Knight’s Reading List XII: December 2007

Reading List:

Arnot, Bob. The Prostate Cancer Protection Plan.
Drake, David. Mistress of the Catacombs.
Edmonds, David, and John Eidinow. Wittgenstein’s Poker.
McGraw, Phil. The Ultimate Weight Solution.


Non-Fiction:

Arnot, Robert, M.D. The Prostate Cancer Protection Plan: The Powerful Foods, Supplements, and Drugs That Could Save Your Life. Boston, New York and London: Little Brown and Company, 2000. xiii + 338 pages. Endnotes. Index. There are a few comments I’d like to make about Bob Arnot’s little book: 1) It contains a nice example of how careful one needs to be when the state of the art is in flux; 2) the title of Part One – A Nutritional Disease, gives away a lot about Arnot’s predispositions; 3) the lifestyle and diet changes recommended here (following Dean Ornish to a large degree) are probably good for your heart, your vascular system, and your digestion, but I wouldn’t count on them to prevent prostate cancer, let alone cure it. (Not that Arnot claims that they will; his book could, however, leave one with that impression.)

At the time Arnot wrote there was a vogue for PC-SPES, a natural supplement that was supposed to reduce PSA (prostate-specific antigen) scores. Unfortunately, PC-SPES had some nasty side effects, and, in the end, it was demonstrated that PC-SPES only worked when it was contaminated with a drug that had known problems – like causing uncontrolled bleeding from every orifice. There are a lot of fads in the prostate cancer world, partly because the legitimate treatments (surgery and radiation) have their own side effects, and one should be careful about any claims for miraculous success.

Yes, I believe that diet and lifestyle can, perhaps, slow down the progress of prostate cancer, and quite probably help to prevent a recurrence. But a disease that affects one in every six human males is just too widespread to be entirely environmental. It may be that those with a genetic predisposition start incubating abnormal cells as soon as puberty kicks in. Again, be wary of easy ways out.

Finally, I’m glad I eat one of Dr. Arnot’s soy protein shakes every day, and that I’ve lost some weight on the low-fat, vegetable-intensive diet I’ve followed for the past year and more. I think I’m less likely to have a heart attack or a stroke than I was a year ago. But I’m really glad I chose to have a course of intensive high-density radiation for the prostate cancer. Now I view the diet as supportive of the other treatments I have going on to make sure the cancer is permanently knocked down.

Edmonds, David, and John Eidinow. Wittgenstein’s Poker. 2001. x + 340 pages. Index.

Terrific book! I wrote a review after I read it, and that review is posted on this blog.

McGraw, Phil. The Ultimate Weight Solution: The 7 Keys to Weight Lost Freedom. New York, London, Toronto, Sydney, Singapore: The Free Press, 2003. xiv + 320 pages. Index.

Yes, that Dr. Phil. If you’re looking for originality, this ain’t it, kid. But I would prefer tried-and-true methods to a brand-new miracle cure for obesity. Don’t buy the potato chips in the first place, and then you can’t eat them when you get the yen. Don’t go on a diet so monotonous you can’t stick with it, and it might be compromising your general nutrition. Choose lower-fat and lower-calorie alternatives. That’s the kind of common-sense advice you get from The Ultimate Weight Solution.

On the one hand, this is the kind of book that you might think you don’t need if you’re ready to lose some weight. I mean, we all know this stuff. But I found the book useful because it pulled together a lot of information in a coherent format, and because Dr. Phil makes it easy to apply his recommendations.


Fiction:

Drake, David. Mistress of the Catacombs. New York: Tor, 2001. A Tom Doherty Associates book. 464 pages. Sequel to Servant of the Dragon.

New Year's Resolutions

A few days ago I counted the books I had "on the run," that is, books that I had started reading, had not finished, and had not chucked into the "never going to finish" or "not worth the effort" piles. Some were books I owned, and some were from the library. By the way, our local library system, the Pikes Peak Library District, is very nice. There is a small branch more or less across the street from me, up at the Village Center shopping center, and the much larger East Branch is only a couple of miles away on Union Boulevard.

I had sixteen books going, not counting the NIV Study Bible, which I began on November 1, 2007, under a program which will have me completing it on October 31, 2008. Sixteen! Some I had started a long time ago, and had not touched in months. Others I had been reading at the rate of a chapter or so a day, for a greater or lesser period of time. And a few had only recently been started.

Therefore, my first New Year's resolution is this:

Read these 16 books [on an attached list], plus the prescribed parts of the Bible, before buying any other book.

I understand this to mean that I will not only not buy another book, but that I will also not withdraw any from the library, nor will I start any of the other books (read or unread) in my collection.

Thanks to this resolution, I have already been able to diminish the disorder in my house, as I shelved a number of books I had taken down, with the idea of reading them soon. Now I have acknowledged I won't read them any time soon, so back on the shelves they go!

This profusion of books is partly due to the networking or referral system on which I read. That is, a couple of months ago I was reading Paul Theroux's travel classic The Old Patagonian Express. In the course of the book, Theroux mentioned that he was reading The Adventure of A. Gordon Pym, by Edgar Allan Poe, and, later, that he read and enjoyed Boswell's Life of Johnson. So I found my copy of the complete works of Poe and set it aside. Then I got Boswell out of my (incomplete) set of the Great Books of the Western World, and put it next to my bed.

I also read Wittgenstein's Poker recently. This is a fascinating little book about a confrontation between Ludwig Wittgenstein and Karl Popper on October, 25, 1946, at King's College, Cambridge (the one whose choir one often hears at Christmas time). That led me to get out the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and The Logic of Scientific Discovery.

Now all of those books are back in their rightful places on the shelves.

My other resolutions are:

2. Maintain weight in the range of 170-175 pounds.

3. Exercise regularly, including the walking program, workout tapes, and yoga.

4. Practice meditation.

5. Eliminate short-term debt.

6. Complete PMP [Project Management Professional] certification.

Today I finished the first of the books on the list, The Ultimate Weight Solution, by Dr. Phil McGraw. I found this book for $2.00 in the bookshop at the East Branch library (proceeds go to the library), and it was in very good shape: no highlighting or underlining. Reading it has obviously been in pursuit of my resolution # 2, although McGraw also talks about exercise and meditation.

McGraw's book isn't bad, for the kind of thing it is. A lot of it is the kind of commensensical advice that seems inane, but is all too easy to forget in the stress of daily living. Set realistic goals, don't expect miracles, make it easy to do the right thing, eliminate excuses - that sort of thing. I'll probably write more about this on another occasion.

Oh, since mid-October I have lost about 30 pounds. I am now down around 175, on my 70.5-inch frame, and it is a far more comfortable weight for me than what I had been maintaining for the past several years. So I think it's important to maintain it until it is really stable.

And now I have another 15 books to read.

Wittgensteins Everywhere

As is often the case, I am reading a number of books concurrently. As is surprisingly often the case, I find that I run across something in one book which relates, somehow or other, to material in another book, without any apparent reason for the connection.

Ludwig Wittgenstein was a well-known philosopher. In fact, a quote from his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is the masthead for this blog. Wittgenstein wrote much of the Tractatus while serving as a forward artillery observer with the Austrian army during World War I. At the moment, I am somewhere in the middle of a work called Wittgenstein's Poker, which is ostensibly about a ten-minute argument between Ludwig Wittgenstein and Karl Popper, which took place in Cambridge, England, in 1946.

There are all sorts of places one could go from there, and Messrs. Edmonds and Eidinow, the authors of Wittgenstein's Poker, go to many of them.* They bring in the backgrounds of the two protagonists, social, religious, and political, as well as philosophical.

The Wittgensteins, though they converted to Protestantism years before Ludwig was born, were Jews, and the original family name was not Wittgenstein, but Maier. Ludwig's grandfather, Moses Maier, took the name from the Sayn-Wittgensteins of Hesse, for whom he was an estate manager. The Times stated in its obituary for Ludwig Wittgenstein that he was descended from that "Prince Wittgenstein who fought against Napoleon." (See Edmonds and Eidinow, page 113.)

Now, that in itself is, I think, an interesting phenomenon. Jews taking the names of the estates on which they worked has a certain resonance to the United States after the Civil War, when black freedmen took the names of their masters and the plantations on which they had labored. It recalls the manner in which the Romans adopted promising young men into their families, and gave them names similar to, but not exactly the same as that of the gens.

At the same time, I've been reading The Book of War. Perhaps I should explain. A few years ago, at the height of the drought in Colorado, my wife and I took a week's vacation at a timeshare resort in Pagosa Springs. While there, we came across a small bookstore selling quite a number of books with black marker stripes across the bottoms of the pages. Naturally, these sold at quite a discount, and I bought several books. To this day, I do not think that I have finished reading any of those books. There may be a reason that they were relegated to the remainder shelves.

But lately I took to reading The Book of War: 25 Centuries of Great War Writing, edited by John Keegan. From pages 155 to 169 Keegan excerpts a work by Helen Roeder about her ancestor, Franz Roeder, who served in a Hessian (note that location!) regiment: the Lifeguard Regiment of the Grand Duke of Hesse. At page 158 Ms. Roeder quotes the Captain's journal as saying, "I begged a piece of bread from Prince Wittgenstein, and then gave it to Amman because I thought that his need was the greater."

Obviously, this is the Prince Wittgenstein for whose family the Jewish Maiers, later the Vienna Wittgensteins, were estate managers. So I have a line connecting page 133 of a book about two twentieth-century philosophers with page 158 of a collection of excerpts from books about a variety of wars. But there's more, because on page 161 of Keegan's collection, we take up the story from the point of view of a Russian memoirist, also writing about the retreat of the Grand Army from Moscow, in which we find this line: "... Count Wittgenstein was approaching from Tschasnik with his corps reinforced by General Steinheil, in order to link up with the Army of the Danube." Not only is Count Wittgenstein not the same as the Prince Wittgenstein of Hesse to whom we were just introduced, he is on the other side! Count Wittgenstein's forces are chasing those of Prince Wittgenstein and his colleagues across the Beresina. Meanwhile, Prince Wittgenstein's estate manager is appropriating his name and moving to Vienna, where his descendants will become the wealthiest family in Austria.

Once again the disparate elements of my reading combine to cast light, or maybe shadows, one upon the other.

Is this merely coincidence, or is there a grand plan operating behind the scenes?

*David Edmonds and John Eidinow, Wittgenstein's Poker: The Story of A Ten-Minute Argument Between Two Great Philosophers. New York: HarperCollins, 2001.