, 2015
|
Dec 05, 2015
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0805092994
| 9780805092998
| 0805092994
| 4.15
| 73,388
| Feb 11, 2014
| Feb 11, 2014
|
it was amazing
| My world, my Earth is a ruin. A planet spoiled by the human species. We multiplied and fought and gobbled until there was nothing left, and then we di My world, my Earth is a ruin. A planet spoiled by the human species. We multiplied and fought and gobbled until there was nothing left, and then we died. We controlled neither appetite nor violence; we did not adapt. We destroyed ourselves. But we destroyed the world first.As an inveterate pessimist, I was at least already psychologically prepared for reading The Sixth Extinction. I've been known to make suggestions to my wife like that we had better visit Las Vegas before Lake Mead dries up and makes it mostly uninhabitable, and it's not too much of a jump to think about that we had better go whale-watching now before there are no more whales to watch. Or black rhinos. Or gorillas. Or elephants. Or frogs. Or bees. Or- Well. You get the idea. The book was a bit different than I expected in that it starts with a history lesson. Kolbert charts the evolution of the concept of extinction out of the ancient idea that the Earth was basically static and, barring miraculous intervention by G-d, hadn't changed much since it was created. Through the efforts of people like Charles Lyell and Jean Léopold Nicolas Frédéric Cuvier, scientists came to understand that the Earth could change over time and that species existed in the past that didn't exist now. This was also "helped" by humans demonstrating extinction in the wild, with examples like the dodo or the great auk. And now that we know we're doing something about it, but how much can we stop? There's a lot of depressing material in here. Chrytid fungus is wiping out frog populations in Panama, but some enterprising biologists have saved some of the frogs and they currently lived in hermetically-sealed chambers. But the frogs aren't immune to the fungus, and the fungus is still rampant in the wild, so we've "saved" the frogs but they can never leave their controlled environment. Coral bleaching is proceeding at an incredibly quick rate, coral reefs are the reason why tropical ocean waters are so abundant with life, and there's really no way to make any kind of reserve for coral. Reserves in general aren't super helpful in the face of climate change, because if the animals and plants can't deal with the new climate on the reserve and they have nowhere else to go, they'll die out. White-nose syndrome is killing so many bats in New England that there are caves that are literally carpeted with their corpses. The main point isn't that this is unprecedented, because there have been several mass extinctions in Earth's prehistory, the most famous probably being the Cretaceous–Paleogene boundary event brought on by a meteor impact (covered in the book, along with the iridium deposits that lead to that conclusion). What's different is the rate of change. The Earth has always had periods of warming and cooling--Antarctica used to be thickly forested and Chicago was once buried under sheets of ice--but the past had a much slower rate of change than is currently happening, which makes it harder to adapt. The main example of this that most people would recognize is the large mammals--the rhinos, hippos, elephants, tigers, and so on of the world. Most of them have no natural predators when grown, so their evolutionary strategy is slow reproduction and then those that survive to adulthood live a long time. But in the face of human predation, slow reproduction is a terrible strategy. There's an analysis presented of megafauna extinction showing that even a very slow rate of hunting would be enough to wipe out a species that reproduces once every few years and takes a decade to reach maturity, and furthermore, the rate would be so slow that no one at the time would be able to recognize what was happening. Maybe they'd know that in their ancestors' days they didn't have to travel so far to find the mammoths, but they probably wouldn't put the pieces together. I can believe that. I mean, look how hard it is for humans now to accept global warming. Similarly, global travel is a recent invention. It's because of humans traveling all over the globe that Australia is overrun with rabbits, the chestnuts in North America have mostly died out, and bats and frogs are both being ravaged by fungal infections. This wasn't the deliberate result of human action like the great auk extinction was, it's just a side effect of human civilization, though both have contributed. As Kolbert says, when you think of the causes of the Sixth Great Extinction: You can picture a poacher in Africa carrying an AK-47 or a logger in the Amazon gripping an ax, or, better still, you can picture yourself, holding a book on your lap.You are killing the planet, and there is no way you can opt out. The Sixth Extinction isn't entirely a bleak horrorshow. It does end with a note of hope that at least humanity is interested in preserving all of these species and trying to mitigate the effects of our changes on the environment. I have to admit, though, that I'm skeptical of how much good it will do. Frogs in glass tanks their entire lives and rhinos under 24-hour armed guard are hardly what I would call "preserving the environment," and there's whole areas of the planet that we can basically do nothing because there's no way to isolate them. Like, the ocean. If you want to have nightmares forever, go look up "ocean acidification." Or read this book. There's a chapter on it. And that's kind of the state of things, really. There's no magical solution on the horizon, though some people hold out a hope that technology will come up with something. Or, failing that, that we should escape to space and build habitats elsewhere (which is ludicrous--if we can build self-sustaining habitats on the Moon or Mars, we should just do it here and save ourselves the headache). We can recognize that there's a problem, but we may have come to awareness too late to do anything about it. The Frozen Zoo may be the last hope for so many of the species that capture human hearts and minds. And that's tragic, but as the history of our planet shows, that's just life. And as everybody knows, life happens at a faster pace nowadays. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Sep 30, 2015
|
Oct 21, 2015
|
Sep 30, 2015
|
Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 1565042611
| 9781565042612
| 1565042611
| 3.81
| 405
| Jan 14, 1999
| Jan 14, 1999
|
liked it
| "Lord, protect me from my friends; I can take care of my enemies."I'm kind of tempted to hack a star off Guide to "Lord, protect me from my friends; I can take care of my enemies."I'm kind of tempted to hack a star off Guide to the Camarilla's rating just because it never actually explains how to pronounce "camarilla." Is it the Spanish way, as would be implied by how one of the founders is named "Rafael de Corazón"? Is it an Anglicization, since the sect's power base is almost entirely in non-Spanish-speaking areas? Just pick one and stick with it, I guess. The biggest problem with this book is that most of it is already set up in the basic premise to Vampire: the Masquerade. The Prince rules the city with the Primogen under them, Elysium is where vampires gather secure in the knowledge that they won't try to kill each other, the Six Traditions are the basis of government, and so on. All of that is set up in the corebook, so talking about it here ends up repeating a lot of information or spending time expanding on concepts that don't really need expansion. How much space do we need devoted to explaining that the Prince has absolute power subject only to their subjects not trying to kill them? I think my favorite part came at the end, when the book was indirectly explaining why the Camarilla is such a nightmare through explaining the elder mindset. Being Embraced into the Camarilla is like being hired at the ground floor of a Wall Street banking firm except that all the employees are immortal and the only way to get promoted is to assassinate your superiors without getting caught. The elders are afraid of the younger vampires because of the constant temptation of diablerie, they're afraid of their peers because power games are the only thing keeping them sane against the endless press of years, and they're afraid of the Methuselahs because the elders manipulate their descendants and the mortals constantly so their own elders must be doing it to them. They're afraid of mortals because the pace of modern technology has left them behind, and they're afraid of not banding together because the Sabbat and non-vampire threats like the werewolves would overwhelm them if they do. And they're afraid of acting themselves because they're immortal and why risk the rest of eternity on any action that exposes themselves to any danger? So the Camarilla exists out of fear, because the consequences of it not existing are worse--as solitary predators, from the point of view of any individual vampire the ideal number of vampires in any given area is one--and the sense of endless paranoia and constantly feeling like you're just a pawn in someone else's schemes is an important part of getting the feel of a Camarilla game. This is also one of the books where they put all the high-level Disciplines--though weirdly, most of the sample Camarilla characters provided are 8th Generation or higher and thus can't use any of them--and since the Camarilla has all the generic Clans without the weird Disciplines the powers are mostly pretty predictable. High-level Fortitude lets you shatter swords on your skin, which will certainly look impressive but probably isn't going to get players excited about buying it, assuming that they're able to do so. That and there's not much parity between the levels. Animalism 9 lets the user force someone's Beast to attack them from the inside, doing a bunch of damage. Dominate 9 lets the user give orders to all vampires descended from them down to the last generation. They cost the same number of experience points, and while you can make a lot of case-by-case arguments, I think the power difference is obvious here. Then again, if you're hoping for rigorous mechanical balance in the oWoD, well, you're gonna have a bad time. There's also a section about the anarchs thrown in near the end. I say "thrown in" because while it's not a bad section, and it's possible to justify its existence since the anarch movement is almost entirely a response to the existence of the Camarilla, that's true of the Sabbat too and they don't get their own section here. It feels like it was thrown in to meet word count, when that space could have been devoted to maybe showing an example Camarilla city. Or maybe a non-standard Camarilla city, one where the Prince is a mere figurehead or where there are six Primogen and two of them are Brujah, for example. Like the basic unit of the Sabbat is the pack, the basic unit of the Camarilla is the city, and I think a couple of example power structures could have helped a lot. And maybe something about places that aren't Europe or North America? There's some notes about Hong Kong being a Camarilla stronghold, but what about Africa? India? Russia? Australia? Anything at all? Those missed opportunities are why I think Guide to the Camarilla is only middling. Since the Camarilla city is the basic assumption of Vampire with other game types being the deviations from it, I would have preferred more expansion on what makes a Camarilla game special. And to be fair, it did do some of that, but it didn't do enough. I'm not sure what "enough" would have been, but without it the book just falls short. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Sep 25, 2015
|
Oct 06, 2015
|
Sep 25, 2015
|
Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 0060920467
| 9780060920463
| 0060920467
| 3.87
| 2,027
| Dec 20, 1989
| Jan 30, 1991
|
really liked it
|
This is more of a survey-level work than anything particularly in-depth, but that's pretty much exactly what I was looking for. Like most people who h
This is more of a survey-level work than anything particularly in-depth, but that's pretty much exactly what I was looking for. Like most people who haven't spent a lot of time studying the period, my knowledge of medieval life is tainted with all kinds of bits picked up from popular culture. For me, it's the mishmash of modern and medieval from tabletop RPGs and video games that comes to mind, with taverns by the village green, suspiciously-clean peasants wandering around, and not enough attention placed on where all the food comes from. If that's your own idea of the past, conscious or unconscious, Life in a Medieval Village will help set you straight. Though I should mention that the title is actually specific. It's not "life in any generic medieval village," because something else that gets lost in popular understanding is that the medieval period wasn't the same in all places at all times (see also the common problem with medieval stasis in creative works). It's about life in a specific medieval village, Elton in England, or Aethelington, Adelintune, Ailincton, or Alyngton, among others, depending on when and who you ask. Elton has relatively extensive surviving records, so while it's not necessarily representative of anywhere else, we can get a pretty good picture of what life was like there, and that's valuable in and of itself. One surprise is just how much daily business was contracted. We think of medieval life as being bound by custom and of modern life as being incredibly litigious, but the people of Elton took each other to court all the time, in both criminal and civil cases. Most punishments were fines, which makes sense--a medieval village was in danger of starvation in the best of times and could hardly be expected to spend resources on having someone sitting in a jail for a while--but there is one example of someone being ordered to the stocks. And there were fines for everything. For failing to provide proper labor for the lord, for assault, for insulting people, for premarital sex--the amount of fines levied for which indicated it was incredibly common among all ranks of the peasantry--and for any number of other events. There are even surviving contracts drawn up as a form of early retirement. A landholder would bequeath his (or her, most often in the case of widows) land to his heirs in exchange for a promise to be supported for the rest of her life. I'm surprised that hasn't caught on now, honestly. Speaking of classes of the peasantry, the village records easily disprove the idea of a sharp lord/peasant distinction with little other differentiation. Many of the village offices--bailiff, reeve, woodward, ale taster, etc.--were chosen by the peasants themselves from among their number. Of the around 200 families in Elton in the records, 49 of them provided candidates for the village officers and just eight of them filled over half of the total office spots. Similarly, there are three broad classes of landholders: those who hold no land at all, small holders of perhaps 10 acres, and large landholders of 50 acres or more. Selling land was technically illegal since the law required it to remain within the family line, but in practice no one actually cared and land was sold all the time, allowing ambitious or lucky peasants to grow rich and peasants who fell on hard times to beggar themselves. Another surprise is how many married priests there were. Apparently in medieval England, the answer is "most of them," and those who weren't married still had concubines. There's an example given of a cautionary tale where one priest had four children, three of whom became priests themselves, who urged the priests's concubine to repent of her sin while alive, but she refused to and was eventually carried off to hell when she died. More compelling to me is the story of the bishop coming to upbraid a vicar for having a mistress. The mistress hears of this and assembles a basket of food and meets the bishop on the road. When the bishop asks her whereabouts, she says she's taking a gift to the bishop's mistress, who was recently bedridden due to advanced pregnancy. Suitably chastized, the bishop visits the vicar and doesn't mention mistresses at all. There's quite a bit more about farming practices, family arrangements, the lord's household and privileges, a bit of history, and everything else you could ask for. It can make for somewhat boring reading at times, but the chapters are well-labeled so if you don't care about "The Lord," for example, you can skip ahead to the next chapter and not really miss any context that will prevent you from enjoying later chapters. I'm not sure how applicable Life in a Medieval Village is to places outside Elton, but it gave me a comprehensive view of life in at least one medieval village. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Sep 10, 2015
|
Sep 15, 2015
|
Aug 28, 2015
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0140449108
| 9780140449105
| 0140449108
| 3.55
| 76,979
| 1516
| May 06, 2003
|
liked it
| Learn to overcome the crass demands of flesh and bone, for they warp the matrix through which we perceive the world. Extend your awareness outward, be Learn to overcome the crass demands of flesh and bone, for they warp the matrix through which we perceive the world. Extend your awareness outward, beyond the self of body, to embrace the self of group and the self of humanity. The goals of the group and the greater race are transcendent, and to embrace them is to achieve enlightenment.Utopia is one of those books that always shows up in high school literature classes, and I remember liking it when I read it all those years ago, though I was always a pretentious child--I read Plato's The Republic in seventh grade because it seemed like the kind of thing I ought to have read--and I'm not sure how much I liked it for its own sake and how much I liked it because look at me, I'm reading an important book, isn't that grand? Because when I read it now, it just seems like its reach is too small. Everyone knows that Utopia is More's critique of Tudor England, but I had forgotten how direct and uninspired most of the critique is. English people are obsessed too much with wealth and property? Utopians have no private property at all, and they forge gold into chamberpots and chains for slaves. England punishes too many crimes with death? Utopia doesn't punish any crimes with death (except serial adulterers and those who practice unlicensed politics). Poor farmers spend their lives working while the nobility is mostly idle? Utopias rotate between living in the cities and living on a farm so they experience both and work no more than six hours a day. England has too many laws? Utopia barely has any laws, letting the Senate decide all issues on a case-by-case basis. The English think war is glorious and let too many of the peasantry die in wars? Utopians prefer to settle wars through assassinating or kidnapping enemy leaders. England has religious splinter groups that are always being persecuted? Utopia doesn't have any persecution of religion at all. Basically, the majority of the book is just Bizarro England. It's not an attempt to form a logical consistent culture that would actually function. And I know that's subject to a "stupid cat, why aren't you a dog?" counterargument, since More's point was never to actually make a consistent society but rather to send up England's flaws, but reading it from the twentieth century I'm unable to look at Utopians as anything other than some weird offshoot of humanity. A closely related eusocial species, perhaps, since we've tried a lot of these kind of communal social experiments since More wrote the book and everything above the small tribe level ends in tears at best and genocide at worst. It's also hard for me to ignore the hypocrisy the Utopians occasionally display. It seems like vegetarianism would be the most obviously consistent with their belief in the importance of life, the way that killing degrades the spirit, and everyone's experience as yeoman farmers, but apparently meat is just too tasty so the Utopians keep eating meat, they just delegate the slaughtering to slave butchers and then look down on them for it. There's a large emphasis on natural good and happiness arriving from pursuing virtue, and that the Utopians believe that their lifestyle is the best that can be arrived at through reason and observation of the natural world, and then they ban all sex before marriage because of possible temptation, so I guess their lifestyle isn't as naturally attractive as they thought? I suppose it mostly comes back to the question of why did More write Utopia, and did he think the Utopians' society was worth emulating. If it's just a jab at English culture, it does a pretty good job of that, but it still leaves the second question open. There are some clues that More doesn't, since the person describing Utopia is named Hythloday--"speaker of nonsense"--and the narrator at the end says that he has some points of disagreement about the Utopians' philosophy but doesn't want to get into it, but there's no obvious answer. And the absence of that answer combined with the unbelievability of the society didn't get very far with me. The part at the beginning before the actual description of Utopia was more interesting, because it's advice that's still obviously true now. Kings love war and are willing to resort to it at the first opportunity even when it's a bad idea. Too-hard punishments for too many crimes are not only innately cruel, they encourage crime, because if you're already condemned to death why not commit more crimes--see also Chen Sheng and the Dazexiang Uprising for a real-life example. People are more willing to listen to the same argument from people they view as more important than others. And as to the role of wealth, well: Therefore I must say that, as I hope for mercy, I can have no other notion of all the other governments that I see or know, than that they are a conspiracy of the rich, who, on pretence of managing the public, only pursue their private ends, and devise all the ways and arts they can find out; first, that they may, without danger, preserve all that they have so ill-acquired, and then, that they may engage the poor to toil and labour for them at as low rates as possible, and oppress them as much as they please; and if they can but prevail to get these contrivances established by the show of public authority, which is considered as the representative of the whole people, then they are accounted laws...Plus ça change. I would have liked the book better if it had been more direct critique in the style of the first third rather than the dry listing of not!England from the second two thirds, but I admit a lot of that is just literary conventions. Maybe if it had been written in the style of A Modest Proposal I would have found it more interesting. As it is, I don't suggest reading this book before bedtime. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Jun 24, 2015
|
Jul 2015
|
Jun 22, 2015
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 159558109X
| 9781595581099
| 159558109X
| 4.09
| 531
| 2004
| Nov 13, 2006
|
it was amazing
| Resources exist to be consumed. And consumed they will be, if not by this generation then by some future. By what right does this forgotten future see Resources exist to be consumed. And consumed they will be, if not by this generation then by some future. By what right does this forgotten future seek to deny us our birthright? None I say! Let us take what is ours, chew and eat our fill.When talking about global warming, one of the things I tell people is that if they really want a sense of paralyzing despair to overcome them, all they need to do is look at what humanity is doing to the oceans. And while I'm usually talking about ocean acidification and pollution, overfishing is just as applicable. Clover's book is quite strident, but it has a right to be. The population of fish has dropped in many places by around 95%. There are entire populations of fish where more than 50% of the catch is taken illegally. Huge parts of the ocean are essentially in a total free-for-all, much the same as assault on the bison in the 19th century American west and with much the same end effect. Spanish fleets under foreign flags travel to Senegal to meet the demand for fish in Spain, and while regulation is patchwork in national waters, in international waters literally anything goes. While some consumers are very concerned about where their food comes from and how it was raised, most people don't even care anything about their fish except that it tastes good. And worst of all, the ocean itself is inscrutable enough that we barely even know how many fish there are, much less how many we can safely take. The End of the Line is most devoted to detailing the problems, which it does extensively. The book lays most of the problem on fishermen and on politicians' unwillingness to go against them even though they form a tiny constituency. Most people's image of fishermen is that of heroic men in oilskins, wresting their livelihood from the bosom of Mother Ocean, but nowadays it's much more likely to be teams in large boats, tracking fish with radar and vacuuming them up with enormous nets or strip-mining the ocean floor. In some cases, bycatch--catching fish other than what the fishermen are looking for--is up to 50% of the total catch. One of the major problems is that fishing is usually regulated by time--i.e., fishermen can spend a certain amount of time at sea, which encourages them to catch the largest amount possible in that time to make the most money. One of the few places The End of the Line points out as well-managed is Iceland, which sells off the fish quota as property rights. Each fisherman can catch a certain number of fish per year and can sell or transfer their quota if they like. It works in Iceland, and Clover seems to suggest that this is the way forward for fisheries management elsewhere, though he devotes only a couple pages to the possibility of consolidation and monopoly. I'm afraid I can't see a widescale implementation of this as anything other than selling off the seas to multinational corporations absent any kind of effective international enforcement, and Clover spends a lot of time explaining how there's barely any effective domestic enforcement when it comes to fisheries, much less international. He does have a point when he mentions that it's impossible to maximize the social, ecological, and economic aspects of fishing all at the same time and something will have to give. A lot of the other reviews describe the book as dry, which seems nearly incomprehensible to me. I found it to be a compelling read, but this is a subject I have a lot of interest in, which might make the difference. It's true that there's little "human element," and Clover blithely brushes off the health of fishing-dependent coast communities and the livelihoods of the people there. His position is basically that either they can survive or the sea can and if the fish die they'll lose their jobs anyway, which is true but not very sympathy-inducing. Farmed fish can help, but they're not even a bandaid, much less a panacea. Clover brings up that farmed fish are much less competitive than wild fish, and interbreeding between them and wild fish makes the wild fish less likely to survive. Even if there was a foolproof way to prevent domesticated fish from escaping--which there is not--farmed carnivorous fish still require overfishing to sustain, because they're fed fish meal made from wild fish and it would be more ecological just to eat the fish the meal comes from directly and cut out the middlefish. It's not totally bleak. Other than the example of Iceland's better management, the book also points to fishing reserves in New Zealand, where fish swarm in numbers not seen in decades and which are economic boons as well, since they've become major tourist locations and fishermen nearby (who are allowed to fish near, but not on, the reserve) report higher catches that they've seen in a long time. There's a list of seven ways to solve the catastrophe at the end of the book, which I'll summarize here: --Fish less --Eat less fish overall --Know where your fish comes from --Choose less wasteful methods of fishing --Give property rights to fishermen --Create reserves --Make fisheries responsible managing international waters as well as local ones --Regain control of the sea by the population The last one is a bit vague, and The End of the Line is more doom and gloom than solutions, but I think that speaks more to the scale of the problem, which is literally world-wide in scope. One of The End of the Line's major points is that all of this is happening because the public is mostly unaware of the problem, and there are few better ways to become aware than to read this book. Even if I don't agree with all of his solutions, it's obvious that what we're doing now isn't working and Clover points out some alternate methods that are having some success, so we'd be fools to ignore them. Otherwise, we'll be telling our children about what fish tasted like when we were young and fish wasn't only for the rich. Bon appétit. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Apr 22, 2015
|
May 13, 2015
|
Apr 22, 2015
|
Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 067443000X
| 9780674430006
| 067443000X
| 4.06
| 32,678
| Aug 30, 2013
| Mar 10, 2014
|
it was amazing
| He who loves money will not be satisfied with money, nor he who loves wealth with his income; this also is vanity.I was kind of temp He who loves money will not be satisfied with money, nor he who loves wealth with his income; this also is vanity.I was kind of tempted to open this review with a picture of a guillotine or a gibbet, but that would actually be a misrepresentation of the book. Capital in the 21st Century isn't a thundering indictment of grasping rich people, it's not a call to revolution, and it's certainly not the modern Communist Manifesto or even the modern Das Kapital. It's a much more statistical, data-driven analysis of why inequality seems to steadily be getting worse, why it dropped so much during the 20th century, and what, if anything, the world can do about it. For people who just want the data, Piketty actually has almost all of it available on his website here. And there's a lot of it. This book is very readable, but it's quite dense (as indicated by the fact that most readers barely get through the introduction) and takes a while to digest, even though the main ideas are actually pretty simple. To wit, as long as r > g, or the rate of return on capital investment is larger than the growth of the economy, then inequality will continually increase. This seems to be part of the nature of capitalism, since it's been true for the majority of human history for which we have detailed statistical models. The only period of time that it wasn't true was the period 1914- ~1980, and that's because of the catastrophic destruction of wealth and property due to two World Wars and the Great Depression (which reduced r) and the subsequent rebuilding (which increased g). It was these disasters, not any inherent property of globalization or modern industrial capitalism, that reduced the proportion of global wealth owned by the top 10% and allowed the rise of a real middle class in the developed world. This was why social progress has occurred to a degree previously unseen. Not because capitalism is innately benign, but because the means to combat the devastation of the war--high marginal tax rates, large estate taxes, inflation, public pension systems, public health systems, and so on--all contributed to reducing inequality. These trends are currently reversing themselves, however. While the post-war years saw a bare majority of new fortunes in the surveyed countries (primarily Britain, France, and the United States) coming from entrepreneurial wealth instead of inherited fortunes, that's no longer true. Furthermore, those entrepreneurs convert to rentiers through investments, and lowered estate taxes mean that they will pass on their fortunes to their heirs, possibly leading to a new Belle Époque. Piketty doesn't indicate that this is inevitable--indeed, he repeatedly states that predicting the economic future is basically impossible--but he does say that trends are certainly pointing in that direction. The global growth rate in the developed countries is now slowing, as is population growth, and the developed countries are catching up due to knowledge diffusion and once they reach an equivalent level, their growth will almost certainly slow as well. That will reduce global growth to a level around 1-1.5%, which is still much higher than the ancient rate of 0.1%, but nowhere near the rates achieved in the post-war period. And when growth is that low, it's much easier for capital to find a high rate, thus increasing the concentration of capital and inequality. There's no innate process in global capitalism to combat this, and it's possible for it to simply increase without limit until the top 10% owns 90% of the wealth and the top 1% owns 50-70% of the wealth, as it did in developed nations before World War I. One point Piketty makes that I thought was interesting is that this kind of inequality undermines the entire point of work. He refers to Le Père Goriot as an example repeatedly, pointing out that Rastignac couldn't earn nearly as much from work as he could from marrying a wealthy heiress, and in such circumstances, why work? Developed economies are nowhere near that point yet, but they might get there again if the dismantling of corrective measures continues. He also deals with why the notion of the self-made man persists in America, and points out the well-founded roots it has. America had extraordinary population growth over the last two centuries, from around 3 million to currently ~310 million--compare France's going from 30 million to 65 million--and had extremely cheap land for reasons that are obvious to anyone who's studied the history of the Native Americans. The first greatly increased g and the second reduced r. Indeed, America instituted progressive taxes in the early 20th century due to a fear of inequality approaching levels seen in the Europe of the day and thus of losing our economic dynamism. Though he does also mention that American inequality is in some ways worse, because this legacy means that the well-off invoke a moral justification for their fortunes and deride the poor as simply lazy. So, how to deal with these trends? Piketty's solutions are actually quite simple to describe: a progressive estate tax, a very high rate on top incomes--80% is the given number--a global tax on wealth, and financial transparency between nations. He admits that all of this is extremely unlikely to be enacted due to the current race-to-the-bottom on tax policy among states as they compete for capital investment, but the point is that it can serve as a standard to compare proposed plans to or as an ideal to work toward. Considering the data, Capital in the 21st Century isn't nearly as pessimistic I would have expected. Everything seems to point toward increasing inequality and a return of the late 19th century social divide, but Piketty points out that World War I and the Great Depression both came as a surprise. In addition, countries were taking steps to institute social services and progressive taxes before the war, and it's unclear what direction that would have gone in without the shocks of 1914-1945 to completely change its dynamics. There's certainly a warning, though, since high enough inequality undermines democracy: When the rate of return on capital exceeds the rate of growth of output and income, as it did in the nineteenth century and seems quite likely to do again in the twenty-first, capitalism automatically generates arbitrary and unsustainable inequalities that radically undermine the meritocratic values on which democratic societies are based.Some amount of inequality isn't a problem for Piketty. It's when there's a nearly-unbreachable class divide and meritocracy becomes even more of a sham than it already is that we really need to worry, and without government action, there's no natural way to stop this. Without action, inequality will destroy democracy. I'm pretty sure that's where we'll end up, actually. It seems pretty clear from political discourse that corrective measures will never be imposed to the right degree, and things will get worse and worse until global warming and the wars it causes create as much of a reset in the 21st or 22nd century as the World Wars did in the 20th century. Capital in the 21st Century will be endlessly bashed by the reactionaries as a new call for the workers of the world to unite until capitalism destroys itself, because endless growth can't work in a world of finite resources. But hey, we can't say we weren't warned. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Nov 13, 2014
|
Nov 21, 2014
|
Nov 13, 2014
|
Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 0441015263
| 9780441015269
| 0441015263
| 4.05
| 6,344
| Aug 12, 1973
| Dec 04, 2007
|
it was ok
|
High Deryni seemed more anticlimactic to me than anything else. The warring armies never actually clash; the Camberian Council is revealed and they're
High Deryni seemed more anticlimactic to me than anything else. The warring armies never actually clash; the Camberian Council is revealed and they're a bunch of squabbling, out-of-touch stuffed shirts; the problem of the rebellious Warin de Grey and his crusade against the Deryni is solved in a couple pages, and all the excommunications just go away as a consequence; major characters use their powers in morally reprehensible ways; and the ending is a deux ex machina with no real dramatic satisfaction. The main problem I have with High Deryni is that it seems to be pushing a blurring between the idea of a strict division between human and Deryni, what with the speculation that Deryniness is a condition that one either is or is not rather than a heritage that comes in degrees, and with Warin displaying powers despite not being Deryni at all. I assume that it's leading into a revelation later that there is no difference, and some humans in the past developed powers and started calling themselves Deryni, and that co-existence is possible, and all of the optimism that could be found in 70s fantasy. But the behavior of the actual Deryni in the book totally undermines that message. I'm not talking about Wencit. Sure, he's a butchering thug, but "butchering thug" has been an apt description of those in power for the entirety of human history so there's nothing different there. I'm talking about Morgan, and Arilan, and Duncan. Like I wrote in my review of Deryni Checkmate, it's reasonable to be suspicious of people with the power to read minds and kill with a thoughts and who--we now learn--have their own secret governmental structure that enforces their own laws with no relation to temporal authority. And with the way Morgan behaves in High Deryni, I'm starting to think the persecutions of the Deryni were entirely reasonable. I'm not just talking about how he casually violates the sanctity of the children's minds at the scene by the waterfall, though that was bad enough. I'm talking about the scene with Warin's sudden "change of heart." I put that in quotes because the reader doesn't get either of their perspectives, so what we see is that Morgan and Duncan claim that Warin might be Deryni because of his healing powers, Morgan offers to "Mind-See" him, and then after the spell is over, Warin changes all of his deeply-held beliefs and decides that if Deryni can heal, and he can heal, Deryni aren't that bad, even though he was a zealous anti-Deryni campaigner for the entire series up to this point. Leaving aside that the backfire effect means that he'd be much more likely to assume that Deryni were counterfeiting his real gifts using the powers of Satan, how do we know that Morgan didn't use his time in Warin's mind to edit his psychology and make him more pliable? Kelson needed all the help he could get, and Derry's betrayal shows that it's possible for Deryni to twist people's minds in ways that probably won't be found until it's too late. Reprogramming Warin's personality is absolutely something Morgan would do, and if this how the "good" Deryni behave, then I can only imagine how bad it was during the days of the Deryni Interregnum and I'm pretty sure the pogroms are justified. Arilan and Duncan aren't that bad, but they've repeatedly proven themselves willing to lie under ecclesiastical oath, so they're hardly trustworthy. So has Morgan, come to think of it. About the only Deryni we see who isn't totally deceitful is Kelson, and he's only fourteen. Give him time. The other thing is the schism in the Church. It's really odd that the real-world Catholic Church is basically transported wholesale into Gwynnedd, but there seems to be no higher authorites to appeal to. Since there are Moors out there somewhere, I would have expected there to be some kind of greater religious hierarchy that Loris would have appealed to for the authority to impose the Interdict or ratify the excommunications, but apparently not. And furthermore, Kelson's authority easily supersedes Loris's, which makes me wonder why he didn't just overturn the excommunications earlier. I realize that Morgan and Duncan going to Dhassa is part of the reason he was able to do it, but what with a cataclysmic war on the horizon I expect he might be forgiven. The Church in High Deryni tries to act like the real-world Catholic Church without any of the authority or infrastructure to back it up, and it rang false every time I thought about how any of it would work. Those two aspects of the book were the major impressions the book left on me, and the damp rag of an ending didn't help. Everything is being set up for a climactic confrontation, and then a sudden but inevitable betrayal occurs from a direction that's impossible to predict and it's over in half-a-dozen pages and I just thought, "is this really it?" Well...yes, it really is. I was wavering between three and four stars halfway through the book, but the scene with Warin and the ending squandered all the goodwill I had built up. A disappointing ending to a series I had hopes for. Previous review: Deryni Checkmate. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Oct 24, 2014
|
Oct 28, 2014
|
Oct 24, 2014
|
Hardcover
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
my rating |
|
|
||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
| 4.35
|
really liked it
|
Jun 16, 2022
|
May 17, 2022
|
|||||
|
| 4.30
|
it was amazing
|
Feb 06, 2020
|
Dec 27, 2019
|
|||||
|
| 3.54
|
really liked it
|
Dec 12, 2019
|
Dec 04, 2019
|
|||||
|
| 3.80
|
liked it
|
Jan 24, 2018
|
Jan 22, 2018
|
|||||
|
| 3.35
|
really liked it
|
Jan 16, 2018
not set
|
Jan 11, 2018
|
|||||
|
| 4.08
|
it was amazing
|
Oct 11, 2017
|
Oct 03, 2017
|
|||||
|
| 3.86
|
liked it
|
May 2017
|
Apr 27, 2017
|
|||||
|
| 4.38
|
it was amazing
|
Mar 02, 2017
|
Feb 24, 2017
|
|||||
|
| 4.02
|
liked it
|
Feb 18, 2017
|
Feb 10, 2017
|
|||||
|
| 4.24
|
it was amazing
|
Dec 20, 2016
|
Dec 20, 2016
|
|||||
|
| 3.96
|
liked it
|
Sep 16, 2016
|
Sep 01, 2016
|
|||||
|
| 3.86
|
did not like it
|
Jul 10, 2017
|
Dec 08, 2015
|
|||||
|
| 4.12
|
really liked it
|
Dec 05, 2015
|
Dec 05, 2015
|
|||||
|
| 4.15
|
it was amazing
|
Oct 21, 2015
|
Sep 30, 2015
|
|||||
|
| 3.81
|
liked it
|
Oct 06, 2015
|
Sep 25, 2015
|
|||||
|
| 3.87
|
really liked it
|
Sep 15, 2015
|
Aug 28, 2015
|
|||||
|
| 3.55
|
liked it
|
Jul 2015
|
Jun 22, 2015
|
|||||
|
| 4.09
|
it was amazing
|
May 13, 2015
|
Apr 22, 2015
|
|||||
|
| 4.06
|
it was amazing
|
Nov 21, 2014
|
Nov 13, 2014
|
|||||
|
| 4.05
|
it was ok
|
Oct 28, 2014
|
Oct 24, 2014
|
Loading...
