Rating - 2: not worth reading (skip it)
I imagine the show is more amusing. I have seen all of five minutes of it, so I cannot say much, but Jeff Foxworthy must be contributing something.
This book has 75 quizzes from or similar to the show: 2 questions from each grade 1-5, then one million-dollar 5th grade question.
This is an indict of the American education system. We have adults who apparently did not learn or retain much from their elementary education -- you are as educated as a 5th grader. Then we see how many things being taught are completely irrelevant, because we can all get through our lives without knowing them.
So this book is like Trivial Pursuit at a lower level. Some things are knowledge that everyone should have, like basic arithmetic and knowing the countries that border ours, and then there is just random stuff. How well do you remember your nursery rhymes?
There is some misassignment of grade levels, either that or kids are learning things entirely oddly. Example: "Maine borders which US state?" (1st grade); "What country has the longest border with the United States?" (3rd grade); "True or false: Ohio shares a border with Illinois" (5th grade). Those are from the same quiz, by the way. Maybe the writer is from New England and found that order intuitive.
There are a few where having better than an elementary education could trip you up. There are more than three states of matter, and I'm pretty sure bad things happen to humans if they breathe only oxygen. I'm still on that same quiz. It also refers to Leonardo as "da Vinci," with no "Leonardo." Americans do that, but it is like referring to Jesus as "of Nazareth."
And then, for the conclusion of that quiz, it asks what general led American forces in the Vietnam War. Two quizzes later, your million-dollar question is what state Boston is in. So there might be some difficulty scaling issues between quizzes.
So it's random trivia, arranged fairly randomly. You won't get much out of it, but maybe you could use it as a way to kill time with a bored group of people.
Amazon link
Friday, February 29, 2008
Saturday, February 23, 2008
God's Problem by Bart Ehrman
Rating - 2: not worth reading (skip it)
It is a fine book, but I cannot recommend it to you because I do not think you will find it useful. If you could use the argument, I do not think you will read it.
The problem of evil is that God cannot or will not prevent suffering. Theologian Bart Ehrman reviews the explanations offered in the Bible and finds them wanting. The suffering is so severe and the explanations are so lacking that this former minister can no longer believe in the Judeo-Christian God.
The problem of evil is long-standing, and Epicurus has perhaps the most famous statement of it. How is an all-powerful, all-loving God consistent with the world around us? God exists; suffering exists; God cannot or will not prevent suffering (or both). Some deny the first, very few deny the second, and the third follows pretty clearly from the second (and more clearly from the denial of the first).
The volume and depth of suffering in the world is nigh-incomprehensible. Prof. Ehrman gives a brief treatment that is still wearyingly long. The standard example these days is the Holocaust, the intentional extermination of eleven million people. Too big -- let's use Dostoevsky's approach: one child. Sometime in the next five seconds, a child is going to die for lack of a good water supply. Maybe it is a waterborne parasite, or dehydration in sub-Saharan Africa, or diarrhea so severe that you could not keep food in the child were he not also malnourished. How do you justify the suffering of the innocent?
Another one will be dead before you finish this paragraph. The child has not done anything wrong. He has hardly had time in his brief life. If you take solace in faith, remember that this child will never even have a chance to hear of your religion.
Prof. Ehrman looks at what the Bible has to say. He is no dilettante or smirking atheist; he was a devout Christian who still teaches the New Testament. If you want to cite verse at him, he can recite it, and he can tell you the historical development of when it was written and how the original differs from the English translation. One large point is that many people think things are in the Bible that are not really there. The explanations you do find will be contradicted by other parts.
Much of the Hebrew Bible suggests or explicitly states that God wills suffering -- not fails to prevent, but actively causes it. It is punishment for sin or disobedience. It is something that happens to those around you as an object lesson. It does not count if you are not the main character. Pause for a moment on those last two. Job's children all die. Not only was Job entirely innocent, but his family was collateral damage in a cosmic bet. The slaughter of entire cities is described approvingly as well, not to mention the plagues of Egypt that kept happening because God hardened Pharaoh's heart. There are a lot of children intentionally being thrown on rocks here.
The Christian New Testament is not immune either. Jesus raises Lazarus from the dead, but John tells us that Jesus intentionally waited for Lazarus to die, rather than going to cure him, so that the resurrection would be a big miracle. Nice guy. Paul's letters made it clear that all suffering would be redeemed in the Kingdom of Heaven, but he also made it clear that the Kingdom would arrive in the first century A.D. The same applied to Revelation and the Old Testament prophets: they were speaking for their contemporaries, not us. After the end of the world failed enough times, you saw late-written books like John that got a bit more cagey.
You pretty much have to abandon at least one of the premises that God can or wants to prevent all suffering, unless you want to say there is not any actual suffering out there, which would be a pretty offensive thing given that at least three more of those children have died since our last update. Many theists revise their notion of God, not quite all-powerful or all-loving. A more popular trend tries to keep them both while saying that some "will not" is fine ("some suffering can be good") and some "cannot" is fine ("you cannot have free will without suffering"). For some examples of all those approaches, see here.
Even the best explanations, if they retain their faith, in the end rely on faith. They do not explain the problem away, instead giving one way that you might continue to believe if you already do. They come back to Job's answer: you do not have an answer, you are not getting an answer, and God has no obligation to provide you with one. Which is to say, they grant Prof. Ehrman's thesis: there is no satisfying explanation (unless you are already satisfied and need an "explanation" as intellectual cover). Is "free will" a strong enough explanation for the latest innocent child who died? "This is the best of all possible worlds" is a really big claim to make, especially to the victims.
Prof. Ehrman instead favors the view of Ecclesiastes. This life is all we have, with probably no personal providence to follow. There will be joy and suffering, and being a good person might (maybe just might) help there to be more of the former than the latter. Treasure your joys, deal with your suffering as best you can, and try to reduce the amount of suffering that others face. And yes, he argues, that bit about "no afterlife" and suffering despite virtue is a Biblical explanation, albeit one that hardly needs nor has much place for an all-powerful, all-loving Judeo-Christian God. Such is life.
If you have read all this and rage against the conclusion, then yes, this book is for you and you should read it. You will get more from it if yours is a cry that there must be more; you share the author's dissatisfaction, and your thoughts will be in dialogue with him. If your reaction is that he is a fool who has missed the obvious explanation, I suggest suspending that conclusion until the end, since odds are he has thought of that one too. He has a stack of nice letters from well-intentioned but not-terribly-deep-thinking people who assure him that the problem has been solved. I remind you that your argument is with the author, not the book reviewer.
If you already know the word "theodicy," you are probably familiar enough to judge whether this book is a useful addition to your philosophizing.
If you have never thought about it much, rather than disturbing your thoughts further with theological questions, might I instead direct your attention to those dying children? We have lost at least three more since our last update. Your time might be better spent working on stopping that.
Amazon link
It is a fine book, but I cannot recommend it to you because I do not think you will find it useful. If you could use the argument, I do not think you will read it.
The problem of evil is that God cannot or will not prevent suffering. Theologian Bart Ehrman reviews the explanations offered in the Bible and finds them wanting. The suffering is so severe and the explanations are so lacking that this former minister can no longer believe in the Judeo-Christian God.
The problem of evil is long-standing, and Epicurus has perhaps the most famous statement of it. How is an all-powerful, all-loving God consistent with the world around us? God exists; suffering exists; God cannot or will not prevent suffering (or both). Some deny the first, very few deny the second, and the third follows pretty clearly from the second (and more clearly from the denial of the first).
The volume and depth of suffering in the world is nigh-incomprehensible. Prof. Ehrman gives a brief treatment that is still wearyingly long. The standard example these days is the Holocaust, the intentional extermination of eleven million people. Too big -- let's use Dostoevsky's approach: one child. Sometime in the next five seconds, a child is going to die for lack of a good water supply. Maybe it is a waterborne parasite, or dehydration in sub-Saharan Africa, or diarrhea so severe that you could not keep food in the child were he not also malnourished. How do you justify the suffering of the innocent?
Another one will be dead before you finish this paragraph. The child has not done anything wrong. He has hardly had time in his brief life. If you take solace in faith, remember that this child will never even have a chance to hear of your religion.
Prof. Ehrman looks at what the Bible has to say. He is no dilettante or smirking atheist; he was a devout Christian who still teaches the New Testament. If you want to cite verse at him, he can recite it, and he can tell you the historical development of when it was written and how the original differs from the English translation. One large point is that many people think things are in the Bible that are not really there. The explanations you do find will be contradicted by other parts.
Much of the Hebrew Bible suggests or explicitly states that God wills suffering -- not fails to prevent, but actively causes it. It is punishment for sin or disobedience. It is something that happens to those around you as an object lesson. It does not count if you are not the main character. Pause for a moment on those last two. Job's children all die. Not only was Job entirely innocent, but his family was collateral damage in a cosmic bet. The slaughter of entire cities is described approvingly as well, not to mention the plagues of Egypt that kept happening because God hardened Pharaoh's heart. There are a lot of children intentionally being thrown on rocks here.
The Christian New Testament is not immune either. Jesus raises Lazarus from the dead, but John tells us that Jesus intentionally waited for Lazarus to die, rather than going to cure him, so that the resurrection would be a big miracle. Nice guy. Paul's letters made it clear that all suffering would be redeemed in the Kingdom of Heaven, but he also made it clear that the Kingdom would arrive in the first century A.D. The same applied to Revelation and the Old Testament prophets: they were speaking for their contemporaries, not us. After the end of the world failed enough times, you saw late-written books like John that got a bit more cagey.
You pretty much have to abandon at least one of the premises that God can or wants to prevent all suffering, unless you want to say there is not any actual suffering out there, which would be a pretty offensive thing given that at least three more of those children have died since our last update. Many theists revise their notion of God, not quite all-powerful or all-loving. A more popular trend tries to keep them both while saying that some "will not" is fine ("some suffering can be good") and some "cannot" is fine ("you cannot have free will without suffering"). For some examples of all those approaches, see here.
Even the best explanations, if they retain their faith, in the end rely on faith. They do not explain the problem away, instead giving one way that you might continue to believe if you already do. They come back to Job's answer: you do not have an answer, you are not getting an answer, and God has no obligation to provide you with one. Which is to say, they grant Prof. Ehrman's thesis: there is no satisfying explanation (unless you are already satisfied and need an "explanation" as intellectual cover). Is "free will" a strong enough explanation for the latest innocent child who died? "This is the best of all possible worlds" is a really big claim to make, especially to the victims.
Prof. Ehrman instead favors the view of Ecclesiastes. This life is all we have, with probably no personal providence to follow. There will be joy and suffering, and being a good person might (maybe just might) help there to be more of the former than the latter. Treasure your joys, deal with your suffering as best you can, and try to reduce the amount of suffering that others face. And yes, he argues, that bit about "no afterlife" and suffering despite virtue is a Biblical explanation, albeit one that hardly needs nor has much place for an all-powerful, all-loving Judeo-Christian God. Such is life.
If you have read all this and rage against the conclusion, then yes, this book is for you and you should read it. You will get more from it if yours is a cry that there must be more; you share the author's dissatisfaction, and your thoughts will be in dialogue with him. If your reaction is that he is a fool who has missed the obvious explanation, I suggest suspending that conclusion until the end, since odds are he has thought of that one too. He has a stack of nice letters from well-intentioned but not-terribly-deep-thinking people who assure him that the problem has been solved. I remind you that your argument is with the author, not the book reviewer.
If you already know the word "theodicy," you are probably familiar enough to judge whether this book is a useful addition to your philosophizing.
If you have never thought about it much, rather than disturbing your thoughts further with theological questions, might I instead direct your attention to those dying children? We have lost at least three more since our last update. Your time might be better spent working on stopping that.
Amazon link
Thursday, February 07, 2008
Confessions of a Blabbermouth by Mike Carey, Louise Carey, and Aaron Alexovich
Rating - 2: not worth reading (skip it)
Another "abandoned 20% of the way through" book. I could not see a reason to keep going.
Tasha's mother has horrible taste in men. The new hack novelist boyfriend has a daughter who may or may not be as mentally unbalanced as him. Tasha has a blog, where she can rant about it all.
The art in this graphic novel is the first off-putting thing. In the first pages, the eyes are various shades of disturbing and drawn in three styles. The art settles down as time goes on, but the quality can very; you have some really good art, and then you turn the page and wonder what happened. Drawings of Chloe are uniformly good, Tasha usually, and everyone else is a crapshoot.
The story was going nowhere useful in the first 20%. We introduce a lot of people I don't want to read about, from our protagonist who hates everything to miscellaneous schoolmates who I suppose could acquire interesting differentiating characteristics. New boyfriend, strange jerk as promised, obvious step-sister conflict. And look, everyone's a writer.
If you want the story, you can get it with a quick skim of the book. It should take about two minutes. That speaks well for the artist, since you can see at a glance how things are going in school. The relationship development is a bit more text-driven, and I skimmed more of it than benefit-cost justified.
There must be something I can enjoy in the Minx line.
Amazon link
Another "abandoned 20% of the way through" book. I could not see a reason to keep going.
Tasha's mother has horrible taste in men. The new hack novelist boyfriend has a daughter who may or may not be as mentally unbalanced as him. Tasha has a blog, where she can rant about it all.
The art in this graphic novel is the first off-putting thing. In the first pages, the eyes are various shades of disturbing and drawn in three styles. The art settles down as time goes on, but the quality can very; you have some really good art, and then you turn the page and wonder what happened. Drawings of Chloe are uniformly good, Tasha usually, and everyone else is a crapshoot.
The story was going nowhere useful in the first 20%. We introduce a lot of people I don't want to read about, from our protagonist who hates everything to miscellaneous schoolmates who I suppose could acquire interesting differentiating characteristics. New boyfriend, strange jerk as promised, obvious step-sister conflict. And look, everyone's a writer.
If you want the story, you can get it with a quick skim of the book. It should take about two minutes. That speaks well for the artist, since you can see at a glance how things are going in school. The relationship development is a bit more text-driven, and I skimmed more of it than benefit-cost justified.
There must be something I can enjoy in the Minx line.
Amazon link
Wednesday, February 06, 2008
Generation Dead by Daniel Waters
Rating - 3: worth reading once (borrow it from a library)
This book came with a strong recommendation from Anne. Were she in a high school with zombies, she would totally be friendly with them.
The dead have risen, and they are going to high school. For reasons unknown, some dead American teenagers are still up and running (well, shuffling). Not brain-eating monsters, they are just a bit living-impaired. Phoebe's school is very accepting of the "differently biotic," although not everyone is thrilled with being a magnet school for the undead. How thrilled will they be when Phoebe gets a crush on the zombie football player?
I am going to tear into this one, because I think it has unfulfilled potential, but note that rating above. This is a good book, and you will look forward to the next chapter. The characters I didn't like, I didn't like rather than didn't care. That is good sign. The writing is good, and I am always harshest with books that are good but could be better. I will get back to the good at the end.
Remember that our ratings are "for that kind of thing." Not everyone likes high school romantic dramas, with or without zombies. The notable part is that this is a romantic drama, not a zombie book. They are more of a subculture than a separate species. This is not the romanticized vampire fetishism that proliferates the young adult shelves these days; there is nothing sexy about being a zombie.
So let's tear in. You first notice jarring details, some of which might be fixed by publication. Hair and nails do not grow after death. A football game that is 10-10 at the half cannot end 21-7. The zombies have no power sources. You are supposed to suspend disbelief on that last one, but notice that undead monsters are almost always shown trying to consume something. They are not eating food, and normal activity must burn 500 calories a day. That is a pound a week, so the biggest zombie around would burn itself out in less than a year. The scientists will be disappointed when they realize that it really is magic.
That weakens the "undead as oppressed minority" theme. We get the parallel, what with multiple explicit references to the civil rights fight in each chapter. The only thing understated there is that the lynchings are not an exaggerated parallel. Murder with no legal repercussions, and even with police and government support, has a long history in every country I know. Making the oppressed group zombies, however, undercuts it. There are legitimate reasons to worry about having the undead roaming the halls of the school, even if they seem to have no hostile intent. Public health concerns about corpses aside, these things violate basic principles of biology and physics, so either the religious fanatics are right (they are fueled by some sort of necromancy) or there is some potentially dangerous natural phenomenon going on here. Love and friendship do not generate the kilojoules of energy needed to keep these kids moving.
On the other hand, it seems clear that the hate is entirely irrational. That there are legitimate reasons for concern does not matter if those are excuses to justify existing prejudices. But it does undercut your argument when the villains are right about half the characters' being unnatural monsters animated by supernatural forces. They just happen to be polite, good-natured unnatural monsters seeking friendship and understanding.
The other major complaint is that the book lacks closure. It is like a season of Lost, ending on a new question instead of resolving any of the subplots. And there are numerous subplots, some popping up every chapter or two, that are just abandoned. It is as though Chekhov put a gun on the mantle, mentioned it every five minutes, and then never shot anyone. The main plot falls victim to the same. You can leave the ending implied, you can leave some characters' fates to the reader's speculation, but you cannot just wander off. Some books and authors can support the implications of doing so, but this is not one of them.
Do I need to explain that one? Some books portray the sort of world where protagonists can be killed and replaced. Heinlein frequently has events defy characters' plans and shunt the plot in a new direction. You must build a story to support that kind of weight, rather than letting things go over a cliff in the last chapter.
But maybe I am wrong. Maybe that was the main plot, rather than a major but competing thread in it. In which case, this is really a romantic drama. Relationships are all that matter in the end.
In terms of romance and relationships, Mr. Waters does an excellent job. Half the characters are unsure of how they feel, and the other half will not admit it. It is a touch-and-go state of limbo that accurately presents the webs of teenage relationships (both romance and friendship). A character might not know his own feelings, but they are clear to his/her friends or the reader. Or maybe not: some things remain uncertain, which is completely fair.
Mr. Waters writes well what many write poorly: the inexplicable attraction. Phoebe's interest seems entirely reasonable, even if she has trouble articulating it. All the potential pairings are comprehensible. We are not left wondering what there is to see in Leo or Pumpkin. Many stories fail because they expect you to buy a relationship that does not work at all. This works.
The characters have good interactions. The relationships, potentially romantic or not, have their own dynamics. Phoebe is always Phoebe, but Phoebe might show different parts of herself with different people. It is subtle but compelling and believable.
The book centers on people and relationships, and it does those well. It is a good high school story, one that also has zombies in it. I criticized it for making the standard anti-discrimination cross-cultural story more complicated, rather than abstracting from it, but maybe zombies give it enough distance for a re-approach. I wish more threads were tied up, and with 400 pages I should be able to expect that, but it is a good sign that I still want more at the end.
Amazon link
author's blog
Expected publication: May 2008
I am too used to seeing stories set in generic fantasyland, quasi-Dickensian England, or indistinguishable middle America. It is jarring when a character is set in the modern day and has his own blog. Hey, this is connected to real life!
This book came with a strong recommendation from Anne. Were she in a high school with zombies, she would totally be friendly with them.
The dead have risen, and they are going to high school. For reasons unknown, some dead American teenagers are still up and running (well, shuffling). Not brain-eating monsters, they are just a bit living-impaired. Phoebe's school is very accepting of the "differently biotic," although not everyone is thrilled with being a magnet school for the undead. How thrilled will they be when Phoebe gets a crush on the zombie football player?
I am going to tear into this one, because I think it has unfulfilled potential, but note that rating above. This is a good book, and you will look forward to the next chapter. The characters I didn't like, I didn't like rather than didn't care. That is good sign. The writing is good, and I am always harshest with books that are good but could be better. I will get back to the good at the end.
Remember that our ratings are "for that kind of thing." Not everyone likes high school romantic dramas, with or without zombies. The notable part is that this is a romantic drama, not a zombie book. They are more of a subculture than a separate species. This is not the romanticized vampire fetishism that proliferates the young adult shelves these days; there is nothing sexy about being a zombie.
So let's tear in. You first notice jarring details, some of which might be fixed by publication. Hair and nails do not grow after death. A football game that is 10-10 at the half cannot end 21-7. The zombies have no power sources. You are supposed to suspend disbelief on that last one, but notice that undead monsters are almost always shown trying to consume something. They are not eating food, and normal activity must burn 500 calories a day. That is a pound a week, so the biggest zombie around would burn itself out in less than a year. The scientists will be disappointed when they realize that it really is magic.
That weakens the "undead as oppressed minority" theme. We get the parallel, what with multiple explicit references to the civil rights fight in each chapter. The only thing understated there is that the lynchings are not an exaggerated parallel. Murder with no legal repercussions, and even with police and government support, has a long history in every country I know. Making the oppressed group zombies, however, undercuts it. There are legitimate reasons to worry about having the undead roaming the halls of the school, even if they seem to have no hostile intent. Public health concerns about corpses aside, these things violate basic principles of biology and physics, so either the religious fanatics are right (they are fueled by some sort of necromancy) or there is some potentially dangerous natural phenomenon going on here. Love and friendship do not generate the kilojoules of energy needed to keep these kids moving.
On the other hand, it seems clear that the hate is entirely irrational. That there are legitimate reasons for concern does not matter if those are excuses to justify existing prejudices. But it does undercut your argument when the villains are right about half the characters' being unnatural monsters animated by supernatural forces. They just happen to be polite, good-natured unnatural monsters seeking friendship and understanding.
The other major complaint is that the book lacks closure. It is like a season of Lost, ending on a new question instead of resolving any of the subplots. And there are numerous subplots, some popping up every chapter or two, that are just abandoned. It is as though Chekhov put a gun on the mantle, mentioned it every five minutes, and then never shot anyone. The main plot falls victim to the same. You can leave the ending implied, you can leave some characters' fates to the reader's speculation, but you cannot just wander off. Some books and authors can support the implications of doing so, but this is not one of them.
Do I need to explain that one? Some books portray the sort of world where protagonists can be killed and replaced. Heinlein frequently has events defy characters' plans and shunt the plot in a new direction. You must build a story to support that kind of weight, rather than letting things go over a cliff in the last chapter.
But maybe I am wrong. Maybe that was the main plot, rather than a major but competing thread in it. In which case, this is really a romantic drama. Relationships are all that matter in the end.
In terms of romance and relationships, Mr. Waters does an excellent job. Half the characters are unsure of how they feel, and the other half will not admit it. It is a touch-and-go state of limbo that accurately presents the webs of teenage relationships (both romance and friendship). A character might not know his own feelings, but they are clear to his/her friends or the reader. Or maybe not: some things remain uncertain, which is completely fair.
Mr. Waters writes well what many write poorly: the inexplicable attraction. Phoebe's interest seems entirely reasonable, even if she has trouble articulating it. All the potential pairings are comprehensible. We are not left wondering what there is to see in Leo or Pumpkin. Many stories fail because they expect you to buy a relationship that does not work at all. This works.
The characters have good interactions. The relationships, potentially romantic or not, have their own dynamics. Phoebe is always Phoebe, but Phoebe might show different parts of herself with different people. It is subtle but compelling and believable.
The book centers on people and relationships, and it does those well. It is a good high school story, one that also has zombies in it. I criticized it for making the standard anti-discrimination cross-cultural story more complicated, rather than abstracting from it, but maybe zombies give it enough distance for a re-approach. I wish more threads were tied up, and with 400 pages I should be able to expect that, but it is a good sign that I still want more at the end.
Amazon link
author's blog
Expected publication: May 2008
I am too used to seeing stories set in generic fantasyland, quasi-Dickensian England, or indistinguishable middle America. It is jarring when a character is set in the modern day and has his own blog. Hey, this is connected to real life!
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