Maritain's Complete Works, Vol. 6 and 8

I read the books in those volumes, and I retain three thoughts. (1) Corruption is what makes a person waste his/her energies and what is best in him/her. By that standard many institutions, including the university, are corrupt. (2) What is most precious and most wasted is the spiritual life of a human being -- spiritual life being broadly defined. (3) There is a temptation for Christians to stay in the desert, i.e. to be only mystics rather than genuine actors in the world. He is immensely clear and easy to read, even if I continue to pick up on his feelings of superiority as a Catholic, and I still am not sure there is such a thing possible as a Catholic philosopher, which he tried to be.

Tainter's Collapse, Record's Wins, Bazin's Cinema

I finished Tainter's study of collapsing societies, which unfortunately didn't include Greenland. I also read Jeffrey Record's Why Insurgencies Win, which uses the same strong- and weak- side strategy nomenclature that I do. I am also reveling in Rene Bazin's collected review of post-war French films. I am reading it for the same reason I read Saint-Simon: it's gorgeously written. I also read the latest New Yorker, and on my night table are three volumes of the complete works of Maritain, which I've been trying to get for a long time. However, the kayaking season is upon us, and I expect to have less time to read. On the other hand, there is still no working TV in the house...

Death and Collapse

I devoured Drew Gilpin Faust's This Republic of Suffering, a book about death and mortuary practices during the US Civil War. It is very clearly written, and the topic fascinates me, and there was ample documentation to exploit. I really enjoyed it. After than, I had three books on the collapse of societies to read. The first was a bit of a light weight, Jared Diamond's Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, but it did have a discussion of how the Greenland settlements came to fail in the 1400's, a topic I've long been interested in. I also learned a great deal about other societies I never knew existed. It puts the environmental situation in perspective, I think. I am also interested in the topic because of how strategies may fail in complex situations. Last night, I fell asleep over Tainter's Collapse of Complex Societies. This book, at least, is written by an anthropologist. Diamond is an ornithologist, not exactly the background for a discussion of a subject well beyond biology.

Genlis, Abazov, Khan, Ely, Descartes

Gee, almost a month since my last post. I was in Italy visiting my partner's extended family, but since i returned I've been busy. I've read Genlis' Mademoiselle de Lafayette, which ends on the famous heartbreaking scene of the Sun King gazing at a nun, his former mistress. I also read the proceedings of a conference on the pedagogy of the long war. I read Democracy and Distrust, which is actually about constructivist judges in the US, by John Ely. It's an older book, and I disagree with even the existence of the label 'constructivist', but it was pleasantly written. I also read Rafis Abazov's The formation of post-Soviet international politics in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan, which was really informative for me since I hadn't read a word about the "Stans". I also read four issues of The New Yorker, and four issues of The New Scientist. Now I'm in the middle of a book of essays on Muslim democracy, edited by Muqtebar Khan, which is also informative. I also read with interest about 100 pages of Descartes' philosophical works, and I'm learning a great deal, but I'm not very far along: there are three volumes of about 1000 pages each.