My Book Reviews

I wish to discuss the searingly moving book  Their Darkest Hour: People Tested To The Extreme in World War II by Laurence Rees, Ebury Press, UK, 2008.  This book is a good book to read in tandem with any standard history book of the period, and indeed with Jonathan Glover's Humanity: A Moral History of The Twentieth Century which is a tour de force on the moral and ethical implications of War, and which I reviewed in this blog here  Glover .  I can trace my interest in the topic of evil back to viewing as a boy in my late father's company the wonderful documentary series, which is still considered one of the greatest and most profound summaries of WWII, namely  The World at War.   This documentary was produced by Jeremy Isaacs , narrated by the famous actor Lawrence Olivier   and included a most moving and haunting score composed by Carl Davis .  As I write this piece I am listening to the theme music by Davis on YouTube World At War Theme ...

Philosophy of Mind and Philosophy of Self  As an erstwhile theologian and a current philosopher (of sorts) I have always been interested in making some sense of the enterprise of life.  Finding ourselves thrust or thrown into existence (that old Heideggerian "dasein") we seek to make sense of life, with the myriads of complex problems it throws at us, as soon as self-consciousness dawns.  The two books I wish to discuss briefly in this post are (i)  The Philosophy of Mind, by  Edward Feser, One World Books, Oxford, 2006 and (ii) Concepts of the Self, by Anthony Elliott, 2nd Edition, revised and updated, Polity, 2008. (i) The Philosophy of Mind   by Edward Feser My Copy of Feser's book In short, this book does exactly what it says in the blurb on the cover: it provides a wonderfully accessible introduction to the topic referred to as philosophy of mind.  The topics he covers in this short introduction to the field are: perception, ...

The Power of Story My Copy that I have just finished reading Khaled Hosseini is a gifted storyteller. He draws us into his web of wonder and sorrow, happiness and pain with the ease of a spider catching its prey.  Suspension of disbelief is never in question as the web he weaves is, alas, all too real and all too true, for the real life sufferings of the Afghani people in the last half of the twentieth century and the first decade of the next form the backdrop of his new novel And The Mountains Echoed (2013) as it does for his previous two A Thousand Splendid Suns (2007) and The Kite Runner (2003). Hosseini is a most powerful writer, all the more extraordinary as English is his second tongue after Farsi.  He writes wonderful descriptions of places, things, customs and people in oftentimes the simplest of words. He is a master of his craft as we see in such descriptions of intuitive feelings as: “...Baba Ayub didn’t understand. Just as he didn’t understand why a ...