Monday 27 October 2014

The Price of Inequality, by Joseph Stiglitz


This book is part of my current attempt to understand at least a bit about economy. In the last few months I was watching a few lectures, or public speeches made by this guy, Joseph Stiglitz, which by the way won a Nobel prize on economy a couple of years ago. I was getting really impressed because although he is a famous economist, he does speak as if he is a normal human being. You know what I mean, he doesn't talk as usually economists do, like pretending they own a kind of superior knowledge that is not questionable in any ways and that we normal human beings must simply listen to them and accept their trues. The guy is a Nobel prize winner and does not do that. And being an economist. That really impressed me. Because of that I liked him from the beginning. But, anyway! I know my decision to read his book and to learn from his talks is a bit biased, from a leftist point of view of course, although not that much, because even though Stiglitz is very aligned with anti-capitalist movements, or at least with anti-establishment movements such as the occupy wall-street, he is not, as far as I understand, any kind of Marxist or so. Anyway, in this book, as the title says, his main point is to properly understand the problems that inequality brings to society, not only economically, but also politically and mainly socially. He does write it in a very simple language, and also does clarify little by little every point he tries to make on the book. So you don't need to know a lot of economy to follow it. He explains things very well. Although in a way the book is only about one subject, inequality, there is a lot of stuff there. He talks a lot on the mechanisms that create or enhance inequality, sometimes very unethical ones, especially showing how dirty politics is sometimes absolutely necessary to maintain certain elements of the inequality puzzle. Since he is american, he uses mainly examples from United States, but not only. He does sometimes refers to European, South american and Asian economies and politics. Yes, that is one thing about him. Although he is an economist, he even makes very clear right from the beginning of the book that he is and always was very interested in the relations between economy and politics. So there is a lot about that everywhere in his book. What more? Well, he obviously describes in detail the bad consequences that high social and economic inequality brings to a country and in the end of the book, on the last chapter, gives suggestions on how to treat, or at least try to treat, the issue. He is not naive and idealist about what he proposes. He is very honest and realist about the difficulties and limitations that that policies he suggest might face. But still... that's pretty much it I think. I'm sorry I can't get in to much detail about his economic views, I am not that knowledgeable on economy to do so properly. If you are interest simply read the book. I think its worth it a go. 

Saturday 9 August 2014

Particle Physics - A Very Short Introduction by Frank Close


As a good physicist, I definitely should one day talk a bit about it here. I've talked a bit about science already in this blog, but never about my beloved physics. So here it goes. I actually just finished reading this book, called Particle Physics - A Very Short Introduction, which was written by a British physicist called Frank Close, and the book is indeed what it says it is: A very short introduction to particle physics. I've decide to read it mainly because I like Frank's books very much. Well, this was only the second book I've read from him, but the thing is that I was very impressed by the first book I read from him a couple of years ago about antimatter, which is definitely still one of the best scientific books I've read so far. I don't read scientific books as often as I read some other stuff, but I do read them with certain frequency (possibly 3 or 4 each year on average) and I have two favorite authors that I like very much, which are Frank Close and Brian Greene. Well, Brian Green might be a bit better I would say. His books are more full of details and do go much deeper into stuff usually. But Frank does a very good job also. His books are not very very deep, but they do work very well as introductions. As very good introductions. I simply like the fact that when I read him I immediately get the impression that he not simply knows what he is saying, but he knows exactly how to explain it very well. The explanations he makes about complicated issues does satisfy me a lot, because in the end I really understand and get precisely the message he is trying to say. This might sound a bit obvious, as every author should do it, but what I see in physics sometimes is quite the opposite. Many books I read about quantum mechanics, theory of relativity and all sort of stuff like that really let me with the impression that the author simply wanted to demonstrate that he masters some difficult knowledge rather than really being interested into developing a nice way to help the reader to access the same knowledge. That's definitely not Frank's case. He does usually says in his books a bit about history, a lot about the physics, a lot about the engineering that is involved in discovering the physics that he talks about, a lot about the ongoing debates and future perspectives, and so on. Also another good thing is that, like a good British man, he usually doesn't bullshit about in his books. He is very objective and says directly what he wants to say or what he needs to say about something so that we can understand it well. He doesn't have the stile of "wonders of the universe" typical of some other authors like Brian Cox, for example.
Let's go to the book then. Although I am a physicist, my PhD was in photonics and not in particle physics, so I am not an expertise on the matter. Well, I did study a lot about lasers and optics in general, so I got a lot to photons and electrons sometimes, but that's about it. No muons or pions whatsoever. But anyway, I usually like physics in general, especially particle physics and quantum mechanics, so I gave it a go on this book. I did like it very much, because it does an very good overview of particle physics going as deep as necessary to understand the basic concepts. I basically liked the way the book was written, going from the basic physical concepts and metrics necessary to properly talk about particles, all the technologies involved in detecting particles, the physics of particles, the current open questions and possible ways around it. Well, that's pretty much about it. I would say that the other book I read from Frank about Antimatter was a bit better because it does go deeper about things. But still, this one is only an introduction but it is a very good one. I am going now for other book I have from him which is about "nothing". Yes, the physics of nothing. But this is a story for other time. I still have to wait to see.

Wednesday 30 July 2014

The Psychology of C. G. Jung, by Jolande Jacobi


This book is a good summary of some of Jung's views on psychology. I am sharing it mainly because I do like Jolande Jacobi, which was a co-worker of Jung himself. In all fairness this isn't one of the best writings from Jolande, but it is the first book I read that was entirely written by her. I first got in contact with her work (or better said with her contributions on Jung's works) when I read the book called Man and His Symbols, which one of the chapters was written by her, and it was by far the best written chapter and definitely the easiest one to understand. I simply liked the way she managed to express complicated psychological things in a very simple and touchable way. Well, Jung's psychology is definitely not as complicated as Freud's, but still... From Jung's students/co-workes she is certainly my favorite one. I think she is even better than Marie Luise von Franz, which seems to be the most famous one. Well, maybe not in knowledge but at least in how she manage to pass the message in simple terms. Anyway, if you already study Jung's views on psychology this book might not add much. However, if you are interested in a place to have a first start this is definitely a good summary of the main points. It doesn't go very deep in any of them, but nevertheless it's worth reading to get in touch with a bit of the wonders of the psychological views of Carl Gustav Jung.

Friday 18 July 2014

Anarchism and Other Essays, by Emma Goldman


This was the first book I've read from Emma Goldman. She was an anarchist activist that lived in US like a century ago. The book is very powerful in the sense that she makes very strong speeches in favor of workers freedom and a lot on feminism also. This is not a very philosophical book, it's more of an activist guideline, but still with a lot of interesting theory about anarchism and feminism in a simplified way. I quite like specially a few things she says about the horrors of marriage and about free love as the only possible form of love. I've got to say I absolutely love this anarchist approach to life. It is more poetical, beautiful, light than our stupid moral rules about how people should behave and do stuff. Well, anyway, this was definitely a nice book to read. I didn't learned much new, but is always good to be in contact with people who are enthusiastic about good stuff, such as Emma was. It's also a very good report of early days of feminist movements and so on. Thanks for that Emma.

Monday 21 April 2014

What is life? How chemistry becomes biology by Addy Pross


Well, this was the first book on Biological scientific issues that I've read. I am a scientist, more precisely a physicist, and now I am felling a strong desire to study more other kinds of sciences. Especially biology. Philosophy, psychology and sociology I've been already reading and studding for some time now. Possible even for a decade. But biology, apart from what I've learned in school, this is really the beginning of a new era in my readings. Why I've decided for that? I don't really know to be honest. It's a kind of a lack of something in a puzzle of the wholeness of life that I just could not fill only with psychological and philosophical insights. I don't know. Even when I try to think about society as whole, when I try to really understand it, when I think about Marxism and how I really see the society dynamics, I always have the feeling that although I am learning and conceiving part of the story, there is definitely something lacking. I don't really know in what sense I truly mean this lacking of something, I don't even think that biology and chemistry are in itself this lacking, but I feel now that they are definitely at least a piece of something that might help me to proper formulate and understand this lack, and who knows, by doing it, dissolving it?

So Ok, here it goes. I got a couple of books into sort of similar subjects (or not so much), how life emerged from chemistry, anthropology of extinction, how the brain functions, the principles of change that shaped life and so on. This one, by Addy Pross treats basically the question, how non-living chemical elements could evolve and become alive? How life could emerge from not-living things? And to be fair I was really skeptical about the whole thing before starting to read the book. Ok, I won't get into a lot of details about the book, because I am not very familiar with the whole background from where the discussion is made, but just a couple of comments here. The author is a scientist, with a lot of academic work on this subject, and by reading the book you really get the impression that he does know a lot about what he is saying. But in what sense? In the book he is not simply trying to prove a point but he does make a very broad and even easy to follow review of the current scientific debate about this life issue. Even for people who are not scientists, the book does explain very well the whole background knowledge that is needed to understand the debate. It gets a bit boring sometimes because of the amount of preparation about the subject he does, however that makes everything he is talking about very clear. There is a lot of references about many of the discussions he shows in the book. Well, what I am trying to say is that the book is very well written, very clear and you can see that the author is very honesty and never pretends to know or to have found something that he really didn't. That is what I mean by the author being a good scientist that knows what he is saying.

Ok, so his attempt here in the book is basically to try to find a kind of general law of evolution, in a similar way from what Darwinism is, but with the only difference that he wants to find it a bit earlier, by looking it directly into chemical reactions and how the laws of simple chemical systems have already an early shape of what we consider general laws of life, such as Darwinism for example that deals with evolution of species. He tries basically to find insights into how we can formulate from simple chemical terms a sort of "evolution of species" law (but not really species here, it should be something more like chemical evolution or whatever) that would have allowed simple chemical reactions to lead to the formation of more complex and self-replicating systems. And to that he does show a lot of references from scientific papers with results that does demonstrate all chemical mechanisms that he talks about when he tries to conceive this sort of general "law of chemical evolution".

Well, he definitely do not show exactly the moment when chemical no-living entities become "alive". Simply because we simply do not know that yet. But he is very clear and honesty about it all the time, showing precisely the current debate in academia that is ongoing on the subject. However, when he tries to conceive this general law of chemical systems that would allow molecules or whatever, to self-replicate, enhancing their complexity (that could potentially leads toward creation of living systems) he is very convincing. Well, I don't know much to be honesty about the whole thing to actually make a criticism of his toughs. But he is definitely convincing (At least to me he was). And the book to be fair did gave me some new tools to put in my head when I do think about society, human beings, and so on. It is just the beginning, things are not very clear yet. But anyway, that's the way I will go now. Will try to get some more biology stuff to read about and comment here in the next few months or years. So let's see. That's all for now.

Saturday 8 March 2014

Sybil - The Classic True Story of a Woman Possessed by Sixteen Personalities, by Flora Rheta Schreiber

This book tells the story of Sybil, a woman that, as the title says, was possessed by sixteen different personalities. Unbelievably this was a real story. Sybil (which is a fake name) suffered from dissociative identity disorder caused by severe traumas that she experienced during her childhood, and she really had initially 16 personalities from different ages, that some were not even aware of the others (as Sybil wasn't aware of any), and interestingly two of them were even men. Each personality had its own taste for things, opinions, believes, that were strongly conflicted at times, even physically they were different, the way they dressed and talked, and that made Sybil's life a huge mess. The book basically tells the story of the psychoanalytical treatment she received during 11 years until she got completely healed. The good thing I liked about the book is that it goes step by step along the treatment showing in details all the difficulties faced by both therapist and patient and how they overcame them. It tells a lot about how the human psyche works sometimes. And the best thing is that, since it is a story and not a textbook on psychoanalysis,  it is very easy to follow everything even if you don't know much about psychology. It was really intense for me to follow all the steps of Sybil treatment because it did make me get in touch with a lot of working mechanisms of my own psyche. And not need to mention that the meditations I do on a daily basis, got again very deep and liberating during the period I was reading this book. It is something I can't explain exactly why an how it works but the true is that, in my case at least, the difference on depth of my meditations during normal periods and periods when I am reading such books is astonishing. It really is. Well, just to summarize, I did love the book. I always like books that make me get involved with them to such an extend that after reading I can say I am not the same person who started reading it. That's mainly it. Enjoy if you want.

Tuesday 11 February 2014

Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution by Peter Kropotkin


Ok. How should I start this? Well, Kropotkin is my favorite social anarchist writer. By far! From the four main ones, Proudhon, Bakunin, Kropotkin and Malatesta, he is the one I like the most. His first book I've read was a few years ago (maybe 4 years) and it was called The conquest of bread. About this subject, this was so far the book I tough it was the most honest and precise about all the aspects of the anarchist ideology, its necessity and its possibles developments, in a very simple, down to earth and human way. He doesn't have for example the frenetic fire Bakunin has, he is much more serene, which is quite hard to find in anarchists sometimes, and that amazes me about him. Well, I do like Bakunin also. Very much indeed. However I think Bakunin is more the kind of guy that would give the fuel to a machine, but wouldn't himself project and built the machine itself. For me this is more kind of a Kropotkin style. Well, anyway it doesn't matter. About anarchy Proudhon is a good guy also, however he gets to much into economics to me. I don't follow it to much so sometimes I get a bit lost into Proudhon's books. Well, Malatesta seems to be more of a Kropotkin also, however I confess I only read a few essays he wrote so I don't really have enough knowledge to conceive a very good opinion about him. Although I did like his essays I read. He has a nice touch of his Italianess on his philosophy I would say. He puts a bit of love into his writings for example. I find this amazing. This is something that to be fair you sometimes feel when reading about anarchy. That there is some ocean moving deep down that makes some people desire freedom for everybody. Call it love or whatever, although this is something I sometimes get from some anarchists essays, in Malatesta this seems to me to be more clear and open than in the Russians for example (Bakunin and Kropotkin). Although I confess this is more of a feeling I have than of an analytic analysis of theirs writings. But anyway, this was supposed to be about Kropotkin's book and not a review on anarchist writers. So let it be it. I might come back to the others latter on.

After falling in love with The conquest of bread, I decided to give a go at his other famous book called Mutual aid: A factor of evolution. I liked very much the title already. One of the things I most dislike about some capitalist preachers is when they come and say, but such are human beings, they like to compete, to be better than others, is the struggle to survive, the survival of the fittest, or whatever. Kind of trying to say that capitalism is almost nature's choice. Ok, as Kropotkin also says in his book, it is absolutely true that these kind of things are indeed present in human beings, and did exist over human evolution. But what is not true is that this is the only thing that exists in us. We are a bit more than only struggle and fight. This is what Kropotkin shows in this book. He starts showing mutual aid in nature, in animals. He does a very long analysis of Darwin's works but also does himself a lot of empirical research with many kind of animal species from Siberia and from other parts of Russian and the world. The first chapter is all dedicated to this study. I confess this kind of analysis is a bit new to me because I've never read Darwin's or any other biologist, or evolutionist, about those things. So Kropotkin was kind of the open door for me to it. I got a few other books about evolution and development of species to read latter, but that will still take some time. Ok, but the book is not only that. In the second chapter he starts to describe a lot of the development of the firsts human tribes and how mutual aid is present constantly over its evolution. He does a very anthropological study about human development from tribes, clans, small villages, cities and so on, and shows how even in the cruelest tribes there were always in some degree towards some aspects of its existence mutual aid. But more than this, he shows how mutual aid was indeed very important in the survival of animal species and of human societies all over history. In the latter chapters he goes on in history telling this kind of things until we get to our days. The book follows kind of the line: animals, savages, barbarians, medieval cities, and ourselves. It is a very good book about anthropology. But what impressed me the most is the amount of knowledge and detailed information he gives about such a variety of subjects. Specially biology and history. I don't know exactly how many years took him to write the whole book but I guess it couldn't have been less than ten years. The guy really studied and did a lot of research to write about it. To be fair, although I wasn't very familiarized with at least the biological part, I thinks this is by far one of the most rich books I've ever read in terms of content. The guy was amazing. Really, he was not only a social scientist but also a traditional scientist and knew history and anthropology very deeply. I am very amazed by him. And all for a noble cause. What a guy this Kropotkin was. Unbelievable!


Thursday 9 January 2014

Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology by Paul Radin

This was the last book I've read. I wasn't particularly interested in american Indian mythology, but I was as I still am very interested about the Trickster figure. This is an archetype that continuously appears under different forms in my dreams and because of that I decided to study it more deeply. And to be fair I think this is also a figure which is very present and unconsciously admired in the current Brazilian culture (or should I say in the Brazilian soul to give it a more mystic touch?). Anyway, the trickster is one of the archetypes that appears a lot in the Jungian texts. Its main characteristic is its extreme contradiction between its divine essence and its animal destructive unconscious. This antagonism between destruction and creation is always present in the Trickster image. It is very interesting to see how very old american Indian cultures have tales in which the hero behaves exactly as a Trickster showing all its life cycle and the transformations that happen during his life. The book tells some of these myths and after that the author makes some comments about these cultures and how they related to the myths, where he tries to explain the nature and the meaning of the stories. There are also two extra chapters in the end, one from Karl Kerényi about the Trickster in the Greek mythology, and other from Jung himself about the psychology of the Trickster figure. I quite like books like this one that shows a nice historical account of an psychological pattern (or an archetype) that is still very alive, although many times unconsciously alive, showing indeed that our behavior today is still very much guided by forces which are much older than what we can imagine. I don't know. I simply like to deconstruct the idea that nowadays we do things differently, that we are "modern innovative people creating the future". Well, obviously there are differences, but I don't know exactly to what extend the are just different variations of old patterns or whether they are indeed some new elements that came into life. Anyway, this is a talk for other time. That's all for now.

Friday 3 January 2014

Inner Work - Using dreams and active imagination for personal growth by Robert A. Jonhson


This was one of the books I most liked reading last year. The author is an Jungian analyst that had lectures with Jung himself. The book explain a lot about analytical psychology and it gives a lot of techniques on how to use it on ourselves. A lot involves active imagination and dream analysis. What I liked most was the dream analysis. On a daily basis I have a very lively memory of my dreams and I can clearly remember the feelings that were involved in each situation of the dream. So this book and all the information and techniques it shows have been very useful to me in order to understand the hidden mechanisms that are operating in my unconscious world. Nowadays I use a lot of the content I find in my dreams even on my nearly daily meditations and it has been priceless because it helps me a lot to guide myself on where to go during the meditation. The book is very well written, it is very clear and even if you don't know to much about analytical psychology this is not a major issue. The author gives a lot of practical examples of dream analysis and active meditations of some of the patients he had and sometimes even of the work he did on himself so that all the theory he explains in the early chapters of the book becomes very tangible and real. I read a few other books of the same author, but this one was by far the best I've seen so far because it sums basically all the theory with very good examples. This is kind of his bible I would say. It is much more complete and useful than his other works. Inner Work is a very good tool for people interested in dealing with its own unconscious mechanisms. I absolutely loved it.

Wednesday 1 January 2014

Finnish lessons - What can the world learn from educational change in Finland? by Pasi Sahlberg


I read this book a couple of months ago, and it tells a lot about the current educational system in Finland and how it got to this point. What happened there was something very interesting. A couple of decades ago the Finnishs decided that the educational system should not anymore be based on competition and prize-given for goal-achievers, but rather on cooperation and equality. There was a big change in basically all aspects of the teaching process. Much less homework, much less examinations, much less hours in class, more freedom to chose the learning subjects, no failing mechanisms, flexible times, and better conditions for teachers. Schools became a bit less like a prison, such as they usually are all over the world. But the most interesting thing about it was the results that came over the years. The intention of the changes were more to bring equality to society and to make the educational system more accessible and human. However, surprisingly the result was not only that but also Finnish students started to achieve the highest grades in international examination process. Although that wasn't the goal, the average grade of the Finnish students in international examinations started to achieve levels never achieved before. I think this is really amazing. The changes were better for everybody in all aspects. People were effectively learning more with more freedom. That is all I believe about education. Exams, grades, goal-achieving, prizes, discipline, I think this is all rubbish that brings nothing good to anyone. I really think true education should help the students to learn what they want to learn rather than giving them something you want them to learn and then examining them about that. This Finnish example is a very good thing in this direction. This book itself is sometimes a bit repetitive and it was written quite in an almost academic style (although not to much), but it is a very nice account of what happened and is still happening in Finland. Definitely worth reading if you are interested in educational issues.