So, yesterday was the official kick-off of the Keep Portland Weird festival here in Paris, which meant that I had a reading/screening in the...
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This short, dense book presents a logical response to "the problem of evil" in Christian thought. "The problem of evil" typically is presented by non-Christians in something like this format: If God is all-powerful and all-knowing, then God could do away with evil in the world. That he does not do so, has various negative connotations: he's not all-powerful; he's not a loving God (because he lets evil things happen to people); he doesn't exist; &c.
Using syllogistic logic, Plantinga demonstrates that evil must exist in order for human beings to have free will. It is impossible for God to remove evil from the world without at the same time removing free will.
This is not a proof that God exists. It simply is a refutation of the "problem of evil" arguments against the existence of God as he is understood by Christians. It's not an easy read, either. To fully understand the argument, you have to be able to follow some fairly complex logical constructions. I found it a worthwhile book because it enables the reader to simply dump the whole "problem of evil" question back on its proponents.
This is a solidly-written book that uses a narrative style in the recounting of a notorious "character" in North Platte, NE history. Although the book is in the "true crime" genre, Yost has extracted dialog from the numerous documents relating to the case and from the recollections of a number of the protagonists. She purportedly waited a number years after completing the book to publish it, because she did not want to publish during the lifetimes of the survivors.
And well might those of Anne Cook's family and relations be called survivors. It's hard in these days to comprehend the brutal beatings, the torment, the starvation and even murders, that took place for decades at the Cook Poor Farm. Today, it might happen for a year or 5 years, but decades?
Yost restricts her telling of the tale to the plain facts. There is no psychologizing, no speculation or analysis of the origin of the evil deeds. This omission probably saves the book from the cloying moralism of so much of the true crime genre.
It's a good read, a bit slow at the start -- probably, it takes a while to get used to the style. In the end, you have finished a good story, but there may be some lack of satisfaction that we can't see into the heart of the evil, we can't see the "why" of what happened. We go to the zoo, but we never know why the lion is roaring. So, in Evil Obsession, we see Anne Cook without knowing why she was evil.
This book is well worth reading. It's not without flaws; however, these flaws are structural.
There are two structural elements to this book: the investigative work that Skinner did, tracking the origins, routes and destinations of modern slave traffic; and the raw statistical realm which these routes and locations define.
The two elements are not always well-coordinated. There are many occasions in which Skinner offers up flat statements such as this: "Beginning in the 1990s, human trafficking metastasized faster than any other form of slave-trading in history. As many as 2 million people left their homes and entered bondage every year." (p. 132) No cite is given for these figures. It's not so much that I disbelieve the statements outright, as that I would like to be given the provenance. This is especially significant given that "human trafficking" is the U.S. gov't jargon for selling into sexual bondage as prostitutes. Thus, it's quite likely that these numbers came from a Federal government the motives of which Skinner himself repeatedly questions.
The book does contain many pages of end notes. These notes are not flagged in the text, so the reader has the clumsy and annoying task of flipping to the back to see if an item is noted.
The investigative work drives the narrative. Skinner shows a certain bold willingness to "try anything" to get further along the road toward connecting with traffickers and victims. At times, this comes off as naive. But the book is sufficiently leavened with the anecdotal accounts of the real "human traffickers" -- some interviewed in prison, some unwittingly interviewed in their real-life roles -- and of the real victims. In the latter case, it mostly is those who have escaped.
In the final section, Skinner offers an in depth account of "debt bondage," a major practice in the Indian subcontinent. This perhaps is most chilling, for a thoughtful reader cannot but realize that there are many products being shipped from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh that are made by slaves. Readers familiar with the story of the famous Phoolan Devi will not be surprised by the horrific account here, centering around a middle-aged quarry worker working as a slave since age 6 to pay off a debt incurred by his grandfather over 50 years ago.
This book offers an unnerving view of the state of the modern world in which millions of men, women and children are enslaved. Sex slaves, debt slaves, house slaves, field slaves -- all exist today in societies stretching from The Netherlands to Central Africa, west to Haiti and the United States and east to China and India. Skinner demonstrates that this problem is not confined to a few "primitive" societies, but rather permeates societies around the world. Slavery is not a remnant of the past, but a thriving and lucrative modern business practice. That makes the book worth reading.
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(3 of 6 readers found this comment helpful)
Isikoff and Corn have produced a topical book that wins in all three significant categories: writing, documentation and logical structure.
First, this book is so well-written, it reads like a thriller. In my experience, topical nonfiction that doesn't read like a textbook is rare. I hated to get to the last page of this book. It's that good.
Second, the book relies almost completely on documented and identified sources. The "anonymous White House official" is practically nonexistent in this work. And, they've scrupulously multisourced every major point of the book.
Third, they don't lose sight of their thesis. "Rambling" is the besetting sin of topical nonfiction, which frequently succumbs to a surfeit of anecdotes, as though the authors felt compelled to get every item in their notes into the book.
The two authors have put all that together to demonstrate how the top members of the Bush administration came into office already having determined to start a war with Iraq and how they developed the internal mechanisms to promote that objective.
It truly was, from the Administration's perspective, a marketing campaign. And, one of the key theses of this book is how that campaign eventually became a bubble around the campaigners, which blocked their views of the realities of the war and which warped their views of their own actions and shaped their decisions. At the same time, the authors demonstrate that this bubble was of the campaigners own creation -- that they were never capable of getting free of their own prejudices long enough to cast a critical eye on their mission and their own behavior.
Of course, I never was a supporter of nor a believer in George W. Bush and his war. Nonetheless, my takeaway from this book was shock -- shock at the depth of the mendacity and self-delusion of the top Administration officials. It is difficult to imagine, until you see it documented and formally structured, the depth of moral and intellectual failure of the nation's leadership.
I was amazed to read, for example, that Bush was utterly indifferent to the failure to find WMD in Iraq. Multiple sources declared after briefing the president on this matter, that it didn't seem to bother him at all. He never expressed the slightest concern. WMD was a marketing stratagem, to sell the war to the public. The war itself was the mission.
Lastly, the book's pre-publication claim to fame was its detailed accounting of the exposure of CIA covert operative Valerie Wilson, nee Plame. Most of the last piece of the book is an intense, detailed and dismaying accounting of how this "outing" was planned, carried out, and investigated. This episode becomes a metaphor for the venality and intellectual corruption of the administration in pursuit of its objective -- the war against Iraq. The authors also use it as a demonstration of how difficult it is to bring these slippery characters to book. They gamed the system and won.
Hubris is a definitive account of the "Washington Merry-go-Round" and the political gamesters who ride it. A book well worth reading, and one that will stay with you afterwards. "Ripped from today's headlines"? Perhaps. But not a throwaway.
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(12 of 14 readers found this comment helpful)
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God, Freedom, and Evil by Alvin Plantinga
Michael Powe, January 25, 2011
This short, dense book presents a logical response to "the problem of evil" in Christian thought. "The problem of evil" typically is presented by non-Christians in something like this format: If God is all-powerful and all-knowing, then God could do away with evil in the world. That he does not do so, has various negative connotations: he's not all-powerful; he's not a loving God (because he lets evil things happen to people); he doesn't exist; &c.Using syllogistic logic, Plantinga demonstrates that evil must exist in order for human beings to have free will. It is impossible for God to remove evil from the world without at the same time removing free will.
This is not a proof that God exists. It simply is a refutation of the "problem of evil" arguments against the existence of God as he is understood by Christians. It's not an easy read, either. To fully understand the argument, you have to be able to follow some fairly complex logical constructions. I found it a worthwhile book because it enables the reader to simply dump the whole "problem of evil" question back on its proponents.
Evil Obsession: The Annie Cook Story
Michael Powe, July 12, 2009
This is a solidly-written book that uses a narrative style in the recounting of a notorious "character" in North Platte, NE history. Although the book is in the "true crime" genre, Yost has extracted dialog from the numerous documents relating to the case and from the recollections of a number of the protagonists. She purportedly waited a number years after completing the book to publish it, because she did not want to publish during the lifetimes of the survivors.And well might those of Anne Cook's family and relations be called survivors. It's hard in these days to comprehend the brutal beatings, the torment, the starvation and even murders, that took place for decades at the Cook Poor Farm. Today, it might happen for a year or 5 years, but decades?
Yost restricts her telling of the tale to the plain facts. There is no psychologizing, no speculation or analysis of the origin of the evil deeds. This omission probably saves the book from the cloying moralism of so much of the true crime genre.
It's a good read, a bit slow at the start -- probably, it takes a while to get used to the style. In the end, you have finished a good story, but there may be some lack of satisfaction that we can't see into the heart of the evil, we can't see the "why" of what happened. We go to the zoo, but we never know why the lion is roaring. So, in Evil Obsession, we see Anne Cook without knowing why she was evil.
A Crime So Monstrous: Face-To-Face with Modern-Day Slavery by E Benjamin Skinner
Michael Powe, June 29, 2008
This book is well worth reading. It's not without flaws; however, these flaws are structural.There are two structural elements to this book: the investigative work that Skinner did, tracking the origins, routes and destinations of modern slave traffic; and the raw statistical realm which these routes and locations define.
The two elements are not always well-coordinated. There are many occasions in which Skinner offers up flat statements such as this: "Beginning in the 1990s, human trafficking metastasized faster than any other form of slave-trading in history. As many as 2 million people left their homes and entered bondage every year." (p. 132) No cite is given for these figures. It's not so much that I disbelieve the statements outright, as that I would like to be given the provenance. This is especially significant given that "human trafficking" is the U.S. gov't jargon for selling into sexual bondage as prostitutes. Thus, it's quite likely that these numbers came from a Federal government the motives of which Skinner himself repeatedly questions.
The book does contain many pages of end notes. These notes are not flagged in the text, so the reader has the clumsy and annoying task of flipping to the back to see if an item is noted.
The investigative work drives the narrative. Skinner shows a certain bold willingness to "try anything" to get further along the road toward connecting with traffickers and victims. At times, this comes off as naive. But the book is sufficiently leavened with the anecdotal accounts of the real "human traffickers" -- some interviewed in prison, some unwittingly interviewed in their real-life roles -- and of the real victims. In the latter case, it mostly is those who have escaped.
In the final section, Skinner offers an in depth account of "debt bondage," a major practice in the Indian subcontinent. This perhaps is most chilling, for a thoughtful reader cannot but realize that there are many products being shipped from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh that are made by slaves. Readers familiar with the story of the famous Phoolan Devi will not be surprised by the horrific account here, centering around a middle-aged quarry worker working as a slave since age 6 to pay off a debt incurred by his grandfather over 50 years ago.
This book offers an unnerving view of the state of the modern world in which millions of men, women and children are enslaved. Sex slaves, debt slaves, house slaves, field slaves -- all exist today in societies stretching from The Netherlands to Central Africa, west to Haiti and the United States and east to China and India. Skinner demonstrates that this problem is not confined to a few "primitive" societies, but rather permeates societies around the world. Slavery is not a remnant of the past, but a thriving and lucrative modern business practice. That makes the book worth reading.
(3 of 6 readers found this comment helpful)
Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War by Michael Isikoff
Michael Powe, October 12, 2006
Isikoff and Corn have produced a topical book that wins in all three significant categories: writing, documentation and logical structure.First, this book is so well-written, it reads like a thriller. In my experience, topical nonfiction that doesn't read like a textbook is rare. I hated to get to the last page of this book. It's that good.
Second, the book relies almost completely on documented and identified sources. The "anonymous White House official" is practically nonexistent in this work. And, they've scrupulously multisourced every major point of the book.
Third, they don't lose sight of their thesis. "Rambling" is the besetting sin of topical nonfiction, which frequently succumbs to a surfeit of anecdotes, as though the authors felt compelled to get every item in their notes into the book.
The two authors have put all that together to demonstrate how the top members of the Bush administration came into office already having determined to start a war with Iraq and how they developed the internal mechanisms to promote that objective.
It truly was, from the Administration's perspective, a marketing campaign. And, one of the key theses of this book is how that campaign eventually became a bubble around the campaigners, which blocked their views of the realities of the war and which warped their views of their own actions and shaped their decisions. At the same time, the authors demonstrate that this bubble was of the campaigners own creation -- that they were never capable of getting free of their own prejudices long enough to cast a critical eye on their mission and their own behavior.
Of course, I never was a supporter of nor a believer in George W. Bush and his war. Nonetheless, my takeaway from this book was shock -- shock at the depth of the mendacity and self-delusion of the top Administration officials. It is difficult to imagine, until you see it documented and formally structured, the depth of moral and intellectual failure of the nation's leadership.
I was amazed to read, for example, that Bush was utterly indifferent to the failure to find WMD in Iraq. Multiple sources declared after briefing the president on this matter, that it didn't seem to bother him at all. He never expressed the slightest concern. WMD was a marketing stratagem, to sell the war to the public. The war itself was the mission.
Lastly, the book's pre-publication claim to fame was its detailed accounting of the exposure of CIA covert operative Valerie Wilson, nee Plame. Most of the last piece of the book is an intense, detailed and dismaying accounting of how this "outing" was planned, carried out, and investigated. This episode becomes a metaphor for the venality and intellectual corruption of the administration in pursuit of its objective -- the war against Iraq. The authors also use it as a demonstration of how difficult it is to bring these slippery characters to book. They gamed the system and won.
Hubris is a definitive account of the "Washington Merry-go-Round" and the political gamesters who ride it. A book well worth reading, and one that will stay with you afterwards. "Ripped from today's headlines"? Perhaps. But not a throwaway.
(12 of 14 readers found this comment helpful)