Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur, April 2005
- Robert J. Sawyer, Calculating
God
- Mind candy. Pleasantly-written novel about first contact, the Argument
from Design, and cancer. Sawyer's characters are however far too credulous
about anthropic arguments; if they'd taken a drive from
the Royal Ontario Museum to
the Perimeter
Institute, Lee Smolin could've straightened them
out. Still, it's hard not to enjoy a novel where the newly-arrived alien's
first request is for a paleontologist (and is met with "Vertebrate or
invertebrate?").
- W. G. Runciman, A
Treatise on Social Theory, vol. I: The
Methodology of Social Theory
- First part of a massive trilogy on social science and how it should be
conducted, by a sociologist who is also (as he puts it) a practicing
capitalist. I was inspired to start this by reading his one-volume
popularization (and revision), The
Social Animal, which is excellent. Here is mostly concerned with
clearing the ground and laying foundations --- answering doubts about whether
social science is possible (it is), whether it must be fundamentally different
from natural science (no, with one exception), etc. This is largely done
through an exploration of four concepts: three different sorts of
understanding, and evaluation. He introduces primary, secondary and tertiary
understanding thus: "The first of these is the understanding necessary for the
reportage of what has been observed to occur or to be the case; the second is
the understanding of what caused it, or how it came about; and the third is the
understanding necessary for its description in the special sense here given to
that term," that of "convey what it is like" to do X or to be Y or to suffer Z.
The difference between the social and the natural sciences doesn't lie in
problems of reportage or explanation, but in description (in this sense), and
in evaluation. ("[N]othing prevents those engaged in research into human
institutions and practices from incorporating into their research the ideas
which they cannot help having about what makes one form of social organization
either better or worse.... If they wish to expound to their readers their
theories of justice or freedom, or their vision of the good society, neither
their readers nor any passing methodologist can stop them. All the
methodologist can do is to make clear to them ... that in seeking to vindicate
their evaluations against those of [rival] theoretical schools they are
appealing to fundamentally different criteria from those to which they appeal
in seeking to vindicate their reports as accurate, their explanations as valid
and their descriptions as authentic.") As a writer, Runciman is careful,
level-headed, thorough and agreeable, but not (here) exciting. (The
Social Animal displays more verve.) He is good at raising, and fairly
airing, serious objections, and generally convincing in his counter-arguments.
I will definitely be pressing on to vol. II, where he finally introduces his
substantive social theory, which a selectionist one, concerned with the
differential reproduction and propagation of beliefs, and, more centrally, of
practices.
- Jane Lindskold, The
Buried Pyramid
- Mind candy. Enjoyable fantasy novel about 19th century Egyptology (in a
rather more literal sense than Elizabeth
Peters's books).
- Damien
Broderick, The
Black Grail
- An unusually well-written and well-conceived member of the dying earth genre,
melding well-controlled mythic allusions with a thoroughly naturalistic world,
though the protagonist is ignorant enough to often think he's dealing with
magic. (Paul McAuley does something similar in his Confluence
trilogy.) The ending is particularly fine, and surprising. (I won't spoil
it.) A hideous
cover makes it look like a Star Wars rip-off, which could
hardly be further from the truth. Update, some weeks
later: The Black Grail is a drastically revised version
of a novel published over ten years earlier as Sorceror's World.
Having now browsed through a copy of the later, I urge you not to read
it, unless you want to see just how much better Broderick got in that
time.
- J. H. Plumb, In
the Light of History
- Well-written historical essays, mostly on British politics and society in
the 18th century, with excursions to other parts of the English-speaking world
before and since. I particularly liked the one attacking the cult of Burke,
and the one on the oppression of women.
- Jane Haddam, The
Headmaster's Wife
- Hadaam's latest mystery novel (oddly not mentioned on her website). As always with Haddam, an
excellent combination of well-realized characters, in various stages of
desperation, delusion and distress, with a portrait of an institution --- here,
a marvelously unappealing New England boarding school that combines snobbery
with hypertrophied political correctness.
- Mark Noll, The
Scandal of the Evangelical Mind
- The scandal being that there essentially is no distinctively
evangelical life of the mind, no respectable intellectual activity which is
informed by the concerns and ideas of evangelical Protestantism. (This is not
to say there is no respectable intellectual activity on the part of evangelical
Protestants.) Noll is a historian and an evangelical, which leads to
some interesting perspectives. It also leads him to end the book with a rather
desperate search for signs of a "revival" of the evangelical mind (so desperate
he instances both Philip Johnson and Christian
Reconstructionism), and a whistling-in-the-dark hope that these dry bones
shall yet live, when the — I use the word advisedly —
natural conclusion is that he's made a strong case that there is
no hope for the evangelical mind. For the most part, he's quite good,
but there are places, especially when he discusses evolution and science (which
I hasten to say he accepts) where I was definitely irritated: apparently
Stephen Jay Gould was uppity for daring, as a mere paleontologist, to discuss
what science is and what it can and cannot do, a task better left to those more
qualified, like ecclesiastical historians. Still, it's an extremely
informative and interesting book, and I strongly recommend it to anyone who
wants to understand what a large fraction of Americans are thinking, or,
rather, not thinking.
- [It's tangential, but I was struck, while reading this, that Noll explains
the origins of distinctive evangelical cultural traits in one way ---
essentially, as adaptations to contemporary social conditions and more
widely-distributed cultural traits --- but their maintenance in a
quite different way: in fact he never does explain why they're maintained,
seeming to take that as automatic. This seems not uncommon among historians,
but it is curious. As a good Darwinian, I'm more than happy to accept that the
two phenomena have different sorts of causes, but I would like to know why what
seem like two completely different mechanisms were operative at different eras,
and what the mechanisms which preserved, e.g., Baconian ideas about science
among North American evangelical Protestants actually were.]
- Read on the recommendation of Fred "slacktivist" Clark.
- Stephen King, Wolves
of the Calla
- Volume five of King's Dark Tower series, good if you've read
its predecessors and pointless otherwise. (I think the predecessors are worth
reading: here's 1, 2, 3
and 4, the last link
to my review. Bits of this one also draw on Black House, below,
and still more on 'Salem's
Lot, as well as Gaiman &
co.'s World's
End --- for which King wrote the afterword, come to think of it.)
It's not much of a spoiler to say that this time Roland, the Last Gunslinger,
stars in a remake of The Seven Samurai. The illustrations,
however, are not very good.
- Stephen King and Peter Straub, Black
House
- Sequel to their earlier collaboration, The
Talisman, but independent, and highly enjoyable. They should
collaborate more.
Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur
Posted at April 30, 2005 23:59 | permanent link