Summer Reading: Part II

Books on my summer reading list include:

• The Selfless Gene: Living with God and Darwin, Charles Foster
• From Dawn to Decadence, 1500 to the Present: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, Jacques Barzun
• William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism, Robert D. Richardson

Charles Foster is a writer, barrister, and tutor in medical law and ethics at the University of Oxford. After he couldn't take it any more, he wrote a book looking at both sides of the "Young Earth Creationists" and the Richard Dawkins evolutionists. He raises the very questions many of us have asked. Reading a book like The Selfless Gene is almost like auditing one  of Charles Foster's classes, I assume. It is very, very good. I am a fan of Richard Dawkins' biology writings but I am not a fan of his rantings and "lecturing." Dawkins has always seemed to me to be very angry and arrogant. I don't know why he should be so angry.  I think Charles Foster would agree: Dawkins seems so angry, but why? You might enjoy this book review.

Jacques Barzun is a contemporary (b. 1907) French-born American historian of ideas and culture. His is a fascinating biography but I almost fell off my chair at the Huntington Beach Library when I read that he has lived in San Antonio since 1996. Who wudda thunk?

This is what Wikipedia has to say about Barzun's swan song, From Dawn to Decadence: "Jacques Barzun has continued to write on education and cultural history since retiring from Columbia. At 84 years of age, he began writing his swan song, to which he devoted the better part of the 1990s. The resulting book of more than 800 pages, From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 to the Present, reveals a vast erudition and brilliance undimmed by advanced age. Historians, literary critics, and popular reviewers all lauded From Dawn to Decadence as a sweeping and powerful survey of modern Western history, and it became a New York Times bestseller. The book introduces several novel typographic devices that aid an unusually rich system of cross-referencing and help keep many strands of thought in the book under organized control. Most pages feature a sidebar containing a pithy quotation--usually little known, and often surprising or humorous--from some author or historical figure." 

Jacques Barzun remarks that there are four "best" philosophers: Aristotle, Plato, Liebniz, and William James. Not long ago, I read a biography of Henry James and that made me even more curious to read about his brother William. It appears that I will be reading Richardson's biography slowly and savoring every bit of it.

So, that's just a start. I will also be reading Shakespeare's A Midsummer's Night Dream. Don't ask.