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HAF book club: November poll and discussion

Started by Sandra Craft, October 20, 2018, 02:35:21 AM

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Sandra Craft

And Man Created God: A History of the World at the Time of Jesus, by Selina O'Grady.
To explore the power that religious belief has had over societies through the ages, Selina O'Grady takes the reader on a dazzling journey across the empires of the ancient world and introduces us to rulers, merchants, messiahs, priests, and holy men. Throughout, she seeks to answer why, amongst the countless religious options available, the empires at the time of Jesus "chose" the religions they did.

Between the World and Me, by Ta-Nehisi Coates
The New York Times - Michiko Kakutani
Inspired by James Baldwin's 1963 classic The Fire Next Time, Ta-Nehisi Coates's new book, Between the World and Me, is a searing meditation on what it means to be black in America today...[a] powerful and passionate book...  [written as a letter from father to son]

Genesis: The Scientific Quest for Life's Origin, by Robert M. Hazen
Life on Earth arose nearly 4 billion years ago, bursting forth from air, water, and rock. Though the process obeyed all the rules of chemistry and physics, the details of that original event pose as deep a mystery as any facing science. How did non-living chemicals become alive? While the question is (deceivingly) simple, the answers are unquestionably complex. Science inevitably plays a key role in any discussion of life's origins, dealing less with the question of why life appeared on Earth than with where, when, and how it emerged on the blasted, barren face of our primitive planet.

The Invention of Nature, by Andrea Wulf
The acclaimed author of Founding Gardeners reveals the forgotten life of Alexander von Humboldt, the visionary German naturalist whose ideas changed the way we see the natural world—and in the process created modern environmentalism.

Levels of Life, by Julian Barnes
(I'm adding this one because we're getting a little light on both the non-fiction and non-science books, and it's on my TBR list).  Winner of the 2011 Man Booker Prize, this is a book about "ballooning, photography, love, and grief; about putting two things, and two people, together, and about tearing them apart". 
Sandy

  

"Life is short, and it is up to you to make it sweet."  Sarah Louise Delany

Icarus

von Humbolt is the one who is quoted as as having said: " The most dangerous worldview is the worldview of the ones who have not viewed the world".

Davin

These all look like good ones, I'd be happy to read any of them. But I still voted for the three I think I'll enjoy most at this point in my life.
Always question all authorities because the authority you don't question is the most dangerous... except me, never question me.

Sandra Craft

We have a clear winner -- And Man Created God: A History of the World at the Time of Jesus, by Selina O'Grady.
Sandy

  

"Life is short, and it is up to you to make it sweet."  Sarah Louise Delany

Davin

I read the book, but am doing NaNoWriMo, so I don't have much time this month. It was a good read, very interesting and well written. There were a few things that conflicted with my understanding of things that I don't have time to research at the moment. I hope I still remember when I have time.
Always question all authorities because the authority you don't question is the most dangerous... except me, never question me.

Sandra Craft

Quote from: Davin on November 16, 2018, 04:19:05 PM
I read the book, but am doing NaNoWriMo, so I don't have much time this month. It was a good read, very interesting and well written. There were a few things that conflicted with my understanding of things that I don't have time to research at the moment. I hope I still remember when I have time.

I'm about half-way thru and will probably be bringing up those things later.  For instance, I noticed she takes Josephus' word as gospel and I'm not sure how accurate a historian he is.  I wonder how much of his history is littered with gossip and propaganda.
Sandy

  

"Life is short, and it is up to you to make it sweet."  Sarah Louise Delany

Davin

Quote from: Sandra Craft on November 17, 2018, 03:54:54 AM
Quote from: Davin on November 16, 2018, 04:19:05 PM
I read the book, but am doing NaNoWriMo, so I don't have much time this month. It was a good read, very interesting and well written. There were a few things that conflicted with my understanding of things that I don't have time to research at the moment. I hope I still remember when I have time.

I'm about half-way thru and will probably be bringing up those things later.  For instance, I noticed she takes Josephus' word as gospel and I'm not sure how accurate a historian he is.  I wonder how much of his history is littered with gossip and propaganda.

Yeah, I don't trust Josephus too much, from what I remember a bunch of his notes about Christians were from what he heard people saying about them, so it's kind of double fuzzy.
Always question all authorities because the authority you don't question is the most dangerous... except me, never question me.

Sandra Craft

Finally finished this! I would have finished it over a week ago, but I got wrapped up in making some progress on two cross stitch projects and there that went. My original plan had been to stitch all day and read in bed before sleeping, but I wound up sewing all day and half the night as well, which meant falling asleep as soon as I lost consciousness somewhere near the bed.  Yesterday I made up my mind to power thru the last six chapters, mostly because I'd stabbed my fingers with the needle so much that they needed a break anyway, and so finally got this one under my belt.

Overall, I think this book is a good history of the times all over the world a few centuries before and after the reputed life of Christ. It's interesting to know what was going on, not only in Rome and Jerusalem, but in Africa, China, India, etc that made them open to a serious change in their societies (tho of course not always a Xtian change) at about the same time.

A lot of it, according to O'Grady, was about power and the manipulation of the masses, unsurprisingly. That's what it's still about today. Of Constantine, who got the Xtian ball rolling in Rome, she writes:

"A centralized religion, bent on uniformity, worshipping a single all-powerful God, was particularly appealing to a man bent on reuniting the two halves of the Roman Empire under his sole rule. And such a religion made good subjects. . . .

For Constantine, Christianity may well have seemed to be a glorified form of Imperial cult anyway. He certainly maintained the cult, was worshipped as a god in the city that bore his name and at his death was proclaimed *divus*."

O'Grady doesn't get into the development of Xtianity into an actual religion separate from Judaism until the very last chapter, tellingly called "And Paul Created Christ". She has quite a lot of admiration for Paul as a salesman and promoter, but isn't shy about pointing out where his interpretation of Jesus' message went far afield of what the other apostles were supposed to have recorded of it, and the resulting tensions between late-comer Paul and the ones who were supposed to have actually known Jesus personally.

That being said, I think O'Grady needs to work on her writing style. She was forever interrupting her own narrative to note which chapter covered a detail she had just mentioned (as if the reader weren't going to be getting to it, or had already read it, anyway), and she had the annoying habit of referring to a wide variety of things as "the greatest X the world has ever known". There's a lot of really swell and remarkable stuff in the world's history but referring to each piece of it with exactly the same phrase gets grindingly repetitious.

And I noticed several places were the proof-reader could have been paying more attention, particularly the sentence about "James, the brother of John, and John's brother James".

Also there were places were she passed on eye-googling bits of info from Josephus such as a certain ancient queen killing her husband then marrying her own son without any additional historical background (such as in some lands mothers and sons did sometimes rule jointly, but were certainly not married to each other) or qualifiers such as Josephus' possible prejudice against the subject making him more of a gossip monger than a historian (because, let's face it, incest is one of the Big Three people often accuse their enemies of).

Altho I will credit her for including this, which is often glossed over:  "Josephus' two major works, The Jewish War and Jewish Antiquities, both written towards the end of the first century AD, are the main sources for Palestine at this period and provide some of the few near-contemporary references to Jesus outside the New Testament, although some historians believe these references were additions made by a later Christian editor to provide a first-century proof of Jesus' existence."

Overall, an interesting history but not always the most interesting read.
Sandy

  

"Life is short, and it is up to you to make it sweet."  Sarah Louise Delany

Davin

Quote from: Sandra Craft on December 05, 2018, 08:44:46 PMThat being said, I think O'Grady needs to work on her writing style. She was forever interrupting her own narrative to note which chapter covered a detail she had just mentioned (as if the reader weren't going to be getting to it, or had already read it, anyway), and she had the annoying habit of referring to a wide variety of things as "the greatest X the world has ever known". There's a lot of really swell and remarkable stuff in the world's history but referring to each piece of it with exactly the same phrase gets grindingly repetitious.
Those things bugged me too! Why in chapter 2 mention that you're going to cover something in chapter 9? If it's important to the current topic, then cover it now, if it's not then don't mention it.

Quote from: Sandra CraftAlso there were places were she passed on eye-googling bits of info from Josephus such as a certain ancient queen killing her husband then marrying her own son without any additional historical background (such as in some lands mothers and sons did sometimes rule jointly, but were certainly not married to each other) or qualifiers such as Josephus' possible prejudice against the subject making him more of a gossip monger than a historian (because, let's face it, incest is one of the Big Three people often accuse their enemies of).
It would have been nice for the author to alleviate some bias by at least mentioning the bias.

Quote from: Sandra CraftAltho I will credit her for including this, which is often glossed over:  "Josephus' two major works, The Jewish War and Jewish Antiquities, both written towards the end of the first century AD, are the main sources for Palestine at this period and provide some of the few near-contemporary references to Jesus outside the New Testament, although some historians believe these references were additions made by a later Christian editor to provide a first-century proof of Jesus' existence."
I remember that some of the entries about Christianity are suspected to either be modified or completely made up for a few reasons, one I remember being the sentence structure and word choices not matching the rest of Josephus' writings. And it's not like Christians are shy about doing dishonest things that help themselves out.
Always question all authorities because the authority you don't question is the most dangerous... except me, never question me.