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Loricat: Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion (someone linked to a section of her essay on morality...I was intrigued, went out to buy it)

That would be me. What do you think of it? I linked to the morality essay because it seemed to be the easiest to tie into some of our pet themes here, but a number of her essays are quite interesting.

Once again, I'm reading more books than I'm really capable of juggling, which means that it takes me longer to get through any particular book. Here's the rundown; if any catch your fancy, find a copy and open a thread. I'd love to have someone to discuss with.

Silent Spring, by Rachel Carson. Carson's "The Sea Around Us" is one of my favorite books of science/nature writing, but she's probably best known for this, the first book to really bring ecological disaster into public debate. If you've never read Carson before, you owe it to yourselves as scientifically-inclined person's to give her a run through. She's one of those writers gifted with a tremendous ability to translate her interest in a topic into prose that infects the reader with her enthusiasm, and she renders scientific information intelligible without writing down to the lowest common denominator.

The Demon-Haunted World, by Carl Sagan. In middle-school and high-school I made abortive attempts to read both "Cosmos" and "Contact". I've read some of Sagan's technical papers, but this is my first adult brush with his attempts to bridge the gap between the scientific community and the popular perception of science. Frankly, I have my issues with the way that he polemicizes "superstition" and "pseudo-science", and I think that writers like C.P. Snow and Jacob Bronowski have made much more concise and elegant arguments for a fuller public embrace of science. But I'll hear Sagan out, at least.

The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism and the Cant of Conquest, by Francis Jennings. I stumbled on this one by accident, and in all honestly, my decision to read it was probably heavily influenced by our discussion of the Native American Church v. Snowbowl Ski Resort. So far, it's an incredibly astute analysis of the motives that went into the European conquestion of North American, the ways in which they justified that conquest back home, and how the clash of the Amerindians and the Euramericans (the terms are Jennings') affected the future of both. Really fascinating stuff, and I hope someone else will track down a copy of the book so we can discuss it.

Momento Mori, by Muriel Sparks. A group of elderly people are harrassed by crank calls that say only, "Remember that you must die." I need hardly mention that this is dark comedy, or better yet, satire. Sparks is an interesting figure in the world of fiction, always choosing off-kilter plots that are difficult to pigeonhole, and I've been meaning to tackle one of her books for a while now, so this one is about due.

Ride of the Second Horseman, Robert S. O'Connell. I think I suggested this as a quarterly reading several quarters back, and I've only just now gotten around to reading it. The book purports to be an inquiry into the cultural and biological origins of war, and it covers some fairly interesting ground in a number of disciplines. The first chapter makes a brief attempt at situating some archaelogical data into a narrative of the earliest examples of war in human culture, while the second chapter looks at war-like ant behavior, including slave raids and slave revolts. Interesting stuff, and I'm finding O'Connell to have a really open yet balanced approach to the topic.

The Prophets: An Introduction, by Abraham J. Heschel. Heschel examines the prophets of Israel from the perspective of people caught up in a moral vision and compelled to confront society on both its behalf and the behalf of God. Pretty fascinating stuff, and I appreciate his effort to break down the reader's assumption of familiarity, making it possible to see the prophets as the radicals they no doubt were.

The Fourth Crusade and the Sack of Constantinople, by Jonathan Phillips. The subject matter is fascinating -- how did a Crusade intended to "liberate" Jerusalem from Saladin instead end with the decimation of the Christian capital of Byzantium? -- and Phillips presents the major figures and events clearly, but I can't help but think there must be a more scholarly and better reasoned book on the subject. I'll probably follow this one up by reading Villehardouin's first-hand account of the Crusade.

The Copernican Revolution, by Thomas Kuhn. Okay, okay, I haven't really started this one just yet, but I don't intend to wait. Kuhn's a pioneer in the history of science, and the development of astronomy was his forte, so I'm really eager to see how he handles the theme.

Any takers?

Honestly, I don't know if there's much to discuss in "Demon-Haunted World" beyond the first chapter or so. I was disappointed to find that, from that point on, it turns into little more than an exercise in debunking pseudo-science. I really don't feel that the whole James Randi/Michael Shermer genre of skepticism has much to offer me. My interest in ESP, sunken continents, out-of-body experience and alien abduction ended some time before I graduated high school, so reading arguments against believing any of those things gets rather tedious. I skipped ahead to the chapter on medieval demon belief, but I found Sagan's discussion pretty lacking -- he didn't even note that the eminance of Aristotelian physics after the 12th century made the existence of demons an expectation consonant with the accepted science of the age, analogous to, say, the missing link -- and since I can name a number more complete works on that subject, I really don't feel the need to invest too much time in considering Sagan's argument.

But don't let my disappointment disuade you. It might still be worth discussing, so if you feel the inclination to give it a go, I'd be glad to respond to any comments you might have.

"Religious Literacy" sounds interesting. Let me know what you think.

garicker: I read the The Demon-Haunted World some time ago and thought it represented Sagan at his best.

It may represent one aspect of Sagan's public persona -- Sagan as popularizer -- at its best, but I think put in much more valuable work in a lot of other domains, and "The Demon-Haunted World" seems, to me, a pretty limited kind of achievement.

I can understand Mad's lack of enthusiasm for the book, but then it wasn't written as an adademic exercise.

Believe it or not, I don't limit myself to academic exercises. I think "Demon-Haunted World" is problematic even for what it attempts to be. For instance, who's the audience it's likely to appeal to? I wonder how successful the book has been at really reaching the sort of people who read "Weekly World News" and "The Celestine Prophecy". It seems entirely likely to me that it's read far more often by people who already share Sagan's point of view.

A very unsystematic way to check that is to take a look at this page of customer reviews from Amazon. They seem to fall into roughly two categories: one, people who seem to have never seriously entertained any of the pseudo-science claims covered in "Demon-Haunted World" and have only the smallest qualifications in their praise of the book, and two, people who abhor the book for its agnosticism, feel compelled to warn people about the evils of not taking the Bible as the inerrable, inspired word of God, and who show no indication of have actually read "Demon-Haunted World" in the first place. What I don't see much (if any) of, are testimonials that say, in effect, I used to believe in ESP or alien abduction, but reading this book straightened me out. Which is, I gather, a major part of what Sagan intended in writing it.

On the whole I think Sagan was a very laudable presence in American society, and he made a lot of truly significant contributions, both scientific and cultural. But I think this book approaches its task in a likely unfruitful way, and probably serves entirely too often as an exercise in self-congratulations. I would hope that Sagan's legacy is not too tied up in it in the future.