January 2010

  • Jared Diamond, "Guns, Germs and Steel"

    By erika on 1/25/10 6:17pm
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    Jared Diamond's book won the Pulitzer Prize, among many others, and has even been made into a PBS documentary.  Diamond managed to tackle a thorny issue head on, with a remarkable tact.  At the same time, it's a chicken and egg sort of debate, and it all comes down to "why we won," whereas a lot of people question that we really did win.

    Guns, Germs and Steel refutes any racial theories of why Western civilization thrived and took over the globe, whereas cultures from continents like Africa and the Americas didn't fare so well in the cultural arms race of the last 13,000 years.  Although I found long passages of the book to be extremely dry (I admit, I did some skimming) overall Diamond's writing and premise are gripping and informative.


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  • Security

    By akgoemans on 1/19/10 10:09am
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    SecuritySecurity

    The trouble with science fiction novels about dystopian worlds is their overall message that this type of end is inescapable. Admittedly, a lot of books have a more cheerful end-note whereby a group of people will set the stage for a new way of life. Having said that, I also noticed that while those are great reads in their own right, the truly good books are ones that tackle this topic with the view that dystopia, in one form or another, is unavoidable. Poul Anderson's Security falls into this category.


    In this short story, the author describes a bleak world where a nanny state pretends to be a democratic one, where the government watches over every move of its citizens.

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