Comments on: Book Meme

By: Audrey

Audrey — Fri, 22 Dec 2006 17:52:15 +0000

Closest:
“During the middle of the twelfth century it must have been rapid. In 1163 Pope Alexander III held a council at Tours and at King Louis VII’s request issued an anathema against all who sheltered or had an dealings with the heretics of the Toulousain and Gascony. In 1165 the bishops of the south of France held a council at Lombez, where the heretic doctrines, the rejection of the Sacrements and of the Old Testament were once more condemned.”
Steven Runciman, “The Medieval Manichee: A Study of the Christian Dualist Heresy”, Cambridge University Press, Reprinted in 1999 (originally published 1947).

Slightly less close:
“Fourtunately– or even providentially– Jerome was quite simply the greatest scholar of his time in the West. Almost uniquely among his contemporaries and sucessors, he was a ‘three-language man,’ as Augustine once called him with unmistakable envy for his command of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. Augustine himself– of whom it has been said that ‘whether Augustine be the greatest Latin writer or not, he is the greatest man who ever wrote in Latin’ — had only fragmentary knowledge of Greek and a second-hand aquaintence with Hebrew (plus just a smattering of some North African ‘Punic’ dialects).”
Jaroslav Pelikan, “Whose Bible Is It?: A Shot History Of The Scriptures”, Penguin Books, 2006.

By: Julie

Julie — Mon, 18 Dec 2006 23:01:21 +0000

A remark suddenly struck me with such force that I was surprised to hear myself utter it” “Why a generation in Walden Two must mean about twenty years!”"Instead of the usual thirty” said Frazier, laughing at my astonishment. “We get no end of amusement out of that, at the expense of the “big litter” people. We don’t sacrifice our women to a policy of maximal childbearing, but we equal or exceed their rate of propogation, and with healthy children too, by the simple expedient of getting three generations for two.”

Walden Two, by BF Skinner

By: Thomas

Thomas — Mon, 18 Dec 2006 21:04:01 +0000

“The coral atolls in Mangareva lagoon had no good raw stone at all, and even the volcanic islands offered only relatively coarse-grained basalt. That was adequate for building houses and garden walls, using as oven stones and fashioning into canoe anchors and food pounders and other crude tools, but coarse-grained basalt yielded only inferior adzes.

Fortunately, that deficiency was spectacularly remedied on Pitcairn, the much smaller (2-1/2 square miles) and steeper extinct volcanic island lying 300 miles southeast of Mangareva.”

Jared Diamond, Collapse.

Say what you want about Diamond’s theories, but he sure can keep a reader’s attention.

Also, in my view, he gets points for beginning Collapse with Shelly’s Ozymandias:

I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
tell that its sculptor well those passions read,
Which yet survive, stampt on these lifeless things,
The hand that mockt them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that collosal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

By: Linnaeus

Linnaeus — Mon, 18 Dec 2006 03:42:11 +0000

“Ford is extremely critical of the accomodations and living conditions with which he and the other warrant officers were provided. While this may appear petty, given the circumstances, it is enlightening (although not entirely surprising) to learn that such tensions arose between the two ships’ companies.

Ford’s journal probably reveals much more about the journalist than do any of the contemporary officers’ journals from the Franklin search.”

William Barr, “A Warrant Officer in the Arctic: The Journal of George Ford, 1850-1854″, in Alan Frost and Jane Simpson, eds., Pacific Empires: Essays in Honor of Glyndwr Williams (Vancouver: UBC Press), 1999.