Iain McGilchrist's The Divided Brain & the Search forMeaning

This book that sells for $1.50 as a Kindle book is a real deal. It's a shorter considertion of the issues addressed in McGilchrist's The Master & His Emissary. 

But wait, before doing forward with any review, if you haven't done so already, you should review the RSA that I'd done a short while ago but forgot to post. (It is now the post immediately preceding this one.) The short Youtube piece provides a concise overview of what this book and The Master & His Emissary go into. 

How important is this stuff? Incredibly so, I think. It takes us beyond the old left brain-right brain dichotomy for beginners, but more importantly, it shows us how the human brain evolved to serve two different types of needs. One focused and manipulative, the other broadly focused and in search of understanding. The revolutions occurring in neuroscience provide us with new insights into our human condition and how and why we act as we do, for good & ill. McGilchrist sees a woeful imbalance in Western thinking, which, from other sources, I would trace back to Descartes at least, but perhaps we should go back as far as the Greek rationalists. In any event, this book is a quick overview of McGilchrist's important thinking on this crucial project. I highly recommend it.  

Better Than TED Talks? RSAnimate & The Divided Brain

Two topics here:

1. Is RSAnimate better than TED talks? Of course, it's not a contest, but this type of presentation I find very lively & engaging. The visual (a skill that I deeply admire, probably because of my lack of talent) really adds to the presentation without dumbing-down the presentation.

2. The brain & neuroscience research is a fascinating topic & one that continues to grow and give us insight. The idea--a flawed one I believe--that divides Reason & Passion goes back at least to Plato in the West, with a big boost from Descartes along the way. But while it has some metaphorical value, taken too literally it's false. This view, better than the old Left Brain-Right Brain exact division of function, gives us a new view of ourselves that should prove very useful and practical.

Found courtesy of a Jonathan Haidt Tweet.

The New Yorker’s Endorsement of Barack Obama : The New Yorker

The New Yorker’s Endorsement of Barack Obama : The New Yorker

This is a terrific statement of why we should re-elect Obama. I urge everyone to read it and consider it.
My only complaint? I wish I was this articulate!
Then after reading, vote. 

Movie Review: Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

Iowa Guru and I watched the film version of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. It was worth seeing. Iowa Guru has had read the book, and spoke very highly of it. My sense of the film is that like most attempts to turn first rate literature into film, a great deal comes up missing. When an author like Foer deals with characters so mainstream in some ways and so marginal in others, and the complex interaction between them, I think it’s extremely difficult to make the transfer. Ask yourself, how many great books have I seen translated into great films? That’s my sense of this film, worth seeing, well- acted (and extremely well-acted by the boy who plays Oskar), and thoughtful. One comes away with a sense that I ought to read the book. But, given the line of books I have yet to read, the film will do for now, and I can recommend it to others.

Eric Ambler's Background to Danger

Before Graham Greene (and his in his so-called “entertainments"), before Len Deighton, before Robert Ludlum, before John Le Carre, and before Alan Furst, there was Eric Ambler. Ambler is often credited as the father of the contemporary thriller. Perhaps, John Buchan deserves the title, but Ambler is the recognized master. Ambler, who started writing these the 1930s, sets the tone for fast-paced, international intrigue. Many years ago, I read Ambler's ACoffin for Dimitrios, which I enjoyed, so I was happy to find a copy of Background to Danger and plunge back into Ambler's work. I was not disappointed.

Background to Danger starts with an international correspondent who's lost most of his money gambling, and finds himself sharing a compartment on a train with a stranger who claims to be a Jewish refugee escaping Nazi agents with some important documents. I won't go into further detail, as the plot moves quickly from that basic premise. Ambler’s writing is fast-paced and clear, with enough character to draw in the reader. His plot lines, as you may recognize from the brief teaser I just gave you, would suit perfectly for an Alfred Hitchcock movie. In fact, that's a good question, whether Hitchcock ever used any of Ambler’s works for any of his movies. He certainly could have.

You don't get the characterization and depth in Ambler that you do in Greene or Le Carre, but you do get the fast-paced intrigue at a level similar to what we find currently in Alan Furst. If you're looking for a fine read of intrigue set in the volatile Europe of the 1930s, you would have a hard time doing better than Ambler’s work.

The Sad State of Civil Liberties - Why Nations Fail — whynationsfail.com — Readability

The Sad State of Civil Liberties   - Why Nations Fail — whynationsfail.com — Readability

This blog deserves more than a Tweet. I have held this fear of a decline in out civil liberties for some time, and this article reinforces that fear. Should we have attempted to capture Bin Laden and tried him? I realize the immense practical difficulties that this would have presented. Could he have received anything approaching a fair trial? Was he not guilty by his own boastful admission? So OBL, I'm not quite so troubled by. But I am troubled deeply by those that we keep in Guantanamo. Most are no doubt guilty of some serious crimes, but to allow them to languish there indefinitely is consistent  with the actions of real tyrants. Also, let's face it, the American public has shown a high degree of cowardice about having the prisoners held in the U.S. mainland, not to mention holding trials here. Shame on us! 

In my Tweet about India posted just a short while ago, I see the effects of an insufficient state, one without enough money or will, and with too much corruption, to create as good a place to live as this country should enjoy. So here's a case of state weakness, but the other end of the matter is excessive state authority. Lord Acton wasn't kidding, power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. This might be thought a cliche by now, but we ignore this at our peril. Too bad we don't have more principled civil libertarians, as these folks should come from both the right and the left. But too many self-styled political 'conservatives' are really authoritarians. I'm okay with conserving, and I recognize legitimate and rational authority, but too many take this too far. 

Civil liberties have been ignored as an issue in this election, which probably is an indication of how poorly the Obama administration has done on this count. Karl Rove, even from the sidelines, would have been raising the fear alarms to high decibels as he did in the Bush administration if he had anything to work with there. Not good that they're not raising a ruckus! 

Namaste

 

Movie Review: The Green Mile

In addition to picking up some light reading that the local bookstore and with Iowa Guru away for a couple days, I bought some movies that I think she wouldn't enjoy. Among those that I picked up was The Green Mile. I picked up The Green Mile because it starred Tom Hanks, because it was based on a book by Stephen King, and because I read that it had been nominated for Best Picture the year it was released. I'm not a big horror fan, but I'd recently viewed the movie version of King’s The Shawshank Redemption, and it made me realize that King could work outside the horror genre as well as having become the master within it. In addition, I recalled Stand By Me, another compelling King movie without elements of horror or the supernatural.

The Green Mile is a carefully told story with a number of different elements ranging from the humorous and lighthearted to the cruel, violent, and harsh. The setting is a death row in a Louisiana penitentiary in 1935. One could probably not think of a bleaker setting, but King ameliorates the situation by creating four of the most humane prison guards imaginable. The fifth, I assure you, is a sadistic bastard. Within this setting, King places the character, John Coffey, a huge African-American man, who becomes the Billy Budd figure in the film.

It's a long film with various subplots, elements of miraculous healing, and personifications of evil. But King and his adapting screenwriter-director, Frank Darabont, did not over power the film with elements of the miraculous or supernatural. Instead, they used these effects to highlight the very human dilemmas and characters that populate the film.

This is really a fine film. It's harsh, at times violent, at times cruel, but in the end, it's about humanity. In some ways it reminds me of the work of author Roald Dahl, who's given license with the fantastic because he writes for children. But the dilemmas and repercussions of what happens in Dahl’s The Witches, for instance, can be very troubling because of cruelty and bitter outcomes, but the sadder aspects are redeemed by the humanity of the characters and their heroic sacrifices. So it is with this particular work. For all the cruelty and harshness, for all of the moral dilemmas, it is an essentially redemptive theme that dominates the film.

Soft-Boiled Detective: Robert Parker's The Professional

Sometimes there is nothing better than a serendipitous trip to the bookstore. With some additional reading time here in India, and with Iowa Guru away for a couple of days, I went back to the local chain bookstore to check it out in a leisurely fashion. I came across a couple of detective novels that caught my eye, one author whom I'd enjoyed before and one new one. This genre usually provides entertaining and quick reads with enough literary talent to keep you engaged if you pick carefully. On this occasion  I picked up one by Robert B. Park, the author I'd heard of but had never read before. I tried Parker's The Professional (a Spenser mystery). After reading only a couple of pages, I was hooked. 

The setup is a common one in classic American detective fiction. The opening scene as an ex-cop turned private eye, Spenser, sitting in his office waiting for someone to come in and lay a case on his desk. It happens right away, and the action moves quickly from there. Parker's  prose is concise, with most of the pages consisting of dialogue. The dialogue is snappy and literate in the best tradition of American detective fiction, similar to that found in one my favorites, the John Marshall Tanner series by Stephen H. Greenleaf.

But what really sets this Spenser book apart is that for all of his ability with his fists, his quick wit, and his knowledge of the underworld, Spenser is an awfully nice guy. More specifically, in contrast to his promiscuous and jaded clients in The Professional, Spenser is a man  who enjoys his mate  (although they're not so conventional as to have tied the knot). In fact, the dialogue and interaction between Spenser and his consort Susan, who is a Ph.D. psychologist, provides some of the most enjoyable  and distinctive scenes in the book. Spenser is a guy with dealing with all kinds of problems in a seedy world, but he's really a romantic softy around his honey (although the dialogue never turns from snappy to sappy).

So would I read another Spenser? Sure. You can imagine this guy you like to be around to enjoy the pleasure of his company as well as his adventures with the darker side.

P.S. Based on this character, A television series, Spenser: For Hire, ran in the mid-80's. I never saw it, so I don't know how well it translated onto the big screen.