A Mind @ Play

Told through the eyes of a decidedly unreliable narrator, The Dinner is an elegantly simple novel served up over five courses. From the casual opening aperitif to the grittier, questionable digestif, the book layers on the story over a meal in a swanky restaurant.

Graham Greene originally divided his works into novels and ’entertainments’, separating his popular work from those he wished his literary career to be remembered for. In later life, this distinction would be blurred until it was dropped entirely. The Ministry of Fear is one of these earlier works labelled an entertainment. Made a year later into a film directed by Fritz Lang, it was written in the middle of wartime, and on the surface is a typical espionage thriller in the tradition of John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps , dealing with a Nazi spy ring operating in London during the blitz. On its own, the plot is gripping enough to carry the book through to the end, and those bits we can regard as ’entertainment’ made their way into the film.

Perhaps the most significant book in post-war American literature, one which has regained popularity since the start of the economic crisis, Altas Shrugged is the embodiment of an ideal society, the ultimate vehicle for Ayn Rand’s philosophy of objectivism. Weighing in at over 1,000 pages of tightly-packed print, it’s also one of the longest novels in English literature. Is it any good?

Dieser Eintrag ist auch auf Englisch verfügbar.

Auf irgendeiner Ebene sind uns die Eigenschaften der menschlichen Natur, die „Thinking, fast and slow“ erläutert, schon bekannt. In unserer Gesellschaft wird die Vernunft und die rationalen Handlungen der Menschen gerne hervorgehoben, Attribute, durch die wir uns sehr gerne gegenüber unseren sonstigen Verwandten im Tierreich einen besonderen Standesdünkel gönnen. Doch wie in diesem Buch so meisterhaft dargestellt, gibt es eine beträchtliche Menge an Faktoren, die unsere scheinbar so vernünftigen Entscheidungen verdrehen und beeinflussen können. Laut Kahneman kann man diese zwei so unvereinbaren Aspekte unseres Wesens als getrennte Systeme betrachten: Das erste System verkörpert unsere gedankenlosen, selbstständigen, unterbewussten und reflexartigen Reaktionen, wogegen das zweite System das logisch handelnde und vernünftige Dasein vertritt, wofür wir uns Menschen eigentlich halten. Viele der Forschungsarbeiten und Ergebnisse, die in diesem Buch behandelt werden, hat Kahneman zusammen mit seinem verstorbenen Kollegen Amos Tversky selbst durchgeführt. Ihm ist das Buch auch gewidmet.

This post is also available in German .

The qualities of human nature described in “Thinking, fast and slow” are already known to all of us at some level. We are all taught in society to believe in the rational, thinking human being as distinct from his animal peers, yet at this book excellently details, there are plenty of ways in which our seemingly rational decisions can be bent and perverted by various forms of bias. Daniel Kahneman details these two seemingly incongruous facets of our nature as two ‘distinct’ halves: System 1 represents our autonomous, unthinking, reflex and subconscious reactions, whereas System 2 is that logical, calculating being we consider ourselves to be. Much of the relevant research covered in this volume was pioneered and conducted by Kahneman and his late colleague Amos Tversky, to whom this volume is dedicated.

This entry is also available in English .

In ähnlicher Weise zu Dava Sobels Buch „Longitude “ dreht sich im „Nathaniel’s Nutmeg“ alles um die Erfahrungen eines der unsichtbarsten Protagonisten der Geschichte. Obwohl es sich um die Geschichte eines kleineren Maßstabes handelt, stimmt das Ziel des Werks überragend mit einem Zitat des Historikers E. P. Thompson überein, geschichtliche Figuren „from the enormous condescension of posterity“ zu retten. Die Hauptakteure dieses Buches werden den meisten Lesern unbekannt, sowie viele der Ereignisse, dennoch bleibt deren Auswirkung für die Gegenwart für jeden ersichtlich.

Dieser Eintrag ist auch auf Deutsch verfügbar.

In a similar vein to Dava Sobel’s Longitude , Nathaniel’s Nutmeg revolves around the story of one of history’s largely invisible protagonists. Whilst this isn’t history on the same scale, it sits very nicely with something E. P. Thompson said, about rescuing characters “from the enormous condescension of posterity.” The major characters in this book will be unknown to most people, as will most of the events, but their importance for the modern world will be clear to everyman.

Whilst I can’t claim to have had massive expectations from this book, the author’s reputation, experience, and the subject matter piqued my interest at first glance. This book is a collection of essays roughly sewn together reflecting the author’s personal experiences in the field of translation, either via conversations and experiences with translators and translations of his own works, or through translating by his own hand.

A work born of the Great Depression, The Grapes of Wrath is surely one of the greatest, most powerful and important books in American literature. Focusing on a poor family of tenant farmers escaping the Dust Bowl of Oklahoma, Steinbeck set out with the express intention of shaming the people he held responsible for the plight of these losers of the Depression, and aimed quite simply to “rip a reader’s nerves to rags” with his tale. The Joad family sets out for California with their few remaining possessions, seeking work, land and new lives among the colourful orchards and vineyards of the western state, a veritable promised land. Instead they find further hardship, exploitation and abuse, labelled as ‘Okies’ and reds, welcome if they’re willing to work for a pittance, hounded should they try to make a living for themselves.

This is the only Stephen Ambrose book I’ve read, spurred on by recently rewatching Saving Private Ryan and Band Of Brothers . A look at the American soldiers in the European theatre from D-Day to the end of the war, the book is based on oodles of research and countless memoirs, oral and written, from the people who were actually there. It doesn’t go into the actual events of the war in any detail, so it would behoove readers to have some background knowledge, but Ambrose does a decent job of sketching out the general situation.