1 comments about Practical Mystic: Religion, Science, and A. S. Eddington.

1. This is the first work I've read by Matthew Stanley - he is insightful and thorough, using Eddington as a focus for delving into the hot topic of science and religion. The book is extremely well-written, and clear enough for the lay reader to understand. I highly recommend it for anyone interested in the interaction of science and religion.

1 comments about On Her Own Terms: Annie Montague Alexander and the Rise of Science in the American West.

1. I was unaware of Alexander until I encountered this book at the Smithsonian's gift shop. It is a well-written biography of an important figure in biology. Alexander was not merely the patron of two natural history museums at U.Cal Berkeley, she and her partner collected thousands of animal, plant, and fossil specimens for it over the course of decades.
   
   Worth reading for a portrait of turn-of-the-century collecting, science, and the role of an extraordinary woman at that time.
   
   The text does meander a bit at times in the time periods discussed in each chapter and it could use a few more maps, but it is otherwise well researched and well-written.

2 comments about A Matter of Choices: Memoirs of a Female Physicist (Lives of Women in Science).

1. Fay Ajzenberg-Selove first proves herself extraordinary in her ability to talk her way past a Nazi in her escape from Germany. The remarkable force of her personality carried her past bad physics grades and blatant sexism into a successful academic & scientific career.

   The book is well-written and enjoyable.




2. Selove's memoir is short and sweet. I especially liked the style of writing, which seems to match and convey her nonchalant but passionate outlook on life. The book is short and to-the-point. It's honest and thought-provoking.
   
   The obstacles that she faced as a physicist may not be as pertinent today, but they still do exist. The book would provide an excellent read for male and female students and faculty members at major science institutions, especially physics departmental personnel.
   
   I recommend the book to anyone who has the chance to read it!

1 comments about Making Waves (Masters of Modern Physics).

1. This book shows the wide variety of subjects that Charles H. Townes explored and did substantive and original contributions. Then he is uniquely qualified for criticize excesses in unifying attempts in the frontiers of Physics and the overlaps of this discipline with other fields (Townes'Gathering of the Realms') when he say: "Scientists have now become a good deal more cautious and modest about extending scientific ideas into realms where they have not yet been throughly tested. We know today that the most sophisticated scientific theories, including quantum mechanics, are still incomplete". Reading these words one is like to ask: How much dose of caution and modesty a scientist must employ (e.g. extending quantum mechanical concepts to scientific anomalies 'no througly tested' or to theological thinking) for him/her starting a useful speculation on likely future explanatory theories of hypothetical consilient gatherings of realms?. In fact Townes himself is the first to break this advice of caution when he extends the uncertainty and complementarity principles to spiritual and ethical dimensions. All the contemporary attempts of scientific synthesis begin breaking this rule: Penrose extending quantum gravity theory into neurobiological realms still not 'throughly tested', Deutch stretching the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics to computation, evolution and epistemology -realms where experiments still are in the long process of exploring the shocking implications of his insights-, Wolf dazzling extension of quantum vacuum physics to deep psychology and religion, fiels where of course testing is far of being 'throughly' examined, Jahn and Dunne 'metaphorical' generalization of QM to anomalous consciousness phenomena where both the theory and the claimed experimental results to be explained by the theory are by the time being far of 'unbiased' evidential scrutiny, and finally (we are distant of a complete review of synthesis-looking extrapolations) we have Wilson extension of non-quantum biological thinking to anthropology, psychology, religion, philosophy and the arts where the Townes'caution criteria is openly broken. May be the reason for wanting to extrapolate our 'still incomplete' scientific theories into still untested realms must to be looked in the last author (Wilson), in our yearning of "interlocking of causal explanations across disciplines", our "need to search for the proof that everything in our world is organized in terms of a small number of fundamental natural laws that comprise the principles underlying every branch of learning". Do not blame the generalists if their longing for consiliense outpace their caution and modesty. In these terms Townes book is a ideal complement to Wilson's "Consiliense".

2 comments about Translate This Darkness : The Life of Christiana Morgan.

1. Sorry, I don't know how to let you know other than this but you have an extra author's name in the listing of my book. It is by Claire Douglas alone. Your Chaire Douglas as co author needs to be deleted. Whoever is reading this please send it on to the right person. Thanks. C. D. As I'm on the subject: my The Woman in the Mirror is out again thanks to you, Holly, and Backinprint.com and through the authors guild. Could you also list it? Thank you.



2. Translate this Darkness is an unevenly argued book that one cannot decide is about how dangerous men are to women or how dangerous women are to themselves, or how dangerous life is to the living.

   While on the one hand author Claire Douglas describes her heroine, Christiana Morgan, in sympathetic terms almost exclusively, Carl Jung's and Henry Murray's influence on Mrs. Morgan is seen as predominantly destructive. Their general existence in her life -- as father figures, as receivers of her endlessly extolled beauty and erotic influence -- is seen as parasitic. They are all 'round exploitative conquerors of the feminine mystique

   One cannot help but simply exclaim out loud at several points in the book, especially during the epilogue, what a load of hypocritical American feminist rubbish it is. Why doesn't Christiana just leave Murray, find someone else, and write something in her own right. Jung's 'women', after all, did not need his permission to write and create and have lives of their own.

   Douglas claims that these men somehow did not allow Morgan to take responsibility for her own life. Her famous visions, painted by her, and the subject of a four-and-a-half year seminar by Jung in the 1930s (which Douglas has edited, published by Princeton) are considered by Douglas to be of biblical importance to the women of the world. Rather than being used to further an understanding of the feminine by Morgan, these visions were expropriated by Jung for his own supposedly deluded purposes, and were "feared" by Murray as they represented an overwhelming feminine "power" that must be thwarted, lest he lose his own masculine power to it.

   First Jung: for the great part of Morgan's life he was simply 3,000 miles away in another part of the world, after the age of 50 making use of Morgan's visions as he made use of so much other diverse literature that influenced his ideas. To say that he unjustly "bent" Morgan's visions to satisfy his own theory of archetypes, thereby damaging Christiana Morgan's soul, becomes irreconcilable when one considers Douglas's statement that these visions also helped Jung to develop those theories (should have been good for her soul, no?)

   Wolfgang Pauli's dreams and visions served the same purpose for Jung (see the book Atom and Archetype). Pauli, it may be argued, also lived a life of relatively unrealized potential. He had bouts of alcoholism as did Morgan, and died relatively young, but no one would think to lay this at Jung's feet, perhaps because Pauli was a man and had won a Nobel prize. Morgan was just a poor uneducated girl with a lot of potential that was subsumed by the power of male masculinity and not allowed to be realised into some Golden Flower, if we are to believe the thesis.

   Now Murray: he was influenced by Jung to take Christiana as a mistress. This is because Murray was already married, as was Morgan. So it's a tough call who's at fault here. If it was a man's influence that has again ruined the life of yet another woman, blaming Murray for being the wrong man begs the question that there is probably a right man. If the answer is that there should be no man and that Morgan could have gone it alone with strength and conviction, why didn't she, if she had so much "power"? Perhaps she was not so powerful, after all, and certainly without Jung, her visions would not have seen the light of day, as they were "visioned" with his encouragement.

   We are left simply with a melodrama of Jungian proportion, an analysis that has been terminated prematurely through the exhaustion and limitations of the two participants. Douglas comes in to pronounce that the unjust winners are still the men and losers the women, in the process ignoring or misrepresenting the success of the women in Jung's circle, and smarter women everywhere.

   Men are once again back to being faulted for wanting something from women. To make something out of a mass of visions which would in another time and place be considered certifiable, is not enough. It remains with feminism that it must be the cake and the eating of it, too, something which, if Ms. Douglas would only admit, Jung and Murray were simply not able to have with the impunity she implies, and, therefore, not at all.

1 comments about Abelard and the Origin and Early History of Universities.

1. This book is a must for anyone interested in the roots of universities. Well documented, with references to a long list of authors through the ages, it tells the story of the very beginning of universities as learned societies which gained public and political support in the era of heavy turbulence. Fascinatuing stuff. I read it in one breath.

No comments about Alfred Nobel: A Biography.

No comments about Origins: Selected Letters of Charles Darwin, 1822-1859. Anniversary edition. (Selected Letters of C. Darwin).

1 comments about Linnaeus: The Compleat Naturalist.

1. This book reprints the text of Wilfred Blunt's 1971 biography, "The Compleat Naturalist: A Life of Linnaeus," adding lavish illustrations, a brief bibliography by Gavin Bridson, an explanation of Linnaeus's system of taxonomy by William T. Stearn, and a comment on modern biological systematics by C. J. Humphries. Carl Linnaeus was an egotistical, vain, and sometimes difficult man, but he was also a beloved teacher, and his impact on natural history is undeniable. Blunt is a charming writer, and he skilfully tells the story of Linnaeus's rise from obscure provincial to famous professor, drawing on Linnaeus's own writings and those of his contemporaries. The illustrations bring to life the places Linnaeus lived and traveled and the plants that he observed, described, and named. Blunt has less to say about Linnaeus's science; readers who want to know how Linnaeus's contemporaries reacted to his ideas and what effect they had on biology will have to turn to works by Lisbet Koerner and others. But if you've ever wondered who was responsible for modern scientific nomenclature, and what it was like traveling in Sweden and Europe in the eighteenth century, this book is a fine place to start.

1 comments about The Zookeeper's Daughter.

1. I thought "The Zookeeper's Daughter" was is a refreshing tale of the real life experiences of a strong woman. It was a book that I could relate to. It deals with life and death and the joy of what comes inbetween. It is a must read