Category: Audio Courses/Books

Wow, gentle reader: Atypically, I did not buy this set of lectures at a Friends of the Library Book Sale, but rather at a book store in Overland, Kansas, in 2022 (that trip was that long ago already?). At any rate, after the half of An Introduction to Greek Philosophy (of which I only had Part I), I delved into this set of three binders, eighteen lectures, about nine hours running time. And since I had a lot of car time this week, I polished off the last third of it pretty quickly.

It is not a science course. It is a history of the philosophy of science course. So the tack of the course is not only on scientific discoveries, but on the social impace (and Progress) each one brings. You get some early lectures on Greek philosophers and natural scientists and the tension between Being and Becoming focii, and we’ll see how they play out over the centuries and even into the quantum era which might unify the two concepts. Or not.

At any rate, the lectures include:

1. Knowledge, Know-How, and Social Changes
2. Writing Makes Science Possible
3. Inventing Reason and Knowledge
4. The Birth of Natural Science
5. Mathematics and the Order of Nature
6. The Birth of Techno-Science
7. Universities Relaunch the Idea of Knowledge
8. The Medieval Revolution in Know-How
9. Progress Enters Into History
10. The Printed Book–Gutenberg to Galileo
11. Renaissance Painting and Techno-Science
12. Copernicus Moves the Earth
13. The Birth of Modern Science
14. Algebra, Calculus, and Probability
15. Conservation and Symmetry
16. Instruments as Extensions of the Mind
17. Time, Change, and Novelty
18. The Atomic Theory of Matter
19. The Cell Theory of Life
20. The Germ Theory of Disease
21. Energy Challenges Matter
22. Fields–The Immaterial Becomes Real
23. Relationships Become Physical
24. Evolution as Process Science
25. Statistical Laws Challenge Determinism
26. Techno-Science Comes Of Age
27. Institutions Empower Innovation
28. The Quantum Revolution
29. Relativity Redefines Space and Time
30. Reconceiving the Universe, Again
31. The Idea Behind The Computer
32. Three Faces of Information
33. Systems, Chaos, and Self-Organization
34. Life as Molecules in Action
35. Great Ideas, Past and Future

Ope, I missed one, but I can’t be arsed to go get them off of the shelf to review.

The lecture names are generic enough that I’m already forgetting the names of the philosophers and scientists it discusses. Well, most of them, anyway.

The author is a little left–not too bad, although he hangs onto the u in evolution, revolution, and solution a little like I (mis)remembered Old Major doing in Animal Farm (the cartoon). And he’s very eager for science to dispense with its relationship with the church and all that nonsense. Still, not filled with invective or name-calling, so still listenable like professors were in the late 20th century.

I think I would have enjoyed a course on actual science instead of the philosophy of it, but I got a little something out of this one anyway.

One of my goals (probably a stretch goal given how I waste time) is to clean my office closet so I can unbox and review the binders of audio course that I have available and pick one quickly. But that’s a stretch goal. Also, I’ve completed so many over the years that the bookshelf dedicated to the listened to audio courses is almost full. So I might have to take them out of the library binders or something. Or…. Pass them on? Hush your mouth! My estate sale is soon enough.

Wow, it seems like I just finished The History of Ancient Egypt. When I finished it, I went looking for another course to listen to, and this particular one caught my eye but drove me a little batty because I could find only the first part of it. No matter; I’ll listen to the first half of it and then maybe look for the other half. It only took me about two weeks to listen to this binder of lectures, and as I finished up and thought about looking for the other half, I half-remembered that I might have bought only part 1 of a two part course at some time. Ah, yes, it was September 2024, and this was indeed the course. So I don’t get the whole thing, but I did get a lot of food for thought.

You know, a couple of years ago, I started reading Thomas Copleston’s History of Philosophy series, taking notes, jotting down the thinkers he mentioned and their main points. It was easy in the early days because only a few jottings from the early Greek philosophers survived until you get to Plato. So I had definitely read many of the names before (ah, gentle reader, my philosophy degree was the social philosophy track, not the history of philosophy track, so it was more a survey of “Here’s a problem, and here’s what a bunch of philosophers thought about it”), not to mention in other places: Great Authors of the Western Literary Tradition, which I listened to earlier this year; Socrates, which I listened to in 2021; reading several Plato dialogs a couple years ago, but not all of them in the Classics Club volume, so no book report; the various Greek playwrights and poets I’ve read in the past, like Pindar last October, Sophocles, well, I guess a decade ago, Euripedes in 2020, and Aristophanes in 2021; and hitting the Greek Periclean golden age section of The Life of Greece while listening to this course. So: Kinda familiar territory, lightly, thankfully, humblebraggingly.

Lectures include:

1. A Dialectic Approach to Greek Philosophy
2. From Myth to Philosophy–Hesiod and Thales
3. The Milesians and the Quest for Being
4. The Great Intrusion–Heraclitus
5. Parmenides–The Champion of Being
6. Reconciling Heraclitus and Parmenides
7. The Sophists–Protagoras, the First “Humanist”
8. Socrates
9. An Introduction to Plato’s Dialogues
10. Plato versus the Sophists, I
11. Plato versus the Sophists, II
12. Plato’s Forms, I

Man, it must have been a while since I read the Copleston as I only barely remember some of the pre-Socratics, but the lectures lay out how the philosophers approached the problems of how to describe being, whether existence is static and ultimately fire or water or earth or if it is ultimately reducible to nothing but change (becoming). You know, I’ve focused my thinking on the Plato versus Aristotle thing, thinking it was a matter of working from abstractions to concrete or abstracting from the concrete, but really the great divide in Western thought it ultimately between Plato and Aristotle and the Sophists/relativists on the other side. Which is still playing out today, and the good guys might not be winning at the societal level.

I guess it was only six hours over the course of this binder–the last two lecture series were bonzers, so I guess I expected this to be long as well. The professor, though, talks slowly and sometimes paused so long I thought the DVDs were having problems playing. And given that the lecturer repeats himself or reiterates things, I found my mind wandering as I listened, and when I snapped back, I don’t think I lost much.

At any rate, that’s what I thought of it. If you want deep insight into philosophy, go over to Blogdidact and join me in spitting on Protatogoras’s name.

This has been atop the boxes of audio courses that I have in my office closet since I bought it in 2024 at the Friends of the Christian County Library sale at the Nixa branch (which is this month, come to think of it). I have been a little reluctant to delve into it because it is four binders/48 lectures/24 hours. But a couple months ago, I loaded the DVDs into the main auto and went for it. And I’m glad I did.

The lectures include:

1. Introduction
2. Prehistoric Egypt
3. Ancient Egyptian Thought
4. Napoleon and the Beginnings of Egyptology
5. The Rosetta Stone, and Much More
6. The First Nation in History
7. The Rise of the Old Kingdom
8. Sneferu, the Pyramid Builder
9. The Great Pyramid of Giza
10. The End of the Old Kingdom
11. The First Intermediate Period
12. The Middle Kingdom–Dynasty XI
13. The Middle Kingdom–Dynasty XII
14. The Second Intermediate Period
15. Joseph in Egypt
16. The Beginning of the New Kingdom–the Fabulous XVIII^th Dynasty
17. Queen Hatshepsut
18. Obelisks
19. Tuthmosis III-King At Last
20. The Fabulous XVIII^th Dynasty Rolls On
21. Akhenaten the Heretic Pharoah
22. The Discovery of Tutankhamen’s Tomb
23. The Murder of Tutankhamen–A Theory
24. Medicine–The Necessary Art
25. The End of Dynasty XVIII
26. Mummification–How We Know What We Know
27. What Mummies Tell Us
28. Making a Modern Mummy
29. Dynasty XIX Begins
30. Ramses the Great–The Early Years
31. Ramses the Great–The Later Years
32. The Exodus–Did It Happen?
33. The Decline of Dynasty XIX
34. Dynasty XX–The Decline Continues
35. Ancient Egyptian Magic
36. Dynasty XXI–Egypt Divided
37. Dynasty XXII–Egypt United
38. Dynasty XXV–The Nubians Have Their Day
39. Dynasty XXVI–The Saite Period
40. Dynasty XXVII–The Persians
41. Dynasties XXVIII to XXXI–The Beginning of the End
42. Alexander the Great
43. The First Ptolemies
44. The Middle Ptolemies–The Decline
45. Animal Mummies
46. Cleopatra’s Family
47. Cleopatra–The Last Ptolemy
48. The Grand Finale

The series is, for the most part, chronological but with some topical asides. It is a very high level survey, though, as it deals with 70,000 years (including the prehistory) and 3,000 years of history (written language supplemented by archeological finds), and it boggles the mind: The series ends in the years BC, and as the meme says, the Pyramids were older to Cleopatra (VII, the seventh with that name but the only one who can go without a number to us in the modern world) than Cleopatra is to us (3,000 years versus 2000 years, give or take). Breathtaking.

The professor is definitely a homer/enthusiastic on the topic, and he has this way of repeating words to emphasize or underline his thoughts. It sounds like it would have been annoying, but it was not, actually. And I watched the last two lectures, and I can say that he was better to listen to than to watch. Part of that is that it’s an older series, even older than 2003–not only does the voiceover stock narrator talk about these tapes, but the lecturer himself calls them tapes. And it’s of the cinematography of pretending he’s lecturing to a crowd, which means he’s standing at a lectern and looking at students who are not there, only occasionally looking at the camera. Other ones I’ve seen, including Lost Worlds of South America and a set on watching movies that I’ve not finished because I was watching them–those were made with the DVD viewer in mind. But: I don’t mind because I’m fortunate enough to have an old vehicle which accepts DVDs and will play the audio from them without bothering me with the video. Man, I’m going to miss that when I’m gone.

It reinforced a bit from what I gleaned from Origins of Great Ancient Civilizations and even Our Oriental Heritage (which remaind the only volume of the Story of Civilization which I’ve actually read, although I’m going to revisit the partially read second volume real soon, I hope). Egypt got an early start with its civilization and the benefit of the regular overflowing of the Nile, but that early opulence didn’t help it in the long run when the hungrier groups from less providential environments started showing up. But, man, it did quite blossom in those early days, and Professor Brier is just the man to tell you about it.

Unlike some English literature courses that I’ve listened to, I’m not ready to rush out and buy primary texts or join the societies mentioned in the conclusion lecture. But if I stumble upon them in the wild, I might pick them up. And, briefly, until the knowledge is overwritten by nothing at all, I know some basics and can talk about Hatshepsut, Akhenaten, Nefertiti, Tutankhamen, and Ramses a bit, and I know the differences between who was buried in pyramids and who was buried in the Valley of the Kings, and I can tell the difference between some of the relative dynasties. However, since there’s not going to be a test, I’m afraid that most of this will be forgotten by the time the next trivia night rolls around. Not that history questions come up in trivia nights these days.

It’s funny, or sad, about how quickly these things roll out of my mind. I guess repeated exposure over time will help cement things–such as reading Our Oriental Heritage in 2023 and listening to Origins of Great Ancient Civilizations in 2019 and now this course. And if you linger on LinkedIn as any hustler or underemployed tech person is wont to do, you see lots of messages about continuing to learn, continuing to educate yourself, etc. But it’s always in practical and artificial professional things. Chasing certifications, and so on. I get the sense that being able to kinda talk about the Old Kingdom, Middle Kingdom, and New Kingdom and to talk about the fact that The Valley of Kings has no pyramids in it doesn’t count. Too bad it’s what I find interesting. Too bad for me, perhaps.

It’s been a month weeks since I finished Part VI, and, with the completion of this binder, I have completed the whole series–84 lectures in all, gentle reader, started–well, I reported on the first two parts in February, so–earlier this year? Late last year? It seems like a long time.

This set is entitled “Modern Literature” and covers mostly early 20th century authors. Individual lectures include:

73. Henry James
74. Joseph Conrad
75. William Butler Yeats
76. Marcel Proust
77. James Joyce
78. Franz Kafka
79. Virgina Woolf
80. William Faulkner
81. Bertholt Brecht
82. Albert Camus
83. Samuel Beckett
84. Conclusion

As with Part VI, I would have expected to have not read many of the authors, but I’ve read Conrad, a poem or two of Yeats, Kafka, Woolf, Camus, and Beckett, and I have books by Faulkner, Joyce, and James which I might get to someday.

Professor Hefferman focuses on single works, for the most part, but gives biographical sketches and, across lectures, explains the development, particularly in the novels but also in the dramas and poetry, the evolution of modernism from what came before. It does tail off mid-century, but if it went much further, I would definitely not be able to report that I’d read the authors–Roth, Updike, and whatnot.

I cannot help but notice that Faulkner is the only American on the list, so no love for Fitzgerald or Hemingway here.

So: The conclusion talks more about themes that are constant in Western literature (love, the relationship with God or gods, and war) more than tracing the evolution of the forms, but I guess 82 of the lectures covered that.

Does it make me want to read the authors? Some of them, the ones I have/own, I suppose. Other, particularly French authors and playwrights, eh, probably not (although who knows what I might find for a dollar in the wild).

I think I’ll do a proper quiz-style post to brag about which ones I’ve read and which ones I have in the stacks to read on another day. Perhaps a day after I remove the CDs from the player in the vehicle (yes, gentle reader, the completion is that fresh: yesterday).

It’s been three weeks since I finished Part V, so I’m really closing in on finishing this, by far the longest lecture series I’ve listened to. This set is subtitled “Literature of the 19th Century”.

Individual lectures include:

61. William Wordsworth
62. Jane Austen
63. Stendahl
64. Herman Melville
65. Walt Whitman
66. Gustave Flaubert
67. Charles Dickens
68. Fyodor Dostoevsky
69. Leo Tolstoy
70. Mark Twain
71. Thomas Hardy
72. Oscar Wilde

You know, I thought that I would find that I’ve read fewer and fewer of the authors as we got further along in history, but with the focus on the French authors in the preceding binder, that seems to have peaked. I’ve read all of these except for Stendahl and Flaubert (French writers). Heck, this very blog contains book reports for some of the works the author focused on (such as Great Expectations–in 2007–that long ago already?). I wondered if I had Madame Bovary–I mean, I know I have Madame Bovary, C’Est Moi, and, apparently, I read it almost ten years ago–so I must see it on my read shelves when I dust and not my to-read shelves when looking for something to read. And when I was looking for something to read recently, I found my copy of Madame Bovary. Which I had the urge to read in 2017 which, clearly, passed.

So the lectures serve as a bit of a refresher as much as an introduction to these authors; given the overlap of this series with some of the others I’ve listened to (for example, The Lives and Works of the English Romantic Poets last year), it’s almost like I’m back in Dr. Duffy’s class at the university. Which isn’t bad, and it makes me feel smart. And it passes the time I have in the car alone.

Wow, I’m relatively tearing through this set. I “just” finished up the previous binder, a 6 disc/12 lecture set, last month. And, with each as we get later into the canon, which spreads and broadens after antiquity, I think, “Man, I don’t think I will have read or will want to read many I’m about to hear about.” But in this set, I am wrong.

This set is taught by Dr. Heinzelman, an Englishwoman whose accent was almost somnulent at the beginning, is subtitled “Neoclassical Literature and the 18th Century”.

Individual lectures include:

49. Molière
50. Jean Racine
51. Sister Juana Inés de la Cruz
52. Daniel Defoe
53. Alexander Pope
54. Jonathan Swift
55. Voltaire
56. Jean-Jacques Rosseau
57. Samuel Johnson
58. Denis Diderot
59. William Blake
60. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Sorry, I guess with a book quiz, I would have highlighted what I have read and would have posted links to what I have read in the last 20 years, but I didn’t. Allow me to say I just read Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels in 2016. I thought I’d reviewed some Blake on the blog, but maybe I was thinking about Drawings of William Blake in 2016 (also) or hearing a lecture on Blake in The Lives and Works of the English Romantic Poets last year (a recurring theme, as the next set kicks off with Wordsworth). I listened to Voltaire and the Triumph of the Enlightenment in 2021, and my beautiful girlfriend (now wife) and I read Candide to each other while courting (although she identified with Cunegonde, but my wife is beautiful and baked me little rhubarb pies to take to work when I was going to work in the 1900s). I read Robinson Crusoe on my own in high school. I read Sor Juana de la Cruz…. In high school? In college? But en español (so, of all the things we will cover/will have covered in this lecture series, this will be the only non-native English writer I will have read in the original, although I remember only a bit/concept). Also, no, no Molière, but to contrast Wisconsin with Missouri, at least we pronounce Racine correctly (even though many or most people up north do not know who Racine was). Also, although I did not read Faust in the original (I read Dr. Faustus by Marlowe in 2020 and saw the opera form of it at Loretto-Hilton Center in St. Louis with that same beautiful girlfriend who would become my beautiful wife), I am almost there in pronouncing Goethe with the invisible R like an educated person.

So: I’ve read a bunch. I might need to look into my Classics Club editions to see what I can read from these authors (and authors from previous binders in this series). Hopefully, some Diderot. But I listened to this, and I came home from St. Louis, and I found a substack from Jack Baruth quoting Samuel Johnson. So maybe I should pick up that volume, should I have it in the stacks, first. After all the other things, cheap and/or deep, I have stacked up beside the chair.

This particular set, six discs in a single binder and with a single professor, from the much larger series that I bought in 2024. I am writing the reports on this particular course as I go because the whole series is 7 binders, 42 CDs, and 84 lectures in total–it might take me eight months or more to get through them.

This set is taught by Professor Ronald Herzman and is subtitled “Literature of the Renaissance”. Of course, those of us in the know will tell you that the dates of “the Renaissance” differ based on geography; the Italian Renaissance, for example, was far earlier than the English Renaissance. So this set of lectures would cover a broad swath indeed

Individual lectures include:

37. Christine de Pizan
38. Erasmus
39. Thomas More
40. Michel de Montaigne
41. François Rabelais
42. Christopher Marlowe
43. William Shakespeare — The Merchant of Venice
44. William Shakespeare — Hamlet
45. Lope de Vega
46. Miguel de Cervantes
47. John Milton
48. Blaise Pascal

It started out with a lecture on an obscure author, a woman who wrote a book about women who is unknown today unless you’re in the academy–and by “today,” I guess I mean the end of the 20th century. Hell’s bells, but the youth of today might not know any of them except maybe Shakespeare. And maybe I was a little deeper into books than most, even amongst my cohorts at the university.

At any rate, I’ve got many of these authors in Classics Club editions, including the Montaigne I started reading in 2017 (and have since re-shelved). As you might know, gentle reader, I am working through the complete works of Shakespeare in a multi-decade (probably) project (most recently A Midsummer Night’s Dream).

So: It made me want to delve into the works I’m not currently reading, so it’s got that going for it. Unfortunately, they will wash over me during the remaining lectures so that the feeling will pass. Hopefully, I won’t rush out to buy anything which will hold down my chair side table for years (I bought Pamela after hearing The English Novel in 2020, and I probably started it not long after–which makes me glad I did not run out and buy Tom Jones, too).

So I am on the downhill slide on these lectures; only three more binders, 36 lectures to go. And, looking ahead (or at least to the next set, “Neoclassic Literature of the 17th Century”), I have to think that the further into the more recent past we go, the less I’ll be inspired to read the authors. If the book makes it into the 20th century, that’s likely true. But I will still get something out of it, even if I don’t remember it.

I manufactured enough trips in the main vehicle to listen to this binder of CDs from the set I bought in 2024 and whose first two parts I listened to earlier this yeara>. As I mentioned, I am writing the reports on this particular course as I go because the whole series is 7 binders, 42 CDs, and 84 lectures in total–it might take me eight months or more to get through them.

This set is taught by Professor Thomas Noble and is subtitled “Literature of the Middle Ages”. Individual lectures include:

25. Beowulf
26. The Song of Roland
27. El Cid
28. Tristan and Isolt
29. The Romance of the Rose<
30. Dante Alighieri — Life and Works
31. Dante Aligheieri — The Divine Comedy
32. Petrarch
33. Giovanni Boccaccio
34. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
35. Geoffrey Chaucer — Life and Works
36. Geoffrey Chaucer — The Canterbury Tales

So: I got a little more out of this than parts 1 and 2 because it did not overlap with so many of the other lecture series I’ve listened to. Of the source material, I’ve read Beowulf, parts of The Canterbury Tales and The Divine Comedy, Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde (mentioned in the Life and Works), and probably some Petrarch. Undoubtedly, I have more of the source material available–a good hardback reading copy of The Canterbury Tales which I bought in 2013 (?!) and some Classics Club editions. And the series wants to make me read them.

At any rate, a decent set of lectures covering the end of Roman times and leading into the 1400s or so. Although the next part of the set, already loaded in the truck, calls itself the Literature of the Renaissance, arguably this series covers the Italian Renaissance which came before the rest of the European Renaissance. Aren’t I clever to draw the distinction? Not clever enough to steep myself in these authors and time periods; just clever enough to read them.

An interesting listen, a lot of coverage of who’s influencing whom (apparently, everyone back then read The Consolation of Philosophy), and a good background biographic material when available as well as indentifying the limitations of the source material (fragmentary in some cases even into the end of the Middle Ages, but the number of extant copies of the works increases over time). It makes me feel smahter than listening to the 200 “Greatest hits of the 80s, 90s, and today” scattered over the radio stations here. And, as I mentioned, I have a couple boxes full of these courses, acquired cheaply at book sales over the years, and I need to get cracking on them if I want to get them out of the closet and onto the bookshelves dedicated to them. Maybe I will luck out and my next job will require a commute. To St. Louis or Kansas City every day. I did not say good luck.

I bought this bonzer of a collection in 2024; it’s 42 discs total, and it’s broken into 7 parts with 5 different instructors. It will take a little while for me to go through the whole thing, I decided I would break my “reports” of them into parts separated by lecturer.

The first part is Near Eastern and Mediterranean Foundations with these lectures:

1. Near Eastern and Mediterranean Foundations
2. The Epic of Gilgamesh
3. Genesis and the Documentary Hypothesis
4. The Deuteronomistic History
5. Isaiah
6. Job
7. Homer–The Iliad
8. Homer–The Odyssey
9. Sappho and Pindar
10. Aeschylus
11. Sophocles
12. Euripides

The second part is Literature of the Classical World with these lectures:

1. Literature of the Classic World
2. Herodotus
3. Thucydides
4. Aristophanes
5. Plato
6. Menander and Hellenistic Literature
7. Catullus and Horace
8. Virgil
9. Ovid
10. Livy, Tacitus, Plutarch
11. Petronious and Apuleius
12. The Gospels
13. Augustine

Jeez, but not to be a braggart or anything, but a lot of this seemed familiar. But I have listened to courses on The History of the Bible: The Making of the New Testament Canon, The Bible as the Root of Western Literature: Stories, Poems and Parables, Socrates, Aristotle, e Aeneid of Virgil (by this same professor), Augustine: Philosopher and Saint, and Augustine. I’ve read Pindar (recently), Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, and The Making of the Old Testament. I’ve got, certainly, Plutarch, Livy, Homer, Virgil, Ovid, plenty of Plato, Augustine, The Epic of Gilgamesh and maybe Tacitus, Aeschylus, and Horace around here somewhere for me to read sometime after the 2026 Winter Reading Challenge completes. So, look at me! I am a learnèd man! Or at least a guy with an English and philosophy degree he takes seriously.

But, as this course is moving chronologically, it does kind of put the authors in order and in their eras. So, briefly, I know when the Hellenisitc era begins and when it ends and the order in which the Greek tragedians wrote, and…. Well, no, their exact years are gone from my memory. I wasn’t taking notes, you know–I was driving (and sometimes taking the long way home to finish a lecture). But, yeah, I get more familiar with these things the more I listent to them, and if nothing else, they do make me want to dive into the original materials. Although that itself does not mean much–I’ve had a copy of Pamela only slightly read for probably five years since I listened to the audio course The English Novel in 2020 and bought the early epistolary novel in 2020 because it was mentioned in the book. But, oh, it moves so slowly. Slower than my reading of slow books even.

At any rate, I have five (5) more binders of CDs to listen to (I guess they’re really DVDs, so I could watch them in the house if I really wanted to), and that could well take me into the summer or autumn. Which, again, is why I’m going to report on them professor-by-professor. So I can enumerate what I’ve already read or already own, I guess, since I’m not sharing with you, gentle reader, much about the development of verse and prose from Ur to the fall of Rome. Which is: It did. A major turn from the old Greek tragedians who wrote epics with the gods in them to the new comedians who didn’t write so much about gods but more about every day people. Well, every day royalty or aristocrats, but still, more narrow in scope. Will I remember that next week? Maybe. Ask me then.

Ah, gentle reader, I just read this book, wherein the just here refers to 2017, the Hot Springs vacation year–I read the author’s Travels with Epicurus when traveling (to Hot Springs, Arkansas), and I borrowed this book from the library later in the year. As to this audiobook version, I picked it up this May because I remembered reading the author, but I didn’t remember this book, per se, but certainly Travels with Epicurus. Since I’m again in the habit of putting in audio courses and audio books in the truck even though I’m only spending thirty minutes in the car several days a week instead of an hour or more every day. It takes me longer to get through them, but I’m getting through them. The odds are far greater that I’ll listen to the two and a half boxes of overstock I have in my closet before I read all the unread books in my library, but the odds of completing either stack are pretty low.

At any rate, to recap, this book (on audiobook) takes a list of quotes that Klein wrote in notebooks from when he was young and then picked it up again later. You know, I might have done something similar in journals, but I remember writing some quotes on index cards and taping them to my monitor. Not so much philosophical quotes–I was mostly an English major, after all. But Klein was not a professor of philosophy; this book alludes to it and his Wikipedia entry seems to confirm that he got his BA in philosophy and then took to writing for television and then some books. So we’re about even on formal education but definitely not on erudition. And the best part of his Wikipedia is the present tense (“Daniel Martin Klein (born 1939 in Wilmington, Delaware) is an American writer of fiction, non-fiction, and humor.”) God bless him, for he has blessed us.

So, yeah, in this book, he quotes something included in his notebook, a quote by an proper Philosopher of some sort, along with some history including the bio a bit of the quoted and then goes into a freewheeling discussion of what he thought about the quote and where it led him. Some relate to previous entries, but not all of them. The book came out before Substacks became popular, but one could imagine each being a Substack post.

Klein is an agnostic who has little truck with formal religion–one of his pithies pretty much attacks Christianity–and some of the things have aged poorly–his utilitarian defense of vaccines, for example, has taken a bit of a hit recently, but he’s never polemic or offensive. He does try to find meaning, and he embraces a lot of Existentialist points of view and the currently (and ever) popular drive to live mindfully in the moment and offers a number of pithies defend that approach.

The book, read by someone other than the author, spans six discs, so six and a half hours of listening over a month or two. Definitely worth my time. And, you know, I borrowed his books from the library, so I don’t own them. And if I can find them in the wild, I will by them and add them to the to-read stacks. Because I like them that much. Maybe I should also keep an eye out for his novels as well, but they’re probably more obscure/requiring of ordering than the philosophy books. Although I see on Abe Books that all of them go for about $5 a paperback which is not bad.

I bought this in September, and I started it in the car not long thereafter since my primary driver still has an audiocassette player in it. But it’s getting long-in-tooth (210,000 miles, something unimaginable in my youth when my cars crapped out at ~120k miles) and it won’t be too long until its failure is just another thing on the pile of things. And my trip to Iowa in October involved a rental car, and base unit newer vehicles don’t even have CD/DVD players stock, so my great accumulation of these CD and DVD courses might prove to be a poor investment. At least until I downgrade the audio and video options in a new vehicle.

At any rate, as you know, I’m a bit interested in Christian church history, so I’ve listened to a number of similar lecture sets (The History of the Bible: The Making of the New Testament Canon in 2019 and Lost Christianities: Christian Scriptures and the Battles over Authentication, both also by Bart D. Ehrman). Given that realization (driven by searching my own blog), that explains one of the knocks I had as I was listening to the series: One, the professor was kind of repetitive, saying the same things a couple of times in a lecture (basically) or the same thing in different lectures. I thought maybe he was padding things out to fill the required time like Mr. Howe, an assistant professor at Marquette when I was there, admitted doing during the semester where I booked 18 hours of classes on Tuesdays and Thursdays–8 to 5pm with only fifteen minutes between classes–and his was the last. Ah, I’d enjoyed his asides until I learned he felt compelled to add them to keep us there the whole class period. I don’t even remember what he taught–I should get a set of my transcripts just so I can remember all the things I learned and forgot.

At any rate, here’s the course list:

1. The Birth of Christianity
2. The Religious World of Early Christianity
3. The Historical Jesus
4. Oral and Written Traditions about Jesus
5. The Apostle Paul
6. The Beginning of Jewish-Christian Relations
7. The Anti-Jewish Use of the Old Testament
8. The Rise of Christian Anti-Judaism
9. The Early Christian Mission
10. The Christianization of the Roman Empire
11. The Early Persecutions of the State
12. The Causes of Christian Persecution
13. Christian Reactions to Persecution
14. The Diversity of Early Christian Communities
15. Christianities of the Second Century
16. The Role of Pseudepigraphia
17. The Victory of the Proto-Orthodox
18. The New Testament Canon
19. The Development of Church Offices
20. The Rise of the Christian Liturgy
21. The Beginnings of Normative Theology
22. The Doctrine of the Trinity
23. Christianity and the Conquest of an Empire

Welp, I missed one, but I’ve already shelved them, so it will just have to be a mystery which.

So you can see that a lot of the material overlaps with the other courses. And three lectures on Christian anti-semitism? Three lectures on the persecutions? That’s a quarter of the total course, and it might have been too much.

I’m not saying I didn’t get anything from it–probably some insights into what some of the non-canon Christian writers were saying, and a couple of things–the turn from the charismatic, smaller communal church bodies expecting to see Christ return in short order into institutions that had staying power, or how the Roman church came to dominate through its administrative experience and relative wealth, but mostly this could have been an 18-lecture or maybe even a 12-lecture course without losing much.

Maybe I need to remember, too, that I’ve listened to a lot by this fellow and maybe be careful about getting more from him. But probably not.

And Mr. Howe, he probably made it to Dr. Howe at some point. And might well have already retired. How old am I, again? I’ve got a birthday card signed Josephus. Is that worth anything?

I picked this audio course up at the Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library book sale in April 2024, and a couple of currents in my life crossed to give me the opportunity to listen to the 12 hours of the course: First, I realized that I was spending a half hour a day in the vehicle on a number of days per week, so I could feasibly listen to a course, albeit slowly, and cross country season was starting which would also give me the chance to listen to a couple of the lectures per weekend. The second intersector was the fact that I finished the complete works of Keats after slogging through it for, what, a decade? Of course, there’s no book report for it since it’s a single book edition which also contains the complete works of Shelley (P.B., not Mary). And since that book looks like this:

| Keats |        Shelley        |

It might be another decade until I finish the book. If ever.

At any rate, this course focuses really on the poets and some of their works instead of English history around the turn of the nineteenth century, although we get a bit, which is why the course is and Works and not and TImes like the Ben Franklin course.

The lectures include:

• Romantic Beginnings
• Wordsworth and the Lyrical Ballads
• Life and Death, Past and Present
• Epic Ambitions and Autobiography
• Spots of Time and Poetic Growth
• Coleridge and the Art of Conversation
• Hell to Heaven via Purgatory
• Rivals and Friends
• William Blake–Eccentric Genius
• From Innocence to Experience
• Blake’s Prophetic Books
• Women Romantic Poets
• “Mad, Bad, and Dangerous to Know”
• The Byronic Hero
• Don Juan–A Comic Masterpiece
• Shelley and Romantic Lyricism
• Shelley’s Figures of Thought
• Shelley and History
• Shelley and Love
• Keats and the Poetry of Aspiration
• Keats and Eros
• Process, Ripeness, Fulfillment
• The Persistence of Romanticism

With 24 lectures, he really does have time to cover the major poets, their biographies (often, in the case of the second generation, short biographies). And he emphasizes how each influenced the others and how each influenced poets who came later. I mean, I can see it: I can see how my own work was influenced by Wordsworth, and I surely wanted to be a Byronic hero back when I was steeped in this stuff in the university.

So a good course to listen to. But, I have to admit, sometimes my mind drifted during the actual poetry reading, which should have been when I was paying the most attention. And the professor goes into a great deal of analysis and finds meanings deeper probably than the poet probably intended, which again shows me that I was wise to not become a professor myself with that English degree. No matter how much I like poetry, having to teach one or more courses like this every semester for thirty years…. Not gonna lie, I don’t think I’d like it much at all. But the results (like this course)? I like them.

It seems like I just re-read the actual book, but that was in 2020. I’m not sure at what garage sale I might have picked up this single audiocassette with no binder/folder, but our recent ride back from St. Louis (to see Herb Alpert as the ancients foretold), I popped it into the vehicle’s audio cassette player.

This is a condensed version of the book, and it’s read by the author. It has three “chapters” that distill some of the book’s contents into less than an hour and a single audio cassette. It covers, basically, the power of prayer, the power of reframing your mind with positive affirmation, and whatnot (he said, because a couple of days later he forgot one of the chapters). A female narrator, who introduces us the the Sound Ideas, offers some takeaways and exercises as well, but basically, they’re to reframe your thinking by repeating some of the uplifting Bible verses like “This is the day the Lord has made; I will rejoice and be glad in it.” (Psalms 118:24) and “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.” (Philippians 4:13) as well as studying some scripture for solace.

Some people have likely dinged Peale for his focus on calling upon “The Power” that God has given you–it seems a little gauche, perhaps, but some interpretations of the Old Testament and some bits of the epistles (and perhaps even the Gospels) encourage believers to call for aid for the basics and for triumphs. So I’m not going to pile on him for his interpretation. It served him, and many of his followers, well.

My beautiful wife remarked a bit on one of the elements–silence, and listening to God, I think–and said nobody does this sort of thing any more. However, they do. It’s just been denatured and turned into Mindfulness. Strip the words God and Christ out of Peale’s teaching, and it would fit right into the modern zeitgeist without having icky Christian overtones. But, to be honest, the lessons are also found in Buddhism and Stoicism which predate Christianity.

At any rate, it was a nice, short review of the material, and I might well listen to it again.

Discogs lists 13 titles in the series, but does not include this one. They might be worth picking up when and where I can, if I ever see others of the ilk.

As to this title, I’m not sure what to do with it. I’m not sure where I got it, but without an audiobook-style binder, I won’t put it with the other audio books on the bookshelves. I’ll probably put it under the bed with the rest of our audiocassettes.

This Modern Scholar course from the turn of the century (what, exactly, is the +/- for the term “turn of the century”? We would have accepted plus or minus five years, maybe ten, for the turn of the 19th into the 20th century, but it seems like that’s a pretty big window for the turn of the 20th to the the 21st–perhaps that’s because that decade is in living memory of the dot-com era leading to the collapse of the dot-com bubble and the war on terror and because it was during my formative years, going from the death of my father to my beautiful wife is pregnant)–sorry, this Modern Scholar course (he said, easing out of the digression) is on CDs which is far better for listening to on road trips than DVDs. Our truck will play the audio from DVDs, which is all I need, but the DVD menus and other interstitial things play as well, which means that I get lots of filler transition music and that it’s hard to find where you left off because you have to forward through all of these things in an odd fashion. So, ah, CDs!

Clearly I could not wait to listen to this as I just bought it last month, but the fact that it was on top of the two boxes of courses I have in my office closet. And, apparently, I have picked out audio courses for the truck on several trips, as the glove box was full of them. Two courses I’ve abandoned for now; one that only had a single disc of it (which turns out was only a single disk course); one course on DVDs that I was going to stagger with this course; and another course where I seemingly missed the first disc when pulling to from the binder and putting it into the glove box. So in eighteen hours of driving, it turns out I only listened to this single course.

But it was a good course. As The Life and Time of Benjamin Franklin, it is mostly biography but also delves into the history of the eighteenth century (the 1700s, you damned kids) as Franklin was born in 1706 and was a seventy years old when the Declaration of Independence came about and then became the ambassador to France and whatnot.

The individual lectures are:

• Out of Boston: 1706-1723
• Among Friends: 1723-1726
• Poor Richard: 1726-1733
• The Art of Virtue: 1728-1737
• Practical Citizenship: 1739-1747
• Stealing Lightning from the Heavens: 1748-1752
• Join or Die: 1752-1757
• A Personal Stamp Act Crisis: 1757-1765
• The Cockpit: 1765-1774
• The Most Dangerous Man in America: 1774-1776
• Paris by Storm: 1776-1778
• To Be Seventy Again: 1778-1783
• Eldest Statesman: 1783-1787
• In Peach with Them All: 1787-1790

He runs away from being an apprentice in Boston to having his own print shop in Philadelphia, becomes an active participant in the local civic scene, acts as a colonial representative in London until he’s basically accused of treason, retires and does his scientific studies of electricity which made him a worldwide name (especially in France), unretired to work on American independence, and eventually became a representative to France (from which he tried to retire, but they kept making him stay–until Jefferson was ready, perhaps), and then he retired to his home and large library. To make a very long story short, that’s the plot, although it was not planned by him.

It’s a bit like George Burns: The 100-Year Dash in that the subject had a varied life and that it did not end at forty, or fifty, or sixty, or seventy. It’s a good lesson for those who are getting to be about forty, or fifty, or sixty, or seventy, that they might get to do great things yet. On the other hand, the short time frames in the chapters of this course indict me. Basically, what would be the block of time for me that is the last couple of decades? 2006-2026: Raised children or 2009-2025: Worked for a variety of concerns from the same computer and office setup for fifteen years or 2003-2028: Wrote a blog with a series of twee political hot takes, book reports, and enumerations of books he bought but will probably never read and videos he will probably never have time enough to watch? I guess that’s why one reads audiobooks/listens to these courses: to get a sense of what’s possible, not what’s habit (except at the end of the twee audio course reports).

Still, definitely worth a lesson if you can find it for $2 like I did (or borrow it from the library if yours has not yet remaindered it).

Also, I noticed when I was putting this course on the shelf (not in the closet with the other unlistened-to courses) that this is the second lecture set I have listened to by H.W. Brands, whose The Masters of Enterprise: American Business History and the People Who Made It I listened to earlier this year. It’s an amazing coincidence given that I bought them at different book sales. Perhaps I should take note of the name and look for more by the author, but, c’mon, man, if I find any interesting-looking audio course at the book sale on half price days, I’m buying it. So I probably don’t ned to seek out this professor at all. I’ll just pick them up as a matter of course.

I picked this course in the Modern American Scholar line in April, and I loaded parts of it into the car for when three of our yet four headed to Arkansas for a conference, but, of course, Arkansas which means narrow, curvy two lane highways, so I could not pay much attention then. But I’ve been inventing enough reasons to drive the main vehicle with the CD changer in it to listen to the courses.

This set is 14 lectures on 7 CDs that nominally tells the stories of a dozen entrepreneurs and the businesses they built, but they actually focus on prevailing market trends and the changes in American life over the centuries and how the entrepreneurs took advantage of that. So the actual biographies of the people are generally just a paragraph or two in the lecture.

Lectures include:

• The Business of America
• John Jacob Astor: From Furs to Real Estate
• Cyrus McCormick: The Business of Agriculture
• Cornelius Vanderbilt and Jay Gould: Speculating on America
• Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller: An Obsession for Efficiency
• J.P. Morgan: The Triumph of the Money Man
• Henry Ford and Alfred P. Sloan: Capturing the Dream
• Walt Disney: The Business of Fantasy
• Robert Woodruff: As American as Coke
• Ray Kroc: The Industrialization of Eating
• Sam Walton: Will the Real Uncle Same Please Stand Up?
• Mary Kay Ash: What Do Women Want?
• Andrew Grove and Bill Gates: Intel (and Microsoft) Inside
• The Past and Future of American Business

I rather got a lot of interesting things out of it. One, the drive for innovation in the early years in the United States: It had a lot of land, and few people to work it compared to Europe. So that drove innovations in the agricultural machinery (such as Cyrus McCormick’s wheat harvester). The car makers thought demand for their product would be limited to the number of people who could afford to have drivers for their cars; Henry Ford saw that people would want to drive their own cars. And after the car was invented and people were living in cities, they had leisure time for Disney and whatnot. The inclusion of Mary Kay of Mary Kay Cosmetics is a bit of an outlier in the list because the professor wanted to include a woman entrepreneur, but there were not many to choose from and none succeeded like the men listed (although my beautiful wife has a Mary Kay dealer whose products but burnish her natural beauty). He also highlights that American business is very often speculative in ways that European and other business environments or mindsets are not.

So it’s a good survey of business history, and it does acknowledge one of, if not the business conundrums of American business: the role of government in business. The government was hands-off early in our history, but certainly started intervening more and more from the late 19th century on. Although the professor thinks that the government’s hand has been a balancing influence, staving off panics after the Great Depression, the course is dated 2003. The last 20 years have certainly seen more and more overt government intervention into the economy and probably to a deleterious effect.

But I enjoyed the course as a history course, not an economics course. That is, telling the stories from our ancestors and not too much trying to steer us to a glorious future that our betters have picked out for us.

Well, gentle reader, it has taken me several years and several tries to get through this particular volume of The Giants of Philosophy series. As you might recall, I listened to several volumes in 2021 and 2022, including:

• Aristotle
• St. Thomas Aquinas
• St. Augustine
• Baruch Spinoza
• David Hume
• Søren Kierkegaard
• Friedrich Neitzche

I mean, those are giants of philosophy, for the most part, and innovative thinkers who challenged the paradigm of thought in their time, whereas Dewey was just the guy who took Pragmatism and turned it into the seeds of elitist destruction we see around us, where the credentialed “experts” should be in charge and should help usher those of us who are lesser than they to an atheist, relativistic, collective future.

It takes a very special hobgoblin of a mind to take uncertainty in thought and wed it to the certainty that some of the elevated thinkers should actually run things because, uh, their uncertainty is more pragmatic than the common person. He denies any objective reality aside from the interaction of people with the environment in their circumstances, and somehow derives a “better” that can be applied somehow to different circumstances, environment, and people, because Dewey somehow in his voluminous writings says so.

So, yeah. Not only is it rather administrative in its scope, but…. Well, no, that’s a good way to put it: Dewey would be the patron saint of adminstrators had they a religion of their own, but no. I agreed most with this course when Charlton Heston said Dewey’s critics would say that he is….. And he is, and I do.

So if you’re making a time machine and want to go back and take care of Hitler, if it’s all right, I’d like to borrow it and take care of Dewey. Ah, but it would not work: The communist infusion into university thought was not only the work of Dewey, and turning him so that he got rich making a New England brewery would only have delayed where we are today.

Still, after finally finishing this particular two cassettes (Only two! Which averages out almost to one whole cassette a year for my listening!) leaves me with two takeaways.

First, My youngest son had to listen to part of this series a couple weeks back when we were on the road to a conference in Arkansas, and he said, “John Dewey” in the fashion that the kids said “John Cena” when that was a thing several years ago, and I will forever say John Dewey in that fashion.

Secondly: I have really enjoyed this entries in this series. I don’t remember where I bought them–probably the Friends of the Springfield-Greene Library Book Sale some year or another–but they’re quicker listens than a full audio course, and as I’ve mentioned, having Charlton Heston read them is something. The voice acting now reminds me of the 1990s videocassette Richard the Lionheart–as these cassettes have different vocal actors for different thinkers, critics, and inspirations–sorry, where did I first apply the em dash?–but it’s slightly less distracting on audio cassette. But if I run into other entries in this series, I will pick them up, although the closer the subjects are to the twentieth century, the longer it will take me to listen to them. Unless, of course, they have a couple of cassettes on Ayn Rand. But they won’t.

At any rate, I’m fond of the series, but not of this particular spit philosopher.

This videocassette is part of a series called The History Makers which came out right before the Internet blew up. I only have one of them, this one, although the Friends of the Library Book Sale is this week, so if I get into a real frenzy on Saturday (half price day), I might pick up others for fifty cents each. But probably not.

The video runs about 45 minutes and features four actors portraying Richard, an English poet, an…. Arab poet? Turkish poet?, and Saladin who appear at intervals to recite passages from their respective historical documents. The rest of it is a narrator, well, narrating the life of Richard over stock imagery that looks only slightly better than a Renaissance festival. It has less content than, say, a Teaching Company/Great Courses series and only slightly more, maybe, than a ten minute YouTube video with quicker cuts and the possibly same stock footage.

I knew enough about Richard I to know that Sean Connery’s portrayal of him in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves was flattering. He ruled over people with whom he could not converse and spent most of his time campaigning and crusading, looking at England as a source of funding rather than as his people. So I didn’t get much out of it.

But when they were planning it all out in 1994 or 1995, they were targeting people who did not have streaming broadband connections to YouTube or Khan Academy or the Hillsdale College courses online. Maybe they were advertised on the History channel or other cable stations that appealed to the aspirationally academic set. Or in the backs of magazines, perhaps. Maybe the target audience appreciated them more than I did.

After watching the Indiana Jones movies last month, I opted to watch the remainder of this video series.

I started listening to this course last June on our way to vacation in Fairfield Bay, Arkansas, but when we passed Harrison, the lanes on the state highways narrowed, and I needed all my concentration to navigate the roads, so I didn’t end up listening to it. And once we returned, well, I spend, what, an hour to an hour and a half in the car each week nowadays? It’s hard to maintain the thread of a lecture over a week. So the discs remained in the car until last month, when I pulled them out and brought them downstairs to watch.

And, gentle reader, as I discovered when listening to Unqualified is that listening to audiobooks is a bit of a pain for me these days since I’m not in the car and I’m not often doing mindless things where I can kind of listen and follow something while doing something else. In this case, watching a Great Courses lecture series means dedicating hours across many evenings. This lecture series is 24 lectures, which would be the upwards of 20 evenings given that I would sometimes watch two episodes. It seems like a big commitment–I haven’t completed seasons of television shows, for example, because of the commitment. So time will tell how often I complete these series until such time as maybe I commute again.

But I started watching the lectures in the middle, trying to remember where I had been when I last stopped listening in the car last year. I think I overlapped with a lecture or two, but the first couple of lectures–the first couple of nations/civilizations/worlds were very similar, although in different places.

The lectures include:

1. South America’s Cradle of Civilization
2. Discovering Peru’s Earliest Cities
3. South America’s First People
4. Ceramics, Textiles, and Organized States
5. Chavín and the Rise of Religious Authority
6. Cupisnique to Salinar–Elite Rulers and War
7. Paracas–Mummies, Shamans, and Severed Heads
8. The Nazca Lines and Underground Channels
9. The Moche–Pyramids, Gold, and Warriors
10. The Moche–Richest Tombs in the New World
11. The Moche–Drugs, Sex, Music, and Puppies
12. Enigmatic Tiwanaku by Lake Titicaca
13. The Amazon–Civilization Lost in the Jungle
14. The Wari–Foundations of the Inca Empire?
15. The Chimu–Empire of the Northern Coast
16. The Sican–Goldsmiths of the Northern Coast
17. The Inca Origins–Mythology v. Archeology
18. Cuzco and the Tawantinsuyu Empire
19. The Inca–From Raiders to Empire
20. The Inca–Gifts of the Empire
21. The Khipu–Language Hidden in Knots
22. Machu Picchu and the Sacred Valley
23. Spanish Contact–Pizarro Conquers the Inca
24. Remnants of the Past–Andean Culture Today

I say that the lectures were a bit repetitive, and some of that might be because I was listening and not watching the earlier lectures. The professor spoke of the earlier civilizations having similar architecture, but in different locations, and he focused a lot on the common elements–the similar architectural styles/city layouts, the prevalence of the Fanged Deity/Decapitator Deity, and so on–although he did mention the differences–seafood diets versus agriculture based on location and the importance in El Niño cycle in ending some of these civilizations.

But watching the lectures added some depth. One could see the art he was describing, view the maps showing relative locations, and observe the ruins as they are today (Brian J. stopped the series because he was running out of synonyms for see). It proved a little distracting in part, though, as one notices that the shifts from one camera to another were not cut, so when he changes between the two, he pauses, his head turns to pick up the teleprompter or cue cards, he turns his body, and then he starts walking again and speaking. One wonders, is he on a set or is it a green screen behind him? He picks up a stirrup vessel from a table, but was that table always there or was it set before a green screen? Has he always had the remote or controller in his right hand? How many lectures does he wear the same clothes? And so on. Maybe it’s not so much a distraction but just something else to observe and think about while learning the material. So it’s more like the actual college experience.

At any rate, the lectures focus on Andean civilizations mainly because the Amazon has not been explored properly even now–the professor mentions that archeologists don’t generally want to dig in really remote areas–they want to spend years in urban areas where they can drive out to a dig not far away. Which led me to look up the number of uncontacted tribes in the Amazon, and it’s dozens of tribes (I saw a table on one Web site, but cannot find it now). Fascinating. So although Raiders of the Lost Ark was set in the 1930s, one could throw in a couple of drones and set something very similar today.

And although I am briefly able to talk about some of the greater pre-Inca civilizations like the Chavín, the Moche, the Wari, The Chimo, and the Sican–I made a gag at a trivia night a couple weeks ago that if we had such a category, I would be dialed in. But as time passes between now and the future, the details will start to fade, and I’ll only remember a couple of things. Like that the people of the Incan civilization had endured a Civil War prior to Spanish contact, and smallpox had already done maybe the opposite of decimate (whatever the latinate for kill 9 of 10 is) the population. But the civilization was not a utopia, and it expanded by military force (a conscript army of 100,000 showed up and asked if you would like to join the empire). So the lecture series plays it pretty straight in laying out that everything was not rosy, even if the professor argues that the civilizations might not have been as bloody-thirsty and head-hunting as thought. It gives you room to think for yourself and to research further if you can.

So I enjoyed the course, and I am briefly interested in reading some of the primary source material I have here–I have some stories of the Aztec conquest written near the actual events, and I was kind of tempted to seek out some of the primary texts that Barnhart mentions, especially chronicles written by the Spanish. But this will likely pass. And I have recently been researching raising alpacas as the Inca did, and I’m already planning to plant some potatoes this spring. So the course might have influenced me more than most (especially if I end up with alpacas and a couple llamas). At the very least, it triggered passing enthusiasm.

The 2024 Winter Reading Challenge, like previous ones, has a category for audio books, but this year, it had an additional requirement: it needed to be narrated by the author. Fortunately, I had a copy of this audio book, which was at the top of the box containing audio books and courses that I’d removed from atop the desk hutch because the stacks were blocking the light from the lamps up there. It was fortunate that I picked up this former library copy at the Friends of the Library book sale last spring as I took a quick spin through the audio books section of the library and did not find anything narrated by the author. Well, nothing I would want to listen to anyway.

It took some effort to fit this audio book in, gentle reader. As you might know, my children are older now and don’t require me to drive them to and from school on weekdays, so I lost about an hour each day in audiobook listening time. Coupled with the fact that I currently have no wheels (ask me sometime about how the autumn and winter of 2023/2024 vexed me) and don’t really go anywhere, so I had to make an effort to listen to an audio book at home. I briefly tried to listen while I worked, but I was focused on other things and was not paying attention to the audio book, so I could not do that. I didn’t have any hands-on, not processing words hobbies in the workshop to do while this played. So I spent six evenings, well, six individual hours over six evenings, to listen to this. Instead of reading a book or watching a film. I lit a fire, popped a CD into the DVD player to listen through the den’s audio system, and I just listened to the book. I gave my attention pretty strictly to the book. I couldn’t even putz around on my phone as I don’t have any games or mindless activity apps installed on the phone. Just a browser for reading Web sites. But, gentle reader, I wanted that 2024 Winter Reading Challenge mug. And, most importantly, I wanted to hit all of the categories. So I listened to Anna (ah-na) Faris (one R) read her book.

So: Although I have seen her in Lost in Translation and Keanu (although it must have been a small role, playing herself, perhaps in the Hollywood scene), I remember her mostly from My Super Ex-Girlfriend where she played Hannah, the cute assistant to the Luke Wilson character. Mostly because I just watched the film last year. She has been in a number of other comedies and voice actor in children’s movies and some television appearances. But, as I discovered, she is a comic actress and not a comedienne, which is important because this book is earnest and not humorous.

She also has or had a successful podcast, or maybe successfulish as I don’t know what metrics mark a successful podcast, called Unqualified. On the podcast, Faris gives advice, mostly (I presume based on the contents of the book) on sex and relationships. But she holds that she is really unqualified to give this advice.

So this book is part memoir, with some stories about her growing up and becoming an actor but also about her early relationships, her first marriage, her second marriage to Chris Pratt and the birth of their son, and some behind-the-scenes glimpses of life in Hollywood (she and Pratt divorced after the book came out, and she is on her third marriage now), and a bit about the podcast and its production. Another part of the book is relationship advice based on callers to the podcast, and another bit of it is filler material where she reads comments from the podcast’s Facebook page and whatnot. Unfortunately, it’s not particularly humorous (comic actress, not a comedienne). It might be a better read as some of the material is probably pretty skimmable, whereas listening to it means you have to hear every word at the author’s pace.

I don’t want to poop all over the author’s efforts here; she is very earnest in wanting to help people by giving them advice. But I am really not the target audience for this book, and I’m sure I would not have picked up the book if I saw it in a bookstore. But I saw it through the veil of profligate accumulation on a Audiobooks table for $.50 a month after I’d seen Faris in a film, so I got the book. And, fortunately, it counted for a category in the Winter Reading Challenge. But I can only recommend it if you’re a fan of Anna Faris or advice columns/podcasts. Not if you’re looking for topical humor from a comedian or comedienne.

It’s been a while since I listened to most or perhaps all of this course. My beautiful wife discovered that the DVD player in our old, but newish to us, truck would “play” DVDs, but when it played them, it would not display the video on the new-then-fangled touchscreen video control. Instead, it would play the audio. Which opened us up to “listening” to DVD courses while driving. Except that the track listing was not as straight-forward as actual CDs. The track listing includes menus you cannot see, titles and whatnot, and other things. So I listened to this course in May and June, culminating in our trip to Wisconsin. But somewhere on the trip, we reached a point where we were retreading the same ground, hearing the same course again, so either we got the discs out of order or mangled returning to our place on the last lecture or three. So we removed it from the car’s audio system and went onto the next course. And then we didn’t drive anywhere of consequence. Given that my oldest son is old enough to drive he and his brother to school, and the round trip in the car is no longer an hour and a half per day, who knows when I will finish another course?

Well, UPDATE, although you have not seen this post before, I started it in August of last year and discovered the course in the back of my to-review and notepad set on my desk. All I had written was the above paragraph, and then I rebooted or something where I closed the text editor. So, six months later, my recollections of the course are a little hazier, but at a high level, I can remember some elements of it, and sometime I think I would like to revisit the course and/or read more on the subject.

The book deals with research in psychology, particularly the science of decision making, which is the root of economics. How do people make the choices they do given the information they have? How much do they weigh this, how much do they research, how much do they go with their gut, and how’s that working out for them?

The lectures include:

1. What Is A Good Decision?
2. The Rise of Behavioral Economics
3. Reference Dependence–It’s All Relative
4. Reference Dependence–Economic Implications
5. Probability Weighting
6. Risk–The Known Unknowns
7. Ambiguity–The Unknown Unknowns
8. Temporal Discounting–Now or Later?
9. Comparison–Apples and Oranges
10. Bounded Rationality–Knowing Your Limits
11. Heuristics and Biases
12. Randomness and Patterns
13. How Much Evidence Do We Need?
14. The Value of Experience
15. Medical Decision Making
16. Social Decisions–Competition and Coordination
17. Group Decision Making–The Vox Populi
18. Giving and Helping–Why Altruism?
19. Cooperation by Individuals and in Socialism
20. When Incentives Backfire
21. Precommitment–Setting Rationality Aside
22. Framing–Moving to a Different Perspective
23. Interventions, Nudges, and Decisions

I liked it better than On Thinking Like An Economist: A Guide To Rational Decision Making because this course and discipline are more descriptive and enquiring into what guides peoples’ decision making rather than on how to proscriptively alter people’s minds and mental calculus by imposing outside incentives–that other course sure did want to guide people to the right path, which is what the economists and their paymasters determined as the right path. I also liked it far better than Seven Bad Ideas: How Mainstream Economists Have Damaged America and the World, which I did not finish, which found the State should fix the values for its subjects (and the bad ideas were basically individuals and self-determination).

Sorry to have held out on you, but this really was a good and engaging course, and I recommend it. I guess it’s available on the Internet and you don’t need a DVD player that plays audio in your truck to appreciate it. And watching it on an actual television might just give me the excuse I need to watch it again, perhaps with an actual notebook in hand.