This book is easy to read and provides a nice summary of evolution theory, with lots of interesting examples. Again, the big idea is that the earth is REALLY OLD. Yes, I know that sounds trite, but it's only with the acceptance of the concept of millions and millions of years slowly grinding by that one can truly be convinced that evolution has time to work. Otherwise, how do we explain the cicadas in Augusta Georgia (the site of the golfing Masters tournament) that only come out of the ground to mate every 17 years -- a prime number that ensures that predators can't match their breeding cycle. Dawkins does go fairly hard after the creationists, so there's a political edge to this book. But the science and examples in it make it worth reading.

I picked up this book at a garage sale and didn't know what to expect. At the start it's the story of a Harvard student from the higher ranks of society of that day, who takes a job as a common seaman on a sailing ship bound for the west coast of North America. Later on it became fascinating to read his descriptions of the coast of California, which at that time (about 1835) was VERY lightly inhabited and had yet to be won from Mexico in war. There basically isn't a San Francisco or San Diego. It turns out that the gold rush of 1849 (after which the San Francisco 49ers are named) completely transformed the area and cities grew up in a period of 20 years. The author, who after his two year trip returned to Harvard, became a successful lawyer in Boston, and took his place in that society, became famous as the first person to describe the "old" California. In the epilogue he returns to California 24 years later and is shocked to see the changes that have occurred in that short a time. This book is actually a classic and makes a very interesting read.

This book fits into the genre of society and ecology, and is somewhat similar to Diamond's book "Collapse". The premise is "what would happen to the world and its ecology if humans suddenly disappeared". The answer is generally good things, with the exception that some environmental issues and pollution are so severe that it would take hundreds of thousands of years for them to recede. At the end he mentions a society interested in voluntary self-euthanasia, something like "we should all agree that there will be no more human babies, and things will get really good for a hundred years, and then we'll all be gone". Also, Weisman makes a brief argument that all families should be restricted to one child as a way to reduce population pressures, which are the fundamental reason why resources are being overused and therefore other species driven to extinction.

Diamond examines several cultures that have collapsed and shows why. I found the chapter on Easter Island the most interesting, followed by Pitcairn Island as I didn't know there were inhabitants there before the "Mutiny on the Bounty" group arrived to hide out. The chapter on current Australia is also interesting and makes the point that the government's plan to keep adding population is not sustainable in the long run. I recall that a geographer once estimated the long-term maximum population of Australia at 14 million and was roundly denounced and castigated for his views. There are some examples of societies that have managed to succeed in the longer run, like Japanese forestry management by the Shoguns, so the message is meant to be positive, that we can get out of the environmental mess we are in.

This is the Barnes & Noble paperback edition of the original 1845 work originally titled "Journal of Researches into the Natural History and Geology of the countries visited during the voyage round the world of H.M.S. Beagle" (second edition). The work is a precursor to the 1859 "The Origin of Species" by Charles Darwin, with the most important idea being that evolution of species occurs as individual variations are selected for in a particular environment (or ecological niche) and they leave more offspring. In the Voyage of the Beagle (from 1831 to 1836) we see glimpses of Darwin's thoughts being formed on ecological survival. The book is also a fascinating look at South America of the time, the native peoples and the Spanish, and the way of life of an English gentleman. It is a slow read and very enjoyable. I found interesting that Darwin had no theory of germs. He writes of the mystery of a ship 160 miles off the coast of Africa and sailors onboard getting the plague that was then raging on land. My guess is that mosquitoes were carried to the ship by a storm, but in Darwin's time no one knew that connection. He also is unconcerned when bitten by fleas, whereas a traveller of today would worry about disease transmission. Unfortunately Darwin suffered from Chagas' disease in later life, which is transmitted by ticks, and which he likely picked up on his travels. Darwin knows that aboriginal inhabitants often die on contact with Europeans, but he only knows it is a puzzling fact, not the mechanisms. Darwin makes many points about geology and the movement of the earth, and on the formation of coral reefs (Australia's Great Barrier Reef used to be just offshore and is now out to sea because the continent of Australia has subsided, or sunk, into the ocean). The 1889 illustrated edition of the Voyage of the Beagle is online at: http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/d/d22v/

Darwin's book "On the distribution of coral reefs" is a fuller treatment of reef creation than the chapter given in the "Voyage of the Beagle". Darwin almost but didn't quite get to the idea of continental drift. I feel that the key to this book and "The Origin of Species" was Darwin's understanding of the immense time the earth has been in existence and how slow processes of change can accumulate to large results. We accept the earth's age today as in the billions of years, but not too long ago people generally thought the earth was 5000 years old, a time far too short to allow for gradual processes of geology or evolution. Darwin disputes the importance of catastrophes in extinctions and instead prefers the idea of slow changes, a species gradually becoming rare, then extinction, often because of competition by the descendents of the very species just suffering extinction. Darwin speculates that the "races" of humankind have been formed by variation from an original stock and that sexual selection may have been partly causal of the "races" that we see in the world today.

This is a nice companion to 1997's "Guns, Germs, and Steel" by Jared Diamond. The first edition was 1986 so it preceded Diamond's more well-known book by a few years. It makes the basic point that Europe/Asia is oriented East/West which allows the easy spread of plants and animals across similar climatic zones, whereas North/South America is oriented North/South and it was difficult to move plants and animals across widely different climatic zones and the bottleneck isthmus to reach the equivalent zone in the other hemisphere. Therefore when Europeans set out to other lands they took their foods and animals and have been successful in the types of climates where these animals and plants originated, e.g. Argentina, Australia, North America, and so on.

This is a nice companion to "Genome" by Matt Ridley and "Guns, Germs, and Steel" by Jared Diamond. Wells presents in clear writing the biological and anthropological evidence for the movements of humankind as they moved out of Africa and populated the rest of the world. It's a nice summary but I'd like to see the PBS 2-hour program (The Journey of Man DVD is available from www.shoppbs.org) to see the maps and animated arrows tracing population movements.

This is a great book about team building, motivation, and leadership. The high school De La Salle Spartans of Concord California have now won (as of April 2004) 151 consecutive football games. They have not been defeated since 1992. The key point is that while they players change every year, and change totally every four years, the coaching staff headed by Bob Ladouceur and Terry Eidson remain constant. They focus on the team, on building relationships between the players, and on demanding the players set difficult goals and publicly commit to them. There is a short article on the team in the October 2003 issue of Fast Company, a business magazine (http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/75/soul.html). This book follows the team through its 2002 season, but I suspect that the 2003 year was similar (see the team's website at http://www.delasallesports.com/Teams/Football/football.html). 

The last in her series of six big books on Rome of Julius Caesar's time. The first five were "The First Man in Rome", "The Grass Crown", "Fortune's Favorites", "Caesar's Women", and "Caesar: A Novel". These books as a whole give a fascinating and true-to-life look at the events, people, and values of the ancient Roman civilization. After learning about Greece it is a must to carry on to Rome. Sometimes the number of characters and the events get muddled in my mind, and the names of the people are hard to remember. 

This is the follow-on book to Pressfield's fabulous "Gates of Fire". And now in 2003 his new book "Last of the Amazons" has been published. Tides of war is about the Peloponnesian War between Sparta and Athens that lasted 27 years. It's good, but more the standard war action thriller than philosophy about democracy. It's actually more about the dark side of democracy whereas "Gates of Fire" was about the bright side. I was reminded of the Winston Churchill quote that goes something like "No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” A book covering the same time period and cast of characters is "Goat Song" by Frank Yerby, published in 1967.

This was a good book in my search for understanding of the extinction of the dinosaurs. In the early parts the author makes a convincing case that the cause was NOT an asteroid impact, then perplexingly changes his mind at the end of the book. I found this unconvincing and prefer the explanations offered by Charles Officer and Jake Page (see the review below) in The Great Dinosaur Extinction Controversy (1996). However, on page 262 there is a great analogy to help us understand species, genus, and families. "Let us imagine that each car model currently driving around today is a species, and each company it came from a genus. All belong to one family, Cars. Other families are on the roads as well: Trucks, Motorcycles, Roadgraders, Ambulances, and so on. All of these families first evolved around the turn of the century, and all can be placed into even a higher category, the order Combustion Engine Vehicle. Since the origin of the family Cars, the number of species has proliferated enormously; where the genus Ford once had only two species, the Model T and the Model A, it now has the Taurus, Probe, Escort, Thunderbird, Tempo, Mustand, and so on, as well as many extinct species: the Galaxy, Fairlane, Pinto, Edsel, and so on." 

This is the third volume in Boorstin's trilogy of "The Discoverers" (see below) and "The Creators" (see below). This one is about thinkers and philosophers and I found it less interesting, for me, than the Discoverers, which was more about action and consequences.

Another book recommended by Hugh Hewitt in his book "In, But Not Of", here we have the central idea that before the Jewish people and their idea of one God, people living on the earth believed that their destiny was controlled by a multitude of gods, who the sought to appease or control by offering various gifts or sacrifices. Instead, the one God provided free will and the sense that what one did mattered. There came to be the concept of a past and therefore a present that affected what the future would be like. The future was not foreordained or circular, the idea that everything had happened before and would happen again, so life was essentially pointless. There are interesting discussions about how the bible came to be written and how it can be interpreted differently.

This was an absolutely outstanding book. It was recommended by Hugh Hewitt in his book "In, But Not Of (2003)". Hewitt's point is that people of the Western World should know our history, and the history of the Greeks and in particular the Spartans is of central importance. Gates of Fire is mostly about the battle at the pass of Thermopylae where 300 Spartans and their Hellene allies fought the invasion of the Persian King Xerxes in 480 B.C. But the book is more about the foundations of democracy, of freedom, and of the necessity to fight for it and for some to die in its defense. The Persian King offers Leonidas, the king of the Spartans, honour and riches to submit his people to the will of Xerxes, but Leonidas values freedom too much to submit. From page 413: "A king does not expend his substance to enslave men, but by his conduct and example makes them free. ... I set down my life with gladness, and would do it again a hundred times, for Leonidas, ... for my own mother and father, my wife and children. I and every man there (at Thermopylae) were never more free than when we gave freely obedience to those harsh laws which take life and give it back again." The 300 Spartans refused to leave the pass and all died. Their monument says "Tell the Spartans, stranger passing by, that here obedient to their laws we lie." This still gives me chills when I read it. Next time you see a local high school sports team called "The Spartans", think about the original Spartans and what they stood for. It turns out that their military system of life and fighting methods could not remain dominant and they were eventually defeated by the Athenians and then the Romans. But they left an enduring legacy of the value of freedom and the cost of maintaining it.

This book is well worth reading. The main argument is that differences in population concentrations and geography can explain why the Spanish invaded and conquered the Americas rather than the Incas invading Spain. The answer is, of course, guns, germs, and steel. The most interesting part is the argument that it was the east-west orientation of the Asia-Europe landmass that led to easy transfer of new crops, domestic animals, and inventions, which in turn led to denser populations and therefore diseases. The North and South Americas have a north-south orientation which meant that crop discoveries couldn't and didn't travel (a crop that grows well in a temperate climate in North America can't travel down into South America where there is another temperate climate because of all the other societies and geographic barriers and tropical climates in the way). Potato, for example, originated in South America but didn't travel to North America because people couldn't travel across different climatic zones with it. The result of these basic forces and conditions was that Europeans invented large ocean-going ships, guns, and steel, and brought with them horses and germs, so that when they came upon North and South America the indigenous peoples could not effectively fight either their germs (having never been exposed) or their tools for war. An interesting side note is that we live in a time when the foods we eat come from all over the world, from all kinds of climatic zones. This was not the case for most of human history so population densities were very much a function of the local food supplies.

This was a nice book covering the major theories of how the dinosaurs and other species went extinct 65 million years ago, but other species didn't. It also serves as a cautionary tale to the reader of popular science magazines, which, after all, are in the business of selling copies by reporting on fantastic and spectacular ideas and "findings". The more humble and boring science that follows and debunks these big hits is published in the regular science journals and is therefore never seen by the vast majority of the public. The theory that a huge asteroid/meteor impact and/or cometary impacts caused the dinousaur demise is shown to be unlikely and unnecessary to explain the extinction. The huge crater supposedly found in the Yucutan is most probably not there. And one that I still believed, they show that the idea that the earth goes through an asteroid belt every 26 million years, and therefore there are periodic extinctions of this time line, is false. I particularly liked their use of Imre Lakatos' point that "In a progressive research programme, theory leads to the discovery of hitherto unknown novel facts. In degenerating programmes, however, theories are fabricated only in order to accommodate known facts." Their point is that the asteroid impact theory is degenerative theory. I've seen this with reinforcement theory in the 1970s, where the theory got progressively complex and elaborated in its (losing) fight against cognitivism. Occam's razor also bears here -- one can choose between two theories that explain the data equally well by choosing the simpler theory.

A little book that can be read in an afternoon, it's a history of the development of chronometers to accurately keep time at sea and therefore allow mariners to determine where they are. There's also a bit on the use of the moon, stars and planets to determine position. It's interesting, but light. 

An interesting book on Darwin and evolution, I particularly liked the explanation on page 247 of why certain cicadas (like grasshoppers or locusts) emerge after 17 years underground to breed. I read this just as the 2004 Master's Golf Tournament was being played in Augusta Georgia, and the cicadas were out. "By having a large prime number of years between appearances, the cicadas minimize the likelihood of being discovered and later tracked as a predictable feast by predators who themselves show up every two years, or three years, or five years. If the cicadas had a periodicity of, say, sixteen years, then they would be a rare treat for predators who showed up every year, but a more reliable source of food for predators who showed up every two or four years, and an even-money gamble for predators that got in phase with them on an eight-year schedule. If their period is not a multiple of any lower number, however, they are a rare treat -- not worth 'trying' to track -- for any species that isn't lucky enough to have exactly their periodicity." And some kids in school say that prime numbers are important!

This is a short book on education theory that I found matched well with my own developed theory. It is based on Karl Popper's idea of "evolutionary epistemology", that how we know (epistemology) is by the competition of ideas with only the fittest surviving (Darwin's evolutionary theory). The title is a bit misleading, in that when I read the title without reading the book I thought the book would be about teachers who, in a bad way, didn't have goals for their students, and students who lacked purpose or motivation. But the title should be read as teachers who have an agenda to bring forward material for the critical consideration of their students and not a goal of what those students will learn. Likewise, the student does not have the purpose of assimilating a body of knowledge but in finding out what gaps there are in what they now know and filling those in with material that makes sense to him/her.

This one is pretty dense and has a strong dose of philosophy. The premise is that the world has tried a variety of political systems but since the fall of the Berlin wall has settled on liberal democracy as the only one that works. Thus we have the "end of history" in the sense that we have come to the end of the trials of what works. History of course, as events, will continue. These ideas are foundational for Friedman's "Lexus and the Olive Tree" about globalization, that openness of economic systems around the world allows poor countries, with no more resources than a hard working population, to enter into the global economy and succeed in raising the living standards of their people. The corresponding point is that to enter the global economy only a liberal democracy will do, and that as people in poor and isolated countries come to see how others around the world live (via computers, television, and so on), they become motivated to live that way too, which causes the push for their political system to change to allow their integration into the global economy and government systems. As for the last man, modern man is the last man as he has been jaded by the experience of history (p. 306). "The last man at the end of history knows better than to risk his life for a cause, because he recognizes that history was full of pointless battles in which men fought over whether they should be Christian or Muslim, Protestant or Catholic, German or French. The loyalties that drove men to desperate acts of courage and sacrifice were proven by subsequent history to be silly prejudices. Men with modern educations are content to sit at home, congratulating themselves on their broadmindedness and lack of fanaticism."

You may know the motion picture or the A&E biography episode on Oskar Schindler more than the book. I liked the biography episode the best as it captures the main points of the book while adding visual interest from archival still photographs. And it's only 50 minutes long! But the book adds lots of smaller detail that answers some questions left hanging. I'd have liked more information on what happened to Schindler after the war.

This is the second book in Boorstin's trilogy "The Discovers" (see below), "The Seekers" (see above). This one is about artists and writers and I haven't been able to get through the whole book. Of the three I liked the Discoverers the best as it was about explorers and I guess that interests me the most.

This is really a history book that makes the point that who is going to win a war is determined by the strengths of their respective economies. A good example is the U.S. civil war of 1861 to 1865. Kennedy shows in a few short pages how the South, even though they were willing and courageous, had to lose to the larger and more economically powerful North. He points out that the North was encouraging immigration at this time and I recalled a scene from the movie "Gangs of New York" that showed Irish immigrants getting off the boat and being immediately inducted into the Northern army and sent off to fight. Kennedy's overarching point is that a strong economy means a strong military capability and therefore a "rise" in that nation's overall power. The ideas about globalization are foundational for Friedman's book "The Lexus and the Olive Tree". The book is long but the first half was especially interesting and provides short histories of well known wars.

Having been to Australia, I loved this book about its founding. This is history at its finest. It is rich and detailed and is the full-meal deal. It leaves you fulfilled with a sense that having read the book, you now really know the early history of Australia and what it was like for the settlers and the aboriginals.

A fantastic general history book about how humankind has explored and sought knowledge. Full of interesting facts and stories. Some perplexing problems are explained, such as why the Chinese didn't explore the world for themselves when they could.

I just finished this book in March 2004. It's set in Dahomea Africa in the mid-1800's. This country is now Benin, which is on the south-west African coast, in-between Togo and Nigeria. The hero of the story is the son of a local village chief and general in the king's army. The story follows his life in his society, and is based on the Melville Herskovits' anthropology (1967). It's a fascinating look at the culture that was tightly tied to the slave trade, selling them to European middlemen in order to obtain guns and other manufactured goods. The society is complex and has multiple gods, the source of the Voodoo religion. The hero of the story is himself sold into slavery at the end of the book, but this isn't a "Roots" type of story (by Alex Haley). Roots was published in 1977 and became a cultural tidal wave when the TV mini-series was made of the history of Kunta Kinte, taken in the slave trade, and his ancestors who lived and still live in America. The Dahomean is more about the African culture the hero is from and not at all about what happens to him when he is captured and sent to America.

At the author's website (http://www.thefiredrake.com/), Cecelia sums up this book as: "The Mongols storm across Russia and into Europe in the 13th Century". But this just doesn't do the book justice. The year is 1237 and the author has given us a look inside the people we call the Mongols, who saw their mission as making the whole world Mongol. Here they gather their troops and ride into Russia, sweeping all before them. They make it to Vienna and might have gone on but the death of their leader back in their home grounds calls them back. I really enjoyed this book and recommend it highly. However, it was confusing for me at the start -- just who are all these people? I had to re-read the first 150 pages once I was done to figure it all out. The part I liked the best was on page 316: "Everywhere we go we fight a tribe that has been fighting another tribe for generations, east, west, north, south, that we shall have to fight. Each tribe had its own circle of wars, enemies, friends, land to graze, hills to hunt in, forests for hiding: each of them thought its small circle the center of God's purpose and was surprised to find things happened, far away, beyond their knowledge, that mattered more to them than the quiet events within their own horizons." The things happening far away in this case are the election of Temujin as leader of the Mongols and his program of expansion. But this is an excellent description of GLOBALIZATION, that things happening far away, that you've never heard of or thought of, are more important to you than normal events around you that seem so important.

Set in the mid 800's, this is a story of the conflict between Jewish, Christian, and Muslim cultures in medieval Spain. The Arab empire has expanded to its high-water mark and Christians are about to begin the reconquest of Spain. The hero of the book moves among the cultures and allows us to see the strengths and weaknesses of each. The language is complex but worth working through.

Although this book was published in 1952 I just found it over the 2003 Christmas holiday break while looking through bookcases in the house. It starts slowly and is in a small print, which was hard to read, but it gets better and better as you go on. Seemingly a love story, the book is really a history of the medieval period of 1194 to 1250 in and around what is now Sicily. There is a very good treatment of the crusades and Yerby's point is that they are best thought of as the last of the barbarian invasions, only this time it is the Europeans who are the barbarians and it's the civilized Saracens that are being invaded. This book is medium in difficulty, not a history in the "here's a date and here's what happened" sense, but gives a great sense of what it must have been like to have lived in that time. Frank Yerby wrote a large number of novels and is an author worth exploring.