How Jesus Became God by Bart Ehrman Having read some of the more prominent books from the "Christ myth" point of view, I decided to have a look at the ideas of the most prominent mainstream scholar who holds to a historical Jesus, who happens to be Bart Ehrman. I had in fact previously read some other historical Jesus stuff, notably Reza Aslan but he doesn't seem to be as widely respected, nor is his work as thorough as this in its interepretation of the New Testament. Ehrman plausibly outlines how Jesus the man originally would have claimed to be the Messiah, a Jewish king who would overthrow Roman rule and clear the way for the new age, representing the Kingdom of Heaven. Upon his execution and failure in this task some of his followers claimed to experience visions of him. In light of this he was re-interpreted as a human being who had been exalted after death by God to become the Son of Man, a supernatural figure who was to lead the armies of heaven in the coming apocalypse. This "exaltation Christology" began by placing the exaltation after Jesus's death, but it was then moved backwards by his followers to having taken placed during his life, at his birth and eventually "before all ages". Along the way the title "son of God" became appended, originally referring to a lesser divinity much in the same way that angels are in the Old Testament, but eventually acquiring the much grander implications that we're familiar with today. These "higher" Christologies are known as incarnation Christologies. Am I sold? Well, not quite. It is as I said, plausible. But most of the above is based on interpretation of the gospel accounts. The letters of Paul seem to indicate that higher Christologies existed much earlier rather than being late developments. Ehrman tries to explain this away but I suspect that there's something else going on - perhaps the fusion of two seperate belief systems, one stemming from a historical figure and the other from a mythical one. It is unlikely that we'll ever have closure on any of this but I find it fascinating to weight the different viewpoints. Misquoting Jesus by Bart Ehrman This one elaborates on the history of textual transmission of the New Testament, outlining how and why what we read today is very different from what was originally written. The subject is a little more dry, but Ehrman keeps it interesting. Starting from the oral transmission of the material, through the theological debates of the first three Christian centuries, subsequent translations from Greek to Latin and the other languages, he explains how the diverse and very human books of the NT have become homogenised and corrupted by those of faith essentially attempting to impose their doctrines on them. Often this was "accidental" but sometimes also deliberate. I have never been a believer in biblical inerrancy of course but even from my perspective this was eye-opening. These aren't minor textual variants. For centuries the works were copied by hand by barely literate scribes. The oldest extant documents originate after this, and our English-language copies often derive from the more unreliable versions, translated from a translation. The question is begged of believers - what exactly are you saying is inerrant?
Revelation Space by Alistair Reynolds Back to some hard sci-fi. Reynolds has the credentials to write this stuff, with a a PhD in astrophysics and so forth. He tells of a highly advanced human civilisation in the 26th century, on various colony worlds and split into various factions as a consequence of genetic and biomechanical engineering. The story centres around the obsession of a scientist with a long-dead culture and the manner of their extinction. It's all highly dystopian, verging on horror at times. There are some problems. It's probably a little too long. None of the characters are at all likeable. Some of the writing is a bit contrived - cutting away from the action at times to create artificial cliff-hangers, and having characters withhold information thus making their motiviations difficult to understand. But as world building it's really good, setting up a universe full of danger and full of mystery that is ripe for exploration. I might not have gone any further but the sequel is apparently better, so I'll get to it soon.
Reread all my back issues of Litmag in preparation for the new issue. I think #s 8 and 14 are the best overall (the ones I worked on or contributed to will of course always be the sentimental favorites). I actually hadn't read the most recent few thoroughly, so I got to be surprised by some good stuff in there.
(also have read the new issues now ) Blue Highways: A Journey Into America - William Least Heat Moon The author lost his job and wife, so he drove the back highways of early 1980s America to see what he could see. A lot of scenery, a lot of people, a lot of reflections and stories told and lived. A very good read, one that I've been savoring for a while.
1177BC: The Year Civilisation Collapsed by Eric H. Cline The Bronze Age Collapse is an interesting subject, referring to the period at the end of the second millennium BC where the old palace-based kingdoms in the Mediterranean and Near East stopped functioning, precipitating a dark age and subsequently the onset of the less centralised Iron Age. The year 1177 BC is somewhat arbitrary (as are all such dates) but I'm okay with that. This is ostensibly an effort to give an account of the history leading up to this collapse and examine the reasons for it. Unfortunately it's a fairly poor book. There's little effort to provide the kind of narrative structure that usually exists in popular history books. Instead it takes the form of a what is essentially a series of archaeological notes, with dozens of names of various kings and rulers strewn around the text. Some of the vignettes are interesting but together they don't add up to much other than to tell the reader that there was quite a lot of trade going on between the various powers of the time, as well as some warfare. The conclusion then examines the various theories concerning the collapse - including climate change, famine, rebellion and invasion (of the mysterious sea peoples) but ends up taking no position other than that perhaps it was a mixture of these things. I think perhaps Cline's effort falls between the two stools of popular history and academic history, but is unlikely to appeal to readers of either.
I breezed through 1177BC about a year back, and found it pretty underwhelming. @RickDeckard's reaction is pretty much the same one I had. The one fascinating point I took away was a better understanding of how connected the Mediterranean world was at the time, a situation that invites comparisons to modern globalization.
The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky This is one of Dostoevsky's less celebrated works, telling the tale of a gentle and kind young man who returns home after recieving treatment abroad for his epilepsy. This Prince Mishkin is intended to represent a Christ-like character and to illustrate what happens to such a person in todays world (or in 19th century Russia as it were). Coming in to some money, he's quickly caught in all manner of intrigue including a love triangle and some attempts at extortion. It's not giving much away to say that it doesn't end well. It is as one would expect, fairly long-winded. But that's less forgiveable here because there's such a preponderous of melodrama, and less of the weighty contemplation that marks out Crime and Punishment or The Brothers Karamazov. When he does get going, Dostoevsky is even more reactionary than usual, espousing what seems to be a brand of slavophile theocracy. It still has its moments of insight and pathos but not one for the casual reader.
Ice Man: Confessions of a Mafia Contract Killer by Philip Carlo This is a "true crime" book about the career of Richard Kuklinski, telling of his life as a serial killer and mafia hitman. Kuklinski had an abusive father and apparently began murdering people as a teenager, claiming dozens of lives and eventually working for the Mafia as a contract killer even though as a Pole he could never become a member. He also dabbles in pornography and money laundering. It is diverting in the morbid kind of way that these usual are. Unfortunately it's poorly written, in quite a banal style and with the author prone to repitition of certain points. It's also based mostly on interviews with Kuklinski which magnifies another problem. With crime stories one always tends to doubt the veracity of some of what one is being told, but here the claims made stretch credibility so much that one comes away with the impression that whoever he may have killed, Kuklinski was a fantasist who became carried away with promoting the role that pop culture had assigned him. His various claims include being involved in the assasinations of two Mafia bosses - although it appears from other sources that this is disputed by those who were convicted of the crimes. A more skeptical author might have framed this better, but of course the less sensational story doesn't sell as well.
Stranger in a Strange Land - Robert A. Heinlein The first human expedition to Mars goes less than perfectly, leaving a single offspring of the crew to return to Earth years later, having grown up essentially a native Martian and having learned miraculous abilities from the locals. Thus the Earth (or rather, Heinlein's vision of a near-future, radically different Earth) is the strange land. The offspring quickly becomes wrapped up in money and politics beyond his knowledge or ken. And then . . . Look, I've read The Past Through Tomorrow (and enjoyed it), I had some idea what I was getting into. But the middle of the book eventually just slogs and bogs along. I was afraid Mike was going to stay in that home clear through to the end of the book, with Heinlein's authorial megaphone character holding the floor, nine paragraphs out of ten, to argue and rehash his worldview the whole way. The constant casual chauvinism endemic to the book's era gets annoying after a while, too. Fortunately the plot moves on and the book comes back to life, with Mike trying to build a utopia under the guise of a new religion. It's one thing to come into a book expecting one thing about an idea, only to get a different approach to that idea. That happened here; I don't know that I was expecting anything in particular, but a Martian coming to Earth only to get engulfed in political and religious commentary was a surprise. My major problem is with that middle section, with Mike quietly doing his own thing while the book mostly shifts the focus to Jubal's commentaries on Earth, with Mike only coming in as a whetstone if you will. That's a book engaging with another idea entirely. The Martian worldbuilding was good -- I would have liked more, but it would have been outside the author's intended scope, so I'll let it pass -- and Mike's POV and development were good. I probably needn't say that I disagree with a lot of the religious philosophy espoused, but I won't hold that against the book. It might just be a good idea for me to stick to Heinlein's short stories in the future. The Tale of Ginger and Pickles - Beatrix Potter A harrowing, keenly incisive economic screed that would surely get the author branded as a cynical wacko bent on brainwashing children if it were released in modern times. Foolish animals run a shop charitably, only to run into the realities of an authoritarian government, with Randian (Randist?) results. I liked the pictures of bunnies.
A Short Time For Insanity, the autobiography of William A. Wellman. You may have never heard of him, but he went from juvenile delinquent to World War I aviator to Hollywood director whose film career spanned from the early 1920s to the late 1950s. There's a lot of macho swagger here, but it's in good humor and well-earned. After all, he lived a big, brash, quintessentially American life at a time when American culture came to be a dominant influence on the rest of the world. His movies contributed in no small part to that. Worth reading.
Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency - Douglas Adams Very entertaining, as one would expect. Adams's usual snark, wild plotting, and sharp descriptions are fully on display here, and I always have a soft spot for the Gently type of character who insists on coming at the world from his own peculiar angle. If you haven't read it, read it and its sequel. That's all there is to say. The Bridge Over The River Kwai - Pierre Boulle A quicker read than I expected. Captured British soldiers are set to building a critical bridge for the Japanese in mainland Asia during WWII, while some other Brits seek to blow it up. Several very strong personalities on either side shape the plot. It's good.
The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver Nate Silver is best known for his website, Five Thirty Eight, which aggregates political polls in order to predict the outcome of elections. His wider interest is in Big Data and prediction generally and this book is his summary of the field, "the signal" being the relevant data pointing to the correct outcome and "the noise" being the remainder. He spends a chapter each on some of the areas where such prediction techniques are used - among them politics, economics, the stock market, various sports and natural phenomenon. It's generally quite absorbing, and he writes about these topics in a way that attempts to be as free from bias as possible. I found that my interest in the book varied throughout in line with how much prior interest I had in a given subject - the parts about baseball were a real slog since I don't care for it, whereas those about chess were fascinating.
George Mason: Forgotten Founder by Jeff Broadwater Latest in my founding fathers biography obsession, this one looks at George Mason. Relatively well known here in Virginia, Mason is often overlooked elsewhere in the country when considering the Revolutionary War/Founding period. A somewhat thin volume compared to the bios of, say, Franklin or Hamilton that I've read (altho extensively footnoted), this spends most of its pages on the period immediately preceding the American Revolution thru to the Constitutional Convention and then the ratifying conventions with of course special emphasis on the Virginia convention. Mason, altho an anti-federalist due to his dissatisfaction with the ultimate state of the Constitution as adopted, nevertheless had extensive influence on the document and the convention itself. His influence is most strongly felt in the Bill of Rights, which he wanted included in the Constitution itself before he would support it. A good informative (if quick) read.
The Trial by Franz Kafka This is a short and possibly unfinished work by the famous absurdist Czech writer whose name has slipped into the dictionary under the term "Kafkaeque". It relates the story of bank worker K. who on his 30th birthday is arrested and put on trial. He isn't told what the charges are, and his attempts to engage with the court are maddedingly unsuccessful. On the surface it's a satire on bureaucracy gone mad, and perhaps a prescient warning about totalitarianism (it was written in 1913). And for perhaps the first half of the book, it's hard to get to grips with. But as it nears the climax it aquires some degree of profundity. Does the court represent society, the universe, God, fate, or all of these things? K. has hints of all of these things, and what tantalising hints of actual meaning he can glimpse are out of reach, each path he pursues leading to further absurdity. The ending is like a gut punch. Certainly one of the most extraordinarily pessimistic things I have ever read.
Norse Mythology by Neil Gaiman Gaiman updates/refreshes old Norse myths. A quick read and strangely I was familiar with all the myths in the volume. Personally, I don't find this to be one of Gaiman's better works. Altho his usual flourishes are present and you can definitely tell it's Gaiman, there's not much depth to anything. Still, a good read. Entertaining if nothing else. Gaiman somehow manages to make the Fenris Wolf a sympathetic character.
The Blade Artist by Irvine Welsh Welsh has focused his new book on one of his most notorious characters, the violent alcoholic Francis Begbie. The central thrust is that Begbie has reformed, and is now living a comfortable existence as an artist in California only to be drawn back into his old world by the death of his son in Scotland. I didn't like it much. While I can buy into the idea of Begbie addressing his anger management issues somewhat, his development into an urbane intellectual type who has read Elliot and can quote Nietzsche is a step too far. And when his old self resurfaces as you know it will, Welsh draws him as a methodical master criminal rather than the loser that I'd always assumed him to be, giving him a street reputation that he probably didn't deserve. It's all a tremendous disservice to the character and an unwelcome retcon to the Trainspotting universe. The plot and indeed the other characters are serviceable, a vehicle to explore Begbie's personality. But overall, I fear that Irvine Welsh has simply become too bourgeois and needs a fresh start in his writing of some sort.
Never Call Retreat - Bruce Catton Another of his Civil War books, this one covers from December 1862 up past Lincoln's assassination. It's the same trilogy as The Coming Fury and so has quite a bit of space devoted to the politics and politicians, in this case notably spending some time on just how ugly the racial politics could get. A blurb on another of his books mentions Catton's "affection for style and color, his interest in details that reveal or imply the whole, his conception of history as the drama of personalities", and that, combined with the fascination and wealth of the subject matter, sums up his continued appeal for me.
The Boy Who Harnessed The Wind - William Kamkwamba and Bryan Mealer This is not just one long read about a boy putting together a windmill to provide power for his impoverished village in Malawi. This book can be divided into three rough sections. First is an account of the local culture (particularly the magic) and of Kamkwamba's family background. That done, the middle tells of a harrowing famine year in Malawi, which probably takes up half the book on its own. It's an unaffected but harrowing tale as things gradually get more and more desperate. Kamkwamba's family runs out of money, forcing him to drop out of school, which leads into the last part. Kamkwamba uses the local library to learn enough engineering to build a windmill to give his family a little electricity, which gets the world's attention. The book is written in a frank, simple narrative voice that makes one feel that one is right there through it all. I suspect that Mealer did very little editorial work in translating Kamkwamba's words into English. It's all a fascinating read. It's also the first time I've ever seen a list consisting of "witches, Satan worshippers, and business tycoons", but maybe I'm just visiting the wrong blogs.
The Island of Lost Maps: A True Story of Cartographic Crime - Miles Harvey The kernel of this book is a study of the life of James Bland, a nobody who systematically stole several hundred priceless maps from institutions across the United States (and a few in Canada) before being caught. Harvey surrounds it with the history of maps and map thievery, the current state of map collecting, the thrill of discovery and thievery and collecting in general, and other things that don't come to mind immediately. Included are literary quotes; interviews with librarians, collectors and sellers, and an FBI agent; and speculatory ruminations about all the above. Again, it all makes for an interesting read.
The Romanovs: 1613-1918 by Simon Sebag-Montefiore The epic quality of Russian history continues to fascinate me - the sheer vastness of the place and the staggering numbers associated with its many tumults. And while I'd read quite a lot about the 20th century and to a lesser extent the 19th, I was only very vaguely aware of the period preceding that. So a history of the dynasty that ruled the place seemed a good idea to get up to speed and having read this authors biography of Stalin previously I decided to go with it. I certainly learned a lot. The barbarism stands out. Peter the Great may have made great strides towards modernisation and been a military genius, but his appetite for torture - he tortured and (probably personally) murdered his own son - casts his status as a national icon in a fairly sinister light. The brideshows. The palace coups. The dashing Potemkin. The burning of Moscow. The freeing of the serfs. The stuttering attempts to modernise while refusing to budge on the principle of autocracy. The revolutions of the 20th century. Rasputin. The incompetence of Nicholas II. The grisly murder of the royal family by Bolshveik thugs. It's all suitably dramatic and puts modern-day Russia in a more rounded context. The character of the Russian people is different in many ways to that of western peoples. A man like Putin must know this stuff inside out. My major criticism is that there's a lot of focus on the personal lives of the Romanovs. Lengthy sections describe their love letters to each other, their sexual daliences and other salacious details. While some of this is probably necessary, there's too much and it probably detracts from the social and political programs that were going on. That said, this is the history of one family rather than of the state. The narrow understanding that this work gives me of the latter whets my appetite for more.
Planet of the apes- Pierre Boulle A space traveler and his lover find a message in a bottle floating around in space, the message is the story of a journalist who gets to ride on the first human FTL flight. It still takes 1000ish years to the destination but time moves slower in the bubble. The astronauts find a planet with breathable air and damn, dirty apes ensue. Only it's not earth, and the explanation for the intelligent apes is kind of...dumb, and there are 2 ape planets.
The Hirschfeld Century: Portrait of an Artist and His Age - David Leopold (ed.) It's basically a coffee table book of moderate dimensions. If you want Al Hirschfeld drawings, there are hundreds of 'em. If you want to read about the arc of his career and a few incidents shaping the same, there's some of that. If you want to read lots of names and Broadway play titles, there's a lot of that too. Anything else, and you'll be disappointed. There are a few anecdotes and Hirschfeld opinions -- he didn't like Snow White and subsequent Disney animations, and the look of the genie in Aladdin was modeled after his work -- but they mostly just fill in a few corners here and there. Hirschfeld was a much more pervasive, more varied artist than I had supposed, and I enjoyed looking at his art and being bad at finding the NINAs he put in most of his drawings. Truly one of a kind.
Brave New World by Audlous Huxley In the future, the nanny state has gone into overdrive and abolished all pain and discomfort through the use of eugenics, drugs, brainwashing and consumerism. Unfortunately this has also meant the abolition of family, love, art and much else of value. Bernard Marx (upon whom some mistakes have been made) begins to question the state of things. It's frequently mentioned as a classic of dystopian fiction alongside the likes of Nineteen Eighty Four. I didn't find it to be quite as good as all that. It's a little heavy-handed at times with several anachronisms (Henry Ford is an object of worship for some reason) and is as much a satire of the kind of utopian fiction doing the rounds in the early 20th century as anything else. But the writing is frequently gorgeous, helped by the allusions to Shakespeare and there is a lot that is thought provoking about the nature of suffering and struggle.
I always liked Brave New World a lot more than 1984, because as dystopian as BNW's future is, it's a hell of a lot nicer than Orwell's vision of tyranny. I also find the characters more engaging.
DOOM-Knee deep in the dead. By Brad Linaweaver and Dafydd ab Hugh. Ah, the original DOOM novel. The first of 4 parts, part 1, knee deep in the dead, does try to represent the game, a little bit. Doomguy's name is Flynn Taggert and he starts this story under arrest for slugging his shithead c.o. His unit doesn't have time to drop him off for court-martial as something fucked is happening on Deimos, so they drag him with them and keep him detained as they investigate the Deimos anomaly. Screams over the radio convince Doomguy to talk his way passed his guards and enter the U.A.C. facility to try and find the character based on the other marine on the game cover, Arlene Sanders, his sort of love interest. The smell of rotting lemons signify the presence of zombies, and a bit of DOOM ensues, until Doomguy finds A.S. written on the wall, and the book goes into a chapter about journey to the center of the earth and how much of a movie nerd Arlene is. After a chapter describing E1M8 and the hell knights, Flynn and Arlene reunite, and speculate more science-y reasons for the demons and zombies taking over Mars's moons, oh, and Phobos just disappeared. The Doom duo's sci-fi speculation is later confirmed when they find cloning vats producing pinkies and some biochemist the demons were holding prisoner. They step through a teleporter and Arlene, who worked as a guard at Phobos base, recognises part of the increasingly warped by the demon aliens architecture as part of Phobos base and they run like hell from a cyberdemon. It turns out that there were strange zones on Phobos and Deimos that had earth normal gravity and alien ruins, and the U.A.C. set up to study them. Doom Doom Doom, Arlene is a nerd, Doom Doom Doom, final boss fight. The spider Mastermind fight is a pretty fun chapter, and once it dies and the group makes their way to the surface of Phobos, they discover that the moon is in some hyperspace tunnel and it drops out of it in orbit of the earth. To be continued in book 2, Hell on Earth, where things start to divert from the source material and go to some very strange places.
I recently re-read Shattered Sword, a history of the Battle of Midway from the Japanese perspective. I'm currently doing a re-read of Neptune's Inferno, an account of the naval battles in the Solomons. Both are excellent books and part of the reason for revisiting them is because I read them both so fast the first time. Next up are The World Wonder'd: What Really Happened Off Samar and That Night at Surigao: Life on a Battleship at War. Both are about engagements that occurred during the Battle of Leyte Gulf.
I read all these back when they came out. Ultimately very disappointing due to the authors choosing to go all science-fictiony and jettisoning the "Demons from hell" stuff.
What it lost in demon fighting it made up for in the weird segues into mormon dogma and bizarre sci-fi logic.
Adults in the Room by Yanis Varoufakis Varoufakis was the Greek finance minister for 6 months in 2015 following the election of the left-wing Syriza party to office with a pledge to escape from the disgraceful austerity programs and "debt bondage" imposed on his country by the EU and IMF. Observers will know that after fraught negotiations Syriza capitulated and Varoufakis resigned. This is his memoir of the period. And it's terrifying. The troika of institutions refused to negotiate, wrapped the Greeks up in bureaucracy, threatened, blackmailed, u-turned and lied. At various points they even admitted that the programs that they were imposing were unworkable but that they were unable to lose face by changing course. Wolfgang Schable (the German finance minister) is identified as the chief villain. His endgame is to effectively control the budgets of all Eurozone countries from Berlin - he wants to "take the troika to Paris". To do this Greece must be made an example of. His boss Angela Merkel restrains him somewhat and wants Greece kept in the Eurozone but has little care for their well-being. Others, particularly the odious Jeroem Dijsselbloem (president of the extra-legal Eurogroup) serve as lackeys for Schauble. The French are spineless and say one thing in private, another in public (though Emmanuel Macron is one of few cast in a good light so his subsequent tenure should be interesting). Syriza themselves are unable to hold together in the face of the onslaught, with leader Alexis Tsipras gradually resiling from his promise to leave the Euro should he be backed into a corner. His actions following an eventual referendum on the proposed offer - which he wins despite hoping that he will lose - cannot be seen as other than a cowardly betrayal. The Greeks are also hamstrung by their own central bank being against them, and by factionalism within their government. Varoufakis has many scores to settle both with his own colleagues and the Europeans. His accounts of meetings are of course open to challenge by them. It has also been suggested that Varoufakis has an outsized ego and that comes across here at various points, but I'd argue that a milder character could not have endured the intense pressure he was subjected to. It's never less than immensely readable, which is impressive given the plethora of economic statistics. All in all, this is a devastating exposure of the rotten state of the European Union. The personalities portrayed in it are likely to be furious at how candid Varoufakis has been.
Gironimo! Riding the Very Terrible 1914 Tour of Italy - Tim Moore A cycling enthusiast, disgusted with the Lance Armstrong era of professional cycling, decides to retrace the route of the (convincingly) worst-ever race, the 1914 Giro de Italia, in which less than 10% of the starting field finished. And he's going to do it in period-appropriate gear, on a period bike. It's partly my fault that I went in expecting something akin to the lost maps book, with an expert blending of here-and-now with entertaining historical bits and anecdotes. The book starts out with a long period of hapless putting-together of an appropriate bicycle, while breezily violating one of my deepest dislikes, that of casual obscenities in the narration. That grimy part over with, it's time for the actual riding in Italy, which is a much better read (partly because the anticipated anecdotes finally appear). Humor and tragedy, horror and pathos suffuse a tale of mountains, homicidal Italian drivers everywhere, the occasional angel of mercy, and bystanders who by turns jeer and applaud a lunatic on a bike with wine corks for brakes. The blurbs are also at fault, with several declaring this to be a very funny book. It's funny in fits and starts but never really builds on itself in that regard. If you like cycling, it's a good book, and might be funnier if you know the scene more than I do. Otherwise, go read any of the other books I've read this year instead.
