Dave O’Reilly’s Blog

	Our Culture, What’s Left of It: The Mandarins and the Masses Author: Theodore Dalrymple Rating:
Buy this on Amazon right now.
A book that restores our faith in the central importance of literature and criticism to our civilization. In the twenty six pieces, Dr. Dalrymple ranges over literature and ideas, from Shakespeare to Marx.

This book is a collection of essays by Theodore Dalrymple about half of which are on various topics in literature and the other half are social commentary. The author worked for many years as a prison doctor in Britain, which obviously led to him having a greater than average  exposure to some of the more difficult aspects of society. His experiences in this environment led to the development of some unique insights and hypotheses as to the root causes of some difficult social problems, which he lays out in this book.  He is obviously quite unimpressed with British society, and the welfare state in particular. He believes the welfare state leads to a form of learned helplessness among the most needy in society by not providing them with any incentives to better themselves.

There are a lot of interesting thoughts in this book, and I would recommend it, but it’s a bit over general in my opinion. I agree that some people end up becoming trapped in the welfare system either intentionally or unintentionally. I suspect that the author may have been exposed to a large number of people who have become trapped in the welfare system that he may be overestimating the frequency of this phenomenon. I would assert that people who become trapped in this way are in the minority and that that vast majority of people who are living on welfare would rather not be. I also think that there are a lot of people who have lost their jobs who are grateful that some assistance was available to them while they found a new job. What I’m trying to say is that I don’t agree that the existence of a welfare system is necessarily a bad thing.

Also, there is a degree of moral absolutism about this book that I don’t really agree with. Now, I have to be careful here because I accept that there are certain acts and situations which are clearly bad. However, he uses expressions like ‘the elite’ and ‘evil’ without spelling out what he means. When you’re using these types of words I think there is a great deal of scope for misinterpretation and even if a valid point is being made, it’s substance can be lost due to the choice of inflamatory language.

By and large I would say that this book is worth a read because it provides a unique perspective on some very topical social problems, whether you agree with his opinions or not.

The author also maintains a blog which can be found here.

	Quirkology: The Curious Science of Everyday Lives Author: Richard Wiseman Rating:
Buy this on Amazon right now.

This is the second book by Richard Wiseman that I have read in the past while (the other one was did you spot the gorilla?). I must say they’re both very enjoyable reads.

At the very end of this book he presents the results of an experimental dinner party where he asks people to rate how interesting they found some of the facts presented in this book. I think the contents of the list gives a great indication of the type of book this is and what it’s about. So here they are in reverse order:

10. People asked to write down a few words describing a university professor answer more Trivian Pursuit questions correctly than those describing a football hooligan.

9. Women’s personal ads would attract more replies if they were written by a man. The opposite is not true of men’s ads.

8. The mona lisa seems enigmatic because Leonardo da Vinci painted her so that her smile appears more striking when people look at her eyes than her mouth.

7. Women van drivers are more likely than others to take more than ten items through the express lane in a supermarket, break speed limits, and park in restricted areas.

6. Some seemingly ghostly experiences, such as feeling an odd sense of presence, are actually due to low-frequency sound waves produced by the wind blowing across an open window.

5. Words containing the ‘K’ sound - such as duck, quack and Krusty the Colown - are especially likely to make people laugh.

4. People born during the summer are luckier than those born in the winter - temperature differences around the time of birth makes summer-borns more optimistic and open to opportunities.

3. The best way of detecting lies is to listen rather than look - liars say less, give fewer details, and use the word ‘I’ less than people telling the truth.

2. The difference between a genuine and a fake smile is all in the eyes - in a genuine smile, the skin around the eyes crinkles, in a fake smile it remains much flatter.

1. People would rather wear a sweater that has been dropped in dog faeces and not washed, than one that has been dry-cleaned but used to belong to a mass murderer.

If you want to find out more (and there’s lots more to find out), buy the book!

	Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl Author: Anne Frank Rating:
Buy this on Amazon right now.
Discovered in the attic in which she spent the last years of her life, Anne Frank’s remarkable diary has since become a world classic — a powerful reminder of the horrors of war and an eloquent testament to the human spirit. In 1942, with Nazis occupying Holland, a thirteen-year-old Jewish girl and her family fled their home in Amsterdam and went into hiding. For the next two years, until their whereabouts were betrayed to the Gestapo, they and another family lived cloistered in the “Secret Annex” of an old office building. Cut off from the outside world, they faced hunger, boredom, the constant cruelties of living in confined quarters, and the ever-present threat of discovery and death. In her diary Anne Frank recorded vivid impressions of her experiences during this period. By turns thoughtful, moving, and amusing, her account offers a fascinating commentary on human courage and frailty and a compelling self-portrait of a sensitive and spirited young woman whose promise was tragically cut short.

This is a book that I’ve wanted to read for a long time. I visited the “Secret Annexe” where the families hid once when I was in Amsterdam, but obviously it would be much more meaningful if I was to visit it now.

What can you say about this book really? It’s a very easy read and well worth it.

	Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time (The Jerusalem-Harvard Lectures) Author: Stephen Jay Gould Rating:
Buy this on Amazon right now.
Gould’s subject is nothing less than geology’s signal contribution to human thought–the discovery of “deep time,” a history so ancient that we can best comprehend it as metaphor.

In broad terms, this book discusses three other books;

1. Telluris theoria sacra (The sacred theory of the earth) by Thomas Burnet, published between 1680 and 1690
2. Theory of the Earth by James Hutton, published 1795
3. Principles of Geology by Charles Lyell, published 1830

These books straddle the period in time when humanity came to the realisation that the world couldn’t possibly be approximately 6,000 years old which creationist religous doctrine had been teaching.

Gould argues that the history of these three books is often misrepresented as a conflict between religion and science, with Burnet’s book being a statement of religous doctrine and the others being a triumph for scientific discovery. In actuality, these three books represent a struggle between two different interpretations of time; the understanding of time as a cyclic process where each point in history can only be understood as a point in one iteration of an eternally repeating cycle and the understanding of time as an arrow where each point in history can be uniquely identified and placed in chronological order.

He describes how in modern times the idea of time’s arrow is so entrenched in our thinking that we have trouble understanding how people could possibly have thought of history in any other terms, but that does a disservice to the thinkers of earlier times who made valiant efforts to reconcile their religious doctrine with theories about the origin of the world.

This book provides some interesting and well researched historical context for the three books mentioned above which are all clearly significant works even though I have never personally read any of them. The aspect of this book that I enjoyed the most was the understanding it gave me of how people used to conceptualise time, history and our place as human beings in the world, how that was changing even at the time the books above were being written, and how much it has changed since.

Gould makes the point that the understanding of time in terms of cyclic processes repeating eternally or as an arrow progressing through history are both important within different contexts. He also points out that the miscasting of the debate on the age of the earth as a debate between religion and science rather than a shift in understanding of time means that there is a danger that we tend to underplay one of these two conceptual interpretations of time (time’s cycle), which is not a good thing.