Sarah Scoles. Countdown.

  A book written on the basis of Sarah's interview with the people (scientists, engineers, etc.) who maintain nation's nuclear weapons. Sarah, unlike many science journalists, is sufficiently competent to dissemble the information obtained from them but, for the life of me, I could not understand what the book was about. I suspect that she had to clear the book with the censors and they, as the Soviet censors of old, butchered the text till a full unrecognizability. 

Natalie Cabrol. The Secret Life of the Universe. An Astrobiologist's Search for the Origins and Frontiers of Life

    During my childhood and youth, the search for the life in the Universe was the domain of crackpots and madmen. Now, it is the main driver of planetary research and few grants in it can be awarded without a promise of a potential significance for astrobiology. 

    The book by Natalie Cabrol stands out from many similar books by its systematic approach, grouping the exoplanets by their astrophysical characteristics and discussing the possibilities of life or lack thereof in each. Especially exciting is her description of the traces of life in our Solar System. It is not a superb writing but quite an achievement in putting in a small, by the modern standards, book, so many insights into the search for life in the Cosmos. 

Frank Tallis. Mortal Secrets: Freud, Vienna and the Discovery of the Modern Mind.

      

         Tallis is a brilliant storyteller with sometimes razor sharp insights into intellectual world surrounding St. Sigismund, influences on him and his influences on the world civilization. He is a Viennese aficionado with a flair for dramatic. Also, his book is a treasure trove of unexpected facts about Freud's views and work. The book sheds light on his impossible greatness given that late in life he himself began to recognize that psychoanalysis is more an anthropological construct than a therapeutic method and had foreseen its replacement in psychiatry by psychopharmacology. 

    For a practicing analyst, he tells surprisingly little about the structure of psychoanalysis and his venturing into biology is pure crap ([1], pp. 290-293) [2]. And, of course, no nonfiction book emanating from the New York publishing milieu can avoid random (and rather incongruous) mentions of Putin and Ukraine. 

[1] A convergence of mythologies of unrelated tribes and peoples was convincingly explained by U. Eco (some remember that his day job was in semiotics) without references to epigenetics. Namely, that primeval beliefs are centered on the comparison of external objects with a human body. 

[2] Bygren's 1984 observations of intergenerational heart problems after the famine can be easily explained by the fact that, in times of hunger, survival favors people who randomly accumulate bodily fat faster than others. Naturally, in the subsequent generations, this feature increases the prevalence of heart disease. 

        The application of a similar logic to the descendants of the Holocaust/Shoah survivors is more tenuous. But following the previous example, one may surmise that, among the survivors, the people with an extreme propensity to sense danger fared marginally better. Yet, for their descendants being permanently under stress could cause substantial problems of adaptation. 

 

Edward II themed costume party at the Elysee. 

Adam Kirsch. The Blessing and the Curse: The Jewish People and Their Books in the Twentieth Century.

     

Isaac Babel (1894-1940), a Soviet-Russian Jewish writer as distant from Judaic religion as possible.

       Adam Kirsch is very insightful in his study of the (secular) literature created by the Jews. His penetration into literary genre is deep and enlightening. However, his partiality as an art critic of the Wall Street Journal is showing. All the discrimination and oppression of the Jews is attributed to the Germans and Russians and, a little bit, to the French. Supposedly, the Jewish life in the Anglo-Saxon countries was all sunshine and roses. In fact, until the end of the World War II, in the US and England, there was little of the educated Jewish middle class. All Jews were either business and banking tycoons, who imitated the tastes of the upper classes of their respective countries, or lower classes struggling for surviving. The Jewish experience was framed by others, e.g. Fagin in Dickens. Only when the reader of the Jewish books appeared, so did the writers (P. Roth, S. Bellow, I. Asimov, N. Mailer, etc.).