An Awfully Beastly Business: Seamonsters and other Delicacies by David Sinden, Matthew Morgan and Guy Macdonald
Rhys, my seven year old son, started reading the Awfully Beastly Business books last year with the first installment of the series, Werewolf vs. Troll. He enjoyed it thoroughly and insisted that his father, his older brother, and I all read it after he finished. He finished this second in the series recently, while reading in bed as a matter of fact, and rushed to find me and insist that I read it as well. This was exciting to me for a number of reasons. Rhys was reading in bed – I loved to sneak a book under the covers as a kid myself. Rhys was excited about a book he read – nothing is a better indication of future reading success than current enjoyment. For Rhys reading is fun and for me that’s wonderful. And, finally, Rhys wanted to share, and later discuss, what he’d read. In our home reading is a social activity. We read books together, read books suggested by each other, and talk daily about what we’ve read. That Rhys was eager to share was exciting for me.
The Beastly Business books center around a young werewolf named Ulf who works at the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Beasts. The RSPCB was founded by Professor Faraway at his estate. His son is the evil villian in the books – appearing in the first two at least. As a child he tormented animals and beasts and even, we find in this installment, murdered his father when his own cruelty was discovered. Apparently he’d hoped to inherit but instead the Professor left it all to the RSPCB and the books, so far, have centered on the son’s evil plots to regain control of his father’s property.
The beasts themselves are interesting and imaginative. There is a fair amount of action though Rhys was never in doubt about the outcome while being thrilled. There are disguises worthy of Scooby Doo which, though failing to fool me, kept Rhys in suspense until the dramatic reveal. I’d have enjoyed them as a kid. As an adult I’m happy to enjoy my son’s enjoyment of them.
Bottom Line: Recommended for young readers (Chapter Books)
Conversations of Socrates – Xenophon
I’ve had this Penguin Classics volume for a while; I can’t actually remember when I got it. The volume contains Socrates’ Defence, Memoirs of Socrates, The dinner-Party, The Estate-Manager. I’d read the Apology (called here Socrates’ Defence) but nothing else. I. F. Stone’s book, reviewed here earlier this month, mentioned the Memorabilia (Memoirs of Socrates) frequently so I pulled this down. Most of the translations are by Hugh Tredennick (1899-1982) with corrections and new material by Robin Waterfield. Each piece also has an introduction by Waterfield. I can’t comment on the quality of the translation as I didn’t look at the Greek at all though Waterfield’s notes were interesting and thoughtful which gives me some confidence in his decisions.
When people speak of Socrates they generally mean Plato’s Socrates. And while this Socrates is a great, if occasionally frustrating, character it’s perhaps not wise to assume that Socrates as Plato described him is very like Socrates as he lived. Sadly Socrates didn’t write anything; he preferred conversation reportedly saying that one couldn’t question a text. The dialog form, popular among his followers, allows characters to be questioned but, of course, the only questions asked and answered are those of the author. Xenophon, a contemporary of Socrates, also offers a portrait of the elusive man himself using, essentially, the same form. This Socrates is rather different and, frankly, more likable. Both, incidentally, are very different again from the Socrates described by Aristophanes. Though I admit to dwelling fondly on Aristophanes’ view of Socrates when frustrated by Plato’s Socrates.
These three writers are very different and were, it must be remembered, writing with very different goals. Aristophanes wrote the Clouds years before the Trial of Socrates and he was a writer of comedies. He sought to bring out the flaws he saw in Athenian society in a humorous way. I don’t mean to argue that his words weren’t barbed but it’s difficult to tell how they were taken – how seriously his description of Socrates was. Plato was not focused on Athenian society and politics. Instead he seems most concerned with issues of definition. This isn’t to say that Plato was unaffected by the political world around him but the dialogs seem removed from this world. Reading Plato’s Apology one is shocked by the accusations and the sentence. Xenophon is not, primarily, a philosopher. Some might say that Xenophon isn’t a philosopher at all – he’s frequently dismissed as a dolt. But he was interested in the world around him – in military actions, in the best way to manage one’s property, and in how to be a good person or leader. In Xenophon Socrates has opinions and expresses them. Those opinions are not surprising in themselves but that Socrates admits to having them is.
I don’t know, frankly, whether it’s important to know what the ‘real’ Socrates was like. One doesn’t read Plato, after all, to know what Socrates thought but to know what Plato thought. However the Trial itself is such a shocking thing and so difficult to understand that one would like to know what Socrates thought and said and did. How did Athens, with not one but four words for freedom of speech, come to accuse and kill this man? Apparently the ‘Apology of Socrates’ was a common form of writing and, in antiquity, there were many dialogs by men trying to explain – defend – Socrates. But all we know is based on Socrates’ friends – his defenders. We rely on his defenders even to know the charges. And we may suspect that even they are not accurate – that they are a cover for charges which cannot be spoken openly because of the reconciliation after the oligarchy was overthrown. Xenophon, though clearly a defender, offers us another way to try to get at the truth. Certainly he’s a defender and he does not give us good reasons for the charges but, if we can determine what position Xenophon himself had, what he believed, then we might get insight into the trial itself. Xenophon is much more straightforward than Plato which makes him a better potential source so long as we keep in mind that he would have worked to cast Socrates in the best light and focused on those things for which he could defend the man who appears to have been his friend.
Bottom Line: Recommended if your interested!
Plato by R. M Hare
Richard Mervyn Hare (1919–2002) was a pacifist when he volunteered for service in WWII. He was taken prisoner and held for most of the last three years of the war. His first, though unpublished, work was apparently a moral guide to living in extremely harsh conditions. His focus was always moral philosophy. Hare is known for introducing Universal Prescriptivism. Prescriptivism holds that moral statements, rather than being primarily objective, relative, or emotive (statements about attitudes) are imperatives and can be universalized. So claiming that it is immoral to steal is not, in Hare’s view, simply making a statement about some objective quality of the action stealing, or merely a statement about societal disapproval or a simple statement about personal attitude. The statement isn’t a proposition. So it may stand for all these other things but is primarily a prescriptive statement – and imperative – which may be universalized. At least that’s my understanding!
This work is a very brief overview of Plato’s thought for Oxford’s Past Masters series. It is quite good and shows a real attention to detail. I found it balanced and very thorough – no small feat given the size – without being overly obscure or difficult for the lay reader to follow. It’s the only volume from the Past Masters series I’ve read but was good enough that I’d read more should the opportunity arise.
Bottom Line: Recommended if your looking for a brief introduction to Plato
The Trial of Socrates by I. F. Stone
It’s become something of a tradition, in US political campaigns, for the candidates to offer up their current reading or their favorite books as a way for voters to gain some insight into their thoughts and potential policy decision making. No doubt there are people who specialize in providing candidates with the perfect answer though, certainly, candidates have given some duds in the past. I remember, years ago, hearing Dan Quayle offering Plato’s Republic up as his favorite read — he claimed to try to reread it each and every summer of his life. I didn’t know, at the time, whether we were meant to imagine him in a hammock somewhere earnestly reading the dialog with his trusty Liddel-Scott at his side or whether we were to imagine him perusing a translation. There was no follow up about the version so we could draw no inference from that – it might have been Allan Bloom whispering in the future vice president’s ear as he sipped lemonade or perhaps he was lulled to sleep by Jowett. In any case the first thing I imagined was Dan Quayle, convinced he was a philosopher king, thinking how nice it would be if the rest of us just learned our place. In other words it made me suspicious that the man was a closet oligarch. In the most recent US Presidential campaign, during the primaries, John Edwards was asked the same question and answered with The Trial of Socrates by I. F. Stone. Robert Novak was apoplectic. Izzy Stone, he insisted, had been a Soviet apologist and a suspected spy! I don’t think it did much damage to Edwards whether because Novak is so discredited himself or because the rumors about Stone are so unbelievable or because voters really don’t care what the candidates read.
I. F. Stone was, without question, a leftist. He was openly pro-Soviet for some time though he was disillusioned by the USSR as the reality of Stalinism became apparent to the world. As were many people who held out hope that Communism would turn out to be the way to a egalitarian society not to mention stop Hitler. He was known to have lunched with a Soviet attache – though apparently paid for his own food. For years the attack dogs of the right – people like Novak and Coulter – have insisted that Stone was a Soviet spy. One supposes that ‘fellow traveler’ is a term to be avoided since the shame of the House Un-American Activities Committee. Simply being a Communist isn’t actually illegal. Not to be deterred by these facts, the haters of ‘commies’ and their ‘fellow travelers’ now make the claim of espionage against Stone – despite the oddity of calling a journalist not given to keeping his opinions close to his chest a secret spy. He didn’t have information to sell nor does anyone claim he sold information. A former KGB agent, Alexander Vassiliev, has been recruited to opine that journalists ask lots of questions so were used to gain information. Vassiliev also visited the archives which have been made available by the Russian government and has discovered that Stone indeed met on at least two occasions with a Soviet agent before 1939. He was concerned, apparently, about fascism and felt the Soviets would stop it. After the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939 he, obviously, gave up this hope – along with many others. This, the foolish hope that the Soviets would do something about Hitler in the thirties and the willingness of a journalist to talk to people all those years ago has apparently tainted a presidential candidate sixty years later because he foolishly read a book about Socrates written by the same journalist. I’d have thought that sort of thing couldn’t happen outside a very closed society – say the Soviet Union of the not so distant past.
All of this goes to show that old political battles never die though, with the passage of time, they change and our understanding of them changes as well. In the thirties many people might have hoped that communism would offer hope to those who faced a life of poverty and grueling work in dangerous and unregulated conditions. In the thirties many people, fearing fascism, might have hoped that the Soviet Union might do something to stop its spread. Indeed, in the thirties there were many here who thought fascism was a good idea. But looking back we think them all fools at best and spies at worst. Hindsight, we insist, is twenty-twenty. Sadly we’re foolish in this as well. In hindsight we lose the immediacy of a situation, we forget the miserable conditions in factories and mines, we forget that many doubted Hitler was evil and that some had some idea just what evil was happening and no way to stop it. If sixty years can make this difference imagine what millennia can do.
More than two millennia ago the city of Athens, that birthplace of Democracy, tried Socrates for his speech. He was found guilty and sentenced to death. Essentially all we know about the trial has been gleaned from those sources which remain. Some are mere references and others clearly reflect the passage of some time between events and the opinions offered about them. For the most part we rely on Plato and Xenophon for information about Socrates and his trial. Both men were followers of Socrates. Plato had connections to two of the ‘Thirty’ the oligarchs who, with aid from Sparta, overthrew Democracy in Athens. Xenophon left after the trial of Socrates and spent much of the remainder of his life in Sparta. For those who do not know Sparta was a closed society – essentially a military dictatorship. They did not welcome philosophers so however much it appeared that Socrates and Plato, his student, admired them neither would have made a home there. Athens was the happening place for learning. This makes Socrates’ trial so startling and perhaps why Stone focused on it after his retirement. He devoted the last years of his life to learning Greek and examining various sources. In the end he isn’t easy on Athens though one does have the feeling that Stone suspected some new plot in the works – that Socrates was killed for being the teacher of Critias and Alcibiades, some of those those known even today for their attempts to overthrow democracy in Athens, and for seeking out a new generation of future oligarchs. It’s possible; Socrates was apparently the teacher of Critias and Alcibiades and he was also known to be disparaging of Democracy and an admirer of Sparta. It’s also possible that nothing survives of the real reason or that what information survives doesn’t give us a clear picture of the political situation at the time. It’s true that most of what we have left are the reports of the ‘fellow travelers’ of oligarchy.
The publication of Stone’s final work created a stir. Many people were complimentary and willing to offer glowing summations of Stone’s career – an honest and opinionated man, never pulling punches, always questioning, true to his personal moral beliefs. The ‘fellow travelers’ of oligarchy spluttered over their lemonade and sneered at Stone’s attempt to ‘rehabilitate’ Athenian democracy and sneak in some ‘commie’ propaganda at the same time. No doubt the fans of direct democracy crowed over references to Critias and Alcibiades - those ancient oligarchs and enemies of democracy who, judging by their appearances in the dialogues were followers of Socrates. And some people, not reading for fear of the Soviet taint, gnashed their teeth and waited for some unsuspecting Pol to put his foot in it. It’s an old story but loses none of the thrill for that.
Bottom Line: Recommended
The History of Love by Nicole Krauss
The History of Love is Nicole Krauss’ second novel. She’s young and has enjoyed surprising success with her first novel Man Walks Into a Room. I’ve not read it so can’t say anything about it but can say that her second novel read, to me, like a first novel. The History of Love is about a novel by the same name, written during World War II and passed by it’s author to a friend who later translated it into Spanish and published it. Then it becomes the favorite novel of a couple who name their daughter for all the women in it – Alma. The real author, living alone with the ghost of his childhood friend and rival for Alma’s love, writes another book which he sends to his son, the child of Alma who was raised by a man she married during the war. The son, a famous novelist, apparently adopts the identity of one of his own characters to hire Alma’s mother to translate the novel The History of Love from Spanish. Apparently someone read part of it to him when he was ill – we assume it was his mother. He dies before meeting his father – or Alma who is searching for him to find a replacement love for her mother (her father is dead) – but Alma’s younger brother, who thinks he’s a lamed vovnik, brings the old man and Alma together for the moment of his death. Take a breath. It was very cute.
Krauss’ writing did remind me of her husband, Jonathan Safran Foer, in that she seems to have an ear for linguistic oddities but a tin ear for writing them. She’s successful in capturing the old man’s voice, and yet… And yet being her favorite pepper in those sections. It’s over done and annoying just as Foer’s was in his first novel – I’ve not read the second and may not. Similarly she’s good at playing the emotions but doesn’t deliver the writing itself. The novel has a postmodern feel but it’s formulaic — an unusual formula but still a formula.
Bottom Line: I’m not recommending it but it was ok rather than awful.