Finished Legacy of Ashes. Ended up feeling kind of sorry for the CIA. Still think, always assuming the book's content is not too biased, the Agency's history is one screw-up after another. At the end of the Cold War, they had no clear target and a President with no use for them. The Agency exists to serve the needs of the President. Without a clear target, a mandate from the President, and facing a Congress eager for a "peace dividend," many in the Agency left for more-lucrative pastures. That left the CIA staffed with people too burned-out to look for other work, and recent graduates with no experience of the world outside Yale, yet alone North America, and burdened by myriad regulations. One anecdote is of a recruit, who would have been only the 2nd fluent Farsi-speaker in the entire Agency, who was not hired because he couldn't pass the English-language test. It wasn't that he could speak & write English -- it was that his English wasn't up to Ivy League standards.
Origin of Species is something I've wanted to read for a long time. It's not easy. Darwin was clearly, obviously, unmistakably writing about something he knew. The degree of logic, the layer upon layer of reason, example, expected dissent and counter-argument is overwhelming. The man understood that he was presenting an idea that wasn't self-evident, and went to great lengths to show that it was correct. Even to the extent of starting from really simple things -- like the fact that individual organisms compete to survive. Who, other than a genius trying to demonstrate an obscure truth by constructing a framework of observations, would bother to establish that fact with multiple examples and still more citations? But those same densely-layered arguments are almost impossible to follow, especially in an audio format. There are also problems of anachronism. Not surprisingly, in Darwin's day "species" didn't have a rigorously-defined meaning, so Darwin uses it (and the term "variety") in ways that seem incorrect to modern ears. I may have to abandon it.
Listened, again, to Neil Gaiman's Anansi Boys. Still, in my opinion, possibly the best fiction audiobook ever. Lenny Henry's reading is outstanding.
Next up . . . Homer's Odyssey and Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food.
Origin of Species is something I've wanted to read for a long time. It's not easy. Darwin was clearly, obviously, unmistakably writing about something he knew. The degree of logic, the layer upon layer of reason, example, expected dissent and counter-argument is overwhelming. The man understood that he was presenting an idea that wasn't self-evident, and went to great lengths to show that it was correct. Even to the extent of starting from really simple things -- like the fact that individual organisms compete to survive. Who, other than a genius trying to demonstrate an obscure truth by constructing a framework of observations, would bother to establish that fact with multiple examples and still more citations? But those same densely-layered arguments are almost impossible to follow, especially in an audio format. There are also problems of anachronism. Not surprisingly, in Darwin's day "species" didn't have a rigorously-defined meaning, so Darwin uses it (and the term "variety") in ways that seem incorrect to modern ears. I may have to abandon it.
Listened, again, to Neil Gaiman's Anansi Boys. Still, in my opinion, possibly the best fiction audiobook ever. Lenny Henry's reading is outstanding.
Next up . . . Homer's Odyssey and Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food.
