Reviews and Comments

I started reading this book thinking this was a historical exploration of the philosophical conceptions of time. Maybe I’m not the only one to fall for this, for, as the author himself acknowledges in the introduction, the title may be a bit of a misnomer. Even so, I was pleasantly surprised by the the content of this work. For this is a history of the ways people kept track of time. In this sense, yes, this is a history of time, but time in a weaker sense.

So what is this book actually about? This is an exploration of how the different calendars were divised, its lengths, its relations and justifications within a particular culture, and how some of these notions, ideas, calculations and, even, mistakes, are still influencing our own ways of keeping track of time.

So, what do I keep from this? Well, to be honest, just the loose impression that most peoples (if not all) in their need to keep track of time, end up being trapped within the cultural necessity of trying to make the universe conform to the calendar. I know, sounds weird. But we are still doing it. For we rise when the clock ticks, and not when the Sun rises. This, although not explicitly stated in the book, it’s something that permeates the whole message; at least when you start considering that all calendars are filled with incongruencies shaped by cultures offsetting the counting with the universal measure of Nature.

Maybe you’ll like to know why your days are called the way they are. Maybe you just like to know some random facts about calendars, Easter days, and why do we call it Summer. Maybe you’re just glad do know how cutely random these defining features of our civilization truly are. In any case, you’ll find something of interest worth of your time.

If you heard about Terence McKenna, you probably know how weird, and inspiring, his ideas were. If you know Terence McKenna well enough, you also know who Dennis McKenna is and how instrumental Dennis was in Terence’s life. If you know a bit about Terence’s self-proclaimed biography, his experiments at La Chorrera, his predictions and how incredibly weird the whole experience was to Terence and Dennis, you probably want to know a bit more about it from a different perspective.

So this is it. This is that new perspective onto Terence’s life and thought. Well written, engaging at times (for all lives have those meh moments that look like filling-ins to a major thrust of the whole story), and providing new insights onto how McKenna deal with his normal life, relations, and people around him.

If you’re a Terence McKenna’s buff, you won’t be disappointed to read this biography. If you don’t know who he is, you better start elsewhere — probably by Terence’s own works and, more importantly, by his talks (most of them available for free on youtube).

You probably know the author from his masterpiece Guns, Germs and Steel. If you do, you know what to expect from this book. The same thorough explanations, the vast array of interconnected factors, all grounded on scientific data.

This is not the book for those who truly want an optimistic view of what the future holds for us. The title says it all: collapse. So the author guides us through many paradigmatic collapses of civilizations that acted either greedy, naively, or simply recklessly.

11 years from its publication and the rate of global destruction has not halted — in fact, it is accelerating, as predicted by those who are often called pessimists. So, in a sense, Jared Diamond’s call to action to make the change happen has not come to fruition. However, if you happen to read this book, you’ll probably become one amongst many contributing to at least slow down the rate of destruction. And that, by itself, if anything else, makes reading this book something truly worthy of your time.

Once again Frans de Waal takes us through a journey into the realm of animals’ behavior. Combining his thorough experience with primates and his deep theoretical knowledge of animal cognition, this book provides a much needed and profound analysis of the field of ethology.

Starting with an almost too simple of question (that of the title), de Waal shows us that for a long time animal studies didn’t, or couldn’t pay enough regard to animal intelligence, for reasons that range from the fears of falling into an unscientific anthropomorphism to the basic psychological bias of wanting to preserve human exceptionalism.

As we follow his narrative, we embark on a history of ethology, its problems, its setbacks, its successes and even what may lie ahead for this field of study. As it is usual with his other books, de Waal provides ample examples of observations, experiments, field studies and many anecdotes that not only make his case stronger, but also give us a glimpse of what an animal Umwelt (inner world) may look like.

This is a book for animal lovers; but this is also a book for those who “patronize [animals] for their incompleteness” (BESTON, 1928). On an era where ecological disaster looms, this, thus, is one of those books to read. Only by understanding animals and their worlds can we give the long due respect nature deserves

Primates and Philosophers, or how you should think of morality on the 21st century. This could as well be the title of this book. For, as de Waal states in the conclusion of this work "The debate with my colleagues made me think of Wilson’s (1975: 562) recommendation three decades ago that 'the time has come for ethics to be removed temporarily from the hands of philosophers and biologicized.'" (2006) So there you have. You can either go by the moralists who believe that morality is only a human affair, or go the biological way and realize that as with everything else, in what concerns morality, we are again the tip of the iceberg in evolutionary terms.

If you are interested in delving deeper into these kind of debates, you'll definitely love this book. There's plenty of academic nitty-picking inside, so you have to measure how much committed you are to these issues before opening the book. Again, quoting de Waal, "While making for good academic fights, semantics are mostly a waste of time. Are animals moral? Let us simply conclude that they occupy several floors of the tower of morality. Rejection of even this modest proposal can only result in an impoverished view of the structure as a whole" (2006).

In any case, de Waal's essays are rich and insightful as everything he has written thus far. So you won't waste your time if you just read his contributions to the volume.

If you, like me, tended to think atheism as a somewhat more recent phenomenon (a product of the European enlightenment), this book will definitely challenge your views.

The author carries us on a historical journey through ancient Greco-Roman history, providing ample examples on how atheism came to be a defensible philosophical position in late antiquity.

On the whole, the book offers an alternative reading of Ancient Philosophy on the lookout for the atheistic positions throughout the scattered and fragmentary evidence of the extant texts. This will broaden your view on how the many philosophical debates were carried, how the ideas came to be and what were ultimately their consequences to the furthering the debate.

With a solid argumentation, a clear style and a compelling narrative, this book is not only insightful as it is also entertaining, making it very easy to read and understand. Even if you do not agree with the author's speculations and liberties in the way he treats the ancient texts, you can rest assured that you will no longer view the history of philosophy in the same way.

How do we stop the wreck that humans are doing to the environment? Are the conservation efforts enough? Or are we really headed to the sixth extinction? Can we halt this process?

Edward O. Wilson believes we can change our ecological future before it is too late. For that we need more than just to preserve this or that species, or this or that environment, but to set a very specific goal: half-earth — that is to say, that we must reserve half of our planet for wild nature. Less than that and we are taking a very risky gamble with the future of our own species.

Throughout the book, in an easy to read and well argued fashion (as is his style), Wilson tries to make the case for the necessity of the preservation of wild nature, in all its complexities, and tries to demolish the vacuous reasoning behind those that think that we have long passed the turning point in terms of conservation (the Antropocene Movement).

If you are sensitive to the cause of nature's conservatism, you'll find this book a very compelling one. If, on the other hand, you have never payed much attention to this (or these) cause, maybe you'll start to give it a little more attention, and maybe, just maybe, you'll become a convert to the Wilson's idea — giving it little more strength in terms of support. If. For, as Wilson clearly demonstrate, we most probably don't have the luxury of time to postpone such an effort. In the end, Nature will always come out victorious — but if we make the wrong choices, we won't be around anymore to witness it in all its continuous wonder.

The Voyage of the Turtle is more than just a book about turtles. This book is also a voyage throughout the many seas the leatherback sea turtles inhabit. by journeying with the turtles, we get to know the people that try to protect them, their nesting sites, the many problems surrounding their conservation, how fisheries hurt the turtles and the seas with their practices. But, most of all, the Voyage is about getting to know one of nature’s oldest and mysterious creatures, creating an empathy bond with its life and destiny.

As with Beyond Words, by the same author, we are taken to the animal world and get to see it through different eyes, eyes not accustomed (or forgetful) to seeing life as life in nature is.

If you want to broaden your empathy circle to encompass more of nature, if you want to, at least for a bit, to break with a human-centered view of the world, this book won’t disappoint you.

Wilson's proposal is ambitious, at least judging by the title. However, to understand what he means, one has to get the straighten out our causality thinking about what it means to talk about existence — not in an empty (i.e. non-empirical) ideological way, but taking the hard evidence of the natural sciences and then, only then, think about existence.

This is Wilson's proposal. The book is well written, with good examples and with a narrative that is not too demanding to follow. Since life is what it is, and that is truly the only acceptable starting point to discuss The Meaning of Human Existence, in that sense, Wilson is right in trying to tackle such a long and difficult discussion through the biological lens. Wilson does not offer an answer — he wants to open the way to a more fruitful discussion.

If you prefer to swallow the blue pill of whatever dream narrative it best suits your interests, this is not the book for you. On the other hand, if you choose the red one, you have to face the crudeness of how things truly are — only then you can start to think about The Meaning of [your] Human Existence — and this book is probably well suited for you.

“Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?”. Yali's question serves the basis for a worldwide survey of the many factors influencing history and that determined the fates of world's power balance.

Through this amazingly thorough journey throughout history, we learn that most of what happened happened by chance, by subjecting different peoples in different continents to different conditions, conditions which were ultimately responsible for a particular set of peoples having reached the stage of dominating guns, steel and having greater immunity to certain (and very deadly germs).

This is probably one of the best books to make you rethink history under a much more naturalistic perspective, taking the thunder out of those that naively think that the real reasons for the present day status quo lie somewhere on human personality or will [to power?].

From geography to weather to food production to plant and animal domestication to greater demography to wider spread of technology and diseases, all that contributing to make some peoples more apt to conquer others, resulting in the human world we witness today.

If you really want to know how we got from point A (being hunter-gatherers) to point B (present day world structure), this is one of the best books that will present an easy to follow, sufficiently rich in examples, and concise enough to save you from being overburdened with information (for any conversation trying to tie up all of human history necessarily covers too many topics, peoples and their histories, and thus covering too much raw information, which can be way too difficult to absorb and digest). If, by chance, you happen to be one of those who vow for the supremacy of any particular group of people, you probably should avoid this volume — for claiming superiority when you happen to be at the end of a long string of random events does not make you particularly special. In any case, whatever your starting position, you will be much more illuminated on world's history by the time you end up reading this book.

If life is meaningless, why not enjoy its simple pleasures? If Epicurus had read what this Persian philosopher, astronomer, mathematician, and poet had written, he probably would have approved of it.

Omar Khayyam, through the brilliant English poetic voice that Edward FitzGerald lent him, speaks to us in a way that few are capable of. Realizing how incapable to provide any substantial answers any philosophical attempt is, what else can you conclude than a sort of Epicureanism that takes being alive as everything you will ever get, and that your enjoyments, sparse as they are, should be praised? If you have no metaphysical expectations beyond this life and experiences, Omar will speak directly to you. If you have a different set of beliefs, he might offend you, as he has many others throughout history. In any case, you won't feel indifferent to his thoughts. And thanks to Edward FitzGerald's translation, you will find in the words and their musicality the joys of the wine that Omar repeatedly praises.

É Saramago. Mas, ainda assim, algo lhe falta. Como se não estivesse todo, algo lhe tivesse escapado. O estilo, seu, é inconfundível. Mas, ainda assim, há algo que não está. É como se o ânimo o tivesse abandonado e as mortes, os anúncios e seus prenúncios, fossem já os da sua morte anunciada.

O livro, numa reflexão grosseira, divide-se em 3 momentos, como 3 ensaios à volta do mesmo tema. E esse é talvez o problema, aquilo que o torna estranho, porque os 3 ensaios, embora interessantes, só forçosamente se ligam uns aos outros, embora haja entre eles a coerência forçada de se transvestir sempre da mesma história.

O primeiro é da morte que desapareceu. Este é o Saramago que se espera quando se abre um dos seus livros, o do episódio fantástico que como barata kafkiana não nos é sequer permitido contestar e sobre o qual tudo o resto fica em dívida. A ideia, interessante, a lembrar outras cegueiras e as lucidezes que sempre faltam.

Mudança de premissa. A morte agora anuncia-se. Outro cenário, outras consequências. O segundo ensaio parece querer explorar as dimensões do problema da morte como facto consumado, com pré-aviso em carta. Não convence, mas só porque dele se espera uma coerência com o que antes parecia prometido.

Por fim, a morte mulher. Um violoncelista, um cão, e uma vida toda sem graça. Uma carta que nunca chega e uma morte que não acontece. O final que se aceita para um livro que parece haver perdido rumo; ou, dando larga a justificações poéticas, aquelas que se toleram em autor de renome (cujo nome basta para que se exija do leitor a responsabilidade de inventar significações que ao texto faltam), o final que justifica as intermitências da morte numa morte que se particulariza em quase ganhar personalidade.

Vale a pena? Se fosse o único Saramago, diria que sim. Havendo outros, e tão melhores, deixaria este para o fim, para quando houvesse tempo e a preocupação não fosse já a de conhecer a obra.