Books & Reviews – Page 13

Stoic or Epicurean?

I’ve been listening to the History of Rome podcasts of late and was pondering on some of the comments about the emperor Marcus Aurelius. He was, before listening, one of my top three choices for best ruler of the empire. What better role model than the philosopher-king? Now, I’m not so sure that he managed both the empire and his own position as well as I had assumed. But that’s neither here nor there. What caught my attention was the narrator’s comments on the philosophical life of his times. Marcus Aurelius was, of course, the unwitting author of the now-famous, inspirational work Meditations, ……… click below for more ↓

O tempora, o mores!

2016-04-26 2016-04-26 Classics / Culture / Literature / What I'm Reading NowLeave a comment

Nihil est incertius vulgo, nihil obscurius voluntate hominum, nihil fallacius ratione tota comitiorum. Marcus Tullius Cicero wrote those words in the short book about a Roman court case, Pro Lucio Murena (For Lucius Murena). They mean, in English, Nothing is more unpredictable than the mob, nothing more obscure than public opinion, nothing more deceptive than the whole political system.” * In 63 BCE, Cicero successfully defended Lucius Licinius Murena on the charge of bribery or in Latin, crimina ambitus as a means to garner votes. The wealthy Murena had won his election as consul and the charge was filed by the losing candidate, Servius ……… click below for more ↓

On the 400th anniversary of the Bard’s death

2016-04-24 2016-04-24 Culture / Literature / Shakespeare / What I'm Reading NowOne Comment

“Is There Such a Thing as a ‘Bad’ Shakespeare Play?” asks a recent article on the Smithsonian website. It adds, “Shakespeare, despite the efforts of notable dissenting critics and writers to forcibly eject him, has occupied the position of world’s greatest playwright since his star was re-affixed to the firmament in the late 18th century. No other playwright is as universally revered. No other playwright has had countless theses and courses and books and articles speculative novels and so many buckets and buckets of ink devoted to him. And while to works of other playwrights of the era are still ……… click below for more ↓

The Bard’s Best? Nope…

2016-04-20 2016-04-24 Books & Reviews / Culture / Literature / Pop Culture / ShakespeareLeave a comment

To help celebrate the 400th anniversary of William Shakespeare’s death (April 23) and 452nd of his birth (also April 23), the website Mashable has put together a “battle” for the “Best Shakespeare Play Ever.” It’s done up as a sort of sports playoff grid (a tournament bracket), broken into four categories. Four? That’s right. Even though the First Folio was only divided into three categories, Mashable added their own: The plays are organized into four quadrants based on the four genres of plays Shakespeare commonly wrote: comedies, histories, tragedies and weird magic stuff. (Okay, we may have made up that last ……… click below for more ↓

Peter, Parkinson and Adams

2016-04-12 2016-04-12 Books & Reviews / Collingwood / Council / Critical Thinking / Ethics and behaviour / Philosophy / PoliticsOne Comment

C. Northcote Parkinson, Lawrence J. Peter, and Scott Adams are for me the ‘holy trinity’ of philosophers of modern bureaucracy, within both the public service and the corporate structure. As philosophers, they are all keen observers and witty commentators on the human condition, with emphasis on the nature of organizations, leadership and management. Not always in the lofty or strategically-focused terms of, say, Sun Tzu or Machiavelli; all three are more prosaic and more cynical. And funnier – an adjective seldom used with either classical writer. These three pundits are, of course, well-known today: every CEO, corporate leader and ambitious manager worth their ……… click below for more ↓

Demagogues and democracy

2016-04-08 2016-04-08 Books & Reviews / Collingwood / Council / Municipal Politics / What I'm Reading NowLeave a comment

“I just wish, at some point in time, councillors would show a little more integrity or credibility on the floor of council… It’s like every time we try to do something, there’s criticism, no matter what we do. I’d like to see councillors do the right thing. And in my opinion, these people are not doing the right thing. They’re hypocrites. They’re not telling the truth.” No, that’s not Mayor Cooper speaking about our current council that continues to blindly clear cut its way through the town’s institutions and services, masticate our already battered reputation into spittle-and-chips, and bludgeon staff morale into pulpy submission. ……… click below for more ↓

Master Han Fei’s Wisdom

2016-03-30 2016-03-30 Collingwood / Council / Politics / What I'm Reading NowLeave a comment

Long before Niccolo Machiavelli wrote his now-famous work of political philosophy, The Prince, there was another man writing in a similar vein in China. And, like many other sages, his words have important lessons that can prove useful, even today, for our own municipal council. Han Fei Tzu (aka Han Feizi) was a prince in the Han Kingdom in the third century BCE. He was a member of and spokesperson for the “legalistic” school that challenged many of the Confucian notions of government. In his short life he wrote 55 books – really short essays we would call chapters today. ……… click below for more ↓

CAOs: Mene mene, tekel upharsin

2016-03-19 2016-03-19 Books & Reviews / Collingwood / Council / Ethics and behaviour / What I'm Reading NowOne Comment

The title, as you well know, dear reader, comes from the writing on the wall in Daniel 5, translated as, “You have been weighed in the balance and found wanting.” Those words came to me as I read David Siegel’s recent book on Canadian municipal CAOs, Leaders in the Shadows. It’s subtitled, “The Leadership Qualities of Municipal Chief Administrative Officers.” Interesting stuff for any municipal politician engaged in the recruitment of a CAO.* Siegel suggests CAOs lead from the shadows because, in part, “…a CAO whose name is in the media frequently is probably in some kind of trouble.” I also suggest ……… click below for more ↓

The Crafty Crow and the Doves

2016-02-27 2016-02-27 Culture / Fables / Humour & Satire / Legends & Myths / Literature / What I'm Reading Now / Writing & FictionLeave a comment

Once upon a time, an old crow lived by the seaside. He had grown fat over the years because he was too lazy to work for his food. He preferred to sit than fly. He followed the other animals to get their leftovers, taking what wasn’t his, and annoying them by begging for some of their food. The other animals shunned him. They had chased him from many places, until he found himself on the coast. He was unwanted and unloved. One day, a flight of doves appeared. They were young, inexperienced doves fresh from the forest, who didn’t know their way ……… click below for more ↓

Aesop is Still Relevant

2016-02-06 2016-02-06 Books & Reviews / Collingwood / Council / Literature / What I'm Reading Now3 Comments

A MONKEY perched upon a lofty tree saw some Fishermen casting their nets into a river, and narrowly watched their proceedings. The Fishermen after a while gave up fishing, and on going home to dinner left their nets upon the bank. The Monkey, who is the most imitative of animals, descended from the treetop and endeavored to do as they had done. Having handled the net, he threw it into the river, but became tangled in the meshes and drowned. With his last breath he said to himself, “I am rightly served; for what business had I who had never handled ……… click below for more ↓

De Officiis: Cicero on Political Obligations

2016-02-04 2016-02-06 Books & Reviews / Collingwood / Council / Ethics & morality / Ethics and behaviour / Philosophy / What I'm Reading Now2 Comments

No phase of life, whether public or private, whether in business or in the home, whether one is working on what concerns oneself alone or dealing with another, can be without its moral duty; on the discharge of such duties depends all that is morally right, and on their neglect all that is morally wrong in life. Cicero wrote that in 44 BCE in his last work in his last year of life: De Officiis, or in English: On Obligations. The translation from Book 1.4 above comes from the Perseus Project (the 1913 Miller/Loeb translation). In the 2000 edition (Oxford University Press, reprinted ……… click below for more ↓

Reading Pablo Neruda

2016-02-03 2016-02-03 Books & Reviews / Literature / Poetry & Lyrics / What I'm Reading NowLeave a comment

One hardly expects poets to generate spirited debate in the media these days*, but they did, not that long ago, well within my own lifetime. Pablo Neruda (1904-1973) was one of those who sparked great, passionate emotions in people, for both his writing and his leftist politics. And in his own country, Chile, he was the equivalent of a rock star for many years. Even his 1971 Nobel Prize for Literature was controversial: the award noted Neruda was a “contentious author” about whom the debate still raged. His death, shortly after the coup by the right-wing general, Augusto Pinochet, was ……… click below for more ↓

Decoding Alice in Wonderland

2016-01-18 2016-01-18 Books & Reviews / Literature / Scifi and fantasy / What I'm Reading NowLeave a comment

It is tempting to suggest author David Day’s lush new book, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland Decoded is the final word on the mysteries and secrets behind Lewis Carroll’s iconic children’s fantasy, but alas, it would be an over-reach. Surely others will follow, perhaps even Day himself will extend his research to a sequel. Aside from the difficulties of probing the motives of a man dead more than 125 years, there comes the question of interpretation, which is more like opinion than it is fact. Looking back 150 years at possible explanations for a reference or a character sometimes involves guesswork. But even from its original publication, ……… click below for more ↓

Where Have all the Readers Gone?

2016-01-16 2016-01-16 Books & Reviews / Culture / E-books & E-readers / Literature / Media / What I'm Reading NowOne Comment

No, it’s not a remake of Pete Seeger’s famous 1955 anti-war song. That’s the title of an article that appeared in the Globe and Mail this week, by Peter Denton, lamenting our overall slide into image-based information with the “…intellectual attention span of squirrels…” * It grabbed my attention from the headline, but I stand at odds over his conclusions and his figures. Denton worries that people are reading less and sliding towards “personal illiteracy”: It’s not that e-books are taking over, either. People hardly buy books any more. Even fewer read them. My e-book sales are almost non-existent and ……… click below for more ↓