Great Books About Scotland -- A St. Andrew's Day Celebration

The Scots — who gave us classics that range from Treasure Island to James Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson — celebrate their heritage on St. Andrew’s Day, Nov. 30, the feast day of the patron saint of Scotland. Here, in its honor, are some of my favorite books about the land of my maternal ancestors:

The Crofter and the Laird (FSG, 1992), by John McPhee. More than three decades ago, McPhee moved with his wife and four young daughters to a small island in the inner Hebrides, just off the Scottish mainland, which had fewer than 200 residents. He tells the story of that visit to the land of his ancestors in The Crofter and the Laird, a fascinating of study of a place that refracts the history of Colonsay through his family’s experiences. The book is especially noteworthy for its portrait of changing relations between crofters or tenant farmers and their English laird (then, a glorified landlord who owned the island) long before the establishment of a Scottish Parliament. McPhee won a Pulitzer Prize for Annals of the Former World. First published in 1969.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (HarperPerennial, 2009), by Muriel Spark. This great novella is a brilliant psychological study of female power as deployed by a teacher at an Edinburgh girls’ school in the early 1930s. The 1969 movie version had a memorable star turn by Maggie Smith but didn’t capture the most remarkable aspect of the book: It is a masterpiece of tone. Spark neither sentimentalizes nor demonizes her heroine, but describes her with the kind of cool detachment rarely found in novels about the sexually overheated world of girls’ and boys’ schools.  First published in 1961.

The Thirty-Nine Steps (Oxford University Press, 2009),by John Buchan. This slender, classic spy thriller is the first of Buchan’s five novels about Richard Hannay, a 37-year-old Scottish-born engineer who became a prototype for generations of adventurous patriots. In The Thirty-Nine Steps Hannary shelters a spy who has learned of a secret German plan to invade England and, when the man is murdered, flees to the Scotland, where he hopes to lie low amid remote glens and moors. He soon finds himself hunted both by the British police who consider him a suspect and by the Germans who have killed the spy. After being spotted from an airplane, Hannay tries to elude his pursuers by adopting disguises and traveling by foot, bicycle and train through Scotland. This story is better known today for its movie version by Alfred Hitchcock. But Hitchcock changed so much of the plot that no matter often you’ve seen the film, you can enjoy the book. First published in 1915.

Other good books about Scotland include Israel Shenker’s In the Footsteps of Johnson and Boswell : A Modern Day Journey through Scotland, a re-tracing of one of the most famous literary excursions in history, and the two books that inspired it: Samuel Johnson’s Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland and James Boswell’s A Tour to the Hebrides. You can find them together in one edition.

A fine golf book for serious readers (as opposed to serious picture-gazers) is A Season in Dornoch: Golf and Life in the Scottish Highlands, the journalist Lorne Rubenstein’s account of a summer of playing on the Royal Dornoch Golf Course. And Liza Campbell writes of her life as the daughter of a Thane of Cawdor in A Charmed Life: Growing Up in Macbeth’s Castle, a memoir that offers a stars-without-makeup view of 20th-century Scottish aristocrats. Campbell’s book isn’t perfect, but the British class system is dissolving fast enough that her story may be one of the last of its kind.

You can also follow Jan Harayda on Twitter (@janiceharayda) www.Twitter.com/janiceharayda, where you’ll find others’ favorite books on Scotland by reading her home page or searching Twitter for the hashtag #scots.

© 2009 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.

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Treasure Island Review

It Begins: “Squire Trelawney, Dr. Livesey, and the rest of these gentlemen having asked me to write down the whole particulars about Treasure Island, from the beginning to the end, keeping nothing back but the bearings of the island, and that only because there is still treasure not yet lifted, I take up my pen in the year of grace 17– and go back to the time when my father kept the “Admiral Benbow” inn and the brown old seaman with the sabre cut first took up his lodging under our roof.”

And it Ends with: “The bar silver and the arms still lie, for all that I know, where Flint buried them; and certainly they shall lie there for me. Oxen and wainropes would not bring be back again to that accursed island; and the worst dreams that ever I have are when I hear the surf booming about its coasts or start upright in bed with the sharp voice of Captain Flint still ringing in my ears: “Pieces of eight! Pieces of eight!”

It is 191 pages and it took me 16 days.

I would recommend this book to every male I know. And females can read it too. I emphasized the ‘male’ audience because Stevenson himself said he wrote the tale for boys.  The ideal audience for this book, in my humble opinion, would be boys 14 and older. That is only because some of the paragraphs seem to throw me off of what is happening. At these times you need to read with faith, because 3 sentences down the page it’ll all make sense.

What I got out of this book is a lot of enjoyment and an increased suspicion of all men with a wooden leg. It is a great story and a classic for a reason. I also love the way it is written. The sentences describe more than the words they are made of… similar to the words ’splash’ and ‘goo’. Treasure Island has everything that makes a great tale great: adventure, a goal, good versus evil, death, lots of different characters, excitement, deception, battles, and an underlying morality. This book also gives me a proper basis to judge all of the pirate stories and TV shows that I grew up on. I fully agree that this is a book that every man should read. And I’ll probably read it again.

[Via http://jakereads.com]

How mind acquired knowledge?

How mind acquired knowledge? (Nov. 25, 2009)

Berkeley, the British philosopher of the 19th century, insists that we cannot directly comprehend objects with just our senses: our senses are causally linked to phenomena that are affected by the objects. In this case, the “existence of objects” becomes problematic if we try to insert a third transmission factor between the subject and the object to account for our comprehension. The traditional reflection that we need a speculative concept-based system of thinking to mediate between object and subject has been disrupted by physical sciences.

By the by, the conviction that transformations of our senses lead to comprehending brute matters relied on a double proof: first, the impossibility of acquiring knowledge by the sole speculative thinking and second, empirical research enhanced our knowledge base.

Hume, another British philosopher, claimed that causal relations, among other concepts considered essential, cannot be understood from matters that are offered to our senses.  According to Hume, the sensed brute matter is our only source of knowledge and thus, it modifies our understanding but never leads us to formulating laws: “empirical knowledge is never certain”. Hume warned against indulging into metaphysical concept (as the true opposite to objectivity); this word “metaphysic” aroused this erroneous fear that got the subsequent contemporary philosophers rattled and wrote thousand of obscure pages just to sounding objective. This anxious fear of extending metaphysical notions prompted philosophers into describing objects as equivalent to their qualities or characteristics, thus, evaluating relations is equivalent to evaluating qualities.

Consequently, contemporary philosophers reached this understanding that sure and stable knowledge has to be founded on reasoning such as it is done in geometry and the principle of causality. The paradox, said Einstein, is that we learned that most reasoning systems do not necessarily generate certainty in any field of science or that are intimately necessary for our knowledge development.

Bertrand Russell in his “Inquiry into meaning and truth” stated: “We all start with the realism that objects are what they appear: grass is green, snow is cold, and stone is hard. Then physics teaches us that color, heat, or hardness are different in quality or characteristics of what we might have experienced. The observer is in fact registering the impressions of the grass, snow, or stone. When science attempts to be objective it sinks, against its will, into subjectivity. Thus, naïf realism leads to physics, physics then demonstrates that realism is false. Logically false, and thus false.”

To avoid their concepts being labeled “metaphysical” then Scientists have been formulating boundaries or axioms to their concepts; for example, in order for a concept not to degenerate into metaphysic then first, enough numbers of propositions must be linked to the sensed world and second, the conceptual system must have essential functions of re-arranging, organizing, and synthesizing the sensed “reality”. A system expresses a game of logical symbols ruled by logical arbitrary given propositions.

Einstein is not bothered at all by the term metaphysic; he does not mind accepting an object as an independent concept in spatial-temporal structures. As he views it, it is unavoidable bypassing metaphysical concepts and thus, there should be no need to be apprehensive of a concept being considered metaphysical. Einstein thinks that concepts are logically creations of the mind, that it cannot be due to inductive reasoning from the sensed experiences. For example, prime numbers are considered invention of the mind. Yes, that concepts are extracted from the sensed brute matters is a reasonable contention, what is wrong is to exclude all concepts not considered to be related to the sensed world as metaphysical concepts.

What is so fishy about contemporary philosophy is that they avoid dwelling on the processes of hundreds of thousands of years that was necessary for human brain to acquire the necessary associations and images of objects and expressions, of metaphors, and then abstract analogies. It is my contention that reasoning methods of induction, deduction, and logical systems of rules are but organizations and descriptions of mental processes of the brain and memories for retrieving and recalling stored information. I believe that the neo-cortex has been undergoing specialized connected areas for expert specialized and restricted disciplines for work or labor divisions. General knowledge is going down the drain that will result in man destruction and moral oblivion.

[Via http://adonis49.wordpress.com]

Physics of the Impossible

One hundred years ago, scientists would have said that lasers, televisions, and the atomic bomb were beyond the realm of physical possibility. In Physics of the Impossible, Dr. Michio Kaku–a renowned theoretical physicist, bestselling author, futurist, and popularizer of science–explores to what extent the technologies and devices of science fiction that are deemed equally impossible today might well become commonplace in the future.

He uses the world of science fiction to explore the fundamentals and limits of the laws of physics as we know them today. He ranks the impossible technologies by category–Class I, II, and III–depending on when they might be achieved, within the next century, millennia, or perhaps never.

CLASS I impossiblities includes force fields, invisibility, phasers and death stars, teleportation, telepathy, psychokinesis, robots, extraterrestrials and UFOs, starships, and antimatter and anti-universe. CLASS II impossiblities includes time travel and parallel universes. CLASS III impossiblities includes perpetual motion machines and precognition.

The link below is his lecture at WGBH and Museum of Science in Boston. It is a summary of his texbook. So enjoy yourself and impress yourself with his exploration!!!

Physics of the Impossible Lecture at WGBH and Museum of Science, Boston.

[Via http://phannsophearin.wordpress.com]

Book Review: BlackOut - A Riley Covington Thriller

Blackout by Jason Elam

My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Blackout (A Riley Covington Thriller)
Thriller is indeed accurate.
This is my first book by these authors to read. I do not think that it will be my last.
Riley Covington is a pro football player. He is also a hero. A former member of the US Armed Forces, and an expert in various terrorist weapons, Covington is in great demand.
Covington is also a Christian. That means that all the he does is influenced by his commitment to Jesus.
Covington is inexplicably traded away from the team that he loves to play on. He is moved to Washington only to find that he is not wanted by that team’s owner. He learns, however, that the government is behind his move, and that they have a need for him.
Covington is to seek to prevent another terrorist attack that could lead to a blackout of the whole nation. In the midst of all of this, he is torn between his feelings for two very different women.
What will the outcome of all of this be?
One thing is for sure, the outcome is that I desire to read more books about Riley Covington.

Thanks to Christy Wong of Tyndale for this advance reader copy of Blackout.

View all my reviews >>

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book

my friend emily grace wrote this:

i read this really good series called “uglies” by scott westerfeld. dont think the name is weird cause this book has some serious action and drama. i couldnt put any of them down!! (thers 4 btw) any one who like adventure, action, drama, and a tiny bit of romance should read this AMAZING series. Tally will have to make several choices depending on her life and others….read to find out!!

[Via http://aylas98.wordpress.com]

Book Review: Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell (2008)

The formula for Malcolm Gladwell’s three best-selling non-fiction works is simple:  amusing anecdotes plus a little science equal some “interesting” ideas about how we could fix something.  In Blink he looked at a variety of seemingly disconnected things like taste tests and military war games to show how gut reactions can be better used and trained to take advantage of their accuracy.

Outliers seeks to answer questions about why some people are successful.  The answers that Gladwell finds are neither earth-shaking, nor really all that “interesting.”  The anecdotes, however, are, and it’s Gladwell’s ability as a story-teller that still makes the book worth reading. 

In short, Gladwell argues that success is shaped by opportunity and legacy. This means that an uncontrollable factor such as when or where you were born could be a more controlling influence over the likelihood of an individual succeeding as factors like genetics or hard work and responsibility.  Gladwell does not deny the influence of these other factors, noting that they are, in fact, necessary.  Only that hard work alone does not necessarily account for why some succeed and some fail.

Gladwell leads this into a discussion about what can be done for schools to help students experience success.  Among the ideas he advocates:

Re-grouping classes based on birth month.  Gladwell shows how the younger students in a class are wrongly judged on their abilities because of their development.  He recommends a 3-4 month grouping so the gap between youngest and oldest isn’t as pronounced. 

Using the Asian system of numbers.  Gladwell believes the American number system  is counter-intuitive and that the Asian system fosters a greater ability to calculate individually. 

Adopting year-round school.  According to stats that Gladwell produces, most schools work.  It’s the summer break that skews what progress is made when reading and math scores are broken down along socioeconomic lines.  The lower brackets lose reading gains over the summer and actually make greater strides during the school year.  Were the school calendar to reflect a more natural work calendar (or an Asian calendar) these gains would be maintained.

Adopting Asian-type school days.  Looking at the TIMSS test Gladwell shows how you can predict the outcome of the test based on the number of questions students leave blank on the pre-test questionnaire.  It’s amazing but true.  This gets attributed to attention span and the way school days break down.  Asian schools have longer bells, allowing for more time on individual problems, while typical American students give up after 30 seconds-2 minutes.  Gladwell’s theory is that if American students were better at persisting (something he imaginatively attributes to rice paddy farming v. American-style farming) we would improve our ability to score highly on these tests. 

In the end, it’s hard to say much more about Gladwell than “that’s interesting.”  It’s not science, it’s not research, it’s a loose connection of anecdotes.  Taken together, he seems to advocate Asian schools and Asian culture for producing academic success as measured by standardized tests.  Why we should use such tests to measure what a successful student is or care about their results is not, however, addressed here.  He leaves that for the academics.

See Gladwell on Charlie Rose (12/19/08 ) here.

[Via http://dustyhum.wordpress.com]