A Separate Peace

I don't know. It just didn't hold up well for me as an adult listen even though I had some of my students read it year after year. Sara may have hit the nail on the head when she said that it could have ended much, much earlier. In any case, the ties to World War II seem to come out much stronger in an extended listen than in a disjointed read. But at the same time, it seemed that Forrester almost absolved himself of personal responsibility for Phinney's broken leg by comparing this individual act with those acts that he and his classmates will be committing in the war. In many ways, Gene's inability to handle his guilt drives the book and makes for his basic dishonesty with himself. (That really came out in Old School as well. What is it about boarding schools that seems to bring out the worst in late adolescent boys? Finney is irrepressible, as always, but there is also a lack of honesty, and of depth, in his character that doesn't hold up as well as it did when I taught the book. I don't think that it is a book that I would try to teach anymore if I could help it.

Author: Knowles, John

Date Published: 1959

Length: 6hr 35min

Narrator: McClure, Spike

The Grapes of Wrath

First off, Grapes works so well as an audiobook. Steinbeck's language and his descriptive passages come alive. I think that this has to be the great American novel of the 20th century. Only Philip Roth comes close in my reading. Roth is probably better at dissecting the human condition, especially in the late 20th century, but his language is nowhere close to Steinbeck. The audio version brings out the narrative structure of the book more clearly for me than the printed version, especially the interposing structure of the Joad's personal tribulations vs the wider perspective of the problems as a whole.

The used car salesman is one of the great scenes of literature, and reminds a lot of Tom Waits' "Step Right Up." Or the pathos of the farmers having to sell off the equipment that they had worked so hard to accumulate for pennies on the dollar, especially the draft horses that were now victims of progress and of history. And it goes on and on, taking pains to show the Joads as but one instance of great social forces at work. It is also apparant tht the book belongs to Ma as the central character of the book.  That makes the pathos even greater since her goal is to keep the family together even as she watches it fall apart.

Grapes lacks the metaphysics--timshel--of East of Eden, but it does have Casey's being part of one big soul and Tom's "I'll be there" speech. People break down under the pressures of life and dislocations. Only Ma and Jim Casey come through it as stronger characters.

Author: Steinbeck, John

Date Published: 1929

Length: 21hr

Narrator: Baker, Dylan

The Rosicrucian Enlightenment

Yates is again tracing the magical roots of the late Renaissance, this time in the Jacobean Age. The Rosicrucian manifestos appear in 1614-15 and herald a new age whereby all thought will be known. John Dee, renaissance magus in Elizabeth's court, appears as one of the major influences on the manifestos, also incorporating Paracelsian alchemy, but seeking inner gold. "The Rosicrucian movement is aware that large new revelations of knowledge are at hand, that man is about to arrive at another stage of advance, far beyond that already achieved…And the Rosicrucians…are concerned to integrate these into a religious philosophy."

This movement is also strongly associated with the court of the Elector Palatine, Frederick V, who married the daughter of James I of England in 1613. This marriage represents an alliance of Protestant forces in Europe to keep the Catholic Hapsburgs and the post Council of Trent counterreformation in check, and perhaps to wrest the Holy Roman Empire and especially the German states, from Hapsburg control. Yates makes it clear that Frederick overplays his hand--especially after James I refuses to come to his aid, a move that disgusted English Protestants and helped foster the attitudes that led to the Glorious Revolution of 1848-- after the "defenestration of Prague" in wresting the throne of Bohemia from Ferdinand, who revoked the religious toleration promulgated by Rudolph II. Frederick's crushing defeat in 1620 seemed to promise the total annihilation of all Protestant forces in Europe until Gustavous Aldophus saved the day, but only after the Thirty Years War devastated much of Germany.

Rosicrucianism was pretty much a spent force by then, but the ideas gave rise to the Royal Society, to Masonic Lodges, and occupy an important background of thought and attitude in the coming Scientific Revolution. "The world, nearing its end, is to receive a new illumination in which the advances in knowledge made in the preceding age of the Renaissance will be immensely expanded. New discoveries are at hand, a new age is dawning. And this illumination shines inward as well as outward; it is an inward spiritual illumination revealing to man new possibilities in himself, teaching him to understand his own dignity and worth and the part his called upon to play in the divine scheme."

Author: Yates, Frances

Date Published: 1972

Length: 322

print

The Arts of Memory

Dame Yates spends the first 200 pages or so reconstructing the classical arts of memory--developed primarily by Simonides and Cicero--and continued through the medieval thinkers Albertus Magnus, Aquinas, and Raymond Lull--and moving into the Renaissance with a long chapter on Camillo's Theatre of Memory. But it is really the chapters on Bruno that the book starts moving into interesting territory, for Bruno's various and convoluted memory projects are really his religio-magico techniques that lead to gnosis, to unification of the cosmos and man through the mind of the magus.

The mind of man holds archetypal images that can be retrieved and activated by the magus through the arts of memory that allows him to achieve a vision of unity of the One through the All, and the All through the One. "the art of memory was … the inner discipline of his religion, the inner means by which he sought to grasp and unify the world of appearances" The creation of this vast memory apparatus that tries to unify all knowledge is really an attempt to articulate Chardin's noosphere, I think, and to lead to the salvation both of man and of the universe by tapping "into the powers of the cosmos, which are in man, himself."

But Dame Yates also makes clear, as she did in Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, that this search for a method also underlies the search for a method that undergirds the thinking of Bacon, Descartes and Leibniz--"the profound conviction that man … can grasp, hold, and understand the greater world through the power of his imagination" and "prepared the way for the conception of a mechanical universe, operated by mathematics."

Author: Yates, Francis

Date Published: 1966

Length: 389pp

print

Brain Rules

One of the first books that I read on the Kindle, which makes highlighting and saving information very easy. Medina, a molecular biologist, outlines 12 rules based on the anatomy and physiology of the brain that will help us lead healthier and more productive lives. Many of the current educational and business environments that we work in are absolutely counterproductive to the ways out brain works, and we must change them if we expect different results from ourselves, our classroom, our businesses.

Our brains evolved to solve problems related to solving problems quickly in an unstable environment. The ways that our brains perceive, encode, and store information are based on this highly mobile, flexible learning pattern based on exploration. The means, for example, that we must exercise frequently to keep the brain alert and healthy, that long term stress is absolutely destructive of our brain's ability to quickly adapt to situations, that we must get enough sleep--and naps--to give the brain time to digest, reorganize, and recover the information taken in during our waking hours. Multitasking is a myth that wastes our "attentional" energies; we learn much better through exploration than rote memory; audiences check out within 10 minutes of any presentation; vision trumps all other senses, but even then what we perceive is based on previous experiences, so that two different people have different experiences and interpretations of the same event.

I found Medina's ideas fascinating, even if a bit shallow or simplistic at times, but I wonder how realistically his ideas can be implemented. Certainly his ideas have important implications for education, and for business, but I don't see school districts or international corporations incorporating them any time soon.

Author: Medina, John

Date Published: 2008

Length: 301

electronic print