Historical Mystery: The Vanished Child, by Sarah Smith; Sister Pelagia and the Red Cockerel, by Boris Akunin; In the Shadow of Gotham, by Stefanie Pintoff
The doctor ran down the path, reached the house. Servants were coming downstairs, screaming and crying. William Knight was dead, shot dead, in the front room. A bloodbath, a shambles. Jay was gone. Richard Knight was downstairs, by his grandfather's body, deep in shock (Prepare to be astounded, my dear). The doctor asks the child, "Richard, did you see anything?" And what does Richard say?
"I won't tell." says Richard. I'll never tell.
Smith, Akunin, Pintoff. Remember these names, because they write GOOD stuff, and not enough of it. Akunin's was the last of three Sister Pelagias and six Fandorins.
Sarah Smith (quoted above) has an incredible first book, where the narrator is told to impersonate a missing heir and repudiate the inheritance so that surviving relatives can move on--but things become complicated in spoiler ways. I read a lot of these, but Vanished Child stands out as an unusually suspenseful page turner. She wrote others, and I'm intrigued to see what happens in the next one.
Pintoff writes about 1900s NYC and surrounding areas. The character and atmosphere are wonderful, but the solution is a groaner.
First Dewey: Education and Experience 7 How We Think, by John Dewey
What we want and need is education pure and simple, and we shall make surer and faster progress when we devote ourselves to finding out just what education is and what conditions have to be satisfied in order that education may be a reality and not a name or a slogan. It is for this reason alone that I have emphasized the need for a sound philosophy of experience.
--from "Education and Experience"
Dewey and Bertrand Russell are the major philosophers I intend to read this year. Some of the big philosophy surveys (including Russell's) END with these two.
I know generally that Dewey (no relation to the guy who, according to the Chicago Tribune, defeated Truman) followed William James and was the father of the "progressive education" model that conservatives mock as "letting children run rampant through the schools doing what they want", but not much else.
"Education and Experience" is an essay chosen to represent Dewey in the second edition of Great Books, so I started with that. it starts out talking about the difference between book-learning and learning by doing things, points out that both are necessary (it is hard to imagine a situation where there is either experience or education taking place without both), and proposes an increase in guided, controlled experiences as a foundation of education.
It may be that Dewey was a forerunner of having science labs, wood shop and home ec in the schools.
"How We Think" is about cognitive function and memory, and building on knowledge to learn new things. I read it going "Well, duh." It says things that one pretty much takes for granted if one is liberal and believes in education at all, instead of obeying declared authority and despising elitists who ask questions and know what they're talking about.
Snarky Economics: Vested Interests and the State of Industrial; Arts; Absentee Ownership and Business Enterprise in Recent Times, by Thorstein Veblen
Unrestricted ownership of property, with inheritance, free contract, and self-help, is believed to have been highly expedient as well as eminently equitable under the circumstances which conditioned civilized life at the period when the civilized world made up its mind to that effect. And the discrepancy which has come in evidence at this later time is traceable to the fact that other things have not remained the same. The odious outcome has been made by disturbing causes, not by these enlightened principles of honest living. Security and unlimited discretion in the rights of ownership were once rightly made much of as a simple and obvious safeguard of self-direction and self-help for the common man; whereas, in the event, under a new order of circumstances, it all promises to be nothing more than a means of assured defeat and vexation to the common man.
Veblen mostly wrote short, snarky works that are to economics what Jack London is to literature: exposing the savage, deadly struggles beneath the surface of civilization and showing us how close we all are to the state of nature. Aristocrats preying on the poor, claiming ownership of things essential to life, and taking everything you have in exchange for what you need in order to live. A common theme in Veblen, Ricardo, Mill, Marx, Henry George and Tawney is that economic rules and values, such as private property, that make sense on small scales become absurd when expanded to justify godzillionaires. Most of us--except Republicans--understand the difference between taxing a peasant's only dollar and taxing the billionth dollar. But here we are.
Russian Doll: Emily of Blue Moon, by L.M. Montgomery
"There isn't anybody in the world who loves me now," she said as she curled up on her bed by the window. But she was determined she would not cry. The Murrays, who had hated her father, should not see her crying. She felt that she detested them all--except perhaps Aunt Laura. How very big and empty the world had suddenly become. Nothing was interesting any more. It didn't matter that the squat apple tree between Adam-and-Eve had become a thing of rose-and-snow beauty--that the hills beyond the hollow were of green silk, purple-misted--that the daffodils were out in the garden, that the birches were hung all over with golden tassels, that the Wind Woman was blowing white young clouds across the sky. None of these things had any charm or consolation for her now. In her inexperience, she believed they never would have again.
I read this one because a copy of the book plays a major role in the TV series Russian Doll, where the protagonist needs to give it to the small daughter of a single father before Bad Things happen. It's never fully explained why, and the show is a little trippy, so I thought there was maybe a clue in the book.
Nope. In fact, since the girl protagonist's father dies early in the book, leaving the free-spirited girl to be miserably brought up by uptight aunts who find fault with every bit of her, I'd find it an odd choice to give to a girl with one parent.
But yes. Prince Edward Island's most popular writer, more famous for Anne of Green Gables, has another series. This girl is possibly more free-spirited than Anne, but it's a similar 'growing up' story set in the same general environmant.
Cill My Landlord: The Acquisitive Society, by R.H. Tawney
The truth is that at present it is idle to seek to resist the demands of any group of workers by appeals to "the interests of society," because to-day, as long as the economic plane alone is considered, there is not one society but two, which dwell together in uneasy juxtaposition, like Sinbad and the Old Man of the Sea, but which in spirit, in ideals, and in economic interest, are worlds asunder. There is the society of those who live by labor, whatever their craft or profession, and the society of those who live on it. All the latter cannot command the sacrifices or the loyalty which are due to the former, for they have no title which will bear inspection. The instinct to ignore that tragic division instead of ending it is amiable, and sometimes generous. But it is a sentimentality which is like the morbid optimism of the consumptive who dares not admit even to himself the virulence of his disease. As long as the division exists, the general body of workers, while it may suffer from the struggles of any one group within it, nevertheless supports them by its sympathy, because all are interested in the results of the contest carried on by each. Different sections of workers will exercise mutual restraint only when the termination of the {136}struggle leaves them face to face with each other, and not as now, with the common enemy. The ideal of a united society in which no one group uses its power to encroach upon the standards of another is, in short, unattainable, except through the preliminary abolition of functionless property.
Another selection from the second edition of the Great Books set, Tawney is one economist I hadn't heard of outside the Great Books set. He's in the econ volume between Veblen and Keynes, and his small book is an example of Socialist Economics.
The big takeaway is to define landlords and investors as parasites on society who draw income from claiming ownership over things without doing any actual work. He wrote in England at a time when industrial workers labored under backbreaking conditions for pitiful wages, or starved, while the aristocracy lived in mansions and said "Wot-Wot" while their butlers got them out of comic scrapes. 20 years ago, I'd have said the problem had been mostly solved, but we're coming around to it again. Wealth is a good thing that it is possible to have too much of.
Tawney does not want to abolish private property, but he would like it if nobody got seconds until everyone else had had a helping. Those who buy income-producing property with money they earned from their labors, or whose investments provide the capital to help others start a successful business are cool; those whose inheritances keep growing while they live off of the rents take money from needy people who worked for it and add no value.
Carnival of Carnage: The Killing Floor, by Lee Child
I'd killed one guy and blinded another. Now I'd have to confront my feelings. But I didn't feel much at all. Nothing, in fact. No guilt, no remorse. None at all. I felt like I'd chased two roaches around the bathroom and stomped on them. But at least a roach is a rational, reasonable, evolved sort of a creature.
Too much heavy duty reading wears on you. I figured it was time to look into Child's Jack Reacher thriller series, see what the fuss was about.
What the library had was a reprinting of the first in the series. You could tell by the "The first Jack Reacher tale!" blurb on the cover, and by Child's earnest attempt to alienate me before I even started it, with his pompous Benioff/Weissian introduction explaining how clever he is. If you can see a bandwagon, says Child, it is too late to get on it...and so Child cleverly avoided the new (in 1997) tendency of action heroes to have moral complexity and more than two dimensions, and instead went very originally to the oldest action hero trope in existence, the brooding, silent, unstoppable, conscienceless tank-drifter made famous by Shane, Rambo, 80s era Schwarzenegger, and a dozen rogue cops for whom "there is only one law, and that's HIS law" #YouHaveTheRightToRemainDead
Like--what if the action hero NEVER loses a fight? What if he NEVER second-guesses himself, doesn't have any flaws, just comes into town, litters the place with the bodies of villains who are always dangerous but NEVER close to a match for him, and then goes, brooding, off into the sunset? No one's ever done that before, right?
In spite of the intro, I kept going. Mike Hammer, Rambo and Chuck Norris are fun if you're in the right mood and don't overthink it, right?
So he wanders into a strange town, immediately gets arrested for a murder he knows nothing about (letting the reader know he could easily have overpowered the cops, but he plays along with them), and goes to one of those superpredator prisons where the black convicts immediately go "fresh meat" and try to rape him, the way black convicts are always written in these stories, and he kicke their asses, and then the Aryans come for him too, and he mutilates them, but gets away with it because the black convicts are eager to claim they did it because badass. And then he finds out more things about the murder, that improbably makes it personal, and they commit more murders in gruesome ways to show how truly scum of the earth they are, and then Reacher kills them all and then he leaves.
And I'm probably going to read more, just because I need some eye-rolling junk food between the good stuff and because I tend to see a series through to the end. If your mileage is like that, or if it isn't, you know what you're getting.
Frazer Lite: Folkways, by William Graham Sumner
The operation by which folkways are produced consists in the frequent repetition of petty acts, often by great numbers acting in concert or, at least, acting in the same way when face to face with the same need. The immediate motive is interest. It produces habit in the individual and custom in the group. It is, therefore, in the highest degree original and primitive. By habit and custom it exerts a strain on every individual within its range; therefore it rises to a societal force to which great classes of societal phenomena are due. Its earliest stages, its course, and laws may be studied; also its influence on individuals and their reaction on it. It is our present purpose so to study it. We have to recognize it as one of the chief forces by which a society is made to be what it is. Out of the unconscious experiment which every repetition of the ways includes, there issues pleasure or pain, and then, so far as the men are capable of reflection, convictions that the ways are conducive to societal welfare. These two experiences are not the same. The most uncivilized men, both in the food quest and in war, do things which are painful, but which have been found to be expedient. Perhaps these cases teach the sense of social welfare better than those which are pleasurable and favorable to welfare. The former cases call for some intelligent reflection on experience. When this conviction as to the relation to welfare is added to the folkways they are converted into mores, and, by virtue of the philosophical and ethical element added to them, they win utility and importance and become the source of the science and the art of living.
After taking the better part of a year to get through The Golden Bough, Sumner's single volume tome was smooth sailing. It either influenced or was influenced by Frazer, as it takes almost the same approach, without specifically stating that local cultural customs are religious--though most of the examples given are at least highly superstitious and irrational, and often based on Bible rules.
Like Frazer, Sumner goes all around the world for examples, that have strange tendencies to be similar, even in very remote locations.
The customs studied involve slavery, cannibalism, courtship, marriage and sex rituals, practices that make one "unclean", blood feuds and justice, and public spectacles. If there are patterns, we're left to draw our own conclusions, and no commentary is made as to whether any particular superstition, from homicidal ones to wearing ornamental jewelry, is empirically wrong.
It's a dry and humorless book, but worth the read for one interested in sociology. Recommended.
Law for Non-Lawyers: The Common Law, by Oliver Wendell Holmes II
The life of the law has not been logic: it has been experience. The felt necessities of the time, the prevalent moral and political theories, intuitions of public policy, avowed or unconscious, even the prejudices which judges share with their fellow-men, have had a good deal more to do than the syllogism in determining the rules by which men should be governed. The law embodies the story of a nation's development through many centuries, and it cannot be dealt with as if it contained only the axioms and corollaries of a book of mathematics. In order to know what it is, we must know what it has been, and what it tends to become. We must alternately consult history and existing theories of legislation. But the most difficult labor will be to understand the combination of the two into new products at every stage. The substance of the law at any given time pretty nearly [2] corresponds, so far as it goes, with what is then understood to be convenient; but its form and machinery, and the degree to which it is able to work out desired results, depend very much upon its past.
Common Law is doctrine handed down by courts, as opposed to legislation. If you agree with a judge's ruling, it is justice. If you disagree, it is "legislating from the bench", and an abomination against God and Man. Prior rulings are taken into account as precedents when arguing subsequent cases, hence Swift's observation "It is a maxim among these lawyers that whatever has been done before, may legally be done again: and therefore they take special care to record all the decisions formerly made against common justice, and the general reason of mankind. These, under the name of precedents, they produce as authorities to justify the most iniquitous opinions; and the judges never fail of directing accordingly."
The Common Law is what lawyers would call a hornbook; a simple survey of basic common law covering criminal prosecution, civil injury law, contracts and property (the first year curriculum of law school) in English law as carried over to the USA. To an attorney, it's basic information, and not particularly useful, as over a century of new cases and legislation have occurred since and canceled out much of the old ones. To a generalist, it has some value in lawyersplaining the law to nonlawyers and providing a snapshot of how people used to think, as a stepping stone to what's going on now. Like an astronomer reading about the Ptolomeic geocentric universe model. Otherwise, a dated antique.
Biology for Half-Dead Cats: What is Life?, by Erwin Schrodinger
Let us see whether we cannot draw the correct non-contradictory conclusion from the following two premises: (1) My body functions as a pure mechanism according to Laws of Nature; and (2) Yet I know, by incontrovertible direct experience, that I am directing its motions, of which I foresee the effects, that may be fateful and all-important, in which case I feel and take full responsibility for them. The only possible inference from these two facts is, I think, that I – I in the widest meaning of the word, that is to say, every conscious mind that has ever said or felt 'I' – am the person, if any, who controls the 'motion of the atoms' according to the Laws of Nature.
Another Great Books selection, notable for postulating chromosomes as the way genetic material is passed on to offspring, which eventually gets metaphysical and suggests a basis for life after death based upon the premise that there is one supreme consciousness, of which each of us is a small part. Watson and Crick gave Schrodinger credit for influencing their DNA research, when they should have mentioned Rosalind Franklin. #FuckingWatson #FuckingCrick
Schrodinger also suggests that the open ended nature of the universe solves any apparent paradox in the law of thermodynamics, in that the increasing order and complexity in a developing human body and soul is compensated for by an equal and opposite disorder and chaos elsewhere in the universe (such as in an old man descending into Trump support).