Wednesday Reading Meme
Jul. 22nd, 2015 07:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerWhat I've Just Finished Reading
Virginia Morrell's Animal Wise, a book about animal intelligence, which I really enjoyed even though it led me to the rather gloomy conclusion that if we ever run into intelligent extraterrestrial life we probably won't notice. We've signally failed to notice any of the intelligent life on earth, after all.
It also included the observation, which I thought was really interesting, that generally the reason why animals (including humans) evolve highly complex brains is to deal with the complexity of our social networks. That apparently demands far more of our processing power than tool-making or hunting or any of the other things that have been proposed as the drivers for brain evolution.
What I'm Reading Now
Robert Conquest's The Great Terror, which pretty much every other book I've ever read about Soviet history seems to reference, because he got there first. In some ways this works to his detriment, because I've seen a lot of this information before, but it's also interesting to see how he puts things together differently. In particular, he pretty much takes it as given that Stalin is behind every prominent death which is even slightly mysterious: he argues, for instance, that Stalin was behind the Kirov assassination, which he then used as the pretext for the Terror. The mind rather recoils from such calculating mendacity and evil.
Which doesn't mean it isn't true, mind. We're talking about Stalin, who told Zinoviev and Kamenev he would save their lives if they perjured and abased themselves before a public court and then had them shot anyway. (And then had one of his bodyguards, Pauker, act out Zinoviev's death for him, because he wanted to fulfill every possible evil dictator cliche, I suppose.)
I was also under the vague impression that Bertrand Russell was one of the western thinkers who wrote nice things about the Soviet Union after visiting it, but apparently Bertrand Russell wrote an entire book in 1920 about how the Bolsheviks were going about establishing communism entirely the wrong way and generally walking the road of good intentions directly into hell. I must have gotten him confused with someone else. Maybe a playwright? This is going to bother me.
I've also been reading the first Kamala Khan comic book (thanks to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
sineala's great enthusiasm), which I've enjoyed so far.
What I Plan to Read Next
Jane Mayer's The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals, which I've been sort of putting off because it's probably going to be the most depressing, just look at that title.
Virginia Morrell's Animal Wise, a book about animal intelligence, which I really enjoyed even though it led me to the rather gloomy conclusion that if we ever run into intelligent extraterrestrial life we probably won't notice. We've signally failed to notice any of the intelligent life on earth, after all.
It also included the observation, which I thought was really interesting, that generally the reason why animals (including humans) evolve highly complex brains is to deal with the complexity of our social networks. That apparently demands far more of our processing power than tool-making or hunting or any of the other things that have been proposed as the drivers for brain evolution.
What I'm Reading Now
Robert Conquest's The Great Terror, which pretty much every other book I've ever read about Soviet history seems to reference, because he got there first. In some ways this works to his detriment, because I've seen a lot of this information before, but it's also interesting to see how he puts things together differently. In particular, he pretty much takes it as given that Stalin is behind every prominent death which is even slightly mysterious: he argues, for instance, that Stalin was behind the Kirov assassination, which he then used as the pretext for the Terror. The mind rather recoils from such calculating mendacity and evil.
Which doesn't mean it isn't true, mind. We're talking about Stalin, who told Zinoviev and Kamenev he would save their lives if they perjured and abased themselves before a public court and then had them shot anyway. (And then had one of his bodyguards, Pauker, act out Zinoviev's death for him, because he wanted to fulfill every possible evil dictator cliche, I suppose.)
I was also under the vague impression that Bertrand Russell was one of the western thinkers who wrote nice things about the Soviet Union after visiting it, but apparently Bertrand Russell wrote an entire book in 1920 about how the Bolsheviks were going about establishing communism entirely the wrong way and generally walking the road of good intentions directly into hell. I must have gotten him confused with someone else. Maybe a playwright? This is going to bother me.
I've also been reading the first Kamala Khan comic book (thanks to
sineala's great enthusiasm), which I've enjoyed so far. What I Plan to Read Next
Jane Mayer's The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals, which I've been sort of putting off because it's probably going to be the most depressing, just look at that title.
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no subject
Date: 2015-07-23 12:02 am (UTC)John Reed was the journalist who wrote Ten Days That Shook the World and died before he could learn how it turned out, but I don't know if he's who you mean. There were a lot of guys defending the Soviet Union back in the day. Every time another country got invaded, the list would get a little shorter, but some people stuck it out for quite a long time.
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Date: 2015-07-23 01:06 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-07-23 02:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-07-23 05:39 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-07-23 01:47 pm (UTC)