Monday, April 29, 2019
Saturday, April 27, 2019
Review: Pavane for a Dead Princess
Pavane for a Dead Princess by Min-gyu ParkMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
While riding their horse, from time to time,
they dismount and turn to look back over the way they came.
This was not done to rest themselves or their horse.
It was an act of waiting for their souls to catch up to them,
as souls tread much more slowly than we do.
Only when they are sure their souls are by their side,
do they continue on their journey.
"Because their lives are so boring and because death isn't coming for them anytime soon, the Seven Dwarfs get gigs as television studio audiences, those people who cheer when a special guest is introduced in the studio and sob when the guest shares a heartfelt story of personal survival and burst out laughing when she regales them with a funny episode, with their reactions later being used as sound effects for the show. And then they'll die"
Probably the best book I've read so far this year.
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Thursday, April 25, 2019
Review: James Buchanan
James Buchanan by Jean H. BakerMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
Odd how the most prepared person "since James Madison" to run for president could end up being such a terrible president. His undoing seems to be due to:
1) Like previous presidents, he backed slavery (despite being a Northerner). This puts him on the wrong side of history, as well as being a testimony to how blind people can be to basic fundamentals of life. However, his obvious siding with the South and slave states appalled Northerners, making many of them more sympathetic to the Republican cause.
2) Extreme corruption in his cabinet. Here again, it seems odd, since he himself seems to have been so well-versed in law and politics. Although, maybe the "politics" part was a disadvantage. There seems to have been an attitude that "the ends justify the means" in order to get things done, which, in his case, was silencing the "vocal minority" of abolitionists. Of course, by the end of his presidency this was no longer a minority. He also let his cabinet members, all of whom shared his views, do more or less as they pleased.
3) Following these two points, his cabinet consisted in Southerners and dough-faced Northerners (Northerner sympathetic to Southerners). In the meantime, pro-slavery southerners were becoming a smaller and smaller minority, which is why they started getting louder and louder. He didn't realize the real "vocal minority" was the Southern slave-holders.
Some people say the Civil war wasn't about slavery. His presidency and this book show it very obviously was. States Rights are only brought up during these years in relation to slavery. Let's not forget that it's a small minority of white men who even owned slaves, but they seem to have had all the power. In fact, as can be been with the Missouri compromise, the Wilmot Proviso and the fugitive slave act, these same "pro-states rights" people suddenly wanted Federal law to supersede when it came to slaves going to other states.
I found this book quite good. I think it's often difficult to write a biography of someone like Buchanan. After spending so much time researching one person, you end up either justifying all their bad decisions, or just concentrating on their bad points and reviling them. But this book seemed to do a good job of pointing out how bad he was without covering up or pushing the matter too much.
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Tuesday, April 23, 2019
Review: The House of Rothschild: The World's Banker 1849-1999
The House of Rothschild: The World's Banker 1849-1999 by Niall FergusonMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
This volume goes into even more detail than the first. It basically continues like that until the beginning of World War I, and sort of during the inter-war period, but then skims through the final decades. This was a bit disappointing to me, since I was curious to know more about recent years (at least until the 90s, since the book was written in 2000), and I got the impression he did this so as not to offend any members of the family who are currently alive, which doesn't make me feel good about the rest of the book.
However, that is just a minor quibble. The detail he goes into for the rest of the book basically means a detailed history of Europe and its economy throughout all those years. It is interesting to see how the Rothschilds changed over the generations, from strugglers to hustlers (in the entrepreneurial sense) to hard workers to aristocratic workers to idle-aristocrats (which was also important, since it let them mingle with royalty), back to hustlers, but in a more modern sense.
Some of my highlights:
"The Rothschilds, it should be stressed, did not need to go to Cambridge, much mess Oxford, any more than they needed to sit in the House of Commons. The education of Rothschild children remained for most of the nineteenth century a much more cosmopolitan affair than the ancient English public schools and universities could provide. Thus the family continued to rely on private tutors and to send children abroad for a substantial part of their studies, to ensure above all that they maintained the family's multilingualism." (p. 43)
"Why were the French more willing to pay for defeat after the fact than to pay for the chance of victory before war broke out?" (re: Napoleon III's France's willingness to pay more money in reparations than for the initial war in 1870). (p.217)
- Despite France's reparations, it was Germany's finance that was brought to a standstill in 1873
"it was always a weakness of the conservative argument against higher taxation that in general private charitability at the turn of the century tended to fall short of the traditional 10 per cent" (p. 276)
Gustave's prediction in 1888: "Should the Emperor Frederick III die and his son Prince WIlliam ascend to the throne, there would be no change of policy as long as M. von Bismarck is alive and carries on' however, should he retire voluntarily or die, it is believed that nothing could then prevent Prince William from pursuing his warlike objectives and this would mean a world war." (P. 386)
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Wednesday, April 10, 2019
Monday, April 08, 2019
Review: The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life
The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life by Kevin SimlerMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
I was going to give up on the book early on, since it started mentioning things I thought were quite obvious as if they were revelations. Their first point seems to be that we do things for selfish reasons, (which Adam Smith also said a few centuries ago), and then it discusses Signaling. These are both well-known concepts in the world of economics.
Then it talks about societal norms and how to enforce them, and that we need to punish those who don't punish transgressions: "In the US, for example, it is unlawful to witness a crime without reporting it". Is this true though??
Later it states how we repress bad memories (in which we did bad things or things we're embarrassed about). Do we though? I feel like memories of embarrassing things I did keep coming back to me at random times. I'd hate to think what I'm repressing if that's the case.
However, I stuck with it, and there were some interesting points later on. For example, how we have to deceive ourselves in order to deceive others (politicians do this a lot). It isn't enough to lie, but we have to lie to ourselves in order to make it work.
I really liked the section about how we do not get into discussions with other people to learn new things, but to prove how much we already know. It always bothered me in a sense. If A and B get in an argument, and A clearly wins, then B will go home feeling bad, while A will feel good about himself. However, the fact is B Is better off, since B learned something new, while A didn't gain anything. This seems like a flaw in human wiring, but it was sort of explained here (getting into discussions is another way of displaying how "fit" we are in an evolutionary sense, not of gaining new information. So the more arguments we win, the more we show we have the resources to 'survive').
The chapter on art seemed a bit odd (why do we like the original art work so much more than a copy?). I think they don't take into account the appreciation factor, in the sense of appreciating what humankind is capable of. Seeing the Mona Lisa in its original helps us "feel closer" (as faulty as that reasoning may be) to Davinci and his genius.
A couple more interesting tidbits:
There used to laws against feeding lobsters to inmates more than once a week because it was considered cruel and unusual (like eating rats).
Aluminum spoons are better than silver spoons in every sense, yet we prefer silver spoons
So, over all, pretty hit or miss. They did state that the average reader would agree with 70% of the points they make. I probably agree with a bit more, but I feel like a lot of it had been covered in other books. The few new points, however, were enlightening.
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