The Sunday Review

Things are getting into order at The Notes Taken.

Coming up in the next week, we've got Sean Moreland reviewing Anna Powell's Deleuze and Horror Film, and sometime soon, Jamie Bradley will be reviewing Thomas Pynchon's Inherent Vice. Matt McLennan and I will, in our own ways, contribute something.

Today, in the New York Times Book Review, Jim Holt reviews Logicomix (written by Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos H. Papadimitriou; illustrated by Alecos Papadatos and Annie Di Donna):

Well, this is unexpected — a comic book about the quest for logical certainty in mathematics. The story spans the decades from the late 19th century to World War II, a period when the nature of mathematical truth was being furiously debated. The stellar cast, headed up by Bertrand Russell, includes the greatest philosophers, logicians and mathematicians of the era, along with sundry wives and mistresses, plus a couple of homicidal maniacs, an apocryphal barber and Adolf Hitler.

And, in The London Review of Books (although this article is from late July), Tariq Ali provides a glimpse into the politics of Pakistan. In sum,

This is now Obama’s war. He campaigned to send more troops into Afghanistan and to extend the war, if necessary, into Pakistan. These pledges are now being fulfilled. On the day he publicly expressed his sadness at the death of a young Iranian woman caught up in the repression in Tehran, US drones killed 60 people in Pakistan. The dead included women and children, whom even the BBC would find it difficult to describe as ‘militants’. Their names mean nothing to the world; their images will not be seen on TV networks. Their deaths are in a ‘good cause’.

And my recent project on Sartre and the New Atheists leads me even further (back[?]) into the arcane and otherwise. I've started on Terry Eagleton's Reason, Faith, and Revolution, while Hegel's Faith and Knowledge taunts me from the shelf.