A book on my reading list: The Impossibility of Religious Freedom

As a reminder to self:
Winnifred Fallers Sullivan (2007), The Impossibility of Religious Freedom
Introduction (PDF file)
Blurb (emphasis added):

The Constitution may guarantee it. But religious freedom in America is, in fact, impossible. So argues this timely and iconoclastic work by law and religion scholar Winnifred Sullivan. Sullivan uses as the backdrop for the book the trial of Warner vs. Boca Raton, a recent case concerning the laws that protect the free exercise of religion in America. The trial, for which the author served as an expert witness, concerned regulations banning certain memorials from a multiconfessional nondenominational cemetery in Boca Raton, Florida. The book portrays the unsuccessful struggle of Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish families in Boca Raton to preserve the practice of placing such religious artifacts as crosses and stars of David on the graves of the city-owned burial ground.

Sullivan demonstrates how, during the course of the proceeding, citizens from all walks of life and religious backgrounds were harassed to define just what their religion is. She argues that their plight points up a shocking truth: religion cannot be coherently defined for the purposes of American law, because everyone has different definitions of what religion is. Indeed, while religious freedom as a political idea was arguably once a force for tolerance, it has now become a force for intolerance, she maintains.

A clear-eyed look at the laws created to protect religious freedom, this vigorously argued book offers a new take on a right deemed by many to be necessary for a free democratic society. It will have broad appeal not only for religion scholars, but also for anyone interested in law and the Constitution.

Winnifred Fallers Sullivan is associate professor of law and director of the Law and Religion Program at the University at Buffalo Law School. She is also the author of Paying the Words Extra: Religious Discourse in the Supreme Court of the United States. 

Book memo: more retreat into fiction

My escapism continues with Lee Child's Jack Reacher series: Tripwire, Running Blind and Echo Burning; L.E. Modesitt Jr.'s Saga of Recluce fantasy series: The Magic of Recluse, The Towers of Sunset, The Magic Engineer, The Order War, The Death of Chaos.

Book memo: Die Trying

My retreat from current affairs continues.

Lee Child, Die Trying, a Jack Reacher novel, 1998.

A woman is kidnapped off a street in Chicago, and Jack Reacher is kidnapped along with her.  Reacher has to rescue himself and her from the kidnappers, or "Die Trying".

Book memo: Killing Floor

Fiction: "Killing Floor" by Lee Child, first published 1997.

This is the first Jack Reacher novel.  I read it as an escape from the daily infuriation of current affairs.  This edition in 2012 has an introduction by Lee Child, who turns out, is an Englishman.    He invented the character of Jack Reacher as a ex-military cop in America, a physical giant, typically the most intimidating person in the neighborhood, an uncomplicated man emotionally speaking, a drifter but functioning misfit in civilian society, whose adventures come about because of noblesse oblige.

In this adventure, Reacher arrives at Margrave, Georgia, where he is arrested for murder, and soon is up to his neck in the strange goings-on in the town.

This is a fast-moving, but sometimes overly gruesome adventure.

Book memo: A Long Way Home

Having seen the movie, Lion, which was well-made, I picked up at the library the book, "A Long Way Home" by Saroo Brierley.   As the title blurb says: "As a five-year-old in India, I got lost on a train. Twenty-five years later, from Australia, I found my way back.  This is what happened in between"; and the book adds significantly to what is shown in the two hour movie.  Definitely worth reading.  It provides all kinds of interesting things to think about.

Cixin Liu : Death's End

The third book in Cixin Liu's science-fiction trilogy that began with The Three Body Problem and The Dark Forest, does not disappoint.  Don't read any reviews, just read the book.  If you insist on a review, here is one, from which I quote: "If you thought The Three-Body Problem and The Dark Forest were expansive, they're nothing compared to Death's End."

Cixin Liu: The Dark Forest and The Three Body Problem

The first two books of Cixin Liu's trilogy, translated from the Chinese: The Three Body Problem and The Dark Forest are excellent science fiction, and I look forward to the final book Death's End that is due for release in a couple of weeks.

Reviews likely contain spoilers, so avoid them if you plan on reading the books. After reading the pair of books, I've read a few of the reviews that show up in the first page of Google search, and generally agree with them, so I won't burden the world with yet another review.  What to expect from the books, though?  The general portrayal of characters is weak, like in Asimov's early fiction, but the science fiction imagination on display is absolutely top-notch.  The author has to bend a little some well-known physics to make his plot work, but unless you are an insufferable purist, it shouldn't matter.   The Dark Forest sufficiently closes out the story that I don't feel compelled to read the third book to get closure, but rather to see what further worlds of imagination the author creates.

mathpages.com

Stumbled across this yesterday - http://mathpages.com/ - looks like a lot of interesting reading - mostly mathematics, and some physics.  I came across this via a trail that began at a classic - The Art of Unix Programming.

Amitav Ghosh on the Opium Wars

From this review/interview:

Amitav Ghosh, the acclaimed 58-year-old Indian novelist, is describing his extraordinary Ibis trilogy which has just concluded with the publication of the equally stupendous Flood of Fire. A decade in the writing, this exciting, passionate and scathing account of the First Opium War deserves to stand as one of the outstanding achievements of 21st-century literature.

...
In Ghosh’s telling, English merchants’ expansionist policy of selling opium, grown in India by near-slave labour, and sold in China where there was a vast illegal market, did not simply mark the foundations of the British Empire. It signalled a new form of global trade and politics, laying the foundations of outsourcing, migrant populations and truly international foreign relations – all driven by advances in military technology and realpolitik.
...
“It’s strange that the world pays such little attention to the Opium Wars, but opium was perhaps the largest single trade of the 19th century. All the profits went to England. All the work was done by Indians. All the silver came from China which was consuming it. It was one of the most iniquitous things that has ever happened in the history of mankind.”

Books

Not sure anymore why I'm reading these:

* The History of White People, by Nell Irvin Painter.
* The Limits of Influence: America's Role in Kashmir, by Howard B Schaffer.
* The Science of Liberty, by Timothy Ferris.

What things worth knowing will I know after reading these books?

Incoherence

I started reading Andrew Sullivan's "The Conservative Soul - How we lost it, how to get it back". Even got through several chapters. Then I realize that I don't understand what he's saying.

Now, if the "we" referred to the Republican Party, so that an alternate title could be - "The Conservative Soul - How the GOP lost it, how the GOP can get it back", that would make perfect sense. This is not what the book is about. Andrew Sullivan describes two sets of people, with diametrically opposed ideologies, as conservatives! The only common feature of these two sets of people is that they both are skeptical of government. Well, a progressive advocating that the government must take up a certain task is not less skeptical of government, only more skeptical of the other mechanisms like the "free market" to accomplish that task.

For example, historically, the "free market" did very little to undo segregation in the South. Ultimately it took federal government power (superseding the state governments). The Leftist or whatever you want to term the people who fought segregation was using the government as the last resort, not as the instrument of choice. But you cannot in good conscience let a few more generations rot away while the southern segregationists take their sweet time to change their minds. The southern racists could have simply dropped their fight supporting segregation and no federal government involvement would have been there. Affirmative action came out of a people's unwillingness to give up their unreason, and not because some progressives were in favor of bigger government. {The same is true of the Civil War.}

The point is that skepticism of government is not a defining characteristic of a philosophy. It no more defines two different ideologies to be conservative than it distinguishes between conservative and progressive.

An alternative meaning that one can apply to the title is that the biggest, loudest, meanest faction that declares itself to be conservative owns the title, and Andrew Sullivan wants instead some other faction to take over. But the book then becomes something, that in extreme would be, for instance, "Progressives should take over the conservative movement", or "Muslims should run the Vatican".

Either being conservative is a property of a soul, and Andrew Sullivan is saying that we don't have any such souls any more (else, where have they gone?) or else conservative is a label attached to a specific set of people, and they have swung between one ideology to another, in which case, being firmly attached to their souls, they couldn't have lost the conservative soul.

The Republican Party is fundamentally incoherent, and Andrew Sullivan merely reflects the confusion. The only reason to be interested in the Republican Party and its broken thinkers is out of concern for democracy, which cannot long last with only one working party.

Novel: The Messenger

The Messenger by Daniel Silva

Israeli Intelligence battles Saudi terrorists - one of these books will one day be a major motion picture. Reads well, and difficult to put down once started. As with all fiction, suspend belief when reading it and all will be well. For its genre, it rates four stars out of five.

The Gaudi Key

The Gaudi Key
Esteban Martin & Andreu Carranza, translated from the Spanish by Lisa Dillman.

This is a book of the "The Da Vinci Code" mode; actually better than that book - which is not saying much. However, I had never heard of Antonio Gaudi and now want to see his creations.

I give the book somewhere between two and three stars out of five.

PS: corrected a URL.
PPS: Made an attempt at a google map showing key locations in the story.

Also, here are some more images of Gaudi's work. It is also from where I lifted most of the addresses for the map.

PPPS: The most comprehensive site on Gaudí and Catalan Art Nouveau

Dragonback Adventures

The set of six books: Dragon and Thief, Dragon and Soldier, Dragon and Slave, Dragon and Herdsman, Dragon and Judge, and Dragon and Liberator, by Timothy Zahn is an entertaining read, even if directed at young adults (in fact, it won a young adult book award). Our heroes are a boy, Jack Morgan, age 14, and a symbiotic tiger-sized dragon, Draycos, a poet-warrior of the K'Da. The symbiosis is that the K'Da regularly need to assume a two-dimensional form and need a host to sustain them during that period. The setting of the novels is a space-faring galactic culture. Jack and Draycos need to collaborate to clear up Jack's problems and to save Draycos's people from genocide.

Nicely done set of books. Only because they will not be universally to everyone's taste and therefore are not must-reads, I give them a 4 out of 5 stars rating.

Taking On The System

Taking On The System: Rules for Radical Change in A Digital Era
by Markos Moulitsas Zuniga (founder of dailykos.com)

It is Sun Tzu's "The Art of War", except tailored for our times for the activist working within the legal bounds of the system. To achieve change we have to wrestle with entrenched elites who resist it. The Internet, cell phones, social networking on the net, and such have provided a new set of tools for the non-elite rabble that can be very effective if wielded correctly. The author provides a lot of how-to: outlining a principle and then illustrating it with recent real-life examples. The message is:

We live in a world where there's no reason anyone should whine or complain that they are being shut out of the system. The tools are available to mount credible challenges to even the most entrenched of powers. Such efforts will always lack resources and will mostly face well-funded deeply entrenched foes, but innovative tactics and smart use of money can carry the day....Perhaps most important, effective activism requires that those who have the heart and passion for it step out of their comfort zone and into the fire.

This is a must-read book, and not just for the reason that Kos's brand of activism is actually changing the political landscape in the US. That always elusive goal, of citizens actively engaged in their own governance seems more in reach than ever before.

I rate the book five stars out of five.

The Decline of Men

The Decline of Men
How the American male is tuning out, giving up, and flipping off his future
by Guy Garcia

Grabbed this from the new books' shelves at the library. Might have been a mistake.

Men are doomed. 300,000 years ago, the human Y chromosome supposedly had 1400 genes. Today it contains 45. So it will soon be extinct. (What a misunderstanding of evolution!) Men are supposedly so different from women "as to render them almost a separate species". Women's brains are better integrated than men's. Testosterone levels in men are dropping 1.2% per year. Self-control, cooperation and verbal participation are difficult to impossible for many boys, yielding girls a huge advantage in the classroom. The sky is falling!

One of the problems with the book is that far too often it simply documents a relative decline of men with respect to women, which is only to be expected as women become the equals of men in practice, not just in principle.

E.g.,

Over the past twenty-five years the number of women enrolled in undergraduate colleges has grown more than twice as fast as that of their male counterparts. By 2006, women outnumbered men on American college campuses by more than two million, and the gap is growing.

Now let's look at what the National Center for Education Statistics says:

Enrollment in degree-granting institutions increased by 16 percent between 1985 and 1995. Between 1995 and 2005, enrollment increased at a faster rate (23 percent), from 14.3 million to 17.5 million. Much of the growth between 1995 and 2005 was in female enrollment; the number of females enrolled rose 27 percent, while the number of males rose 18 percent. During the same time period, part-time enrollment rose by 9 percent, compared to an increase of 33 percent in full-time enrollment. Enrollment increases can be affected both by population growth and by rising rates of enrollment. Between 1995 and 2005 the number of 18- to 24-year-olds increased from 25.5 million to 29.3 million, and the percentage of 18- to 24-year-olds enrolled in college rose from 34 percent to 39 percent. In addition to the enrollment in accredited 2-year colleges, 4-year colleges, and universities, about 434,000 students attended non-degree-granting, Title IV eligible,1 postsecondary institutions in fall 2005.

So the decline is relative to women, not an absolute decline, nor a decline relative their share in the population. This is not "a national emergency with economic, sociological and cultural ramifications...".

Another problem with the book is that it examines many possible explanations for the apparent decline of men, but leaves them as plausible stories. How we might go about checking whether the stated explanation is correct is not touched upon. Rather, the book goes from opinion to conflicting opinion. If it is not clear what the problem is (see above) and even less clear what the cause of the problem is, then it is impossible to solve.

Ultimately, I couldn't go more than about halfway through the book. Since I've held the book for one week beyond when some poor schmuck placed a hold on it, I have to go to the library to return it. As in now.

The book rates a single star.

The Apostate's Tale: A Dame Frevisse Medieval Mystery
Margaret Frazer


A mystery novel set in mid-15th century England. Bad things happen when a ex-nun returns repentant to St. Frideswide's priory, and it is upto Dame Frevisse to set it straight.

St. Frideswide is the patron saint of Oxford. Frevisse is a another of her names.
Wikipedia on The Historical St. Frideswide.

My rating: 3/5 stars.