Scan barcode
lpm100's reviews
726 reviews
The Necessity of Exile: Essays from a Distance by Shaul Magid
informative
medium-paced
Book Review (1591 words; 5m47s to read)
Shaul Magid
The Necessity of Exile
4/5 stars
"Too many words loses information"
*******
The number one value of this book is that it is an overview of a lot of thought from different Jewish non/anti Zionists.
You have loopy Jewish academics on one hand (Judith "they"Butler) and loopy Jewish rabbis on the other (Teitelbaum, Satmar) that have separate experiences but mutual conclusions.
And in between are a lot of interesting thinkers (all with citations) that see reasons for Jews to stay right where they are. (MM Schneerson (p.280), for example, saw the United States as "a place where Jews could complete the necessary work of purification before Moshiach.")
There are a lot of interesting philosophical questions about what is Judaism.
Is it related to land?
Or is ethical monotheism place independent?
Does the diaspora maintain strong practice and settlement of Israel vitiate the same practice? (Some in the diaspora will assimilate, and others will be extra on guard to avoid assimilation. Not the same dynamic as in Eretz Israel.)
Diaspora Jews are just as Jewish as Israeli Jews, and probably a lot wealthier with fewer headaches. Can Jewish sovereignty be justified on a cost benefit basis given that nationalism is actually more expensive than exile (golah) when you run the numbers?
I thought I would give this type of literature a second try, because the first book that I read of this type ("No State Solution," by Daniel Boyarin) was about as reasonably intelligible as the Sokal hoax paper.
This book does have the advantage of superior readability.
On the other hand: Imagine my surprise when I picked this book up and saw that it was endorsed by.... Daniel Boyarin. Also, Magid cited Hannah Arendt as a source--among many other "interesting" types.
With the Daniel Boyarin book in my mental register: It really is a lot of old wine in new bottles here.
In many cases, we have academics (who tend to live nowhere on this planet) and Rabbis with corresponding training (also not so useful for living anywhere on this planet) compete see just how far from reality each can diverge / how many words can be used to say nothing in particular. (How else can you deal with the sentence (p.209): "In the case of Kook, secular principles were absorbed into a dialectical cosmology founded on a highly romanticized Kabbalistic metaphysics." )
It looks like this author grew up in a secular family, and he became a Baal Teshuva and then went to Israel and lived as a "Haredi hippie" (p.68) in one of their anti Zionist communities for about 4 to 5 years and one marriage and then he became tired of that.
Later he became a Zionist, a citizen of Israel, an IDF soldier ("second tier," one that never saw combat). And finally, a post Zionist/counter Zionist.
All things considered, this is an excellent exposition of critiques of Zionism / cases for non Zionism, but through Jewish eyes. (99.9% of people who call themselves anti-Zionists don't have this level of discourse, but instead use that designation as a fig leaf for anti-Semitism.)
Of the book:
-9 chapters plus a two-page "Outro"/20 page Intro
-297 pages of prose over 9 chapters + intro is about 30 pages each.
-104 sources (22 journal articles, ≈7 magazine articles, 1 lecture).
-≈0.33 sources per page. Not well sourced.
-No index
*******
MAJOR POINT ONE is that this book does not need to be read in order, because it is actually a bunch of freestanding essays (of relative degrees of quality) stapled together as a book.
I will just abstract one each, the best and the worst to review, so as to not to get too Talmudic (defined here as "writing an expansion that is actually many times longer than the source text"-- the Talmud is about 34 times longer than the Five Books of Moses).
MAJOR POINT TWO is that I can tell that this guy has done a lot of Gemara, because:
1. His level of hair splitting is positively...... Talmudic.
Example: In Chapter 7, he asks the question "Are the Jews an oppressed people today?" And then he separates anti-Semitism from oppression based on whether or not anti-Semitism has an effect on the ability of Jewish people to live their lives freely while being identifiably Jewish. (p.165: "In short, oppression is hatred coupled with power.")
But then he pulls (what he must know) is a switcheroo by defining the Israeli Jews as "oppressors" and Palestinians as "oppressed," even though nobody in Israel is saying that Arabs cannot live as Muslims / Arabs; only that they can't set up a state whose manifest function is to destroy Jewish people.
Or, could he mean that anyone who lives as a subject people is "oppressed," by definition?
Of course, he (again) cites Hannah Arendt.
And predictably, Maggid trots out the old canard that "racism is only true if somebody has power over somebody else, and people who are powerless cannot be racist."
2. Reality just does not exist for this guy. (The same way it does not for people who sit in the Beth Midrash for decades on end, avoiding any productive work. And who could tell you anything about any of the Six Orders of The Talmud, but couldn't tell you anything so mundane as the price of a gallon of gas or how to write a CV to seek employment.)
So, he talks about Aviva Cantor and Meir Kahane who insist that America is no exception to ostensible Jewish oppression.
It's almost like the author doesn't notice that 70% of Jews marry non-Jewish people, or that Jews have the first or second highest income of any ethnic group.
The author draws some bizarre symmetry between Jewish reticence to make a fetish of oppression for 20 centuries to militant blacks who do not hesitate to speak of their oppression (p.171).
People (*other* than black people) who live in the world that we wake up in every day realize that part of functioning in present times is to have some sense of closure toward events of the past - - no matter how horrific.
How much do we even believe (the multiply cited) Aviva Cantor? Immigration to Israel is the only solution to "resolve such oppression," but that's exactly where she does not live! (p. 172)
There's also commentary about Jews obligation "to conform to Christian America's perception of them" (p. 175).
I don't know what that could mean, because Americans don't have any religiously rooted perception of Jewish people because they have NO idea about the practice of Judaism. (You ask 100 people EACH in a trailer park/ black ghetto / middle class white bread neighborhood "What is Mincha?" and see if it takes more than one hand to count how many people have any semblance of an answer.)
A few more howlers in this chapter.
1. Frantz Fanon is a "groundbreaking theorist" (p.191).
2. (p.189) According to Deborah Lipstadt, "Philosemites are anti-semites who like Jews."
3. (p. 198) "Anti-Semitism is hatred of Jews qua Jews." (Not quite sure how that is an upgrade on "Anti-Semitism is hatred of Jews." But time I guess anything can seem profound if you just use the word "qua" enough times over 46 pages.)
*******
The chapter on Jews, un-Jews, and anti-Jews is quite good actually.
Magid shows how people on the opposite side of the Zionist / anti-Zionist camps actually show similar epistemic foundations. (And this is a running theme throughout his book: opposite camps are really on opposite sides of the same circle.)
1. (p. 110) "Stalin said that Jews are not a nation because they lack the two essential attributes of nations: language and territory. And many Zionists agreed with those claims!"
2. (p. 111) Theodore Herzl once, advocated mass conversion to Christianity as the only solution to the Jewish question in European politics.
3. (p. 105) Some Zionist thinkers imagined that it is a replacement for Judaism; returning to the land of Israel was meant to make the Jewish religion superfluous. Mikhail Yosef Berdyczewski thought that he was "the last Jew and the first Hebrew."
Quotes:
(p. 152) Every civilization finds it necessary to negotiate compromises with its own values. (Attributed to Golda Meir).
Vocabulary:
alterity
golah≠galut
Zionist ≠diaspora nationalist
autochthony
Second order thoughts:
Too much talking and thinking has actually made this situation a lot worse-You have a bunch of professional chatterers speculating about so many counterfactual possibilities, that nobody can agree on a single course of action.
I think that Israel should probably take some lessons from China (which has conquered huge swathes of territory with MINIMAL DISCUSSION.)
China started out as 890K mi² and are now 3.7mln mi²-- an acquisition of 2.8mln mi² in 23 centuries. (About 1200 mi² per year. About 34.6 mi on one edge of territory. About 10 times the square mileage of Detroit. Every / single/year.)
Gaza and the West Bank are 2,314 mi² COMBINED--2 years worth of territorial acquisition at Chinese rates.
And this argument has been going on, in fits and starts for about 77 years at this point about whether certain parts are disputed/occupied/respect international law (blah blah blah).
To think: If somebody had started working on the incorporation of the disputed territories from 1948, that would have been exactly 30 square miles per year. (A piece of territory 5.5 mi on one edge.)
If this incorporation had been started in 1967, that would have been about 39.9 mi² per year.(6.3 mi² on one edge per year. )
Shaul Magid
The Necessity of Exile
4/5 stars
"Too many words loses information"
*******
The number one value of this book is that it is an overview of a lot of thought from different Jewish non/anti Zionists.
You have loopy Jewish academics on one hand (Judith "they"Butler) and loopy Jewish rabbis on the other (Teitelbaum, Satmar) that have separate experiences but mutual conclusions.
And in between are a lot of interesting thinkers (all with citations) that see reasons for Jews to stay right where they are. (MM Schneerson (p.280), for example, saw the United States as "a place where Jews could complete the necessary work of purification before Moshiach.")
There are a lot of interesting philosophical questions about what is Judaism.
Is it related to land?
Or is ethical monotheism place independent?
Does the diaspora maintain strong practice and settlement of Israel vitiate the same practice? (Some in the diaspora will assimilate, and others will be extra on guard to avoid assimilation. Not the same dynamic as in Eretz Israel.)
Diaspora Jews are just as Jewish as Israeli Jews, and probably a lot wealthier with fewer headaches. Can Jewish sovereignty be justified on a cost benefit basis given that nationalism is actually more expensive than exile (golah) when you run the numbers?
I thought I would give this type of literature a second try, because the first book that I read of this type ("No State Solution," by Daniel Boyarin) was about as reasonably intelligible as the Sokal hoax paper.
This book does have the advantage of superior readability.
On the other hand: Imagine my surprise when I picked this book up and saw that it was endorsed by.... Daniel Boyarin. Also, Magid cited Hannah Arendt as a source--among many other "interesting" types.
With the Daniel Boyarin book in my mental register: It really is a lot of old wine in new bottles here.
In many cases, we have academics (who tend to live nowhere on this planet) and Rabbis with corresponding training (also not so useful for living anywhere on this planet) compete see just how far from reality each can diverge / how many words can be used to say nothing in particular. (How else can you deal with the sentence (p.209): "In the case of Kook, secular principles were absorbed into a dialectical cosmology founded on a highly romanticized Kabbalistic metaphysics." )
It looks like this author grew up in a secular family, and he became a Baal Teshuva and then went to Israel and lived as a "Haredi hippie" (p.68) in one of their anti Zionist communities for about 4 to 5 years and one marriage and then he became tired of that.
Later he became a Zionist, a citizen of Israel, an IDF soldier ("second tier," one that never saw combat). And finally, a post Zionist/counter Zionist.
All things considered, this is an excellent exposition of critiques of Zionism / cases for non Zionism, but through Jewish eyes. (99.9% of people who call themselves anti-Zionists don't have this level of discourse, but instead use that designation as a fig leaf for anti-Semitism.)
Of the book:
-9 chapters plus a two-page "Outro"/20 page Intro
-297 pages of prose over 9 chapters + intro is about 30 pages each.
-104 sources (22 journal articles, ≈7 magazine articles, 1 lecture).
-≈0.33 sources per page. Not well sourced.
-No index
*******
MAJOR POINT ONE is that this book does not need to be read in order, because it is actually a bunch of freestanding essays (of relative degrees of quality) stapled together as a book.
I will just abstract one each, the best and the worst to review, so as to not to get too Talmudic (defined here as "writing an expansion that is actually many times longer than the source text"-- the Talmud is about 34 times longer than the Five Books of Moses).
MAJOR POINT TWO is that I can tell that this guy has done a lot of Gemara, because:
1. His level of hair splitting is positively...... Talmudic.
Example: In Chapter 7, he asks the question "Are the Jews an oppressed people today?" And then he separates anti-Semitism from oppression based on whether or not anti-Semitism has an effect on the ability of Jewish people to live their lives freely while being identifiably Jewish. (p.165: "In short, oppression is hatred coupled with power.")
But then he pulls (what he must know) is a switcheroo by defining the Israeli Jews as "oppressors" and Palestinians as "oppressed," even though nobody in Israel is saying that Arabs cannot live as Muslims / Arabs; only that they can't set up a state whose manifest function is to destroy Jewish people.
Or, could he mean that anyone who lives as a subject people is "oppressed," by definition?
Of course, he (again) cites Hannah Arendt.
And predictably, Maggid trots out the old canard that "racism is only true if somebody has power over somebody else, and people who are powerless cannot be racist."
2. Reality just does not exist for this guy. (The same way it does not for people who sit in the Beth Midrash for decades on end, avoiding any productive work. And who could tell you anything about any of the Six Orders of The Talmud, but couldn't tell you anything so mundane as the price of a gallon of gas or how to write a CV to seek employment.)
So, he talks about Aviva Cantor and Meir Kahane who insist that America is no exception to ostensible Jewish oppression.
It's almost like the author doesn't notice that 70% of Jews marry non-Jewish people, or that Jews have the first or second highest income of any ethnic group.
The author draws some bizarre symmetry between Jewish reticence to make a fetish of oppression for 20 centuries to militant blacks who do not hesitate to speak of their oppression (p.171).
People (*other* than black people) who live in the world that we wake up in every day realize that part of functioning in present times is to have some sense of closure toward events of the past - - no matter how horrific.
How much do we even believe (the multiply cited) Aviva Cantor? Immigration to Israel is the only solution to "resolve such oppression," but that's exactly where she does not live! (p. 172)
There's also commentary about Jews obligation "to conform to Christian America's perception of them" (p. 175).
I don't know what that could mean, because Americans don't have any religiously rooted perception of Jewish people because they have NO idea about the practice of Judaism. (You ask 100 people EACH in a trailer park/ black ghetto / middle class white bread neighborhood "What is Mincha?" and see if it takes more than one hand to count how many people have any semblance of an answer.)
A few more howlers in this chapter.
1. Frantz Fanon is a "groundbreaking theorist" (p.191).
2. (p.189) According to Deborah Lipstadt, "Philosemites are anti-semites who like Jews."
3. (p. 198) "Anti-Semitism is hatred of Jews qua Jews." (Not quite sure how that is an upgrade on "Anti-Semitism is hatred of Jews." But time I guess anything can seem profound if you just use the word "qua" enough times over 46 pages.)
*******
The chapter on Jews, un-Jews, and anti-Jews is quite good actually.
Magid shows how people on the opposite side of the Zionist / anti-Zionist camps actually show similar epistemic foundations. (And this is a running theme throughout his book: opposite camps are really on opposite sides of the same circle.)
1. (p. 110) "Stalin said that Jews are not a nation because they lack the two essential attributes of nations: language and territory. And many Zionists agreed with those claims!"
2. (p. 111) Theodore Herzl once, advocated mass conversion to Christianity as the only solution to the Jewish question in European politics.
3. (p. 105) Some Zionist thinkers imagined that it is a replacement for Judaism; returning to the land of Israel was meant to make the Jewish religion superfluous. Mikhail Yosef Berdyczewski thought that he was "the last Jew and the first Hebrew."
Quotes:
(p. 152) Every civilization finds it necessary to negotiate compromises with its own values. (Attributed to Golda Meir).
Vocabulary:
alterity
golah≠galut
Zionist ≠diaspora nationalist
autochthony
Second order thoughts:
Too much talking and thinking has actually made this situation a lot worse-You have a bunch of professional chatterers speculating about so many counterfactual possibilities, that nobody can agree on a single course of action.
I think that Israel should probably take some lessons from China (which has conquered huge swathes of territory with MINIMAL DISCUSSION.)
China started out as 890K mi² and are now 3.7mln mi²-- an acquisition of 2.8mln mi² in 23 centuries. (About 1200 mi² per year. About 34.6 mi on one edge of territory. About 10 times the square mileage of Detroit. Every / single/year.)
Gaza and the West Bank are 2,314 mi² COMBINED--2 years worth of territorial acquisition at Chinese rates.
And this argument has been going on, in fits and starts for about 77 years at this point about whether certain parts are disputed/occupied/respect international law (blah blah blah).
To think: If somebody had started working on the incorporation of the disputed territories from 1948, that would have been exactly 30 square miles per year. (A piece of territory 5.5 mi on one edge.)
If this incorporation had been started in 1967, that would have been about 39.9 mi² per year.(6.3 mi² on one edge per year. )
Date-Onomics: How Dating Became a Lopsided Numbers Game by Jon Birger
informative
fast-paced
3.0
Book Review
Dateonomics
Jon Birger
3/5 stars
"Unnecessarily college-centric view of hoeflation"
*******
Of the book:
- 178 pages over a chapters; 22 pages per chapter average.
-index
-No bibliography, No point citations, no idea of how well sourced the book is.
-Much is anecdotal. Plural of "anecdote" is not "data"
*******
This book only takes a few hours to read, and that's fine because that's probably all it's worth.
There are a few problems:
1. It is a bit too college centric. A lot of people don't realize this, but something like 61% of Americans do not go to undergraduate. Author even says that (p.104) "challenges faced by Blue collar men do not receive nearly the attention nor sympathy heaped on the dating rules of urban, professional women."
2. A lot of these strictures described are self-imposed.
a. So, if someone insists on ONLY dating college graduates, they are deliberately excluding 61% of the market.
b. If you are a college graduate who is working at Starbucks as a barista, is a well-paid skilled tradesman really so beneath you? Same thing with people that are working Uber as an adjunct in spite of having a PhD in English.
Let's be realistic here.
3. He does not take into account this phenomenon called "hoeflation" (defined in the Urban Dictionary for those who don't know). In real life, 90% of women are after 10% of men under ordinary circumstances. So, I wonder how much difference the lopsidedness really makes?
And it does seem true that the last people to realize that female beauty depreciates quickly is women who let a few too many years get away from them.
4. In some sense, this idea of "knowing your value" and "finding your market" is something that everybody goes through. (Do we really need to go over the sociological cliché of black men with overweight white women?)
The author notices some changing behaviors in response to differences in the dating market-- and none of them are exactly unpredictable, to be honest.
It is nice to see them discussed in one place, albeit it in a desultory way.
Everybody else in the world has to figure out That changing conditions in the dating market require different strategies, but fluffy white college educated women seem to be worth an entire book.
5. Author talks about the manufactured shidduch crisis in Orthodoxy; As somebody who is on the inside of this, I would have to say that it is just that: MANUFACTURED.
a. It seems like I've heard the story 1001 times before of people passing over a perfectly normal, healthy people because of some imaginary philosophical barrier. (And other orthodox Jewish authors have noticed this self-generated morass: Penina Shtauber, Chananiya Weissman. Some authors have even written their own stories about failure to match because of their own stupidity: Sarah Lavane.)
b. The author described some number of Jewish women having anorexia because they were afraid they would be unmatchable.
Like these women have never heard of black men? (As quiet as it is kept, there is even a subset of white men who like big women.)
*******
I am interested in this because I have several sons and I'd like to have some ideas about their prospects - - even though this book is 12 years old at this point.
There are some things that are true with the benefit of hindsight, and caveats that I would give my own sons:
1. Even if you go someplace where you have your pick of the women (let's say the fabled, multiply mentioned Sarah Lawrence college), that has its own downside:
a. A person's whole life is not spent in undergraduate, and that high availability will be true but for a short period of life.
b. A guy could start putting his expectations too high when he is in a situation where access to trim is too easy.
And it is really hard to lower one's expectations than it is to have them already low and be pleasantly surprised. (Trust me on this.)
c. As much as the author talks about Sarah Lawrence, the price tag for that is $90,920 per annum (with all the fees included). Over a 4-year degree: $363,680. Or, at the rate of one sexual encounter per day for an entire 4 years of university, that works out to $249.10 per day. $7,567.67 per month. (Sarah Lawrence has 1,671 people on campus. About the size of a large high school.)
WAY too much to pay just for trim--And we are assuming 0% interest for this example. (Sugar babies are $1,500 to $2000 per month. Top tier sugar babies are $6,000. If you have 363K to burn, a $2,000 a month sugar baby for 4 years would be $96,000, and You could go to a respectable State College for Engineering for maybe $40,000 and still have enough money left over to completely pay the mortgage off on a house.)
Son: "Getting access to a woman's moist bits is going to have some type of cost, and that is to be expected.
"But you really have to think about how much you are willing to forgo for something that one of every two people on the planet has."
2. College is not the whole world.
3. You can find good women at shul that are marriage minded and have little to no mileage on them.
4. I have a number of relatives (male and female) that had WAY TOO MUCH sexual choice, and it led to either:
a. no children,
b. outside children
c. children that turned into a child support liability (baby mamas don't need permission to put you on child support).
5. If you spend 4 years at undergraduate (or maybe six?) for a degree that is useless, that is time that you cannot get back.
Verdict: This book is okay to sketch some ideas, but it does require thinking beyond the first step.
Dateonomics
Jon Birger
3/5 stars
"Unnecessarily college-centric view of hoeflation"
*******
Of the book:
- 178 pages over a chapters; 22 pages per chapter average.
-index
-No bibliography, No point citations, no idea of how well sourced the book is.
-Much is anecdotal. Plural of "anecdote" is not "data"
*******
This book only takes a few hours to read, and that's fine because that's probably all it's worth.
There are a few problems:
1. It is a bit too college centric. A lot of people don't realize this, but something like 61% of Americans do not go to undergraduate. Author even says that (p.104) "challenges faced by Blue collar men do not receive nearly the attention nor sympathy heaped on the dating rules of urban, professional women."
2. A lot of these strictures described are self-imposed.
a. So, if someone insists on ONLY dating college graduates, they are deliberately excluding 61% of the market.
b. If you are a college graduate who is working at Starbucks as a barista, is a well-paid skilled tradesman really so beneath you? Same thing with people that are working Uber as an adjunct in spite of having a PhD in English.
Let's be realistic here.
3. He does not take into account this phenomenon called "hoeflation" (defined in the Urban Dictionary for those who don't know). In real life, 90% of women are after 10% of men under ordinary circumstances. So, I wonder how much difference the lopsidedness really makes?
And it does seem true that the last people to realize that female beauty depreciates quickly is women who let a few too many years get away from them.
4. In some sense, this idea of "knowing your value" and "finding your market" is something that everybody goes through. (Do we really need to go over the sociological cliché of black men with overweight white women?)
The author notices some changing behaviors in response to differences in the dating market-- and none of them are exactly unpredictable, to be honest.
It is nice to see them discussed in one place, albeit it in a desultory way.
Everybody else in the world has to figure out That changing conditions in the dating market require different strategies, but fluffy white college educated women seem to be worth an entire book.
5. Author talks about the manufactured shidduch crisis in Orthodoxy; As somebody who is on the inside of this, I would have to say that it is just that: MANUFACTURED.
a. It seems like I've heard the story 1001 times before of people passing over a perfectly normal, healthy people because of some imaginary philosophical barrier. (And other orthodox Jewish authors have noticed this self-generated morass: Penina Shtauber, Chananiya Weissman. Some authors have even written their own stories about failure to match because of their own stupidity: Sarah Lavane.)
b. The author described some number of Jewish women having anorexia because they were afraid they would be unmatchable.
Like these women have never heard of black men? (As quiet as it is kept, there is even a subset of white men who like big women.)
*******
I am interested in this because I have several sons and I'd like to have some ideas about their prospects - - even though this book is 12 years old at this point.
There are some things that are true with the benefit of hindsight, and caveats that I would give my own sons:
1. Even if you go someplace where you have your pick of the women (let's say the fabled, multiply mentioned Sarah Lawrence college), that has its own downside:
a. A person's whole life is not spent in undergraduate, and that high availability will be true but for a short period of life.
b. A guy could start putting his expectations too high when he is in a situation where access to trim is too easy.
And it is really hard to lower one's expectations than it is to have them already low and be pleasantly surprised. (Trust me on this.)
c. As much as the author talks about Sarah Lawrence, the price tag for that is $90,920 per annum (with all the fees included). Over a 4-year degree: $363,680. Or, at the rate of one sexual encounter per day for an entire 4 years of university, that works out to $249.10 per day. $7,567.67 per month. (Sarah Lawrence has 1,671 people on campus. About the size of a large high school.)
WAY too much to pay just for trim--And we are assuming 0% interest for this example. (Sugar babies are $1,500 to $2000 per month. Top tier sugar babies are $6,000. If you have 363K to burn, a $2,000 a month sugar baby for 4 years would be $96,000, and You could go to a respectable State College for Engineering for maybe $40,000 and still have enough money left over to completely pay the mortgage off on a house.)
Son: "Getting access to a woman's moist bits is going to have some type of cost, and that is to be expected.
"But you really have to think about how much you are willing to forgo for something that one of every two people on the planet has."
2. College is not the whole world.
3. You can find good women at shul that are marriage minded and have little to no mileage on them.
4. I have a number of relatives (male and female) that had WAY TOO MUCH sexual choice, and it led to either:
a. no children,
b. outside children
c. children that turned into a child support liability (baby mamas don't need permission to put you on child support).
5. If you spend 4 years at undergraduate (or maybe six?) for a degree that is useless, that is time that you cannot get back.
Verdict: This book is okay to sketch some ideas, but it does require thinking beyond the first step.
Catch the Jew! by Tuvia Tenenbom
funny
informative
reflective
sad
fast-paced
5.0
Book Review
Catch The Jew
5/5 stars
Through the Looking Glass type inanity
*******
This gonzo journalist author is super smart.
Hebrew as a first language. And then: German, English, Yiddish, and Arabic.
So, he decides to come back to Israel decades after leaving and pass himself off as "Tobi the German" in order to be a fly on the wall and write his impressions from that experience.
And this book really is priceless because most people who take up these type of crusades take them up on behalf of people about which they know nothing.
Toby the German talks to them all, and in their language: Settlers. Prostitutes. NGO workers. Token Arabs. Jewish Weirdos like Shlomo Sand/ Gideon Levy. Professional activists/grievancemongers.
400 NGOs working just between Gaza and the West Bank. (As of 2013.) About one every 5.7 mi².
To sum up the book in one sentence, the author says (p.143) "For a moment I think I have just been dropped into a mental institution," and I whole-heartedly agree.
Who are the cast of characters?
1. Well fed and employed academic Arab professional grievance mongers.
2. Loopy White People from various parts of the world. ("Loopy," as used here, means people that go somewhere and get up in arms about some shit that has NOTHING to do with them. It could be straight people being concerned about gay marriage. It could be white people who never have abortions squawking about the right of black people to unalive their own children. It could be Europeans blabbering on about Tibet, in spite of never having been there.)
In this case, it is ones that work for non-governmental organizations whose job it is is to demonize the Israeli government and center themselves within a conflict that has nothing to do with them.
3. Loopy Jewish People. ("Loopy," as used here, means Jewish people that choose to see each other as enemies and their enemies as friends.)
-The author talks about his grandfather refusing to leave Hungary because he would rather die than liv wee with Zionists. And the Germans rewarded him with an immediate burial right there in Hungary.
-Anti-Zionist Haredim.
-Left wing pro-Palestinian anti-semitic Jews.
Other, second order thoughts:
1. Only a small number of American Jews go to live in Israel, and now that I see the complexity of the situation I don't wonder why.
2. It's very interesting the Arab fascination with Adolf Hitler. A lot of people like to imagine that these guys are hapless victims, but I really don't think that's the case.
Given their violent, destructive nature.... If there were no Jews there for them to fight against, they would just be fighting with each other.
It seems like it's one of those things that you would have to be there to understand.
3. It sure must be nice to be an Affluent White Person. These Fabulous White People that the author describes in the book don't speak any Arabic, don't know any Arabs, and have not read anything about the situation that they are protesting/teaching about.
Nonetheless, governments and donors give funds for Fabulous White People to turn the entire world into a self-actualization therapy exercise.
Idiots like Ibram X Kendi are whiter than what they realize, their names not withstanding.
4. There are ways to expand a country's territorial footprint, and I think that Israel should probably take some lessons from China. (They started out as 890K mi² and are now 3.7mln mi². 2.8mln mi² in 23 centuries. About 1200 mi² per year. Gaza and the West Bank are 2,314 mi² COMBINED--2 years worth of territorial acquisition at Chinese rates-- that has been fought over for the past 85 years.)
5. How is there even a state in Israel at all? If they are not able to keep that state, No one will ever have thought that it was a sustainable situation.
-A monstrous infestation of non-working, non taxpaying, politically destructive Haredim.
-Surrounded by a bunch of hostile neighbors.
-20% of the population are Arabs that call themselves Palestinians.
The author says as much in the epilogue: "If history is any guide, Israel will not survive. Besieged by hate from without and from within, no land can survive for very long.... [The Israelis] hate themselves, they belie themselves, they are full of fears and many of them rush to get another passport."
6. Lindy effect: something can be expected to last for as long as it is already lasted. One of the MKs in this book predicted Peace between Arabs and Jews within 10 years (p.377). That was in 2013.
Verdict: Recommend
Quotes:
(??)There are people who are alcoholics and there are people who are recovering alcoholics, meaning they've stopped drinking. I happen to be a recovering intellectual and I draw from my former self to understand this intellectual.
(98) He who cannot explain his thesis in simple words is he who has no thesis.
(124) It's mind-boggling to me how people who say they love Palestinians so much and dedicate their lives for preserving Palestinian identity and culture don't even entertain the thought of studying this culture. They know no Quran, no hadith, and no Arabic.
(130) I look at him and think: this is the biggest proof that God exists. Who else could create such an idiot as this Swiss? No Big Bang ever could.
(162) No wonder Silvio Berlusconi was the longest serving postwar prime minister of Italy. It takes the Italians ages before they figure out they make no sense.
(212) And then General Jibril has an idea, a brilliant one: "Your name, from now on, is Abu Ali. (The Brave. The Hero.)" What they don't tell me, and maybe they assume I already know, is which other white man the Palestinians have honored with this very name. Adolf Hitler.
(237) Being a human rights activist in our time is to be a persona, not a philosophy; it's a fad, it's a fashion. Human rights activist does not look for facts or logic; it's all about a certain dress code, "cool" clothing, about language, diction, expressions, and certain manners.
(244) Like Nadia, eternity gets higher education for free. And like her, she studies with the Jews and she spits on them. These two women, I think, are smarter than the Jews who pay for their education.
(346) If you deduct from the total population of Israel those who believe in dead men or flying horses or camels, the people you will have left are the NGO activists and the editor-in-chief of Haaretz.
(329) A Mercedes and an iPhone, coupled with a law degree from an Israeli University, are the truest trademarks of the poor. This is the theater of the absurd, and we're only in scene 1.
(328) The man drives a Mercedes and thinks he is an Auschwitz.
(289-interview with a hooker) "I live with my man, my mate." (Does he mind what you're doing?) "He is a Haredi Jew." (Does he know what you are doing?) " That's how we met! Outside, he puts on those black clothes of the Haredi. But inside the house, he is normal. Really normal."
(284) There are so many anti-Israel [NGO] groups within Israel that is not simple to choose the best one. I go by the alphabet.
(386) You can pause your hatred [of Jews] because of an uncomfortable Auschwitz moment, as the Europeans did a few decades ago, but to completely erase the habit of hatred is a much harder task.
Vocab
zekel beiner (Yiddish? German?). Sack of bones
Yekke Potz. Internal Jewish epithet. "German Jewish idiot."
Catch The Jew
5/5 stars
Through the Looking Glass type inanity
*******
This gonzo journalist author is super smart.
Hebrew as a first language. And then: German, English, Yiddish, and Arabic.
So, he decides to come back to Israel decades after leaving and pass himself off as "Tobi the German" in order to be a fly on the wall and write his impressions from that experience.
And this book really is priceless because most people who take up these type of crusades take them up on behalf of people about which they know nothing.
Toby the German talks to them all, and in their language: Settlers. Prostitutes. NGO workers. Token Arabs. Jewish Weirdos like Shlomo Sand/ Gideon Levy. Professional activists/grievancemongers.
400 NGOs working just between Gaza and the West Bank. (As of 2013.) About one every 5.7 mi².
To sum up the book in one sentence, the author says (p.143) "For a moment I think I have just been dropped into a mental institution," and I whole-heartedly agree.
Who are the cast of characters?
1. Well fed and employed academic Arab professional grievance mongers.
2. Loopy White People from various parts of the world. ("Loopy," as used here, means people that go somewhere and get up in arms about some shit that has NOTHING to do with them. It could be straight people being concerned about gay marriage. It could be white people who never have abortions squawking about the right of black people to unalive their own children. It could be Europeans blabbering on about Tibet, in spite of never having been there.)
In this case, it is ones that work for non-governmental organizations whose job it is is to demonize the Israeli government and center themselves within a conflict that has nothing to do with them.
3. Loopy Jewish People. ("Loopy," as used here, means Jewish people that choose to see each other as enemies and their enemies as friends.)
-The author talks about his grandfather refusing to leave Hungary because he would rather die than liv wee with Zionists. And the Germans rewarded him with an immediate burial right there in Hungary.
-Anti-Zionist Haredim.
-Left wing pro-Palestinian anti-semitic Jews.
Other, second order thoughts:
1. Only a small number of American Jews go to live in Israel, and now that I see the complexity of the situation I don't wonder why.
2. It's very interesting the Arab fascination with Adolf Hitler. A lot of people like to imagine that these guys are hapless victims, but I really don't think that's the case.
Given their violent, destructive nature.... If there were no Jews there for them to fight against, they would just be fighting with each other.
It seems like it's one of those things that you would have to be there to understand.
3. It sure must be nice to be an Affluent White Person. These Fabulous White People that the author describes in the book don't speak any Arabic, don't know any Arabs, and have not read anything about the situation that they are protesting/teaching about.
Nonetheless, governments and donors give funds for Fabulous White People to turn the entire world into a self-actualization therapy exercise.
Idiots like Ibram X Kendi are whiter than what they realize, their names not withstanding.
4. There are ways to expand a country's territorial footprint, and I think that Israel should probably take some lessons from China. (They started out as 890K mi² and are now 3.7mln mi². 2.8mln mi² in 23 centuries. About 1200 mi² per year. Gaza and the West Bank are 2,314 mi² COMBINED--2 years worth of territorial acquisition at Chinese rates-- that has been fought over for the past 85 years.)
5. How is there even a state in Israel at all? If they are not able to keep that state, No one will ever have thought that it was a sustainable situation.
-A monstrous infestation of non-working, non taxpaying, politically destructive Haredim.
-Surrounded by a bunch of hostile neighbors.
-20% of the population are Arabs that call themselves Palestinians.
The author says as much in the epilogue: "If history is any guide, Israel will not survive. Besieged by hate from without and from within, no land can survive for very long.... [The Israelis] hate themselves, they belie themselves, they are full of fears and many of them rush to get another passport."
6. Lindy effect: something can be expected to last for as long as it is already lasted. One of the MKs in this book predicted Peace between Arabs and Jews within 10 years (p.377). That was in 2013.
Verdict: Recommend
Quotes:
(??)There are people who are alcoholics and there are people who are recovering alcoholics, meaning they've stopped drinking. I happen to be a recovering intellectual and I draw from my former self to understand this intellectual.
(98) He who cannot explain his thesis in simple words is he who has no thesis.
(124) It's mind-boggling to me how people who say they love Palestinians so much and dedicate their lives for preserving Palestinian identity and culture don't even entertain the thought of studying this culture. They know no Quran, no hadith, and no Arabic.
(130) I look at him and think: this is the biggest proof that God exists. Who else could create such an idiot as this Swiss? No Big Bang ever could.
(162) No wonder Silvio Berlusconi was the longest serving postwar prime minister of Italy. It takes the Italians ages before they figure out they make no sense.
(212) And then General Jibril has an idea, a brilliant one: "Your name, from now on, is Abu Ali. (The Brave. The Hero.)" What they don't tell me, and maybe they assume I already know, is which other white man the Palestinians have honored with this very name. Adolf Hitler.
(237) Being a human rights activist in our time is to be a persona, not a philosophy; it's a fad, it's a fashion. Human rights activist does not look for facts or logic; it's all about a certain dress code, "cool" clothing, about language, diction, expressions, and certain manners.
(244) Like Nadia, eternity gets higher education for free. And like her, she studies with the Jews and she spits on them. These two women, I think, are smarter than the Jews who pay for their education.
(346) If you deduct from the total population of Israel those who believe in dead men or flying horses or camels, the people you will have left are the NGO activists and the editor-in-chief of Haaretz.
(329) A Mercedes and an iPhone, coupled with a law degree from an Israeli University, are the truest trademarks of the poor. This is the theater of the absurd, and we're only in scene 1.
(328) The man drives a Mercedes and thinks he is an Auschwitz.
(289-interview with a hooker) "I live with my man, my mate." (Does he mind what you're doing?) "He is a Haredi Jew." (Does he know what you are doing?) " That's how we met! Outside, he puts on those black clothes of the Haredi. But inside the house, he is normal. Really normal."
(284) There are so many anti-Israel [NGO] groups within Israel that is not simple to choose the best one. I go by the alphabet.
(386) You can pause your hatred [of Jews] because of an uncomfortable Auschwitz moment, as the Europeans did a few decades ago, but to completely erase the habit of hatred is a much harder task.
Vocab
zekel beiner (Yiddish? German?). Sack of bones
Yekke Potz. Internal Jewish epithet. "German Jewish idiot."
Go Ask Alice by Beatrice Sparks
fast-paced
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
0.0
Book Review
Go Ask Alice
0/5 stars
"Even garbage can sell 5 million copies; a Mormon writes propaganda."
*******
This book/series had sold so many copies that I thought I might take a look at it, and about 1/3 of the way through the book it was clear that this was a fake book. In the genre of works such as "Roots" / "Uncle Tom's Cabin" / "The Willie Lynch letter, " the purpose was to give people a myth to live by/ push an agenda.
In this book, the point was to push the thoroughly discredited ideas that:
1. Pot is an addictive gateway drug
2. LSD is an addictive gateway drug
First problem is that both of these facts are empirically false.
Second problem is that the plausibility of this book is so low. (My information is based on a family that is littered with alcoholics and drug addicts as far as the eye can see; also, during undergraduate I spent a year working at a gas station in an inner city neighborhood and must have seen at least 10,000 black people of low intelligence walk in after puffing their brains out to buy ice cream one piece at a time after smoking.):
1. People that use drugs are not usually in the business of selling drugs. (The drug business was detailed by "Freakonomics," and they mentioned that a lot of times if sellers got into using the product, beatings were used to let them know to stay away from it.)
2. Most of the time when people become drug addicts, they don't go through a whole bunch of different drugs until they hit on one to be addicted.
So, I had one relative that was a heroin addict for several decades, but cocaine was never a thing that he liked.
Also, he snorted heroin instead of shooting it, and even in 30 years never progressed to shooting up.
3. I have multiple other relatives that are severe potheads, and no one has ever had to turn tricks for something as low value as weed.
4. When people go through an addiction, the time scales are not quite like they were in this book (which was about 2 weeks from first taste to total collapse). People have to go through first taste, and then second taste and then financial problems caused by too much. And then stealing. And then destroying family relationships. It's not overnight.
5. (p. 182) 12-year-olds don't hitchhike to San Francisco without responsible adults noticing.
6. (p. 141, 152) People don't try and force each other to smoke weed. If you don't have any money, you just don't smoke and if people don't want to smoke with you, they just don't smoke. They don't talk about needing a "fix." (p.108)
7. (p.91) Anglos don't talk about learning to speak Spanish like a Spaniard--And that's handy because NOBODY speaks Castilian Spanish outside of Spain. They talk about learning to speak it a Mexican, if they are even interested at all.
8. If one guy has 3 girls in a drug situation where copulation is possible, it will NEVER
work out that he takes turns "raping them and treating them sadistically and brutally." (p.78) Also, women don't do the same thing. (How does a woman rape another woman brutally? Maybe she makes a mean face while licking?)
-First problem is that being high makes it kind of hard to want to do that.
-Second is with *that* many available orifices, a guy's number one concern is sampling them all, and then comparing and contrasting.
9. How can a drug addict keep such a detailed diary from one place to another? This girl can't keep enough Kotex to attend to hygiene needs, but she can carry a diary, be lucid enough to remember what happened, and write it down?
10. (p.185). The author has a clueless take of opportunistic/situational lesbianism.
Give me a break.
******
Of course, the days that people could go and stay in a mental hospital for weeks on end to sort out a drug problem are LONG gone.
One good quote: "Adolescents have a very rocky and insecure time. Grown ups treat them like children yet expect them to act like adults. They give them orders like little animals, then expect them to react like mature, and always rational, self-assured persons of legal stature. It is a difficult, lost, vacillating time."
Verdict: Not worth it. Save your time and money. This book feels fake in the same way as "A Piece of Cake" (where every big dramatic event happens 5 minutes after the last) or "Manchild in the Promised Land" (where there is just SO MUCH shit that does not go together that the reader wants to discount the entire book.
Go Ask Alice
0/5 stars
"Even garbage can sell 5 million copies; a Mormon writes propaganda."
*******
This book/series had sold so many copies that I thought I might take a look at it, and about 1/3 of the way through the book it was clear that this was a fake book. In the genre of works such as "Roots" / "Uncle Tom's Cabin" / "The Willie Lynch letter, " the purpose was to give people a myth to live by/ push an agenda.
In this book, the point was to push the thoroughly discredited ideas that:
1. Pot is an addictive gateway drug
2. LSD is an addictive gateway drug
First problem is that both of these facts are empirically false.
Second problem is that the plausibility of this book is so low. (My information is based on a family that is littered with alcoholics and drug addicts as far as the eye can see; also, during undergraduate I spent a year working at a gas station in an inner city neighborhood and must have seen at least 10,000 black people of low intelligence walk in after puffing their brains out to buy ice cream one piece at a time after smoking.):
1. People that use drugs are not usually in the business of selling drugs. (The drug business was detailed by "Freakonomics," and they mentioned that a lot of times if sellers got into using the product, beatings were used to let them know to stay away from it.)
2. Most of the time when people become drug addicts, they don't go through a whole bunch of different drugs until they hit on one to be addicted.
So, I had one relative that was a heroin addict for several decades, but cocaine was never a thing that he liked.
Also, he snorted heroin instead of shooting it, and even in 30 years never progressed to shooting up.
3. I have multiple other relatives that are severe potheads, and no one has ever had to turn tricks for something as low value as weed.
4. When people go through an addiction, the time scales are not quite like they were in this book (which was about 2 weeks from first taste to total collapse). People have to go through first taste, and then second taste and then financial problems caused by too much. And then stealing. And then destroying family relationships. It's not overnight.
5. (p. 182) 12-year-olds don't hitchhike to San Francisco without responsible adults noticing.
6. (p. 141, 152) People don't try and force each other to smoke weed. If you don't have any money, you just don't smoke and if people don't want to smoke with you, they just don't smoke. They don't talk about needing a "fix." (p.108)
7. (p.91) Anglos don't talk about learning to speak Spanish like a Spaniard--And that's handy because NOBODY speaks Castilian Spanish outside of Spain. They talk about learning to speak it a Mexican, if they are even interested at all.
8. If one guy has 3 girls in a drug situation where copulation is possible, it will NEVER
work out that he takes turns "raping them and treating them sadistically and brutally." (p.78) Also, women don't do the same thing. (How does a woman rape another woman brutally? Maybe she makes a mean face while licking?)
-First problem is that being high makes it kind of hard to want to do that.
-Second is with *that* many available orifices, a guy's number one concern is sampling them all, and then comparing and contrasting.
9. How can a drug addict keep such a detailed diary from one place to another? This girl can't keep enough Kotex to attend to hygiene needs, but she can carry a diary, be lucid enough to remember what happened, and write it down?
10. (p.185). The author has a clueless take of opportunistic/situational lesbianism.
Give me a break.
******
Of course, the days that people could go and stay in a mental hospital for weeks on end to sort out a drug problem are LONG gone.
One good quote: "Adolescents have a very rocky and insecure time. Grown ups treat them like children yet expect them to act like adults. They give them orders like little animals, then expect them to react like mature, and always rational, self-assured persons of legal stature. It is a difficult, lost, vacillating time."
Verdict: Not worth it. Save your time and money. This book feels fake in the same way as "A Piece of Cake" (where every big dramatic event happens 5 minutes after the last) or "Manchild in the Promised Land" (where there is just SO MUCH shit that does not go together that the reader wants to discount the entire book.
The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined by Steven Pinker
informative
reflective
medium-paced
5.0
Book Review
"The Better Angels Of Our Nature"
5/5 stars
"A Masterwork"
*******
Of the book:
-10 chapters over 696 pages. ≈70pps/chapter
-1955 point citations. ≈2.8/page (extremely well sourced)
-1,160 bibliographic sources. ≈1.67 per page(!)
*******
When the topic under discussion is human trends over long periods of time, it's necessarily going to be an interdisciplinary discussion.
The question is: how well can it be done?
As for this book, quite well as it turns out: it's a fascinating, extended and interdisciplinary meditation on the nature of violence from a person who obviously has an exquisite intellect.
And the reader can know that because this author cites/is in communion with the best minds in his discussion. (Kahnemann. Sowell. Haidt. Bentham. Hoffer.) And because of the breadth of the survey. (Genetics. Statistics. Biology. Population genetics. Philosophy/Moral Foundations Theory. History. Neurology. Behavioral Psychology.)
*******
It's impossible to do a thorough write up of a masterwork like this one (for that matter, it was pretty tough to read).
I will just address a few of the points that made the most intense impression on me (the much-maligned availability heuristic) and hope that the reader can get something from this review.
Factoids:
(10) The Bible contains 600 passages that explicitly talk about nations/kings / individuals killing each other and there are approximately 1,000 passages in which HKB"H himself is the executioner.
(328) Utopian ideologies invite genocide for two reasons. One is that they set up a pernicious utilitarian calculus. In the Utopia, everyone is happy forever, so its moral value is infinite... How many people would it be permissible to sacrifice to attain that infinite good? A few million can seem like a pretty good bargain.
(337) 3/4 of all deaths from all 141 democidal regimes were committed by just four governments.... 80% of the deaths were caused by 4% of the regimes.
(339) 700,000 deaths in Rwanda were caused by ragtag bands of about 10,000 men.... It actually only takes a small minority of people to create a genocide.
(363) More than half of armed conflicts in 2008 embroiled Muslim countries. Sunni terrorists killed 2/3 of the world's victims of terrorism. Only about a quarter of Muslim countries elect their governments. 100 million girls in Muslim countries have had their genitals mutilated. Saudi Arabia abolished slavery in 1962 and Mauritania in 1980. Saudi Arabia convicted a man for carrying a phone booklet with Eritrean writing because they thought it was occult symbols and he went to jail for 3 years and was lashed 300 times. About a fifth as many books are translated into Arabic as Greece translates into Greek.
(397) Traditional societies (think Arabs and Bedouins) see women as property of their fathers and husbands, and so rape is conceptualized as a tort for damage goods. Of course a man cannot rape his own wife because that would be like stealing his own property.
(470) At any moment there are three times as many lapsed vegetarians as observant ones.... Vegetarianism among teenage girls is highly correlated with eating disorders.
(509) Five categories of violence. Instrumental. Dominance. Revenge. Sadistic. Ideological.
(523) Even babies prefer to interact with people of the same race and accent.
(633) Many social critics......have been smart ass comedians rather than thundering prophets. What in our psychology allows the joke to be mightier than the sword?
Thoughts:
1. (p.119) He thoroughly and methodically corrects the misinformation spread by Levitt and Dubner that lack of access to abortion can explain an increased crime rate.
2. There is a useful recapitulation of a lot of info that was attempted by Nasim Nicholas Taleb (too much ego and too many words):
a. The common mistake of using Gaussian distributions to describe phenomenon when various other distributions are available / more appropriate (Poisson, power law, etc).
b. Silent evidence / a little bit adds up over a long time. There been several thousand different conflicts that add up to way more than the most, but the biggest ones are within recent memory. When Europe was in smaller administrative units, there were way more deaths because they were more people to fight each other - - even though World War II seems so cataclysmic, there were eight other conflicts in the last five centuries that produced proportionally more casualties.
3. There is a lot of good information andthought here about deriving trends from very incomplete data sets. (Such as trying to find ways to compare conflicts when the data for the number of people dead was not written down 500 to 1,000 years ago).
4. Some people have cast aspersions on this book, I believe, because he spills the beans on Islamic-Arab barbarism.
A common refrain that you hear from people is that "It's only a tiny minority" (blah blah blah), But this author points out that it only takes a very few people to cause a lot of damage, both as an abstract possibility (power law distributions) and a documented historical reality.
5. Moral Foundations Theory is recapitulated.
6. There are a number of EXTREMELY UNCOMFORTABLE thoughts, if you take them to their logical conclusion.
a. I'm not sure what to think about the author's position. People that he would describe as "regressive" (his own Orthodox Jewish brothers) are tribal, but they are the only ones that have enough children to replenish themselves. Regressive Haredim (educated in a way more appropriate for the 11th century) have ≈5.5 children per woman --and almost all of the negative characteristics that this author describes in the book fit them to a tee. (Pinker himself has no children.) Arabs are the quintessential tribal people (female illiteracy of 26% and generally educated in way more appropriate for the 7th century), and they have 3.1 children per woman.
b. The author negatively correlates intelligence and violent crime and positively correlates intelligence and cooperation. But, where does that leave African descended people? Violent crime is highest in the blackest parts of the United States and all over Africa, and cooperation is an urban legend in sub-Saharan Africa. (Governments last there about a week at a time.)
He correlates it with economic literacy. (I think the last Communists in the world are in Africa, Latin America, and US universities.)
c. The European Union seems to be so open-minded that their brains have fallen out. That's the only way I could explain their determination to import the Muslim world that has been holding a grudge against the Europeans for the last 1,000 years.
Vocabulary:
taphonomy
seraglio
atrocitologist
strappado
ambuscade
sheefish
peccadilloes
metonym
bobbies
bargees
recrudescence
calumny
altricial
Prisoner's Dilemma
Tragedy of the Commons
Dollar Auction
synecdoche
atavistic
data snooping
Democratic Peace Theory
autarky
judder/juddering
Kantian triangle (democracy / open economy/international engagement)
commodious
myrmidon
Ad feminam
claustration
uxoricide
chary
Life History Theory
Triage Theory
bhang
overlying
goad (a spiked stick used for driving cattle)
axi pepper
Lesbian Until Graduation
subtetanizing
frugivores
mezaraic
bafflegab
homunculus/homunculi
pedomorphy
moral dumbfounding
routine tradeoff (within a single relational model)
Taboo tradeoff (sacred against secular)
tragic tradeoff (sacred against sacred)
wergild
dumbth
(Lady) Justitia
Quotes:
The distancing effect of a good story can make us forget the brutality of the world in which it was set.
(11) Their reverence for the Bible is purely talismanic..... They pay it lip service as a symbol of morality, while getting their actual morality from more modern principles.
If you really believe the failing to accept J***
s as one's Savior is a ticket to fire redemnation, then torturing a person until he acknowledges this truth is doing him the biggest favor of his life. Better a few hours now than an eternity later.
(328) A man's reach must exceed his grasp.
(343) ..... No small part of the decline of genocide is the decline of communism.
(367) Religion thrives on woolly allegory, emotional commitments to texts that no one reads, and other forms of benign hypocrisy.
(395) A man wants what a woman has - - sex. He can steal it (rape), persuade her to give it away (seduction), rent it (prostitution), lease it over the long term (marriage in the United States) or on it outright (marriage in most societies).
(397) In no society are women and in-laws obsessed with the virginity of grooms.
(420)... one can always come up with an ingenious evolutionary explanation for any phenomenon.
(433) The child study movement.... Began to replace the superstition and bunkum of old wives with the superstition and bunkum of child rearing experts.
(446) Milk carton wanted posters are examples of what criminologists call crime control theater: The advertised that something is being done without actually doing anything.
(479) Non-violence, MLK inferred, prevents a movement from being corrupted by thugs and firebrands who are drawn to adventure in mayhem. By removing any pretext for legitimate retaliation by the enemy, it stays on the positive side of the moral ledger in the eyes of third parties, while luring the enemy onto the negative side.
(484) I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure.
(493) The Balkans are a region cursed with too much history per square mile
(493) The victims of a conflict are deciduous historians and cultivators of memory. The perpetrators are pragmatists, firmly planted in the present.
(509) War is merely the continuation of policy by other means [Clausewitz]
(634) Capitalism is the exploitation of man by man; Communism is the exact opposite. [Soviet proverb]
(640) In this tissue of rationalizations, a real historian is about as welcome as a skunk at a garden party.... The elites of a hereditary cast society, he suspected, figure that no good could come from scholars nosing around and archives where they might stumble upon evidence that undermine their claims to have descended from heroes and gods.
(660) Intellectuals cannot operate at room temperature.
"The Better Angels Of Our Nature"
5/5 stars
"A Masterwork"
*******
Of the book:
-10 chapters over 696 pages. ≈70pps/chapter
-1955 point citations. ≈2.8/page (extremely well sourced)
-1,160 bibliographic sources. ≈1.67 per page(!)
*******
When the topic under discussion is human trends over long periods of time, it's necessarily going to be an interdisciplinary discussion.
The question is: how well can it be done?
As for this book, quite well as it turns out: it's a fascinating, extended and interdisciplinary meditation on the nature of violence from a person who obviously has an exquisite intellect.
And the reader can know that because this author cites/is in communion with the best minds in his discussion. (Kahnemann. Sowell. Haidt. Bentham. Hoffer.) And because of the breadth of the survey. (Genetics. Statistics. Biology. Population genetics. Philosophy/Moral Foundations Theory. History. Neurology. Behavioral Psychology.)
*******
It's impossible to do a thorough write up of a masterwork like this one (for that matter, it was pretty tough to read).
I will just address a few of the points that made the most intense impression on me (the much-maligned availability heuristic) and hope that the reader can get something from this review.
Factoids:
(10) The Bible contains 600 passages that explicitly talk about nations/kings / individuals killing each other and there are approximately 1,000 passages in which HKB"H himself is the executioner.
(328) Utopian ideologies invite genocide for two reasons. One is that they set up a pernicious utilitarian calculus. In the Utopia, everyone is happy forever, so its moral value is infinite... How many people would it be permissible to sacrifice to attain that infinite good? A few million can seem like a pretty good bargain.
(337) 3/4 of all deaths from all 141 democidal regimes were committed by just four governments.... 80% of the deaths were caused by 4% of the regimes.
(339) 700,000 deaths in Rwanda were caused by ragtag bands of about 10,000 men.... It actually only takes a small minority of people to create a genocide.
(363) More than half of armed conflicts in 2008 embroiled Muslim countries. Sunni terrorists killed 2/3 of the world's victims of terrorism. Only about a quarter of Muslim countries elect their governments. 100 million girls in Muslim countries have had their genitals mutilated. Saudi Arabia abolished slavery in 1962 and Mauritania in 1980. Saudi Arabia convicted a man for carrying a phone booklet with Eritrean writing because they thought it was occult symbols and he went to jail for 3 years and was lashed 300 times. About a fifth as many books are translated into Arabic as Greece translates into Greek.
(397) Traditional societies (think Arabs and Bedouins) see women as property of their fathers and husbands, and so rape is conceptualized as a tort for damage goods. Of course a man cannot rape his own wife because that would be like stealing his own property.
(470) At any moment there are three times as many lapsed vegetarians as observant ones.... Vegetarianism among teenage girls is highly correlated with eating disorders.
(509) Five categories of violence. Instrumental. Dominance. Revenge. Sadistic. Ideological.
(523) Even babies prefer to interact with people of the same race and accent.
(633) Many social critics......have been smart ass comedians rather than thundering prophets. What in our psychology allows the joke to be mightier than the sword?
Thoughts:
1. (p.119) He thoroughly and methodically corrects the misinformation spread by Levitt and Dubner that lack of access to abortion can explain an increased crime rate.
2. There is a useful recapitulation of a lot of info that was attempted by Nasim Nicholas Taleb (too much ego and too many words):
a. The common mistake of using Gaussian distributions to describe phenomenon when various other distributions are available / more appropriate (Poisson, power law, etc).
b. Silent evidence / a little bit adds up over a long time. There been several thousand different conflicts that add up to way more than the most, but the biggest ones are within recent memory. When Europe was in smaller administrative units, there were way more deaths because they were more people to fight each other - - even though World War II seems so cataclysmic, there were eight other conflicts in the last five centuries that produced proportionally more casualties.
3. There is a lot of good information andthought here about deriving trends from very incomplete data sets. (Such as trying to find ways to compare conflicts when the data for the number of people dead was not written down 500 to 1,000 years ago).
4. Some people have cast aspersions on this book, I believe, because he spills the beans on Islamic-Arab barbarism.
A common refrain that you hear from people is that "It's only a tiny minority" (blah blah blah), But this author points out that it only takes a very few people to cause a lot of damage, both as an abstract possibility (power law distributions) and a documented historical reality.
5. Moral Foundations Theory is recapitulated.
6. There are a number of EXTREMELY UNCOMFORTABLE thoughts, if you take them to their logical conclusion.
a. I'm not sure what to think about the author's position. People that he would describe as "regressive" (his own Orthodox Jewish brothers) are tribal, but they are the only ones that have enough children to replenish themselves. Regressive Haredim (educated in a way more appropriate for the 11th century) have ≈5.5 children per woman --and almost all of the negative characteristics that this author describes in the book fit them to a tee. (Pinker himself has no children.) Arabs are the quintessential tribal people (female illiteracy of 26% and generally educated in way more appropriate for the 7th century), and they have 3.1 children per woman.
b. The author negatively correlates intelligence and violent crime and positively correlates intelligence and cooperation. But, where does that leave African descended people? Violent crime is highest in the blackest parts of the United States and all over Africa, and cooperation is an urban legend in sub-Saharan Africa. (Governments last there about a week at a time.)
He correlates it with economic literacy. (I think the last Communists in the world are in Africa, Latin America, and US universities.)
c. The European Union seems to be so open-minded that their brains have fallen out. That's the only way I could explain their determination to import the Muslim world that has been holding a grudge against the Europeans for the last 1,000 years.
Vocabulary:
taphonomy
seraglio
atrocitologist
strappado
ambuscade
sheefish
peccadilloes
metonym
bobbies
bargees
recrudescence
calumny
altricial
Prisoner's Dilemma
Tragedy of the Commons
Dollar Auction
synecdoche
atavistic
data snooping
Democratic Peace Theory
autarky
judder/juddering
Kantian triangle (democracy / open economy/international engagement)
commodious
myrmidon
Ad feminam
claustration
uxoricide
chary
Life History Theory
Triage Theory
bhang
overlying
goad (a spiked stick used for driving cattle)
axi pepper
Lesbian Until Graduation
subtetanizing
frugivores
mezaraic
bafflegab
homunculus/homunculi
pedomorphy
moral dumbfounding
routine tradeoff (within a single relational model)
Taboo tradeoff (sacred against secular)
tragic tradeoff (sacred against sacred)
wergild
dumbth
(Lady) Justitia
Quotes:
The distancing effect of a good story can make us forget the brutality of the world in which it was set.
(11) Their reverence for the Bible is purely talismanic..... They pay it lip service as a symbol of morality, while getting their actual morality from more modern principles.
If you really believe the failing to accept J***
s as one's Savior is a ticket to fire redemnation, then torturing a person until he acknowledges this truth is doing him the biggest favor of his life. Better a few hours now than an eternity later.
(328) A man's reach must exceed his grasp.
(343) ..... No small part of the decline of genocide is the decline of communism.
(367) Religion thrives on woolly allegory, emotional commitments to texts that no one reads, and other forms of benign hypocrisy.
(395) A man wants what a woman has - - sex. He can steal it (rape), persuade her to give it away (seduction), rent it (prostitution), lease it over the long term (marriage in the United States) or on it outright (marriage in most societies).
(397) In no society are women and in-laws obsessed with the virginity of grooms.
(420)... one can always come up with an ingenious evolutionary explanation for any phenomenon.
(433) The child study movement.... Began to replace the superstition and bunkum of old wives with the superstition and bunkum of child rearing experts.
(446) Milk carton wanted posters are examples of what criminologists call crime control theater: The advertised that something is being done without actually doing anything.
(479) Non-violence, MLK inferred, prevents a movement from being corrupted by thugs and firebrands who are drawn to adventure in mayhem. By removing any pretext for legitimate retaliation by the enemy, it stays on the positive side of the moral ledger in the eyes of third parties, while luring the enemy onto the negative side.
(484) I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure.
(493) The Balkans are a region cursed with too much history per square mile
(493) The victims of a conflict are deciduous historians and cultivators of memory. The perpetrators are pragmatists, firmly planted in the present.
(509) War is merely the continuation of policy by other means [Clausewitz]
(634) Capitalism is the exploitation of man by man; Communism is the exact opposite. [Soviet proverb]
(640) In this tissue of rationalizations, a real historian is about as welcome as a skunk at a garden party.... The elites of a hereditary cast society, he suspected, figure that no good could come from scholars nosing around and archives where they might stumble upon evidence that undermine their claims to have descended from heroes and gods.
(660) Intellectuals cannot operate at room temperature.
The Covenant by Michener, James A. by James A. Michener
adventurous
informative
medium-paced
5.0
A characterization of the strange and complex Republiek van Suid-Afrika.
Reviewed in the United States on October 5, 2020
Book Review
Republiek van Suid-Afrika, a strange and complex place
5 enthusiastic stars
*******
This is the fourth of these James Michener books that I have read, and I'm starting to see a lot of recurring themes.
1. There is some big man who leads his people somewhere in a semi divinely-inspired migration.
2. Those people undergo well-trod path: band--> tribe--> chiefdom -->state.
3. Trade brings together people who would have not other reason to interact, and trade is also what brings better organized powers to establish their own sovereignty over some new area.
4. The Golden Age That Never Was: even as far back as 6 centuries ago, people were hunting animals to the point of extinction for both food and trade.
This thematic overlap is not the fault of Michener as a writer. It's more like: there really are only a very few paths that human beings can take.
*******
There were also a lot of historical resonances to other places and times that were so striking, I thought I might just note them here.
1. The tenacity of ethno-religious groups. And, it is interesting that the Boers repurposed the large number of the Old Testament myths of Jewish people, because they felt those parallels.
2. A government making extremely determined enemies of a large subset of the population. Over a large number of decades. Slagtersnek and the Anglo-Boer war happened almost a century apart. The Jim Crow laws went on all the way from the 1890s until 1964.
3. Total warfare is well known, brutal, and impersonal. Sherman's March to the Sea was meant to break the will of the south, and the English put Boers in concentration camps to kill off tens of thousands of them.
4. People in one place who are similar to each other locked in struggle against one another. In this case, we have English and Afrikaaners, both of whom are Europeans but mortal enemies--but ignore the Africans that are much more numerous and who finally turned out to be a bigger problem. In the United States case, you have (white) Conservatives and Liberals who have become mortal enemies of one another--even as they ignore much larger looming language conflicts/problems with unchecked and Muslim immigration. (Ihlan Omar showed up in Congress and nobody even knows where she came from.)
5. Settled city dwellers crushing nomadic people, a la "Guns, Germs, and Steel." (In the case of the Boer republics, they have been settled but for much shorter periods of time and consequently did not have as much city experience as the English-and they were subjugated in the same way that they subjugated the Africans.)
6. An ethnic group is defeated in warfare, but they find other ways to continue to preserve their identity. (There was a 2000 year hiatus between the last group of Israelis and the current one, both ends bridged by Jews.) And so the Boers focused on their Bibles and language.
7. Affirmative action is an excellent way to turn people against each other and there is no stopping point. (And let us be clear that the Afrikaaners did practice affirmative-action-in-extremis.)
8. Poor population management (as in the American South and South Africa) can have spillover effects that last for many decades longer than the length of the initial problem.
*******
The excessive length is not too bothering, because there are enough variations/details around the edges in each specific case to still make for a very interesting narrative arc--which Michener skillfully provides.
1,153 pages of prose over 14 chapters works out to just about 83 pages per chapter. As in Michener's other works, each chapter is a novella in its own right.
This was not an excessive number of pages, given that the history of South/Southern Africa is so vast and complicated. (And, I have heard more than one American try reinterpret the South African case as a replay of the American case-- which it is emphatically not.)
These 14 novellas that comprise this book coverage such a long time span (so many characters, and so many different narratives), that the overall feeling can only be described as impressionistic.
*******
What do we learn from each chapter?
1. Exposition of Khoi-san people and their hunter-gathering lifestyle.
2. Exposition of the settled Bantu Africans and there higher level of civilization and trade contacts.
-Also, their absolutely appalling mistreatment and enslavement of Khoi-san people. (Inter-African slavery was a thing for thousands of years and still is today. Why nobody knows this is beyond me.)
-It appears that it must be something genetic about black men and fat women (p.64). And I guess people have observed that even several centuries ago.)
-Hunter-gatherers are nothing even close to a match for settled city dwellers.
-The resource curse has a very long history. (Gold. Diamonds. Elephant tusks.)
3. Exposition of the three main colonial powers in that region (Portuguese, Dutch, and English) and their internecine strife for ultimate victory.
-It's amazing how much better off the average human being is today then what they were in those times. A person can buy cinnamon for the price of about 5 minutes worth of labor, and yet whole fleets sales from one place to another to get those things.
-Even though the words Hottentot, Bushman, Koi-san, Khoikhoi (etc) are used interchangeably, they are all quite the different things. They just happen to speak similar languages.
-Governments are extremely slow to realize what are conditions on the ground, and it has been that way for at least three and a half centuries.
-There are Malay people in South Africa, and the mechanism of transfer was as slaves from one Dutch colony (Java) to another Dutch colony (South Africa).
4. How Huguenots made their way into South Africa.
-The religious wars in France were quite intense, with so many tens of thousands of people dead. (They came through it in short order, and now they are a secular country. Maybe there is yet hope for that Muslim Middle East.)
-The Vereenigde Oostindiche Compagnie colonized so much of the East is a testament to the Dutch business acuity.And that serves to highlight how different they were from the Afrikaners, even though they speak the same language.
-The Boers were/ are not entirely Dutchmen. There was a significant influx of French and Germans, but somehow they all ended up speaking Dutch / Afrikaans and coalesced into one ethnic group.
5. Genesis of the Trekboers, and that Cape Dutch and Trekboers are two different things, although they are related.
6. Some of the first English men that came there and lived further inland were missionaries.
From this, it appears that they are some part of the fairly heterogeneous Colored population.
7. Exposition of the paranoid, childless, murderous emperor Zulu conqueror, Shaka Zulu.
-Similar to many other conquerors, he never had any offspring period and it appears that he did not realize that he would die.
-Even back then, there was no clear succession pattern for African rulers. Much like today, they usually end up leaving as a result of assassination. (In recent times, one ruler in the Congo was assassinated by his own son.)
-The current African characteristic of wanton slaughter and brutality actually much predates European contact. Mzilaki-of-the Matabele and Shaka-of-the-Zulu were responsible for the murder of somewhere between 1-2 million Africans. (Far more than perished on The Middle Passage.)
And yet how many people even remember the Mfecane?
-Present day Lesotho and Swaziland are a direct result of the Mfecane.
8. Exposition of the Voortrekkers.
-These extremely sturdy people were still a different group of Boers who fled North to try to escape British rule.
-The English and the Boers are not friends in South Africa, and they have not been for a long time.
-Michener takes the trouble to let us know that the Boers of that time were only semi-literate, and they repurposed the myth of the Israelite expansion to apply to themselves.
-They also made extensive use of the Curse of Cham in their (primarily) Old Testament version of Christianity. (p.639)
-(p. 644) In so many ways, Boers are just like any other tribe in Africa: They engage in the same internicene warfare, and seem completely nonplussed about slaughtering or being slaughtered in tribal warfare. (That's just the way they do in Africa.) Huge numbers of the Boers were slaughtered--and they shook it off and kept moving. I would estimate something like a third or a fourth of them died in such warfare.
A lot of what animated them was fighting due to population pressures.
-As another times, gunpowder was a great equalizer. (p. 613)-At the Battle of Veg Kop, 50 Voortrekkers defeated 6, 000 African attackers. (p. 644) at the Battle of blood river, 4,000 Zulus were killed and not a single Voortrekker--and this is in spite of having a 30:1 numerical advantage on the Zulu side.
-The tsetse fly made it such that the Voortrekkers did not go even as far north as they wanted to. (Their horses could not live past the Limpopo River.)
9. Exposition of other big events.
-Nongqawuse was a female prophet who created a bunch of hysteria, and encouraged the Xhosa to kill all of their cattle (~400,000 head) and burn their crops to hasten the coming of spirits rising from the dead.
End result: about 75,000 people starved to death as a result of deliberately killing their only food source.
-Like the Boers, the German populations in places such as current day Botswana actually came from a very small number of people (p.671-673): Something like 2,350 mercenaries were randomly assigned to German women around 1857, and that explains their existence there 150 years later.
-South African Indians (people like MK Gandhi) came there as an escape of the crushing poverty of India. Almost none of them chose to go back. (p.682)
-We are introduced to Cecil Rhodes (of Zimbabwe - Rhodesia). Michener characterizes him as a closeted homosexual whose single-minded drive was to expand the British empire
10. The Anglo-Boer war
-A most perplexing episode in history: essentially, a bunch of white people fighting each other to the death even though they were much outnumbered by black people. (It has vague residences to conservative / liberal white people in the United States fighting each other tooth and nail even though they are surrounded by more numerous enemies.)
-Even though the varied Afrikaans speakers were not the same thing as the English speakers, they also were not the same thing as each other (Cape Dutch Boers were not the same thing as Voortrekkers)
-Of course with the numerical superiority that the English had, we would not expect the Boer republics to prevail. But, they certainly gave the English quieter run for their money.
-Great figures were present at that moment in history that formed their worldview based on those circumstances. Churchill. Tenacity. Gandhi. Nonviolence. Botha. Commonalties of English and Afrikaans against common black enemies.
-The English were not always the most benevolent of conquerors, and they did resort to concentration camps in the end in order to bring Boers under control.
11. Exposition of the incorporation of the Boer Republics into the new nation of South Africa.
-The "Afrikaaner" was born probably only within the last hundred years or so as an amalgamation of several different Boer subgroups.
-1904 Chinese expulsion from South Africa.
-The hatred of the Bantu people is something that came about because of the humiliation and disenfranchisement of the Afrikaaners and, the clergy was instrumental in developing the conceptual space to support that hatred.
12. Exposition of the Afrikaaner consolidation and control of the country.
-At one point, they considered joining in the side of Germany both in WWI/WWII, so rabid was their hatred of the english.
13. Specific case studies concerning the apartheid laws. (Birth/Work/School/Home/Death).
-Said laws did not exist for the first 300 years that there were "Dutchmen" in that region. They only came to exist as a way for these beleaguered Afrikaaners to protect themselves.
-There was a Race Classification Board (and that is because people of a certain race were only allowed to live and work in certain jobs). There was an example of a person having 2 ancestors out of 256 that may have been Malay/Hottentot, and that person was classified as Colored.
-(p.1000,1002) Crime has been an ongoing issue in South Africa for a very long time. At least since the 50s.
-Asian Indians do not like black people *anywhere* they live, and for black people who are trying to form a political coalition with them ("people of color"), they are going to be sorely disappointed. Just because people happen to be non-white does not necessarily make them friends with each other.
-Brutal interrogations of dissidents by Afrikaaners. (Coincidence. Blacks under Robert Mugabe were just as brutal to each other.)
14. Modern times/ odds and ends.
-This book finished up before the end of apartheid, but the author was cognizant of a sea change underway in the country.
-Then, as now, English have always been much more willing to abandon the country. (The Saltwood family was a well-chosen example of that exodus.)
-The book foreshadowed becoming of a moderate, triangulating Nelson Mandela. (p.1100). When they reverted over to Black rule, places like Mozambique collapsed instantly.
-The country takes on a bizarro world type quality, with people being "banned." (In some ways, it almost puts me in mind of North Korea.)
*******
Verdict:
1. Ultimately, South Africa was a spillover consequence of English misrule. The later events of apartheid were not because of/ by the english, but they were an impelling factor.
2. This book took me the best part of 6 weeks to read, and I don't think that it was time wasted. Highly recommended, even at the new price, as a way to get some insight into the history of that strange country. Republiek van Suid-Afrika.
*******
Mercifully, this book had a glossary.
Just the same, here are the words I extracted.
Piebald
Batik
Cupidity
Celadon
Liana
Escarpment
Dhow
Casuarina
Rondavel
Lateen
Forward agent
Lay in fee
Predikant
Mongery
Post-office stone
Proas
Raiment
Carrack
Sarong
Gamelan
Sockel
Spritsail
Wassail
Chirurgeon
Pinnace
Rix-dollar
Bann
Inlay
Viticulture
Vesicles
Outspan
Steenbok
Pailasse
Mealie
Trekboer
Springbok
Hartebeest
Gemsbok
Blesbok
Smous
Declivity
Abrazos
Lobola
Rushes (Juncaceae)
Wagtail
Hornbill
Bombazine
Laager
Disselboom
Gentoo
chandler
Scimitar
Contumelious
Caparisons
Aerie
Battue
diamantiferous
Frowzy
Suborn
Stoep
Brevet
Enfilade
Affray
Kiekie
Konfyt
Squash-box
Witblits
Lyddite
Sepia wash
Catchment
Snoek
Dagga
Skollies
Satyagraha
Fanakalo
Impi
Alluvial
Draymen
Fossicking
Ilmenite
Donder
Reviewed in the United States on October 5, 2020
Book Review
Republiek van Suid-Afrika, a strange and complex place
5 enthusiastic stars
*******
This is the fourth of these James Michener books that I have read, and I'm starting to see a lot of recurring themes.
1. There is some big man who leads his people somewhere in a semi divinely-inspired migration.
2. Those people undergo well-trod path: band--> tribe--> chiefdom -->state.
3. Trade brings together people who would have not other reason to interact, and trade is also what brings better organized powers to establish their own sovereignty over some new area.
4. The Golden Age That Never Was: even as far back as 6 centuries ago, people were hunting animals to the point of extinction for both food and trade.
This thematic overlap is not the fault of Michener as a writer. It's more like: there really are only a very few paths that human beings can take.
*******
There were also a lot of historical resonances to other places and times that were so striking, I thought I might just note them here.
1. The tenacity of ethno-religious groups. And, it is interesting that the Boers repurposed the large number of the Old Testament myths of Jewish people, because they felt those parallels.
2. A government making extremely determined enemies of a large subset of the population. Over a large number of decades. Slagtersnek and the Anglo-Boer war happened almost a century apart. The Jim Crow laws went on all the way from the 1890s until 1964.
3. Total warfare is well known, brutal, and impersonal. Sherman's March to the Sea was meant to break the will of the south, and the English put Boers in concentration camps to kill off tens of thousands of them.
4. People in one place who are similar to each other locked in struggle against one another. In this case, we have English and Afrikaaners, both of whom are Europeans but mortal enemies--but ignore the Africans that are much more numerous and who finally turned out to be a bigger problem. In the United States case, you have (white) Conservatives and Liberals who have become mortal enemies of one another--even as they ignore much larger looming language conflicts/problems with unchecked and Muslim immigration. (Ihlan Omar showed up in Congress and nobody even knows where she came from.)
5. Settled city dwellers crushing nomadic people, a la "Guns, Germs, and Steel." (In the case of the Boer republics, they have been settled but for much shorter periods of time and consequently did not have as much city experience as the English-and they were subjugated in the same way that they subjugated the Africans.)
6. An ethnic group is defeated in warfare, but they find other ways to continue to preserve their identity. (There was a 2000 year hiatus between the last group of Israelis and the current one, both ends bridged by Jews.) And so the Boers focused on their Bibles and language.
7. Affirmative action is an excellent way to turn people against each other and there is no stopping point. (And let us be clear that the Afrikaaners did practice affirmative-action-in-extremis.)
8. Poor population management (as in the American South and South Africa) can have spillover effects that last for many decades longer than the length of the initial problem.
*******
The excessive length is not too bothering, because there are enough variations/details around the edges in each specific case to still make for a very interesting narrative arc--which Michener skillfully provides.
1,153 pages of prose over 14 chapters works out to just about 83 pages per chapter. As in Michener's other works, each chapter is a novella in its own right.
This was not an excessive number of pages, given that the history of South/Southern Africa is so vast and complicated. (And, I have heard more than one American try reinterpret the South African case as a replay of the American case-- which it is emphatically not.)
These 14 novellas that comprise this book coverage such a long time span (so many characters, and so many different narratives), that the overall feeling can only be described as impressionistic.
*******
What do we learn from each chapter?
1. Exposition of Khoi-san people and their hunter-gathering lifestyle.
2. Exposition of the settled Bantu Africans and there higher level of civilization and trade contacts.
-Also, their absolutely appalling mistreatment and enslavement of Khoi-san people. (Inter-African slavery was a thing for thousands of years and still is today. Why nobody knows this is beyond me.)
-It appears that it must be something genetic about black men and fat women (p.64). And I guess people have observed that even several centuries ago.)
-Hunter-gatherers are nothing even close to a match for settled city dwellers.
-The resource curse has a very long history. (Gold. Diamonds. Elephant tusks.)
3. Exposition of the three main colonial powers in that region (Portuguese, Dutch, and English) and their internecine strife for ultimate victory.
-It's amazing how much better off the average human being is today then what they were in those times. A person can buy cinnamon for the price of about 5 minutes worth of labor, and yet whole fleets sales from one place to another to get those things.
-Even though the words Hottentot, Bushman, Koi-san, Khoikhoi (etc) are used interchangeably, they are all quite the different things. They just happen to speak similar languages.
-Governments are extremely slow to realize what are conditions on the ground, and it has been that way for at least three and a half centuries.
-There are Malay people in South Africa, and the mechanism of transfer was as slaves from one Dutch colony (Java) to another Dutch colony (South Africa).
4. How Huguenots made their way into South Africa.
-The religious wars in France were quite intense, with so many tens of thousands of people dead. (They came through it in short order, and now they are a secular country. Maybe there is yet hope for that Muslim Middle East.)
-The Vereenigde Oostindiche Compagnie colonized so much of the East is a testament to the Dutch business acuity.And that serves to highlight how different they were from the Afrikaners, even though they speak the same language.
-The Boers were/ are not entirely Dutchmen. There was a significant influx of French and Germans, but somehow they all ended up speaking Dutch / Afrikaans and coalesced into one ethnic group.
5. Genesis of the Trekboers, and that Cape Dutch and Trekboers are two different things, although they are related.
6. Some of the first English men that came there and lived further inland were missionaries.
From this, it appears that they are some part of the fairly heterogeneous Colored population.
7. Exposition of the paranoid, childless, murderous emperor Zulu conqueror, Shaka Zulu.
-Similar to many other conquerors, he never had any offspring period and it appears that he did not realize that he would die.
-Even back then, there was no clear succession pattern for African rulers. Much like today, they usually end up leaving as a result of assassination. (In recent times, one ruler in the Congo was assassinated by his own son.)
-The current African characteristic of wanton slaughter and brutality actually much predates European contact. Mzilaki-of-the Matabele and Shaka-of-the-Zulu were responsible for the murder of somewhere between 1-2 million Africans. (Far more than perished on The Middle Passage.)
And yet how many people even remember the Mfecane?
-Present day Lesotho and Swaziland are a direct result of the Mfecane.
8. Exposition of the Voortrekkers.
-These extremely sturdy people were still a different group of Boers who fled North to try to escape British rule.
-The English and the Boers are not friends in South Africa, and they have not been for a long time.
-Michener takes the trouble to let us know that the Boers of that time were only semi-literate, and they repurposed the myth of the Israelite expansion to apply to themselves.
-They also made extensive use of the Curse of Cham in their (primarily) Old Testament version of Christianity. (p.639)
-(p. 644) In so many ways, Boers are just like any other tribe in Africa: They engage in the same internicene warfare, and seem completely nonplussed about slaughtering or being slaughtered in tribal warfare. (That's just the way they do in Africa.) Huge numbers of the Boers were slaughtered--and they shook it off and kept moving. I would estimate something like a third or a fourth of them died in such warfare.
A lot of what animated them was fighting due to population pressures.
-As another times, gunpowder was a great equalizer. (p. 613)-At the Battle of Veg Kop, 50 Voortrekkers defeated 6, 000 African attackers. (p. 644) at the Battle of blood river, 4,000 Zulus were killed and not a single Voortrekker--and this is in spite of having a 30:1 numerical advantage on the Zulu side.
-The tsetse fly made it such that the Voortrekkers did not go even as far north as they wanted to. (Their horses could not live past the Limpopo River.)
9. Exposition of other big events.
-Nongqawuse was a female prophet who created a bunch of hysteria, and encouraged the Xhosa to kill all of their cattle (~400,000 head) and burn their crops to hasten the coming of spirits rising from the dead.
End result: about 75,000 people starved to death as a result of deliberately killing their only food source.
-Like the Boers, the German populations in places such as current day Botswana actually came from a very small number of people (p.671-673): Something like 2,350 mercenaries were randomly assigned to German women around 1857, and that explains their existence there 150 years later.
-South African Indians (people like MK Gandhi) came there as an escape of the crushing poverty of India. Almost none of them chose to go back. (p.682)
-We are introduced to Cecil Rhodes (of Zimbabwe - Rhodesia). Michener characterizes him as a closeted homosexual whose single-minded drive was to expand the British empire
10. The Anglo-Boer war
-A most perplexing episode in history: essentially, a bunch of white people fighting each other to the death even though they were much outnumbered by black people. (It has vague residences to conservative / liberal white people in the United States fighting each other tooth and nail even though they are surrounded by more numerous enemies.)
-Even though the varied Afrikaans speakers were not the same thing as the English speakers, they also were not the same thing as each other (Cape Dutch Boers were not the same thing as Voortrekkers)
-Of course with the numerical superiority that the English had, we would not expect the Boer republics to prevail. But, they certainly gave the English quieter run for their money.
-Great figures were present at that moment in history that formed their worldview based on those circumstances. Churchill. Tenacity. Gandhi. Nonviolence. Botha. Commonalties of English and Afrikaans against common black enemies.
-The English were not always the most benevolent of conquerors, and they did resort to concentration camps in the end in order to bring Boers under control.
11. Exposition of the incorporation of the Boer Republics into the new nation of South Africa.
-The "Afrikaaner" was born probably only within the last hundred years or so as an amalgamation of several different Boer subgroups.
-1904 Chinese expulsion from South Africa.
-The hatred of the Bantu people is something that came about because of the humiliation and disenfranchisement of the Afrikaaners and, the clergy was instrumental in developing the conceptual space to support that hatred.
12. Exposition of the Afrikaaner consolidation and control of the country.
-At one point, they considered joining in the side of Germany both in WWI/WWII, so rabid was their hatred of the english.
13. Specific case studies concerning the apartheid laws. (Birth/Work/School/Home/Death).
-Said laws did not exist for the first 300 years that there were "Dutchmen" in that region. They only came to exist as a way for these beleaguered Afrikaaners to protect themselves.
-There was a Race Classification Board (and that is because people of a certain race were only allowed to live and work in certain jobs). There was an example of a person having 2 ancestors out of 256 that may have been Malay/Hottentot, and that person was classified as Colored.
-(p.1000,1002) Crime has been an ongoing issue in South Africa for a very long time. At least since the 50s.
-Asian Indians do not like black people *anywhere* they live, and for black people who are trying to form a political coalition with them ("people of color"), they are going to be sorely disappointed. Just because people happen to be non-white does not necessarily make them friends with each other.
-Brutal interrogations of dissidents by Afrikaaners. (Coincidence. Blacks under Robert Mugabe were just as brutal to each other.)
14. Modern times/ odds and ends.
-This book finished up before the end of apartheid, but the author was cognizant of a sea change underway in the country.
-Then, as now, English have always been much more willing to abandon the country. (The Saltwood family was a well-chosen example of that exodus.)
-The book foreshadowed becoming of a moderate, triangulating Nelson Mandela. (p.1100). When they reverted over to Black rule, places like Mozambique collapsed instantly.
-The country takes on a bizarro world type quality, with people being "banned." (In some ways, it almost puts me in mind of North Korea.)
*******
Verdict:
1. Ultimately, South Africa was a spillover consequence of English misrule. The later events of apartheid were not because of/ by the english, but they were an impelling factor.
2. This book took me the best part of 6 weeks to read, and I don't think that it was time wasted. Highly recommended, even at the new price, as a way to get some insight into the history of that strange country. Republiek van Suid-Afrika.
*******
Mercifully, this book had a glossary.
Just the same, here are the words I extracted.
Piebald
Batik
Cupidity
Celadon
Liana
Escarpment
Dhow
Casuarina
Rondavel
Lateen
Forward agent
Lay in fee
Predikant
Mongery
Post-office stone
Proas
Raiment
Carrack
Sarong
Gamelan
Sockel
Spritsail
Wassail
Chirurgeon
Pinnace
Rix-dollar
Bann
Inlay
Viticulture
Vesicles
Outspan
Steenbok
Pailasse
Mealie
Trekboer
Springbok
Hartebeest
Gemsbok
Blesbok
Smous
Declivity
Abrazos
Lobola
Rushes (Juncaceae)
Wagtail
Hornbill
Bombazine
Laager
Disselboom
Gentoo
chandler
Scimitar
Contumelious
Caparisons
Aerie
Battue
diamantiferous
Frowzy
Suborn
Stoep
Brevet
Enfilade
Affray
Kiekie
Konfyt
Squash-box
Witblits
Lyddite
Sepia wash
Catchment
Snoek
Dagga
Skollies
Satyagraha
Fanakalo
Impi
Alluvial
Draymen
Fossicking
Ilmenite
Donder
The Kissing Rabbi: Lust, Betrayal, and a Community Turned Inside Out by Andy Becker
funny
informative
fast-paced
5.0
Book Review
The Kissing Rabbi
5/5 stars
"An old story: a cleric gets in trouble because of his slappybag."
*******
251 pages of prose over 30 chapters. Approximately 8.3 pages per chapter.
It does contain a glossary, but for people that are likely to purchase this book they would know all of these terms.
It's easy enough to read over the course of Shabbat; about 5 hours worth of reading time.
Despite its protestations to the commentary, this book is based on actual events.
It is the story of R'Zalman Heber.
From what I've been able to figure out:
Mishegas Dreidel= R'Zalman Heber
TUCAS= Chabad
Lacey Johnson= Tracy Moran
Marshall Goldman= Mark Friedman
Gerald Johnson= Jared Moran
Sarah Shofar=Kim Shomer
Elmer Smith= Spencer Freeman
The Grand Rabbi= Lubavitcher Rebbe
And that's about all the names that I'm willing to research, because this is just one book review--and life is too short.
The elements of the story are so realistic, that it could only have been true; a fictionalized book is technique that a lot of Orthodox insiders use because these stories happen SO OFTEN, that they can fill up an entire book.
1. Hush, Eishes Chayil
2. Sotah, Naomi Ragen
3. Shidduch, Penina Shtauber
4. Shalom Bayit, Penina Shtauber
A lot of these things ring with a lot of my experience.
1. If you have Person X wrong Person Y, then who is right ONLY depends on the status of the relative parties. In the case of this book, two of the people that were telling the truth were actually converts (geirim) but the first thing that people kept doing was questioning their status. BEEN THERE, DONE THAT.
The Rabbinate will ALWAYS side with the stronger party against the weak.
2. A lot of fighting goes on over control of these Chabad Houses. Even though there seems to be at least one of them in every single town in the world, people don't seem to want to deal with administrative things unless/until there is a lawsuit to clarify the legal/financial/ administrative details of the House.
3. These sexual imbroglios happen in real life, and these rabbis that get themselves in trouble are some of the DUMBEST people that I've ever heard of.
If a person (rabbi) wants to have recreational sex, there are definitely ways that that can be done without sacrificing your entire career/reputation.
Maybe, the world's oldest profession?
Maybe, people who are outside of the community that you live in?
Maybe, people inside the community that you live in that are of legal age?
Maybe, sugar daddying? (Sugar babies are available in either sex. Lots of young, dumb guys and gals that make their moist bits available to much older men in exchange for enough income to not have to work a regular job.)
Maybe, a titty bar? All of these guys who wanted to "look at it," cannot be forgiven for not knowing that those are everywhere.
Examples:
-Leib Tropper got recorded trying to proposition a conversion candidate for a threesome.
-Yonasan Abraham got caught giving too much pastoral care to a wife that was wealthy enough to have 24 hours security on her (by her husband).
-Barry Freundel asked so many people to take practice dips in the mikvah, that enough people figured out he had a spy cam there.
-Yosef Kolko ended up in a relationship with an 11-year-old boy, and thought that it could be a secret.
-Chaim Walder/ Yehuda Meshi-Zahav punctured the tender bits of so many boys/girls, that just by sheer volume of incidents, their crimes got out.
It is a mystery to me how somebody can make it through all six orders of Shas, and have so little practical intelligence that they do things like this that get them caught.
*******
This book had a lot of good quotes. I believe that the author must have spoken Yiddish as a first language, because his delivery sounds like any number of Yiddish proverbs. (I have a whole collection of these that I try to keep in mind.)
(p.69) You can't make a stew out of faith.
(p. 43) In the grand tradition of the great Talmudic Rabbis, who knew how to split hairs better than corporate tax attorneys, today's Orthodox rabbis draw distinctions between Jews with "proclivities" and Jews who commit certain acts.
(p.142) Rabbi Dreidel baked promises of confidentiality like they were bagels, and no one bakes one bagel at a time.
(p. 142) A half truth is a whole lie.
Then, there is the word play and insider jokes.
-If a man is named Yitzhak Yosef, What else could he be accept Chabad?
-Mishegas Dreidel. Crazy Spinning Top?
Verdict:
Recommended at the price of $5. That may be a while, because the price on this book is still quite high a few years after it is published.
The Kissing Rabbi
5/5 stars
"An old story: a cleric gets in trouble because of his slappybag."
*******
251 pages of prose over 30 chapters. Approximately 8.3 pages per chapter.
It does contain a glossary, but for people that are likely to purchase this book they would know all of these terms.
It's easy enough to read over the course of Shabbat; about 5 hours worth of reading time.
Despite its protestations to the commentary, this book is based on actual events.
It is the story of R'Zalman Heber.
From what I've been able to figure out:
Mishegas Dreidel= R'Zalman Heber
TUCAS= Chabad
Lacey Johnson= Tracy Moran
Marshall Goldman= Mark Friedman
Gerald Johnson= Jared Moran
Sarah Shofar=Kim Shomer
Elmer Smith= Spencer Freeman
The Grand Rabbi= Lubavitcher Rebbe
And that's about all the names that I'm willing to research, because this is just one book review--and life is too short.
The elements of the story are so realistic, that it could only have been true; a fictionalized book is technique that a lot of Orthodox insiders use because these stories happen SO OFTEN, that they can fill up an entire book.
1. Hush, Eishes Chayil
2. Sotah, Naomi Ragen
3. Shidduch, Penina Shtauber
4. Shalom Bayit, Penina Shtauber
A lot of these things ring with a lot of my experience.
1. If you have Person X wrong Person Y, then who is right ONLY depends on the status of the relative parties. In the case of this book, two of the people that were telling the truth were actually converts (geirim) but the first thing that people kept doing was questioning their status. BEEN THERE, DONE THAT.
The Rabbinate will ALWAYS side with the stronger party against the weak.
2. A lot of fighting goes on over control of these Chabad Houses. Even though there seems to be at least one of them in every single town in the world, people don't seem to want to deal with administrative things unless/until there is a lawsuit to clarify the legal/financial/ administrative details of the House.
3. These sexual imbroglios happen in real life, and these rabbis that get themselves in trouble are some of the DUMBEST people that I've ever heard of.
If a person (rabbi) wants to have recreational sex, there are definitely ways that that can be done without sacrificing your entire career/reputation.
Maybe, the world's oldest profession?
Maybe, people who are outside of the community that you live in?
Maybe, people inside the community that you live in that are of legal age?
Maybe, sugar daddying? (Sugar babies are available in either sex. Lots of young, dumb guys and gals that make their moist bits available to much older men in exchange for enough income to not have to work a regular job.)
Maybe, a titty bar? All of these guys who wanted to "look at it," cannot be forgiven for not knowing that those are everywhere.
Examples:
-Leib Tropper got recorded trying to proposition a conversion candidate for a threesome.
-Yonasan Abraham got caught giving too much pastoral care to a wife that was wealthy enough to have 24 hours security on her (by her husband).
-Barry Freundel asked so many people to take practice dips in the mikvah, that enough people figured out he had a spy cam there.
-Yosef Kolko ended up in a relationship with an 11-year-old boy, and thought that it could be a secret.
-Chaim Walder/ Yehuda Meshi-Zahav punctured the tender bits of so many boys/girls, that just by sheer volume of incidents, their crimes got out.
It is a mystery to me how somebody can make it through all six orders of Shas, and have so little practical intelligence that they do things like this that get them caught.
*******
This book had a lot of good quotes. I believe that the author must have spoken Yiddish as a first language, because his delivery sounds like any number of Yiddish proverbs. (I have a whole collection of these that I try to keep in mind.)
(p.69) You can't make a stew out of faith.
(p. 43) In the grand tradition of the great Talmudic Rabbis, who knew how to split hairs better than corporate tax attorneys, today's Orthodox rabbis draw distinctions between Jews with "proclivities" and Jews who commit certain acts.
(p.142) Rabbi Dreidel baked promises of confidentiality like they were bagels, and no one bakes one bagel at a time.
(p. 142) A half truth is a whole lie.
Then, there is the word play and insider jokes.
-If a man is named Yitzhak Yosef, What else could he be accept Chabad?
-Mishegas Dreidel. Crazy Spinning Top?
Verdict:
Recommended at the price of $5. That may be a while, because the price on this book is still quite high a few years after it is published.
Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver
dark
funny
informative
slow-paced
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? N/A
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
Book Review
Demon Copperhead
4/5 stars
"Moderately interesting. Too long. Not worth a reread."
********
The book could have been about half as long as it was.
Two thoughts:
1. If a man is meant to drown, he will drown in a spoonful of water. (Yiddish proverb)
2. There but for the grace of God go I.
Factoids:
1. Strikers during the Battle of Blair Mountain wore RED bandanas on their NECKS as a form of identification.
The slur that people use actually traces back to that single incident.
2. There is some interesting speculation toward the end of the book that the disdain toward / demonization of Appalachian people is a specific case of the general problem of government's trying to encourage people to live in bigger cities so that they can be controlled and taxed more easily.
Subtext seems to be that: if you can make Mountain people feel bad enough about who they are, then that will make them leave their land.
*******
If you listen to enough music, you notice that a lot of old stuff gets remade and repackaged as new or maybe a new song is two or three samples from several older ones.
And it's even okay that people remake movies or reimagine old books into new movies. ("Clueless" was a huge hit based on Jane Austen's "Emma.")
But feeling is quite different when somebody actually rewrites a book from a couple of centuries back.
This book is quite fascinating, and I wonder if I had read the original (David Copperfield) would it have been as good.
The author updates the basic idea of the story by setting it in the Appalachian region of the United States instead of London, England. And she uses the little known Melungeon People as an element of her story.
Other than that, the names of almost all of the characters in her books are plays on the name of that in the Charles Dickens book
Demon Copperhead= David Copperfield
Murrell Stone= Mr. Murdstone
Betsy Woodall= Betsey Trotwood
Mrs. Peggot= Peggotty
U-Haul=Uriah Heep
The writing is extremely pithy, but then we have this problem of 11-17 year olds with the wisdom of 45-year-old adults that read more like jaded, triply divorced, alcoholic gumshoes. (John Green has a habit of writing this way.)
And this protagonist does seem a bit of a stretch: If you have a 16-year-old boy who has those raging hormones, he will not exercise anywhere near the amount of restraint that this character did. ("I liked the idea of starting from the top of the chase scene, not jumping in last second before the vehicle explodes.")
Young guys (the protagonist) have been known to try to rape the Statue of Liberty, and even donut holes are not safe around them.
And this guy stayed a virgin even as a football star and a sophomore? After school girls were leaving their thongs in his locker?
Really?
Of course, this is a risk that people run when they are authors trying to speak in the voices of adolescents.
*******
Threads
1. Foster children used as free labor by foster parents. (Rob Henderson, "Troubled")
2. Foster children as a secondary income for cash strapped families. (Rob Henderson, "Troubled")
3. The general: Repetitive, cyclical dysfunction and poverty. (Rob Henderson, "Troubled")
The specific: Mentally ill parents give birth to children that have to go into foster care, who in turn give birth to mentally ill children of their own. (Disproportionate murderous / serial killers were fostered. Also disproportionate drug abuse.)
4. Continuing trauma after the closure of the coal industry in the coal mine states. (JD Vance. "Hillbilly Elegy.")
5. Poor white towns and seeing for Southern lights through their own eyes, and not only as the butt of jokes on TV shows. (JD Vance. "Hillbilly Elegy.")
6. Southern customs. A lot of them like to wash and shave their own dead (p.357).
7. A significant fraction of women are not satisfied unless they are with a man who beats their ass (Rose, Emmy in this book).
And they will keep on going back for more.
8. Where there are rural people with no hope/prospects, there are military recruiters offering them the opportunity to join the military--either to get educated, or to finish throwing their lives away in some conflict that has nothing to do with them.
*******
Verdict: Wait until the price goes down to about $5. It's not worth the $16 that I paid for it.
Also, I referenced a nonfictional and less pretentious treatment of various of these topics by the authors Henderson and Vance.
It would be good to read more about the history of the Melungeons as well as government attempts to erase rural/mountain people from history and their culture.
*******
Vocabulary
Melungeon (people)
gauges (ear)
silage
derpness
green tobacco sickness
gouache
Battle of Blair Mountain
sigogglin(g)
Bogart (Urban dictionary sense)
kyarn
casement window
Quotes
(256) He was a horror movie. Brain says "run." Eyes can't look away.
(254) If you sit there and let your ears take all that girl business, other body parts may get their turn.
(387) What's this guys? Some deeply committed episode of "Jackass"?
(392) I was advised to show up for dinner with my ass kissing lips all shined up.
(?) The wonder is that you could start life with nothing, end with nothing, and lose so much in between.
Unresolved plot points:
How did Collins die?
How did Humvee die?
How did Copperhead's father die?
Demon Copperhead
4/5 stars
"Moderately interesting. Too long. Not worth a reread."
********
The book could have been about half as long as it was.
Two thoughts:
1. If a man is meant to drown, he will drown in a spoonful of water. (Yiddish proverb)
2. There but for the grace of God go I.
Factoids:
1. Strikers during the Battle of Blair Mountain wore RED bandanas on their NECKS as a form of identification.
The slur that people use actually traces back to that single incident.
2. There is some interesting speculation toward the end of the book that the disdain toward / demonization of Appalachian people is a specific case of the general problem of government's trying to encourage people to live in bigger cities so that they can be controlled and taxed more easily.
Subtext seems to be that: if you can make Mountain people feel bad enough about who they are, then that will make them leave their land.
*******
If you listen to enough music, you notice that a lot of old stuff gets remade and repackaged as new or maybe a new song is two or three samples from several older ones.
And it's even okay that people remake movies or reimagine old books into new movies. ("Clueless" was a huge hit based on Jane Austen's "Emma.")
But feeling is quite different when somebody actually rewrites a book from a couple of centuries back.
This book is quite fascinating, and I wonder if I had read the original (David Copperfield) would it have been as good.
The author updates the basic idea of the story by setting it in the Appalachian region of the United States instead of London, England. And she uses the little known Melungeon People as an element of her story.
Other than that, the names of almost all of the characters in her books are plays on the name of that in the Charles Dickens book
Demon Copperhead= David Copperfield
Murrell Stone= Mr. Murdstone
Betsy Woodall= Betsey Trotwood
Mrs. Peggot= Peggotty
U-Haul=Uriah Heep
The writing is extremely pithy, but then we have this problem of 11-17 year olds with the wisdom of 45-year-old adults that read more like jaded, triply divorced, alcoholic gumshoes. (John Green has a habit of writing this way.)
And this protagonist does seem a bit of a stretch: If you have a 16-year-old boy who has those raging hormones, he will not exercise anywhere near the amount of restraint that this character did. ("I liked the idea of starting from the top of the chase scene, not jumping in last second before the vehicle explodes.")
Young guys (the protagonist) have been known to try to rape the Statue of Liberty, and even donut holes are not safe around them.
And this guy stayed a virgin even as a football star and a sophomore? After school girls were leaving their thongs in his locker?
Really?
Of course, this is a risk that people run when they are authors trying to speak in the voices of adolescents.
*******
Threads
1. Foster children used as free labor by foster parents. (Rob Henderson, "Troubled")
2. Foster children as a secondary income for cash strapped families. (Rob Henderson, "Troubled")
3. The general: Repetitive, cyclical dysfunction and poverty. (Rob Henderson, "Troubled")
The specific: Mentally ill parents give birth to children that have to go into foster care, who in turn give birth to mentally ill children of their own. (Disproportionate murderous / serial killers were fostered. Also disproportionate drug abuse.)
4. Continuing trauma after the closure of the coal industry in the coal mine states. (JD Vance. "Hillbilly Elegy.")
5. Poor white towns and seeing for Southern lights through their own eyes, and not only as the butt of jokes on TV shows. (JD Vance. "Hillbilly Elegy.")
6. Southern customs. A lot of them like to wash and shave their own dead (p.357).
7. A significant fraction of women are not satisfied unless they are with a man who beats their ass (Rose, Emmy in this book).
And they will keep on going back for more.
8. Where there are rural people with no hope/prospects, there are military recruiters offering them the opportunity to join the military--either to get educated, or to finish throwing their lives away in some conflict that has nothing to do with them.
*******
Verdict: Wait until the price goes down to about $5. It's not worth the $16 that I paid for it.
Also, I referenced a nonfictional and less pretentious treatment of various of these topics by the authors Henderson and Vance.
It would be good to read more about the history of the Melungeons as well as government attempts to erase rural/mountain people from history and their culture.
*******
Vocabulary
Melungeon (people)
gauges (ear)
silage
derpness
green tobacco sickness
gouache
Battle of Blair Mountain
sigogglin(g)
Bogart (Urban dictionary sense)
kyarn
casement window
Quotes
(256) He was a horror movie. Brain says "run." Eyes can't look away.
(254) If you sit there and let your ears take all that girl business, other body parts may get their turn.
(387) What's this guys? Some deeply committed episode of "Jackass"?
(392) I was advised to show up for dinner with my ass kissing lips all shined up.
(?) The wonder is that you could start life with nothing, end with nothing, and lose so much in between.
Unresolved plot points:
How did Collins die?
How did Humvee die?
How did Copperhead's father die?
Stay off My Operating Table: A Heart Surgeon's Metabolic Health Guide to Lose Weight, Prevent Disease, and Feel Your Best Every Day by Philip Ovadia, Jack Murphy
informative
fast-paced
5.0
Book Review
"Stay Off My Operating Table"
5/5 stars
"A surgeon speaks on sustainable diets"
*******
There are essentially three types of diets:
1. Count calories;
2. Count carbs;
3. Count time
There is a lot of overlap in these books about ways to lose weight, and so I just have to think what does this author bring to the table that is new:
1. He actually gives us numbers that we can use to determine metabolic health. All of them are easily found in your chart from your semi-annual physical.
2. He redefines metabolic health as a process and not an end goal. So, you are metabolically only as good as your last meal. If you fast and lose huge amounts of weight or do the Atkins and lose huge amounts of weight, is there any stopping point?
What he says is that if you just be judicious about each meal and make small modifications that are sustainable, then the goal is a foregone conclusion.
3. The doctor is a heart surgeon, and while a lot of people have been physicians who have written these popular books (Jason Fung / Peter Atkins), a heart surgeon really is the extreme and of metabolic syndrome. And he sees the worst cases all day, everyday, several times a day.
That's not a level of experience to be taken lightly.
4. Not all olive oil is olive oil, and this doctor takes the trouble to let us know which brands are acceptable.
Verdict: Strongly recommended.The book is only 158 easy pages and it is so short that there's really no excuse not to read it.
*****
There are things that you should find no place for:
1. Grains, potatoes, starches
2. Processed foods
3. High fructose corn syrup
"Stay Off My Operating Table"
5/5 stars
"A surgeon speaks on sustainable diets"
*******
There are essentially three types of diets:
1. Count calories;
2. Count carbs;
3. Count time
There is a lot of overlap in these books about ways to lose weight, and so I just have to think what does this author bring to the table that is new:
1. He actually gives us numbers that we can use to determine metabolic health. All of them are easily found in your chart from your semi-annual physical.
2. He redefines metabolic health as a process and not an end goal. So, you are metabolically only as good as your last meal. If you fast and lose huge amounts of weight or do the Atkins and lose huge amounts of weight, is there any stopping point?
What he says is that if you just be judicious about each meal and make small modifications that are sustainable, then the goal is a foregone conclusion.
3. The doctor is a heart surgeon, and while a lot of people have been physicians who have written these popular books (Jason Fung / Peter Atkins), a heart surgeon really is the extreme and of metabolic syndrome. And he sees the worst cases all day, everyday, several times a day.
That's not a level of experience to be taken lightly.
4. Not all olive oil is olive oil, and this doctor takes the trouble to let us know which brands are acceptable.
Verdict: Strongly recommended.The book is only 158 easy pages and it is so short that there's really no excuse not to read it.
*****
There are things that you should find no place for:
1. Grains, potatoes, starches
2. Processed foods
3. High fructose corn syrup
The No-State Solution: A Jewish Manifesto by Daniel Boyarin
Did not finish book. Stopped at 8%.
Did not finish book. Stopped at 8%.
Book review
The No-state Solution
0/5 stars
"With prose like this, who needs waterboarding?"
******
Even as short as this book was, I couldn't get more than 15 pages into it.
Books published on University labels tend to be intensely boring, and so I have a little bit more patience with them.
But every man has his limits.
The takeaway message that I get from this book is: Even though they seem to be different, academics and Kollel avreichem really are on opposite sides of the same circle.
Both are excellent examples of what happens when people retreat into a "labyrinth of textuality, such that reality does not exist for them anymore."
What we have here, of all possible things, is an academic that teaches Gemara.
What could possibly go wrong?!?!
In the mind of somebody that studies Gemara for a living, everything is floating abstraction and anything could be true or false.
So, that explains how A Jewish Man could come to the mental state to write a book about a "no-state solution."
Right in the introduction the author starts out with the word "social construction" and he also mentions the postmodern dogma that "there are no biological races." (And it's just a coincidence that all of the lowest HDI countries are all black African and all of the lowest performing people in the United States are black.)
Another way to look at this topic (I'm still not sure what it is, 12 pages in) is that: That which is can be.
If the circumstances make it such that the State of Israel can exist, then one can reverse engineer the answer to "what is Jewishness?" (When circumstances were not right for Israel to be reestablished, then Jews were The Diaspora Nation; Now that the circumstances are fitting, they can be a nation-state. If circumstances change again, then they can go back to being A Diaspora Nation.)
So, what difference do ab initio definitions make?
And what are we supposed to do with sentences like this? ("[Christian supersessionism] as has been shown in various works of post-colonial criticism, deeply informs modern colonial ideologies of Eurocentric progressivism.")
******
Verdict: EMPHATICALLY NOT RECOMMENDED.
$25.63 I spent for this piece of crap.
And the best I can get as a buyback is about $6 - - not even enough to reach the $10 threshold for somebody to cut a PayPal deposit.
Vocabulary:
bruit
The No-state Solution
0/5 stars
"With prose like this, who needs waterboarding?"
******
Even as short as this book was, I couldn't get more than 15 pages into it.
Books published on University labels tend to be intensely boring, and so I have a little bit more patience with them.
But every man has his limits.
The takeaway message that I get from this book is: Even though they seem to be different, academics and Kollel avreichem really are on opposite sides of the same circle.
Both are excellent examples of what happens when people retreat into a "labyrinth of textuality, such that reality does not exist for them anymore."
What we have here, of all possible things, is an academic that teaches Gemara.
What could possibly go wrong?!?!
In the mind of somebody that studies Gemara for a living, everything is floating abstraction and anything could be true or false.
So, that explains how A Jewish Man could come to the mental state to write a book about a "no-state solution."
Right in the introduction the author starts out with the word "social construction" and he also mentions the postmodern dogma that "there are no biological races." (And it's just a coincidence that all of the lowest HDI countries are all black African and all of the lowest performing people in the United States are black.)
Another way to look at this topic (I'm still not sure what it is, 12 pages in) is that: That which is can be.
If the circumstances make it such that the State of Israel can exist, then one can reverse engineer the answer to "what is Jewishness?" (When circumstances were not right for Israel to be reestablished, then Jews were The Diaspora Nation; Now that the circumstances are fitting, they can be a nation-state. If circumstances change again, then they can go back to being A Diaspora Nation.)
So, what difference do ab initio definitions make?
And what are we supposed to do with sentences like this? ("[Christian supersessionism] as has been shown in various works of post-colonial criticism, deeply informs modern colonial ideologies of Eurocentric progressivism.")
******
Verdict: EMPHATICALLY NOT RECOMMENDED.
$25.63 I spent for this piece of crap.
And the best I can get as a buyback is about $6 - - not even enough to reach the $10 threshold for somebody to cut a PayPal deposit.
Vocabulary:
bruit
Content Warnings
BORING AS FUCK