Robert Jacoby's Blog, page 3
October 8, 2018
Publication of "The Span of Blood"
My story "The Span of Blood," selected as a runner up in the 2018 Haunted Waters Press Short Shorts Flash Fiction Competition, was published today.
A print copy can be ordered, but they've made the entire issue available online for free. Beautiful graphics and layout! Go see for yourself.
Read "The Span of Blood" in From the Depths 2018 No. 16.
Enjoy!
PS: An author's interview they did with me is coming up, too. Stay tuned for that!
A print copy can be ordered, but they've made the entire issue available online for free. Beautiful graphics and layout! Go see for yourself.
Read "The Span of Blood" in From the Depths 2018 No. 16.
Enjoy!
PS: An author's interview they did with me is coming up, too. Stay tuned for that!
September 5, 2018
"The Span of Blood"
Very happy to share the news that my story "The Span of Blood" was selected as a runner up in the 2018 Haunted Waters Press Short Shorts Flash Fiction Competition. Publication coming soon!
Announcement on the Haunted Waters Press Facebook page.
Announcement on the Haunted Waters Press Facebook page.
August 11, 2018
Three new poems published this week
I had three new poems published this week online in The RavensPerch. Check them out, leave comments if you'd like. Three short love poems...first line or two from each one below...click the link to read the entire poem at The RavensPerch website.
"The Thread"
There is a thread I follow home
It runs from where I am to who you are
[read the poem]
"Tenseless Love"
No words exist to describe us here
[read the poem]
"Perfect Meaning"
Now I know these sentences won’t leave me alone
until I describe fully their longing,
[read the poem]
"The Thread"
There is a thread I follow home
It runs from where I am to who you are
[read the poem]
"Tenseless Love"
No words exist to describe us here
[read the poem]
"Perfect Meaning"
Now I know these sentences won’t leave me alone
until I describe fully their longing,
[read the poem]
July 3, 2018
Review of The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life In God by Dallas Willard
Title: Simply amazing book on modern Christian living
This is one of "those books." It might change your life. So it's a dangerous read. Highly recommended.
I first picked up this book when it came out in the late 1990s. Back then, I think I got about 50 or 100 pages in, and gave up. I couldn't take it. Its truth; its perceptiveness; its vitalness. Twenty years later I regret not sticking with it.
This book is a heady read. The breadth and depth of Dallas Willard's insights into human psychology is simply and plainly ... amazing.
The Divine Conspiracy is one of the richest spiritual reading experiences I've had in my life. There is not a page that goes by--really, hardly a paragraph--where I wasn't putting the book down and musing over what I'd just read, or making a note, or underlining something in the text or in the footnotes.
His explication on correction love .... left me appalled and disappointed...at how we live.
His exposition on corrective love in Chapter 7 will leave you sad and wondering if there is any Christian community in the U.S. practicing such techniques. I've read that house churches in China are close-knit communities. Where else are they?
Some gems to share:
"God has paid an awful price to arrange for human self-determination. He obviously places great value on it. It is, after all, the *only* way he can get the kind of personal beings he desires for his eternal purposes." (p. 220)
"Human life is not about human life. Nothing will go right in it until the greatness and goodness of its source and governor is adequately grasped. His very name is then held in the highest possible regard. Until that is so, the human compass will always be pointing in the wrong direction, and individual lives as well as history as a whole will suffer from constant and fluctuating disorientation. Candidly, that is exactly the condition we find ourselves in." (p. 259)
"Who teaches you? Whose disciple are you? Honestly. One thing is sure: You are somebody's disciple. You learned how to live from somebody else. There are no exceptions to this rule, for human beings are just the kind of creatures that have to learn and keep learning from others how to live." (p. 271)
As other reviewers have noted, Willard has problems with both the Christian Left and the Christian Right in America. The Left, for its push of social activism (the "social gospel") bereft of the active person of Jesus Christ; the Right, for its "faith alone" approach that abandons any active work in the Christian community and world at large here on earth.
If you're not near tears in many passages while reading this book, your heart is too hard.
Richard Foster provides the Foreword and compares The Divine Conspiracy to the writings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, John Calvin, Martin Luther, and even Thomas Aquinas and Augustine of Hippo. I have to agree.
The Divine Conspiracy is that rare book where the standard rating system's words actually meet stars: I did love it, and it was amazing.
I loved it/It was amazing
5/5 Goodreads
5/5 Amazon
This is one of "those books." It might change your life. So it's a dangerous read. Highly recommended.
I first picked up this book when it came out in the late 1990s. Back then, I think I got about 50 or 100 pages in, and gave up. I couldn't take it. Its truth; its perceptiveness; its vitalness. Twenty years later I regret not sticking with it.
This book is a heady read. The breadth and depth of Dallas Willard's insights into human psychology is simply and plainly ... amazing.
The Divine Conspiracy is one of the richest spiritual reading experiences I've had in my life. There is not a page that goes by--really, hardly a paragraph--where I wasn't putting the book down and musing over what I'd just read, or making a note, or underlining something in the text or in the footnotes.
His explication on correction love .... left me appalled and disappointed...at how we live.
His exposition on corrective love in Chapter 7 will leave you sad and wondering if there is any Christian community in the U.S. practicing such techniques. I've read that house churches in China are close-knit communities. Where else are they?
Some gems to share:
"God has paid an awful price to arrange for human self-determination. He obviously places great value on it. It is, after all, the *only* way he can get the kind of personal beings he desires for his eternal purposes." (p. 220)
"Human life is not about human life. Nothing will go right in it until the greatness and goodness of its source and governor is adequately grasped. His very name is then held in the highest possible regard. Until that is so, the human compass will always be pointing in the wrong direction, and individual lives as well as history as a whole will suffer from constant and fluctuating disorientation. Candidly, that is exactly the condition we find ourselves in." (p. 259)
"Who teaches you? Whose disciple are you? Honestly. One thing is sure: You are somebody's disciple. You learned how to live from somebody else. There are no exceptions to this rule, for human beings are just the kind of creatures that have to learn and keep learning from others how to live." (p. 271)
As other reviewers have noted, Willard has problems with both the Christian Left and the Christian Right in America. The Left, for its push of social activism (the "social gospel") bereft of the active person of Jesus Christ; the Right, for its "faith alone" approach that abandons any active work in the Christian community and world at large here on earth.
If you're not near tears in many passages while reading this book, your heart is too hard.
Richard Foster provides the Foreword and compares The Divine Conspiracy to the writings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, John Calvin, Martin Luther, and even Thomas Aquinas and Augustine of Hippo. I have to agree.
The Divine Conspiracy is that rare book where the standard rating system's words actually meet stars: I did love it, and it was amazing.
I loved it/It was amazing
5/5 Goodreads
5/5 Amazon
June 26, 2018
Review of The Question of Bruno by Aleksandar Hemon
Reader beware: this is not your normal short story collection. There's not one traditional "short story" with a beginning, a middle, and an end. They're a mix of slice-of-life and vignette. This can work to great effect in the hands of, say, Victoria Lancelotta in Here in This World. In Hemon's collection, the writing is interesting and curious, even startling, in spots, because he is not a native English speaker. (He gives a couple of nods in the text to his literary hero Joseph Conrad.) Sometimes this unusual phrasing is quite awkward, though, Pynchon-like, and most of the "short stories" as I was reading them felt like a long march, like I had to force my way through them to finish them, because there's no arc of narrative, no tension, nothing pulling me along to read to the end, to make me *want* to get to the end. The Sorge Spy Ring is one of those stories. I almost gave up reading the entire book trying to get through this one. But I'm glad I persevered. The final story, Imitation of Life, reads like a delicate musical composition.
As a whole, the stilted language and drudgery are a 1, the marvelous passages of prose scattered throughout are a 5.
It's okay
2/5 Goodreads
3/5 Amazon
As a whole, the stilted language and drudgery are a 1, the marvelous passages of prose scattered throughout are a 5.
It's okay
2/5 Goodreads
3/5 Amazon
June 19, 2018
Review of A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race, and Human History by Nicholas Wade
Title: The science of human races explained carefully and reasonably
5 stars for Nicholas Wade taking on a too-often politicized topic and presenting the science with unemotional seriousness.
Many topics he covers may be new to readers, and disturbing, such as research done on racial variation in the MAO-A ("violence" or "warrior") gene and its association with psychopathic personality traits; world-wide variations in IQ and links to economic disparities and crime. All very interesting, none of which I'll detail here for fear of down-voting and inciting a comment war. The chapter "Jewish Adaptations" was eye opening, as well.
Copious Notes helped me understand the depth of Wade's research into the important topic. A plus was that I found some new books to read, too.
In Wade's hands, history and science are made plain, and you can't ask for much more. A studious reader will take much away from this book.
I loved it/It was amazing
5/5 Goodreads
5/5 Amazon
5 stars for Nicholas Wade taking on a too-often politicized topic and presenting the science with unemotional seriousness.
Many topics he covers may be new to readers, and disturbing, such as research done on racial variation in the MAO-A ("violence" or "warrior") gene and its association with psychopathic personality traits; world-wide variations in IQ and links to economic disparities and crime. All very interesting, none of which I'll detail here for fear of down-voting and inciting a comment war. The chapter "Jewish Adaptations" was eye opening, as well.
Copious Notes helped me understand the depth of Wade's research into the important topic. A plus was that I found some new books to read, too.
In Wade's hands, history and science are made plain, and you can't ask for much more. A studious reader will take much away from this book.
I loved it/It was amazing
5/5 Goodreads
5/5 Amazon
June 11, 2018
Review of The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor, edited by Sally Fitzgerald
Title: Interesting read for fans, not so much for casual readers
I'm a fan of Flannery O'Connor's from way back. She was one of my first and major influences. Having said that, I can also say that, with my own two nonfiction books and two novels done (and a third novel in its final edits), her style does not impress me as much as it did when I first started writing seriously 30 years ago. I am still impressed with her, though, and learn from her every time I read her fiction, both what to do and what not to do. I tell you that to tell you this:
This volume of her letters is likely to be of interest only to Flannery O'Connor fans. Cursory readers can let this pass.
These letters provide some insight into her writing, but just some. More is filler on her daily life, her visits and letter exchanges with various literary and non-literary people, her limited travels outside Georgia, and her life raising birds of many kinds. A few of the gems I've picked out on her thoughts on writing and God:
You write what you can.
God rescues us from ourselves if we want Him to.
The mind serves best when it's anchored in the word of God.
The novel is an art form and when you use it for anything other than art, you pervert it.
Fiction doesn't lie, but it can't tell the whole truth.
If [James] Baldwin were white nobody would stand him a minute.
Trigger Warning: Ms. O'Connor is free with the N-word when she likes to be throughout, and, that last one--boy, I'd like to know what she would have written had she lived to see the early 2000s. Probably it's best she didn't, because she would have had some things to say about certain women and black writers. She is ardent--almost militant--in her Catholicism, which is a real shame, because it binds her to certain religious doctrines, which aren't necessarily spiritual truths.
And truth is hard enough to bear. And certain truths are never born at all.
I liked it
3/5 Goodreads
4/5 Amazon
I'm a fan of Flannery O'Connor's from way back. She was one of my first and major influences. Having said that, I can also say that, with my own two nonfiction books and two novels done (and a third novel in its final edits), her style does not impress me as much as it did when I first started writing seriously 30 years ago. I am still impressed with her, though, and learn from her every time I read her fiction, both what to do and what not to do. I tell you that to tell you this:
This volume of her letters is likely to be of interest only to Flannery O'Connor fans. Cursory readers can let this pass.
These letters provide some insight into her writing, but just some. More is filler on her daily life, her visits and letter exchanges with various literary and non-literary people, her limited travels outside Georgia, and her life raising birds of many kinds. A few of the gems I've picked out on her thoughts on writing and God:
You write what you can.
God rescues us from ourselves if we want Him to.
The mind serves best when it's anchored in the word of God.
The novel is an art form and when you use it for anything other than art, you pervert it.
Fiction doesn't lie, but it can't tell the whole truth.
If [James] Baldwin were white nobody would stand him a minute.
Trigger Warning: Ms. O'Connor is free with the N-word when she likes to be throughout, and, that last one--boy, I'd like to know what she would have written had she lived to see the early 2000s. Probably it's best she didn't, because she would have had some things to say about certain women and black writers. She is ardent--almost militant--in her Catholicism, which is a real shame, because it binds her to certain religious doctrines, which aren't necessarily spiritual truths.
And truth is hard enough to bear. And certain truths are never born at all.
I liked it
3/5 Goodreads
4/5 Amazon
June 5, 2018
Review of Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond
Title: I see the emperor's new clothes
I came late to the party on this one. I had high hopes. Alas, they are dashed. This book was such a disappointment, on so many levels. I'm glad I'm not alone in this. The other 1-star reviews on Amazon are a treasure trove of reasons *not* to read Guns, Germs, and Steel and also other, better books to read. Four I recommend heartily on similar topics:
Staring into Chaos: Explorations in the Decline of Western Civilization
The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization
A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race, and Human History
Hive Mind: How Your Nation's IQ Matters So Much More Than Your Own
Now for my thoughts on Guns, Germs, and Steel. And, admittedly, I stopped reading at about page 100. I could hardly make it through the Prologue. There Diamond provides the germ (no pun intended) of this book, which has its origins in a simple question posed to the author decades ago by an acquaintance as they were walking on a beach in New Guinea: "Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo [material wealth] and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?"
Diamond immediately dismisses IQ (p. 19), a field of research more than a hundred years old used by governments, businesses, schools, and militaries to great effect (see Hive Mind: How Your Nation’s IQ Matters So Much More Than Your Own, Jones, 2016). In one paragraph Diamond dismisses this entire (and proven) body of research and then spends two pages arguing for native New Guineans genetic superiority over European/American peoples. This is classic denial on Diamond's part. Ignore the science that you don't like; embrace what you do like.
"From the very beginning of my work with New Guineans, they impressed me as being on the average more intelligent, more alert, more expressive, and more interested in things and people around them than the average European or American is" (p. 20). Wow! What a statement! Diamond is using himself as an "N of 1," ignoring thousands of years of history! He continues down his lonesome, illogical path: "It's easy to recognize two reasons why my impression that New Guineans are smarter than Westerners may be correct." This is laughable, but he's serious. So from this nothingness springs Diamond's claim: "...in mental ability New Guineans are probably genetically superior to Westerners" (p. 21). My jaw was on the floor. Absolutely astounding. Here is Diamond's "scientific process" in a nutshell: 1. I'm impressed by X. 2. I'll explain X by what I myself believe. 3. What I just claimed about X must be scientifically true.
It's perfectly acceptable to claim that New Guineans are "genetically superior to Westerners," but don't you dare claim the reverse. Because that would be racist, right?
It's easy to hate white people, and trendy and popular, and Jared Diamond shows us how.
But let's see what other researchers have to say about their experiences in New Guinea.
o "And we've had one corpse float by, a newborn infant; they are always throwing away infants here, as the fathers object to observing the taboos associated with their survival" (Letters From the Field, 1925 - 1975, Margaret Mead, 1977)
o "...infanticide, especially female infanticide, was quite common throughout New Guinea. The Bena Bena, for example, often killed a newborn daughter if the mother already had a small child to care for, and they also typically killed one of a pair of twins." (Child Abuse and Neglect: Cross-cultural Perspectives, edited by Jill E. Korbin, 1982, p. 14)
o "In New Guinea one can find infanticide, initiation rites, child mutilations, sale of infants for both marriage and sacrifice, and forced homosexuality, to name only the more dramatic examples" (ibid, p. 13)
o When tribal mothers were asked why they killed their infants, they stated it was because they were “demon children,” because “children are too much trouble,” because “it was a girl and must be killed,” or “because her husband would go to another woman” for sex if she had to nurse the infant. Children watched their mothers bury their siblings live, eat them, or toss them to sows to devour—or else they would force the grown-up children to help them kill their siblings or even sometimes make them kill live infants purchased for murdering from other tribes. Mothers who ate their children are described as “overcome by frightful hunger for baby meat”—again, not because of lack of food, but because of an inner need to re-incorporate infants after losing them at birth. (The Origins of War in Child Abuse, Lloyd DeMause, Chapter 7)
o "Females in New Guinea are treated brutally. Since they are routinely viewed as secretly being witches “who can kill simply by staring at a person” (Killer Mother alters), they are often killed simply because they are imagined to have poisoned people. Mothers in New Guinea are horribly abused as girls, being routinely raped by fathers, brothers, visitors, peers, gangs. When they become wives they are treated brutally by men and have suicide rates as high as 25 percent." (ibid)
And one more from DeMause's book:
o "New Guinea mothers constantly “rub the penes of their infant sons [and] the little boys…have erections” while they sleep naked together at night. One boy described to Poole how whenever his mother was depressed or angry she often “pulled, pinched, rubbed, or flicked a fingernail against his penis” until he cried, afraid it might break off. “It hurts inside,” he said. “It bleeds in there and hurts when I pee…Mother not like my penis, wants to cut it off.” Males also masturbated and sucked children’s genitals, both sexes, using the child as a maternal breast as all pedophiles do. Mothers also masturbate and kiss the vagina of baby girls. Malinowski reports watching the widespread sucking of genitals and intercourse between children in Melanesia, encouraged by parents, so that most girls are raped by the time they are seven years old.40 New Guinea fathers rarely care for their little children, but when they do they mainly fondle their genitals, using the child as a breast-object “because they say they get sexually aroused when they watch them nurse.”
*This* is the culture and society Diamond states that he *prefers* over Western/American culture/society. What a sick man. That, or he's a liar, or, worse, a charlatan. In any case, Diamond is fooling thousands with his book.
Diamond writes: "Many of the white colonialists openly despised New Guineans as 'primitive.'" Well, that may have something to do with what those Europeans witnessed: child sacrifice, child rape, forced homosexuality, sales of infants, mutilations, cannibalism, etc etc.
What really got me was how Diamond -- a so-called expert in his field -- is *completely* unaware of this previously published research on the absolutely horrific child abuse in New Guinea. But I know about it. No wonder the academic world is in the state it's in. It's a joke, and a bad one at that.
Diamond sums up his book in one sentence: "History followed different courses for different peoples because of differences among peoples' environments, not because of biological differences among peoples themselves" (p. 25).
"Mobile bands of hunter-gatherers are relatively egalitarian..." (p. 29).Wrong. Hobbes was right. Warfare is in mankind's blood. (see Science shows Thomas Hobbes was right – which is why the Right-wing rule the Earth, The Telegraph, September 29, 2016). Also see quotes on New Guinea populations in above cited works.
So even before we're out of this book's Prologue we get a sense of Diamond's biases, scientific research ignorance, and desire to hoodwink his readers. That's a real shame, because he put a lot of effort into this work. But when a reader has to question everything he reads, it's not enjoyable.
This work is an excellent illustration of a man with a conclusion in search of a hypotheses. In other words, Diamond does the opposite of what he claims. He's not letting the evidence lead him where it might; he starts with his conclusion in mind and builds a case to support it. He's working backwards. He's not a scientist at all.
So, to answer Yali's Question: Your society might get ahead if you stop eating and sacrificing your infants, raping your daughters, sexually abusing your sons, selling your infants into slavery and forcing them into homosexual activities, and abusing your women. That'd be a start.
Reading the book
I trudged on.
Diamond uses coy phrasing throughout--Great Leap Forward (no, not the Chinese one where multiple millions of people starved or were executed), uses terms like "colonization" both negatively and positively, as it suits him; and favors Australia/New Guinea in his discourse.
In Chapter 2 in his extraordinarily detailed description of the human colonization of the Polynesian islands, including Hawaii, he fails to mention ritualistic human sacrifice (and cannibalism) as usually practiced for canoe launches, war parties, etc. Diamond mentions gladly the temples on Hawaii but fails to mention human sacrifices practiced there. I wonder why. (Search "Polynesian human sacrifice" and "Polynesian cannibal feasts" for details.)
Chapter 3 reads like some high schooler's breathless explanation of European conquests in the Americas. Surprise! Greater societies conquer lesser societies!
Chapter 4. Wow. Chapter 4 is titled Farmer Power, but halfway through Diamond gets sidetracked with horses (and then germs) and their influence on war. Here's a gem: "The most direct contribution of plant and animal domestication to wars of conquest was from Eurasia's horses, whose military role made them the jeeps and Sherman tanks of ancient warfare on that continent" (p. 86). Wut? I literally laughed out loud. This book won a Pulitzer Prize?
A few pages later:
"The peoples of areas with a head start on food production thereby gained a head start on the path leading toward guns, germs, and steel. The result was a long series of collisions between the haves and the have-nots of history" (p. 99). Was that written by a 10th grader in her Social Sciences class?
I can't take it anymore.
It's difficult for me to understand how a book like this can be so popular, even winning the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction and then also the Aventis Prize for Best Science Book. It's simply discouraging to read (part of) such a poorly written book and know that it's been so successful. But then I sift through hundreds of news feeds and Twitter, and the only thing I can think is that it's trendy to hate white people nowadays, particularly white men, and blame them for every ill in the world.
Remember, when Native Americans were putting up mud walls in half caves in Arizona, when New Guineans were killing their children and raping them, and when Native Hawaiians were sacrificing humans, Europeans were building the cathedral at Notre Dame (all events circa 1100 AD).
Does culture matter? You bet. And it's important to study the differences among cultures and societies to explain those differences. But this isn't the book to do that.
Did not like it
1/5 Goodreads
1/5 Amazon
I came late to the party on this one. I had high hopes. Alas, they are dashed. This book was such a disappointment, on so many levels. I'm glad I'm not alone in this. The other 1-star reviews on Amazon are a treasure trove of reasons *not* to read Guns, Germs, and Steel and also other, better books to read. Four I recommend heartily on similar topics:
Staring into Chaos: Explorations in the Decline of Western Civilization
The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization
A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race, and Human History
Hive Mind: How Your Nation's IQ Matters So Much More Than Your Own
Now for my thoughts on Guns, Germs, and Steel. And, admittedly, I stopped reading at about page 100. I could hardly make it through the Prologue. There Diamond provides the germ (no pun intended) of this book, which has its origins in a simple question posed to the author decades ago by an acquaintance as they were walking on a beach in New Guinea: "Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo [material wealth] and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?"
Diamond immediately dismisses IQ (p. 19), a field of research more than a hundred years old used by governments, businesses, schools, and militaries to great effect (see Hive Mind: How Your Nation’s IQ Matters So Much More Than Your Own, Jones, 2016). In one paragraph Diamond dismisses this entire (and proven) body of research and then spends two pages arguing for native New Guineans genetic superiority over European/American peoples. This is classic denial on Diamond's part. Ignore the science that you don't like; embrace what you do like.
"From the very beginning of my work with New Guineans, they impressed me as being on the average more intelligent, more alert, more expressive, and more interested in things and people around them than the average European or American is" (p. 20). Wow! What a statement! Diamond is using himself as an "N of 1," ignoring thousands of years of history! He continues down his lonesome, illogical path: "It's easy to recognize two reasons why my impression that New Guineans are smarter than Westerners may be correct." This is laughable, but he's serious. So from this nothingness springs Diamond's claim: "...in mental ability New Guineans are probably genetically superior to Westerners" (p. 21). My jaw was on the floor. Absolutely astounding. Here is Diamond's "scientific process" in a nutshell: 1. I'm impressed by X. 2. I'll explain X by what I myself believe. 3. What I just claimed about X must be scientifically true.
It's perfectly acceptable to claim that New Guineans are "genetically superior to Westerners," but don't you dare claim the reverse. Because that would be racist, right?
It's easy to hate white people, and trendy and popular, and Jared Diamond shows us how.
But let's see what other researchers have to say about their experiences in New Guinea.
o "And we've had one corpse float by, a newborn infant; they are always throwing away infants here, as the fathers object to observing the taboos associated with their survival" (Letters From the Field, 1925 - 1975, Margaret Mead, 1977)
o "...infanticide, especially female infanticide, was quite common throughout New Guinea. The Bena Bena, for example, often killed a newborn daughter if the mother already had a small child to care for, and they also typically killed one of a pair of twins." (Child Abuse and Neglect: Cross-cultural Perspectives, edited by Jill E. Korbin, 1982, p. 14)
o "In New Guinea one can find infanticide, initiation rites, child mutilations, sale of infants for both marriage and sacrifice, and forced homosexuality, to name only the more dramatic examples" (ibid, p. 13)
o When tribal mothers were asked why they killed their infants, they stated it was because they were “demon children,” because “children are too much trouble,” because “it was a girl and must be killed,” or “because her husband would go to another woman” for sex if she had to nurse the infant. Children watched their mothers bury their siblings live, eat them, or toss them to sows to devour—or else they would force the grown-up children to help them kill their siblings or even sometimes make them kill live infants purchased for murdering from other tribes. Mothers who ate their children are described as “overcome by frightful hunger for baby meat”—again, not because of lack of food, but because of an inner need to re-incorporate infants after losing them at birth. (The Origins of War in Child Abuse, Lloyd DeMause, Chapter 7)
o "Females in New Guinea are treated brutally. Since they are routinely viewed as secretly being witches “who can kill simply by staring at a person” (Killer Mother alters), they are often killed simply because they are imagined to have poisoned people. Mothers in New Guinea are horribly abused as girls, being routinely raped by fathers, brothers, visitors, peers, gangs. When they become wives they are treated brutally by men and have suicide rates as high as 25 percent." (ibid)
And one more from DeMause's book:
o "New Guinea mothers constantly “rub the penes of their infant sons [and] the little boys…have erections” while they sleep naked together at night. One boy described to Poole how whenever his mother was depressed or angry she often “pulled, pinched, rubbed, or flicked a fingernail against his penis” until he cried, afraid it might break off. “It hurts inside,” he said. “It bleeds in there and hurts when I pee…Mother not like my penis, wants to cut it off.” Males also masturbated and sucked children’s genitals, both sexes, using the child as a maternal breast as all pedophiles do. Mothers also masturbate and kiss the vagina of baby girls. Malinowski reports watching the widespread sucking of genitals and intercourse between children in Melanesia, encouraged by parents, so that most girls are raped by the time they are seven years old.40 New Guinea fathers rarely care for their little children, but when they do they mainly fondle their genitals, using the child as a breast-object “because they say they get sexually aroused when they watch them nurse.”
*This* is the culture and society Diamond states that he *prefers* over Western/American culture/society. What a sick man. That, or he's a liar, or, worse, a charlatan. In any case, Diamond is fooling thousands with his book.
Diamond writes: "Many of the white colonialists openly despised New Guineans as 'primitive.'" Well, that may have something to do with what those Europeans witnessed: child sacrifice, child rape, forced homosexuality, sales of infants, mutilations, cannibalism, etc etc.
What really got me was how Diamond -- a so-called expert in his field -- is *completely* unaware of this previously published research on the absolutely horrific child abuse in New Guinea. But I know about it. No wonder the academic world is in the state it's in. It's a joke, and a bad one at that.
Diamond sums up his book in one sentence: "History followed different courses for different peoples because of differences among peoples' environments, not because of biological differences among peoples themselves" (p. 25).
"Mobile bands of hunter-gatherers are relatively egalitarian..." (p. 29).Wrong. Hobbes was right. Warfare is in mankind's blood. (see Science shows Thomas Hobbes was right – which is why the Right-wing rule the Earth, The Telegraph, September 29, 2016). Also see quotes on New Guinea populations in above cited works.
So even before we're out of this book's Prologue we get a sense of Diamond's biases, scientific research ignorance, and desire to hoodwink his readers. That's a real shame, because he put a lot of effort into this work. But when a reader has to question everything he reads, it's not enjoyable.
This work is an excellent illustration of a man with a conclusion in search of a hypotheses. In other words, Diamond does the opposite of what he claims. He's not letting the evidence lead him where it might; he starts with his conclusion in mind and builds a case to support it. He's working backwards. He's not a scientist at all.
So, to answer Yali's Question: Your society might get ahead if you stop eating and sacrificing your infants, raping your daughters, sexually abusing your sons, selling your infants into slavery and forcing them into homosexual activities, and abusing your women. That'd be a start.
Reading the book
I trudged on.
Diamond uses coy phrasing throughout--Great Leap Forward (no, not the Chinese one where multiple millions of people starved or were executed), uses terms like "colonization" both negatively and positively, as it suits him; and favors Australia/New Guinea in his discourse.
In Chapter 2 in his extraordinarily detailed description of the human colonization of the Polynesian islands, including Hawaii, he fails to mention ritualistic human sacrifice (and cannibalism) as usually practiced for canoe launches, war parties, etc. Diamond mentions gladly the temples on Hawaii but fails to mention human sacrifices practiced there. I wonder why. (Search "Polynesian human sacrifice" and "Polynesian cannibal feasts" for details.)
Chapter 3 reads like some high schooler's breathless explanation of European conquests in the Americas. Surprise! Greater societies conquer lesser societies!
Chapter 4. Wow. Chapter 4 is titled Farmer Power, but halfway through Diamond gets sidetracked with horses (and then germs) and their influence on war. Here's a gem: "The most direct contribution of plant and animal domestication to wars of conquest was from Eurasia's horses, whose military role made them the jeeps and Sherman tanks of ancient warfare on that continent" (p. 86). Wut? I literally laughed out loud. This book won a Pulitzer Prize?
A few pages later:
"The peoples of areas with a head start on food production thereby gained a head start on the path leading toward guns, germs, and steel. The result was a long series of collisions between the haves and the have-nots of history" (p. 99). Was that written by a 10th grader in her Social Sciences class?
I can't take it anymore.
It's difficult for me to understand how a book like this can be so popular, even winning the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction and then also the Aventis Prize for Best Science Book. It's simply discouraging to read (part of) such a poorly written book and know that it's been so successful. But then I sift through hundreds of news feeds and Twitter, and the only thing I can think is that it's trendy to hate white people nowadays, particularly white men, and blame them for every ill in the world.
Remember, when Native Americans were putting up mud walls in half caves in Arizona, when New Guineans were killing their children and raping them, and when Native Hawaiians were sacrificing humans, Europeans were building the cathedral at Notre Dame (all events circa 1100 AD).
Does culture matter? You bet. And it's important to study the differences among cultures and societies to explain those differences. But this isn't the book to do that.
Did not like it
1/5 Goodreads
1/5 Amazon
April 16, 2018
Review of The Fall of Rome by Bryan Ward-Perkins
Part of my reason to read this book was to see if there were any parallels in the fall of Rome to what's happening today in the West. Turns out, plenty, if you care to look.
I loved it/It was amazing
5/5 Goodreads
5/5 Amazon
Further Reading
o The Decline and Fall of Europe (and maybe the West), Time, August 22, 2011
o The New Europeans, National Geographic, September 28, 2016
I loved it/It was amazing
5/5 Goodreads
5/5 Amazon
Further Reading
o The Decline and Fall of Europe (and maybe the West), Time, August 22, 2011
o The New Europeans, National Geographic, September 28, 2016
March 27, 2018
Review of The Dwarf by Par Lagerkvist
Title: Queer story about a queer character
I'm appropriating the term "queer" and applying it to this odd-strange-wonderful story about a court dwarf serving an Italian Renaissance-era prince. I don't usually like reading novels or poetry in translation because so much of the author's intentions are lost, but I was drawn to this novel because 1. Lagerkvist won the 1951 Nobel Prize for Literature and 2. this is widely considered to be his greatest novel.
There's not much of an arc of narrative, this is more a "things happen" novel. The prose style is simple and direct, so it reads almost like a children's book, or a modern Aesop's fable.
Evil is its theme, both played out in reality in the novel and within the human heart--although the dwarf (Piccoline) points out that he is "from a race older than that which now populates the world." Lagerkvist skillfully uses the first person narrative to explore Piccoline's self-hatred and hatred for humankind. He is evil, and he seems to only delight in that. (He's not the "most evil" character written in fiction; I'll give that award to the judge in Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian.)
Read for a glimpse into a heart of darkness, if you want.
I really liked it
4/5 Goodreads
4/5 Amazon
I'm appropriating the term "queer" and applying it to this odd-strange-wonderful story about a court dwarf serving an Italian Renaissance-era prince. I don't usually like reading novels or poetry in translation because so much of the author's intentions are lost, but I was drawn to this novel because 1. Lagerkvist won the 1951 Nobel Prize for Literature and 2. this is widely considered to be his greatest novel.
There's not much of an arc of narrative, this is more a "things happen" novel. The prose style is simple and direct, so it reads almost like a children's book, or a modern Aesop's fable.
Evil is its theme, both played out in reality in the novel and within the human heart--although the dwarf (Piccoline) points out that he is "from a race older than that which now populates the world." Lagerkvist skillfully uses the first person narrative to explore Piccoline's self-hatred and hatred for humankind. He is evil, and he seems to only delight in that. (He's not the "most evil" character written in fiction; I'll give that award to the judge in Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian.)
Read for a glimpse into a heart of darkness, if you want.
I really liked it
4/5 Goodreads
4/5 Amazon
