Everyone in my family has read the whole “Dark Materials” trilogy, and enjoyed it quite a bit.  It’ll be interesting to see how the movie adaptation works, since they’re going to have to go a bit easier on the church than Pullman did, unless they want crowds with torches and pitchforks protesting outside the theaters.

As far as what I’m reading now, I’m part-way through the first volume of Shelby Foote’s history of the Civil War.

Dawkins “The God Delusion”, Harris’ “The End of Faith”, and now Watsons “DNA”.

Finished Hitchen’s “God is not great” which I’m inclined to rate as the best of the Four Horseman books. Also just finished Alan Alda’s memoir entitled “Things I heard while talking to myself” in which he’s an open non-believer. Right now I’m working through “Talking Points” by George Lakoff.

I finally have something new to read in book form (other than my own manuscript).  Professor Marian Apostol from Romania asked me to download “Against the Tide” from the http://archivefreedom.org/ WWW site.  According to the foreword, the contributors detail the extremely harsh academic climate experienced by researchers with unorthodox ideas to offer.  The Archive Freedom site complains that the http://arXiv.org/ preprint site has become strategic, but is arbitrarily censored. So, Archive Freedom has its own depository of books and papers.

I’m finishing up “Revolutionary Characters: What Made the Founders Different” by Gordon Wood and will start “The Failure of the Founding Fathers: Jefferson, Marshall, and the Rise of Presidential Democracy” by Bruce Ackerman.

I finally finished my biography of Benjamin Franklin and started “Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights” by Thom Hartmann.  VERY eye-opening!  It’s a whole different perspective on American history, and from everything I’ve checked thus far, completely true.  Then again, I’m only on chapter 2!  :D

Concerning “Against the Tide”

The uniform note here is the forlorn complaint about the politicization of research in the physical sciences.  The contributors are all well known senior researchers with variant views, whether these views are central to their specialty or not.  They allege that lesser talents resort to politics for position.

The renowned Professor Arp claims that his statistical argument for the location of high red-shift objects nearby low red-shift objects is unjustly neglected. Professor Marian Apostol denounces the defunding of the Institutes for research in Romania in favor of a new and corrupt Romanian Academy.  Professor Kundt doubts the Hawking radiation from event horizons. And Professor Kurilyuk skewers monolithic reductionist theories of physics that block understanding of his theories of complexity.

--
Michael J. Burns