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711 reviews
The Beilis Transcripts: The Anti-semitic Trial that Shook the World by Ezekiel Leikin
dark
funny
informative
sad
medium-paced
4.0
Book Review
The Beilis Transcripts
4/5 stars
"Truth is stranger than fiction."
*******
For the record, this is a book about a trial that just happened a little over a century ago where a Russian Jewish man is accused of murdering a child in order to use his blood in matzah.
He was acquitted after sitting in jail for 2 years. The trial lasted 34 days and called over 200 witnesses.
The upshot is that the boy's mother was a criminal and her criminal connections ended up getting her son killed, and the Jews of that time were a scapegoat.
It's also set in the context of a Russia that was soon to fall to the Bolsheviks, and it was the government of the Catastrophically Stupid Emperor of Russia, Nicholas II. (We spent almost an entire undergraduate semester with the Robert K Massie book "Nicholas and Alexandra." The description of Nicholas II is accurate.)
Lots of African levels of corruption here: the government beats fabricated testimony out of witnesses, testimony changes three and four times during a trial, etc.
********
Tons of second order thoughts:
1. This trial was set in 1911, but the mental architecture of the people was probably more appropriate for the 9th century. It really is amazing to me the people who knew how to use indoor toilets to be convinced of the blood libel.
2. It was unintentional, but the deadpan humor of the witnesses reminds me of a combination episode of "Newhart" and "Cinemasins."
3. Then, as now, most Jewish people were not interested in the ritual aspects of Judaism and were secular. (The subject of the book worked on Shabbat.)
4. Then, as now, it seems like the Jews catch it from both sides. The Loyalists and defenders of the Russian throne (the "right") were vicious anti-semites, and when the Bolsheviks ("the left") took over, they and the later Soviets were just as anti-Semitic as the government that they replaced.
5. Even today, a century after the Russian events and in a country several thousand miles away from Russia it seems that the (Orthodox) Jewish conceptual space is extremely secretive and paranoid. As I read the improbable (but true) events of this book, I don't wonder why anymore.
6. Jewish people live around Some Other People who refuse to realize that they have plenty of good people among them, and they don't want to cooperate with them. (Einstein fled Germany to the benefit of the United states. And he wasn't the first. Plenty of Russian billionaires are Jewish.)
7. This specific events had sunk down the memory hole probably even by the 1950s. (Remember that the Rosenbergs were executed because of spying on behalf of Russia--which despised Jews.)
8. I know that American academics are obsessed with Europe because they think it's just so "sophisticated."
But, these blood libels and pogroms were very common throughout that exact region and for something like over a thousand years.
"Sophisticated" is not a word that I would use to apply to people like this.
9. There is no rational explanation for the Jewish obsession with left wing causes, given that they don't find any love and affection there, either. (Think about Jewish Voice for Peace. Or their saying kaddish for dead terrorists. Or Jewish involvement in the ACLU. And did I mention the Rosenbergs)
10. Many examples of the famed (Ashkenazi) Jewish verbal virtuosity are here. These are real conversations and not scripted, believe it or not. (Some of these dialogues were as good as anything off of "BoJack Horseman.")
11. When people try to set up conspiracies, trying to explain them to a jury / future readers is nowhere near as easy as it is in the movies.
Verdict: Recommended at the price of about $5.
This book is not worth rereading for further benefit. It is a bit difficult to follow in places, and so it loses one star on account thereof.
226 pages, about 3-4 hours worth of reading.
The Beilis Transcripts
4/5 stars
"Truth is stranger than fiction."
*******
For the record, this is a book about a trial that just happened a little over a century ago where a Russian Jewish man is accused of murdering a child in order to use his blood in matzah.
He was acquitted after sitting in jail for 2 years. The trial lasted 34 days and called over 200 witnesses.
The upshot is that the boy's mother was a criminal and her criminal connections ended up getting her son killed, and the Jews of that time were a scapegoat.
It's also set in the context of a Russia that was soon to fall to the Bolsheviks, and it was the government of the Catastrophically Stupid Emperor of Russia, Nicholas II. (We spent almost an entire undergraduate semester with the Robert K Massie book "Nicholas and Alexandra." The description of Nicholas II is accurate.)
Lots of African levels of corruption here: the government beats fabricated testimony out of witnesses, testimony changes three and four times during a trial, etc.
********
Tons of second order thoughts:
1. This trial was set in 1911, but the mental architecture of the people was probably more appropriate for the 9th century. It really is amazing to me the people who knew how to use indoor toilets to be convinced of the blood libel.
2. It was unintentional, but the deadpan humor of the witnesses reminds me of a combination episode of "Newhart" and "Cinemasins."
3. Then, as now, most Jewish people were not interested in the ritual aspects of Judaism and were secular. (The subject of the book worked on Shabbat.)
4. Then, as now, it seems like the Jews catch it from both sides. The Loyalists and defenders of the Russian throne (the "right") were vicious anti-semites, and when the Bolsheviks ("the left") took over, they and the later Soviets were just as anti-Semitic as the government that they replaced.
5. Even today, a century after the Russian events and in a country several thousand miles away from Russia it seems that the (Orthodox) Jewish conceptual space is extremely secretive and paranoid. As I read the improbable (but true) events of this book, I don't wonder why anymore.
6. Jewish people live around Some Other People who refuse to realize that they have plenty of good people among them, and they don't want to cooperate with them. (Einstein fled Germany to the benefit of the United states. And he wasn't the first. Plenty of Russian billionaires are Jewish.)
7. This specific events had sunk down the memory hole probably even by the 1950s. (Remember that the Rosenbergs were executed because of spying on behalf of Russia--which despised Jews.)
8. I know that American academics are obsessed with Europe because they think it's just so "sophisticated."
But, these blood libels and pogroms were very common throughout that exact region and for something like over a thousand years.
"Sophisticated" is not a word that I would use to apply to people like this.
9. There is no rational explanation for the Jewish obsession with left wing causes, given that they don't find any love and affection there, either. (Think about Jewish Voice for Peace. Or their saying kaddish for dead terrorists. Or Jewish involvement in the ACLU. And did I mention the Rosenbergs)
10. Many examples of the famed (Ashkenazi) Jewish verbal virtuosity are here. These are real conversations and not scripted, believe it or not. (Some of these dialogues were as good as anything off of "BoJack Horseman.")
11. When people try to set up conspiracies, trying to explain them to a jury / future readers is nowhere near as easy as it is in the movies.
Verdict: Recommended at the price of about $5.
This book is not worth rereading for further benefit. It is a bit difficult to follow in places, and so it loses one star on account thereof.
226 pages, about 3-4 hours worth of reading.
How History and Genetics Define Jewish Diversity and Identity: Are We All Cousins? by Boris Draznin
Book Review:
"How History and Genetics Define Jewish Diversity and Identity"
5/5 stars
" Info packed updating of interdisciplinary topic"
*******
Of the book:
-127 pages/11 chapters. 11.5/per
-99 references=0.8/per
-There are a few spelling mistakes, and a lot more work should have been done to point the sources back to the text.
-Appendix and glossary, but no index. (The suggestions for further reading may be the bibliography, but that's not clear.)
This book only takes 2~3 hours to read, and at that time-cost there's really no excuse not to read it.
It should probably be read once and then reread 6 months to a year later.
This is essentially a broadside with a brief synopsis of Genetics as well as the history surrounding the situation. (It also puts me in mind of "Legacy," by Dr Harry Ostrer.)
The same story is told again and again, which is essentially: some number of Jews start out in place X, and through war or expulsion move to place Y. And while there, they pick up bits of genetic variation from surrounding populations.
The overwhelming majority of Jewish history has been Diaspora history:
1. And those in The Diaspora have most of the time been quite a bit richer than those in Eretz Yisrael--and that is what kept them living in the Diaspora in preference to Israel. (American Jews are a lot better off on average than Israeli Jews, and they also don't have compulsory military service.)
2. It seems that when Jews live with each other, their internal bickering gets out of hand and makes it difficult to live there. (The Hasmomean Dynasty, THEN. The bar-Kochba revolt, THEN. Obstructive, non-working, non-contributing, non-tax paying Haredim in Israel, NOW.)
In some cases, these Jews stabilized into some sort of endogamy (Europe) and in other cases they were so overwhelmed by the local population that there are only a few traces of Jewish ancestry left (sub-Saharan Africa); the question becomes "what is the range of Middle Eastern ancestry versus that of local populations?"
The Lost Tribes is also a powerful myth that will not die: in reality, the Northern Kingdom was conquered and the people were just displaced--as was the habit of Assyrians.
*******
Most interesting points:
1. Debunking of the ever-undying Khazar hypothesis. AGAIN.
2. Falasha Mura≠ Beta Israel
3. Bene Israel≠Cochin≠Baghdadi Jews
4. There are about 50,000 Lemba. Most are Xtian. Some are Muslim.
5. As of the time of the book, there were about 50 million Igbos. About 3,000 out of that total are Jewish (according to some definitions). For the record, that is 0.006%
6. It is silly to say that someone is 1% Scandinavian or 2% Spanish when those small percentages lie within the margin of error. (I have noticed the DNA testing services are very coy about their margins of error.)
7. 14,000 wars have taken place between 3500 BCE and the late 20th century, with billions of people killed or displaced.
8. "Owing to the high degree of intermarriage and the end of endogamy, it will soon be nearly impossible to establish the genetic relatedness of Jews living in the Diaspora to a single Jewish ancestry."
*****
Extended thoughts:
1. In the minds of a lot of people, everyone else is a sideshow to the Ashkenazim. Often, they themselves don't know anything about other traditions that are actually *older* than their own.
This book does remedy some of that, though there's much more to learn.
2. The author takes the trouble to debunk the 4 Favorite Useful Idiots of Anti-semites (these 4 are super-popular among Hebrew Israelites, and that right there should tell you something).
a. Paul Wexler wrote a book called "The Ashkenazi Jews," and he seems to think that they are Slavic descendants of Khazars. He is a linguist, and not a geneticist.
b. Arthur Koestler (a journalist, and not a geneticist) wrote a book called "The 13th Tribe" (in 1976), which also argued in favor of the Khazar hypothesis. This is before the entire human genome have been sequence, let alone Genome Wide Association Studies.
c. Shlomo Sands is a professor of History (again, not Genetics) and seems to promote the Khazar hypothesis.
d. Ehran Elhaik has published papers in support of that, although he is an extreme minority opinion (also, the only one of these that is actually trained in genetics).
3. It seems that Ashkenazim descended from about 20,000 Jews that moved from Italy into Europe during the first millennium (Roman Empire Jews are thought to have been between 4 and 6 million people)--and then these were subject to a severe bottleneck about 7 to 8 centuries ago and the remaining 350 to 450 (!) are the founding population of modern-day Ashkenazim.
4. The author suggests (and he is not the first) that modern day Israel is creating a new type of Jew because of the coalescence of populations from many parts of the world. Mixed marriages are quite popular over there - - and far more than they are in the Diaspora. He also notes that a lot of these Diaspora cultures were intact up until moving to Israel, at which point they were immediately destroyed by amalgamation.
Verdict: Recommended.
Vocabulary:
Romaniotes
Yevanic
Judeo-Georgian (Kivruli)
Frawardigan
Neofiti
Susiti
Judeo-Tat (Juhuri)
Single Tandem Repeats
Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms
Genome Wide Association Study
informative
fast-paced
5.0
Book Review:
"How History and Genetics Define Jewish Diversity and Identity"
5/5 stars
" Info packed updating of interdisciplinary topic"
*******
Of the book:
-127 pages/11 chapters. 11.5/per
-99 references=0.8/per
-There are a few spelling mistakes, and a lot more work should have been done to point the sources back to the text.
-Appendix and glossary, but no index. (The suggestions for further reading may be the bibliography, but that's not clear.)
This book only takes 2~3 hours to read, and at that time-cost there's really no excuse not to read it.
It should probably be read once and then reread 6 months to a year later.
This is essentially a broadside with a brief synopsis of Genetics as well as the history surrounding the situation. (It also puts me in mind of "Legacy," by Dr Harry Ostrer.)
The same story is told again and again, which is essentially: some number of Jews start out in place X, and through war or expulsion move to place Y. And while there, they pick up bits of genetic variation from surrounding populations.
The overwhelming majority of Jewish history has been Diaspora history:
1. And those in The Diaspora have most of the time been quite a bit richer than those in Eretz Yisrael--and that is what kept them living in the Diaspora in preference to Israel. (American Jews are a lot better off on average than Israeli Jews, and they also don't have compulsory military service.)
2. It seems that when Jews live with each other, their internal bickering gets out of hand and makes it difficult to live there. (The Hasmomean Dynasty, THEN. The bar-Kochba revolt, THEN. Obstructive, non-working, non-contributing, non-tax paying Haredim in Israel, NOW.)
In some cases, these Jews stabilized into some sort of endogamy (Europe) and in other cases they were so overwhelmed by the local population that there are only a few traces of Jewish ancestry left (sub-Saharan Africa); the question becomes "what is the range of Middle Eastern ancestry versus that of local populations?"
The Lost Tribes is also a powerful myth that will not die: in reality, the Northern Kingdom was conquered and the people were just displaced--as was the habit of Assyrians.
*******
Most interesting points:
1. Debunking of the ever-undying Khazar hypothesis. AGAIN.
2. Falasha Mura≠ Beta Israel
3. Bene Israel≠Cochin≠Baghdadi Jews
4. There are about 50,000 Lemba. Most are Xtian. Some are Muslim.
5. As of the time of the book, there were about 50 million Igbos. About 3,000 out of that total are Jewish (according to some definitions). For the record, that is 0.006%
6. It is silly to say that someone is 1% Scandinavian or 2% Spanish when those small percentages lie within the margin of error. (I have noticed the DNA testing services are very coy about their margins of error.)
7. 14,000 wars have taken place between 3500 BCE and the late 20th century, with billions of people killed or displaced.
8. "Owing to the high degree of intermarriage and the end of endogamy, it will soon be nearly impossible to establish the genetic relatedness of Jews living in the Diaspora to a single Jewish ancestry."
*****
Extended thoughts:
1. In the minds of a lot of people, everyone else is a sideshow to the Ashkenazim. Often, they themselves don't know anything about other traditions that are actually *older* than their own.
This book does remedy some of that, though there's much more to learn.
2. The author takes the trouble to debunk the 4 Favorite Useful Idiots of Anti-semites (these 4 are super-popular among Hebrew Israelites, and that right there should tell you something).
a. Paul Wexler wrote a book called "The Ashkenazi Jews," and he seems to think that they are Slavic descendants of Khazars. He is a linguist, and not a geneticist.
b. Arthur Koestler (a journalist, and not a geneticist) wrote a book called "The 13th Tribe" (in 1976), which also argued in favor of the Khazar hypothesis. This is before the entire human genome have been sequence, let alone Genome Wide Association Studies.
c. Shlomo Sands is a professor of History (again, not Genetics) and seems to promote the Khazar hypothesis.
d. Ehran Elhaik has published papers in support of that, although he is an extreme minority opinion (also, the only one of these that is actually trained in genetics).
3. It seems that Ashkenazim descended from about 20,000 Jews that moved from Italy into Europe during the first millennium (Roman Empire Jews are thought to have been between 4 and 6 million people)--and then these were subject to a severe bottleneck about 7 to 8 centuries ago and the remaining 350 to 450 (!) are the founding population of modern-day Ashkenazim.
4. The author suggests (and he is not the first) that modern day Israel is creating a new type of Jew because of the coalescence of populations from many parts of the world. Mixed marriages are quite popular over there - - and far more than they are in the Diaspora. He also notes that a lot of these Diaspora cultures were intact up until moving to Israel, at which point they were immediately destroyed by amalgamation.
Verdict: Recommended.
Vocabulary:
Romaniotes
Yevanic
Judeo-Georgian (Kivruli)
Frawardigan
Neofiti
Susiti
Judeo-Tat (Juhuri)
Single Tandem Repeats
Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms
Genome Wide Association Study
Bisexual Married Men: Stories of Relationships, Acceptance, and Authenticity by Robert Brooks Cohen
medium-paced
2.0
Book Review
Bisexual Married Men.
2/5 stars
"Save your money"
*******
This book had the potential to be a lot more.
I count the stories of 11 men and 2 couples over 231 pages of prose. (Each case was *exactly* 12 pages, for some reason.)
That should work out to about 156 pages, or about 2/3 of the book. But, it was effectively significantly less than that because the author kept inserting points about his own personal experience within the text of the people's stories.
Most annoying. (It's like "You had 1/3 of the book to say what you wanted to say; couldn't you just let these guys tell their stories uninterrupted?")
Another aggravating thing was to keep trying to put "intersectionality" (critical race theory) into the stories of these men; it compromises the integrity of the work, because I don't know how much it is representative examples versus the amount that is someone else's political agenda.
The upshot is that I just really don't see that much helpful information in this book.
1. If there is a straight couple husband and wife couple, and the husband has other women / outside children (I've seen this happen so many times that I've lost count), then that husband and wife will come to some sort of equilibrium that makes sense only to them. And it doesn't matter, because it's a relevant concern *only* to them.
Another couple might have different conclusions, or any of the partners in the aforementioned marriage might have a different conclusion with another partner.
And it really just is what it is.
2. A lot of books about non-monogamy / open marriages have been written (the one that I remember best was Jenny Block's "Open"), and it is also very complicated negotiating an open marriage even in the context of a straight marriage. The fact that these happen to be marriages in which one of the partners is bisexual is a red herring.
The negotiation process in this case has to be done the same as it is for a straight marriage, which is: CAREFULLY. (I have seen marriages where husband and wife brought in a third party and that is what broke the marriage up-- one of the marital partners was MORE attracted to the outside partner than the inside partner.)
4. I know it happens a lot, but I don't understand what is this BIG LIFT that everybody gets from making sure that everyone around them knows about their sexual orientation.
If a friend or a relative told me that he was interested in his wife and occasional guys, my next question would be...."Okay, so now what? How is this any more useful than my knowing that you are allergic to cats or do not like cilantro?"
*******
At least a couple of these stories have me wondering: "WTF is the point? WTF is this?!?!"
1. Stanley and Christine met at a bisexual Play Party, and both of them are too old to have kids at this point. And as you age, in reality, you have a lot less to choose from. If you have a wife with a bisexual husband in the context of marriage, and they have children (and the children have children), then it seems to me like that's some more valuable memory of a relationship than trying to reach back always further in the past to recall memories of sexual encounters.
2. "Carter" was both trans and bi. I've never understood this: I have met a person that grew up as a girl, and then it decided that it was a boy. And then its dating choices were men. (It had its breasts surgically removed and was given male hormones. A side effect of that is vaginal atrophy and a cooter that is probably drier than a bucket of sand.)
Carter started out as a girl and decided to become a man, but now has sex with boys and girls?
But then married a white lady, and they're expecting their first child together. (But the child cannot belong to Carter because he doesn't have the equipment to make children????)
Then, Carter and his white wife decided to use a black sperm donor. (Why did it have to be that way? How many times have we heard the joke that the best way to get rid of a black boyfriend that you don't want is to just tell him that you are pregnant?)
3. The author himself is a "WTF?" He started out with a person who was a man, and then identified his non-binary, and then decided to transition to be a woman. So, Moxie's going to go through all of this surgery and construct a pseudo-vagina. (Wow, do I hear stories about how difficult they are to maintain.)
But then the author claims to be interested in real women, and they have ladybits that require no surgery to create and an absolute minimum of maintenance.
*******
I would be very interested to see if there were significant differences in children that were raised by gay parents.
"Bennett" was raised by a lesbian feminazi, and he just assumed that he would be gay. But, his longest term relationships were with women. (First story I've ever read where a guy has to "admit" to himself that he is straight.)
13 couples turns out to birth 14 children. 8 out of the 13 had 0 children, meaning the 5 people accounted for all 14. The counting gets kind of thorny, but there are 14 women in here (in one way or another), and this is almost exactly 1.0 children per woman. (An evolutionary dead end, to be sure.)
*******
A couple of good quotes:
(p.112): "When you have a self-interest in something, you have to be careful that you're reading the other person the correct way."
(p.109): " I have regrets, 100%. I should have been more open. I should have dated more women. I should have allowed myself to date guys. It's not been all bad - - but you never get those years back and you never get those experiences back.". [Mark Twain has been quoted as saying: “Never regret anything that made you smile”]
VERDICT: Save your money and read the short attention span summary, below.
*******
Short attention span summary of the book, and based on information that was published by a psychologist JR Little:
Alternating bisexuals: may have a relationship with a man, and then after that relationship ends, may choose a female partner for a subsequent relationship, and many go back to a male partner in the future.
Circumstantial bisexuals: primarily heterosexual, but will choose same sex partners only if they have no access to other-sex partners, such as when in jail, in the military, or in a gender-segregated school.
Concurrent relationship bisexuals: have primary relationship with one gender only but have other casual or secondary relationships with people of another gender at the same time.
Conditional bisexuals: either straight or gay/lesbian, but will switch to a relationship with another gender for a specific purpose, such as young straight males who become gay prostitutes to make money or lesbians who get married to men in order to gain acceptance from family members or to have children.
Emotional bisexuals: have deeply intimate emotional relationships with both men and women, but only have sex with one gender.
Integrated bisexuals: have more than one primary relationship at the same time, one with a man and one with a woman.
Exploratory bisexuals: either straight or gay/lesbian, but have sex with another gender just to satisfy curiosity or “see what it’s like.”
Hedonistic bisexuals: primarily straight or gay/lesbian but will sometimes have recreational sex with a different gender purely for sexual satisfaction.
Recreational bisexuals: primarily heterosexual but engage in gay or lesbian sex only when under the influence of drugs and/or alcohol.
Isolated bisexuals: 100% straight or gay/lesbian now but has had at one or more sexual experience with another gender in the past.
Latent bisexuals: completely straight or gay lesbian in behavior, they have strong desire for sex with another gender but have never acted on it.
Motivational bisexuals: straight women who have sex with other women to please their male partner who requests it for his own titillataion.
Transitional bisexuals: temporarily identify as bisexual while in the process of moving from being straight to being gay or lesbian, or going from being gay or lesbian to being heterosexual.
Bisexual Married Men.
2/5 stars
"Save your money"
*******
This book had the potential to be a lot more.
I count the stories of 11 men and 2 couples over 231 pages of prose. (Each case was *exactly* 12 pages, for some reason.)
That should work out to about 156 pages, or about 2/3 of the book. But, it was effectively significantly less than that because the author kept inserting points about his own personal experience within the text of the people's stories.
Most annoying. (It's like "You had 1/3 of the book to say what you wanted to say; couldn't you just let these guys tell their stories uninterrupted?")
Another aggravating thing was to keep trying to put "intersectionality" (critical race theory) into the stories of these men; it compromises the integrity of the work, because I don't know how much it is representative examples versus the amount that is someone else's political agenda.
The upshot is that I just really don't see that much helpful information in this book.
1. If there is a straight couple husband and wife couple, and the husband has other women / outside children (I've seen this happen so many times that I've lost count), then that husband and wife will come to some sort of equilibrium that makes sense only to them. And it doesn't matter, because it's a relevant concern *only* to them.
Another couple might have different conclusions, or any of the partners in the aforementioned marriage might have a different conclusion with another partner.
And it really just is what it is.
2. A lot of books about non-monogamy / open marriages have been written (the one that I remember best was Jenny Block's "Open"), and it is also very complicated negotiating an open marriage even in the context of a straight marriage. The fact that these happen to be marriages in which one of the partners is bisexual is a red herring.
The negotiation process in this case has to be done the same as it is for a straight marriage, which is: CAREFULLY. (I have seen marriages where husband and wife brought in a third party and that is what broke the marriage up-- one of the marital partners was MORE attracted to the outside partner than the inside partner.)
4. I know it happens a lot, but I don't understand what is this BIG LIFT that everybody gets from making sure that everyone around them knows about their sexual orientation.
If a friend or a relative told me that he was interested in his wife and occasional guys, my next question would be...."Okay, so now what? How is this any more useful than my knowing that you are allergic to cats or do not like cilantro?"
*******
At least a couple of these stories have me wondering: "WTF is the point? WTF is this?!?!"
1. Stanley and Christine met at a bisexual Play Party, and both of them are too old to have kids at this point. And as you age, in reality, you have a lot less to choose from. If you have a wife with a bisexual husband in the context of marriage, and they have children (and the children have children), then it seems to me like that's some more valuable memory of a relationship than trying to reach back always further in the past to recall memories of sexual encounters.
2. "Carter" was both trans and bi. I've never understood this: I have met a person that grew up as a girl, and then it decided that it was a boy. And then its dating choices were men. (It had its breasts surgically removed and was given male hormones. A side effect of that is vaginal atrophy and a cooter that is probably drier than a bucket of sand.)
Carter started out as a girl and decided to become a man, but now has sex with boys and girls?
But then married a white lady, and they're expecting their first child together. (But the child cannot belong to Carter because he doesn't have the equipment to make children????)
Then, Carter and his white wife decided to use a black sperm donor. (Why did it have to be that way? How many times have we heard the joke that the best way to get rid of a black boyfriend that you don't want is to just tell him that you are pregnant?)
3. The author himself is a "WTF?" He started out with a person who was a man, and then identified his non-binary, and then decided to transition to be a woman. So, Moxie's going to go through all of this surgery and construct a pseudo-vagina. (Wow, do I hear stories about how difficult they are to maintain.)
But then the author claims to be interested in real women, and they have ladybits that require no surgery to create and an absolute minimum of maintenance.
*******
I would be very interested to see if there were significant differences in children that were raised by gay parents.
"Bennett" was raised by a lesbian feminazi, and he just assumed that he would be gay. But, his longest term relationships were with women. (First story I've ever read where a guy has to "admit" to himself that he is straight.)
13 couples turns out to birth 14 children. 8 out of the 13 had 0 children, meaning the 5 people accounted for all 14. The counting gets kind of thorny, but there are 14 women in here (in one way or another), and this is almost exactly 1.0 children per woman. (An evolutionary dead end, to be sure.)
*******
A couple of good quotes:
(p.112): "When you have a self-interest in something, you have to be careful that you're reading the other person the correct way."
(p.109): " I have regrets, 100%. I should have been more open. I should have dated more women. I should have allowed myself to date guys. It's not been all bad - - but you never get those years back and you never get those experiences back.". [Mark Twain has been quoted as saying: “Never regret anything that made you smile”]
VERDICT: Save your money and read the short attention span summary, below.
*******
Short attention span summary of the book, and based on information that was published by a psychologist JR Little:
Alternating bisexuals: may have a relationship with a man, and then after that relationship ends, may choose a female partner for a subsequent relationship, and many go back to a male partner in the future.
Circumstantial bisexuals: primarily heterosexual, but will choose same sex partners only if they have no access to other-sex partners, such as when in jail, in the military, or in a gender-segregated school.
Concurrent relationship bisexuals: have primary relationship with one gender only but have other casual or secondary relationships with people of another gender at the same time.
Conditional bisexuals: either straight or gay/lesbian, but will switch to a relationship with another gender for a specific purpose, such as young straight males who become gay prostitutes to make money or lesbians who get married to men in order to gain acceptance from family members or to have children.
Emotional bisexuals: have deeply intimate emotional relationships with both men and women, but only have sex with one gender.
Integrated bisexuals: have more than one primary relationship at the same time, one with a man and one with a woman.
Exploratory bisexuals: either straight or gay/lesbian, but have sex with another gender just to satisfy curiosity or “see what it’s like.”
Hedonistic bisexuals: primarily straight or gay/lesbian but will sometimes have recreational sex with a different gender purely for sexual satisfaction.
Recreational bisexuals: primarily heterosexual but engage in gay or lesbian sex only when under the influence of drugs and/or alcohol.
Isolated bisexuals: 100% straight or gay/lesbian now but has had at one or more sexual experience with another gender in the past.
Latent bisexuals: completely straight or gay lesbian in behavior, they have strong desire for sex with another gender but have never acted on it.
Motivational bisexuals: straight women who have sex with other women to please their male partner who requests it for his own titillataion.
Transitional bisexuals: temporarily identify as bisexual while in the process of moving from being straight to being gay or lesbian, or going from being gay or lesbian to being heterosexual.
The Monster of Florence by Douglas Preston, Mario Spezi
adventurous
dark
informative
mysterious
reflective
fast-paced
5.0
Book Review
Monster of Florence
5/5 stars
"Italians: Great looking people, but EXTREMELY poor at criminal investigations in particular and statecraft in general."
*******
Of the book:
-60 chapters+intro+foreword
-Over 331 pages, 5.33pps/per
-Index, but no bibliography
-Unputdownable
*******
This is a brilliant book.
The events described are so farcical, that they could never have been a fiction book - -too implausible-- but it defies believe that these events really did happen in real life. (The author, Douglas Preston, is a best-selling author of fiction books; if there was a fictional plot this good, he would have been the one to dream it up.)
As I'm reading this book, I'm wondering: "who in Italy was NOT suspected of being 'The Monster' at some point or another?"
I might note that it was published about 15 years ago, and 4 out of 8 of the murders have been "solved."
It seems that there was more than one person who did the killing.
That aside, this is a fascinating slice of History of Italy, which was only unified in 1871-- and they were still in the process of doing this during the events of this book.
The circumstances that led to these murders are unthinkable to Americans or people in the English-speaking world. For the record: Italian people of this era lived at home until they get married, and so the logical place to have intimate encounters is in a car (WTF?)
And if there are so many people "being intimate" in so many cars, then some of them will be the target of opportunistic killers. (And if you wanted to sneak up on somebody, wouldn't that be the most logical time?)
*******
I see at least four separate threads in this story:
1. Probability and statistics (p.96). At the time of these events, Florence had about 780k people (380k in 2024). Murder rate at that time was about 4/100,000 per annum (33/year). These murders took place over 17 years, during which time there would have been a total of about 531 murders. Some of these would have similar characteristics just by coincidence.
2. Copycat killers (who sense an opportunity to mask their own criminality by copying another person and throwing the authorities off.)
3. Questionable quality of Italian police work/governance structures. (The Italians have had a hard time managing a state for a very long time; why should this be any different?) For example (p.119): police find a rag with 38 spots of blood, but don't bother to analyze it because it seemed unlikely. Also, they didn't even bother conserving any blood from the victims to cross check it with.
4. Mass hysteria / panic. And that type of thing happens from time to time, and it is just coincidence that it was happening in Florence, Italy. A lot of this reminds me of the Salem witch trials, where everybody thought that everybody else was a witch.
*******
A lot of the material for Thomas Harris's book "Hannibal was actually drawn from Florence, Italy and certain of the events around this story (man eating pigs, etc, p.57).
*******
Verdict: the Amanda Knox trial is not new. Apparently, inept Italian law enforcement goes back at least several decades--and possibly even further than that. If you should happen to get killed in italy, don't expect anybody to find out who did it. (At least not any sooner than you would in Sudan or Haiti.) And if you want to kill somebody and not get caught, Italy might be your best bet.
*******
Vocabulary:
-Bonfire of the Vanities (Renaissance term)
-carabineri (military grade police responsible to the Italian Ministry of Defense)
-felucca
-scagliola
-Barbagian code
-crostini
*******
Quotes:
(p. 19): "In Italy, most people live at home with their parents until they marry and most merry late. As a result, having sex in parked cars is a national pastime.... The investigators discovered the dozens of warriors proud the countryside spying on these couples. They were known as 'Indiani.'"
(p. 52): " The unified country had been created in 1871.... The inhabitants spoke some 600 languages and dialects. When the new Italian State chose the Florentine dialect to be official Italian, only 2% of the population could actually speak it. Even in 1960, fewer than half of the citizens could speak standard Italian."
(p. 246): "The doctor, under threat, gave Catapano a quick lesson in anatomy. With one enormous swipe of the knife Catapano opened the man up and ripped out the heart and liver, one in each hand, and then took a bite out of each in turn. "
Monster of Florence
5/5 stars
"Italians: Great looking people, but EXTREMELY poor at criminal investigations in particular and statecraft in general."
*******
Of the book:
-60 chapters+intro+foreword
-Over 331 pages, 5.33pps/per
-Index, but no bibliography
-Unputdownable
*******
This is a brilliant book.
The events described are so farcical, that they could never have been a fiction book - -too implausible-- but it defies believe that these events really did happen in real life. (The author, Douglas Preston, is a best-selling author of fiction books; if there was a fictional plot this good, he would have been the one to dream it up.)
As I'm reading this book, I'm wondering: "who in Italy was NOT suspected of being 'The Monster' at some point or another?"
I might note that it was published about 15 years ago, and 4 out of 8 of the murders have been "solved."
It seems that there was more than one person who did the killing.
That aside, this is a fascinating slice of History of Italy, which was only unified in 1871-- and they were still in the process of doing this during the events of this book.
The circumstances that led to these murders are unthinkable to Americans or people in the English-speaking world. For the record: Italian people of this era lived at home until they get married, and so the logical place to have intimate encounters is in a car (WTF?)
And if there are so many people "being intimate" in so many cars, then some of them will be the target of opportunistic killers. (And if you wanted to sneak up on somebody, wouldn't that be the most logical time?)
*******
I see at least four separate threads in this story:
1. Probability and statistics (p.96). At the time of these events, Florence had about 780k people (380k in 2024). Murder rate at that time was about 4/100,000 per annum (33/year). These murders took place over 17 years, during which time there would have been a total of about 531 murders. Some of these would have similar characteristics just by coincidence.
2. Copycat killers (who sense an opportunity to mask their own criminality by copying another person and throwing the authorities off.)
3. Questionable quality of Italian police work/governance structures. (The Italians have had a hard time managing a state for a very long time; why should this be any different?) For example (p.119): police find a rag with 38 spots of blood, but don't bother to analyze it because it seemed unlikely. Also, they didn't even bother conserving any blood from the victims to cross check it with.
4. Mass hysteria / panic. And that type of thing happens from time to time, and it is just coincidence that it was happening in Florence, Italy. A lot of this reminds me of the Salem witch trials, where everybody thought that everybody else was a witch.
*******
A lot of the material for Thomas Harris's book "Hannibal was actually drawn from Florence, Italy and certain of the events around this story (man eating pigs, etc, p.57).
*******
Verdict: the Amanda Knox trial is not new. Apparently, inept Italian law enforcement goes back at least several decades--and possibly even further than that. If you should happen to get killed in italy, don't expect anybody to find out who did it. (At least not any sooner than you would in Sudan or Haiti.) And if you want to kill somebody and not get caught, Italy might be your best bet.
*******
Vocabulary:
-Bonfire of the Vanities (Renaissance term)
-carabineri (military grade police responsible to the Italian Ministry of Defense)
-felucca
-scagliola
-Barbagian code
-crostini
*******
Quotes:
(p. 19): "In Italy, most people live at home with their parents until they marry and most merry late. As a result, having sex in parked cars is a national pastime.... The investigators discovered the dozens of warriors proud the countryside spying on these couples. They were known as 'Indiani.'"
(p. 52): " The unified country had been created in 1871.... The inhabitants spoke some 600 languages and dialects. When the new Italian State chose the Florentine dialect to be official Italian, only 2% of the population could actually speak it. Even in 1960, fewer than half of the citizens could speak standard Italian."
(p. 246): "The doctor, under threat, gave Catapano a quick lesson in anatomy. With one enormous swipe of the knife Catapano opened the man up and ripped out the heart and liver, one in each hand, and then took a bite out of each in turn. "
#ShalomBayis: Short Stories by Penina Shtauber
funny
informative
lighthearted
fast-paced
5.0
Book Review
Shalom Bayit
5/5 stars
Penina Shtauber
*******
Of the book:
1. 25 chapters.
2. 246 pages of prose (about 10 easy pages per chapter).
3. A few easy hours of reading, such as over Shabbat.
4. Includes glossary for Hebrew / Aramaic / Yiddish terms. (It is thoughtful, but not necessary because people who would likely read this would already know all of these words.)
5. A small number of spelling mistakes observed (=no editor).
*******
This is the second of these books that I have read by this author, and both of them were probably worthwhile - - even though I would not usually say that about fiction.
In her first book, "ShidduchCrisis," I was unclear whether or not the book was fictionalized retelling of actual things or complete fiction. In this book, the author clarifies that "some encounters are imagined, some are exaggerated, and some exist."
There's no love lost for Haredim in her first book, nor this one and in that way she is a woman after my own heart.
It is a recurring theme here that these husbands are kollel bums who are an overhyped bill of goods that turn out to be clueless in any practical sense of the word.
The second story has a husband that spent the wife's hard-earned money to present her a bracelet and used up the grocery money. And he had no clue what he had done wrong.
Before I moved here, I would not have believed it, but now that I've been hanging around here for 10 years - - it makes perfect sense. (These are guys that don't know how to operate a door knob or a dishwasher or a job application. They can learn a mean page of gemara, but they can't even tell you their times tables up to 12.)
I would say that both books in this series are useful for parents and children. The first can tell you examples of what not to do when you are going through the matchmaking process. And the second can tell you what could happen if you choose incorrectly.
Caveat emptor.
Verdict:
Recommended.
This book was a little bit higher than I would ordinarily have paid.
It would be worth it to me at the purchase price of about $10.
*******
Chapter synopses:
1. Neurotic wife is nervous because a few periods pass before pregnancy.
2. Wife has typical kollel-bum husband who doesn't understand that things cost money that is earned by working.
3. Mousy, scatterbrained wife finds that her out-of-her-league husband has a side dish.
4. Social media discordant couple.
5. Wife decides to become religious midway through a pregnancy and rakes her nails down her secular husband's internal chalkboard.
6. Aliyah-discordant couple.
7. Wife with some maturity issues.
8. Frum wife gets a bit floozyish when away from watching eyes.
9. What to call in-laws even 2 years after marriage?
10. Psychotically machmir wife interferes with husband's relationship with secular family.
11. Wife brings home the bacon, but it causes marital tensions.
12. Two babies and 20 months with attendant stress. Clueless husband.
13. Marriage counseling after 2 months to solve NO CLEAR PROBLEM because that's what everybody else is doing.
14. Neurotic Jewish wife thinks that everybody wants her husband.
15. Husband gains 50 lb after marriage and has the nerve to grouch about his wife when she gains 15.
16. Cheap even beyond Jewish norms of frugality husband.
17. Psychotically machmir husband.
18. Bad sex (for the wife) with a clueless husband who seems unaware that he has a tongue/ ability to order some toys / ability to talk to a therapist.
19. Neurotic couple cannot conceive because of being prisoner of ideas about Taharat haMishpacha.
20. Wife complains about horror stories of women married to smelly men, but then finds out that her husband is even more hygienically scrupulous than she.
21. Not always is the Yiddish proverb true that "a boy's contract with his wife is a divorce from his mother."
22. Neurotic wife's overreaction to husband smoking weed.
23. Wife is so preoccupied with helping everybody else that she forgets about her own home.
24. Somebody waited too long to get married and was surprised when she ended up with a discount rack / remnant husband.
25. A couple of gets to know each other after 40 years of marriage because that's the thing to do when the kids move out.
*******
Good quote:
"Heritage to me was like horoscopes. It meant a lot if you cared."
Shalom Bayit
5/5 stars
Penina Shtauber
*******
Of the book:
1. 25 chapters.
2. 246 pages of prose (about 10 easy pages per chapter).
3. A few easy hours of reading, such as over Shabbat.
4. Includes glossary for Hebrew / Aramaic / Yiddish terms. (It is thoughtful, but not necessary because people who would likely read this would already know all of these words.)
5. A small number of spelling mistakes observed (=no editor).
*******
This is the second of these books that I have read by this author, and both of them were probably worthwhile - - even though I would not usually say that about fiction.
In her first book, "ShidduchCrisis," I was unclear whether or not the book was fictionalized retelling of actual things or complete fiction. In this book, the author clarifies that "some encounters are imagined, some are exaggerated, and some exist."
There's no love lost for Haredim in her first book, nor this one and in that way she is a woman after my own heart.
It is a recurring theme here that these husbands are kollel bums who are an overhyped bill of goods that turn out to be clueless in any practical sense of the word.
The second story has a husband that spent the wife's hard-earned money to present her a bracelet and used up the grocery money. And he had no clue what he had done wrong.
Before I moved here, I would not have believed it, but now that I've been hanging around here for 10 years - - it makes perfect sense. (These are guys that don't know how to operate a door knob or a dishwasher or a job application. They can learn a mean page of gemara, but they can't even tell you their times tables up to 12.)
I would say that both books in this series are useful for parents and children. The first can tell you examples of what not to do when you are going through the matchmaking process. And the second can tell you what could happen if you choose incorrectly.
Caveat emptor.
Verdict:
Recommended.
This book was a little bit higher than I would ordinarily have paid.
It would be worth it to me at the purchase price of about $10.
*******
Chapter synopses:
1. Neurotic wife is nervous because a few periods pass before pregnancy.
2. Wife has typical kollel-bum husband who doesn't understand that things cost money that is earned by working.
3. Mousy, scatterbrained wife finds that her out-of-her-league husband has a side dish.
4. Social media discordant couple.
5. Wife decides to become religious midway through a pregnancy and rakes her nails down her secular husband's internal chalkboard.
6. Aliyah-discordant couple.
7. Wife with some maturity issues.
8. Frum wife gets a bit floozyish when away from watching eyes.
9. What to call in-laws even 2 years after marriage?
10. Psychotically machmir wife interferes with husband's relationship with secular family.
11. Wife brings home the bacon, but it causes marital tensions.
12. Two babies and 20 months with attendant stress. Clueless husband.
13. Marriage counseling after 2 months to solve NO CLEAR PROBLEM because that's what everybody else is doing.
14. Neurotic Jewish wife thinks that everybody wants her husband.
15. Husband gains 50 lb after marriage and has the nerve to grouch about his wife when she gains 15.
16. Cheap even beyond Jewish norms of frugality husband.
17. Psychotically machmir husband.
18. Bad sex (for the wife) with a clueless husband who seems unaware that he has a tongue/ ability to order some toys / ability to talk to a therapist.
19. Neurotic couple cannot conceive because of being prisoner of ideas about Taharat haMishpacha.
20. Wife complains about horror stories of women married to smelly men, but then finds out that her husband is even more hygienically scrupulous than she.
21. Not always is the Yiddish proverb true that "a boy's contract with his wife is a divorce from his mother."
22. Neurotic wife's overreaction to husband smoking weed.
23. Wife is so preoccupied with helping everybody else that she forgets about her own home.
24. Somebody waited too long to get married and was surprised when she ended up with a discount rack / remnant husband.
25. A couple of gets to know each other after 40 years of marriage because that's the thing to do when the kids move out.
*******
Good quote:
"Heritage to me was like horoscopes. It meant a lot if you cared."
The Arabian Nights (Norton Critical Editions) [Paperback] [December 2009] (Author) Daniel Heller-Roazen, Muhsin Mahdi, Husain Haddawy by AA
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? No
3.0
Book Review
Arabian Nights: WW Norton Critical Edition
3/5 stars
"Corny, overwrought prose at the front; Expatiative commentary at the back"
*******
Fiction books are less than 5% of all of my reading, but this is a book that has been in print in one form or another for over a millennium. Naturally, I had to figure out what all the fuss was about.
It's not exactly much ado about nothing, but it is much ado about very little--and the actual commentary/criticism on the fiction is 2/3 as long as the book itself. (The book starts with a preface of about 14 pages, and then the story is 350 pages. The commentary goes on from 354 to 521.)
The commentary is just entirely(!) too(!) wordy(!) to make it through. And, other than people who are literary majors of some type, who really cares about the series of steps involved in the creation of this book that is not a book?
*******
One thing I come up with is that Middle Easterners / Arabs really DO NOT like black people.
EVERY TIME they show up in this book, they are portrayed in a negative way. (And this is from the first page. To define a woman as debauched because her lover was black.)
They're always slaves, or linked to some type of sexual immorality.
-(p.63) "The king lowered his voice, stammered, and, simulating the accent of black people, said..."
-(p.7) "But then the 10 black slaves mounted the 10 girls, while the lady called "Massoud Massoud!" And a black slave jumped from the tree to the ground, rushed her, and, raising her legs, went between her thighs and made love to her."
In other cases (p.139), being black is part of a curse or a punishment. (It wasn't bad enough for the people who were cursed to be turned into a couple of bitches. They had to be turned into *black* bitches.) "Here they are, these two black bitches...... If you disobey my command, I will turn you into a bitch like them. I tried to give them every night 300 blows with the rod, as a punishment for what they did."
*******
There are questions about where exactly this book was written, and I would have to say that it didn't start out in the Arab world.
There's alcohol and illicit screwing on every other page of this book. Not what I expect from Arab Muslims. (But then, we have to remember that alcohol was not always illegal and the Wahhabis did not always run the Arabian peninsula.)
What's also missing is that: when Arabs take some place or capture something, they are known to take the women and children of either sex for sexual purposes. That is not found here and it may have been bowdlerized for Western sensitivities.
Or maybe it wasn't written by Arabs.
*******
A lot of stuff here just doesn't make good sense. (And that is some of the way that you know this book was reinterpreted at least once.)
"The Christian Broker's Tale" goes into China and reinterprets it in terms of The Middle East. Dhimmis and all.
These things have *never* been part of the Chinese conceptual space.
Quite a bit of quotation of Solomon and Ecclesiastes, but: how would Arabs or Persians or Indians (all of whom are thought to have made some contribution to this) have known these things?
*******
Of the book:
-It was not originally written in Arabic.
-Nobody knows what first language it was written in (first it was thought to be Arabic, then Farsi), and some people have even speculated Sanskrit--it is set in India.
-It was edited over and over and over again without actually ever having been authored, and "it grew to its present form through a process closer to sedimentation than creation."
-There are not 1001 stories, contrary to popular belief. More like about 271.
-The stories don't finish at night, and they may go on for several nights and the literary technique is called "enjambment."
Of the writing: I have to imagine that maybe it loses something in translation, but I have to say that the prose is so...... corny and... overwrought.
--It seems like every other person has "lips like rubies" or a "face like the moon" or " teeth like pearls." These children of kings are just so beautiful and smart you'd almost think that they didn't even have to ever tend to toilet functions.
--Their descriptions of the men are homoerotic. ("Beautiful as the full moon, with a slender figure and a sweet smile"?)
-The process of this book writing itself took place over more than 1,000 years, with the oldest surviving fragments being 850 CE
******
Notes:
1. The movie "Weekend at Bernie's" is actually a retelling of "The Hunchbacks Tale."
2. "Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves" and "Aladdin" seem to be missing from this edition. (I could guess what they would sound like if they follow a similar literary style.)
3. "Sinbad the Sailor" does not follow the technique of enjambment.
Verdict: The stories are just okay, but I don't recommend this version because the commentary is too much. I'd be willing to invest about 50 pages in the reading some discussion about the formation of this story. NOT 2000.
Recommended at the price of about $3.
Quotes:
(p.124) Better for me to meet and see you not, for if the eye sees nought, the heart grieves not.
Vocabulary:
ragout
cabochon
dappled
Arabian Nights: WW Norton Critical Edition
3/5 stars
"Corny, overwrought prose at the front; Expatiative commentary at the back"
*******
Fiction books are less than 5% of all of my reading, but this is a book that has been in print in one form or another for over a millennium. Naturally, I had to figure out what all the fuss was about.
It's not exactly much ado about nothing, but it is much ado about very little--and the actual commentary/criticism on the fiction is 2/3 as long as the book itself. (The book starts with a preface of about 14 pages, and then the story is 350 pages. The commentary goes on from 354 to 521.)
The commentary is just entirely(!) too(!) wordy(!) to make it through. And, other than people who are literary majors of some type, who really cares about the series of steps involved in the creation of this book that is not a book?
*******
One thing I come up with is that Middle Easterners / Arabs really DO NOT like black people.
EVERY TIME they show up in this book, they are portrayed in a negative way. (And this is from the first page. To define a woman as debauched because her lover was black.)
They're always slaves, or linked to some type of sexual immorality.
-(p.63) "The king lowered his voice, stammered, and, simulating the accent of black people, said..."
-(p.7) "But then the 10 black slaves mounted the 10 girls, while the lady called "Massoud Massoud!" And a black slave jumped from the tree to the ground, rushed her, and, raising her legs, went between her thighs and made love to her."
In other cases (p.139), being black is part of a curse or a punishment. (It wasn't bad enough for the people who were cursed to be turned into a couple of bitches. They had to be turned into *black* bitches.) "Here they are, these two black bitches...... If you disobey my command, I will turn you into a bitch like them. I tried to give them every night 300 blows with the rod, as a punishment for what they did."
*******
There are questions about where exactly this book was written, and I would have to say that it didn't start out in the Arab world.
There's alcohol and illicit screwing on every other page of this book. Not what I expect from Arab Muslims. (But then, we have to remember that alcohol was not always illegal and the Wahhabis did not always run the Arabian peninsula.)
What's also missing is that: when Arabs take some place or capture something, they are known to take the women and children of either sex for sexual purposes. That is not found here and it may have been bowdlerized for Western sensitivities.
Or maybe it wasn't written by Arabs.
*******
A lot of stuff here just doesn't make good sense. (And that is some of the way that you know this book was reinterpreted at least once.)
"The Christian Broker's Tale" goes into China and reinterprets it in terms of The Middle East. Dhimmis and all.
These things have *never* been part of the Chinese conceptual space.
Quite a bit of quotation of Solomon and Ecclesiastes, but: how would Arabs or Persians or Indians (all of whom are thought to have made some contribution to this) have known these things?
*******
Of the book:
-It was not originally written in Arabic.
-Nobody knows what first language it was written in (first it was thought to be Arabic, then Farsi), and some people have even speculated Sanskrit--it is set in India.
-It was edited over and over and over again without actually ever having been authored, and "it grew to its present form through a process closer to sedimentation than creation."
-There are not 1001 stories, contrary to popular belief. More like about 271.
-The stories don't finish at night, and they may go on for several nights and the literary technique is called "enjambment."
Of the writing: I have to imagine that maybe it loses something in translation, but I have to say that the prose is so...... corny and... overwrought.
--It seems like every other person has "lips like rubies" or a "face like the moon" or " teeth like pearls." These children of kings are just so beautiful and smart you'd almost think that they didn't even have to ever tend to toilet functions.
--Their descriptions of the men are homoerotic. ("Beautiful as the full moon, with a slender figure and a sweet smile"?)
-The process of this book writing itself took place over more than 1,000 years, with the oldest surviving fragments being 850 CE
******
Notes:
1. The movie "Weekend at Bernie's" is actually a retelling of "The Hunchbacks Tale."
2. "Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves" and "Aladdin" seem to be missing from this edition. (I could guess what they would sound like if they follow a similar literary style.)
3. "Sinbad the Sailor" does not follow the technique of enjambment.
Verdict: The stories are just okay, but I don't recommend this version because the commentary is too much. I'd be willing to invest about 50 pages in the reading some discussion about the formation of this story. NOT 2000.
Recommended at the price of about $3.
Quotes:
(p.124) Better for me to meet and see you not, for if the eye sees nought, the heart grieves not.
Vocabulary:
ragout
cabochon
dappled
Dear Zealots: Letters from a Divided Land by Amos Oz, Jessica Cohen
informative
inspiring
reflective
fast-paced
5.0
Book Review
Dear Zealots
Amos Oz
5/5 stars
"Profound thoughts are language-independent"
*******
This entire book can be read through in probably about 4 hours.
In terms of sheer pithiness, profundity of insight, portable quotes and signal to noise ratio, this author reminds me of equal parts Eric Hoffer and Leon Wieseltier.
Like "The genuine man of words himself can get along without faith in absolutes" (Hoffer), Oz explorers these issues in a very nuanced way.
Oz makes liberal quotes from the Tanakh and Talmud, and it is impossible to dismiss him as a secular person who knows absolutely nothing about Judaism.
Another thing that he makes is predictions: he died seven years ago, and he predicted that (p.111): "....in perhaps another intifada or two in Jerusalem and the West Bank, until we witness the collapse of the Palestinian Authority and the rise of Hamas--if not an even more radical entity. That is the meaning of 'conflict management.'"
It's interesting that this was originally written in Hebrew, and translated to English.
*******
Of the book:
Chapter 1: Mental properties of zealots and commonalities between zealots of all stripes.
Chalter 2: Divided between Chilonim, Dati-Leumi, and Haredim.... Israel will stand. With control of the latter, it will fall. As it has done several times in the past.
Chapter 3: Pragmatic thoughts on a two-state solution.
Verdict: Strongly recommended
As the book is strong enough to speak for itself, I will truncate the review and just put in some of the most thought-provoking quotes. (Additional 1,456 words. Take the best and leave the rest.)
*******
QUOTES
As the questions grow harder and more complicated, people yearn for simpler answers, one sentence answers, answers that point unhesitatingly to a corporate who can be blamed for all our sufferings, answers that promise that if we only eradicate the villains, all our troubles would vanish.
..... Concepts that only half a century ago seemed innovative and exciting - - multiculturalism and identity politics - - quickly morphed, in many places, into the politics of identity hatred. What began with an expansion of cultural and emotional horizons is increasingly deteriorating into narrower horizons, isolationism, and hatred of the other.
To this day, almost every second or third Jerusalemite has his own her own private formula for instant salvation.
Redemption itself, according to most of these prophets, is easily crammed into a short slogan.
The fanaticism in almost all of Jewish Israeli society, of various shades and types, arrived in Israel with the Jews of Europe. From Eastern Europe we received the revolutionary fanaticism of the founding pioneer generation, bent on remolding the Jewish people and erasing the abundance of heritages of those who came from other diasporas in order to build a "new Hebrew." Also from Europe: Ultra Orthodox fanaticism, which the clues itself inside a walled ghetto and defends itself against anything different. Jewish immigrants from Middle Eastern and North African countries, conversely, brought a generations old heritage of moderation, relative religious tolerance, and the custom of living in good neighborly relations even with those are different. Indeed, the various forms of European fanaticism are now erasing the moderation of Middle Eastern Jews.
One might encounter, for example, fanatic opponents of smoking who act as if anyone who dares light a cigarette near them should be burned alive. Or fanatic vegetarians and vegans who sometimes sound ready to devour people who eat meat.
Those who are unwilling or unable to rank evil may thereby become the servants of evil. Those who make no distinction between such disparate phenomena as apartheid, colonialism, ISIS, Zionism, political incorrectness, the gas chambers, sexism, the 1%'s wealth, and air pollution serve evil with their very refusal to grade it.
Fanatics tend to live in a black and white world, with the simplistic view of good against evil. The fanatic is in fact a person who can only count to one.
The boundary between politics and entertainment is being erased before our eyes. The world is turning into a kind of global kindergarten. The qualities a candidate needs to be elected are antithetical to the qualities required to lead.
Winston Churchill defined the fanatic as "one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject."
The fanatic is comfortable with the slogan, as long as the slogan doesn't translate into shouts, pleas, dying gurgles, puddles of blood, brains spilled out on the sidewalk
Literature and gossip are closely related. People who are curious and imaginative long enough to know "what it's like for other people." This longing can be satisfied in its basest, most banal form through gossip, just as it can attain a more refined and complex gratification in art.
"Why not just agree, all of us, Jews and Xtians, to wait patiently and see what happens? If the Messiah comes one day and says 'I haven't seen you for a long time, I'm so happy to see you again,' the Jews will then have to acknowledge their mistakes. But if, when he comes the Messiah says, 'How do you do? Very pleased to meet you,' then the Xtian world will have to apologize to the Jews. Until then, Grandma concluded... Why can't we all just live and let live?"
*******
There's certainly a Jewish nation, but it is different from many other nations because its lifeblood is not necessarily passed down through genes, nor through victories on the battlefield, but rather through books.
The story of Jewish culture is an age-old game of interpretation, reinterpretation, and counter-interpretation.
If you seek shelter from the wind and rain, erect yourself a tent or hut. If you seek a place to dwell in for the rest of your life, build a house of stone. If you wish to take care of your sons and your son's sons who come after you come up build a walled city. But if you want to construct a building for future generations, write a book.
In fact, our holidays are all similar: the bad guys tried to kill us, they couldn't do it, now let's eat.....Pharaoh came, Pharaoh left, bon appetit.
We have been taught since childhood that the earlier iterations of the State of Israel were brought down by internal strife, having collapsed under the weight of unjustified hatred.... But the truth is that the uprising against the Romans, which led to the destruction of the Second Temple, just like the earlier war against Babylonia... did not fail because of brotherly strife or unjustified hatred among Jews, but because of nationalist and religious fanaticism, because of the delusions of grandeur suffered by both leaders and subjects who had lost all sense of reality.
The Jews as a people are not disposed to obedience. Never have been. Moses could tell you how unaccustomed the Israelites are to being obedient. The prophets could also attest to it. Gd himself complains throughout the Bible that the Israelites are insubordinate.
And in recent generations Hasidic rabbis have demanded that Gd appear before a rabbinical Court to justify the terrible things occurring in this world.
Jewish culture has been built, generation upon generation, with the creative energy arising from tension between the Kohen and the prophet, between Pharisees and Sadducees, between the house of Hillel and the House of Shammai, between Sephardic and Ashkenazi prayer services, between Hasidim and Mitnagdim, between the devout and the proponents of Jewish Enlightenment, between Zionists and anti-Zionists, between the Bialik school and the Berdyczewski school of poetry, between religious and secular, between hawks and doves--to this very day.
I regard blind obedience as a deviation from tradition, even when it purports to be the embodiment of that tradition.
And post biblical times, there has not been a single event regarded by all Jews as a miracle. Many people believe in miracles these days, but the dubious outnumber them.
While it is true the spiritual clocks show different times in the different Jewish communities of Baghdad, Yemen, Morocco, Salonika, and Eastern Europe, all the clocks now show in Mount Sinai is increasingly shrouded in a pillar of smoke made up of layers of interpretive text. This is one cause of the smothering feeling that many people experience around the world of Halacha.
In recent generations, increasing numbers of Jews were no longer satisfied with living strictly according to halacha..... A great many headed to the exit door and assimilated. Halachic Judaism responded with panic and fury shunning, excommunicating, cursing, swearing, toughening up, and hunkering down...... The majority of halachic Judaism has yet to leave that bunker.
Halachic Judaism has become a repository that, although it does not lose a single drop, adds virtually none either.
Halachic Judaism often claims that the Torah is what protected the Jewish people, and that without it we would have long ago assimilated among the nations of the world. But the truth is different: it was not the commandments that protected the Jews, but the Jews who endeavored to preserve the commandments, by observing them or in some other way choosing to be Jewish. Identity is meaningful only when the exit door is wide open. Only when permission is granted. Only when each individual chooses, of his or her own accord, to maintain that identity and not replace it.
A person does not curse Gd if there is no Gd in his heart.
The Haredim are incapable of accepting the state of Israel as either a binding Jewish Authority or a binding foreign one; as the Hebrew saying goes, they can neither swallow nor vomit.
If, Gd forbid, the state of Israel were to disappear overnight, along with its parliament, elections, and courts, all the streams of Halachic Judaism would immediately need a foreign regime to adjudicate.
We must not forget that at least twice an our history we have found ourselves in a head on collision with a large superpower. Both times - - when we rose against Babylonia and against Rome - - things ended badly for us.
If someone had proposed in 1945 that Poland and Germany unite into one by national state, he would have undoubtedly been institutionalized..... The Palestinians and Israelis cannot turn into a happy family overnight. We need two states. Sometime later there might come cooperation, a joint market, a federation. But first the country must be a duplex, because we Jewish Israelis are not going anywhere. We have nowhere to go.
Dear Zealots
Amos Oz
5/5 stars
"Profound thoughts are language-independent"
*******
This entire book can be read through in probably about 4 hours.
In terms of sheer pithiness, profundity of insight, portable quotes and signal to noise ratio, this author reminds me of equal parts Eric Hoffer and Leon Wieseltier.
Like "The genuine man of words himself can get along without faith in absolutes" (Hoffer), Oz explorers these issues in a very nuanced way.
Oz makes liberal quotes from the Tanakh and Talmud, and it is impossible to dismiss him as a secular person who knows absolutely nothing about Judaism.
Another thing that he makes is predictions: he died seven years ago, and he predicted that (p.111): "....in perhaps another intifada or two in Jerusalem and the West Bank, until we witness the collapse of the Palestinian Authority and the rise of Hamas--if not an even more radical entity. That is the meaning of 'conflict management.'"
It's interesting that this was originally written in Hebrew, and translated to English.
*******
Of the book:
Chapter 1: Mental properties of zealots and commonalities between zealots of all stripes.
Chalter 2: Divided between Chilonim, Dati-Leumi, and Haredim.... Israel will stand. With control of the latter, it will fall. As it has done several times in the past.
Chapter 3: Pragmatic thoughts on a two-state solution.
Verdict: Strongly recommended
As the book is strong enough to speak for itself, I will truncate the review and just put in some of the most thought-provoking quotes. (Additional 1,456 words. Take the best and leave the rest.)
*******
QUOTES
As the questions grow harder and more complicated, people yearn for simpler answers, one sentence answers, answers that point unhesitatingly to a corporate who can be blamed for all our sufferings, answers that promise that if we only eradicate the villains, all our troubles would vanish.
..... Concepts that only half a century ago seemed innovative and exciting - - multiculturalism and identity politics - - quickly morphed, in many places, into the politics of identity hatred. What began with an expansion of cultural and emotional horizons is increasingly deteriorating into narrower horizons, isolationism, and hatred of the other.
To this day, almost every second or third Jerusalemite has his own her own private formula for instant salvation.
Redemption itself, according to most of these prophets, is easily crammed into a short slogan.
The fanaticism in almost all of Jewish Israeli society, of various shades and types, arrived in Israel with the Jews of Europe. From Eastern Europe we received the revolutionary fanaticism of the founding pioneer generation, bent on remolding the Jewish people and erasing the abundance of heritages of those who came from other diasporas in order to build a "new Hebrew." Also from Europe: Ultra Orthodox fanaticism, which the clues itself inside a walled ghetto and defends itself against anything different. Jewish immigrants from Middle Eastern and North African countries, conversely, brought a generations old heritage of moderation, relative religious tolerance, and the custom of living in good neighborly relations even with those are different. Indeed, the various forms of European fanaticism are now erasing the moderation of Middle Eastern Jews.
One might encounter, for example, fanatic opponents of smoking who act as if anyone who dares light a cigarette near them should be burned alive. Or fanatic vegetarians and vegans who sometimes sound ready to devour people who eat meat.
Those who are unwilling or unable to rank evil may thereby become the servants of evil. Those who make no distinction between such disparate phenomena as apartheid, colonialism, ISIS, Zionism, political incorrectness, the gas chambers, sexism, the 1%'s wealth, and air pollution serve evil with their very refusal to grade it.
Fanatics tend to live in a black and white world, with the simplistic view of good against evil. The fanatic is in fact a person who can only count to one.
The boundary between politics and entertainment is being erased before our eyes. The world is turning into a kind of global kindergarten. The qualities a candidate needs to be elected are antithetical to the qualities required to lead.
Winston Churchill defined the fanatic as "one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject."
The fanatic is comfortable with the slogan, as long as the slogan doesn't translate into shouts, pleas, dying gurgles, puddles of blood, brains spilled out on the sidewalk
Literature and gossip are closely related. People who are curious and imaginative long enough to know "what it's like for other people." This longing can be satisfied in its basest, most banal form through gossip, just as it can attain a more refined and complex gratification in art.
"Why not just agree, all of us, Jews and Xtians, to wait patiently and see what happens? If the Messiah comes one day and says 'I haven't seen you for a long time, I'm so happy to see you again,' the Jews will then have to acknowledge their mistakes. But if, when he comes the Messiah says, 'How do you do? Very pleased to meet you,' then the Xtian world will have to apologize to the Jews. Until then, Grandma concluded... Why can't we all just live and let live?"
*******
There's certainly a Jewish nation, but it is different from many other nations because its lifeblood is not necessarily passed down through genes, nor through victories on the battlefield, but rather through books.
The story of Jewish culture is an age-old game of interpretation, reinterpretation, and counter-interpretation.
If you seek shelter from the wind and rain, erect yourself a tent or hut. If you seek a place to dwell in for the rest of your life, build a house of stone. If you wish to take care of your sons and your son's sons who come after you come up build a walled city. But if you want to construct a building for future generations, write a book.
In fact, our holidays are all similar: the bad guys tried to kill us, they couldn't do it, now let's eat.....Pharaoh came, Pharaoh left, bon appetit.
We have been taught since childhood that the earlier iterations of the State of Israel were brought down by internal strife, having collapsed under the weight of unjustified hatred.... But the truth is that the uprising against the Romans, which led to the destruction of the Second Temple, just like the earlier war against Babylonia... did not fail because of brotherly strife or unjustified hatred among Jews, but because of nationalist and religious fanaticism, because of the delusions of grandeur suffered by both leaders and subjects who had lost all sense of reality.
The Jews as a people are not disposed to obedience. Never have been. Moses could tell you how unaccustomed the Israelites are to being obedient. The prophets could also attest to it. Gd himself complains throughout the Bible that the Israelites are insubordinate.
And in recent generations Hasidic rabbis have demanded that Gd appear before a rabbinical Court to justify the terrible things occurring in this world.
Jewish culture has been built, generation upon generation, with the creative energy arising from tension between the Kohen and the prophet, between Pharisees and Sadducees, between the house of Hillel and the House of Shammai, between Sephardic and Ashkenazi prayer services, between Hasidim and Mitnagdim, between the devout and the proponents of Jewish Enlightenment, between Zionists and anti-Zionists, between the Bialik school and the Berdyczewski school of poetry, between religious and secular, between hawks and doves--to this very day.
I regard blind obedience as a deviation from tradition, even when it purports to be the embodiment of that tradition.
And post biblical times, there has not been a single event regarded by all Jews as a miracle. Many people believe in miracles these days, but the dubious outnumber them.
While it is true the spiritual clocks show different times in the different Jewish communities of Baghdad, Yemen, Morocco, Salonika, and Eastern Europe, all the clocks now show in Mount Sinai is increasingly shrouded in a pillar of smoke made up of layers of interpretive text. This is one cause of the smothering feeling that many people experience around the world of Halacha.
In recent generations, increasing numbers of Jews were no longer satisfied with living strictly according to halacha..... A great many headed to the exit door and assimilated. Halachic Judaism responded with panic and fury shunning, excommunicating, cursing, swearing, toughening up, and hunkering down...... The majority of halachic Judaism has yet to leave that bunker.
Halachic Judaism has become a repository that, although it does not lose a single drop, adds virtually none either.
Halachic Judaism often claims that the Torah is what protected the Jewish people, and that without it we would have long ago assimilated among the nations of the world. But the truth is different: it was not the commandments that protected the Jews, but the Jews who endeavored to preserve the commandments, by observing them or in some other way choosing to be Jewish. Identity is meaningful only when the exit door is wide open. Only when permission is granted. Only when each individual chooses, of his or her own accord, to maintain that identity and not replace it.
A person does not curse Gd if there is no Gd in his heart.
The Haredim are incapable of accepting the state of Israel as either a binding Jewish Authority or a binding foreign one; as the Hebrew saying goes, they can neither swallow nor vomit.
If, Gd forbid, the state of Israel were to disappear overnight, along with its parliament, elections, and courts, all the streams of Halachic Judaism would immediately need a foreign regime to adjudicate.
We must not forget that at least twice an our history we have found ourselves in a head on collision with a large superpower. Both times - - when we rose against Babylonia and against Rome - - things ended badly for us.
If someone had proposed in 1945 that Poland and Germany unite into one by national state, he would have undoubtedly been institutionalized..... The Palestinians and Israelis cannot turn into a happy family overnight. We need two states. Sometime later there might come cooperation, a joint market, a federation. But first the country must be a duplex, because we Jewish Israelis are not going anywhere. We have nowhere to go.
The Crowd; study of the popular mind by Gustave Le Bon
slow-paced
0.0
Book Review
The Crowd
1/5 stars
"Not worth the trouble. Too unreadable."
*******
It is very rare that I do this, but I got about 1/10 of the way into this book and decided that it is just not worth it.
Even though it is only 130 pages, it reads more like it is 520 pages long.
Just from this sample page, it looks like we have (all estimates):
407 words;
12 sentences;
One sentence with 77 words and about 7 clauses;
Another sentence that is 75 words long with 10 commas;
An average of 33.9 words per sentence
The recommended sentence is between 15 and 20 words for readability, and the AVERAGE sentence in this book is almost twice as long as that.
Ain't nobody got time for that.
The author might have had a point to get across, but his writing is so cumbersome that I'm just going to have to skip it.
-->On the one hand, this book has 1,135 reviews on Amazon, so somebody is reading it. (But, then again, "Fifty Shades of Grey" has 112,170 reviews.)
-->On the other, it is on a no-name label. (Had you ever heard of Loki's publishing before today? I had not.)
NOT RECOMMENDED.
The Crowd
1/5 stars
"Not worth the trouble. Too unreadable."
*******
It is very rare that I do this, but I got about 1/10 of the way into this book and decided that it is just not worth it.
Even though it is only 130 pages, it reads more like it is 520 pages long.
Just from this sample page, it looks like we have (all estimates):
407 words;
12 sentences;
One sentence with 77 words and about 7 clauses;
Another sentence that is 75 words long with 10 commas;
An average of 33.9 words per sentence
The recommended sentence is between 15 and 20 words for readability, and the AVERAGE sentence in this book is almost twice as long as that.
Ain't nobody got time for that.
The author might have had a point to get across, but his writing is so cumbersome that I'm just going to have to skip it.
-->On the one hand, this book has 1,135 reviews on Amazon, so somebody is reading it. (But, then again, "Fifty Shades of Grey" has 112,170 reviews.)
-->On the other, it is on a no-name label. (Had you ever heard of Loki's publishing before today? I had not.)
NOT RECOMMENDED.
Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson
informative
medium-paced
4.0
Book Review
Civilization: The West and The Rest
4/5 stars
"An answer to neurotic Western oikophobia by a respectable historian"
******
Over some amount of time, so many events happen that historians have to abstract certain characters and happenings for focus and exclude others.
And so of course the same book is never written twice, but even when different books are written-- the books don't necessarily add that much value because not every single event in history is necessary to explain present times.
This author's conceptual framework is to reduce the success of Western countries to 6 "killer apps": competition, science, property, medicine, consumption, work. And no small purpose is to rebut Western academic oikophobia. ("Eurocentrism" is a rhetorical epithet to dismiss out of hand any serious analysis.)
The six killer apps each have a chapter, but not all chapters are about what they say they are about - - sometimes there are very lengthy detours. (For instance, his chapter on work is actually a history about the role of Christianity in Western affluence.)
Historical Recapitulations:
1. China squandered a very large lead because of hubris. (Any other book on Chinese history for the past 500 years will tell us this.)
2. Europe had geographic advantages in that it had navigable waterways and harbors that created kingdoms that were not so large as to be monolithic and uncompetitive (à la China), but not so fragmented has to be unable to take advantage of scale effects to support large projects-- à la Africa. (Diamond's "Guns, Germs, and Steel." Thomas Sowell's "Cultures" trilogy)
3. Resource Curse: the English settlers in North America set up to build institutions for purposes of land distribution. The Spanish crown was interested to get the most gold and silver for its Treasury, and not to build institutions. (Francis Fukyuama, "The Origins of Political Order.")
4. Speculation on the possible Christianization of China. (Other people have noticed this. Including at least one author that is quoted in the book. David Aikman.)
5. The consumer Society was created in some part by the techniques of mass production learned during the world wars.
Characters/events brought into focus:
1. Frederick the Great, the architect of the clean Prussian bureaucracy.
2. Kemal Ataturk, the modernizer of Turkey.
3. Debate between John Locke and Thomas Hobbes.
4. French Revolution vis-a-vis the American
Factoids:
1. The main Chinese collapse saw the Chinese population reduced by 40% over a period of 70 years.
2. Brazilian slaves were much larger in number than North American ones, and they had the power of manumission. (Most Brazilian slaves didn't live longer than a year, though.)
3. French and Napoleonic wars between 1792 and 1815, 3.5 million dead. 20 times more dead than Americans that died in the US revolution. (4435 people, and 2,260 for the War of 1812.)
5. Germans perfected their concentration camps actually much before WWII - - in what is now Namibia. Between September 1906 and March 1907, a total of 1,032 /1,795 prisoners on Shark Island died. Before the uprising, the Herrero had numbered 80,000; afterward only 15,000 remained. There had been 20,000 Nama; fewer than 10,000 were left when a census was conducted in 1911. Only 1 in 10 Nama prisoners survived the camps.
6. China has been cheap labor for a long time. For a period of about 3 centuries, their wages raised from 3 g of silver per day to 5~6g. That's a doubling time of over 200 years (p.211).
7. The Jewish inventor of the sewing machine, Isaac Singer, had a total of 24 children by 5 different women and had to flee the United States because of bigamy.
8. If we believe the author's quoting David Aikman, Jiang Zemin said that he would like to issue "a decree to make Christianity the official religion of China" (p.287).
9. Trade brings people together and consumerism is a slow but powerful tool in creating and homogenizing people because of their consumption patterns.
Second order thoughts:
1. This book was published long enough ago that some of the author's assertions can be tested.
a. Ferguson was expecting that China was going to become the biggest economy in the world in the next decade, and then the current financial crisis happened. It's essentially a real estate crisis, and those take quite some time to sort out.
b. Also, the current Chinese emperor (Xi Jinping) is trying to destroy indigenous Christianity and is taking China back in the direction of totalitarianism.
c. No (p.312) US governments budget deficits did not get smaller, but have exploded.
d. Chinese Trade balance is the same as a percentage of GDP from 2011 and almost twice as big in dollar terms; "consume more/import more/invest abroad more/innovate more" DID NOT happen.
e. Belt and road initiative has been shown to be a money loser and is falling apart even as we speak.
f. No, mathematics scores don't have a consistent relationship to economic growth. Japan has had great ones for decades and they have been stagnant just as long.
2. "If you build it, they will come." But that which is built will not last. Western Civilization will have its moment, and through some series of missteps, it will be no more. And that has happened many other times. Maybe it will be slow. Maybe it will be fast. And the details will be different, but everyone gets their turn in this farce. Even very long lived civilizations go through repetitive collapse.
3. There are many different theories about the degeneration of some given civilization. That could have been a book in its own right, although Ferguson did give us a taste in the conclusion.
4. It seems like when Western people get things right, they don't even believe in what they have built. (Total fertility rate is below replacement all over the West.) Meanwhile, Africans can't manage a state (or anything else, really) for any reason, and I think they have a total fertility rate of about 7.0. (The author is very aware of Jewish intellect. And Jews in America live in security, and it seems like they have lost interest in having babies: same population numbers for the past 50 years and 1.86 children per women.)
5. Maybe prosperity/Western Civilization contains the seeds of its own destruction. Enough prosperity creates a class of academics that can sit around and generate problems and turn people against each other. ("Hey ho hey ho, Western civ has got to go.")
6. It has been known for a long time that democracies destroy themselves. Maybe with increased democracy in what is the "West," the same thing is happening again? It is also been asserted before - - about 40 years ago - - by Joseph Tainter that: civilizations reach complexity levels until there is no further benefit from the complexity and then they collapse again.
Verdict: it does not hurt to read this book, and I believe that it might be a keeper--at least until another of these panoramic history books comes along to update it.
Vocabulary:
Eight legged essay
Four Books and Five Classics of Confucianism
pathic
catamite
fee simple
fee tail
freehold
copyhold
palatine
cazique
headright
leet-men
coruscating
subaltern
punkah wallah
equipoise
Quotes:
"A common man marvels at uncommon things. A wise man marvels at the commonplace."
"Christianity was stuffed with miracles kind of contradictions and absurdities, was spawned in the fevered imaginations of the orientals and then spread to our Europe, where some fanatics espoused it, some intriguers pretended to be convinced by it ans some imbeciles actually believed it." (p.76, Frederick The Great).
"No civilization, no matter how mighty it may appear to itself, is indestructible." (p.101)
".... First demonstration in the Modern Age of the grim truth that revolutions devour their own children." (p.153)
"Western civilization was about to encounter its most dangerous foe: itself" (p.181).
"Each European power had its own distinctive way of scrambling for Africa. The French... favored railways and health centers. The British.... built mission schools. The Belgians turned the Congo into a vast slave state. The Portuguese did as little as possible. The Germans..... for them, colonizing Africa was a giant experiment to test, among other things, a racial theory." (p.176).
"The slaughterhouse of the Western front was like a vast and terrifying laboratory for medical science, producing significant advances in surgery, not to mention psychiatry. The skin graft and antiseptic irrigation of wounds..... The earliest blood transfusions. For the first time, all British soldiers were vaccinated against typhoid, and wounded soldiers were routinely given anti-tetanus shots.
"If we want everything to stay as it is, everything will have to change." (p.215- Giuseppe Tomasi de Lampedusa)
"There is more power in rock music, videos, blue jeans, fast food, news networks and TV satellites than in the entire Red Army." (p.244)
Civilization: The West and The Rest
4/5 stars
"An answer to neurotic Western oikophobia by a respectable historian"
******
Over some amount of time, so many events happen that historians have to abstract certain characters and happenings for focus and exclude others.
And so of course the same book is never written twice, but even when different books are written-- the books don't necessarily add that much value because not every single event in history is necessary to explain present times.
This author's conceptual framework is to reduce the success of Western countries to 6 "killer apps": competition, science, property, medicine, consumption, work. And no small purpose is to rebut Western academic oikophobia. ("Eurocentrism" is a rhetorical epithet to dismiss out of hand any serious analysis.)
The six killer apps each have a chapter, but not all chapters are about what they say they are about - - sometimes there are very lengthy detours. (For instance, his chapter on work is actually a history about the role of Christianity in Western affluence.)
Historical Recapitulations:
1. China squandered a very large lead because of hubris. (Any other book on Chinese history for the past 500 years will tell us this.)
2. Europe had geographic advantages in that it had navigable waterways and harbors that created kingdoms that were not so large as to be monolithic and uncompetitive (à la China), but not so fragmented has to be unable to take advantage of scale effects to support large projects-- à la Africa. (Diamond's "Guns, Germs, and Steel." Thomas Sowell's "Cultures" trilogy)
3. Resource Curse: the English settlers in North America set up to build institutions for purposes of land distribution. The Spanish crown was interested to get the most gold and silver for its Treasury, and not to build institutions. (Francis Fukyuama, "The Origins of Political Order.")
4. Speculation on the possible Christianization of China. (Other people have noticed this. Including at least one author that is quoted in the book. David Aikman.)
5. The consumer Society was created in some part by the techniques of mass production learned during the world wars.
Characters/events brought into focus:
1. Frederick the Great, the architect of the clean Prussian bureaucracy.
2. Kemal Ataturk, the modernizer of Turkey.
3. Debate between John Locke and Thomas Hobbes.
4. French Revolution vis-a-vis the American
Factoids:
1. The main Chinese collapse saw the Chinese population reduced by 40% over a period of 70 years.
2. Brazilian slaves were much larger in number than North American ones, and they had the power of manumission. (Most Brazilian slaves didn't live longer than a year, though.)
3. French and Napoleonic wars between 1792 and 1815, 3.5 million dead. 20 times more dead than Americans that died in the US revolution. (4435 people, and 2,260 for the War of 1812.)
5. Germans perfected their concentration camps actually much before WWII - - in what is now Namibia. Between September 1906 and March 1907, a total of 1,032 /1,795 prisoners on Shark Island died. Before the uprising, the Herrero had numbered 80,000; afterward only 15,000 remained. There had been 20,000 Nama; fewer than 10,000 were left when a census was conducted in 1911. Only 1 in 10 Nama prisoners survived the camps.
6. China has been cheap labor for a long time. For a period of about 3 centuries, their wages raised from 3 g of silver per day to 5~6g. That's a doubling time of over 200 years (p.211).
7. The Jewish inventor of the sewing machine, Isaac Singer, had a total of 24 children by 5 different women and had to flee the United States because of bigamy.
8. If we believe the author's quoting David Aikman, Jiang Zemin said that he would like to issue "a decree to make Christianity the official religion of China" (p.287).
9. Trade brings people together and consumerism is a slow but powerful tool in creating and homogenizing people because of their consumption patterns.
Second order thoughts:
1. This book was published long enough ago that some of the author's assertions can be tested.
a. Ferguson was expecting that China was going to become the biggest economy in the world in the next decade, and then the current financial crisis happened. It's essentially a real estate crisis, and those take quite some time to sort out.
b. Also, the current Chinese emperor (Xi Jinping) is trying to destroy indigenous Christianity and is taking China back in the direction of totalitarianism.
c. No (p.312) US governments budget deficits did not get smaller, but have exploded.
d. Chinese Trade balance is the same as a percentage of GDP from 2011 and almost twice as big in dollar terms; "consume more/import more/invest abroad more/innovate more" DID NOT happen.
e. Belt and road initiative has been shown to be a money loser and is falling apart even as we speak.
f. No, mathematics scores don't have a consistent relationship to economic growth. Japan has had great ones for decades and they have been stagnant just as long.
2. "If you build it, they will come." But that which is built will not last. Western Civilization will have its moment, and through some series of missteps, it will be no more. And that has happened many other times. Maybe it will be slow. Maybe it will be fast. And the details will be different, but everyone gets their turn in this farce. Even very long lived civilizations go through repetitive collapse.
3. There are many different theories about the degeneration of some given civilization. That could have been a book in its own right, although Ferguson did give us a taste in the conclusion.
4. It seems like when Western people get things right, they don't even believe in what they have built. (Total fertility rate is below replacement all over the West.) Meanwhile, Africans can't manage a state (or anything else, really) for any reason, and I think they have a total fertility rate of about 7.0. (The author is very aware of Jewish intellect. And Jews in America live in security, and it seems like they have lost interest in having babies: same population numbers for the past 50 years and 1.86 children per women.)
5. Maybe prosperity/Western Civilization contains the seeds of its own destruction. Enough prosperity creates a class of academics that can sit around and generate problems and turn people against each other. ("Hey ho hey ho, Western civ has got to go.")
6. It has been known for a long time that democracies destroy themselves. Maybe with increased democracy in what is the "West," the same thing is happening again? It is also been asserted before - - about 40 years ago - - by Joseph Tainter that: civilizations reach complexity levels until there is no further benefit from the complexity and then they collapse again.
Verdict: it does not hurt to read this book, and I believe that it might be a keeper--at least until another of these panoramic history books comes along to update it.
Vocabulary:
Eight legged essay
Four Books and Five Classics of Confucianism
pathic
catamite
fee simple
fee tail
freehold
copyhold
palatine
cazique
headright
leet-men
coruscating
subaltern
punkah wallah
equipoise
Quotes:
"A common man marvels at uncommon things. A wise man marvels at the commonplace."
"Christianity was stuffed with miracles kind of contradictions and absurdities, was spawned in the fevered imaginations of the orientals and then spread to our Europe, where some fanatics espoused it, some intriguers pretended to be convinced by it ans some imbeciles actually believed it." (p.76, Frederick The Great).
"No civilization, no matter how mighty it may appear to itself, is indestructible." (p.101)
".... First demonstration in the Modern Age of the grim truth that revolutions devour their own children." (p.153)
"Western civilization was about to encounter its most dangerous foe: itself" (p.181).
"Each European power had its own distinctive way of scrambling for Africa. The French... favored railways and health centers. The British.... built mission schools. The Belgians turned the Congo into a vast slave state. The Portuguese did as little as possible. The Germans..... for them, colonizing Africa was a giant experiment to test, among other things, a racial theory." (p.176).
"The slaughterhouse of the Western front was like a vast and terrifying laboratory for medical science, producing significant advances in surgery, not to mention psychiatry. The skin graft and antiseptic irrigation of wounds..... The earliest blood transfusions. For the first time, all British soldiers were vaccinated against typhoid, and wounded soldiers were routinely given anti-tetanus shots.
"If we want everything to stay as it is, everything will have to change." (p.215- Giuseppe Tomasi de Lampedusa)
"There is more power in rock music, videos, blue jeans, fast food, news networks and TV satellites than in the entire Red Army." (p.244)
Shariah: The Threat To America: An Exercise In Competitive Analysis (Report of Team B II) by Henry Cooper, Christine Brim, Harry Edward Soyster
dark
informative
fast-paced
4.0
Book Review
"Shariah. The Threat to America"
4/5 stars
"Realization of sharia across the globe via jihad - - whether by the pen, the purse, or the sword."
*******
In a nutshell: kinetic (military) jihad ≠ institutional jihad.
Of the book (loses one point on account of 2 and 3):
1. It's not exactly dated, because a lot of these things are time independent.
2. No index!!!
3. Needs some editorial work/formatting,
4. 18 different authors, and I'm not sure who wrote what. There is a bit of repetition.
5. 264 pages / 8 chapters. 33 per. Many subsections, about 4-5 hours of reading time.
*******
The best thing to learn from this book is some of the background of schools of Islamic jurisprudence.
Acquired Islamic information:
1. The Quran is not chronologically ordered, but the verses are arranged from longest to shortest.
2. 4 schools of Sunni jurisprudence: Hanafi, Hanbali, Shafi, Maliki; 2 schools of Shia: Jafari, Ismaili Fatimid
3. The Islamic doctrine of abrogation means that later verses supersede the earlier ones. (So, if you can find a verse that talks about living in peace and harmony with Christians and Jews, make sure that there's not something later that tells you otherwise. As is the case.)
4. There are two periods of revelation. The first is in Mecca, and is more calm; the second is in Medina and is a lot more violent. Islamic law is substantially derived from the Medinan period (p. 60).
5. (p. 102) Taqiyya is the Islamically legal basis for deception / dual messaging. (But, then, they don't have any monopoly on this notion. "The devil can cite scripture for his purposes"; Saul Alinsky said that people who are radicals/destructive have no debt of honesty to the people that they are deceiving.)
*******
Extended second order thoughts........
Even if the situation is as bad as it seems, much (most?) of the damage sustained in the case of the United States is self-inflicted:
1. Since 1965 with the Immigration and Nationality Act, they have lost control over the people that they bring to the country and have turned it into a dumping ground for people from the third world. It was a cynical political calculation several decades ago that has never been fixed.
2. There are a lot of kooky things that are in the American political landscape that are making enemies of lots of people (transgender hysteria, litigation to put men in women's locker rooms, and DEI training, to name but a few) and they start to make the stability of Islam look a lot better to people that would not otherwise be interested in political Islam see it as a viable alternative to a bunch of Weird White People Asininity.
3. There were lots of policy blunders in the States over things that were clear and present issues. (HIV/AIDS went on for several years because the government was trying to formulate a policy to deal with it. Covid was another fiasco.) So, for something that is as slow-moving as the Islamic infiltration of the West, who would even be able to see it coming well enough to put a policy together?
4. Ironically: the ACLU is a heavily Jewish organization. And they have actually gone very far making it more difficult to surveil people that they know are a problem (Muslims). But then, we have Jewish authors in this book (David Yerushalmi and Frank Gafney) who point this out, and are assailed by other Jewish organizations. The ADL.
There may be some overstatement here on both sides.
1. Just recently, I read a book called "The Arab Mind," and they made it clear about the Arab penchant for theatrical overstatement. Also, a penchant for being very long on words but very short on concrete plans of action.
2. Intelligence analysts also need to have a reason to have a job, so they might make the situation seem worse than it actually is.
*******
Some of this situation is mistakes that have been made by other places, but it just SEEMS like making this mistake in The West is the first time it's ever happened before.
1. During the days that China was the center of the world, they could never have seen themselves being colonized by westerners, or "inferior" Japanese.
Hubris made them think that they were the center of the world and that everybody would just magically want to be the same thing they are.
The US and Western Europe seem to be taking slightly different paths to the same destination: being caught off guard and VOLUNTARILY importing a bunch of people that have held a grudge for the last 1,000 years and want to destroy them. (When there was this rioting in New York after the latest Israel Hamas conflict, where do you think all these Arabs came from that were climbing poles and tearing down US flags and replacing them with Palestinian flags?)
2. The collapse of a civilization / country is autocatalytic. So, Muslims are about 1% of the US population right now, and if they have a long-term plan (in spite of the high degree of assimilation/mixed marriages), it's interesting to speculate whether or not the United States would/will have already torn itself apart from other internal conflicts (transgender hysteria, litigation to put men in women's locker rooms, and DEI training, to name but a few) before this Islamic plan could come to fruition.
If it wasn't something to do with Islam that will cause a nation to be damaged/perish, then it would / will be just something else--which appears to be frivolity in the case of the United States, and failing to learn from history in Europe.
3. Russia has been dealing with these troublesome Arabs-Muslims for the last thousand years. It took Spain many centuries to be free of them. There's plenty of historical record, and if these Western countries choose not to learn from it then it's nobody's fault but their own.
4. In spite of various degrees of connection between the mosque and the government in these many Arab states..... It has not brought the Utopia that they expect. (What was the genesis/purpose of the Arab spring, again?)
I was recently reading that 90% of Israeli Arabs do not want to live in any future Palestinian state.
5. (p.190) It has been known for at least 15 years that Hezbollah is involved with Latin American weapons smugglers and traffickers and use the porousness of the US Southern border as a way to bring things into the United States. There is no doubt that intelligence services know this, but: Democratic administrations refuse to address the issue because it could be future voters. Republicans refuse to address it because it could be cheap labor.
6. Okay, see you have Western intellectuals that believe something stupid that penetrates the mainstream as a "luxury belief." Communism/Marxism in one generation, Islamic victimhood in the next
*******
The book is very heavily Arab centric (as you would expect it to be if it's about people blowing up things), but there are some problems with this:
1. Most Muslims are not Arab, and they don't have the single-minded ax to grind against the West as the Arabs do. (Indonesian, Malaysian, Turkish, etc Islam are emphatically not the same thing as Arab Islam.)
2. Within the United States, Arabs are (surprisingly) remarkably keen on assimilation. According to Andrzej Kulczycki, 74% of Arab men and 69% of Arab women had non-Arab spouses. And 96% of children of partial Arab ancestry married non-Arabs. Also, Muslims have 21% interfaith marriage.
3. 90% of these ones that I live nearby (I'm talking about Dearborn, Michigan which is a heavily Shia area) are NOT islamically well educated. (If I have questions about things such as Islamic jurisprudence, I have frequently had to pass through 9 people before I found a 10th one that could answer questions for me about it.)
4. As of now, about 20% of US Muslims are black. Given the high rate of criminal activity among this racial group, is it a surprise that there are criminals associated with Islam? Who over the age of 12 did not know about Prislam/prison converts?
Verdict: Recommended
Vocabulary:
ijtihad
Quotes:
(p.98): "The prophet said, 'If I take an oath and later find something else better than that, then I do what is better and expiate my oath.'"
(p. 174): "Both groups are committed to the supremacy of sharia and his realization of across the globe via jihad - - whether by the pen, the purse, or the sword."
"Shariah. The Threat to America"
4/5 stars
"Realization of sharia across the globe via jihad - - whether by the pen, the purse, or the sword."
*******
In a nutshell: kinetic (military) jihad ≠ institutional jihad.
Of the book (loses one point on account of 2 and 3):
1. It's not exactly dated, because a lot of these things are time independent.
2. No index!!!
3. Needs some editorial work/formatting,
4. 18 different authors, and I'm not sure who wrote what. There is a bit of repetition.
5. 264 pages / 8 chapters. 33 per. Many subsections, about 4-5 hours of reading time.
*******
The best thing to learn from this book is some of the background of schools of Islamic jurisprudence.
Acquired Islamic information:
1. The Quran is not chronologically ordered, but the verses are arranged from longest to shortest.
2. 4 schools of Sunni jurisprudence: Hanafi, Hanbali, Shafi, Maliki; 2 schools of Shia: Jafari, Ismaili Fatimid
3. The Islamic doctrine of abrogation means that later verses supersede the earlier ones. (So, if you can find a verse that talks about living in peace and harmony with Christians and Jews, make sure that there's not something later that tells you otherwise. As is the case.)
4. There are two periods of revelation. The first is in Mecca, and is more calm; the second is in Medina and is a lot more violent. Islamic law is substantially derived from the Medinan period (p. 60).
5. (p. 102) Taqiyya is the Islamically legal basis for deception / dual messaging. (But, then, they don't have any monopoly on this notion. "The devil can cite scripture for his purposes"; Saul Alinsky said that people who are radicals/destructive have no debt of honesty to the people that they are deceiving.)
*******
Extended second order thoughts........
Even if the situation is as bad as it seems, much (most?) of the damage sustained in the case of the United States is self-inflicted:
1. Since 1965 with the Immigration and Nationality Act, they have lost control over the people that they bring to the country and have turned it into a dumping ground for people from the third world. It was a cynical political calculation several decades ago that has never been fixed.
2. There are a lot of kooky things that are in the American political landscape that are making enemies of lots of people (transgender hysteria, litigation to put men in women's locker rooms, and DEI training, to name but a few) and they start to make the stability of Islam look a lot better to people that would not otherwise be interested in political Islam see it as a viable alternative to a bunch of Weird White People Asininity.
3. There were lots of policy blunders in the States over things that were clear and present issues. (HIV/AIDS went on for several years because the government was trying to formulate a policy to deal with it. Covid was another fiasco.) So, for something that is as slow-moving as the Islamic infiltration of the West, who would even be able to see it coming well enough to put a policy together?
4. Ironically: the ACLU is a heavily Jewish organization. And they have actually gone very far making it more difficult to surveil people that they know are a problem (Muslims). But then, we have Jewish authors in this book (David Yerushalmi and Frank Gafney) who point this out, and are assailed by other Jewish organizations. The ADL.
There may be some overstatement here on both sides.
1. Just recently, I read a book called "The Arab Mind," and they made it clear about the Arab penchant for theatrical overstatement. Also, a penchant for being very long on words but very short on concrete plans of action.
2. Intelligence analysts also need to have a reason to have a job, so they might make the situation seem worse than it actually is.
*******
Some of this situation is mistakes that have been made by other places, but it just SEEMS like making this mistake in The West is the first time it's ever happened before.
1. During the days that China was the center of the world, they could never have seen themselves being colonized by westerners, or "inferior" Japanese.
Hubris made them think that they were the center of the world and that everybody would just magically want to be the same thing they are.
The US and Western Europe seem to be taking slightly different paths to the same destination: being caught off guard and VOLUNTARILY importing a bunch of people that have held a grudge for the last 1,000 years and want to destroy them. (When there was this rioting in New York after the latest Israel Hamas conflict, where do you think all these Arabs came from that were climbing poles and tearing down US flags and replacing them with Palestinian flags?)
2. The collapse of a civilization / country is autocatalytic. So, Muslims are about 1% of the US population right now, and if they have a long-term plan (in spite of the high degree of assimilation/mixed marriages), it's interesting to speculate whether or not the United States would/will have already torn itself apart from other internal conflicts (transgender hysteria, litigation to put men in women's locker rooms, and DEI training, to name but a few) before this Islamic plan could come to fruition.
If it wasn't something to do with Islam that will cause a nation to be damaged/perish, then it would / will be just something else--which appears to be frivolity in the case of the United States, and failing to learn from history in Europe.
3. Russia has been dealing with these troublesome Arabs-Muslims for the last thousand years. It took Spain many centuries to be free of them. There's plenty of historical record, and if these Western countries choose not to learn from it then it's nobody's fault but their own.
4. In spite of various degrees of connection between the mosque and the government in these many Arab states..... It has not brought the Utopia that they expect. (What was the genesis/purpose of the Arab spring, again?)
I was recently reading that 90% of Israeli Arabs do not want to live in any future Palestinian state.
5. (p.190) It has been known for at least 15 years that Hezbollah is involved with Latin American weapons smugglers and traffickers and use the porousness of the US Southern border as a way to bring things into the United States. There is no doubt that intelligence services know this, but: Democratic administrations refuse to address the issue because it could be future voters. Republicans refuse to address it because it could be cheap labor.
6. Okay, see you have Western intellectuals that believe something stupid that penetrates the mainstream as a "luxury belief." Communism/Marxism in one generation, Islamic victimhood in the next
*******
The book is very heavily Arab centric (as you would expect it to be if it's about people blowing up things), but there are some problems with this:
1. Most Muslims are not Arab, and they don't have the single-minded ax to grind against the West as the Arabs do. (Indonesian, Malaysian, Turkish, etc Islam are emphatically not the same thing as Arab Islam.)
2. Within the United States, Arabs are (surprisingly) remarkably keen on assimilation. According to Andrzej Kulczycki, 74% of Arab men and 69% of Arab women had non-Arab spouses. And 96% of children of partial Arab ancestry married non-Arabs. Also, Muslims have 21% interfaith marriage.
3. 90% of these ones that I live nearby (I'm talking about Dearborn, Michigan which is a heavily Shia area) are NOT islamically well educated. (If I have questions about things such as Islamic jurisprudence, I have frequently had to pass through 9 people before I found a 10th one that could answer questions for me about it.)
4. As of now, about 20% of US Muslims are black. Given the high rate of criminal activity among this racial group, is it a surprise that there are criminals associated with Islam? Who over the age of 12 did not know about Prislam/prison converts?
Verdict: Recommended
Vocabulary:
ijtihad
Quotes:
(p.98): "The prophet said, 'If I take an oath and later find something else better than that, then I do what is better and expiate my oath.'"
(p. 174): "Both groups are committed to the supremacy of sharia and his realization of across the globe via jihad - - whether by the pen, the purse, or the sword."