Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges

A collection of translated short stories, essays and (very) short parables by one of the leading Latin American writers.  The essays and parables I found hard to read and uninteresting.  It looks as if they were just included as padding, or else for reasons of completeness. However, the short stories are marvellous, almost little nightmares; some (eg: The Immortal, and The Circular Ruins) have the atmosphere of paintings by Beksinski, others are steeped in cabbalism, and arcane philosophy and theology.  The Library of Babel and The Lottery in Babylon remind me of Olaf Stapledon's Starmaker in their  scale, but what took Stapledon 250 pages to do, Borges does just as effectively in less than 10.  I am also sure that Umberto Eco must have been influenced by Borges cabbalistic stories when he came to write Foucault's Pendulum.

On the whole, Borges gives the distinct impression of having spent too much time in dusty old libraries, but I am glad that he did, and I will certainly be keeping my eyes open for any more of his short stories.

Update on Sat 2005-09-10 by Tristram Brelstaff

Would-be purchasers should be aware that Penguin Classics has also  published 'Fictions' which  appears  to contain  the same material as 'Labyrinths' without the essays and parables.

Birds of Sardinia

My daughter Zoe is spending a week staying with her cousin in Alghero in Sardinia.  She reports seeing griffon vultures, bee-eaters, and a probable golden eagle.  And here am I stuck in Reading, with Canada geese, ducks and pigeons!

A Quotation on Object Identity and Time

... Not only was it difficult for him to comprehend that the generic symbol dog embraces so many unlike individuals of diverse size and form; it bothered him that the dog at three fourteen (seen from the side) should have the same name as the dog at three fifteen (seen from the front). ...

From Funes el memorioso by Jorge Luis Borges.

How Mumbo-Jumbo conquered the World by Francis Wheen

A sort of 'Brief History of Bullshit' which does for modern politics, economics, and popular culture what Martin Gardner did for pseudosciences in his 'Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science'.  Almost every major Bitish and US figure of the last 25 years is subjected to Wheen's demolition job: Reagan, Thatcher, Blair, Clinton, Bush Snr, Bush Jnr, Al. Gore, Lady Diana, Noam Chomsky, the barons of industry, economists, journalists, post-modernists, etc;  they are all shown up as liars, cheats, self-deceivers and manipulators.  This is really quite an impressive display of Swiftian invective.  However, as when I read 'Fads and Fallacies', I found the whole thing rather depressing.  The ills described are rather overwhelming and it is not until the last chapter, when he gets onto the relationship between the West and Islam that Wheen seems to offer anything positive of his own.

A Reason for Everything by Marek Kohn

This is a popular  account of the lives and ideas of some of the major British figures in evolutionary theory.  

After rather sensibly omitting Darwin, whose life is already adequately covered by several excellent biographies, Kohn concentrates on Alfred Russel Wallace,  Ronald Aylmer Fisher, J. B. S. Haldane, John Maynard Smith, William. D. Hamilton, and Richard Dawkins.  Although he tries to portray all of them, except Maynard Smith, as eccentric, I think that Wallace comes across as a fairly normal and sympathetic character, in spite of his interest in spiritualism.  The fact that the right-wing leanings of Fisher and Hamilton are balanced by the communism of Haldane and the young Maynard Smith refutes the common assumption that evolutionary theory supports right-wing politics.

Most of the book seems to have based on Kohn's researches into the letters of the main characters, but the material on Hamilton seems to be based largely on Hamilton's 'Narrow Roads of Gene Land' and concentrates rather too much for my liking on his apocalyptic views on the accumulation of damaged genes.  However, I think that the most valuable contribution of this book are the parts based on interviews with that epitome of evolutionary common sense, John Maynard Smith.  These give interesting insights into his relationship with Hamilton who apparently bore several grudges against him (for instance, Hamilton thought that Maynard Smith had abused his position as a referee of Hamilton's 1964 paper to get his own ideas on kin selection into print first) .   Maynard Smith's death in 2004 was a great loss.

Update on Sat 2005-08-13 by Tristram Brelstaff

Charles H. Smith of Western Kentucky University runs a wonderful web-site on Alfred Russel Wallace at http://www.wku.edu/~smithch/index1.htm.