Gore Vidal, a class traitor of the best kind, died yesterday.
Born into a well-connected and politically influential family that could have opened doors to a patrician life, he became instead a populist outsider and a scathing critic of the politics of the US. He had wide-ranging interests, writing novels, essays, and screenplays and also acting in films, such as Gattacca where he was pretty good. [Read more…]
When you read classics like Pride and Prejudice, Wuthering Heights, A Study in Scarlet, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, and The Three Musketeers, I am sure the thought crosses your mind, “These books have great stories, excellent writing, and strong characters but there’s something missing. What they need to be really great are some explosive and graphic sex scenes.” [Read more…]
A new book by David Maraniss titled Barack Obama: The Story (that I have not read) apparently challenges certain features of Barack Obama’s life story as recounted by him in his memoir Dreams From My Father (which I have also not read) and says that the reality “was less dramatic — and more routine — than the president made it out to be in the memoir.” [Read more…]
Malcolm Gladwell has made a name for himself by publishing superficial books that basically promotes a simple theory for everyday phenomena and cherry picking data to support it. He is a good writer and when you read his books his argument initially sounds plausible and it is only later you discover that things are a lot more complicated than he lets on and that his favorite theory either has strong competitors or powerful counter-arguments. [Read more…]
Victor Stenger has had a long career in experimental high-energy physics. He has become a prolific writer on the intersection of science and religion and I have referred to him frequently in past blog posts, especially to material in his 2007 book God: The Failed Hypothesis. Stenger is an unabashed ‘new atheist’ who thinks that science and religion are fundamentally incompatible and does not shy away from saying so bluntly. The title of his latest book (and its subtitle The Incompatibility of Science and Religion) leaves the reader with no doubt as to where he stands. The book was released this month and I have just had the pleasure of reading it. It essentially updates and expands on the arguments of that earlier one. [Read more…]
When I returned to Sri Lanka after competing my doctorate, I splurged some of our meager savings on my dream of owning a full set of the Encyclopedia Britannica, although it was really expensive. I used to enjoy looking things up and skimming through the pages. Unfortunately the turmoil in Sri Lanka in 1983 caused us to leave abruptly and leave all our stuff behind, so after enjoying the books for just a little over a year, I gave it away to friends with deep regret. [Read more…]
I made the mistake of reading Ayn Rand’s book The Fountainhead before her more celebrated work Atlas Shrugged that supposedly provides the clearest articulation of her philosophy of objectivism. After a promising start, The Fountainhead degenerated into a dreary polemic, with two-dimensional stereotypical characters behaving in utterly predictable ways, the whole thing written in melodramatic style. Although I completed it, it was such a bad novel that I simply could not bear the thought of reading another 1000 pages by the same writer and so never read Atlas Shrugged.
It is not that I am averse [Read more…]
I was tempted to not watch Stephen Colbert interview children’s book author Maurice Sendak, thinking it would not be interesting. I was wrong. Sendak turns out to be a funny and feisty guy, one of the few who can match wits with Colbert.
(To get hints on how to view clips on The Daily Show and The Colbert Report outside the US, please see this earlier post.)
Part 1 was shown on January 24, 2012.
The Colbert Report
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Part 2 was shown on January 25, 2012.
The Colbert Report
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Some of the most interesting segments on The Daily Show are those involving authors and books that I had never heard of before. In this segment, Jon Stewart interviews Elizabeth Dowling Taylor, author of A Slave in the White House: Paul Jennings and the Madisons.
A review of the book can be read here.
The main thesis of Steven Pinker’s latest book is that violence has declined dramatically over time and that we are now living in the most peaceful time in history, and to suggest reasons for this. The decline has not been uniformly steady but has a saw-tooth pattern of periodic upticks of violence followed by steeper drops leading to an overall decline over time.
This is not a proposition that is obvious since many people despair of the state of the world now with wars between nations, civil wars, genocides, and the brutal suppression of dissent seemingly taking place all over the globe. It is in order to counter this perception that Pinker has to write such a long book (running to nearly 700 pages even without the endnotes and citations), amassing the data and evidence and arguments necessary whenever one is making a counter-intuitive case. So the book is heavy with numbers and graphs that could easily become tedious except that Pinker has a deft writing style that lifts the reader whenever the going gets tough. The book has sparked considerable interest and on his website Pinker has responded to some of the reactions and criticisms.
[Read more…]