Book Review: The Science of Cooking

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Peter Barham, a physics instructor and food science lecturer, describes his hobby of combining cooking with science in this book. It explained quite a few things I did not know, and I've been teaching biochemistry for almost a decade. On top of that, it gave me test questions and an idea for a new lower-division course about biochemistry with labs in the kitchen. The book is straightforwardly written and generally does a good job simplifying complex situations. I especially like the way Barham describes the trade-offs that make certain kinds of cooking (puff pastry, souffles, etc.) so tricky, and then he describes how to avoid those trade-offs. An easy souffle? I think I'll have to try that one myself.

ASA Lecture Audio: "The Chemicals Pour Forth Speech"

Here is a link to the audio of the presentation I did in Washington DC about a month ago at the ASA (American Scientific Affiliation) meeting: "The Chemicals Pour Forth Speech: Teaching Origins with a Biogeochemical Narrative." (I've really got to make some shorter titles ... ) The actual talk starts at the 3-minute mark. Let me know what you think!

Marilynne Robinson is My New Favorite Writer

What I love about Marilynne Robinson is she is capable of writing the most nuanced, delicate, beautiful stories about complicating and interesting human beings, and then she's able to turn around and be all intellectual. Check out this interview in Christianity Today in which she castigates the new breed of atheist Science Writers.

Favorite quote:

"Christianity has abandoned its intellectual traditions, ceding that ground to anybody in a white coat. Where it has tried to muster courage, it has too often tended to become irrational and shrill. Meanwhile, a great age in true science, an absolute catalog of wonders, passes by unnoticed."

She lists some wonders in the last question and mentions cosmology and the microbiology of gut bacteria. I agree!

More Michael Lewis

Michael Lewis has now traveled to Greece to report on the economic crisis there. This has more to it than just credit default swaps and questionable profits, because the center of the scandal is a monastery that is a center of Greek Orthodox spiritual life. Instead of interviewing "suits," Lewis interviews "robes." Underneath it all is a spiritual question of why these monks do what they do, and Lewis never quite gets down to his own beliefs beyond his atheism (leading to duplicity needed to enter the holy mountain, but the monks don't really care and seem strikingly hospitable). It appears the monks are using the real-estate windfall they concocted to benefit their monastery and community, not the "elite" monks at the top. The question remains, isn't that a form of selfishness too? What is going on with Greece here? Any American who made money in any way on the real estate bubble (and that includes me) is fundamentally no different than these monks. And why is it the American investment bankers who are EVERYWHERE promoting the irresponsible finances of the last decade? Michael Lewis opens the door on this situation but by no means are all or even most of the questions answered. Something to chew on.

Here's a great quote:

The tsunami of cheap credit that rolled across the planet between 2002 and 2007 has just now created a new opportunity for travel: financial-disaster tourism. The credit wasn’t just money, it was temptation. It offered entire societies the chance to reveal aspects of their characters they could not normally afford to indulge. Entire countries were told, “The lights are out, you can do whatever you want to do and no one will ever know.” What they wanted to do with money in the dark varied. Americans wanted to own homes far larger than they could afford, and to allow the strong to exploit the weak. Icelanders wanted to stop fishing and become investment bankers, and to allow their alpha males to reveal a theretofore suppressed megalomania. The Germans wanted to be even more German; the Irish wanted to stop being Irish. All these different societies were touched by the same event, but each responded to it in its own peculiar way. No response was as peculiar as the Greeks’, however: anyone who had spent even a few days talking to people in charge of the place could see that. But to see just how peculiar it was, you had to come to this monastery.

Book Review: Great Poems of the Bible

What is fascinating about this book is what I was reading it alongside: Chaim Potok's In the Beginning, a novel in which is formed the kind of Torah scholarship directly evinced in Great Poems of the Bible. In fact, I looked up info on James Kugel to see if he could have inspired Potok in any way, or vice versa, but it's possible the parallels come from both authors simply reflecting reality. Kugel vividly describes the "different way of seeing" offered by the Hebrew Bible and gives his own translation of many poetic passages. I cannot judge the academic quality of these translations but, especially in the cases of Ecclesiastes and Deborah's Song from Judges, the translations make sense of phrases that have previously felt wrong, so I'm inclined to trust his work and keep this book on hand for translation reference. It also gives a clear picture of just what it means to be a faithful Jewish scholar in the late twentieth century, and it's valuable just for that.

In particular, Kugel brings out the A-B sentence form of Biblical poetry, and brings out some of the signficance of this particular form. This surprised me in that it has deep ramifications even for the natural theology that's always on the back burner in my reading. Also, I never realized just how deep "wisdom" literature is, which also has impacts on my writing ideas. So, I'll just say "more to come."

Book Review: Tall Tales

From Chaim Potok to Jeff Smith ... this is a collection of deliberately silly stories set in Smith's Bone universe. The stories are literally told around a campfire and sprinkled throughout with jokes my 8-year-old thought were hilarious. There's a place for that. Unfortunately, I couldn't detect any particular reason to read this unless you've read the entire Bone series and want a little more. It's almost at the level of fan fiction. Not that there's anything wrong with fan fiction.

Book Review: In the Beginning

Only Chaim Potok can take what is essentially an academic and theological interior journey and make it thrilling and meaningful. I don't know how Potok makes his characters so real, especially considering their frequently superhuman intellectual abilities. For a summer thriller, I actually found this more absorbing than Crichton or ... name your novelist here (just don't mention Dan Brown, please, they don't even belong in the same universe). The metaphor near the end about roots is a beautiful, natural symbol for the choice the main character makes. I don't want to review it completely, but I want to note that In the Beginning is an excellent book.