![]() ![]() The protagonist Lauren, a young African American woman with hyperempathy, the uncontrollable sharing of sensations, in particular pain, perceived in others. Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler (1993) ***Ī dystopian science fiction novel that takes place in the near future. Only the hardy survived as medical care was next to non-existing. The novel brings home the precarity of life around 1800. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell (2010) ***Ī historical and cerebral adventure story of an accountant, working for the Dutch East India trading company, living on Dejima, the two-acre island off Nagasaki that served as the only point of contact between the outside world and Japan during its isolationist Edo period. The Great Silence, about the near extinctions of Puerto Rican parrots, the site of the giant (now crashed) radio observatory Arecibo, looking for signs of extraterrestrial life and not finding any (the great silence) while missing the highly intelligent species nearby is very poignant. The narrative of the title story is compelling, using a robotic species that depends on differences in air pressure to survive as a metaphor for that fact that any organism survives by converting low-entropy, ordered food into higher-entropy disordered emanations, consuming order to turn it into disorder (an observation made earlier by Schrödinger). Exhalation by Ted Chiang (2019) ****Ĭollection of SF short stories. The rest is history! The book recounts the subsequent history of acid, its enthusiastic reception by psychiatrists, artists of all kinds, Timothy Leary credo of “turn on, tune in and drop out”, the Summer of Love in the US and the subsequent criminalization of psychedelic drugs under President Nixon. Becoming curious, Hofmann ingested the smallest dose of LSD he expected to have some effect, 250 ug, i.e., a quarter of a milligram (note that a typical dose of psilocybin is a hundred times bigger), on April 19 th 1943 and biked home while experiencing the world’s first acid trip. For unclear reasons, Hoffman, synthesized a few centigrams of LSD in 1943 again and, accidentally discovered some of its psychoactive properties. Besides noting, in passing, that experimental animals given LSD became restless, the pharmacologists and physicians found nothing interesting in this substance. LSD – My Problem Child by Albert Hofmann (1979) ** *Īutobiography of the chemist who, seeking to isolate the active principles from various natural products, synthetized lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD-25 (LSD) in 1938 from ergot (Mutterkorn), while working at Sandoz in Basel. On Writing – A memoir of the Craft by Stephen King (2000) **** Frankl would go on to write dozens of books and teach and practice this sort of existential logotherapy for another fifty years. For Frankl, meaning can even be found under the extreme conditions of the camps we all have choice in the attitude we take to extreme suffering. The second half of the book summarizes logotherapy that was birthed by his experiences – that humans are driven by a will to find meaning in their life, contra the will to pleasure as surmised by Sigmund Freud or the will to power as argued by Alfred Adler. He describes the three psychological phases that inmates undergo – shock during the initial admission, apathy following adaptation to camp existence, and depersonalization, bitterness and disillusionment following liberation that takes years to recede into the cognitive background. ![]() Frankl’s conclusion is encapsulated in his pithy paraphrasing “Those who have a why to live can bear with almost any how” of Nietzsche’s original “Hat man sein Warum des Lebens, so verträgt man sich fast mit jedem Wie.” Frankl’s particular why was a vision of his wife and his drive to write a book on psychotherapy based on the search for meaning in one’s life. The first half of the book is about the psychological attitude that enables some prisoners to survive the extreme brutal environment of the camps. His parents, brother and wife all died in the camps. Translated from the original Ein Psychologe erlebt das Konzentrationslager, Frankl’s matter-of-fact chronicle, based on his experiences as a Jewish psychiatrist from Vienna imprisoned in Auschwitz and other Nazi concentration camps in Bavaria, from 1942 until 1945. Read in 2022 Man’s Search for Meaning – Viktor Frankl (1946) ***** Books that I particularly enjoyed or that express a point of view particularly well are awarded three to five stars. ![]() By-and-large, these are books I like otherwise I wouldn’t have finished them. Chronologically arranged list of interesting books – science, philosophy, novels, whatever – I’ve read. ![]()
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