I am not a blogger. I don't pimp recent media, movies or books, other than referring to them in broader pieces. However, when someone offers something interesting enough, particularly in the cultural and political context of the moment, that everybody ought to watch, listen to or read, I have to offer a recommendation.
A pair of books I think everybody needs to buy came out in the past few weeks. I haven't read them yet, but I've ordered them, and I'm familiar with their authors and have read sufficient excerpts of their content that I'm comfortable suggesting them. If you enjoy some of the themes I touch on, you'll like these books.
The first is a Christopher Hitchens' God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. Shocking choice, eh? And does he really need any more press? Hitchens is a congenital contrarian. Many say he's a cheap shock artist, lost in his cups half the time, the density of his florid prose multiples the heft of his arguments. A lot of people have already and will slam this book in reviews, because the thrust of the polemic makes them uncomfortable. Which is exactly why you should read it. God is Not Great tracks how one of humanity's most successful devices for explaining its past drives its present and future. Whether you agree with Hitchens' point or not, the wit and delivery ought to sustain the narrative.
The second is Nassim Nicholas Taleb's The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, a follow-up to his skeptical take on accepted Wall Street wisdom, Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets. Taleb's message in both books is that a lot of what we think we know, we don't... Most of our explanations for why something happened in the past are flawed because we tend to skew the search for a cause in favor of finding some design in the reason an event took place. Hindsight is poisoned by our need to think there's an order in the chaos, so many of the "lessons" we take from the past are not as predictive as we'd like to believe. We follow models that don't address the determinative random events that occur along the way. Having lost where I should have won and won where I should have lost in court so many times, his message resonated with me. Hard work and careful plotting are necessary, but I can never hedge against a judge taking the bench in a nasty punitive mindset because he'd been in a fender bender on the way to court that morning. Nor can I expect to capitalize on the good mood of a judge whose wife had given him some "morning delight" an hour or so before he took the bench.
As a large portion of society believes they can gain something close to complete control over their circumstances, or believes something much bigger than them yet intimately invested in each of their lives has the wheel, these books will be dismissed as flawed by some, pilloried by others. They shouldn't be. They're just observations. Reasoned, rational observations.
Hope this helps with your beach reading.
ED Note: I just spoke with Phila Lawyer, who thinks it's important to push Hitchens (and people like him) into the national discourse. If you do nothing else, please read this article or watch this video.
Posted by PhilaLawyer at 11:09 AM