2/24/2007

At Cafe La Boheme, home of intellectuals.


Reading The Missing Peace, by peace negotiator, Dennis Ross, which is about the Middle East Peace talks. He's only just started, but is enjoying it, reading it at a measured pace--he says it may be long and he may need a scorecard to keep track of everyone's names, but it is, fortunately, very well written.

Recently he read The End of Faith, by Sam Harris. This controversial book spawned a follow-up book to address the public's outcry-- Letter to a Christian Nation. In The End of Faith, he explains the dangers of religion. As faith is something subjective, people of different faiths feel a need to prove who is right and who is wrong, which creates conflicts between cultures and, ultimately wars, which is something the world, in this day, with the technology and weapons we have, simply cannot withstand. He says that the author points fingers and has a take no prisoners attitude.

He usually gets the books he reads from one of three sources, which have online presences as well as mail out catalogs and flyers: The History Book Club, which deals with anything from politics, to the military, to famous personalities; Quality Paperback Books, which has books on a variety of different topics; and The Readers' Subscription, which caters to more of a "high brow" audience with books written mostly from an academic viewpoint and takes into consideration the big questions of the day.

His favorite book of all time--in considering how much he enjoyed the multidisciplinary approach Harris took in The End of Faith, he recalled another author with an equally broad base of knowledge--John Casti, who wrote Paradigm's Lost. Paradigm's Lost adopts the idea of a "paradigm" from a book written in the late sixties by Thomas Khun, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Khun explains how knowledge builds on itself until a discovery reshapes everything and what has been known needs to be examined with a new perspective, or paradigm. Casti uses paradigms to answer six big questions that cross the disciplines of mathematics, philosophy, sociology, psychology, etc. What makes this book so great, he said, is not only how the author weaves the disciplines together, but also how he writes in a language that is accessible to the reader--it's breathtaking.

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