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The Philosophical Baby: What Children's Minds Tell Us about Truth, Love, and the Meaning of Life
Can't wait until this book arrives in my mailbox. My own review will come later. In the meantime here is what Anthony Gottlieb wrote in the NYTimes: It's always gratifying to hear a new twist on an old joke. In the Marx Brothers' "Duck Soup," Rufus T. Firefly, played by Groucho, is handed the Freedonia cabinet's treasury report: "Why, a child of 4 could understand this report. Run out and find me a 4-year-old child -- I can't make head or tail of it." Alison Gopnik, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, has run out and found plenty of 4-year-old children. In her new book, she announces that they are in some ways "smarter, more imaginative, more caring and even more conscious than adults are." Gopnik does not go so far as to propose that we fire Timothy Geithner and march in a phalanx of preschoolers to fix the credit crunch. She does, however, make the bold suggestion that thinking about small children can shed new light on ancient philosophical problems.
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Chess Story
For many years, I have been an admirer of Stefan Zweig without knowing it. One of my favorite films during my college days, Secret Burning, flowed out of his pen. I learned this after I googled Zweig half way into his wonderful Chess Story. He reveals himself as a master of the psychological drama. This one takes place during the Hilter era. Just like Secret Burning, Chess Story pivots around events that largely play in the minds of characters. The story is an allegory for all the different characters that reside in one human being. Zweig writes beautifully. Reading Chess Story is a marvelous treat. I wonder if he has written other pieces that are equally good.
Blood on the Water: Oxford Versus Cambridge.
This review in the Economist wetted my appetite. I will read this book during my summer holiday. The Economist: SIBLING rivalry has many famous examples. Cain and Abel, Linus and Lucy, Liam and Noel. Less well-known, but no less competitive, are David and James Livingston, two brothers who, in April 2003, raced on opposite sides in the Oxford and Cambridge University Boat Race, one of the toughest sporting challenges in the world. "Blood Over Water", published to coincide with the 155th boat race on March 29th, tells in alternating narratives the story of how the brothers' quest for victory turned them into enemies. Providing context is the broader tale of the historic rowing competition between two prestigious universities.
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How to Help Children Survive Separation and Divorce
The Economist reports: JULIE LYNN EVANS, a well-known British psychotherapist, deals with troubled children with remarkable devotion and insight. As the recession puts added strain on many marriages, her account of the mental stresses and strains that parental break-up inflicts on children could not be more timely.Many of the children Ms Evans sees do not want to talk at all, regarding grown-ups as untrustworthy or irrelevant. She starts by getting them to depict their lives in spray-painted graffiti on giant sheets of paper, or by making models from sand or clay.
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Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness
One afternoon of my sophomore year in college my bicycle was stolen. For reasons I no longer can reconstruct, I decided not to buy another used bike, but henceforth to hitchhike to class. I met many interesting people this way: Professors, sex therapists, construction workers, mothers who wanted to recruit boyfriends for their daughters and the like. My goal for these trips to and fro campus was to strike up a conversation with every single person I met. Would I be able to get everyone to tell me a bit of his or her personal story? I did, indeed, manage to strike a conversation with all my lifters except for a man who I came to refer as the unhappiest person in the world. My efforts to get him to talk went nowhere. When I recounted this peculiar hitchhiking experience to a physicist turned psychotherapist, who gave me a lift a few days later, he explained that the man was probably clinically depressed.
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The Speckled People: Memoirs of a Half Irish Childhood
Don Quixote was too heavy a book to haul for a third time across the Atlantic. The taxi already waiting, I quickly grabbed Hugo Hamilton's childhood autobiography from my bookshelf where it was sitting for the last two years after having received a very good review in one of my favorite news outlets. Having finished the book, it is fair to assume that the reviewer either had special connections to post-World War II Ireland or Germany. These strong emotional ties suspended all critical faculties. The rave review was unwarranted because The Speckled People does not come close to world literature. The book has a few good passages. But unlike the truly pioneering Don Quixote The Speckled People will not withstand the test of time despite having good material to work with. For one, the narrative perspective it adopts does not work.
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Christianity and the Catholic Church at the End of the Millennium
In 1996 Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, who recently became Pope Bednedict XVI, sat down with Peter Seewald, a German journalist who had left the catholic church, for a long conservation that was published as a book in the following year. Salt of the Earth: Christianity and the Catholic Church at the End of the Millennium became a bestseller in catholic circles. On a visit to Germany (the homeland of the new pope) I stumbled upon the book on the coffee table of my host and started reading. It turned out to be so interesting that I spent the next day reading it cover to cover. Seewald asked Ratzinger all the questions that an unbeliever or critic of the catholic church might want to ask the high church officials. Seewald posed Ratzinger one tough question after another, and you wonder constantly whether Ratzinger will be able to give an intellectually satisfying answer. The picture of Ratzinger that emerges in this conversation is quite different than one that I had collected from reading worldy newspapers.
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Disappointed Peter (Pan)
I barely finished Peter Pan. The reader of my diary will remember that I was very excited about the first couple of pages of B. F. Berrie's famous children's story. The last few pages again were excellent. But in between lay for the adult reader one hundred forty painfully boring pages. Even as a child I found it was silly when adults spoke in baby talk. Those who engage in baby talk think it resembles the level of simplicity in the speech of young children although no child ever talks that way. What is so captivating about the Wizard of Oz is that it truly can capture the interest both of child and adult alike. B. F. Berrie, by contrast, writes a lot of baby talk that gets very tiring. Berrie also commits an atrocious crime against adult sensibility: he fundamentally misrepresents what adult life is about to make his young readers feel very special.
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Slouching Towards Bethlehem
Love at first sight may be a romantic illusion. Wild excitement at first sight is certainly real. That's what I experienced reading the first couple of pages of Joan Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem. I quickly realized that this collection is a literary event not to be missed. When I was in college, I bought myself a copy of Didion's Democracy but did not get beyond the first couple of pages. After picking up Slouching Towards Bethlehem I had to force myself to keep appointments because I did not want to put the book down. For once the advertisement on the back cover is not an exageration of the merits of a book but rather nicely captures the quality of its contents. It says: "Universally acclaimed when it was first published in 1968, Slouching Towards Bethelehem has become a modern classic. More than any other book of its time, the collection captures the mood of the 1960s America, especially the center of its counterculture, California.
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The Tale of the 1002nd Night
This tale is magnificient. Roth became famous for his novels Job and Radetzky March. For the contemporary reader Radetzky March is tedious. The slow decline of the Austrian Empire by itself can no longer hold our attention without connecting it to a larger, more universal story. The Tale of the 1002nd Night, in contrast, feels fresh, fast-paced and contemporary because Roth places into the background the unresolved question of how the Muslim and Christians will coexist in the industrial age. In the foreground are the stories of individual human beings (the Shah of Persia, an Austrian aristocrat, a working class girl) who struggle to live in their particular place and position, and who become connected through small chance events. I continue to be surprised how sharp an eye Josepth Roth has and how well he can describe what he sees in the world. Roth knows the human heart in all its complications and weaves together astonishingly gripping tales.
Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds
I discovered Harold Bloom last year and have become a big fan of his literary criticism. Even when he writes about authors I know quite well, he brings a fresh perspective on the material. Many of his 100 creative minds I have not had the chance to read in detail, but my appetitive for their works is enormously stimulated by Bloom's deep knowledge of how they fit in the larger canvass of world literature. Bloom is a literary heavyweight. His language is a spectacle for the mind. I highly recommend this book. One does not have to read the book all at once but can read about one author a day, for example.
Tonio Kroeger
This autobiographical short piece of fiction is the best writing of Thomas Mann that I have laid eyes on. For me it was much more compelling than his famous first major novel The Buddenbrocks. At least one German writer (Martin Walser) claims to have learned the entire novella by heart so that he could readily draw upon it as a role model for his own writing. I suspect there are many more. I have just reread Tonio Kroeger and once again found that Thomas Mann's ability to describe human emotions is breathtaking.
Confession of a Murderer
Joseph Roth died in his Paris exile, leaving behind thirteen novels as well as many stories and essays. The Confession of a Murderer Told in One Night is after Job Roth's most spellbinding novel that I have read to date. Roth had to flee from the Nazis in Germany. The book is a wonderful parable of the spirit that fuelled the Nazi movement without ever saying one word about it. The story, in fact, takes place in Russia and Paris.
Reports from Berlin, 1920-33
A couple of months ago (March 2003) I started reading Joseph Roth's newpaper columns about life in Berlin in the 1920s. He turns out to be a master of short essays on social life. I became so enamored with his powerfully perceptive prose that I started to read his novels. Savoy is a fine story but Job is truly outstanding.
The Story of Job
Roth has the ability to create suspense even though we are reading about the "Life of a Simple" man. The central theme of the novel is the role of destiny in human life that has become surrounded by the products of science and technology. The tale begins with a prophecy in prerevolutionary Russia and ends up in New York. More I shall not tell.
Collected Fictions of Jorge Louis Borges
I have lately become quite enchanted with Jorge Luis Borges. What a pitty that he did not get the Noble Prize for his work! I hereby bestow upon him the Murmann Prize! If you don't enjoy his work, write to me and I may give you back the money you spent on Borges.
Read his story Funes, the Memorious.
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