Books I've read
recently
For those of you wondering how I spend my time, it is
usually in learning something new. That involves plenty of
reading. Here I'll talk about the books I've read most
recently and maybe you'll see something that interests you.
American
Jesus (How the Son
of God Became a National Icon) by Stephen Prothero. A
cultural history of Jesus in America from the founding of
the nation to the present day. He makes some pretty
insightful points that really added to my understanding of
both Jesus and American culture. He points out that this
nation is overwhelmingly a Jesus nation, so much so that
even Jews and atheists have to come to grips with this
national obsession. A good read if you're at all interested
in religion and culture's impact on it.
Mind
OS by "Dr. Paul".
I really hate the name of this book (currently only
available via download here) but there is plenty of great info in
here. Historically, I have not thought much of so called
self-help books, but I have found several that have
actually delivered the goods, and this is one of them.
Essentially, the author tries to give you a roadmap to
your psyche and how it operates. His concept of a
boundary that separates what you control from everything
else has become an important one in my life. Many of the
things that supposedly control us are really things that
are external to us. By seeing that it is out of our
boundary, we can let go of it and reclaim our own
reactions to things. I've found this really helpful in
dealing with customers and food. The other thing that
really resonates with me is his idea that what causes us
stress, worry, and anger is almost always based on
passivity. The most important thing is to do something,
keep moving. Feel the fear and do it anyway. These two
concepts have helped me tremendously, keeping me sane
during Christmas season for the first time in retail and
helping me shed 20 pounds (so far). Highly recommended!
The World is
Flat by Thomas
Friedman. Worried about outsourcing? Worried about
globalization? Worried about Americans loosing jobs? The
author's basic advice (and I'm paraphrasing here) is to get
over it or get get left behind. Yes, he does a good job of
explaining how globalization has happened (notice the past
tense) and its benefits. I think the best parts of the book
are dedicated to alerting the readers to the danger of
coasting and complacence. He points out that 3 billion
people have effectively joined the worldwide labor force
and would like nothing more than your job. They are hungry
for success and will work their asses off to achieve it. If
the good old USA is going to stay at the leading edge of
economic prosperity, we better get cracking because
everyone else is catching up really really fast. A very
good read, even if you are "against" globalization, it will
open your eyes to the realities of this new world.
Your Erronous
Zones by Wayne
Dyer. I bought a vintage paperback version of this.
Apparently it spent some unbelievable amount of time on the
best sellers list during the late 70's, and it shows. Pure
70's cheese picture of the author on the cover, but I got
past it and started reading. Good thing I did too, he goes
through the various neuroses that affect people and prevent
them from functioning in a manner that they would like to.
I.E. to be in complete control of their life. A really easy
read and very illuminating.
Valve
Amplifiers (third
edition) by Morgan Jones. Wow, talk about a comprehensive
book. This is just about every theory and "gotcha" involved
with tube amp design and building. It's refreshing to read
someone talk about what gets the job done, even if that
means using some solid state devices (GASP!). An absolute
must if you're interested in tube amps.
Pulling Your
Own Strings by
Wayne Dyer. This wasn't as good a read for me as his
Erroneous
Zones. Basically
the book is supposed to tell you how to get control of your
life by realizing that it is your reactions, not the other
person's actions that make you feel the way you do. He then
goes on to show how you can go after things in your life
now that you're not so hung up on other people. I dunno, a
lot of it seemed like common sense. Either I'm pretty well
adjusted or the book isn't all that great...
Infinity Walk
the Physical Self by Deborah Sunbeck. I was pretty excited
about her studies about left/right brain integration. I had
heard about her from an audio book called Mega Learning.
The infinity walk is basically walking in a figure eight
pattern. Doesn't sound like that big a deal, but you add
things to it and you can almost literally feel your head
spinning with activity. The most basic thing is to keep a
single subject in view as you walk around. At a certain
point, you have to whip your head around to keep the object
in view. In addition, your eyes are constantly moving. All
of this helps create new neural pathways in the brain
according to her studies. It is also a diagnostic tool for
evaluating how well your two halves of the brain are
interacting. Sure enough, when I started infinity walking I
could sense a definite difference in my gait and balance
during one half of the figure eight. If you keep doing it
things are supposed to even out as you get better
integrated. This book is all about the physical part of the
process. It was interesting, but not of much value since
I'm pretty functional physically. She has long chapters on
dealing with stroke victims and other people with physical
issues with their brain. Her ideas seem to help these
people considerably. I'm actually waiting for her
Infinity Walk Preparing
the Mind to Learn.
There is supposedly a new version coming out some time
soon, but I got tired of waiting for it. I'll keep checking
in with Amazon from time to time to see if it's in yet. I
have a distinct feeling that this will be the book of most
interest for most people.
On the
Shortness of Life (Life is Long if You Know how to Use
it) by Seneca.
This book is actually a collection of long essays written
during Roman times by Seneca. It includes the title one,
Consolation to Helvia, and On Tranquility of Mind.
Consolation is a letter written to his mother on the
occurrence of his being exiled from the Roman Empire and
Tranquility is a treatise on how to keep your head in the
opulent Roman times. These are both well written essays and
have some very good points, but the star is clearly the
title essay. Folks, this is what reading the classics is
supposed to be like, intense, insightful, and timeless. You
get the feeling that he is writing to you despite the fact
that he died 1500 years ago or so.. I'll lay some of the
better quotes on you as a sampler:
"It is not that we
have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it.
Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has
been given to us for the highest achievements if it were
all well invested. But when it is wasted in heedless luxury
and spent on no good activity, we are forced at last by
death's final constraint to realize that it has passed away
before we knew it was passing. So it is: we are not given a
short life but we make it short..."
"You will find no one willing
to share out his money; but to how many does each of us
divide up his life! People are frugal in guarding their
personal property; but as soon as it comes to squandering
time they are most wasteful of the one thing it is right to
be stingy."
He goes on to say that most people waste time as if there
is an endless supply of it. "You act like mortals in all
that you fear, and like immortals in all that you desire."
It's good reading, a real kick in the ass. I know I needed
something like it and its fitting right into my current
mindset of living instead of existing. I highly recommend
this book, it's pretty short and to the point, and what a
great point it is!
Zen for
Christians by Kim
Boykin. This book could really be titled, "An Introduction
to Zen" and still be accurate. She does spend a handful of
pages on common misconceptions that Christians have about
Zen, but the majority of the book is taken up in explaining
and introducing Zen. If you haven't studied Zen before,
it's a bit of an odd duck. It is usually referred to as a
form of Buddhism, but that's only partly true. It
definitely comes from more traditional Buddhist ideas but
it leaves behind a lot of baggage. Zen isn't so much a
religion but a practice. You DO Zen, you experience Zen,
there is no dogma, no gods, and no worship. It isn't that
it denies the existence of God or gods, it just doesn't
come up. This is why people from different, or no religious
affiliations can all do Zen together. It is a practice that
can be done on its own or along with another religious
practice. There's lots of Catholics doing Zen (the author
is an example) and Jews make up the largest American
population of Zen practitioners. Its a good book, I
recommend it if you're looking for an introduction to Zen
or if you want to deepen your experience in your current
religious practice.
Currently reading The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran and The Inner Life by Thomas a Kempis, will report back when
I've gotten through them...
OK, I had to bag a Kempis. I could only take so much "This
life doesn't matter, the only thing that matters is what's
to come! Concentrate on God, you are not important.." This
philosophy begs the obvious question, if this life is so
unimportant, why did He give it to us in the first place?
The
Prophet and
Jesus, Son of
Man by Kahlil
Gibran. I had read both of these years ago but after the
third reference to The Prophet in two weeks (one of them on
The Boondocks!) I decided to revisit them. The Prophet is
pretty straightforward. A seer from a distant land is about
to go back to his native country, before he goes the local
townspeople ask his advice on various topics. I gotta say,
the advice starts out with amazing beauty and depth. Here's
one of the more quoted sections.
"And a woman who
held a babe against her bosom said, Speak to us of
Children.
And he said:
Your children are not your
children.
They are the sons and
daughters of Life's
longing for itself.
They come through you but not
from you,
And though they are with you,
yet they
belong not to you.
You may give them your love
but not your
thoughts.
For they have their own
thoughts.
You may house their bodies
but not their
souls,
For their souls dwell in the
house of tomorrow,
which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like
them, but seek not
to make them like you.
For life goes not backward
nor tarries with
yesterday.
You are the bows from which
your children
as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon
the path of
the infinite, and He bends you with His might
that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the
archer's hand be for
gladness;
For even as he loves the
arrow that flies, so
He loves also the bow that is stable."
And here is an excerpt dealing with love.
Gibran is personifying love as a
person...
"...Even as he ascends to
your height and caresses
your tenderest branches that quiver in
the sun,
So shall he descend to your
roots and shake
them in their clinging to the earth.
Like sheaves of corn he
gathers you unto
himself.
He threshes you to make you
naked.
He sifts you to free you from
your husks.
He grinds you to whiteness.
He kneads you until you are
pliant;
And then he assigns you to
his sacred fire,
that you may become sacred bread for God's
sacred feast.
All these things shall love
do unto you that
you may know the secrets of your heart, and in
that knowledge become a fragment of Life's
heart..."
It goes on like that for a bunch of
different topics. Honestly, I find it to be amazing, but I
can only take so much of it at a time. Even though it is a
smallish book (you could easily read it in one sitting) I
recommend reading one chapter at a time. Otherwise it gets
to be a bit overwhelming. The Prophet is a classic and if
you're in the right frame of mind, it can be illuminating.
As amazing as The
Prophet is,
Jesus, Son of
Man is mind
blowing. The book consists of "interviews" of people that
were contemporaries of Jesus. This includes the Apostles,
His mother Mary, Mary Magdeline (twice, maybe three times),
Judas, Pilate, and most interestingly, regular people that
were and were not fans of His. The end result is a
piecemeal, indirect portrait of Jesus. This is sorely
needed since the Bible gives us so little, and what we do
have is filtered through the Apostles. Even though this is
a work of fiction, it does a very good job of encapsulating
not only the complexities of the Passion, but of the man
Himself. Gibran manages to not only show why his followers
were in awe of Him, but how they could not understand Him,
and why some people did not like Him at all. I consider it
required reading for any Christian to avoid a Franny-like
(of Franny and Zoey by Salinger) meltdown. I especially
recommend it to non-Christians, it may give you an insight
to the man that so many follow. Go out and read this!!!!
The Road to
Serfdom by
Friedrich Hayek. Along with 1984 and Homage to
Catalonia, I
consider this to be third book in the trilogy on the
dangers of totalitarianism. Orwell painted some pretty grim
portraits in the other two books but he never really
connected the dots as far as how those types of governments
come about. Hayek connects the dots for us. He wrote it
during world war two while living in Britain. He had
managed to escape the Nazis of his homeland only to see
England going down the same path he watched Germany go
down. He makes the excellent point that Hitler was allowed
to come to power because of the foundation work done by the
socialists. This book was designed as a warning. The
primary point is that socialism, if it doesn't
automatically lead to, at lest aides and abets the
ascension of totalitarianism.
How does this happen? Well, as you might imagine he goes
into quite a bit of detail in the book but it goes
something like this...
A group of people decide that things are "unfair" and use
their influence to make the government adopt certain
policies designed to address this unfairness. This usually
starts with wealth redistribution, price fixing, and
government control of industries. This starts a recurrent
theme of the book, that socialism entails a small number of
people deciding what the rest of the people in a country
will do. If a government becomes a socialist one, it will
have an overriding objective that must be followed by
everyone if it is to succeed. Of course there is no one
objective that will be agreeable to everyone no matter how
homogenous the population is. By involving the government,
people's options quickly disappear. When the government
assumes total control over the means of production, there
is no longer any option except to do what the government
tells you to do. In a planned economy, there is no room for
individual freedom. The government will decide what needs
to be made, that means it decides what jobs are to be
available and where they will be. Add to that the fact that
the government will control all consumer goods and you can
see that very little freedom is possible. There is no room
for someone that does not want to work where the government
wants them to or does not want what the government makes.
Of course once the government is given this power it
usually takes quite a bit to get them out of power and the
inner circle will do whatever it takes to remain in power.
History has borne out Hayek's assertions. Collective
governments have given us history's most infamous leaders,
Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Hitler, etc. If you look at the few
remaining socialist states, they fit Hayek's diagnosis to a
tee. Some might say that it is only bad luck that the bad
guys have come to power, if we could find a "nice" dictator
it might work out. Hayek makes the obvious point that the
only people that can rise to power in these types of
governments are the ones that have the stomach to do
whatever it takes retain power.
Hayek does not use any economic arguments against
collective governments in this book, he relies on the
concepts of liberty and freedom alone to make his point. We
have all seen the economic collapse (or at least the
capitulation to capitalism) of socialist governments across
the world and the idea that a country would go down that
path again seems pretty remote. I agree, once a country
gets a taste of civil liberties and freedom that capitalism
fosters, it would be difficult to go back. A more subtle
point of the book is still relevant though. Whenever the
government controls an aspect of the economy, whether it is
the regulation of an industry, the controlling of imports,
or the outlawing of substances, it is always the few
controlling the many. The government is the only group that
can do this since it has the entire weight of the justice
system and the military behind it. Every time the
government meddles in the affairs of its people, some
liberty and some options are lost. The title of the book
refers to the fact that during the middle ages we allowed
the ruling class to completely govern the rest of the
population. Capitalism is what broke that system and
collectivistic government programs put us back on the road
to that system. The citizens of North Korea are indeed
serfs, as were the citizens of the USSR, and Germany in the
1930's. Hayek dedicated the book "To the socialists of all
parties", we should listen to his warning....
I am currently studying Arabic in Yemen, so my reading has
been necessarily focused on Arabic textbooks lately. I did
bring one (translated to) English book with me, Ludwig Von
Mises' colossal opus Human Action. It isn't exactly light reading, but it
is the best explanation of what economics actually is, and
you can be sure that it doesn't involve models,
equilibrium, or numbers of any sort. I hope to finish this
by the end of the year (end of 2007), we'll see if I can do
it:-)
I'm still working on the Mises, but it's tough going. I
bought some books while I was in Greece and devoured them
within a week. Nicholas Nickelby
and David Copperfield
are two classic books by
Dickens. I don't think they're very "deep," but they are
good reads and fun stories. There are some moments,
especially in David
Copperfield, that
are quite affecting, but mostly they are just good stories.
The Name of
the Rose (by Eco)
was also a good read, but it made me think a little bit
more. It dealt with a lot of theological issues in the
Catholic church and I was in the mood to dive into it.
Surprisingly, it helped me understand the Orthodox church a
little better... Anyway, it's very Catholic in a lot of
senses, but there's an interesting murder mystery in there
as well...