Michael J. McClymond
This is a nice short overview Christ’s life and scholars’ response to it. The book provides a useful introduction to the search for the “historical Jesus”, charting a sane line between the rocks of fundamentalism and the shoals of the Jesus Seminar.
Charles R. Pellegrino
This is an attempt to find the “factual basis” for events recounted in the Old Testament. For Pellegrino, that all boils down to “blame it on Thera“. He hints at fascinating research, both on the Thera eruption and in Biblical archaeology, but seems to want to credit Thera with every “supernatural” event in the Old Testament. In the process he doesn’t address issues of Hebrew and Egyptian chronology, but assures us that his interpretation is revolutionary - without bothering to tell us why.
This is an interesting but flawed book that promises but doesn’t every quite deliver.
Charles R. Pellegrino
Charles Pellegrino mixes a wealth of little-known Titanic stories, scientific analysis of the wreck, and personal accounts of his encounters with the famous ship; the result is a surprisingly fresh look at a much-written-about subject.
Emergence is a name for what happens when a collection of relatively simple objects, following a small set of rules, behave as if they were controlled by a single guiding intelligence. The flocking of birds is an example of emergence: to the observer on the ground it appears as if some leader bird (surely the one at the point of the “v”) commands the others to fly in formation, but in reality each bird acts independently, each following a few rules about direction and separation from its neighbors.
Johnson’s book begins by describing the emergent behavior of ants and slime molds. But instead of digging deeper into the phenomenon, he starts to drag in everything: the human brain, computer games, and the Internet. He does make some interesting points about how the lack of two-way linking prevents the World Wide Web from becoming an emergent system. At the same time, he ignores fundamental topics like Conway’s “game of life” and Wolfram’s research into cellular automata.
Emergence is a fascinating subject, and it’s a shame that “Emergence” never rises above the level of a magazine article.
