Tuva or Bust

This is a book by Ralph Leighton. It chronicles the adventures he and others had in trying to get to visit Tannu Tuva with Richard Feynman, the American Nobel prize-winning physicist.

Do you know where Tanni Tuva is located? I do, as I once saw it on a globe years ago. It was a country wedged between Russia and Mongolia, but Stalin took it over in the 1940's. Like the people in the book, exotic locales like this interest me, so I had to read this book.

The subtitle of the book is "Richard Feynman's Last Journey" - Feynman died before getting to Tuva. Sort of sad after all the trouble they went to to get there. The author did go, but it was very anti-climatic, as he barely said anything about the actual trip after pages on all the hoops they had to go through to get there.

If you read the book, it seems like Feynman was involved, but not nearly as much as the author and others mentioned in the book. Well, Feynman was famous, so I guess the subtitle helped attract attention to the book. In any case, the story is interesting and illustrates how weird and frustrating it was to deal with the old USSR - something quickly being forgotten perhaps.

To digress, I had a Russian penpal during communist rule, and it was interesting. I had to use registered mail (very expensive) to be sure he saw my letters. He actually defected to England, and I got to meet him there at the end of a business trip.

Getting back to the book review, I do recommend the book. It is like a time capsule for life so different, but not that long ago. Give it a look.

Process Theology

This is a book by Cobb and Griffin based for the most part on the process theology of A. N. Whitehead.

The book starts off well, but around the middle gets very hard to read. The authors seem to become fond of words like epistemology (big words that add little to the discussion at hand, but do much to confuse it) and using sentences that are less than clear in this middle part. Fortunately, things improve in the last part of the book. Appendix A is helpful; Appendix B is so-so. Overall, I would say it might be best to find another book if you are interested in the subject, although this one does have parts that are quite good - they are just thrown in with lots of bad parts. The book is 185 pages long, and I spent weeks on it!

In a previous posting (The Mind of God on 8/18/07), I did mention how I found out about Whitehead's process theology in that book. There is a good introduction there in only a few pages.

Process theology has many aspects, some of which I don't like, but it does offer some great ideas about God and His relation to us and our relation to our environment. It explains about evil in the world quite well I think, as it does about free will. Basically, God is very great, but not absolute. He tries to persuade us to move in the right direction rather than force us. He also feels our love for Him as well as has love for us. Some of it might be quite shocking to traditional Christians, but it does at least make logical sense for the most part.

Other parts of the theology, such as on existence which sounds a lot like the non-existence of Buddhism, do nothing for me, and I reject. I am not sure how much of this part is really Whitehead and not Cobb/Griffin instead.

I have found some other books on the subject by other authors to look at soon - Whitehead's actual books are very difficult to get through according to Cobb/Griffin, so you can imagine how bad that must be, given what I said about Cobb/Griffin's book.

The one I will look at next is by Hamilton, and I checked it carefully for overblown wording. It passed my inspection. I will let you all know soon about it.