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Book ReviewsAvid readers, we generate opinions on many topics, represented by the books which introduce those ideas to society. If all of human knowledge were an outline, the books would be bullet points, and each one would be fixed in a time and tradition to show how it modified, augmented or enhanced thought in its target area. In this view, it makes sense that books - even "artistic" ones - are communications from writer(s) to readers, encoding in whatever is the chosen form a method of making real through metaphor of language the concept in evolution which is being expressed.
AA Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction +The Divine Comedy +The Bhagavad-Gita+Gilgamesh+The Nibenlungenlied / The Saga of the Volsungs +The Sagas of Icelanders +Nicomachean Ethics +Cambridge Encyclopedia of Philosophy +Meditations +BSimulacra and Simulation +Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience +Radical Honesty +Cosmic Consciousness +Naked Lunch +CThe Hero with a Thousand Faces +The Transformations of Myth Through Time +Liber Null and Psychonaut +Sforza, Luigi Luca +Ferdinand +Ferdinand +The Fine Art of Murder +Red Storm Rising +Permanent Healing +Heart of Darkness/The Secret Sharer +Lord Jim +Nostromo +The Lost World +DWhite Noise +Once a Warrior King +The Story of Philosophy +ECollected Works (Raymond Blakeny) +Collected Poems +The Doctrine of Awakening +The Mystery of the Grail +FThe Sound and the Fury +The Great Gatsby +The End of History and the Last Man +GDesign Patterns +Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire +Neuromancer +Pattern Recognition +Chaos +Faust +HNightmare Town +Mythology +Growth of the Soil +I Kissed Dating Goodbye +The Worldly Philosophers +The Sun Also Rises +short stories +The Histories +Zen and the Art of Archery +The Bell Curve +Steppenwolf +The Iliad +The Odyssey +Atomized +The Possibility of an Island +Whatever +American Politics: The Promise of Disharmony +The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order +Brave New World +The Perennial Philosophy +Chaos and Order: Complex Dynamics in Literature and Science +IJDubliners +Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man +Synchronicity +KFoundations of the Metaphysics of Morals +LThe Culture of Narcissism +A Wrinkle in Time +The Kalevala +The Global Bell Curve +IQ and the Wealth of Nations +Francis +MOne Hundred Years of Solitude +Moby +Paradise Lost +The Green Berets +American Terrorist: Timothy McVeigh & the Oklahoma City Bombing +NGoedel's Proof +On Truth and Lies in a Non +The Antichrist +OReflections from the North Country +PAmerican Theocracy +Structuralism +The Republic +The Crying of Lot 49 +HRThe King Must Die +Why They Kill: The Discoveries of a Maverick Criminologist +The Global Brain: The Awakening Earth in a New Century +SThe Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason +Castes and Races +Frankenstein +Inside the Third Reich +The Decline of the West +Man and Technics +On the Improvement of the Understanding and other works +Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics +Elements of Style +An Introduction to Zen Buddhism +TGermania +The Lord of the Rings Trilogy +Hell's Angels +UVThe Aeneid +WYou Can't Go Home Again +Reverence: Renewing a Forgotten Virtue +Collected Works +XYZRunning on Emptiness: The Pathology of Civilization +0Reviews on books about Metal Music can be found here. |
Penguin Classics, 
This is a volume of essays tied together by an introductory contribution by its editor, and in doing so, is one of the first works from the postmodern camp to attempt to find a sensible intellectual structure to the diverse, bizarre, and often incoherent tenets of that doctrine. The attempt is to link representations of natural order in literature with philosophical concepts gestured to by aspects of the new found discipline of chaos science, chasing through fractal patterns and scatter diagrams to find common threads which exemplify the beginnings of a new idealism. What emerges is a group of people attempting to find structure outside of the modernist (Judeo-Christian industrialist) symbolism that constrains our thoughts at the initial levels of our processing, forcing us to react to taboo and/or praise necessary egalitarian principles; this quest for reason is met with problems as the authors, like most in this field, attempt to use the iconographic principles of the modernist era to prove their points. This works - up until the final stage of analysis - at which point no larger abstractions can be drawn, and the entire work collapses in the mumbling incoherence of an intriguing conversation heard through a crowd: fragments of brilliance and the most mundane conclusion of all, a lack of cohesion enough to produce some finite conclusions. With this revealed to the review reader, it is proper to then construe the process of reading this book as a balance between intriguing topics and social affirmations which in the end tips toward indecision. However, it is masterfully written by people who enjoy both the process of writing and academic study, and highlights emerging ideas and language constructions which will be a large part of defining future scholarship.
Few names elicit more controversial reactions than that of Tim McVeigh. Reviled by many but adored by some, he was a man of contradictions: a success in the Army who had bad luck getting ahead, but was recognized as capable and valorous by his peers. The bright child and indifferent student. Militia member and avid reader of The Turner Diaries, yet polite man of multiracial friendships. And finally, the incredibly sensitive, empathic guy who one morning parked a truck full of explosives near a federal building and detonated it. With a subject like that, it's hard to make a book boring, which is why it is fortunate these experienced journalists downplayed their story's sensationalist aspects, preferring instead to make a stab at analysis of McVeigh as a person, and less a deed. In this they succeed brilliantly; although the book drops into a quick sequence of detail toward the end, it is well-staged and develops slowly but confidently during the first 2/3 of its length. Careful research hidden behind everyday language describing the upbringing and early years of its subject, including detailed but withdrawn profile of the family. While I find the "postmodern sociological analysis" horseshit to be over-emphasized in current society, and unable to consider the many factors at work in any situation, while on its drive to hammer home its point, here it's a modest thesis with hints to other areas of possibly related gunk. The book is exceptionally respectful of its subject and wonderfully deadpan about the introduction of the overdramatic points of view that many media outlets, especially the "news," emphasize. The authors stick to mainly a magazine journalism style and in the eyes of their subject, adopt a view of "collateral damage" which allows, for the most part, a break from the hand-wringing moralizing that accompanies the coverage of any non-patriotic public event. If I were writing this, there'd be more detail on the making of large explosive devices, and probably more coverage of McVeigh's hushed political views. However, it's hard to think of much else of a large scale that this book lacks: it's a sturdy exploration of the thoughts and decisions leading up to what was arguably America's first terrorist experience. 
In this lengthy tome of the sort of journalism that bridges scientific topics with their social counterparts, Rhodes - a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist - investigates the roots of violence in its perpetrators. It does so entirely in the context of the work of Lonnie Athens, a maverick criminologist, but in the process carefully recreates a century of sociological analysis slowly evolving to the point where Athens' work has relevance. In short, the theory is thus: people model their prediction of the world based on what they have seen, so if they observe violence or sadism as youths, they understand this as the currency of power which they will have to enact in order to maintain sense of self, because they - like all humans - are externally socialized. What's a shame about this book is that Rhodes shies away from the controversial topics of designing a more intelligent socialization, and instead burns pages with more detailed explication of a theory that, in its outline form, is appealingly commonsense, but in presentation relies heavily on the Judeo-Christian idea that some overarching symbolism must unite all of its parts. Life isn't so handily human-centric. So while this is an exciting revelation of the study of the culture of violence for its first 150 pages, and while it does a brilliant job of bringing out the personalities and motivations of the scientists involved (most of whom were witnesses to intense violence as youngsters), it falls flat in its desire to conform to the weaseling trends of justification and morality. However, for its first two-thirds, this book is a necessary read for anyone curious about self-image and violence (hint: metalheads read this).
Between extreme liberalism and the far right there is a tenuous connection in secular pantheistic beliefs about the nature of earth being one large organic computer, in which we are processor/memory chips and network for the purposes of larger communications made more apparent by our use of technology to link together. Since many of of us growing up in this politically-effete time twitch at the mention of "Gaia" and "planetary consciousness," it is worth noting here that these concepts are handled with wide-eyed liberal hope tempered by a good editor until the waning moments of the book, when the need for page count outweighs the need for coherence. Russell walks his readers through summaries of the major theory about global consciousness, then provides some proofs in the forms of figures and charts and citations of mainstream sources for his beliefs, then launches into a final explication which is where he becomes starry-eyed toward the end. Regardless of this, and the age of this book at the time of this writing, it is a useful guide toward what unifies the theories of both ancient and future time, and creates a flexible starting position for anyone wishing to look outside the dominant "Western" (Judeo-Christian) concept of linear causality and absolute moral independence of the individual, although these positions are never articulated as such by the book. Well-written and of energetic pacing, this book is a pleasant read with something new around every corner, even if the overall plot is known.