A couple of recent reviews of Dont sleep from Amazon. I would like to take the good ones seriously, but that would mean taking the bad ones seriously, so I just find them all random. Still 94 Amazon reviews up now (a mediocre number) but a 4.5 or so average out of 5. So not terrible. The first one does piss me off though. :) Poorly written by a oddly shallow ex-missionary who appears to have a savant-like ability to get college degrees with a mediocre IQ. Worth a read? Yes, but prepared yourself to be bored and annoyed by the author. As a quicker alternative, you can get all of the interesting material from various sources on the Internet. There isnt that much of it, actually. I am really fascinated by Dans deep analysis of language and way of life link. I had been a bit lost in his linguistic interpretation (esp. Chomskys and others points of view) but Dans frankness in conclusion is absolutely astonishing ! There are many other hints to think about: what does it mean to live here and now, to be on the alert permanently, to feel certainty inside oneself etc. Frankly, i dont understand some of the negative commentary here. I had to force myself to put the book down from time to time. The more I study, the more convinced I am that we humans havent only accumulated information over the millennia, weve quite literally taught ourselves how to think. Not just what to think, but how to think. Everetts book underscores that conviction for me. Here we have a group of people who intentionally dont want contact with the rest of the world and whose very thinking is so strange to us as to make us wonder whether they might in fact be imports from some other planet. (I, of course, dont mean the other planets seriously.) The Piraha dont think like most of the rest of the world thinks, often not even at very low levels. What can you make of a culture that has no numbers at all and apparently cant learn them? How about a culture with no sense of history and no projections for the future? They have no words for colors or for the simple concepts of left and right. While I certainly wouldnt want to live among them, they apparently are so satisfied with their lives that centuries of attempts to evangelize them have fazed them not in the slightest. The missionarys expectation that something about the Gospel will inevitably resonate with any human heart is thus proven to be unfounded. This fact so discombobulated Everett that he eventually abandoned his own faith. No, this isnt a novel. In fact, its not even a simple story. It shouldnt be read that way. And, yes, it can get a little technical toward the end. (Seriously, somebody here had the nerve to say that Everett, who chairs the linguistics department at Illinois State University and who holds a PhD in the subject doesnt know what hes talking about?) But if youre as fascinated as I am by, well, humanness, I think youll have a hard time putting the book down, too.
Posted on: Tue, 29 Jul 2014 15:59:28 +0000
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