BTRIPP'S BOOKS

Howdy ...
After many years of not reading (the details of this strange condition, a side-effect of running my own publishing company, can be found in the early entries here), I got back into the habit around 2002, and in February 2004 began to post (in my main LiveJournal) little reviews of books as I read them.

In November 2005, I discovered LibraryThing and began to log in my extensive library. As there is a "review" section for every book listed there, it occurred to me that linking back to my book review posts might be a useful thing to do.

However, I didn't want to "blur the lines" dividing what I primarily use LiveJournal for and what I see LibraryThing being. As such, I started this new journal, just for my book reviews, and have copied over all the book review posts from my main journal to this new one.

{EDIT}
By the way...

EVERYTHING ON THIS SITE (http://btripp-books.livejournal.com/ and all subsidiary pages)
IS COPYRIGHT © 2007-2009 BY BRENDAN TRIPP.

Due to recent developments at LibraryThing.com relating to users' book reviews, I felt a need to make a formal statement of copyright claim.

Book Blogger Appreciation Week

This journal is a member of:
The BooksANDBlogs webring.
Power By Ringsurf

Interesting ...

OK, so those of you who have been following this space with a "stalker-esque" attention to detail (comparing what's been coming through here with the record of my reading over on LibraryThing) will know that I kind of got behind on my reviewing a number of months back, leaving me with a stack of books that were read between November '08 and February '09 still to be addressed. This is one of those. Needless to say, returning to a book six months or more after having read it is not the most ideal context for writing a review (the books hardly being "fresh" in my thought stream), and for this I apologize. So, if some of the upcoming reviews are a bit more "mechanical" than usual, please don't quit reading thinking "I've lost it" as I work my way through the backlog!

Those regulars will know that I've read many books in "alternative Biblical interpretation" (to give a "big tent" name to a number of associated genres), and Hugh J. Schonfield's The Passover Plot is certainly among that part of my library. The tone of this one, however, is rather different, rather than trying to re-write the theological base of Christianity, it takes a more "investigative" look at the stories and what, realistically, was likely to have been behind them. As one could guess from the title, Schonfield's conclusion is something of a well-planned conspiracy aimed at an actual Messianic kingship for Jesus, hatched by him and certain key associates.

This is not to say that the book doesn't have something of a theological axe to grind, the failings and hypocrisies of Christianity are frequently pointed out:

The Christian message obtained the most recruits among the slaves and underprivileged. Many of them, as we find in Paul's letters, were not only of low morality, but factious, restless and disaffected. ...

The message about Jesus found a lodging among peoples who believed in the commerce of gods with mortals and were accustomed to the deification of rulers and other outstanding personages. ...

There is a widespread desire for a realistic rather than an idealized representation of Jesus. The Traditional protraiture no longer satisfies: it is too baffling in its apparent contradiction of the terms of our earthly existence. The God-man of Christianity is increadingly incredible, yet it is not easy to break with centuries of authritative instruction and devout faith, and there remains embedded deep in the sub-conscious a strong sense of the super-natural inherited from remote ages. ...

The modern dilemma of Christianity is patent and stems from a creed which down the centuries has so insisted on seeing God in Jesus Christ that it is in danger, as is now evident, of being unable to apprehend the existence of God without him. Far too many Christians do not know God in any other way than through Jesus. Take away the deity of Jesus and their faith in God is imperiled or destroyed. The New Testament is not entirely to be blamed for this. The major fault lies with those who have pandered to the ignorance and superstition of the people in giving them a God created in the image of man.

So, ultimately, what the author attempts here is to strip away the "superstition", and get to a view of the realistic, human, and historical milieu in which these individuals acted. In this, much of the book unfolds like a TV "procedural" looking at events and trying to pry out of the descriptions a likely 1st century scenario. Much of this hinges on peripheral (yet recurring) characters from the biblical narrative, and positing that some of these were closer to "the inner circle" than the "big name" apostles. To give one example: when folks are sent ahead to get an ass for Jesus' entry into Jerusalem (carefully adhering to the Old Testament "script") it's not a miracle that the animal is just where Jesus tells them to look, or that the owner allows them to take it when told a particular phrase, these sorts of things have all been pre-set to allow the mythic elements to accrue to Jesus.

It would appear that the timing, situations, and activities all point to a plan to have Jesus suffer on the cross, but not to die there (the crucifixion coming so close to the sundown on the Sabbath, when his associates could beg for the body, not being a coincidence), however the "piercing of the side" seems to have complicated things, and, rather than rising to reestablish the Jewish Theocracy, Jesus dies and leaves his followers at loose ends.

The book is in two parts, the stuff leading up to the crucifixion, and the stuff that ended up coagulating into Christianity after the crucifixion. There is a lot of very interesting evidence brought forth for both sides, but way too much to even sketch out here. Needless to say, The Passover Plot is a fascinating read, and I'd highly recommend it to anybody looking to make sense of the generally absurd Christian religion! It is still in print, and has a very low cover price, so this is one that you might as well grab at your local brick-and-mortar book vendor (Amazon has a minor discount on it, and their used guys aren't much lower than that when you figure in shipping). It's not a "light" read, but is nonetheless very illuminating!

Disappointing ...

This is one of those books which had developed a mystique around it in the years when it was out of print. As is (unfortunately) often the case, the reality of the book did not live up to the buzz. Charles Hapgood is an interesting character, having been a History professor, worked in the CIA, etc. Known best for his (quite excellent) Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings, he was willing to publish theories far off of the mainstream. The Path of the Pole (a re-named second edition of his The Earth's Shifting Crust) is certainly in that zone.

There have been tantalizing bits of information out there regarding arctic discoveries of frozen megafauna (most notably Mammoths) with temperate climate spring/summer plant matter in their stomachs, and in some cases mouth/teeth (having been being chewed when the animal died). I've read of these in a number of books, and they certainly suggest a sudden shift of climate. I've also read other books which have traced out the "ice age" glaciations which neatly fit with a pattern of movement of the polar region in relation to the continents. This book is one of the seminal sources cited by many of these others, and yet ... this is only peripherally about that. Hapgood did not believe in continental drift (which, I take it, has been pretty much solidly accepted and understood in the half century since this book was first released), and sought an alternative theory to explain various phenomena. Perhaps one of the things that gives his theorizing so much weight is that he managed to get Albert Einstein to write a foreword to the first edition ... and while Einstein isn't "on board" with everything, he pretty much says "interesting stuff, should be researched". At the core of Hapgood's theory here is the concept that as ice builds up at the poles, the weight is "spun" towards the equator and causes crustal shifting and distortion, with volcanism, etc. resulting.

One of the most glaring "errors" here is his view of the Hawaiian islands. He keeps going back to them as an "anomaly", suggesting that the mass of these huge mountains should be distorting the crust under them. Needless to say, within the context of continental drift, it's clear that these were created by the Pacific plate moving over a "hot spot" with upwelling lava, building up each of the islands in the chain as it went. It was almost humorous to see him trying to calculate solutions to fit these with his theory.

Again, perhaps my expectations were misguided (I had really hoped that this would have discussed the previously-mentioned "pole shifts" resulting in the historic pattern of glaciation), but this book is more about an alternative theory to continental drift than being about movements of the pole. Given that Hapgood's underlying theories were incorrect, it's difficult to figure out what might be of use here. I've had numerous discussions with folks who totally reject polar shifting (for various physical reasons), but there are many things which would be "best explained" by this theory. Unfortunately, that's not what Hapgood was concerned with here.

The fact that Hapgood was not a PhD, and that his specialty was history and not science, come up from time to time in this. There are whole areas not approached here (such as the frequent flipping of the magnetic poles) which a specialist would have spent a considerable time with, and there is so much here that anybody who watches the science channels on cable TV would "know better" about, that it is frequently uncomfortable reading.

Still, there are some fascinating bits in this. Hapgood implies that South America has only very recently been "raised", with the area of Lake Titicaca (now at 12,500ft elevation) having at one point been at sea level, and tracing out "fossil shorelines" which indicate that the region is at a definite incline to the original water level. If one is to take the "conservative" estimates of the Tiwanaku (whose "harbor" features are currently fairly removed from the lake) ruins, this would mean that much of the uplift in the are has only been in the past 2,500 years (of course, these are "mainstream" dates for that culture, and not the "mystical" dates which would push that site into a far more ancient context).

Anyway, The Path of the Pole goes a long way to prove what is unlikely to be provable, and is more embarrassing than interesting for most of it. While it has elements of the stuff I was hoping to read in it, they are incidental to Hapgood's main premise, a premise which is evidently incorrect. If you're still interested in it, it's still in print, and you might as well get it via Amazon (which has it for a discount, and available bundled with the far more satisfying Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings at just over the "free shipping" line). Frankly, I could have skipped this one, as it was a rather substantial read for a very minor pay-off.

Space ...

A while back I wrote a rather frustrated review of one of Paul Davies' books (a collections of lectures for a seminar) saying that nothing quite got where it needed to be going. Well, Cosmic Jackpot: Why Our Universe Is Just Right for Life is the flip side of that coin, taking one of those themes and giving it a full examination.

Now, I have to admit that I had a trace of trepidation when picking up this book, as you never know where fundie insanity might raise its insufferable head, and one could certainly get the impression from the title/subtitle of this that it was nudging into "design" territory. Fortunately, this is not the case!

Of course, it can be argued that our particular Universe is mighty fine-tuned (at this particular point in time, in our particular point in space) to allow for the sort of observing creatures as humanity (as well as the other sentient biota of Earth), and Davies takes a good hard look at the number for many of the component parts of that.

As regular perusers of these reviews know, I've read a lot of books in this general genre, and so I'm always pleasantly surprised when I run across something new and this book did not disappoint with that. Among these was the remarkable assertion that the Universe has "zero mass", deriving from the argument that gravity is negative energy (in that one must apply work to counter gravity), and that if one totals up all the gravitational attraction, the number comes out very similar to the estimation of all the mass in the Universe! Cool, huh?

Davies looks at dark matter/energy, hidden dimensions, universal topography, the history of the Big Bang, and various theories, old and new. One point that Davies and I diverge on is the concept of the "Multiverse" ... he seems to be in the camp that feels that it is a philosophical slight-of-hand, where I still hold that it's the most plausible theory (that our Universe is only one among an infinity of other Universes, and the reason we're here to SEE this particular Universe is that it's one that happened to have "the settings" set for our particular type of creature, sort of a modified weak anthropic stance). He does take the "Multiverse" theory and spin off of it, however ... with one fascinating proposal ... in an "ultimate reality" of that sort, there should be "fake" Universes:

... if our universe is part of a multiverse, the balance of probability shifts dramatically in favor of simulation. It's a matter of basic statistics. ... the multiverse allows all possible variations on a theme, including [universes with a supercivilization with immense computational power] able to simulate fake realities. Unless there is some law that forbids emergence of such civilizations ... it is inevitable that some universes like ours will give rise to universe-simulating supercivilizations. These universes will then spawn a vast number of fakes, so that in the total mix of real and fake universes, fake ones will overwhelmingly predominate. Therefore our universe is very, very likely to be a fake.

Speaking as somebody who has spent much of the past couple of years working in Virtual Worlds, this does not seem too extreme a stretch ... because if we're able to produce immersive environments with our present technology, what could a people with many orders of magnitude more computing power than ours create?

Anyway, if you're interested in a solid, but not too technical, dip into the current state of cosmological theories ... you could do a lot worse than Cosmic Jackpot. Davies covers most of the recent thought in the field with enough depth to give you familiarity, but not so much that you're spending all your time trying to wrap your head around the Calabi–Yau manifold (a 6-dimension string topography)! This is still in print, so you should be able to find it at your larger local brick-and-mortar book vendors, however Amazon has it for 34% off of cover, and their new/used guys have "new" copies for as little as $1.41 ($5.40 with shipping). This is hardly a "for all and sundry" book, but if you'd be open to learning a lot about cosmology, I'd heartily endorse this.

More ...

Some times things just work out ... in the previous book reviewed here, Henry Lincoln's The Holy Place: Discovering the Eighth Wonder of the Ancient World was referenced several times, and I was surprised that I hadn't heard of it before. So off I went to Amazon, and was able to snag a used copy (it does appear to be out of print). As regular readers of this space may recall, I've read quite a lot in the Rennes-le-Château genre over the years, so I brought "a lot of baggage" to this book, which might not be fair to it. It is an interesting book in its focus on the place, but ...

The supposed topic of this book, "the Eighth Wonder of the Ancient World", is frustratingly hard to find within its pages. Maddeningly hard to find, especially given that the end papers of this hardcover edition are reproductions of detailed topographic maps of the region, but in such a scale that it's hard to even make out place names. If Lincoln and his publishers were able to get permission to USE these maps in the book, you would think they'd have done some of their graphing on the maps, but noooooooo ... it's all pentagrams and hexagrams showing "straight lines" through places on blank paper. Lincoln posits that the whole region was one vast "temple", anchored at various points by churches, etc., but at NO POINT in the book are these diagrams and descriptions plotted against the maps, which is supposedly how he discovered them. Sure, this was published in 1991 (in that time before the Web), so we can forgive him not using Google satellite imagery (there is a great view of Rennes-le-Château there!), but how blatant a "tease" is it that he didn't reproduce the very evidence that led him to his premise?

Call me unimaginative, but I also have a very hard time with the whole "diagram on top of the text" thing. There is a very complicated, convoluted, and arcane cipher involved in part of this, and this is eventually "solved" (albeit with certain echoes of the "bible code" text crunching), why then start drawing stuff over it like you're going to come out of the exercise with a treasure map? I'm also much less impressed with "pentagrams" that are grossly distorted so that their points, intersects, and centers can fit over certain locations. Show me a regular figure that fits and I'll start thinking that maybe there's a "grand temple" there ... but I'm guessing that I could come up with just as good pentagrams by connecting Chicago suburbs on a map as what's presented here. Oh, yeah ... and they're not shown on a map so we pretty much have to take his word on it.

I hate to seem this irritated, but there is so much stuff hinted at in here that's just left hanging. Lincoln implies that there is a substantial pre-historic (or otherwise "lost") city sitting there waiting to be dug up at "Great Camp", among other things, only it's impossible to find these places, despite the enticing photos reproduced in the book.

Again, maybe it's me, but I find these carefully drawn out diagrams of 5, 6, even 10-pointed stars and various grids less than convincing when one considers how "random" the placement of landmarks appear to be on their lines ... and, as the book goes on, these keep getting bigger, more complicated, and including more "stuff".

You might be surprised to find that, despite all these caveats, I generally liked the book, and found much of the material quite engaging. It certainly puts the focus in on this one small (I was quite surprised to see what a tiny place Rennes-le-Château actually is) mountain village, and the countryside around it. It was fascinating to read of the possible pre-history of the area, hints of which come up in older ruins, and ruins incorporated into later structures. Of course, the whole "Magdalen" aspect is of interest as well. Ultimately, though, I don't feel convinced of the sub-titular premise ... it seems to me that Lincoln could have made a very substantial case by linking his various diagrams to topographic maps or aerial photography of the sites discussed ... trying to merge his descriptions and lay-outs to Google imagery seemed to go nowhere.

As noted, The Holy Place appears to be out-of-print, so if you'd like to get a copy, you'll be in the hands of the used vendors ... however, this is available fairly reasonably (I got my copy for $2 plus shipping). While this suggests more questions than it answers, it certainly looks at aspects of the whole Priory of Sion mystery without bogging down in the more florid aspects of that story. This shouldn't be one's introduction to the subject, but if one has had some experience with the topic, it does have enticing bits to add.

When is a goddess not a goddess?

So, there I was, with a book that I needed to get from Amazon, and a good ways to go before I made it to the "free shipping" promised land. And, flipping through the suggestions, I notice a title that was familiar, and clicked on it. It was the right (discounted) price, and my order was good-to-go. Yep, that's the extent of the fore-thought and planning involved on my picking up Margaret Starbird's The Woman with the Alabaster Jar: Mary Magdalen and the Holy Grail ... recognized the title from being referenced in other books of the "Holy Blood, Holy Grail" genre. I guess it's featured in The DaVinci Code as well (as the big starburst on the cover points out), but I've not gotten far enough from my "no fiction" ban to have been tempted to read anything that mass-market!

Personally, I found the most interesting thing about this book is its "backstory", of how the author, a one-time good Catholic girl (indeed, a RC theologian and university instructor), discovered the Baigent, Leigh, & Lincoln books and thought that they just HAD to be wrong, and set off to disprove the whole Jesus/Magdalen bloodline thing. And what happened? She found out that the canonical story was full of holes, that there was solid historical traces supporting the heretical version, and she suddenly is a major voice in the "goddess" movement, albeit in a quasi-Christian corner of it focusing on the Sarah (daughter of Jesus and Mary M.) lineage. It's mild sort of Schadenfreude, but I'll take it.

For those who have read widely in the genre, however, there isn't that much "new" in here, except, perhaps a deeper look into symbols in art and iconography which the author suggests are hidden signs of the Magdalen cult. Some of these seem a bit tenuous (i.e. any red X being a marker for the faith, no matter in what context), and some seem a bit stretched (almost anything appearing in a watermark: lions, unicorns, grapes, castles, crowns, etc., etc., etc.) ... here's a bit of a snippet along these lines:

We have already established that the southern part of France was a seedbed for the Grail heresy and for the flowering of arts and letters during the twelfth century. The watermarks from Bayley's research throw a great deal of light on the faith of the heretics, who seem to have believed that Jesus was an earthen vessel for the spirit of God and that his teachings would lead them to personal enlightenment and transformation. Many also believed that Jesus was married and that his bloodline still flowed in the veins of certain of their Provençal families. Some of the watermarks were mystical, referring to the way of personal holiness, purification, and service to others outlined in the Gospels. Yet even these were heretical teachings because they bypassed the liturgies and sacraments of the established Church of Rome. Other watermarks wee heretical because they indicated a belief in a married Jesus who was the royal heir of David.

Again, this whole "watermark" thing seems a bit thin, but as "symbols" you can see where it played into Dan Brown's project. You can also see why the Church came down so hard on this region, perhaps being more blood-thirsty against the Cathars than they were against the Mohammedans!

There are bits and pieces in here which are fascinating, such as a famed 12th-century Magdalen painting hanging in Ariel's Grotto in the Disney version of The Little Mermaid (echoing themes of the Mediterranean coast of France, where mermaids can symbolize Mary/Sarah coming from the water), and traces of what could still be an organized movement (in fact, some threads in here weave in with parts of The Sion Revelation in a rather unexpected way). Starbird also dusts off her theological credentials and has a go at some rather substantial "reinterpretation" of chunks of the New Testament's Jesus stories, such as suggesting that "Mary and Joseph's flight into Egypt" was not Jesus' parents, but his wife, Mary Magdalen, accompanied by Joseph of Arimathea, who would later bring Mary and the young Sarah to France.

Of course, the underlying assumption here, that Jesus was married has certainly lost its shock value as book after book, looking into the culture of 1st century Palestine, point to the fact that any male of Jesus' age, and certainly one with "royal blood", would have been married from his late teens, if for nothing else than religious requirement. It was the emasculating of the Jewish Jesus by the Pauline Church that made it such a focus for the author, and that the figure of the Magdalen had survived the abuses of the Pauline re-boot is seen here as proof of her central role in the Jesus cult.

Anyway ... if you're a "babe in the woods" Christian and would like to have your eyes opened to some stuff that you might find amazing, The Woman with the Alabaster Jar is almost a "must-read" for you. For those more familiar with the concepts here, it adds some material, but is not as strong a statement as one might like. This is available via the Amazon new/used guys for as little as a penny (plus $3.99 shipping, of course) for a "very good" copy, so if you feel like spending a few bucks on an interesting read, by all means do pick up one!

Fascinating ...

I have long had an interest in (and a taste for reading books on) the subject of a forgotten ancient civilization which pre-dates the "early" civilizations, and which might be the seed for these. This concept is, of course, extremely heretical in "official" circles, and the subject of both mocking and suppression. Yet the traces are there, from the megalithic ruins around the world to inexplicably detailed knowledge of things that "pre-historic" man had "no way of knowing".

In Civilization One: The World is Not as You Thought It Was Christopher Knight and Alan Butler go on an intellectual journey of discovery in this shady backwater. The first concept that they put forth is one of "framing", calling it the "Great Wall Of History", which is traced out by the invention of writing in around 3,200 BCE and the "dawn of civilization" in places like Egypt and Sumer. However, modern humans go back at least 100,000 years, leaving a very, very long gap. The homo sapiens living 10,000 or 50,000 years ago were not much different from us today, yet because they are "on the other side of the wall" we (as a culture) dismiss them as "primitives".

There is a much bandied-about quote (frequently mis-attributed to various real-life personages, but actually coming from the pen of Ian Fleming via the Bond arch-villain Auric Goldfinger) which goes: “Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.” ... which keeps coming to mind while reading this book. Time and time again, the authors find situations where not only did "primitive" man seem to have measuring standards that were not only remarkably accurate, but are found again and again in cultures across the planet.

Much of this work starts with Prof. Alexander Thom's discovery of the "megalithic yard", a measure that figures repeatedly in the ancient stoneworks of the British Isles. A cube that is 1/10th of this yard will hold a pint of liquid, or a pound of grain ... remarkably preserved through folk custom in the UK (no wonder the English-speaking world has fought so much against the metric system and the Euro!). In fact, a whole spectrum of weights and measures relate to this one basic "yard".

This also relates to the Sumerian system of weights and measures, units of which fit remarkably with measurements of the size and weight of the Earth, and even of the speed of light(!). Now, I've not delved into this to check the math, but from what's presented in the book, there is "enemy action" all over the place, as "coincidence" hardly covers the fine-grained correspondences between what the ancients used for measure, and things that we currently know only from modern science.

The British Isles, Sumer, Egypt, Minoan Crete, ancient Japan, the same figures keep appearing, all which relate to the size of the Earth, the dynamics of the solar system, etc. ... it is fantastic stuff, but presented here as an unfolding of the authors' own search for answers. Frankly, they express constant disbelief in what they're finding, but again and again the numbers play out the same story.

Unlike theorists such as John Anthony West, the authors of Civilization One do not necessarily posit a global antediluvian civilization, the stunned remnants of which crawled out of the ruins of a shattered world to re-boot culture along the banks of the Nile, the Tigris/Euphrates, and the Indus. Rather, in the closing chapters of this book, they drift towards the zone occupied by Zechariah Sitchin, taking the most ancient records at their word about super-humans that came from elsewhere ... teachers that brought knowledge to the scattered groups of humanity, and then left ... i.e. the "space alien" hypothesis. Given the deliberate pace and general caution exhibited through the course of the book, this must have been a very difficult conclusion to write!

Anyway, this is a fascinating read, and the level of "coincidence" of how the numbers work out on these widely-spread systems points to there being something well beyond that at the root of these traces. It's still in print if you want to check it out at your local brick-and-mortar book vendor, but the Amazon new/used vendors currently have it in "like new" condition for as little as $3.48 (plus shipping).

Wow ...

Every once in a while I will hit an absolute gem at the dollar store, and this is one of those times. I just finished this, and simply had to write about it before the glow wore off.

Now, I really wasn't familiar with Robert Fulghum, but I'd heard of some of his books (All I Really Need To Know I Learned In Kindergarten, etc.), still I launched into What On Earth Have I Done?: Stories, Observations, and Affirmations with some caution, as I have a low tolerance to both preachy and syrupy books, and this, from the outside, held the possibility of being either or both of those. Fortunately, it was not.

I must admit, there was part of me (that frustrated writer whose sole outlet over the past decade or so has been blog scribblings) which was VERY envious of Fulfhum's wandering lifestyle, spending part of the year in Seattle, part of it in Utah, and part of it in Crete (and parts elsewhere at conferences and such), and wondering how one gets to live that way on writing. Obviously, his "hook" is reaching out and touching his readers. Of course, he had a bit of a head start with me, being an older white guy, a UU minister, etc., hitting many trigger points for me to connect with him, but I really feel that his musings would effect other readers as strongly, although possibly for other reasons.

"Musings" is what I saw most of this book as. It appears that he writes (or at least wrote this) in sort of a journal, daily or weekly commentaries on things he thinks of, encounters, or recalls. Everything in it has a bit of a misty, dream-like characteristic, full of details but not hard and sharp in the telling. The book starts with the premise of "Mother Questions", "What on Earth have you done?", "What in the name of God are you doing?", "What will you think of next?", and "Who do you think you are?", which he turns around and asks of himself. I don't know if the rest of his books are as self-reflective as this, but it is a bit like finding a personal journal in a used book store and staring through it into the writer's soul.

From his telling, this Fulghum guy is a bit of a character, a trickster, a dreamer, a big kid, etc., and sounds like the type of guy I'd like to hang out with. He weaves in and out of social situations with a playful eye, being at least reasonably non-judgmental of those who don't care to play along. Perhaps most vividly, he paints a picture of the small town in Crete where he goes to write several months of the year, running off into several sidetracks about the history and personality of the place and people, probably to give a more vivid background for his stories of interactions there. Many of his tales are quite touching, especially the one about a highschool basketball coach, and his "secret weapon" ... which I won't spoil for you just in case you do pick this up!

What On Earth Have I Done? is a wonderful book, and I highly recommend it to all and sundry. What is very strange (to me) is how this ended up in the dollar store. It still seems to be in print (Amazon has it at one of their standard discounts), and my copy even has a price sticker on the back that is more than the cover price of the book ($26.50 for a $22.95 edition) ... it's only been out a year and a half, and yet the new/used guys have "new" copies for as little as 36¢ so you know that something funky must be going on with the publisher. Anyway, if you can find it, get a copy ... I'm not sure I'd pay retail (although I'd hate to take away from the author's travel funds) for this, but it's a real treasure for the used/discontinued rate!

Hmmm ...

As I've probably detailed in this space previously, I encountered "The Enneagram" via Gurdjieff's work, which is, I believe, the ultimate source of all the current threads. However, most of what I've seen outside of "Fourth Way" teachings is some sort of half-baked fortune telling system, which has stripped away all the "difficult" parts of Gurdjieff's Enneagram, and left something of questionable use and doubtful validity. An example ... a number of years back I was at a networking event with a speaker, who was talking about how his consulting firm "worked with the Enneagram", and did a presentation of the watered-down variety. After his presentation I asked him "what about the 'outside shocks'?", which are key elements in the Gurdjieff system ... it was clear that this fellow had never heard of the concept, and yet he and his organization were pitching themselves as experts!

So, it is with a certain trepidation that I approach any book on the subject of the Enneagram, as the "signal to noise" is getting more staticky every passing year. Unfortunately, Don Richard Riso's Understanding the Enneagram: The Practical Guide to Personality Types does not disabuse me of the disdain I hold most of the works in this genre. You might well ask why I picked up this book ... and I can only say that it's been sitting around in the "to be read" boxes for nearly 20 years, was a bookclub edition, and probably seemed like a thing I'd enjoy reading back in the days when I could afford to buy books without a lot of discrimination!

In Riso's defense, his approach is not "newspaper horoscope", but neither does it take into account the systemic elements of Enneagram work. He all but admits the failings of this book, begging off on the history of the Enneagram, and on the "abstract theoretical aspects". Rather, he presents this as an expansion, and "practical guide" to the material he published in a previous book, Personality Types.

In this he deals with nine "personality types": 1 - The Reformer, 2 - The Helper, 3 - The Motivator, 4 - The Artist, 5 - The Thinker, 6 - The Loyalist, 7 - The Generalist, 8 - The Leader, and 9 - The Peacemaker. Each of these nine types are subject to "nine levels of development": 1 - Liberation, 2 - Psychological Capacity, 3 - Social Value, 4 - Imbalance, 5 - Interpersonal Control, 6 - Overcompensation, 7 - Violation, 8 - Delusion and Compulsion, and 9 - Pathological Destructiveness. This gives him 81 type/levels to play with in his descriptions. He also talks about "wings", sub-types on either side of one's "type", which (depending on dominance) provide a whole additional layer of combinations to write about. In addition to this there are "misidentifications" where somebody thinks they're one type when they're actually another, and how one type at one level can look like quite another type at some other level. Again, a lot of "stuff" but not necessarily very much "content".

While it ultimately might be on the level of your typical internet meme, the most interesting part of the book was the self-assessment questionnaire which is comprised of 20 "statements" for each of the 9 types, you go through and mark down which of these 180 items you "agree" or "strongly agree" with. Your main "type" should have fifteen or more of these. Interestingly, my results cooperated, with 17 for Type 5, 11 for Type 6, and 9 for Type 4, showing a primary type with its two "wings", while the others ranged from 1-6 (with a mean of 3). This suggests that Riso is perhaps onto something, although having my results pointing to "The Thinker" might be clouding my perceptions.

Again, I believe that Riso is trying to present something of value, but has "lost the key" in following the non-Gurdjieffian versions of the Enneagram work. I kept being frustrated by his "brushing off" the questions of theory, as I would have been more interested in reading about that than the various factors ("Childhood Origins", "Basic Fear", "Basic Desire", "Secondary Motivations", "Healthy Sense of Self", "Hidden Complaint", "Key Defense Mechanisms", "Characteristic Temptation", "Characteristic Vice", "Characteristic Virtue", and "Saving Grace") that he spins out for the various types here.

While I really can't endorse this book, it's also not the worst of its kind, and has its moments. I'd just have preferred reading the book that Riso says he can't write! If this sounds like something you'd be interested in, however, you're in luck as it can be had for cheap ... the Amazon new/used guys have "very good" copies for 1¢ and up, and "new" copies for as little as 58¢ (plus shipping, of course).

A Classic?

I'm surprised that I hadn't read this one “back in the day” as this was the sort of book that would have easily fit into my late '70s and early '80s reading. I'd certainly been familiar with the name, but had never gotten around to picking up a copy until I encountered one at last summer's Newberry Library Book Fair.

The first thing that stands out about The Aquarian Gospel of Jesus the Christ is its attribution simply “by Levi”, which (with a little bit of Googling) turns out to be one Levi H. Dowling (1844-1911). When encountering “oddly named” authors one has to wonder what the story of the name is (some are simply fruitcakes, of course). In this case, I believe the author was at least trying to flag the book as having been “channeled”. I had gotten about 20% into the book (which is set up like a Bible, with two columns a page of small sections, collected into larger sections, all numbered, etc.) and had one of those “what the heck is with this?” moments and went off to the Internet to fish up info.

It turns out that Mr. Dowling was a sort of fringe preacher who was enamored of (and I guess at least somewhat connected with) the Theosophists. I found this amusing, as my first thought was how much this sounded like Blavatsky's stuff from a similar period. However, rather than showing up in stacks of crayon-scrawled papers in the morning, Dowling directly set himself a program of “visualizations” which he claimed enabled him to “travel in time” and see the events of the past, in this case the life of Jesus.

The Aquarian Gospel is probably best known for “filling in the missing years” of Jesus' history, that big gap that the Bible doesn't bother much with between “miraculous birth” and “ministry & death”. According to Dowling, this information has now been “transcribed from the Akashic Records” … good for us, eh?

The book is more-or-less in two parts … the early years of John, Jesus' family, and “Jesus' travels”, and then the standard New Testament stuff, retold. Frankly, the second half of the book is a real drag, as everybody knows the story, and Levi isn't adding much, just “spinning” things differently (notably, going out of his way to make Pontius Pilate look like a great guy) from the “usual version”. The early part of the book is “the good stuff”, with various teachers of John, Mary, other relatives, Jesus, etc., including transmuting “Abrahamic” religion into the “religion of Brahm”, and relating that to various Persian and Indian (ala Brahma) cults and thence into Buddhism.

Eventually, Jesus “hits the road” and first spends a lot of time bouncing around India and interacting with the Hindu teachers ... inevitably, he gets on the wrong side of the priesthood and has to flee to Nepal, working with Buddhists, then to Tibet, and then back to India. From there he goes to Persia, Assyria, Chaldea, and Babylon before headed home just long enough for his mother to put on a big dinner for him and (I'm extrapolating here) do his laundry. The next stop is Greece, where he briefly hangs out with a guy called Apollo, and heaps tons on praise on the Greeks who weep when he leaves.

After Greece it's time for some schoolin' and the Aquarian Jesus is off to Egypt to study with the big boys … the “Sacred Brotherhood” at the temple of Heliopolis. Here he passes through seven specific challenges, the last of which gives him the title of “The Christ”. Passing this degree appears to have “changed the age” and the next thing is a meeting of “the seven sages of the world”, conveniently all folks that Jesus was hanging out with in his various travels (who'da thunk?), in Alexandria.

Following this, the “standard” tale picks up again, albeit strongly flavored with Theosophical doctrine. The focus moves to John, then Jesus' early ministry, assembling his posse, and endearing himself to the mob while pissing off all sacred and temporal authority. You know the rest. The spin gets heavy after he's crucified, with a lot of “sacred brotherhood” stuff worthy of red and blue crayon, then dips back into the traditional story for Pentecost, and the book ends.

Frankly, as I struggled through the last half of the book, I wondered why this book didn't end up creating a cult of its own … after all, this is “more canonical” than the Book of Mormon, and certainly no less wacky than Dianetics ... how come those went big-time and this stayed (while still in print a hundred years since its publication) on the sidelines? Must be not having a “huckster” to be pushing it … Dowling died within 3 years of penning this, while Joseph Smith and L.Ron Hubbard were able to market the heck out of their books!

Anyway, as noted, this is still in print more than a century down the road, but, because of its vintage, it's also available free on the web … so if you want to check it out, it's only a few clicks away. Used copies (I got mine for $1.50 on “half-price Sunday” at Newberry), are available for as little as a buck forty-five in “good” condition via the Amazon new/used guys, so if you want a dead-tree version you might consider that, were this little bit of channeling something that you felt you couldn't go without.

Another ...

OK, so I was sort of mocking the “for dummies” books the last time I reviewed one, but here I am again, with another awaiting review! Frankly, I pretty much ordered Jerri Ledford's Google AdSense for Dummies by mistake … I have some projects where I'll be using Google's Ad Manager but the specific terminology was not set in my head when I went looking for something to get me up to speed with that, and saw books on Google's AdWords and this one on AdSense and figured this was the one I was looking for, only realizing after it arrived that it wasn't the “manual” that I was hoping to be reading. However, AdSense is a product that I'm likely to use at some point or another, so I figured “what the heck”, and launched into it. This wasn't quite a quick a read as the Ning book (which I plowed through on one afternoon/evening), but that's because it wasn't something that was really holding my interest in the way that something that I was actually working with would have.

I don't generally read other reviews of a book before I write about it, but in this case I took a peek at the Amazon scribes and found very mixed reviews of it, some folks savaging it for perceived inaccuracies, some raving that it was a very useful introduction to the Google program. Having no functional experience with AdSense, I really couldn't speak to the accuracy of the book, but I found it informative, if a bit irritating in parts (the author appears to be some sort of religious fanatic and almost all her “examples” eventually got around to preachy sites).

Of course, the sine qua non of the “For Dummies” books is their ability to take the reader from total cluelessness to the ability to at least reasonably function in a program. Judged by this standard (and with the caveat that I haven't tried anything outlined in the book), I suspect that this fulfills its purpose, as I believe I have a pretty good sense of what's involved in running an AdSense campaign.

The most interesting parts of the book for me were on the “general website coaching” side of things … recommendations of how to keep stuff fresh, how to incorporate profitable “key words” into your pages, and how to stay on the good side of Google (despite the many temptations out there that would lead you to the exile of the banned).

While I have had many web sites and blogs over the years (obviously, my main blogging platform is LiveJournal which does not offer ad options, so it's never been something I've thought at looking into except at the far end of having to make a massive content move to another service!), this at least gave me a context of what one might be able to produce off of one's sites. Honestly, none of my personal sites have ever had the sort of traffic that would make the effort involved (and resulting page clutter) worth the pennies that it might generate via a program like this, but this at least gives me some context from which to discuss the option with others whose sites I may be working on.

As is frequently the case, I got this via the new/used vendors on Amazon, with this running me a relatively high $8.42 (plus shipping) for a “new” copy, still a good discount from the $24.99 cover price and Amazon's own 34% discount. Given that the author has "tainted" the book with her religion (where it hardly belongs!), I'd wholeheartedly recommend getting this though the “used” channels (heck, the same vendor I got this from now has a "new" copy for just $3.79!) to deny her the revenue … something that I usually feel genuinely bad about when pointing out the after-market option. I do feel, however, that this is a useful introduction if you're looking to make some change on your web sites.

A great book ...

I picked this up at the Newberry Library book sale last summer, and read it in October. It, unfortunately, got "backed up" when I hit a mental block on doing reviews and had languished in my to-be-reviewed pile for six months. This is particularly regrettable, as I was quite enthusiastic about the book when I finished it, and, obviously, a lot of that connection has faded with time.

Now, I am a rather fervent "antitheist" in that I feel that religion is A Bad Thing, despite having been a religion major, studied various traditions in depth, and have taken numerous initiations into several traditions. Christopher Hitchens rather summed up my take on Established Religion in his quote: "Since it is obviously inconceivable that all religions can be right, the most reasonable conclusion is that they are all wrong." ... and the more insistent that a particular Religion is that they "are the one true path" the more likely I am to consider them dangerously deluded.

However, my strong agnosticism has an open window for "experiential" spiritual paths, ones where the individual "works on themselves" and are verifiable within one's own being (like the Buddha said: "Believe nothing ... unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense."). This is, no doubt, why I found Swami Prabhavananda's Religion In Practice so appealing, as it is not a doctrinal book, but a something of a guide for looking inside oneself (from a Vedanta perspective) and reaching out to the underlying spiritual realities.

This book, originally published in 1968, is a collection of talks that Prabhavananda gave at Vedanta Society locations in Southern California. There is a certain "going over the same points" in here due to this, as these talks were free-standing and not part of a course or curriculum. It has been assembled into five parts, "The Problem", "The Goal", "The Methods", "The Exemplars", and "Vital Questions on Religion Answered", each with various numbers of talks included. The most impressive part of this is "The Methods", which includes subject such as "Control of the Subconscious Mind", from which is this excerpt:

... owning to our different states of consciousness, we find that it is quite impossible to reach freedom, to reach God. In our waking state of consciousness, with our physical senses, with our human minds which can only become conscious of objects and things, we cannot reach that pure consciousness, however we may try. Then we go to sleep, we dream. There again, in the sleep of dreams, we cannot realize that pure consciousness. Then we go into deep sleep, we become unconscious; but, there is still a veil of darkness covering our consciousness. We do not realize pure consciousness. So long as we live and move within these three states of consciousness, it is not possible to reach the realization of pure consciousness. We cannot see God, cannot realize God, within the provinces of these three states of consciousness that are known to us.

He then goes on to discuss a "fourth state" of consciousness called Turiya, which is one of those concepts that I had managed to not encounter previous to reading this book.

I recall that when I finished reading Religion In Practice, I was wanting to go buy copies for my friends and family (I was that enthusiastic about it), but found, at first glance, that it was out of print. Certainly this version (the 1969 second printing hardcover) was out of print, and this is the only thing that Amazon has listed. However, with some additional digging, I discovered that this is being offered by Vedanta Press on their web site in hardcover, new (I'm assuming), for the remarkably reasonable price of $8.95 ... which could explain why it's not out in Amazon or B&N (which take a very steep percentage, making it hard to sell low cover-priced books at anything other than a loss). While there are some copies floating around the used market, Vedanta Press may be your best bet on getting a hold of this. Needless to say, I'd recommend it to all and sundry!

Duty ...

This book review is brought to you by the heavy hand of OCD ... I just couldn't allow myself to "take a pass" on doing a review because I had decided some years ago to write a review for every book I read. (Now I just need to work on the concept of timely reviewing, still having a dozen waiting-to-be-reviewed books going back as far as last November ... yeah, my impressions on those will be real fresh, not!)

One of things I've observed about myself that I have a hard time synching with my self-image is that I really don't care for Philosophy. I love reading a wide range of non-fiction, and as anybody who's meandered through my LibraryThing catalog can tell, I have a fairly eclectic taste in what I'll pick up, but every time I find myself in a "philosophy" book, I can't wait to get done with it, and then can't find much to say about it once I'm finished.

Anyway, as I've noted in this space previously, I've been trying to "plug some holes" in my basic education, finding that in a lot of cases I know about something but have not read the actual texts involved (hence the amount of Nietzsche I've plowed through in the past year or so). Sure, I could blither on about Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, and hit most of the high points, but I probably only got through text-book excerpts back in highschool and college and now find myself vaguely shamed to have not read the books. This nagging self-doubt had me launching into Plato's The Republic some months back.

Sure, I realize and appreciate that this is a formative book for Western Civilization, and that the main players have largely defined the core elements of what I would consider a rational world-view, but man ... after reading this I totally understood why the Athenians wanted Socrates whacked!

Frankly, my expectations were probably tainted by my "text book excerpt" exposure, where the "significant bits" get highlighted, contextified, and discussed. This book, however, went on and on and on and on, and Socrates sure did seem to like to hear himself talk. My take-away from the "dynamics" of the book were that he was like a modern Rap star with his entourage, and would be playing to this particular audience of admirers who'd be responding primarily with the Ancient Greek version of "tru dat!" and "yo! you da man, Socrates", etc. Needless to say, I'm glad I never had to write a paper on this as "A Blowhard and his Assembled Sycophants" (the latter term coming from Ancient Greek!), as that would have been something that would have likely had a negative impact on my admittedly, uh, "gentlemanly" GPA.

Once again, I had a bunch of small bookmarks in here that I have no idea now what I wanted to convey via (most were in the "politics" sections, so I might have been intending to comment on the unfortunate election of the US's first ~~Communist~~ overtly Socialist government) ... so at least you're spared that rant.

Needless to say, there are significant parts to this book ... and it's one of those things that Should Be Read ... but the format is strange (imagine that in a book that's nearly two and a half millennia old, in a translation that was done over a century ago), and the ideas get chopped up into discussion fragments, and, well, it's philosophy.

So, if you don't want to go through life with this particular hole in your education, do by all means pick up a copy of The Republic and make yourself read it. Heck, you might like it. One of the "happy things" about this "Dover Thrift Edition" is that it's a 320-page book with a cover price of just $3.00. It's in print, but good luck on getting your local brick-and-mortar to order it in for you (you figure the profit margin on this) ... so, your best bet is to keep it in mind for the next time your Amazon or B&N order is twenty-two bucks and you need something "small" to make it into the free-shipping promised land.

A different angle on Gurdjieff ...

I've read a lot of Gurdjieff/Ouspensky/Bennett/etc. books over the years, and I'm frankly amazed at how many "angles" there are from which one can come at the Work. Admittedly, as the years roll on, there's less authenticity in the material (as it seems that none of their students ever got to the point of having something systematic, beyond the core books themselves, to pass on to the next generation), but it is interesting to see where it goes (like the "corporate enneagram" crap that totally has lost the concept of "outside shocks" essential to the model's functioning!).

This book, Views from the Real World: Early Talks Moscow, Essentuki, Tiflis, Berlin, London, Paris, New York, and Chicago as Recollected by His Pupils, attributed to Gurdjieff (but, obviously at one remove) is fascinating as it's the first step away from the his direct teachings (in that these were produced by memory by their transcribers, as Gurdjieff would not allow note-taking), but are also one of the clearest views into his teachings.

I really need to get over my hesitancy to mark up my books ... I had a half a dozen slips of paper stuck in this marking places that, as I was reading, seemed to hold particularly apt bits to quote in a review, however, out of context of the book, these are frequently hard to discover ... perhaps I need to move to sticky notes where I could "bracket" the section in question on the note! In this case, these appear to have been particularly lucid expositions of such things as Gurdjieff's concept of "octaves", of bodily postures (the area that his famous "stop" exercise was intended to highlight), the above-mentioned "shocks", the production of intentional non-subjective art, the various "centers" and "foods" of the being (and how the phrase "I wish to remember myself" triggers various of these in sequence), and subjects such as morality, suffering and consciousness, etc. I guess if you're interested, you'll have to get the book!

This is structured oddly, with sections based on the opening phrases of a talk, or just on their subject, with some being long (the whole of Section I is "Glimpses of Truth" which was in circulation early enough to have been mentioned in Ouspensky's In Search of the Miraculous) and some being just a few paragraphs. In all cases (as I recall) they are anonymous, leading me to wonder who collected them for publication, as these are from far-flung sources (as noted in the lengthy sub-title) and over a fairly wide span of years. After all, if Gurdjieff did not want his students taking notes, these would very likely have been "kept in secret" until after his death, or shared in very limited groups which were more interested in the literal exposition of the teachings than the Teacher's wishes about the teachings. It is also odd that, as far as I've been able to research it, this was published in 1973, while the materials in it range from 1917 to 1930, with Gurdjieff dying in 1949. Was this collected before his death, soon after his death, or much later?

Anyway, the material here is of specific interest as it's first-hand reports of Gurdjieff's teachings, even if those reports had to depend on the student's memory. Each is a moment in time with Gurdjieff, and most provide fascinating glimpses at nuances not necessarily present in the "canon" of what he wrote.

Views from the Real World is still in print, so would be available at your local brick-and-mortar book vendor, although Amazon has it at just over ten bucks, which is a pretty good deal (the new/used copies start at $2.50, so with shipping that's almost there anyway). Some have suggested that this is a "good introduction" to Gurdjieff, but I disagree, as this is something that opens up parts of the teachings to students of Gurdjieff's written material, and it would be better to start with that (perhaps Meetings with Remarkable Men) and then pick this up after absorbing some of the materials that he intended to convey to a general audience. However, if you're interested, this should not hold you back from getting a copy of the book.

So, dat's your story, comrade?

Ah, the mysterious joys of digging into my "to be read" cases of books ... this one could very well have been sitting around for over a quarter century, as it's a "book club edition" (that was likely a throw-in with another order) with a publication date of 1983!

The Russian Version of the Second World War: The History of the War As Taught to Soviet Schoolchildren, edited by Graham Lyons, is a window into (as one would gather from the subtitle) how the Soviets defined the war to their youth. The material in this book is taken from two standard Soviet text books, aimed at highschool-aged students, one which focuses on the military history, and one that focuses on the political history. These materials were developed in 1956, following the death and official denouncement of Joseph Stalin. Prior to that, what few Soviet military histories there were, were "all about Stalin" and he only gets mentioned in passing a few times in these texts.

This was very much like reading an "alternative reality" book ... where the general outlines of events were familiar, but all the detail and framing had changed. There were multiple points that just seemed strange. The one that most stood out to me was the constant inclusion of political operatives in various military operations ... as though nothing could happen unless a Communist Party functionary was on hand and making sure that everybody was in a "revolutionary fervor" ... sort of like a union foreman on a job site or something! It was also odd seeing the term "Hitlerites" when referring to the Germans ... of course, when these texts were written, half of Germany was a Soviet puppet state, so I guess they didn't want to smear the German people with the Nazi acts, but also didn't want to use "Nazi" as that would besmirch Socialism!

The other notable aspect is the flip-flop of how we tend to view things ... the Allies are seen as collaborators with the Nazis in the case of Finland, the Soviet annexation of much of Poland is framed as just "neighbors moving through to fight the Germans". The book constantly harps on how "easy" the Allies had it, how the Germans hardly fought at all on the Western front, and how there was a Big Huge Conspiracy to have the Nazis and the Communists pretty much destroy each other (OK, so that's not so far-fetched). The Japanese (and Pacific theater) are scarcely mentioned unless in context of their being a threat on the far eastern edges of the Soviet empire, and the Allied campaigns around the Mediterranean are pretty much just dismissed. Now, admittedly, the Soviets did fend off the Germans, and broke the power of the "Nazi war machine", but the book plays it out like they did it unassisted, or even with one hand tied behind their back.

And, as one would expect, none of the Soviet atrocities are even alluded to ... while the "Hitlerites" were painted with that brush at every opportunity. Frankly, reading this was a little bit like watching The Sopranos ... it's a look inside a system where brutality, suppression, and the like are just part of the furnishings, and only get brought up when one of your guys gets whacked; a look into a world where totalitarian communist dictatorships are needed to be installed in every corner of the planet, and anything that goes against that is somehow criminal. Hmmm ... sounds like a faculty lounge at most universities!

Anyway, The Russian Version of the Second World War is, understandably (after so many years) out of print, but "very good" copies can be had from the Amazon new/used vendors for under three bucks (plus shipping), and there are even some "like new" copies kicking around out there for a bit more. Again, this is sort of a trip down the rabbit-hole, so will appeal to a wider range of readers than one might think, if any of the above sounds like it's for you, it'll be a fascinating read!

This usually doesn't happen ...

I think this is the last of the books that I got at that $5/bag sale at AfterWords books a year or so back (although I haven't reviewed them all, I'm pretty sure I've read them all at this point). This was the "prize" of that, a big beautiful book, in very good condition, and I was very pleased with myself scoring it for as little as it worked out I paid for it.

You can imagine my embarrassment, when I logged Charles A Goodrum's Treasures of the Library of Congress into my LibraryThing catalog, that I found that I already had a copy in my library! Now, I have a lot of big "coffee table" books that I bought "back in the day" when I was a Public Relations exec pulling down six figures, and this must have been one of the books I added back then, but I had NO recall of it as I read through this ... suggesting to me that I probably had it sitting around more for "looks" than anything else at the time.

As it turns out, I was missing something, because this was quite the interesting read ... both from the standpoint of the history, mission, and changing priorities of the Library of Congress, and the details of the specific collections. The book must have been a daunting challenge to develop, as the LOC holdings are so vast ... some of the choices seem odd (for instance, tracing the development of the musical Oklahoma!) but are put in there to show how the various elements that are in the Library can work together for research, etc.

Generally speaking, however, the book is set up on "themes", many of them not books, it covers maps, and art, and photography, it looks at science, and "Orientalia", and historical documents, and musical instruments, and archival materials relating to Presidents, etc. At every turn there are superlatives, the most this, the most that, the most complete other thing, and the remarkable ways that many of these items found their way into the LOC.

Needless to say, as a former publisher, I was aware of one of the main ways the collection was built, as "back in the day" (I believe the requirement has been lifted, but I'm not sure) one had to submit two copies of everything one was getting copyright filed on to have the application processed. So, everything that was going to have an official US copyright registration ended up at least passing through their hands (a lot of ephemera, like, I suspect, my "chapbook" poetry collections got discarded).

This came out in 1980, and given the subject, does have a slightly dated feel, as computers were only just developing past room-sized leviathans at that point, and the cataloging of the collection was still very much a cards-in-a-drawer system when this was being written!

Treasures of the Library of Congress does appear to be out of print, but I was shocked to find that it is available for very little (especially given the substantial weight and size of the book), with the Amazon new/used vendors having "very good" copies under a buck and "new" copies for as little as $3.25 (plus shipping, of course)! Given what it would cost to mail this, even at book rate, I'd think those guys (who have to agree to a flat-rate shipping fee) are selling it at a loss.

Anyway, this is a remarkable look at a remarkable institution, filled with amazing photos of amazing stuff, and held together by some very well-crafted prose. Especially given the prices that this can be had for, I'd highly recommend it as a great addition to anybody's library.

Another of these ...

OK, maybe it's the color scheme, but every time I pick up a "for Dummies" book I get that nasty guilt thing that all English Majors get when coming in contact with a Cliffs Notes volume! I generally reserve these for situations where I've learned something sometime in the past, and have forgotten most of it (be the subject wine or Visual Basic) via disuse, yet know that I knew it and just need to have those synapses cleaned up and firing again.

Manny Hernandez's Ning for Dummies is rather a different situation in that it's pretty much the only reference for the Ning social-networking platform (on which I'm developing various sites for friends/clients), and I needed this as a short-cut to get around some of the steeper learning curves involved!

Of course, there are challenges to reviewing a "how-to" book that take me out of my standard non-fiction "comfort zone", and especially in that I told the author (via Twitter communications) that I would be reviewing his book ... so I'm likely to be trying to stay more on-topic here than one might expect if this was not the case.

Now, as noted, I have been involved in working with Ning sites for the past 6-9 months, being part of a team that produced a half a dozen projects based on the platform, so I probably have much more familiarity with it than most people coming to the book. However, I was not the "tech lead" on any but the ones that I'm personally working on, so the "crunchier" bits were always lurking just behind the curtain. That said, my initial impression of Ning for Dummies was that it was pretty much three books, one for total beginners, one for mid-level users, and one for folks (like me) who wanted or needed to "get under the hood". I didn't start sticking in slips of paper (for bookmarks) until Chapter 12, towards the end of part 3 (out of 6) so a bit over half the book was "stuff I knew" (albeit there were things laid out in a clearer manner than I'd ever encountered them), and a bit less than half of the book dealing with stuff that I'd either not figured out yet, or hadn't had to deal with (such as the parts of "marketing" the site within the Ning universe).

One substantial problem the book has can hardly be laid at the feet of the author, however, as this comes from the rapid pace of development that Ning has been going through. I follow several Ning feeds on Twitter, and there are new developments coming out weekly, so as new as this is, it's going to be very quickly outdated!

There are currently over a million Ning-based sites out there, ranging from the huge (half a million members on rapper 50¢'s site) to the tiny ... and with this book, I'm pretty sure that anybody with basic web-sense (and a smattering of HTML) could add another one in a couple of hours if they were so inclined. The first third of the book is very basic, and walks the reader step-by-step through what they need to do to start up a Ning-platform site.

The second third of the book pretty much bridges between the intro and expert levels, with a lot of very useful "now you do this" instructions that clarify a lot of things which are not particularly intuitive. Then, of course, there are the "under the hood" parts, as well as bits about getting people to join up (I was referring to a section in here just this afternoon to get over a problem that had come up on one site).

Since this is brand new, you're not likely to get any price break on it (aside from Amazon's 34% discount), but if you're wanting to do a Ning site, and don't have patience to try to dig through the less-than-stellar instructions that Ning has to offer, Ning for Dummies will help!

Back to reviewing?

Yes, I have been slipping further behind in my book reviewing, I know, with 16 books in the stack to be reviewed. As those of you who have been reading my sparse postings in my blog know, my company is falling apart, although I'm still putting significant hours in working from home, I'm having to start looking for a job (in this lovely economy), and The Wife just got laid off. I'm doing 18 hour days, and not making up any ground ... sooooo, the book reviews keep not getting written. I'm in a state tonight where I just couldn't do another networking letter, nor start on a work project, so I'm hoping I can knock down a few titles before I pass out at the keyboard.

Anyway, this is a brand new book, having turned up just a couple of weeks back at the dollar store ... F5: Devastation, Survival, and the Most Violent Tornado Outbreak of the 20th Century by Mark Levine is, as one might guess from the sub-title, a recounting of a devastating weather disaster that happened in northern Alabama in April, 1974. The book is a bit confusing, however, as it was written in 2007, about a storm that happened 33 years earlier, so one might think that the author had some connection to the events. However, the author was born in New York City, grew up in Canada, would have been about 9 years old at the time of the storm, and is primarily known for his poetry. What brought him to this subject? The only clue I can find is that this is "a Miramax book", and might have been penned as a companion book to a movie project.

The fact that Levine is not a "regular" nonfiction writer comes through in the back-and-forth telling of the tale, generally alternating chapters of reporting on what was happening in the US during April 1974, a bit of history on meteorological research (focusing on Dr. Tetsuya Fujita, whose last name graces the tornado intensity scale he developed, hence the "F5" of the title), and "personal stories" of various people caught up in the disaster that hit Limestone County, AL. Unfortunately, this does not "meld" very well, and is more like having had 3 separate books pulled apart and then collated (well, except for the Fujita parts, as he is pretty much "background" info until the very end) chronologically.

The most fascinating part of this, to me at least, was the description of how the weather ended up building up such a ferocious storm front (there were 148 twisters hitting in 24 hours over a dozen states in a broad band ranging from Chicago to Atlanta), which would have been the core of a very interesting book on meteorology, perhaps coupled with the historical background on the science (but at that point it would be a book about Dr. Fujita). However the "soul" of the book deals with the reconstructed stories of a few dozen people, in various family and professional groupings, and how the storm impacted their lives. The problem is, as these stories were told in isolated vignettes, it became hard as the book went on to really tell apart the people, and sort out their back stories. A lot of them died, many were mutilated, some are still alive today, but by the end of the book they all just sort of blend into "people affected by the storm".

Again, my guess is that this book was part of a movie project, and that (given that there is no mention of a movie in it) Miramax opted to just put out the book at some point. As a free-standing work, however, it's highly uneven and difficult to really "get into". This is not to say that it's not interesting in its various parts, just that the level of engagement is pretty low.

As noted above, I got this at the dollar store (with a sticker that indicated that it had been through Target's inventory at some point), so it's likely available in the aftermarket. Oddly (as if sometimes the case with what I find at the dollar store), Amazon seems to have it at their standard discount from cover, and even the new/used guys are asking nearly $3 for a "new" copy (plus shipping, of course). It's not a bad book, and if you're interested in violent weather, a bit of science history, or following folks around in the midst of a disaster, this could be something you'd want to pick up.

Somthing interesting ...

Sometimes a used book tells a story, above and beyond the book itself. There's a group over on LibraryThing.com called "Found in a Book" and I posted a thing over there about a post card that was in this book. It's amazing how that sort of thing can "personalize" a book that moved through somebody else's life before getting into your hands. I picked up this at the Newberry Library Book Fair last summer, which is a pretty good indication that the original owner had died, nearly 35 years after getting the holiday greetings that seem to have been serving as a bookmark.

Anasazi: Ancient People of the Rock came out in January of 1974, and had the rather steep cover price of $18.50 (that's about $85.00 in today's dollars!), fairly high for a book under 200 pages. It is, however, quite a striking photo tour of the Anasazi and related groups' ruins in the southwest. Photographed by David Muench, and with quite informative text by Donald G. Pike (who was not above adding humorous twists such as "The Basket Makers responded with fur blankets and mantles. The raw material was supplied, albeit reluctantly, by the ubiquitous rabbit ...").

Structurally, the book goes back and forth between a substantial essay on the culture and area (briefly illustrated with photos of pottery, petroglyphs, various woven bits, etc.), and a portfolio of pictures of the ruins. Sites covered include Mesa Verde, Kayenta, Sinagua, Salado, Chaco Canyon, among others, including at the end a brief bit on the still-occupied mesa of Acoma, which the authors place in a linear descent from the Anasazi.

When I picked this up, I was sort of expecting it to be just a "picture book", but it did take me several days of sitting down with it to actually get through the text portions, which are nicely balanced on breadth and focus, each essay being on a particular topic, but all hanging together as a coherent narrative.

The pictures are, of course, glorious, to the right is a cropped version of one of the shots from Mesa Verde (of "Spruce Tree House") that I found out on the web.

I've been fortunate to have been able to have visited many of the sites covered here, and it's made me want to dig our my photos to see how I saw the ruins when we were out there. It was amusing to me that I was recalling one site (the restored Grand Kiva at Aztec Monument) from Pike's descriptions, and suddenly be looking at a picture of it (my elder daughter was about 3 when we went there, and was riding on my shoulders most of the time, so I have fond memories from there).

Anyway, Anasazi: Ancient People of the Rock is a goodie, and if you can find a copy of it (and have an interest in the Anasazi), you should definitely consider picking it up. The hardcover I have looks to start around $20, but copies of the paperback can be found for a couple of bucks. Well worth looking for!

Not his best ...

Over the years, I've read quite a number of Paul Davies' books, which are usually entertaining while still being informative on their subject. This one, Are We Alone?: Philosophical Implications Of The Life Of Discovery Of Extraterrestrial Life, just seemed to "miss me".

Perhaps it was the format ... this is a collection of six essays (plus some additional material) presented as lectures at the University of Milan over two days back in 2003, each running somewhere around 20 pages. I assume that, being a college professor, Davies would not be daunted at presenting six lectures over two days (as opposed to most business speakers), but the format does not lend itself to particular depth on any topic. Also, as per the sub-title, everything he's approaching here has an over-laid "philosophical" spin, so not only does he have to present a "getting up to speed" scan of a topic, put it out within the context of "Are We Alone?", but then step into philosophizing over the various implications.

The topics here are: "A Brief History of SETI", "Extraterrestrial Microbes", "Alien Message", "The Nature of Consciousness", and "Alien Contact and Religious Experience", along with appendixes on "Project Phoenix" and "The Argument for Duplicate Beings" (which obsessive readers of this space may recall was a notable point in a book reviewed a few months back).

Frankly, I was made somewhat uncomfortable several times in this book where Davies seems to be making a point to push into "philosophies" amenable to his Papist hosts by taking somewhat uncalled-for shots at the likes of Richard Dawkins and Stephen Jay Gould (ala "The Neo-Darwinian Contingency Argument"). Fortunately, it eventually becomes clear that he is not so much arguing against antitheistic stances as he is arguing for the "crystal-like" tendency towards complexity, and, ultimately, consciousness.

Of course, one of the core arguments for the "we're alone" forces is that if there were other beings out there, and there were some that were more advanced than us, then how come we haven't (despite on-going efforts) found any? One model he charts out is that of "planet hopping" colonization, where creatures (or their more-or-less sentient machines) would spread out across all the occupiable planets in the Galaxy within a span as short (!) as a million years. In a Galaxy that's 15 billion years old, that's a blink of an eye, and should have happened repeatedly.

Anyway, while there are interesting bits like this in here, the book as a whole is a something of a meander ... trying to stay within a thematic concept, and an over-lying "spin", it skips in and out of various concepts, without really providing a substantial look at any. Not surprisingly, this hasn't managed to stay in print (unlike many of Davies' other titles), but is available in the used market. The Amazon guys have "acceptable" copies for as little as a penny, with "like new" copies starting around two bucks. This isn't a bad book, just nowhere near the author's better efforts.

Advertisement