Book and Movie Reports by Ed

Book report: The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason, by Sam Harris Sigh. This is yet another of those books about how great the world would be if only most of the people in it – in this case, the 5 billion or so who believe in God – didn’t exist. Let me save you a little time (and 348 pages) by summarizing his main points: 1. All religious faith is nonsense. 2. Some of it is dangerous nonsense, because it encourages people to hurt or kill people (Spanish Inquisition, suicide bombers). 3. Especially Muslims, because martyrdom and jihad are prominent parts of Islam. Luckily, he has some simple solutions to these problems: 1. Establish a world government to which all nations surrender their power. 2. Induce Muslims to reform Islam from within to remove all the violent elements. 3. Convert our societies to the use of alternative energies so that oil has no value and Muslim countries become impoverished. No, I’m not kidding. Those are his solutions. He doe...

Book report: Who’s Your Caddy? Looping for the Great, Near Great, and Reprobates of Golf, by Rick Reilly A lot of sports fans don’t care for Rick Reilly as a sports writer. He is routinely trashed by the sports talk station I listen to. But I think he is really and inventively funny. That’s what drew me to this book, even though I don’t play golf or know much about it. Reilly’s concept for this is that in no other sport can an ordinary person be so close to a star athlete while they’re actually competing as in golf, where the caddy is right near the player for the entire round. So, to see what it’s like being so up close and personal, Reilly asked many golfers if he could caddy for them for a round. Many said no, but a few said yes. This book is based on Reilly’s experiences caddying for golfers including John Daly, David Duval, Tom Lehman, Jack Nicklaus, Deepak Chopra, Donald Trump, professional gambler Dewey Tomko, Bob Newhart, Casey Martin (whose rare leg ailment allowed ...

Book report: Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, by Jared Diamond  Having read Diamond’s phenomenal “Guns, Germs, and Steel,” I was looking forward to reading “Collapse.” GG&S was a brilliant analysis of why European and Asian societies came to dominate the rest of the world. This success was ultimately deduced from the effects of geography, with all of the logic and inevitability of the proof of a theorem in geometry. I expected the same kind of sharp analysis in Collapse, but I was very disappointed. This book is a rambling, anecdote-laden presentation of certain cherry-picked historical societies like Norse Greenland, Easter Island, the Mayans, the Anasazi, and modern Montana, where Diamond regularly vacations. His main point seems to be that societies that don’t take care of their natural resources – especially their trees – collapse, sometimes very suddenly.  Okay, certainly a good point, but one that could have been presented far more suc...

Book report: Twilight of the elites: America after meritocracy by Christopher Hayes There’s a prestigious public high school in New York City. To gain admission, it doesn’t matter who you know, who your family knows, or how rich you are. All you have to do is score well on their entrance exam and you’re in. Sounds like the perfect meritocracy, right? The smart kids –regardless of race or ethnicity or religion or anything else – will get an excellent free education and a boost into the best colleges, jobs, and lives. So, what’s the result? The student body is almost all white and Asian, from the best neighborhoods of NYC. Not what was intended at all. So, what went wrong? Well, as with anything, there are ways to game the system. There are preparation classes kids can take specifically to help them do well on the entrance exam. Of course, these classes cost a lot of money, and only the kids whose families can afford it can go. Plus, kids from better neighborhoods go to better...

Book report: The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, by Steven Pinker This book makes the unbelievable claim that violence has declined in the world and that we are, in fact, living in the least violent time in human history. What?! Is he crazy? Come on, pal! Watch the news for an hour – with school shootings and terrorists and serial killers and abusive boyfriends – and then tell me what you think! And that’s actually one of the issues he talks about. What we see on the news is the unusual, the uncommon, the unlikely. If you look at the statistics – and believe me, he looks at the statistics – by practically every measure of violence, there is a steady downward trend in time. A couple hundred years ago, you were 30 times as likely to be murdered – yeah, murdered – as you are today. One of the very interesting things he does is to talk about some of the kinds of violence that used to be very common, but that we almost never see any more. Flogging. Pub...

Book report: The Golden Compass, by Philip Pullman This is a really good science fantasy adventure story, something like "Chronicles of Narnia" or "Lord of the Rings". A seemingly ordinary girl named Lyra turns out to have a central role in strange and complex plots that affect the entire world. Her world is a fantastic and imaginative alternate version of our own. In this steampunk world, there are zeppelin airships but no airplanes, trains but no cars, and electricity but no telecommunications. Science is a branch of theology, and the last Pope was named Kelvin. Part of the fascination of the book is to compare our world to this world, and wonder what made the difference. I love how what we call "electric", they call "amberic", for example. The fantasy comes in various forms, including and especially the personal "demons" that every person has in this world. A demon is like a physical manifestation of your mind and spir...

Movie report: Lincoln Steven Spielberg deliberately delayed the release of this movie until after the 2012 presidential elections, which was a shrewd decision. If I had seen the movie before the election, I would have spent 90% of my time wondering who represented who in modern politics, rather than only 10%. The movie “Lincoln” is based on the book "Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln" by Doris Kearns Goodwin. Lincoln was elected President out of 4 serious candidates, and had the savvy to enlist some of his adversaries to help with his administration. Seward, for example, became his Secretary of State. This kind of political shrewdness appears throughout this movie. Daniel Day-Lewis as Lincoln is fascinating. This man at times is as gentle as a woolly lamb, at other times a steely colossus of power. He cracks low wheezes one moment, and quotes Shakespeare and the Bible the next. He is tall and ungainly to the point of farce – you can unders...