NoCoPilot
Posts : 20333
Join date : 2013-01-16
Age : 70
Location : Seattle
 | | Subject: Book: Brave Genius Tue Dec 23, 2014 3:11 pm | |
| Wow, you never know what you'll find at the bookstore.
Just found "Brave Genius" by my favorite biology writer, Sean B. Carroll, about the friendship during WWII between Jacques Monod and Albert Camus, two of my favorite writers. Did not know anything about this!!!
Woo-hoo!!! |
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NoCoPilot
Posts : 20333
Join date : 2013-01-16
Age : 70
Location : Seattle
| | Subject: Re: Book: Brave Genius Sun Jan 18, 2015 11:00 am | |
| One hundred and twenty pages in, I'm somewhat disappointed in that Monod and Camus have yet to meet. The narrative has been all about the buildup to the Second World War, and the early campaigns that saw the falls of Poland, Norway and France.
Like the book on WWI "To End All Wars," you're left with the undeniable certainty that human stupidity led to hundreds of thousands of deaths, for no reason. The generals and military leaders advanced the most bone-headed military strategies, the goals and motives were murky at best, and the people who pay the prices for such gawdawful stupidity are not the people responsible for it. |
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NoCoPilot
Posts : 20333
Join date : 2013-01-16
Age : 70
Location : Seattle
| | Subject: Re: Book: Brave Genius Tue Jan 20, 2015 12:24 pm | |
| - Sean Carroll wrote:
- For Camus,, suicide was a confession that life "is not worth the trouble" and denial of any reason for living. He rejected it on the grounds that it was merely a way out of the question. Likewise, an appeal to faith, to God, to something outside of known existence was also a complete elusion of the question, an act of "philosophical suicide" (but one committed nevertheless by some illustrious thinkers who had previously contronted the same question). Camus sought to "live without appeal" to such either religious or philosophical inventions.
Rather, in the lucid recognition of the absurd condition Camus saw freedom -- to think, to create, and to live in a world "of which man is the sole master. What bound him was the illusion of another world." |
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NoCoPilot
Posts : 20333
Join date : 2013-01-16
Age : 70
Location : Seattle
| | Subject: Re: Book: Brave Genius Tue Feb 10, 2015 7:05 am | |
| 231 pages in, finding it painful going because it is still a battle by battle account of WWII. Camus and Monod are mentioned in passing, as are a thousand other bit players. The insults heaped on the French by the German occupiers are grisly and horrific. I have to keep setting to book aside.
I think in fact I might be done with it. |
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