What are you reading now?

[leese]

My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist's Personal Journey
Just finished it. The science parts, and her recovery  were interesting and encouraging but then she went and got all up in the emotional and spiritual realm and I lost interest.

[jill]

My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist's Personal Journey
Just finished it. The science parts, and her recovery  were interesting and encouraging but then she went and got all up in the emotional and spiritual realm and I lost interest.

Leese

My mom read that (book on tape) after her stroke.  She said she liked it - but didn't seem particularly thrilled with it towards the end.

I never asked her but I bet it was for the exact same reason. 

[leese]

My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist's Personal Journey
Just finished it. The science parts, and her recovery  were interesting and encouraging but then she went and got all up in the emotional and spiritual realm and I lost interest.

Leese

My mom read that (book on tape) after her stroke.  She said she liked it - but didn't seem particularly thrilled with it towards the end.

I never asked her but I bet it was for the exact same reason. 

Yeah, she started going on about feeling connected to the universe and all. Great for her, good she had   a shroom-like kind of stroke. I didn't , so it's not of any interest to me. I'd be curious to know if that part appeals to Christians, besides those liberal Quakers, since it doesn't involve God in the sense they perceive.

[BettyLou]

Deception by Randy Alcorn

[Shawna]

Calling the Rainbow Nation Home:  A Story of Acceptance and Affirmation, by Elaine T. Sundby

The story of the author's coming to faith (Christian), and her struggle with her romantic feelings towards other women, and her eventual acceptance that it is OK to be both Christian and gay.  She and her spouse founded Faith Full Gospel Church, and Elaine was the pastor there for its first six years.  She is also the creator of www.gaychurch.org.

An excellent book.

Leese, I love feeling connected to the universe.  Makes me smile every time.   

[catwixen]

My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist's Personal Journey
Just finished it. The science parts, and her recovery  were interesting and encouraging but then she went and got all up in the emotional and spiritual realm and I lost interest.

It's weird....you would think a neuroscientist would have explanations for "God" feelings during  or after a stroke. I think I saw a doco with this woman....

[leese]

My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist's Personal Journey
Just finished it. The science parts, and her recovery  were interesting and encouraging but then she went and got all up in the emotional and spiritual realm and I lost interest.

It's weird....you would think a neuroscientist would have explanations for "God" feelings during  or after a stroke. I think I saw a doco with this woman....

She got very caught up in her feelings. It was a very profound personal experience for her I suppose it supersedes the clinical aspect for her. My physical therapist who had loaned it to me,told me that the author lost most stroke survivors, that she had gotten feedback from, at that point in the book. It was not the typical stroke. She had a very massive left brain stroke, which knocked out her language/ reading connections among other things. Amazing recovery though. Took her eight years to physically and mentally recover.

Leese, I love feeling connected to the universe.  Makes me smile every time.   

I have moments. The author went a bit further, she experienced her molecules blending in with the walls molecules. I feel cheated..

[Sweetling]

"The Tipping Point" by Malcolm Gladwell.

"A People's History of the United States" by the late, great Howard Zinn.

[David M]

Is God Imaginary

[rickymooston]

article on cockroach brains, lexx and yacc

[eramthgin]

I'm rereading the Harry Potter series.

[JustMyron]

"The Tipping Point" by Malcolm Gladwell.

Me too! I'm liking it so far.

[leese]

I put this on order today. Has anyone read it?  I had seen a blurb on it, advancing that the English Protestants  supported white  slavery as a method of replacing the undesirable Irish Catholics with Scot- English Protestants in government ,and landholder positions. I know how the bible was used to support black slavery, but had no clue there was religion involved in  white slavery. I'll be interested to read the justifications, if the book addresses them.
White Slavery: The Slaves That Time Forgot


By John Martin

 

They came as slaves; vast human cargo transported on tall British ships bound for the Americas. They were shipped by the hundreds of thousands and included men, women, and even the youngest of children.

 

Whenever they rebelled or even disobeyed an order, they were punished in the harshest ways. Slave owners would hang their human property by their hands and set their hands or feet on fire as one form of punishment. They were burned alive and had their heads placed on pikes in the marketplace as a warning to other captives.

 

We don’t really need to go through all of the gory details, do we? After all, we know all too well the atrocities of the African slave trade. But, are we talking about African slavery?

 

King James II and Charles I led a continued effort to enslave the Irish. Britain’s famed Oliver Cromwell furthered this practice of dehumanizing one’s next door neighbor.

 

The Irish slave trade began when James II sold 30,000 Irish prisoners as slaves to the New World. His Proclamation of 1625 required Irish political prisoners be sent overseas and sold to English settlers in the West Indies. By the mid 1600s, the Irish were the main slaves sold to Antigua and Montserrat. At that time, 70% of the total population of Montserrat were Irish slaves.

 

Ireland quickly became the biggest source of human livestock for English merchants. The majority of the early slaves to the New World were actually white.

 

From 1641 to 1652, over 500,000 Irish were killed by the English and another 300,000 were sold as slaves. Ireland’s population fell from about 1,500,000 to 600,000 in one single decade. Families were ripped apart as the British did not allow Irish dads to take their wives and children with them across the Atlantic. This led to a helpless population of homeless women and children. Britain’s solution was to auction them off as well.

 

During the 1650s, over 100,000 Irish children between the ages of 10 and 14 were taken from their parents and sold as slaves in the West Indies, Virginia and New England. In this decade, 52,000 Irish (mostly women and children) were sold to Barbados and Virginia. Another 30,000 Irish men and women were also transported and sold to the highest bidder. In 1656, Cromwell ordered that 2000 Irish children be taken to Jamaica and sold as slaves to English settlers.

 

Many people today will avoid calling the Irish slaves what they truly were: Slaves. They’ll come up with terms like “Indentured Servants” to describe what occurred to the Irish. However, in most cases from the 17th and 18th centuries, Irish slaves were nothing more than human cattle.

 

As an example, the African slave trade was just beginning during this same period. It is well recorded that African slaves, not tainted with the stain of the hated Catholic theology and more expensive to purchase, were often treated far better than their Irish counterparts.

 

African slaves were very expensive during the late 1600s (50 Sterling). Irish slaves came cheap (no more than 5 Sterling). If a planter whipped or branded or beat an Irish slave to death, it was never a crime. A death was a monetary setback, but far cheaper than killing a more expensive African.

 

The English masters quickly began breeding the Irish women for both their own personal pleasure and for greater profit. Children of slaves were themselves slaves, which increased the size of the master’s free workforce. Even if an Irish woman somehow obtained her freedom, her kids would remain slaves of her master. Thus, Irish moms, even with this new found emancipation, would seldom abandon their kids and would remain in servitude.

 

In time, the English thought of a better way to use these women (in many cases, girls as young as 12) to increase their market share: The settlers began to breed Irish women and girls with African men to produce slaves with a distinct complexion. These new “mulatto” slaves brought a higher price than Irish livestock and, likewise, enabled the settlers to save money rather than purchase new African slaves.


 
 
This practice of interbreeding Irish females with African men went on for several decades and was so widespread that, in 1681, legislation was passed “forbidding the practice of mating Irish slave women to African slave men for the purpose of producing slaves for sale.” In short, it was stopped only because it interfered with the profits of a large slave transport company.

 

England continued to ship tens of thousands of Irish slaves for more than a century. Records state that, after the 1798 Irish Rebellion, thousands of Irish slaves were sold to both America and Australia.

 

There were horrible abuses of both African and Irish captives. One British ship even dumped 1,302 slaves into the Atlantic Ocean so that the crew would have plenty of food to eat.

 

There is little question that the Irish experienced the horrors of slavery as much (if not more in the 17th Century) as the Africans did. There is, also, very little question that those brown, tanned faces you witness in your travels to the West Indies are very likely a combination of African and Irish ancestry.

 

In 1839, Britain finally decided on it’s own to end it’s participation in Satan’s highway to hell and stopped transporting slaves. While their decision did not stop pirates from doing what they desired, the new law slowly concluded THIS chapter of nightmarish Irish misery.

 

But, if anyone, black or white, believes that slavery was only an African experience, then they’ve got it completely wrong.

 

[TrisTennant]

I don't want to own up to this but I will. Nightlight - The Twilight Parody.

[maritime]

I've decided to read this book myself :) (had pondered the idea 6 months ago or so)...the Natural History Library edition 1962 edited by L. Engel. After the editor's introduction, the author's Preface and his 1860 Postscript, I've only 503 pages to go.

Completed reading Darwin's Voyage, and yes, it was well worth reading. A lot of bright spots, some dry spells. Trying to understand Darwin's label of a "trifling anecdote" on pages 24/25, I had to underline and make a note of every other instance (more than several) referred to as a trifle or trifling. A popular word with him and perhaps the times; a few instances where Darwin used the word made sense, but mostly it just seemed (to me) an odd qualifier.

Assyriankey, I had a question about the Darwin and sea sickness quote you once shared at the bottom of your posts. Was that from The Voyage of the Beagle? I didn't run into the quote, though I halfway expected to.

I'm very close to finishing the tome on Hippocrates...

What's the book on Hippocrates like? 

Very good, actually.
Contents
Part I: Hippocrates of Cos, Hippocrates the Thessalian, Hippocrates and the School of Cos, and Writings in Search of an Author
Part II: The Physician and the Public, The Physician and the Patient, The Physician and the Disease
Part III: Hippocratic Rationalism and the Divine, Hippocrates and the Birth of the Human Sciences, Challenges to Medicine and the Birth of Epistemology, Medicine in Crisis and the Reaction against Philosophy
Part IV: From Observation of the Visible to Reconstruction of the Invisible, Heath, Sickness and Nature, The Legacy of Hippocratism in Antiquity

The author (Jouanna) makes clear that the Hippocratic Oath was drafted for those outside of the Asclepiad family who wanted to learn the art (practice the tradition); learning the art did not earn you the privilege of becoming an Asclepiad, and not all Asclepiads were doctors. While I learned much reading this book, I still don't know who drafted the oath or when...though I've read elsewhere that "The Hippocratic Oath...was certainly not written by Hippocrates, and probably not before 200 A.D." So I need to find another book to get this answered.

pg. 129 "Although originally the entire oath was taken only by disciples from outside the family of the Asclepiads, and not by the sons of the master, it is plain that the medical ethic contained in this second part [I will use treatment to help, and so forth] applied to everyone--master, sons of the master, and disciples. ... In uniting lofty ideals with solemnity of tone and economy of expression, it singlehandedly raised pagan morality to new heights."

Just now, I'm listening for a second time in as many weeks to the recorded book Descartes' Bones: A Skeletal History of the Conflict Between Faith and Reason by Russell Shorto, Narrated by Paul Hecht (2008). 

I've read Descartes' (78 page) Discourse on Method probably four times; here's one of my favorite passages:

"As to the utility that others would receive from the communication of my thoughts, it cannot be so terribly great, given that I have not yet taken them so far that there is not any need to add many things before applying them to common use. And I believe I can say without conceit that, if there is anyone who can do this, it ought to be me rather than someone else: not that there cannot be in the world many minds incomparably greater than my own, but that one cannot conceive a thing so well and make it one's own when one learns it from another as one can when one discovers it for oneself. This is so true in this matter that, although I have often explained some of my opinions to people with great minds who, while I spoke to them, seemed to understand these opinions quite well, nevertheless, when they repeated them, I noticed that they had almost always altered them in such a way that I could no longer acknowledge them to be mine. At this time I am very happy to ask our posterity never to believe the things people say came from me, unless I myself have revealed them."

[Sita]

I just finished Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes by Daniel L. Everett.  The author describes his years living among the Piraha tribe in the Amazonian jungle as a linguist and Christian Missionary.  The stories he recounts give the reader a glimpse into a way of life that is quite different from the one most of us are used to.  The Piraha live a very hard and, for the most part, self-sufficient life and do not always help each other, yet they are happy and quite content.  They live in the present and do not worry about the future.  They also do not talk about the distant past and have no creation story.  They know that life is hard and bad things happen so there is no need to whine or worry about it.  When something bad does occur, they literally laugh it off and move on. 

Everett intended to convert the Piraha to Christianity by learning their language and translating the Bible into Pirahan, but was surprised to find out their way of life had caused him to question his own beliefs and eventually deconvert.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book and it’s one I intend on rereading.  Thanks and +1 to HE for mentioning this book somewhere on IGI and piquing my interest.

[leese]

I just finished Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes by Daniel L. Everett.  The author describes his years living among the Piraha tribe in the Amazonian jungle as a linguist and Christian Missionary.  The stories he recounts give the reader a glimpse into a way of life that is quite different from the one most of us are used to.  The Piraha live a very hard and, for the most part, self-sufficient life and do not always help each other, yet they are happy and quite content.  They live in the present and do not worry about the future.  They also do not talk about the distant past and have no creation story.  They know that life is hard and bad things happen so there is no need to whine or worry about it.  When something bad does occur, they literally laugh it off and move on. 

Everett intended to convert the Piraha to Christianity by learning their language and translating the Bible into Pirahan, but was surprised to find out their way of life had caused him to question his own beliefs and eventually deconvert.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book and it’s one I intend on rereading.  Thanks and +1 to HE for mentioning this book somewhere on IGI and piquing my interest.

This is in my 'to read' stacks. 

[Scrabble Hamster]

I'm reading The Age of Reason by Thomas Paine.

[Kerlyssa]

Is that about the entire tribe that is probably mentally defective? 

[leese]

Is that about the entire tribe that is probably mentally defective? 

It's an interesting study in linguistics, The tribe doesn't appear to have concepts formed that all other human languages have in common.

[energy]

That sounds absolutely fascinating :)
 
I've always found it intriguing the way humans think differently in different cultures and how their environment and experiences share their worlds and thinking :)

[energy]

^^share = shape

[Sita]

Is that about the entire tribe that is probably mentally defective? 

I've not read anything about them being mentally defective so far.  It may look as though the Piraha are mentally defective, but according to Everett, and I'm paraphrasing here, The Piraha are not mentally incapable of performing certain tasks, they choose not to.

Peter Gordon of Columbia University who studied the Piraha along with Daniel Everett said:

"One can safely rule out that the Piraha are mentally retarded. Their hunting, spatial, categorization and linguistic skills are remarkable and they show no clinical signs of retardation,"

[TrisTennant]

I am reading A Wizard of Mars by Diane Duane. The ninth in the Young Wizards series.

[catwixen]

"Does God Hate Women?" by Ophelia Benson and Jeremy Strangroom

Only one chapter in and they are focusing on Islamic human rights issues against women. (OMG women being executed for being raped? It is quite hard to read)
I hope they go into why women were only the "tempters" in old religions and had no rights to be enlightened themselves. That has always interested me.

[Kerlyssa]

I can tell you what SoM is NOT reading.
 
 
 

[Sita]

Cat, you and I must be on the same wavelength.  I just finished The Bookseller of Kabul by Asne Seierstad.  It’s the true story of the author’s 3-month experience living with an Afghan Family in Kabul shortly after the fall of the Taliban in 2002. The family is in no way a typical Afghan family.  Sultan Kahn, a middle class man, is a bookseller who has spent time in prison for selling books, and for his belief in freedom of speech. He goes to extreme measures to purchase, hide, and sell books in an effort to preserve the literature of his beloved country, a place where ¾ of the people are illiterate.  One might think that his liberal beliefs would carry over into his personal life, but his fundamentalist beliefs are still strong and he subjects his 2 wives and family to a harsh life.  The stories of how women are treated as a result of these extreme beliefs range from degrading to horrifying.  Yes, very hard to read at times and it’s also hard to believe that this treatment still goes on in this day and age.

[Ennoia]

Thief of Time.

I love discworld so f**king much. I'd do Terry Pratchett if he asked.

[Sweetling]

"The Tipping Point" by Malcolm Gladwell.

Me too! I'm liking it so far.

It had some good stuff in it, but I enjoyed the first Freakonomics much more. How about you?

[wabbit111]

Dadzilla is reading Going Postal