The Questioning Librarian

John Brown, Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War and Seeded Civil Rights  by David S. Reynolds (Vintage, 2006) What to do with John Brown? Any historian or student of history interested in the Civil War or the lead-up to one of the greatest calamities in U.S. history must grapple with that same question. Or, perhaps, to re-frame the question, how does one explain the enigma of John Brown, this walking contradiction, a man who somehow managed to be both ahead of his time and behind the times, a militant abolitionist politically, a tolerant Calvinist religiously, a man who believed in the true equality of blacks and whites in a time when even the most progressive white abolitionists still embodied the racist sentiments prevalent in that period. In his magisterial biography of John Brown, the abolitionist who became infamous for the murders he oversaw in the fight over "Bleeding Kansas" and for his attack on Harpers Ferry, David Reynolds seeks t...

It is a curious feature of the human mind that when confronted with evidence of a reality that contradicts our beliefs, we are often quick to reject this evidence. This confirmation bias--our tendency to uncritically accept evidence which bolsters our own views while rejecting immediately evidence which contradicts it--has been understood as a fact of our thought-processes for some time, and it goes a long way towards explaining why we hold doggedly to fixed beliefs in spite of evidence to the contrary.  This may well be the case with a book that I've recently finished, David Owen's radical piece of environmental thought,  Green Metropolis . So what if I say to you that the environmental movement has had it all wrong on a number of very important points? As someone who has been concerned about the state of the environment for some years, I was quite unsettled by much of what Owen had to say.  The main point of the book may be summed up as follows: while the e...

Last evening I enjoyed two pieces of the human imagination that, while different on the surface, still shared a common thread. I sat down and watched the movie "The Awakening," about a woman investigating an alleged haunting; it seems a common horror film theme, but it was quite well done, with the frightening moments used just enough to heighten the tension at key points without being overblown as so many other horror films are. The other bit of human creativity was Nicole Krauss' The History of Love , a beautiful work that is hard to describe save that it is about a Holocaust survivor and the book he wrote in his youth, which he thought destroyed. The thread that ties them together in my mind is that loneliness is at the heart of the stories they tell. Loneliness is, in fact, a theme in much of human storytelling, from the loneliness of the Doctor all the way back to the loneliness of Odysseus as he was trapped on the isle of Calypso. I recalled last evening from m...

For a long time now, I've been concerned about the environment--worrying about my impact, worrying about the profligacy with which we burn through the natural resources of the earth, reading about climate change and conservation and all the implications of the millions of tons of carbon that we're sending up into the atmosphere with reckless abandon. This interest has led to, at times, some mildly obsessive behaviors,  including trundling all the recycling from the grocery store where I used to work to a collection point (picture it, the entire back end of a Jeep crammed with unsold newspapers and plastic strawberry containers). While I like to think that my behavior in this regard is a little less obsessive than it used to be, I still try to do my part. I'm fortunate that where I currently live I can mostly walk to where I need to go, so I'm happy to let my car sit while I walk to work and out for the occasional bite to eat. I still recycle as often as I can, and do s...

Usually in writing about young-earth creationism, the focus is on the damage it does to science and to science education. This is quite understandable, as the primary focus of the young-earthers is to push a narrow, sectarian, and highly unscientific worldview that has done serious harm to science education. While this is, usually, enough to worry about, I've been thinking over the past few days about the damage that creationism does to women, having read my way through a handful of feminist books in recent weeks. At first glance, one may think that this is a silly idea, but as creationism in the United States represents the worldview of reactionary elements within Christianity it also does serious harm through its portrayal of women. This may seem incidental, that the view young-earth creationism holds of women is merely collateral damage from an already harmful worldview (to say nothing of their view of homosexuality, which is, as it were, rather unevolved ), but it is important...

Camarasaurus - very definitely a dinosaur Last time, I wrote about bad science in terrible creature features. One of the things I noted was the tendency of the actors and writers to refer to anything old and extinct as a dinosaur. Of course, this is a problem in that it displays a poor understanding of what a dinosaur actually is, but this misunderstanding isn't limited to bad science fiction films. It instead reflects a larger societal misunderstanding of what constitutes a dinosaur--any big, dead reptile gets lumped into the category of "dinosaur." But in reality, paleontologists have a very specific definition of what a dinosaur is. In the first place, dinosaurs are diapsids, animals that have two openings in their skull behind the eyes (fenestra). Other diapsids include birds, lizards, and crocodiles, but this characteristic alone separates them from the synapsids (one opening behind the eye), a group that includes mammals, and from the anapsids (no openi...

Everyone has their guilty pleasures, whether it is chocolate, Korean television dramas, or even Irish coffee. Among my guilty pleasures I have to include watching cheesy, truly awful science fiction "creature features." These movies are, unlike some major Hollywood films that simply come off as ridiculous, never intended to be high theater, or to be premiered at red carpet events and break box office records. These are made quickly and are generally tongue-in-cheek ridiculous the whole way through. There is just something about their terrible acting, their ridiculous plots and horrible special effects that entertain me to no end. Believe me, I enjoy good films just as much as the next, but there are some times when I just want to sit back and watch a bad movie with ice spiders , giant sharks , and prehistoric beasts . But if there is one thing I hate about bad science fiction movies it is some of the terrible, outlandish science that gets put in--and nothing raises my hackle...