Review: Il fascismo eterno

Il fascismo eterno by Umberto Eco
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Excellent essay on fascism in all its guises. Particularly handy was the list of 14 points that all Fascist states will have in common (available here: https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Il_fascismo_eterno). 

Now read through that list and see which countries you think they apply to (these days, definitely to Russia, and I can think of a couple others). 

View all my reviews

Review: 36 Books That Changed the World

36 Books That Changed the World by Andrew R. Wilson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Great ideas may be executed poorly in many ways. For example, someone may wish to compile a list of what Tyler Cowen called "Quake books" (books that shake your foundation), but then decide only to search for lectures that already exist and simply aggregate them, so the result feels disjointed and often references other lectures that aren't part of the course.

This may also result in incomplete lectures. For example, Aristotle's section might cover just a very small portion of his Nicomachean Ethics, and the St. Augustine section may talk mainly about how St. Augustine influenced later thinkers, rather than his material per se.

Or the books might be compiled by someone who quite obviously is from the US, so the collection is very US-centric (or possibly just western-centric), and there might be just 5 non-western books (Gilgamesh, Art of War, Analects by Confucius, Baghavad Ghita and the Koran).

But many things can be done right as well, and it can introduce you to works you knew nothing about (and usually felt like you should). This happened for me with Tocqueville's Democracy in America and Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. Or even to works you hadn't heard of before (Denis Diderot's & Jean le Rond d'Alembert's The Encyclopedie, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich)

This collection does all of the above. Overall it has more good points than bad, but I would have appreciated maybe one of the 4 Chinese classics, the Tale of Genji, or maybe Arabian Nights.

View all my reviews

Review: Religion in Taiwan and China: Locality and Transmission

Religion in Taiwan and China: Locality and Transmission by Institute of Ethnology Academia Sinica
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A collection of essays and articles. Once again, these are hit or miss. However, there was something interesting in each one of these for me. I either learned about a new person (Yu Yue), or a new sect (Yi-Guan Dao, which is apparently huge in Taiwan), or about a Chinese-born Christian sect (Local Church), or Chinese Sufism, or Shamanism for the Paiwan tribe. .

The Chapters:
1) In Search of the Original Scriptures. About a Japanese and a Chinese monk who try to find original Indian Buddhists scripts, mostly via London
2) Locality and Temple Fundraising in Northern Qing China
3) Yu Yue
4) Inside and Outside the British Settlement in Shanghai
5) The Construction of Fundamentalism in I-Kuan Tao
6) The problem of Locality. About the Little Flock, or the Local Church, the Chinese-born Christian sect.
7) Singing your own song? About New Age in Taiwan. Not sure why this would be considered religious, and the author seems to be criticizing one of the founders (and probably rightly so), but pretty interesting nonetheless.
8) Rituals as Local knowledge. How Several Indigenous populations relate to Millet.
9) A resurgent Temple. All about Fengtian temple in Xingang, Jiayi.
10) Decline and Revitalization of Shamanic traditions in Paiwan village. Relates it to Shamanism in Siberia and Korea. Also discusses how Christianity (and the Japanese and the KMT government) relegated these traditions and tried to get rid of them.
11) City of Saint. About Sufism in China. Quite fascinatin
12) Rivers and Lakes. About Diviners (fortune tellers, Feng shui experts, etc.)

View all my reviews