Warwick Stubbs > Recent Status Updates

"I have experienced nearly all these birds simply as an armchair naturalist, but it has been a revelatory journey and definitely more exciting than exploring my own family tree."

"Arkwright's [attraction to the factory system] was not just that spinning by machine was faster, but that a person had to continue working without rest as long as the machine was running. The machine was thus a medium through which managers and supervisors could control the worker."
- p.187, Chapter 7

The tone seems right - love for the subject; the subject is interesting - I ♥️ mushrooms; yet this book just isn't grabbing me! Sheldrake isn't really a 'writer', just an enthusiast who wants tell you about what he loves, but the narrative isn't settled, and doesn't feel like it has a clear direction. I keep opening to random sections and start reading anew, intensely interested, but that interest soon wanes...

"A far more influential work [than Da Vinci's drawings] was a book published in 1588 by Agostino Ramelli. Among nearly 200 illustrations of machines, more than half showed pumps - many have a certain science fiction quality. ... Some anticipated the rotary pump that would only become practicable in the 19th century."

I can see why a scriptwriter would reinvent this entire story. Stevenson tells the bulk of it from the perspective of Dr. Jekyll's lawyer Mr. Utterson - a completely uninteresting character - and attempts to set up a mystery around the Hyde character. Maybe it worked back then, but since we all know the legend, which, updated uses the mad scientist Jekyll as the main perspective, there's no surprises (or horror!).

"... invention depends on the exercise of imagination. Idealism is important in the history of technology partly because ideals are often a more effective trigger to the imagination then are economic incentives."

"The different directions progress took [during the 1200s] led to innovation that was useful in economic terms. But sometimes as in the monasteries the usefulness of an invention was spiritual, while among the cathedral builders technical progress took a direction which had no practical purpose at all and was of no use to anyone. The technical effort that went into the cathedral had immense symbolic importance."

"Progress is a misleading word to use about technology, because it implies steady advance toward a single, universally accepted goal. In fact, the direction of technical progress has varied in the past. The choice of direction is always open, not least in the 20th century, and it is important to appreciate the full range of options that are available."

And so ends Part 1. Muslims are challenging Christianity, and the Mediterranean is now Saracen seas - the world was no longer so freely able to be travelled with competing religions; monks are hanging out on distant islands and Bede determines that we are all now living in A.D. - the world of Post-Jesus (should really have called it that, then we could all say 2023 PJs...)

I'm not confident I'm going to finish this book. Lots of interesting historical events, but mostly glossed over too quickly. It might be worth looking at thee bibliography and picking out some books on topics I was interested in but didn't get enough of in this volume...

Chapter 4: Belief (AD 177, Lyon) introduces Irenaeus and Origen, two early Christian philosophers who helped shape the universality of Christ's teachings.

...and Constantine came to unify his people under one religious belief, not under rituals.

Unfortunately, instead of Christians being persecuted and murdered by the cartload, it's now the Christians doing all the murdering...

Chapter 3, 'Galatia', Holland skips Jesus himself and goes straight to Paul as he turns from Jewish scholar to Christ's devotee, wrestles with the legacy of Moses against the revelation of Christ, and sets the stage for the future: "hope from despair, reconciliation from betrayal, healing from trauma."

We also get to see how sick Nero was.

33 pages doesn't seem that long, but Holland overstresses so much of the history surrounding events described by the Bible that Part 2 'Jerusalem' became an exercise in speed reading. BC 63 the Torah starts to dominate as all other gods stand off to the side and make way for the one and only true God. Moses features strongly, as you would expect he would.

Chapter 1, 'Athens', feels a bit too long. Holland takes pains to set the scene of a world controlled through violence and the day to day life of heroes bumping shoulders with gods. We know most of this already (especially if we have read Holland's previous books 'Persion Fire' and 'Rubicon'). A slightly more succinct first chapter would have made an easier and more memorable transition into the next, 'Jerusalem'.

"some will say that by injecting a science fictional element, I'm trivializing the true Central American condition. But that's not the case. ... the slaughters, the mass graves, smoldering corpses, rape and torture, all thoroughly documented and all thoroughly ignored, this was merely a part of that, a minor adagio in a symphony of pain, the carrying forward of a diseased tradition."

At times Shepard uses the technique of backstory info dumps to explain a character's current state of mind. And I don't care.

At times Shepard uses the technique of backstory info dumps to explain a character's current state of mind. And I don't care.

Gnostics were more concerned with exiting from history than they were of leaving a record of themselves. Those who are determined to overcome the world are not the people of history; there's is more likely to be a shadow, containing a few faint traces of their tenuous presence. (Stephen Hoeller)

Good, interesting ideas, but too many words. Too much explanation of feelings and motivations that slow the plot down. 'Bound for Glory' is a great story, but shorter, more compact storytelling, would have made the story much more impactful. As it was for its 30 page length, I often found myself thinking about something else...

Prologue Completed

The word 'admiral' is derived from the Arabic "emir al-bahr" - 'Lord of the Sea'. It comes down to us directly from Norman Sicily, where the title was first used.