This is the second book in The Dresden Files, a series that follows the adventures of private detective and wizard Harry Dresden. It is set in present day Chicago and mixes the hard-boiled detective novel with paranormal creatures and magic.
True to the genre, the novel starts with a damsel in distress. Kim Delaney approaches Harry, which is almost broke. Also true to the genre. She wants to know how to use magic circles to contain powerful creatures. Dresden blows her off, she ends up dead, and the story kicks off from there.
“With a sense of humor like that, you could make a living as a garbage man anywhere in the country.”
A series of murders occur, and the victims seems to have been torn to pieces by large animals. Strangely enough most of them occur at full moon. The police believe they are chasing a serial killer, but Harry realizes that they are dealing with werewolves. The local Mob boss Johnny Marcone and the FBI also gets involved. Things get quite hairy (pun intended) and Harry almost ends up dead. But it all sorts out towards the end. I liked the surprising twist.
The novel is fast paced, full of action, and is narrated by Harry Dresden himself. Just like the classical genre is supposed to be. It’s a fairly easy and quick novel to read. I enjoyed it, and will probably pick up the next one in the series. When I say that I read it I meant listened to the audio book.
“I hadn’t gotten beaten up twice, shot, and nearly strangled to get taken out by a misguided werewolf bitch.”
This year I’ve read books about the Middle East, mainly Iran and Saudi-Arabia, and I’ve read books about Putin and Trump. Next in line here will be Iraq, Turkey and Egypt.
As usual I’ve read several books about the natural world. The ever important Charles Darwin turned up again with one of the most important books of all time.
A book that is not easy to forget would be All Quiet on the western front by WWI-veteran Erich Maria Remarque. I read it many years ago but decided to read it again since WWI ended 100 years ago this fall. In 1914 the world stumbled into a war which lead to several empires falling, many million dead and endless suffering world-wide. It’s a very important lessons for us all.
The technological improvements and knowledge about genetics is truly about to change alot of attitudes about what makes us human, and how our personalities are made.This knowledge will lead to amazing discoveries and personalized medicine. Genetics and genetic modified organisms (GMO) will save many many lifes in the years to come. I sincerely encourage people to read books such as Blueprint, How DNA makes us who we are, by Robert Plomin. Or Dine Geniale Gener by Dag Undlien, professor in genetic medicine.
Some of the best books of the year, according to yours truly, must be:
Factfullness – Hans Rosling Most of us are not aware of the progress that has been made in the world within the last few decades, not to mention within the last century. Hans Rosling demonstrates in his book the huge improvements that have been done, and that things can still be bad. He shows how important it is to have a close relationship with data, the scientific method and to critiqual thinking. We have to not endulge our instincts and our feelings (especially fear), because they very often leads us astray. Or in his own words:
“I am not an optimist. Im a very serious possibilist. Its a new category where we take emotion apart and we just work analytically with the world. “
Enlightenment Now – Steven Pinker In Enlightenment Now – The case for Reason, Science, Humanism and Progress, Steven Pinker demonstrated the improvements the world has made the last few centuries, what caused them and what this means for dealing with the challenges of today such as climate change, populism, political and religious extremism. This is probably one of the best and most important books I’ve read ever. Pinker has the same mindset as Hans Rosling in the way he emphasizes critiqual thinking, investigating the data and follow it to where it leads. Pinker writes elequently and is well worth the read. If you rather see his lectures they are easy to find on Youtube as he is a very active public intellectual. Oh yeah! This was the first review that got published in a real magazine! I got published in Fri Tanke, which is the member magazine of The Norwegian Humanist Assosiation.
Origin of Species – Charles Darwin This is perhaps the most important book of all time. Because it connects us humans to every other organism on Earth. It is, however, not the easiest book about evolution you could read. There are several modern and more up-to-date books you could read. But if you’re interested in the topic I encourage you to read it. Last year I read Darwins travel journal: The Journey of the Beagle. This is a much more interesting book for the general public in my opinion. It is easier to read and it describes Darwins thinking and how it evolves as his journey goes on. There are lots of very interesting descriptions og people and places as well. An incredible adventure by an victorian gentleman.
“There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”
Cosmos – Carl Sagan
The book follows the award winning tv-series with the same name and has a corresponding 13 chapters. This was the best-selling science book ever published in the English language,and was the first science book to sell more than half a million copies. Carl Sagans way with language and story telling is only matched by very few. I can definitely recommend this book and not to mention the tv-series. Just read the final passage.
“For we are the local embodiment of a Cosmos grown to self-awareness. We have begyn to contemplate our origins: starstuff pondering the stars: organized assemblages of atoms: tracing the long journey by which, here at last, consciousness arose. Our loyalties are to the species and to the planet. We speak for Earth. Our obligation to survive is owed not just to ourselves but also to that Cosmos, ancient and vast, from which we spring.”
The sixth extinction – Eliabeth Kolbert This is a tragic love story to our planet and the destruction we bring. The extinction rate has been high ever since we left Africa 40-50 000 years ago. The last few species of the Mega Fauna are being hunted to extinction as we speak. This book is an amazing read, but it is also tragic. I really hope books like this one might help humanity slow down and even stop our destruction of our planet. There is no planet B.
On Tyranny – Timothy Snyder Several countries now struggle with right-wing nationalist politicians gaining power. They exagerate some problems and make other problems up, and they play on real worries alot of the population have. Timothy Snyder demonstrates in this book that this is in no way a new thing and has lead to fascist, nazi and communist regimes all over the world before. This book is basically a manual for protecting our liberal democracy to prevent it from being brought down by fear, superstition and the seemingly strong-men who opt to “help us”. It’s a short and quick read but one that I hope as many as possible do.
The hidden life of trees – Peter Wohlleben
This is another amazing book about the relationships in nature. This time the focus is on the larger organisms. namely the trees. It turns out they communicate with eachother, with insects and with other organisms. Several plants produce chemicals that are harmful to grazers. whether those be large herbivores such as giraffes or smaller insects such as different types of ants or beetles. Either way other trees pick up on the scent from these chemicals which leads them to increase their own production before they are targeted. Trees cooperate with fungus and can help each other through the root systems. Peter Wohlleben even coined the term Wood-wide-web to describe this phenomenon. Very eye-opening book. And I promise you won’t look at trees the same ever again.
Insektenes planet – Anne Aslaug Sverdrup-Thygeson (Planet of the insects)
The title of this book translates to “The planet of the insects”, and I’m not sure it has been translated to english.
It is about all the intricate relationships between insects, plants, fungus and not to mention us animals. Very interesting book and you really appreciate the little buggers much more. My favorite story from this book must be the relationship between a moth, ants and the oregano bush. The ants help bring oxygen down to the root system through their pathways. But at the same time if they become too many they will start to eat at the roots. The plant is not a passive victim here, but release the classical oregano odor. which invites a moth that drops its caterpillar into the ant nest. The caterpillar feed on the ants and reduce their number to a level that won’t hurt the plant. Amazing!
“If all mankind were to disappear, the world would regenerate back to the rich state of equilibrium that existed ten thousand years ago. If insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos.” E.O. Wilson
What we think about when we’re trying not to think about climate warming – Per Espen Stoknes Per Espen Stoknes dentifies the five main psychological barriers to climate action, but addresses them with five strategies for how to talk about global warming in a way that creates action and solutions, not further inaction and despair. Facts and data don’t really change people’s mind. Good storytelling that involve people’s emotions do. This is probably something we all need to pay more attention to in the years to come. Stoknes also has a really good TED-talk I can reccommend.
All in all it’s been a really good year when it comes to reading. I’ve managed to read a book every two weeks, which is way more than I could hope for. I´ve logged a little more than 30 books and written 15 reviews all in all. I had a goal of reading and reviewing at least 20 books in 2018. Which means that I achieved the first part and even read 50% more than my goal. Unfortunately that came at the price of not writing enough reviews. Who knows.. Maybe I’ll write some of the reviews in the year to come.
I think I’ll set my reading goal at 15 books for 2019. If I post a new review every three-four weeks I should be good. Speaking of posting I need to find a new platform as the current one is closing. Maybe I’ll start the new year all fresh with a brand new platform. I’ll check out WordPress as I’ve heard alot about them. Not to mention that the ever watchful eye of Facebook has been showing me advertisements for WordPress. Sure would be a petty to let the algorithm down.
I usually end my reviews with giving each book a rating. In this case I’ll give the entire year 2018 a rating of 5 out of 6 stars. Good year!
Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy
by Douglas Adams, 192 pages
“Far out in the uncharted backwaters…lies a small and unregarded sun…orbiting this.. is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet, whose lifeforms are amazingly primitive.”
The adventure starts out at Arthur Dents, the main character, house. Outside the house is a bulldozer and lots of construction workers who are there to tear down his house to make room for a road. Arthur is refusing to move, which momentarily stops the bulldozer. After a while Arthur is talked into going to the pub with his friend Ford Prefect. Down at the pub he reveals that he is in fact an alien and the entire Earth is about to be destroyed. The Vogons are destroying the Earth because it is in the way of an intergalactic space road of some kind.
Ford Prefect and Arthur Dent is saved from being annihilated together with the every other being on Earth by hiding in a Vogon spaceship. You might think having your planet destroyed might lead to a panic attack. And you are right. Arthur Dent freaks out, but luckily Ford Prefect is carrying an intergalactic guidebook. Precisely.. you guessed it.
The Hitchhiker´s Guide to the Galaxy. and the cover reads “Don´t Panic” in big letters.
The adventure continues with one hilarious absurdity after another. and you can never really know what to expect next. Its a great read and if you think it´s quite similar in style to Monty Python, you are right. Douglas Adams did do some work as a screen writer for them.
“on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so muchthe wheel, New York, wars and so on whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man for precisely the same reasons.”
We meet a depressed robot, the president of the universe, and even a super computer who has calculated the answer to life, the universe and everything. Yup.. you guessed it. The answer is 42! We encounter the Babel fish, which is a little fish you insert into your ear and thereby translates all languages for you. There are falling blue whales and we are all encouraged to always carry a towel. Which is the most useful thing you might ever carry.
This book has been waiting for me since my early teens, when I first tried to read it. I remember several of my friends kept quoting the book all the time. I even had a text based computer game on the Amiga 500, which I did play a little. So I should have read it a long time ago, but for some reason I never got around to it. Until a few months ago, when I found it on Storytel.no, which is a Norwegian supplier of audio books. It was even narrated by no other than Stephen Fry
I had an amazing experience listening to the book when I was out running or doing my daily commute to work. Several times throughout the book I had experiences of deja-vu. It turns out my head was more soaked in references to Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy than I previously thought.
The book is satirical and pokes fun at, among other things, human self importance and at religious beliefs. Especially in light of the size or age of the universe.
“Space, it says, is big. Really big. You just wont believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think its a long way down the road to the chemists, but thats just peanuts to space.”
It seems to me like one of the central themes in the book is that the world is huge, old, absurd and we might never really understand it all. Things are usually not what they seem. When we get to roused up we should simply stay occupied and remember the cover from the Hitchhikers Guide to the Universe. Meaning the book mentioned inside this book. “Don´t Panic!”
Richard Dawkins was a close friend to Douglas Adams and dedicated The God Delusion to him. When Adams died Dawkins wrote that “Science has lost a friend, literature has lost a luminary, the mountain gorilla and the black rhino have lost a gallant defender.”
I´ve played tabletop roleplaying games for a few decades now and Shadowrun was the first game I got really involved in. Since the mid 90s it is still one of my favorite games. The world of Shadowrun is a futuristic cyberpunk dystopia mixed with magic and cybernetics. The classical fantasy people like elves, dwarfs, trolls, and not to mention dragons are also thrown into the mix. Large corporations run the world and hire shadowrunners, criminals or disposable assets, o perform illegal activities. This roleplaying game has been one of the most popular games to date and it spawned several computer games, board games and even card games.
We follow the mage Elijah and his team of runners, which are a mixed group with a troll street samurai (warrior beefed up with cyborg machine parts, a goblin rigger (someone logged on to his vehicle), and an elf physical adept (martial arts expert with magical powers). They start out in Seattle where the roleplaying game is centered and they quickly travel to other parts of the world. The groups task is locating and stealing a map with magical properties.
“Shoot strait, conserve ammo and never ever make a deal with a dragon!”
– Shadowrun proverb
Along the way they encounter the new kind of racist organisations such as Humanis, which are not so concerned about the skin tone people have. They are prejudiced against metahumans, meaning elves, dwarfs, orcs and trolls. “Why bother about that brown fellow when that monster over there has hands the size of shovels?”
The group travel to Chicago, which in the 2070s have been infested by huge insect spirits and other fierce creatures, they venture down to the new land of Amazonia. After magic returned to the world the rainforest took on a life of its own. Lets just put it that way. Eventually they end up in Antarctica where the entire climax of the story takes place.
Fire & Frost is a pretty good cyberpunk action novel if you ask me. But then again I know the world of Shadowrun pretty good. I could recognize all the different aspects of the game such as the magic, how integrated technology is into everything, the cyberware etc. The story goes south in every meaning of the word when team members decide to backstab each other, which is just like the world of shadowrun usually is.
A good upside to the book was that it had some pretty short chapters which made them easy to squeeze into a rather busy schedule.
All in all I enjoyed this book! If you just started playing the game and want to get a good feel for the universe this would be a good read for you. Or if you read the old Shadowrun novels you will definitely get a kick out of this one. I am not sure someone not familiar with Shadowrun would enjoy it as much though. But who knows?
Rating: I give it a solid 4 out of 6!
Tell me what you think in the comments.
Robert Plomin (october 2018) “By disentangling the effects of nature and nurture rather than assuming that nurture alone was responsible for who we are, this research produced startling results that suggest a completely different way to think about the roles of nature, nurture and their interplay in making us who we are.”
The discussion of nature or nurture has been raging on and off ever since DNA was discovered. Robert Plomin, an American psychologist and geneticist, gives the reader a brief insight on the methods they use to study the relationship between genetics and psychological traits. We also get a short tour of the history, methods that failed, and what we´ve learned the last few decades. This also leads to some pretty interesting implications.
There are similarities that run in families. And it was assumed it was due to the shared environment. But families also share genetics. In order to separate nature (DNA) and nurture (the environment) there has been two main methods; adoption studies and monozygotic (MZ) twin studies. In adoption studies the children do not share DNA with the adoptive parents so similarities would have to be caused by the environment. And likewise MZ twins are identical exactly because of their biology. But being raised in the same family it is still difficult to separate the environment from nature. The most powerful studies are studies of MZ twins separated at or close after birth. Being raised in completely different environments means that any similarity they share will have to be purely genetics.
It is no surprise that identical twins, monozygotic (MZ) are, well, identical in most things. What was new to me was that even though some identical twins have been reared apart they are still very similar. Not only in appearance but also in personality, interests, and behavior. ” ..MZ twins reared apart are almost as similar as MZ twins reared together, indicating that what makes them so similar is nature, not nurture.” page 19
The study of twins makes researchers able to determine how much of the variation of a trait that is caused by variation in genes. The genetic variance between the height of twins is not surprisingly quite high, but not a perfect 1.0. Fraternal twins is closed to 0,5, which is due to the fact that they share on average about half their genes. Fraternal twins (dizygotic) are just like any other siblings, since two different sperm fertelize two different eggs. From this pattern geneticists can infer that height is a very heritable trait, with most of the variation in the population due to variation in genes.
Cognitive abilities is also quite heritable, but not as much as height. The variance is about 0,75 in identical twins, and between other siblings it is less than 0,5. The correlation for intelligence was the same for adopted children and their biological parents as for children reared by their biological parents. The correlations between these adopted children and their adoptive parents, who share nurture but not nature, hovered near zero. page 54
The book is full of examples like this. A certain trait is somewhat correlated between parents and their children. Sibling usually have a correlation about 50% which is because they share on average 50% of the genes, (while their environment is very similar).
Throughout the book Plomin makes a strong case for genetics has a large impact on just about every psychological trait they have studied. But the genetic studies also quantify to what extent the environment (meaning anything from accidents, chance to education, upbringing, social network etc) affects different traits. “genetics provides the best evidence we have for the importance of the environment independent of genetics. That is, heritabilities are never even close to 100 per cent, which proves that the environment is important.” page 32
Most traits are affected by many different genes. Some traits are affected by thousands of genes. So called single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) Genome Wide Association Studies (GWAS) can determine whether a genetic variant is associated with a disorder or a trait. Because a trait is more or less affected by the number of genes traits fall in a spectrum. This in turn means that the abnormal is normal. Syndromes or genetic disorders are therefore extreme parts of the spectrum. This will lead to two huge implications. First of all it is now possible to anticipate which individuals that might develop certain disorders such as anxieties, dementia or psychosis. We knew that certain disorders ran in families but before proper genetic studies psychologists would have to wait for symptoms before trying to help people. Now we can monitor people and try to prevent disorders from occurring in the first place.
Genetics is not purely deterministic, however. Genetic influences are probabilistic propensities, not predetermined programming.
“Evidence for genetic influence has been found for home environments such as chaotic family environments, for classroom environments such as supportive teachers, peer characteristics such as being bullied, neighborhood safety, being exposed to drugs, work environments and the quality of ones marriage.” page 44.
The last one is particularly interesting. According to Plomin MZ twins have a higher corrolation than DZ twins when it comes to divorce. Which indicates that their genetic makeup is a major factor whether people can maintain a stable relationship or not.
The Flynn Effect, the effect where IQ increases for every generation, has general been explained by an improvement in education, health, food, safety and other factors that increase human wellbeing. Basically the IQ has been increasing because the environment has been improving. I was hoping that Plomin would discuss this. Unfortunately he didn’t. Plomin also fails to support his claims that environmental factors are mostly accidental and poorly understood. I would like to know how he can say that.
Because genetics is such a large factor in determining our psychology Plomin encourages us all to have more empathy and tolerance towards each others misfortune. When a disorder such as obesity is so closely tied to our genetic makeup we should simply stop fat shaming people who are overweight. They need empathy, help and understanding, not ridicule. The same goes for many other aspects of our personality.
The Human Genome Project was a landmark study that mapped all the genes in the human body and it started a revolution. It cost many many millions of dollars to complete. With increased computer power and the much better analytical tools we now have the ability to analyze anyones DNA for a very low price. There are several commercial companies offering to “help us”. Now millions of people all over the world are contributing to companies such as 23andme, Myheritage,Ancestry There are ethical questions about this for sure, but the researchers will have endless data to work with. One of the studies mentioned in the book was based on the DNA from more than a million people!
Needless to say a book like this gets a lot of attention. Most reviews are pretty good, but some warn people about the implications of this new knowledge.
Here are just a few of the reviews I found: The Guardian The Standard Nature National Review
Basically this book is really interesting and I can highly recommend it. At times I had to wrestle with my inner cognitive dissonance, but I guess that is healthy. It is hard for a layman like yours truly to determine whether the science is valid or not. The author says the genetic basis for our psychological traits have been replicated many times. And I do note that none of the reviews I´ve seen disagrees with the science itself.
Do not read the book if you prefer to think of the mind as a blank slate. Or maybe that´s exactly why you should read it.
Oh yeah! almost forgot! Robert Plomin gave the Eilert Sund lecture at Oslo University in october. This lecture sums up parts of the book pretty good and is what got me to buy it in the first place.
By Steven Pinker (2018)
Allan Lane, imprint of Penguin Books, 452 pages
Terror attacks, droughts and civil wars could easily make us depressed and it is easy to think that everything was better in the past.
Steven Pinker, evolutionary psychologist and professor of psychology at Harvard, is one of the voices that claim the opposite. He has already demonstrated how much less violent our world is in the book Better Angels of our nature (2011).
Pinker argues that we should not have too much faith in the news. Media focus on negative events, we overestimate this and larger picture gets unnoticed. We are not as rational as we would like to be, and a combination of this, lack of information and different cognitive biases leads to an overdramatic world view.
The middle part of the book is a thorough account for how the world has improved in almost every possible way. Topics such as average life span, happiness, economic wealth, health access to food, medicine, war, inequality, peace, safety, education, gender equality, and democracy is given a separate chapter each. You could read these topics chronologically, but you could equally also read them in any order you like.
The share of people living in extreme poverty was about 90% not even 200 years ago. The percentage of people in extreme poverty has been dramatically reduced since then, the absolute number has been more than halved since the 1970s. Despite that the world population has increased from 3,7 billion to 7,3 billion! The share of people living in extreme poverty is now less than 10%! Max Roser, economist at the University of Oxford and founder of Our World in Data, has been quoted saying that the news papers could have run the following headline:The number of people in extreme poverty has been reduced by 137 000 since yesterday! every day the last 25 years.
The impression that the world was a much better place is therefore not just a misunderstanding, but a fundamentally wrong view of the world. There can be no question of which was the greatest era for culture; the answer has to be today, until it is superseded by tomorrow.
Climate crisis
Even if Pinker wants to show how the world has moved forward and is much better today he does not trivialize the challenges we are facing with the climate crisis. He means that this crisis should be dealt with using the tools weve inherited from The Enlightenment. The climate crisis is a global problem we have never encountered before. An increase in greenhouse gases like carbondioxide and methane leads to increased ocean levels, more extreme weather, droughts some places and more flooding in other locations. Which in turn can lead to failed crops. National and international crisis follows. To stay within the 2-degree goal the amount of greenhouse gas has to be reduced to at least half within this century and by much more within the next.
Connection between energy production and progress
Today we get about 86% of our energy production from fossil fuels. The majority of our energy use goes to heavy industry, transportation, buildings and agriculture. Needless to say, ridding the world of fossil fuels a monumental task.
Energy channeled by knowledge is the elixir with which we stave off entropy, and advances in energy capture are advances in human destiny.
Pinker makes a valid point when he claims that this is nothing we can fix just by recycling our garbage and eat organic food, which uses a much larger area of land mass than intensive agriculture. A main part of the climate crisis is that it is a tragedy of the commons. It is a global problem and needs to be solved globally. And not by reducing our use of energy. An often overlooked problem is that reducing poverty, increased education, better health care and all other fruits of progress requires vast amounts of energy. The solution of the climate crisis cannot therefore be cutting the use of energy to start with. Even if renewable energy sources have a certain potential they are simply not ready to replace fossil fuels just yet.
Nuclear power as the solution to the climate crisis
Nuclear power has no carbon footprint what so ever. Besides the process of building the power plant itself. The exhaust coming from nuclear power plants is pure water vapor. Nuclear power has had extremely few deaths and there is no pollution to speak of. Fossil fuels are responsible for approximately 1 million deaths per year. When you compare number of deaths by the different energy sources nuclear power is by far the safest!
Pinker basically shows how fossil energy production is far worse for human suffering, death, and the climate crisis than nuclear power is. Compared to fossil fuels this should be a no brainer. He concludes therefore that we should shut down coal plants and build a lot more nuclear plants. Not the other way around like a lot of countries like Germany, India and China does today.
Secular humanism
Towards the end of the book Pinker talks about reason, science and humanism and what threatens these values. He shows that when people of very different background sits down to make common rules they very often end up with a form of secular humanism. The most known examples are the American declaration of independence and the UN declaration of human rights. It is Pinkers opinion that a humanistic moral, that you get from UN declaration of Human Rights, should be the guiding moral for the development of society. And to be clear he does not imply atheistic humanism exclusively. All forms of liberal humanism whether it is in the cloak of a lutheran, muslim, or buddist is a part of this larger concept of humanism.
Warning of all forms of extremism
Pinker warns us about right wing extremism, left wing communist romantisism and Islamic extremism. All three political ideologies have millions of deaths on their conscience, and they struggle towards a eutopian world. Together with populism and nasjonalism they threaten to dismantle the stabile institutions weve had in place since world war two.
Any jackass can kick down a barn, but it takes a carpenter to build one.
Radical change is counter productive according to Pinker. We simply have to do more of what we are already doing. Pinker is probably more positively inclined, without being a naive dreamer.
Progress is not an automatic process and will not happen at the same rate all the time or in all places. But just like weve solved many other problems todays challenges will also be solved. As long as we cherish the values and ideals like reason, science and humanism.
“This book is to be neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure, for death is not an adventure to those who stand face to face with it. It will try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped shells, were destroyed by the war.”
I recently reread the novel “All Quiet on the western Front” by Erich Maria Remarque, written in 1929. The author served in the german army and was wounded four times during the war.
The book tells the story of the german soldier Paul who enlists together with his friends at the start of World War One. One by one they get killed or maimed and we get a thorough understanding of the horrors of trench warfare. As well as the feeling of powerlessness these men felt. They had no say in the decision in going to war, yet they were the one dying. An entire generation of men were outright killed or maimed. Those who where lucky enough to survive were mentally destroyed during the Great War. In the beginning of the book Paul pictures the war as a boyish adventure almost. But he quickly changes as he gets more experience. Towards the end he is just clinging on to the hope that he might be lucky and survive.
“Bombardment, barrage, curtain-fire, mines, gas, tanks, machine-guns, hand-grenades – words, words, but they hold the horror of the world.”
The difference between the front lines getting pounded by enemy artillery and the peaceful areas away from the front is astounding. When they are on leave they discribe the distant bombardment almost like a thunderstorm a few miles away. On leave there is a feeling of tranquility and peace. but at the same time a feeling of apprehension because the men knew they would soon be back in the hell hole of the front. Where it was simply a game of chance if you lived or died.
The chaos of bombardment and charging across a muddy dead-mans-land filled with craters was on the other hand a other worldly experience. Suddendly a soldier could be blown to pieces and his remains splattered all over his friends.
“We see men living with their skulls blown open; we see soldiers run with their two feet cut off, they stagger on their splintered stumps into the next shell-hole; a lance-corporal crawls a mile and a half on his hands dragging his smashed knee after him; another goes to the dressing station and over his clasped hands bulge his intestines; we see men without mouths, without jaws, without faces we find one man who has held the artery of his arm in his teeth for two hours in order not to bleed to death (134).”
Why should you read a novel about the experiences of a soldier in WWI?
First of all it is always important to remind ourselves about the horrors of war. We have to do whatever we can to prevent anything like that to ever happen again. There are times war is necessary unfortunately, but we should try every other measure first.
Secondly I think that knowing about WWI is extremely important because we can still feel its aftermath in Europe, not to mention the Middle East today. The Great War was supposed to be the war to end all wars, which it failed to do. But The Great War did end four empires and laid the foundations for the chaos of the Middle East today. The Russian Empire, the Austrian-Hungarian Empire,The Ottoman Empire and the German Empire were all dismantled as a result of the war. The Balfour Declaration in 1917 laid the foundations for the creation of Israel.
If you would like to listen to a thorough and skillfully told podcast about history I would definitely reccommend Dan Carlins Hardcore History. He has a great series on WWI, which he has called A Blueprint for Armageddon. I cannot reccommend it enough.
Fear – Trump in the White House
Written by Bob Woodward
357 pagesBob Woodward has been an investigative journalist for The Washington Post for almost 50 years, and together with Carl Bernstein he investigated the Watergate case which brought down Richard Nixon. He has won several award for his outstanding work, winning the Pulitzer prize twice. Woodward has written numerous books about politics and American Presidents.
In Fear – Trump in the White House Woodward paints a picture of the Trump Administration that is not very different from what you get by following the general media. The White House is clearly very dysfunctional and nobody really has any control. There does not seem to be a concise strategy on how to implement the often contradictory goals Trump has set.
Despite this the tone in the book is matter-of-factly and most of the people in the book are portrayed in a sympathetic light. At least some of the time. Even Trump gets his share of this.
All in all the descriptions and stories in the book seem believable not to mention really scary.
The story is told from a first person view, but Woodward was obviously not present in all these situations. He has based his book on hundreds of hours of interviews with people he will not name. I guess this is both the strength and the weakness of the book.
Some people frequent the story much more than others. Vice President Mike Pence is hardly even mentioned at all. Woodward has obviously not spoken to him. Whereas several of the people who has resigned or being fired has more likely been interviewed. I would have liked the motives of the people mentioned being examined more closely. Why are they saying exactly what they are saying? How do they remember the conversations in question?
Woodward shows in great detail that Trump is clearly not fit to be President. I think it is no coincidence that this book is published about two months before the mid term elections.
Trump is portrayed as a childish impulsive liar who lacks a basic fundamental understanding of the world. He is easily flattered has a huge temper and is driven by petty vengeance and his advisers mainly deals with him with diversions and stalling. Several times they remove or hides documents so that Trump won’t see them. Trump didn’t seem to notice.
“It’s not what we did for the country,” Gary Cohn said of himself and Jim Mattis.“It’s what we saved him from doing.”
… “Trump seemed not to remember his own decision because he did not ask about it. He had no list – in his mind of anywhere else – of tasks to complete.”
The major issue with Trump dawns on you as you read the book. He lacks so much understanding of how the world works it is almost unbelievable. He also refuses to learn, he almost starts a nuclear war with North Korea, he insists on tariffs on steel even though he is shown that it will seriously damage the US economy, He insists that Iran is cheating on the nuclear weapons agreement even though they seem to be in compliance. No amount of statistics, facts, or experience from even his own advisors will do. Once he has made up his mind he will stick to it. For at least a short time until he is distracted by something else.
“A third of my job was trying to react to some of the really dangerous ideas that he had and try to give him reasons to believe that maybe they weren’t such good ideas.” Staff secretary Rob Porter is quoted saying
If you’re extra interested in the inner workings of Trumps Administration I guess this book is for you. I look forward to reading the books that will be written about the total impact of Trump further down the line. Because this story sure isn’t over.
Lets just hope the stories to come will be printed on paper and not etched on a cave wall with a piece of burned wood.
Trump was asked if he wanted to contribute to the book directly, but he turned it down. A few days since the book was a week ago a taped phone call between Bob Woodward and Donald Trump was released. In the tape President Trump claims to never have heard that Woodward wanted to speak with him in the first place. This phone call basically support one of the central claims in the book and the final words as put but Gary Cohn: “He’s a fucking liar.”
Factfulness – Ten reasons we’re wrong about the world – and why things are better than you think.
By Hans Rosling (with Ola Rosling and Anna Rosling Rönnlund)
259 pages
Hans Rosling was a swedish doctor, statistician and a Professor of International Health. He studied medicine and statistics and earned international fame for his fantastic TED-talks. If you haven’t seen them you should check them out. Here’s my favorite Hans Rosling TED-talk.
Factfulness is basically Hans Roslings destilled message to us all. It is his legacy and his way of making an impact on the world. Or in his own words:
“This book is my last battle in my life-long mission to fight devastating ignorance…Previously I armed myself with huge data sets, eye-opening software, an energetic learning style and a Swedish bayonet for sword-swallowing. It wasn’t enough. But I hope this book will be.”
Hans Rosling, February 2017.
We suffer from an overdramatic world view. This leads to bad decisions and unecessary stress. This is not only caused by ignorance, but most importantly by ten instincts that leads us astray. Every chapter in this book centers on one of these instincts. And also gives us some rules-of-thumb that we can make use of to curb our over dramatic instincts.
The book starts with a seemingly simple little quiz on world progress. Topics such as poverty, vaccination, the education of girls, mortality rates, average family size etc are covered. Rosling has testet thousands of people on his hundreds of lectures all over the world. Mostly all these well educated people do really bad. For the most part people do worse than what they would if chimps did the choosing randomly. Which is pretty funny. sad but funny.
Among many things I learned that the terms “rich and poor countries”, “developed vs developing countries”, “the west and the rest” etc. are all bad categories and should be avoided. This is part of the first chapter called the Gap instinct. It has been replaced with four income levels in stead. Level 1 = < 2 dollars per day, Level 2 = 2 – 8 dollars per day Level 3 = 8 – 32 dollars per day Level 4 = > 32 dollars per day
After many years of lecturing, the World Bank has now adopted this way of viewing the countries of the world. For the most part the majority of people is located on level 2 and 3. Now less than 10 % of the world population find themselves on level 1. As opposed to just a few decades ago when half the population was there, or not to mention the end of the 1800s when 90% of the world was at level 1. For the first time in history humanity is about to eradicate extreme poverty.
When extreme poverty goes down, Life span increases. Family sizes drop and is now down to about 2 children per woman for a large majority of the world. Life expectancy has risen up to about 70 years on a global scale. Most people get 9-10 years of school and are vaccinated.
This is not a made up fairy tale, but the official IMF and UN numbers speak for themselves.
Rosling reminds us that things can be improving but still be bad. Which they are in several places. Roslings main method is to count the data. Always look for the data behind something. Many times the best think you could do when you are worried is to always look for the data behind a phenomenon. Especially if you are afraid (The Fear Instinct) or feel that it is urgent (The urgency instinct).
Emotions are important but they often times cloud our judgement and distorts our view of reality. They can make you believe that some one individual or group is responsible for everything bad happening (The blame instinct). If you are partial to one particular ideology you are partial to The Single Perspective Instinct etc. These chapters are all good, but just as the problems they describe they could be abit more nuyanced.
“I am not an optimist. Im a very serious possibilist. Its a new category where we take emotion apart and we just work analytically with the world. “
Rosling singles out five major threats to humanity where climate change is one of them. Its common to hear “the third world can’t live like us. The resources on earth will be depleted.” The truth is that the we cannot live like us. Roslings message here is that we have to radically change our we structure our societies. We desperately have to do something with our dependence on oil and gas. To start with our governments have to measure CO2 emissions more effectively and use emission per person as a unit.
If you are thinking something along the lines of:
“What about that quiz? I am better informed than most people. I bet I would do pretty good on this test.”
I suggest you take the short quiz yourself and find out how you do. You will find the test here, with a short introduction from the authors.
And who knows.. You might be almost as good as a chimp.
I do get enthusiastic about books from time to time, but this time it’s different. The topic of this book is super important and should be taught everywhere. It goes great together with Steven Pinkers latest book Enlightenment Now (a review is coming).
“Fame is easy to acquire; impact is much more difficult.”
My prediction is that the impact of Hans Rosling, and Gapminder, will be with us for quite some time.
“The Founding Fathers tried to protect us from the threat they knew, the tyranny that overcame ancient democracy. Today, our political order faces new threats, not unlike the totalitarianism of the twentieth century. We are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism. Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience.And the time to do just that is now.”
Authoritarianism promote nationalistic politics across the western world and threaten to tear down the stabile institutions we’ve had in place since WWII. Timothy Snyder, Author and professor of history at Yale University, is an expert in the two world wars and especially the Holocaust and the eastern part of Europe. He shows in this book how easy it is to destroy seemingly solid democracies.
Based on his knowledge of former democratic countries falling victims to tyranny, Snyder has destilled twenty lessons we should all pay attention to. On tyranny is basically a handbook, or even a manifesto, on how to protect our fragile democracies and even offer resistance to the powers that threaten them.
This book is a quick and quite frankly a scary read. I think I read it in less than two hours. The book offer good sound advice on what the normal person can do in the big scheme of things. And it turns out we can do quite a lot.
Snyder uses examples from the Russian revolution, Hungary, Poland, Nazi Germany and Putins way to power in modern Russia.
Sometimes I got the feeling that Snyder was exaggerating. But at the same time he uses plenty of examples from the Russian revolution, the growth of fascism in Italy and nazism in Germany. And likewise he clearly puts President Trump in the same category of leadership. Not the same as necessarily wanting to go through with genocides and full on war. But a leader that uses the same tactics to scare and control the population.
And it turns out that we can do quite alot.
Each chapter centers starts with one clear advice, and the author then follows with an explanation of why the advice is important illustrated by a historic example.
In the chapter titled “think up your own way of speaking” Snyder discusses the work of the jewish philologist Victor Klemperer. Klemperer notices how Hitler and the Nazi propaganda made use of language to undermine all opposition. “The people’ always meant some people and not others’ encounters were always “struggles” and any attempt by free people to understand the world in a different way was “defamation” of the leader.”
“Believe in truth” is chapter 10, and Snyder claims that you submit to tyranny when you no longer wish to distinguish between what you want to believe and what is actually true. Klemperer and others have shown that totalitarian regimes tend to kill the truth in four ways. Firstly they are openly hostile to verifyable truth. (“largest inaugeration crowd ever!”) Secondly they use shamanic incantations, meaning endless repetition to make the lie permanent. The third way is magical thinking or completely contradictory statements, such as promising huge tax cuts while increasing spending on the military
The fourth and last way to kill the truth is raising oneself to a godlike figure, claiming that there is only one man that can fix the problem.
All these chilling ways of making truth less relevant is something Trump has done and continues to do.
I love chapter 11 “investigate” because it encourages critical thinking. We should spend more time reading books, paying for investigative journalism, not to mention fact-checking as much as possibly before sharing something online. Every one of us can and will be fooled from time to time. Some more than others. We therefore have to be sceptical of all claims. Again Snyder connects a dictator from the past to President Trump. This time he shows how Trump reacts just like Hitler did when confronted with critisism he doesn’t like. He calls it fake news, and even portrays the media as an enemy of the people.
Throughout the book I got the feeling that Snyder paints President Trump as much more of a dictatorial candidate than I think he really is. So far the American institutions are holding up pretty good. Not that Trump doesn’t try to tear them down. I hope that Snyder is exaggerating Trumps behavior. But then again.. Millions of people had that thought in the 1930s… Can I get everybody to shout “Peace in our time”.
Another interesting topic was how very few people realize the moment that they voted for the last time. Several of the oppressive regimes of the 20th century came to power by ordinary elections. The Nazi Party in Germany, communist Hungary after WWII, Iran in 1979, Hugo Chavez in Venezuela in 1998, Putin in Russia in 2000 etc. Many people had real frustrations and real problems, and they had lost faith in the existing powers. And for many of them with good reason to. Then they fall for the sweet talking of some opposition party who come with some outrageous statements. But hey.. The promise to fix the problems. How bad can they really be?
And boom… Suddenly the opposition is silenced, media suppressed or under control, and the former stable institutions cease to exist.
I recommend this book to everyone!
It is simply a must-read.
P.S. The Swedish general election 2018 in will take place on september 9th. I am truly afraid that the increasing gang violence in swedish suburbs, not to mention the arson of more than 100 cars will turn out to be the Swedish version of the 1933 Reichstag Fire. The Sweden Democrats has roots in swedish fascist and white supremacy neo-nazi movement. It has tried to rid itself of the old reputation. It seems like a hard thing to do, especially when they insist on having former nazis run for office.
Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy
Fire & Frost
Robert Plomin (october 2018)
By Steven Pinker (2018)
“The Founding Fathers tried to protect us from the threat they knew, the tyranny that overcame ancient democracy. Today, our political order faces new threats, not unlike the totalitarianism of the twentieth century. We are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism. Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience.And the time to do just that is now.”
Confessions of a book addict 