jasonfurman's reviews
1367 reviews

A good accompaniment to Don Quixote, marred only by Nabokov's less-than-complete love for the novel. It is six lectures he gave at Harvard that ranges from more conventional discussion to more novel presentations, like a scorecard that goes through the 40 "battles" in the book, classifies them into different types, and calls each one a win or a loss. Turns out the final score was 20-20.

Nabokov might be right that the novel would have been even better if Don Quixote's final combat was with the false Don Quixote from the false Part Two that wasn't written by Cervantes. Oh well.

If you want to cheer up after reading Mockingjay, then I highly recommend The Road. It is one of the most touching father-son relationships I have read, as a father and his young son trek down a road in post-apocalyptic America. The landscape is cold and barren, the few people they come across dehumanized and brutal, but the father keeps his son going as they move South, carry the flame, and look for the good guys.

This book addresses the question of why the neanderthals died out while homo sapiens survived. It rejects the genetic superiority of the later and is scathing on the thesis that homo sapiens played a causal role in the extinction of the neanderthals. Instead, Finlayson argues that the main culprit was the cooling climate. Moreover, he argues that this development disproportionately affected the somewhat more successful neanderthals because they were more used to one way of life, rather than the more marginal and thus more innovative homo sapiens. The analogy he offers is a study in Gibraltar that found that rich families suffered less from diseases from poor water. But when there was a drought and everyone had to drink dirty water the poor survived (because they were resistant) while the rich suffered comparatively more.

It is a somewhat interesting thesis, although marred by the suspicion that one politically motivated narrative (conquest by the superior homo sapiens) is just being replaced with another (climate change combined with a form of moral relativism). The evidence for the later seems thin, especially given the many large climatic changes that took place over the approximately 500,000 years since homo sapiens and neanderthals split off from each other.

As for the writing, two complaints: (1) the author is prone to grandiose statements about how this book differs from the previous literature (e.g., he finds the rejection of the "Out of Africa" hypothesis particularly important, even though he just replaces it with the observation that the eurasian zone was geographically and climatically contiguous with Africa). (2) the first third/half of the book is an uninspired retelling of evolution through about 50,000 years ago.

All of this aside, Finlayson hits his stride in the second half of the book when he focuses on the period from 50,000 years ago (when neanderthals were in Europe but homo sapiens were not) to 10,000 years ago (the end of the last ice age and the invention of agriculture). This is presented with a reasonable amount of detail and grounding in the original scholarly material, to which Finlayson is a contributor.

This is an excellent graphic novel rendition of Richard Stark's Parker novel The Hunter. I haven't read the original so I can't compare, but the graphic novel format works extremely well in telling this very hard-boiled story of a criminal's return from prison and revenge on the people, including his wife, that double-crossed him into ending up there. It has a raw, propulsive intensity that drives from beginning to end.

While I started out liking this novella a lot, as it disintegrated into the surreal and disconnected my interest started to disintegrate as well. It tells the story of Pierre Pain, a mesmerist engaged to help cure a poet of a fatal case of the hiccups. His efforts are blocked by two mysterious Spaniards. Monsieur Pain gets drawn into an increasingly dreamy world with a montage-like feel of dram, film, and auditory hallucination. At some point I simply stopped following exactly what was happening. That said, it remains interesting -- just not as mesmerizing, so to speak, as the first 70 or so pages.

Balzac can't help himself, despite a didactic premise about a society of selfless people doing anonymous works of charity he can't help but let his characters, intrigues, and places shine through. This is a recent translation of the rarely translated last book in the Human Comedy. While it's certainly nowhere near the top of that set of works it is well worth reading -- and a sad reminder that there must be dozens of other Balzac novels that are just as good that haven't been translated in over a century.

A remarkable book, an allegorical fable that reads at times like Kafka and at times like Primo Levi. It clearly depicts the Holocaust in Central Europe, notwithstanding the somewhat thin veneer of a quasi-mythical setting outside of any particular time or place. The narrator has a combination of naivete, sophistication, insight, and apathy that is memorable. And perhaps the most memorable scene of dead horses since Anna Karenina. Overall highly recommended.

It wasn't until I was thirty-eight years old that I learned there was no such thing as fish. Specifically, the most recent common ancestor of sharks, lambreys and salmon is also an ancestor of snakes, bats, and pigeons. And in some cases what we call "fish" are actually more closely related to mammals (via our ancestor that made its way out of the water) than they are to salmon.

So when I saw a book that began with a chapter on the death of fish I was intrigued. This book is a history of taxonomy, from Carl Linnaeus to the raging cladists. But more interestingly, it is about the evolutionary biology of our taxonomical abilities. Specifically, being able to tell edible from non-edible, threatening from non, etc., confers an evolutionary advantage -- and thus our ability to classify nature is something that we share with many animals and has evolved.

The thesis of the book is that the history of taxonomy is the struggle between abstract science and our instincts. And that the death of fish is the ultimate blow to our instincts. Personally, I think this is what makes science exciting, substituting rigor for instinct. And parallels (in a much simpler fashion) the way the general relativity and quantum mechanics force us to think in ways that are deeply contradictory to the macroscopic world we live in.

Yoon, however, seems to think that going against our instincts is the problem with taxonomy. And more strangely, that our mistreatment of the environment is somehow related to taxonomy becoming increasingly divorced from our instincts -- whether or not the vast majority of the population even know that was happening.

This isn't the main reason I only gave the book 3-1/2 stars. Largely that is because it was overly repetitive and superficial. All that said, the overall thesis and the first chapter were intriguing enough that I don't regret reading it.

Amazing, amazing, amazing. About the best plotting/pacing in any book I've read in a long time. The only minor quibble would be the characters sometimes were a little more cookie-cutter than one might like. But that is really very minor relative to the extraordinary strengths of the book.

A very enjoyable book. It was hard not to be drawn in by the introduction: