The Official Seal of the Well-Read Man

Tim Patrick is at it again. Reading, that is. He enjoys books, but now he’s about to get professional. Starting today, May 1, 2011, Tim embarks on The Well-Read Man Project. His goal: to read fifty of the most important books of all time within the span of a year. Fortunately, he’s not going to sit in a quiet corner giggling to himself with a book in hand. He’s going to blog about the experience.

During the first two months of the project, Tim will select the fifty books to read. Then, starting on July 1, the real fun begins, if you consider something as thick as War and Peace to be fun. Hopefully, when June 30, 2012 rolls around, Tim will be fifty books wiser.

To follow along, visit the new project web site, www.wellreadman.com. On that site, you’ll find the latest news about the project, places for you to add your own comments, and information on how you can join in the reading yourself.

by Robert Kroese

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True believers have been trying to pin down the apocalypse since angels first visited the Apostle John on Patmos, a crazy evening 1,900 years ago that included a few too many late-night chili-dogs. Some of these prognosticators of man’s demise are charismatic, by which I mean that they will force-feed you grape Kool-Aid in your sleep or train you in the use of semi-automatic weapons. Some are even crazy enough to craft multi-volume fiction bestsellers, only to have their main characters played by former child TV stars in low-budget theatrical releases.

But in every pack of end-times extremists is a voice of reason, someone who will make the muddy eschatological waters crystal clear. And standing next to him is Robert Kroese, the class clown, the person who, whether for right or for wrong, is able to bring true joy to something that—let’s face it—is a real downer. In Mercury Falls, Rob’s new novel on the apocalypse, the curtain that separates this world from eternal realities is torn open, revealing a glimpse of heaven normally only seen in a Department of Motor Vehicles field office.

The story centers on Mercury, a middle-class angel in the heavenly bureaucracy who, despite having friends in really high places, is feeling uncomfortable with this whole end-of-the-world thing. Through his dealings with angelic airport stewards, demonic call center agents, and mundane humans, Mercury manages to take the apocalypse to the very brink of Armageddon.

Although the theology in Mercury Falls is a mess, it might just succeed in opening your heart to the joyful parts of the Bible’s final book. Five stars!

by Antony Flew

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Today’s atheists and Christians seem to rub each other the wrong way. Whether it’s a “new atheist” like Sam Harris or Richard Dawkins dumping on believers, or a James Dobson type identifying atheists as the source of all evils in the world, there’s sure to be someone dogmatic making a rude statement somewhere. But it wasn’t always like this. If you go back to England sixty years ago, you would have seen C. S. Lewis, the famous Narnia author and Christian apologist, rubbing elbows regularly with his colleague Antony Flew, an atheistic philosopher. Despite being as Dobson-Dawkins as you could get, meetings at Oxford University’s Socratic Club were cordial and deeply philosophical. In this atmosphere of “following the argument wherever it leads,” those with opposing views seemed to follow that path together as friends.

After following that Socratic path for decades, Anthony Flew has been rubbed the right way, at least from his own perspective. The man identified as “the world’s most notorious atheist” is now a believer in God. Not Lewis’s personal God necessarily, but still a powerful, omni-everything creator God. In his new book, There Is A God, Professor Antony Flew documents his journey from atheism to theism. Some of the book is auto-biographical, providing the typical glimpse into an author’s formative years. But most of the text is devoted to providing what Flew loves doing most: philosophizing. In this case, he waxes philosophical on God, detailing the logical steps that led him to make a slow but firm about face away from atheism.

While Flew has stopped short of endorsing Christianity, he includes as an appendix compelling content from Bishop N. T. Wright concerning the claims surrounding Jesus Christ. Although Bishop Wright’s discussion is thought-provoking, its short length makes it less influential than the more general proofs for God found in Flew’s main chapters.

If you consider yourself to be left-brained you will certainly enjoy the book, whether you believe in God or not. Flew is a trained ivy-league professor and an octogenarian, so he slips into incoherent philosophical ramblings and twenty-syllable words periodically. But most of the text is cogent, well organized, and pensive. It might not be a page-turner, but for some it will be a life-turner.

by John R. Lott, Jr.

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I just finished reading Freedomnomics, a book by John R. Lott, Jr., that is, in part, a response to the popular book Freakonomics by Levitt and Dubner. To be honest, I didn’t really read the book; I listened to it as an audio book. Years ago I listened to a 5-million-hour recording of Lord of the Rings during my commute. It was a great way to pass the drive, but I found that I didn’t retain much, a fact made clear when I eventually watched the movie version.

But I doubt there will be a movie version of Freedomnomics, so I thought I would write a review to keep the ideas fresh. Despite having been written by an economics professor, the book turned out to be pretty enjoyable. A big plus for the book is that the author lived for a while in Montana, so the book automatically gets an extra ten points.

The five chapters of Freedomnomics exist to communicate four main ideas.

• Levitt and Dubner are buffoons.
• The free market works way better than a government-controlled economy.
• Abortion did not cause the crime rate to decrease in the 1990s.
• America’s government largess was caused primarily by women’s suffrage in the early twentieth century.

The last idea is, naturally, the most controversial, and despite the plausible arguments provided by Lott, I’m sure a lot more went into the making of a bloated federal bureaucracy than women showing up at the polls. He did provide a lot of facts and figures to support the claim, but they are a little hard to follow when strolling through a park with headphones on.

Still, I did learn some new things about how the market economy works. I also learned that economists don’t just spend their days counting money or money systems. Lott was constantly saying, “A study by economists…” about studies that had nothing to do with finances. And most of the studies were intriguing.

I recommend Freedomnomics, especially in its audio format. While it didn’t convince me to take classes in economics, it did prompt me to think a little more deeply about the way that I interact with businesses, government, and audiobooks.

by Steven Levy

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I finally broke down and bought my son an iPod this week. He already had a music player, something called the “Coby MPC885″ that doubled as a thumb drive. It was small, sleek, had a glowing multi-color single-line interface, and could never remember where it put the downloaded songs in its memory. So we upgraded to an iPod Nano (3G) 4GB device. It’s much better than the Coby, but it’s not perfect.

Steven Levy disagrees with me. He’s the author of The Perfect Thing, a book that focuses on the iPod and its impact on American and world cultures. As the chief technology correspondent for Newsweek, Levy certainly understands the world of electronic devices. His book chronicles the rise of the iPod and the parallel rise of Apple’s returning star, CEO Steve Jobs. I love a good history lesson, especially from authors who have the clout to sit down and interview those making that history, as Levy does.

The Perfect Thing also presents the history of the iPod as reflected in the millions of individuals who have purchased the minuscule music player, and those who hated it. From radio DJs to media moguls to ordinary school kids to rock stars, Levy discusses how the iPod has become a symbol of our present age.

But he fails to show its perfection. I’m not trying to be to picky here, but I’ve been a little stymied in trying to set up my son’s device. The most imperfect thing about this music and video player is that it rejects so much music and video content.

As a Windows developer, I naturally have a lot of Microsoft software on my system. I had ripped several of my personal CDs into my desktop system using Microsoft’s Windows Media Player application. Apple’s desktop software for the iPod, iTunes, was able to recognize these media files, but it refused to play them in their Microsoft-inspired format. Despite the double hit on my hard disk, I agreed to let my son convert those songs to iTunes’ AAC format. But that still wasn’t good enough for the iPod. In order to get these songs into the iPod, I had to reinsert the original CD and re-rip the media.

Perhaps I was doing it wrong, but I couldn’t find any other way to get those songs in. Also, my son’s excitement at watching The Chronicles of Narnia movie from our collection on that tiny screen quickly faded when iTunes refused to even recognize the presence of the DVD in the drive. It seems that only movies purchased from Apple’s web site are permitted access to the royal gates of the iPod. Anything else is media non grata.

So the iPod isn’t The Perfect Thing, at least for our family. But as Levy points out, the iPod accounted for over 60% of all Apple sales during its first few years on the market. So for Apple, it probably is perfect. And for Levy, it’s a perfect subject for his excellent writing talents.

Short History compares favorably to the World Book Encyclopedia for sheer number of historical names and facts crammed onto the printed page, with new important names appearing on nearly every page. But at least the first half of the book is interesting and relatively guilt-free. From his treatment of the universe’s not-so-humble beginnings to the inner workings of the atom, to the line of descent leading up to Homo Sapiens, Bryson introduces in fireside-chat mode the movers, shakers, and accidental tourists that make up the history of scientific discovery. A glutton for the simile, Bryson ensures that you will easily understand the size of the components of a molecule, the scope of the universe, and the various reasons why the city of Denver should possibly not exist (page 184).

Bryson makes an admirable attempt at being thorough in his science, but he is lax in filling in the historical realities sufficiently, despite including “history” in the title. His key omission is any hint that anyone in the history of the earth ever thought that a God or gods were involved in creative activity. I don’t expect the author to support the ideas conveyed in the various theories of Young-Earth or Old-Earth Creationism, Intelligent Design, or Biblical Literalism. If Bryson had called all such ideas “rot,” I would have been assuaged. But for hundreds of pages on what amounts to a treatise on human origins, he pretends such views don’t even exist. Bishop Ussher does receive passing mention on pages 74-75, but only to clarify that nobody every listened to the high-church calendar cruncher.

While you will find Short History entertaining, especially when read in slow chunks over several weeks, you would be hard pressed to identify it as a history of nearly everything, when it lacks nearly everything that really counts in a history of life.

To purchase a copy of A Short History of Nearly Everything, by Bill Bryson, click here.