Work won’t love you back – Book Review

It’s a particularly apposite time to be reading this book when many people are re-evaluating their life in regard to their work situation and indeed whether they should stay employed in their current role. This book made me think deeply about why I’m working where I am and whether I shouldn’t move somewhere else.

This book shows how the capitalist system has transformed work into a labour of love that’s wreaking havoc on people’s lives. Sarah Jaffe’s book provides examples on how some employees are fighting back against the all-consuming conditions of work and gives us hope that employers of the future can provide jobs that treat people as humans rather than commodities in companies where there’s no exploitation.

We have re-created the society of the ancient Greeks, where many of us are so busy with work that being informed members of society feels impossible, and political and social engagement are indulgences for the wealthy. Free time is necessary in order to participate fully in society and a lot of people are denied this time.

The Holy Grail by Giles Morgan

This is a high-level guide to The Holy Grail charting the origins of the quest from the early Christian gospels through to modern day stories and films.

The book introduces all the characters you would expect: King Arthur, Galahad, Percival, Wolfram von Eschenbach, Malory, TS Eliot, Dan Brown, and Indiana Jones.

It’s an interesting read and includes many interpretations about the Grail legends from authors who might not get a mention in more academic books on the subject.

The book was written before the latest ‘research’ on the Holy Grail, research indicating the grail is in Leon, Spain. There’s also no mention of the grail in Valencia cathedral.

Three Men on the Bummel – Book Review

This is the sequel to Three Men in a Boat and it is really rather good, especially when the three men – George, Harris and J – are travelling around the middle of Europe interacting with the locals and passing judgment on their surroundings as they move from Hamburg to Berlin and Dresden and their destination The Black Forest.

A bummel is a journey either long or short without a specific end date. It strikes me everyone should go on a bummel occasionally.

There are some amusing anecdotes – George tries to buy a pillow / cushion for his aunt but ends up with a peck on the cheek from an embarrassed shop assistant (the difference between kissen and kussen). Harris tries to stop a man watering a road in Hanover and ends up wetting everyone in sight in his struggle to wrest the hose from the man’s grasp. J steals a bike from a train under the mistaken impression it was Harris’s bike and not a complete stranger’s bike and ends up having to explain himself to the police who believe him to be a thief.

There are some excellent insights into the male character, for example on a man’s sense of direction:

“My instinct is correct enough; it is the earth that is wrong. I led them by the middle road….If the middle road had gone in the direction it ought to have done, it would have taken us to where we wanted to go.”

and a great reason why English spread through Europe and beyond

“But the man who has spread the knowledge of English from Cape St Vincent to the Ural Mountains is the Englishman who, unable or unwilling to learn a single a single word of any language but his own, travels purse in hand into every corner of the Continent.”

The Roots of Coincidence – Arthur Koestler

For many decades, extra-sensory perception (ESP) – including clairvoyance and telepathy – has been dismissed as illusion and fakery. ESP was compared with the world of physics as scientists thought it existed and dismissed as unimportant and contradictory to the established scientific norms.

But nowadays, with the advent of Quantum Physics breaking the established models of nature and the universe and introducing concepts such as particles travelling backwards in time and electrons being both a wave and a particle depending on whether they’re observed, ESP fits in more easily.

This book suggests it’s time for a new attitude towards parapsychology and that there is a natural law that leads to coincidences occurring.

This book is worth reading for the story about how Dr Soal of University College London was conducting experiments with people ‘predicting’ what Zener cards would be turned up by a researcher in another room. For many years he found no results that were out of the ordinary until a colleague Whately Carington suggested Soal check guesses for the card after the one turned up by the researcher.

Soal was delighted and disconcerted to discover that one man, Basil Shackleton, had scored consistently on the next card ahead with results so high that chance had to be ruled out. The time interval between two guesses which Shackleton found most congenial was 2.6 seconds. At this rate, he consistently guessed at the next card to be turned up. If, however, the rate of turning up cards was speeded up to about half that time then he guessed just as consistently the card that would turn up two ahead. In other words, Basil was fixated on an event that would occur 2.6 seconds into the future.

Compare this with the elementary particle fired towards a wall with two holes in it. Does the unobserved particle go through one hole or the other? No, it goes through both.

Our world is very strange indeed and it may be that ESP is the least strange of all the phenomena in our existence.

Why Has Nobody Told Me This Before? – Book Review

I will be using this book for reference. The various sections deal with moods, motivation, emotional pain, grief, self-doubt, fear, stress, and how to lead a meaningful life.

It’s a really useful guide on how to recognise your behaviour for what it is and provides methods for understanding what’s happening and for counteracting the behaviour if it’s causing you stress or anxiety.

The power of any thought is in how much we buy into it and how much we believe it to be true and meaningful. Thoughts aren’t facts, they’re judgements, theories, memories, predictions, and interpretations about the future. The brain’s job is to save us as much time and energy as possible and this means it takes short-cuts and makes guesses / predictions all the time but with limited information. Mindfulness allows us to notice a thought and choose not to stick to it, but focus our attention somewhere else.

The Black Book of Carmarthen – Review

This book dates from around 1250AD though many of the poems contained in it are a lot older and occur nowhere else, showing what a valuable service the unknown monk who copied them down onto a manuscript did for the world of literature.

It’s believed this monk resided at the Augustinian Priory of St Johns in Carmarthen. He was a Welsh-speaking monk amongst many Norman and English brothers and wanted to place a number of poems centred on Dyfed and Carmarthen in the same anthology.

These poems include dialogue between Myrddin (Merlin) and Taliesin who is believed to have lived between 534 and 599. Taliesin was chief bard in the courts of at least three kings of Britain. There are also verses said to have been written by Myrddin after the Battle of Arderydd, when he was in hiding.

The presence of these poems corroborates the Carmarthen link as the legend of Myrddin is said to be in part a fictional explanation of the name of the town.

Primitive Rebels -Eric Hobsbawm

Eric Hobsbawm was a British historian who wrote many books on Socialism, Nationalism, and Capitalism. He was a contemporary of other Marxist historians such as Christopher Hill, EP Thompson, and Sheila Rowbotham.

Primitive Rebels is his first major work and inspects rebellion from the time of Robin Hood onwards, concentrating on the 19th Century risings in Southern Italy and Andalusia, as well as The Mafia, social bandits similar to Robin Hood, and the social rituals of groups interested in making changes in society.

Careful analysis of these social movements will allow us to better understand the modern protest movements springing up on an almost monthly basis around the world.

Why Has Nobody Told Me This Before? – Book Review

I will be using this book for reference. The various sections deal with moods, motivation, emotional pain, grief, self-doubt, fear, stress, and how to lead a meaningful life.

It’s a really useful guide on how to recognise your behaviour for what it is and provides methods for understanding what’s happening and for counteracting the behaviour if it’s causing you stress or anxiety.

The power of any thought is in how much we buy into it and how much we believe it to be true and meaningful. Thoughts aren’t facts, they’re judgements, theories, memories, predictions, and interpretations about the future. The brain’s job is to save us as much time and energy as possible and this means it takes short-cuts and makes guesses / predictions all the time but with limited information. Mindfulness allows us to notice a thought and choose not to stick to it, but focus our attention somewhere else.

The Black Book of Carmarthen – Review

This book dates from around 1250AD though many of the poems contained in it are a lot older and occur nowhere else, showing what a valuable service the unknown monk who copied them down onto a manuscript did for the world of literature.

It’s believed this monk resided at the Augustinian Priory of St Johns in Carmarthen. He was a Welsh-speaking monk amongst many Norman and English brothers and wanted to place a number of poems centred on Dyfed and Carmarthen in the same anthology.

These poems include dialogue between Myrddin (Merlin) and Taliesin who is believed to have lived between 534 and 599. Taliesin was chief bard in the courts of at least three kings of Britain. There are also verses said to have been written by Myrddin after the Battle of Arderydd, when he was in hiding.

The presence of these poems corroborates the Carmarthen link as the legend of Myrddin is said to be in part a fictional explanation of the name of the town.

The Roots of Coincidence – Arthur Koestler

For many decades, extra-sensory perception (ESP) – including clairvoyance and telepathy – has been dismissed as illusion and fakery. ESP was compared with the world of physics as scientists thought it existed and dismissed as unimportant and contradictory to the established scientific norms.

But nowadays, with the advent of Quantum Physics breaking the established models of nature and the universe and introducing concepts such as particles travelling backwards in time and electrons being both a wave and a particle depending on whether they’re observed, ESP fits in more easily.

This book suggests it’s time for a new attitude towards parapsychology and that there is a natural law that leads to coincidences occurring.

This book is worth reading for the story about how Dr Soal of University College London was conducting experiments with people ‘predicting’ what Zener cards would be turned up by a researcher in another room. For many years he found no results that were out of the ordinary until a colleague Whately Carington suggested Soal check guesses for the card after the one turned up by the researcher.

Soal was delighted and disconcerted to discover that one man, Basil Shackleton, had scored consistently on the next card ahead with results so high that chance had to be ruled out. The time interval between two guesses which Shackleton found most congenial was 2.6 seconds. At this rate, he consistently guessed at the next card to be turned up. If, however, the rate of turning up cards was speeded up to about half that time then he guessed just as consistently the card that would turn up two ahead. In other words, Basil was fixated on an event that would occur 2.6 seconds into the future.

Compare this with the elementary particle fired towards a wall with two holes in it. Does the unobserved particle go through one hole or the other? No, it goes through both.

Our world is very strange indeed and it may be that ESP is the least strange of all the phenomena in our existence.