If you asked me to list the names of 19th century American atheists, I would have said Robert G. Ingersoll (1833-1899) and stopped. He is clearly the most famous but it turns out that there is another person who preceded him, and that was Dr. Charles Knowlton. I became aware of him because of a …
Category Archive: Books
May 12 2013
The Great Gatsby and me
As an immigrant, I figured that probably a good way to understand to nature of my adopted country was to familiarize myself with its literature, especially the ones that are asserted to be classics, since the books that a society values are the ones that reveal its sense of identity. So naturally as part of …
Feb 01 2013
Bertie Wooster and the n-word
At the risk of beating a dead horse, I want to come back one more time to the question of when the use of the n-word might be appropriate. I am a huge fan of English humorist P. G. Wodehouse, especially enjoying his Jeeves and Wooster series. If you have read Wodehouse, you know that …
Oct 15 2012
The annual exposure of my ignorance of literature
I like to think of myself as fairly well read but the season of Nobel-prize winning announcements has just ended and of all the prizes, the literature prize is the one that reminds me each year of how wrong my self estimation is because I have never even heard of almost any of the winners. …
Aug 01 2012
Gore Vidal, 1925-2012
Gore Vidal, a class traitor of the best kind, died yesterday. Born into a well-connected and politically influential family that could have opened doors to a patrician life, he became instead a populist outsider and a scathing critic of the politics of the US. He had wide-ranging interests, writing novels, essays, and screenplays and also …
Jul 20 2012
Sherlock in love
When you read classics like Pride and Prejudice, Wuthering Heights, A Study in Scarlet, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, and The Three Musketeers, I am sure the thought crosses your mind, “These books have great stories, excellent writing, and strong characters but there’s something missing. What they need to be really great are some …
Jun 25 2012
The problem with memoirs
A new book by David Maraniss titled Barack Obama: The Story (that I have not read) apparently challenges certain features of Barack Obama’s life story as recounted by him in his memoir Dreams From My Father (which I have also not read) and says that the reality “was less dramatic — and more routine — …
Jun 08 2012
Introducing the Malcolm Gladwell Book Generator
Malcolm Gladwell has made a name for himself by publishing superficial books that basically promotes a simple theory for everyday phenomena and cherry picking data to support it. He is a good writer and when you read his books his argument initially sounds plausible and it is only later you discover that things are a …
Apr 26 2012
Book Review: God and the Folly of Faith by Victor J. Stenger
Victor Stenger has had a long career in experimental high-energy physics. He has become a prolific writer on the intersection of science and religion and I have referred to him frequently in past blog posts, especially to material in his 2007 book God: The Failed Hypothesis. Stenger is an unabashed ‘new atheist’ who thinks that …
Mar 15 2012
Encyclopedia Britannica ends print editions
When I returned to Sri Lanka after competing my doctorate, I splurged some of our meager savings on my dream of owning a full set of the Encyclopedia Britannica, although it was really expensive. I used to enjoy looking things up and skimming through the pages. Unfortunately the turmoil in Sri Lanka in 1983 caused …
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