The Buried Age

I just finished Christopher Bennett's book, THE BURIED AGE. Overall, I liked the book, but as I seem to say too often lately about many books recently published, it could use some more editing. Has there been a big cut back on editors at publishing houses or what? This book involves many of the Star Trek Next Generation characters in the time before what is covered in the TV series; a synopsis is available on the amazon website.

That being said, I will share (other) observations I made on the book. First, the book flows much better in the first half than the second. I thought the court martial scenes were well done. Unlike some other reviewers, I thought the science was interesting - why do people who are bothered by science read Star Trek books anyway? If anything, I thought the author could have explained the science a little MORE than he did as not everyone can follow quantum mechanics and related topics with ease. I did find it interesting how the author illustrated the immensity of both time and space in the galaxy in the archeological parts of the book.

I thought the author did a wonderful job with the Data character in this book! Guinan figures in quite a bit and is pretty well done. I had some problems with the handling of the Picard character. Picard here didn't seem enough like the Picard we know from the TV series - too many girl friends and a little too trigger happy in the latter part of the book. It isn't like this was supposed to be a very young Picard and that he matured before we see him in the TV series. The Ariel character could have used some work in the middle of the book - she was too different from what she was at the start and then at the end; maybe an editing issue.

As some other reviewers have noted, the book does explain much of the background that the TV series apparently didn't. This may have been part of the flow problem in the second part that I mentioned earlier. Things seemed choppy. Maybe the author just tried to do too much here and/or needed some better editing. This was a good (4 star) book, but could have been a great (5 star) one.

The God Who Risks

This is a book by John Sanders with the subtitle, A Theology of Divine Providence. I noticed this book on an expedition I did on amazon.com looking for books on process theology - something once of interest to Whitehead. This one was in a more Christian context and a lot easier to understand and relate to than the more Whiteheadian texts which I believe I talked about in earlier posts. I found two others similar to the current one which I will describe after I have read them.

The Sanders book describes open theism and concepts important to it like dynamic omniscience and contrasts it and its implications with those of more traditional theological models. This book is written in a Christian context, but it might be applicable more broadly.

For readers unfamiliar with the general idea of open theism, it is basically one where God has chosen NOT to determine everything. God is seen as desiring a truly interactive relationship with his creation (especially us) and is responsive to things that happen in creation not caused by God. For example, open theism allows for God to change his mind based on requests made by people. This seems to be completely counter to Augustine, Aquinas and Calvin, who appeared to view God as immutable to an extreme with the implication being that humans are actually puppets. In my opinion, the God Jesus described was certainly more of the open theists than that of Calvin and the like.

Open theists allow for God to have some broad plan for the creation and individual people, and he can take action to guide things in that direction, but the important thing is that he (at least usually) will not force the issue. The implications of this make for a more hopeful existence than the alternative.

There is actually quite a lot more to this, at least as to implications - those involving the problem of evil being some of the most interesting. (I would argue that even quantum mechanics and its probabilistic picture of the physical universe could be another of these implications, but the author did not seem to mention this one in particular.) The author takes readers carefully through a series of arguments to show basic implications and how open theism makes good sense and is even well based on very old tradition and the Bible itself. I thought that these arguments also made the alternatives look illogical, but the author tried to be respectful and didn't beat on that too much.

Overall, I liked the book. My only complaints are that (1) the author seemed to be a little inconsistent in terminology now and then, (2) the notes should have been footnotes, not endnotes and (3) the text should have been edited a little more to hone the language/argument and to cut the length down 10 to 20%, as it was a little long for what it had to say. Don't take this the wrong way - the book is still well worth reading in my opinion.

Happy New Year

Happy New Year!

I have been at this blog for over 4 years now. Hope you find it worthwhile.

Postwar

This is a review of Tony Judt's book, POSTWAR - A History of Europe Since 1945.

When I first saw mention of Judt's POSTWAR, I put it one my book list. It took me a while to get to it, but I finally did. Although it did seem to have some good points, it had more bad ones.

The book is too long (it takes forever to finish) and superficial at the same time. Add to this that Judt jumps all over the place and very abruptly - as another reviewer mentioned, subheadings would have helped. He also seems to flip flop on many points as other reviewers have noted. I found his overuse of the colon to separate clauses irritating, and his sentence structure was "overburdening" many times - don't editors fix this sort of thing any more?

One of the main reasons I am giving this book such a bad review is that I found it to be unfairly anti-American. Frankly, if Judt thinks that the USA is so bad, why does he live here? Of course, he seems to dislike his native country (the UK) about as much. It seems he can't make up his mind about "Europe" either. In any case, "Europe" does owe its very existence to the USA, since neither the Nazis nor the Stalinists would have allowed it to exist if they had been left to decide.

Some reviewers say he is anti-Israel which I did find hard to match up with his Epilogue. In any case, I did find the Epilogue to be somewhat contradictory and thought it a bad way to end the book - I like a "happy ending". This information should have been placed elsewhere in the book in my opinion with the contradictions removed.

There were a lot of interesting statistics presented in the book, but this got tedious at times. I did find his summaries of the events around the collapse of Communism helpful, even if his analysis of them might be a little suspect. Same for the Yugoslav wars. I had hoped for something more in depth about life under Communism though.

Being of French descent, I can get away with saying something here about the French, so I will. I have always been proud of my French heritage, but in the period covered in this book, the French have behaved on several occasions in ways that I find disappointing. I always suspected there was something not being acknowledged that was behind this behavior. Judt's analysis here (one of the times I thought he was right) confirmed what I had always imagined it to be - wounded pride has a lot to do with it. Pride is not called the worst of the seven deadly sins for nothing.

I used to think that European culture/outlook/ways were in many ways superior to American, but more recently I have come to think this is not really the case. Judt's book (which might come as a surprise to him) gave me further support for my newer way of thinking. His analysis showed me that many Europeans are likely suffering from another of the seven deadly sins, but I'll leave that to another time.

Overall, I will put it like this. Read the book if you must, but don't say I didn't warn you about its bad points.