Another Breath: 2011-07-17

Thursday, July 21, 2011

Summer Reading #2

Have to finish before I watch the movie. My trip to Newfoundland has got me thinking about being at sea!
A great read. And the movie, starring George Clooney, definitely does the book justice. Now I need to read more books about sailing and the sea.
4 stars out of 5

Summer Reading #1

Young is a new action-thriller author. His first full novel explores a realistic situation where an air force pilot is shot down while transporting a controversial, high-level mullah with terrorist connections. They end up being chased around the mountains of Afghanistan. It explores stereotypes and sheds light on the way trained soldiers think when under pressure.

3 stars out of 5

Devotion, Inspiration, and "The Noonday Brightness of Human Genius"

"... Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins--all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul's habitation henceforth be safely built."

- Bertrand Russell, A Free Man's Worship