First published in 1953, this is one of those wonderful old scholarly books that collects decades of work in a short space. Books like this don't really get made much anymore. There's no real thesis here, it's instead a look at the foundations of the world view of the 11th/12th centuries (with a focus on England and France). If you're interested in the period, it holds up as a collection of historical anecdotes and insights. An enjoyable short read.

Recommended for: Poasters interested in medieval or Western Church history.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4415161&forum_id=2#39379953)

no need to order from AMAZOG because they don't discount it, but you might find a good used copy

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4415161&forum_id=2#39638501)

https://www.amazon.ca/Medieval-Cities-Their-Origins-Revival/dp/0691007608

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4415161&forum_id=2#39701516)

I'd finish the books I've started first tho

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4415161&forum_id=2#39379986)

This was a genuinely exciting book, even if I have no expertise which would let me judge some of Beckwith's major claims. There are a lot of major claims here, too:

— The Buddha was likely a Scythian in the eastern Persian Empire, and the religious context of his teaching was Early Zoroastrianism, not Brahmanism.

— That Brahmanism and Jainism were formed after Buddhism.

— That the best-attested proponent of Early Buddhism (Beckwith's term, which he distinguishes from "Normative Buddhism," which would include the familiar picture of early Buddhism) was Pyrrho of Elis.

— That Early Taoism was a Chinese religion inspired by Early Buddhism and that Laotzu is actually an Old Chinese transliteration of Gautama (Beckwith is a linguist and his argument here is interesting but beyond my paygrade).

On questions I do feel comfortable judging Beckwith on (his readings of Greek texts and interpretive questions in Greek philosophy) and on questions I have some comfort with (Buddhist exegesis), I find myself either in agreement with Beckwith or find his arguments compelling. A great book.

Recommended for: Poasters interested in Buddhism or history of philosophy; Poasters who liked Beckwith's "Empires of the Silk Road" and wanted more.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4415161&forum_id=2#39379970)

thread delivered.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4415161&forum_id=2#39380170)

Robert Spencer has a book on whether Mohammed was completely invented 200 years later

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4415161&forum_id=2#39636885)

The traditional story of the Koran's origins is almost certainly wrong, but believing Muhammad didn't exist – or even that it's very likely he didn't – is *almost* up there with believing Jesus didn't

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4415161&forum_id=2#39638416)

This is a book where I think a reader interested in the subject matter should feel free to only read the chapters that grab him; even as someone with an interest in Schiller, I found the long second chapter relatively unilluminating, and the chapter on the type problem in poetry was also frequently dry.

Since Jung's theory of types is behind the midwit's favorite tool of psychological analysis, the MBTI, it's fascinating to see how shallow that tool is (especially in its popular reception— the "function stack" of actual MBTI is closer to the Jungian analysis) compared to Jung's theory.

Cf., e.g., the relatively useless idea of intro/extraversion we've received (bullshit about socialization and energy which only makes sense from the perspective of extreme feminine neurotics) vs Jung's theory which is about object/subject orientation.

I might have more to say about this book later, probably after a few months and I go and reread some sections I marked as particularly interesting.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4415161&forum_id=2#39531095)

"The Art of Raising a Puppy" and "How to Be Your Dog's Best Friend" by the Monks of New Skete

got these on the recommendations of friends because my wife is on board with getting a dog, but is anxious about the fact she didn't grow up in a dog-owning household. I ended up reading them so I could talk to her about what I thought about them, how they lined up with my experience, etc.

Both books are good, dated at times, maybe a bit eccentric (but training is almost psychoanalysis, just dogs are much simpler than people) but they are a good start for anyone. I would NOT recommend reading them back to back like I did (they're short and easy to digest) because there's a lot of overlapping and semi-overlapping material and I told my wife to just put "How to be Your Dog's Best friend' off.

"Nāgārjuna's Middle Way", Mark Siderits and Shōryū Katsura

This is a translation of and commentary on Nagarjuna's Mūlammadhyamakakārikā, and overall it's an interesting work and the translation is engaging (can't speak to accuracy as my knowledge of Sanskrit is very basic bitch, though the original text in Latin script *is* included).

The disappointing thing about this volume is how the commentary is arranged. Nagarjuna's argumentation is actually quite lucid (by Buddhist standards anyhow). Siderits and Katsura break up the lovely flow of the verses by inserting extensive commentary every 1–3 verses. After a few chapters of this, I started skipping the commentary and only went back to read it at the end— sad!

anyhow, I'm retreating to the Indo-Aryan Tropical Urheimat after the bar, so hopefully I'll get a lot more reading done.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4415161&forum_id=2#39636865)

1. V. S. Naipaul, "A Bend in the River"

It's interesting how often this book is dismissed as colonialist, because while it's brutally realistic about the bantu, it's also so about the European and the Indian:

"Those of us who had been part of Africa before the Europeans had never lied about ourselves. Not because we were moral. We didn't lie because because we never assessed ourselves and didn't think there was anything for us to lie about; we were people who simply did what we did. But the Europeans could do one thing and say something quite different; and they could act in this way because they had an idea of what they owed to their civilization. It was their great advantage over us. The Europeans wanted gold and slaves, like everybody else; but at the same time they wanted statues put up to themselves as people who had done good things for slaves. Being an intelligent and energetic people, and at the peak of their powers, they could express both sides of their civilization; and they got both the slaves and the statues."

The narrator is realistically drawn, the prose is beautiful and somber, the plot manages to reach a point of excitement. It's an excellent novel, and I'd recommend anyone read it.

2. Christopher Caldwell, "The Age of Entitlement"

This is hard to objectively. I agree with the major thesis of the book – The Civil Rights Revolution and its Consequences have been a Disaster for the European Race – but found it frustrating how little of the book was devoted to this strong core premise, and how much it lapsed into recounting old cultural battles and the aesthetic quirks of the author. Caldwell does the right a great service in coming to bury Reagan, but I feel like there was a much better, more impactful 150 page book inside this 280 page one. I would still recommend it to many people, but it's harder to recommend here at the Great Bort unless you need to discuss it with normies.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4415161&forum_id=2#39701481)

Maybe it's not a good idea for someone fundamentally skeptical of psychology–as–a–science to read a modern work of psychology, but this book had the ambition to lay out a novel view of how human beings learn and learn to think. In my view, the essential material is mostly in the first few chapters, and one could read them quickly if so inclined. I cannot critique the studies she cites, but have heard enough people I respect do so I am reluctant to recommend it as a good guide to up-to-date empirical knowledge. As food for thought, the book was good, especially those first chapters. I recommend the critical paragraphs found here ( https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/closer-to-beast-than-angel/ ) and the interview with Prof. Heyes here ( https://www.socialsciencespace.com/2018/06/celia-heyes-on-cognitive-gadgets/ ) instead. If you want more, the book is clearly written.

4. Michel Houellebecq, "Serotonin"

I would not be surprised if this ends up being my favorite of his novels in the future. Houllebecq is still cruel (maybe needlessly so), but there is a real heart to this novel with a heartless narrator, and it is despair at the suicide of the childless West. I ended up marking a lot of places in the book, and think it is worth a more detailed review after I have time to digest it. Highly recommended.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4415161&forum_id=2#39701493)

James Scott, "Against the Grain"

some Gene Wolfe stories

Peter Frankopan, "The Silk Roads"

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4415161&forum_id=2#39704147)

Robertson Davies, "The Rebel Angels"

John Alcock, "Animal Behavior" (it's an older edition of the textbook, but that's what you get for $5 online)

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4415161&forum_id=2#39868746)

I've long thought that the lesson of Mesoamerican + Fertile Crescent archeology has to be this: Early-stage civilization is fragile, and the remarkable thing is that it ever got going long enough.

I was hoping this book would get into the theory of how state permanence was achieved, but it's mostly about that ephemerality. It's a good book (if a bit overconcerned with arguing against an attitude which seems decades out of date)with good detail, and if you haven't read much about the archeology of the Fertile Crescent, Scott's prose is very readable and it serves as a good introduction with a lot of commentary. This book wasn't what I hoped it would be, but I would still recommend it for the person who is interested in the book it is.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4415161&forum_id=2#39733375)

but I have read another book, and a few other things I'd like to talk about

1. Henri Pirenne, "Medieval Cities"

recommended by a brother above, this does share much in common with the Southern book in terms of style and character, though the subject matter is very different. Pierenne traces the decline of cities in the West not to barbarian invasion, but the closing of the Mediterranean trade that came with the rise of Islam; the rise of the medieval city was thus in conjunction with the rise of new trade networks, in the Mediterranean as well as in the North and Baltic seas. I'd recommend this to exactly the sort of posters I recommended the Southern book to, with the caveat that I enjoyed Southern more as a source of anecdotes and citations, while Pierenne lays out and convincingly defends a clear thesis.

2. Gene Wolfe, "The Fifth Head of Cerberus"

I'm talking the short story here, not the short story + accompaniments published as a novel under the same title. I've read this /twice/ in the past month, once on a plane, and again, aloud, to my wife. My wife is working at home, and she does a lot of time-consuming work at a microscope, and she normally listens to podcasts while doing this. I've subbed in a bit.

One marker of a great prose artist is you notice much more about them in reading him aloud. This was the first time I read a Wolfe story out loud, and I really recommend the experience. "Fifth Head" has absolutely all the markers of Wolfe at his full maturity and is a joy to reread. I felt this when I reread it on the plane, and again when I reread it a short time later.

2. Plato, "Apology" & "Crito"

There's no way of thinking about political thought without beginning with these two Platonic writings, but I don't want to talk about their content so much as their form. I also read these aloud to my wife, and it struck me how well both work as literature even more in doing so. (I confess I made spontaneous alterations to the translation I was reading at times based on my memory of the Greek.) Crito especially, because of its short length and singular action works well as a drama, as well as having excellent prose. I think there is something to be gained in reading these works out loud, because I also found myself *thinking* about them differently in doing so, and will probably read a few more over the weeks.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4415161&forum_id=2#39868055)

I decided I'm not getting any more new books during quarantine – I have plenty to work through right now – but I'll add it to my amazon list and maybe I'll review it before the end of the year

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4415161&forum_id=2#39943657)

This was well-written, but I found it pretty disappointing overall. It has some good detail in it here & there, but most of it is very general history. The book is very much aimed at people who don't know much about history in the first place and is more concerned with just giving a new narrative frame than presenting more recent scholarly insight in a revealing fashion. I could recommend this to poasters who are looking for a very general history of the period it covers— the prose is fine and the framing is mostly interesting. But it wasn't written for me.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4415161&forum_id=2#39920766)

Very good ethology textbook working through lots of examples using good darwinian logic, traditional zoological observation, and experiments. I enjoyed this book a lot and can rec it to any poaster wanting an introduction to the subject. Basic stats and bio help, but aren't required.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4415161&forum_id=2#39943097)

You don't seem overly interested in tech, so let me suggest "The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation."

The most brilliant students from Caltech, MIT, etc., go into industry in the 1930s, win WW2, then come back and design the modern world. Recommended.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4415161&forum_id=2#39943643)

If I can be excused a cliché, we never really fall in love with persons so much as we do the images of persons— the test of love is in reconciling that image with the person we encounter. I am not so cynical as to believe that knowing another is, finally, impossible; I am, however, very aware that it's difficult.

One form of the novelist's magic (and perhaps his highest mystery) is to widen our circle of sympathy by letting us *know* some imaginary person and thus broaden ourselves out from that parochialism where we all are tempted to believe "Only I hold such hidden depths of feeling!" and come to some sitting-with the other.

While I had had other girlfriends – even a couple I believed I loved intensely – the first serious one was a wild, mutual work of imagination. She knew the sort of girl I wanted to fall in love with an insight I can only now admire (though I hated it for many years), and – of course – this shared creative work would not have been nearly so successful if she had not been already a girl somewhat like the one I fell in love with to begin with.

The masquerade lover was a girl rather like "The Rebel Angels"' first narrator, Maria Theotoky, and it is rare that the novelist manages to capture the opposite gendered narrator, even to the degree of reminding his fellow man of some burning image of his past. If novels can be judged by this high mystery alone, "The Rebel Angels" is (possibly) a great novel.

Try it.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4415161&forum_id=2#39949057)

Got this book sometime last year after thinking about flight mechanics and realizing I knew almost nothing about this entire group except for very basic information covered in related texts.

Witton's book is well-illustrated, and well-written. It's surprisingly scientific for a book that has a popular affect on the shelf, and it is best if you already understand basic anatomical terminology as there is a lot of it employed, here. (Normally, when reading a book like this I keep in mind whether or not it would be a good gift for a smart kid interested in the subject; well, except for the rare case of the kid nerdy enough to learn his anatomy, the answer here is "probably not.") But this also means it's well-sourced and the bibliography (while about seven years old) is a good place to start if I want to read more into one of the subjects discussed. Witton has a dorky sense of humor which may annoy some people but is typical of paleontologists. His accounts of competing theories in all aspects are very well done, and his cases for his preferences are generally convincing.

BTW, if poasters are interested in a more general-level textbook in vertebrate paleontology, Witton recommends the Michael Benton textbook "Vertebrate Palaeontology." I can also recommend that textbook. I read the 2nd edition way back when, but it's on a 4th currently.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4415161&forum_id=2#39975374)

I had this sitting on my Kindle for a while from before Amazon removed most naughty books from sale (also fuck you Bezos). It's not worth reading, a half-baked summary of generational theory with not enough detail about the rise of the Identitarian movement in Europe.

The lack of quality control on the alt-right makes me wonder why I never bother getting bux from it.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4415161&forum_id=2#40025689)

I'm interested in Spinoza and not-uninterested in mid-century Orthodox Jewish memoir, but Goldstein's combination of the two topics wasn't really captivating past the first couple chapters. Ultimately, it's a book that isn't great at either of its subjects and probably only strongly appeals to people who are emotionally pre-invested in people with Goldstein's background.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4415161&forum_id=2#40068572)

This is a fascinating book. I found the early parts hard to get into, and there are the problems that often crop up in a big book like this – some copyediting errors, some repetition, some mystifying organization – but overall it's good. I wouldn't call the prose captivating, but the amount of unique detail here is fantastic.

Smith's portrait of Rasputin is a talented, but unpolished prole, a man who had vices but is ultimately unlike his popular portrait. Perhaps one day we'll get a cinematic treatment of the fall of the Romanovs which takes advantage of Smith's research into the primary sources here, something which paints a captivating, but believable Grigory Rasputin. I'd like to watch it.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4415161&forum_id=2#40093060)

I had read the title essay before, but not the others in this collection. It's baffling to me that people suggest this as an introduction to Heidegger, as it dives right in to all his idiosyncrasies without doing anything to introduce or explain his vocabulary. You'd actually be better off just reading Division One of Being & Time rather than this.

Highlight: "The Age of the World Picture"

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4415161&forum_id=2#40119323)

This was written not just as an introduction to graph theory but as an introduction to pure mathematics by use of graph theory. I might have rather had an intro to graph theory that could have assumed more ("An Introduction to Graph Theory for People With Mathematical Logic" or something). Fun exercises, clearly written, and (importantly) cheap.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4415161&forum_id=2#40134011)

Gene Wolfe, "The Best of Gene Wolfe"

Each of the stories in this compilation is accompanied by a note from Wolfe. The last one explains that Wolfe picked all the stories (but one) himself, and I think it shows, as I can see why he is particularly fond of some of them (especially those which obviously were preludes in theme or art to The Book of the New Sun), but the volume is overlong for an author's own best-of. SFF publishing is in a place where volumes under 400pp are anathema, however, which is too bad, as the best stories in this volume are *excellent*. I was especially fond of a number of the shorter stories from the 1980s that were included.

Worth it, as even the weaker stories are interesting, and there are a few I am not now particularly fond of that I already suspect that if I revisit them in another mood, at another time, I may love.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4415161&forum_id=2#40226810)