Short Book Reviews: Volume III

Authors you might be familiar with: Valliant, Holland, Houellebecq, Dreher — Subjects you might be interested in: Genetic betrayal, Meganets, Modern Christianity — Plus the Three Witnesses

1. Meganets: How Digital Forces Beyond Our Control Commandeer Our Daily Lives and Inner Realities by: David B. Auerbach

2. The Robot’s Rebellion: Finding Meaning in the Age of Darwin by: Keith E. Stanovich

3. Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World by: John Vaillant

4. Persian Fire The First World Empire and the Battle for the West by: Tom Holland

5. Submission by: Michel Houellebecq

6. The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation by: Rod Dreher

7. Great Emergence: How Christianity is Changing and Why by: Phyllis Tickle

8. Investigating the Book of Mormon Witnesses by: Richard Lloyd Anderson

Here are some more book reviews. I’m still here. And, even better, I can feel my mojo coming back, I think. Mojo is elusive. Though perhaps more importantly I’m all but done with Baldur’s Gate 3. (I just have the final boss left.) I’m doing a ridiculous amount of traveling the next couple of weeks, but it’s my hope that soonish there will be something other than book reviews in this space. Or maybe it will just be longer book reviews… In any case, enough navel gazing!

Non-Fiction Reviews

Meganets: How Digital Forces Beyond Our Control Commandeer Our Daily Lives and Inner Realities

By: David B. Auerbach

Published: 2023

352 Pages

Briefly, what is this book about?

The emergence of a new chaotic force in the world: the meganet. It’s both complex and non-linear — meaning that small changes in the initial setup could have dramatically different outcomes. Think of the butterfly effect: the classic idea that a butterfly flapping its wings in Malaysia could cause an Atlantic hurricane. And indeed Auerbach compares the behavior of meganets to the operation of the weather. Most importantly he points out that even the owners of these meganets (think Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook) have as much control over their creations as they do over the weather.

What's the author's angle?

Auerbach has worked for Google and Microsoft, so he brings something of an insider’s perspective to how large computer networks operate, and what sort of emergent qualities arise in very large networks, i.e. meganets.

Who should read this book?

Those who are worried about new technology—in particular social media—and are looking for a reason to worry even more. 

Specific Thought: Evolution Is Inescapable

Auerbach’s central and most interesting claim is that a network of sufficient size (i.e. a meganet) becomes autonomous.

To put that in more concrete terms, Mark Zuckerberg can make changes at Facebook — the avatar of all internet harm — but he has no control over the results of those changes. When he says that they’re going to crack down on X, most of the time such crackdown has no effect on X, and frequently it leads to more of X.

Auerbach opens the book with an example from the pandemic. Despite repeated assurances (seemingly sincere) from Zuckerberg that they were going to remove “false claims and conspiracy theories that have been flagged by leading global health organizations” Auerbach points out that:

By May, the infamous Plandemic video was flying across the platform unimpeded, while conspiratorial posts about the disease, masks, and vaccines increasingly populated people’s walls. 

Many people think that this happened because Facebook is only interested in money. But internal documents reveal that they really were trying, but they couldn’t control the system they owned. As the 2020 election neared, Facebook finally ended up blocking the number of times that any content could be forwarded. Basically:

The blunt fact of one of the world’s biggest companies failing to address ongoing, stinging criticism from all sides on an issue that doesn’t greatly profit them in any way does not speak to malice and not even to incompetence. It speaks to an actual inability to solve the problems. And Zuckerberg’s own frustration was that of an unfathomably rich and powerful man who could not control what he had created any more than its users could stop logging on to it. Zuckerberg’s creation had become as autonomous as nature—as the weather, as the tides, as plate tectonics. This loss of control, more than privacy violations and the spread of disinformation, was a fact Facebook (the company) wished to obscure. In one internal Facebook memo the company’s communications department worried, above all, about people thinking that Facebook employees couldn’t control their own networks. [Emphasis original]

This excerpt gives a reasonably accurate description of what happened, but it doesn’t go very much into why it happened. Here, Google and the practice of search engine optimization (SEO) are more instructive. 

As I have mentioned I own a business, and that business has a website. I pay a company $1750 a month to do SEO for that website. I haven’t been doing it very long and the jury’s out on whether that’s a good use of money, but it is clear that without paying a company to do SEO there’s virtually no chance I would show up anywhere even remotely near the top of the search rankings. One of the things this money buys is a couple of blog posts a month. And they’re reasonably good posts. I’m sure I could do better, but the difference in page rank between the actual owner of the company carefully crafting a post, and a poorly paid Filipino cranking one out is insignificant. 

In fact, it’s likely that because I’m an iconoclast who writes whatever I feel like my posts would do worse. But this is not what Google is hoping for. They would prefer that the passionate business owner gets more traffic than the mercenary business owner, or more generally they would prefer it if their system could not be gamed, at least not easily, and so you end up in an arms race between Google and the people doing SEO. Both using dynamic algorithms to try and outfox the other.

While Google’s more advanced algorithms were initially fairly elegant and comprehensible to humans, the meganet’s feedback loop sent Google’s algorithms tumbling into vastly greater complexity and constant evolution. Google’s search ranking became neither orderly nor static, nor humanly comprehensible. Much like meganets more generally, these sorts of algorithms are ever-shifting, voluminous entities that do not stay in one place long enough to be precisely observed…

The feedback from Google’s search engine—the effects Google had on the web and on its users—became as important to determining Google’s rankings as the original content Google had crawled. Google, in other words, had to play catchup with itself, struggling to track the changes its own search engine was causing across the wider web. Google—and perhaps the entire web—effectively began chasing its tail. That feedback-driven loss of control—by which Google was struggling to keep reins on the extraordinarily successful system it had built—heralds the meganet.

He mentions the term evolution, and I wish he had leaned into that idea more. The sense I got was that ownership of a meganet was like owning a very large piece of land. You can spray pesticide from the air; you can irrigate it; you can make fences; but you will never end up with exactly the flora and fauna you desire. There will always be weeds, and there will always be rats. And in fact by spraying pesticide you may make the weeds that remain even tougher.  What he’s really saying is that meganets are a new evolutionary space with selection pressure, survival considerations, and competition between various entities. In any case I think this sort of thing provides a useful metaphor, but it’s one he never explores.

He does offer some potential solutions to the problems created by meganets. In particular he recommends that you fight chaos with chaos. 

For all that we perceive the meganet to be chaos, the addition of chaos and complexity can ironically also mitigate the force of meganets. To illustrate this extremely counterintuitive principle, take a self-contained example: the deployment of ranked choice voting (RCV) in the 2021 New York City mayoral election. RCV has long been an alternative to traditional ballots in which voters choose a single candidate. In RCV, voters list several candidates in order of preference so that their vote can be reassigned to whomever is left as less-popular candidates are eliminated from the algorithmic tallying of votes. RCV’s New York rollout, however, had one important secondary effect: political campaigns no longer knew who to target… 

RCV’s complexity…negated much of the microtargeting and mobilization typical of campaigns these days. Not that these tactics didn’t occur, but they were deployed with far less specificity and intelligence—as operatives themselves admitted. The net effect was a regression to a more naïve, earlier kind of campaign in which candidates were more or less consistently themselves and pandered less to perceived momentary shifts because it had become impossible to determine the fallout of any such fine-grained pandering. And the end result was a throwback to the era in which compromise candidates could win out over fiery ideologues.

The lesson from the implementation of RCV is that chaos doesn’t necessarily build on itself. Chaos can in fact neutralize chaos, if the chaos is directed in opposing directions. 

This would seem to feed into my evolutionary model — trying to create monoculture leads to disaster. (See for example the rational forestry movement, as described in James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State.) While reintroducing wolves (see the example of Yellowstone) makes everything run more smoothly.

Unfortunately fighting chaos with chaos does not seem like the path anyone is following. But Auerbach’s book only came out last year, so it’s probably too early to say. Which is another way of saying that the idea’s evolutionary fitness has yet to be tested in the bloody Darwinian struggle that is the modern meganet.

The Robot’s Rebellion: Finding Meaning in the Age of Darwin

By: Keith E. Stanovich

Published: 2004

374 Pages

Briefly, what is this book about?

Rebelling against the power of our genetic programming, insofar as our genes might cause us to make suboptimal decisions in the modern world.

What's the author's angle?

Stanovich is very passionate about these arguments to the point where one detects a certain amount of venom for those who are unpersuaded. Religion attracts a large share of his venom and if you viewed this as atheist apologia you wouldn’t be wrong.

Who should read this book?

This was one of the selections for the SSC/ACX book club I belong to. Of the ten people there five had not read the book (four had tried and failed, one hadn’t even tried); three people (including me) had skimmed the whole thing; and two had read every word. Put simply, even should you desire to read the book, you will probably fail. 

Specific Thoughts: How Radical Can We Make Our Individualism?

Early on in the book Stanovich presents us with an extended metaphor. Imagine that we have decided to have ourselves cryogenically frozen upon our deaths. This will result in our body being stored in a cryogenic capsule and this capsule needs to survive until technology advances far enough that we can be revived. We can choose some spot for our capsule, but the ensuing immobility carries considerable risk. If, at any point in the future, someone should decide to eliminate our capsule, or just decide that they want that space or land, it would be hard to stop him. Apparently in circles where this sort of thing is discussed this is called the “plant” strategy. Alternatively you could adopt the “animal” strategy, i.e. attach your capsule to a mobile intelligent platform: a robot. 

Should you decide to take this path, numerous other difficulties present themselves. What if lots of people follow this strategy? What if their robots are more advanced? What sort of strategies might develop in this competitive environment? Parasitism? Warfare? What laws might be written? But the key issue Stanovich wants to raise is, what happens when what’s best for the capsule diverges from what’s best for the robot? At what point should the robot eject the capsule and just live its best life? Stanovich’s answer is “without any further delay”. This is the “robot rebellion” of the title and as you might have guessed, we’re the robots and the capsules are our genes. 

I understand his point, but all of this assumes that it’s possible to identify what someone’s “best life” is in the absence of their genes. Does my best life consist of eating amazing food? Or having all the sex? In both cases those are genetic drives. Certainly if you stripped away all genetic influences on your desire something would remain, but what that something would be is not at all clear to me. 

I could go on, but as I said I only skimmed the book, and I’m already in danger of overstepping my command of the book’s argument. Needless to say I was not persuaded.

Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World

By: John Vaillant

Published: 2023

432 Pages

Briefly, what is this book about?

How global warming is creating conditions for unprecedented fires.

What's the author's angle?

Vaillant definitely wants to create alarm around global warming, and it’s clear that he feels highlighting insane recent fires, and in particular the Fort McMurray Fire of 2016 is a great way to do that.

Who should read this book?

If you like stories of disasters, the McMurray fire is pretty interesting. If you like being warned about global warming then this at least approaches it from an interesting angle. But if you’re not that interested in disaster and you don’t like being preached to about global warming then this book is probably not for you.

Specific Thoughts: My Burning Complaints

On one level this is a book about the Fort McMurray Fire and other similar extreme fires. On another level it’s a metaphor about humanity’s new relationship to fire. How we extract fossil fuels in order to burn them, but CO2 thereby emitted makes forest fires more probable. And on another level this is a book about the ways in which global warming has increased the odds of such fires.

I found the first level very interesting. I find disaster stories to be fascinating, in particular the way people respond to extreme events. The McMurray fire was extreme both in terms of speed and power. It ended up being the most costly natural disaster in Canadian history and depending on the estimate it was somewhere between 50-100% more expensive than its next closest competitor. 

As far as the metaphor connecting the various forms of fire, it was an interesting idea, that the more we mastered one form of fire — combustion of hydrocarbons to power our machines — the more we were losing control of another kind of fire — forest fires. What made it more interesting is that Fort McMurray is the center of the Canadian bitumen/oil sands industry. You can extract usable petroleum products from oil sands, but it’s 10x as expensive as the oil coming out of Saudi Arabia. All of these things were interesting coincidences, but the metaphor came across more preachy than revelatory — Vaillant never provided me with an actual epiphany. The metaphor didn’t contain any startling additional insight about how the world worked. 

Finally there was the connection between global warming and forest fires. Underlying everything is an assumption that global warming is making these fires both more frequent and more intense. At many points in the story he mentions both the record setting temperature in the Fort McMurray area at the time of the fires, along with the exceptionally low humidity. 

In understated tones, the wildfire manager then noted that the forecast called for temperatures in the high eighties. This wasn’t just a little bit warmer than normal—it was almost thirty degrees hotter than the average high for that time of year. Meanwhile, the forecast for relative humidity—15 percent—was also record-breaking for that date. Fifteen percent humidity is not typical of the boreal forest in May; it is typical of Death Valley in July. Combined, these conditions were as conducive to fire as is possible anywhere on Earth—comparable to peak fire season in Southern California or Australia. But as radical as these heat and humidity forecasts were, weather stations in Fort McMurray would soon confirm that they had been conservative. The forest that day was a bomb, but it would take wind to detonate it. Six hours earlier, at 5:00 a.m. Mountain Time, Environment Canada had issued the following forecast: “WIND BECOMING WEST 20 KM/H (12 MPH) GUSTING TO 40 (25 MPH) IN THE AFTERNOON.” While Schmitte acknowledged that such a wind shift would pose a “challenge,” he did not say what would have been crystal clear to anyone familiar with boreal fire: winds of twenty-five miles per hour can cast embers hundreds of yards, all but guaranteeing that Fire 009 would enter the city.

Vaillant takes it as given that we will see the connection between these record setting conditions and global warming. And perhaps for most people the connection is obvious and no further elaboration is necessary. But as a bear of very little brain I like things spelled out for me, and in that respect this book is woefully lacking. I’m not saying that global warming had nothing to do with these record-setting conditions, but it would be nice for him to reference some studies, and bring in a little bit of science. Wikipedia, which is not known for being a hotbed of global warming denialism put it this way:

Climate change was also cited as a potential contributor to the start and spread of the fire.

I like the word “potential” that sounds like the right amount of confidence as a default, and I had hoped that this book would take that default and build a case for it being a near certainty. But the book started with certainty and never looked back.

In particular I’ve long been interested in the role that fuel load accumulation plays in modern forest fire severity. Vaillant often mentions that fires are an important part of the boreal forest lifecycle, but other than the global warming angle he doesn’t mention any other ways in which we might have disrupted this cycle. I know up until recently we extinguished fires immediately which leads to the accumulation of fuel, something which naturally makes fires worse. Also, while it’s long been known that we should be doing controlled burns it turns out that those have been difficult to get past the various bureaucratic hurdles so they aren’t happening as often as they should. Perhaps these elements didn’t apply at all to the Fort McMurray fire, but I have no idea. Vaillant didn’t mention anything about them. If he had managed to spend a couple of pages on them I think it would have made his overall case much stronger. I can’t imagine I was the only person thinking about it. 

The biggest omission however is one this book has in common with so many other books on global warming: there is zero mention of nuclear power. You might think this is too nitpicky — why should a book about fire need to also talk about nuclear power? Vaillant spends a large fraction of the book talking about the history of the science of global warming. He starts all the way back in 1856, and takes things up to the present day. He pays particular attention to the post WWII period when the linkage between fossil fuels and CO2 was well known, and there was no partisan rancor on the subject. In his telling this was the inflection point when we had a chance to take a more sustainable path. I agree that there was an inflection point, when nuclear power was still on the table.

As I said he doesn’t mention nuclear power, which still might be forgivable, but he does mention a speech given by Edward Teller where he advocated using a nuclear bomb as a way of liberating usable hydrocarbons from the Fort McMurray oil sands. If you’ve already gone that far down the path of nuclear, it does seem like a conscious omission to not then mention nuclear power. Which would appear to make Vaillant one more person who is really, really worried about global warming, but not so worried that he’s willing to advocate for nuclear power.

Persian Fire: The First World Empire and the Battle for the West

By: Tom Holland

Published: 2007

464 Pages

Briefly, what is this book about?

The rise of the Persian empire and their wars against the Greek city states.

Who should read this book?

Anyone who loves military history, or the early history of Greece and the West.

Specific Thoughts: Early Fire

I already knew much of the history that was covered by this book, but I still found Holland’s take to be worthwhile because he took some interesting angles in his presentation of the story. Keep in mind that a large part of the reason I found them interesting is that they played to my biases. 

Biases such as…Civic religion. This element plays a major role in the story. Most people are familiar with the civic religions of Athens and Sparta. Very broadly we could say that for the former it was democracy and for the latter it was bad-assery… I mean… militarism. But something similar, though less well-known, was happening among the Persians. Before Darius came to power there was a series of succession crises, something common to nearly all monarchies. Darius’s claim to the throne was particularly tenuous, so rather than build it around how closely related he was to the previous royal line he built his legitimacy around his devotion to Ahura Mazda and the religion of Zoroastrianism. 

Interestingly, this led the Persians and Greeks being on opposite sides of a debate that still rages to this very day: nationalism vs. multiculturalism. In Holland’s description, Darius and Xerxes saw Persia as a vast melting-pot with Phoenician sailors, “Egyptian archers, Lydian cavalrymen, axe-wielding Saka.” On the other side, the Greeks fought for Greece, and more often than not among themselves as well. The different styles of warfare that grew out of this difference was not the critical factor in the Greek’s winning the war, but it does appear to have given them an edge, particularly in the decisive battle of Salamis. 

The other element worth mentioning is the conflict between democracy and monarchy. Here declaring any kind of winner is much more difficult. At many points the courage of free men fighting for their homes gave the Athenians a power the Persians could never hope to duplicate. At other times democracy seemed just as likely to lose the war for the Athenians and the Greeks as it was to win it. At one point the Athenians nearly ostracized (banished) Themistocles, the later hero of Salamis. Even more important than losing his leadership, this ostracism would have also meant rejecting his massive ship-building plan. One can imagine a very different history if that vote had gone the other way, as in the Persians would have won the war. One gets a sense of democracy’s power, but also its enormous volatility. 

We have conclusively decided that democracy is better than monarchy, but we are still dealing with its volatility even 2500 years later.

Fiction Reviews

Submission

By: Michel Houellebecq

Published: 2015

256 Pages

Briefly, what is this book about?

The takeover of France by an Islamist government as seen through the eyes of a desolate literature professor.

Who should read this book?

I’m not sure. My sense is that Houellebecq is definitely worth reading, but that this is not the best book to start with — it feels somewhat dated. However since this is the only one I’ve read I can’t offer any opinion on which one would be better. Also for those of my readers with a more puritan bent, there are quite a few fairly graphic sex scenes in the book. 

Specific Thoughts: Muslims Aren’t the Problem…

This book suffers from the fact that it came out just before Trump was elected, before the Brexit vote, before the Yellow Vest Protests, and long before farmers started protesting all over Europe (including France). So while it’s still somewhat conceivable that an Islamist party could come to power, it’s entirely inconceivable that the nationalists would take it lying down. Which is not to say that nationalists, farmers, Marie Le Pen, and the Yellow Vest protestors are all exactly the same, or even all that easy to define. But then this is precisely the point, the world Houellebecq describes in the book is far too clean, while the actual world turned out to be — just as the book was being published — far more chaotic. In the book, the Islamist party triumphs, they get a bunch of money from the petrostates of the Middle East, and nationalism and liberalism are both quietly and quickly ushered off the stage. In reality we’re locked into a battle between all three forces, and a dozen others, and this battle just keeps getting hotter and more all-consuming. 

Where the book is more interesting and has aged better, is in describing François’ (the main character) search for meaning. I feel like I know a lot of François’s, though in another case of being ill-timed, Houellebecq entirely neglects to account for the way the internet, and video games have filled that hole for most men, albeit imperfectly and superficially. Still, peel that away, and the world is full of François’s, and by describing their inner life, Houellebecq has provided a great service.

Religious Reviews

The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation 

By: Rod Dreher

Published: 2017

272 Pages

Briefly, what is this book about?

How to create a semi-monastic Christian space in a world that’s increasingly hostile to Christianity.

What's the author's angle?

Dreher believes strongly that in a post-Obergefell world that Christians need to take extreme measures to maintain their traditional beliefs.

Who should read this book?

This book got a lot of attention when it came out, and “The Benedict Option” has become shorthand for any attempt to create a separate enclave within the larger society. If that sort of separateness appeals to you, or if you want to see what all the fuss was about, then you should read this book.

Specific Thoughts: How’d That Work Out for Him?

Anytime you come across a book that strongly recommends some course of action as being the cure for certain ills, you would do well to see how it worked out for the author themselves. If someone writes a book on how to have a happy marriage and then later gets divorced you would inevitably downgrade their advice. Though not quite so obviously inconsistent, Dreher did get divorced. He moved to Louisiana to be close to family, expecting to live there for the rest of his life. Certainly on some level he had to be pursuing his own version of the Benedict Option, but 11 years later his marriage was over and he was moving to Budapest for a self-described exile. (Interestingly in that post I just linked to he mentions Submission by Houellebecq, small world I guess.)

Despite Dreher’s own failures, I think the book has some good advice. And what surprised me is that most of it is pretty actionable. I went into the book imagining that it would recommend separation of such an extreme nature that I, and most others, would find it to be impractical. That was not the case, most of his suggestions were fairly reasonable, for example: 

• Staying in a place long enough to put down roots and build a community

• Having your own business so you have more flexibility on how to navigate laws that might impact your religious beliefs.

• Working to pass laws which guarantee religious liberty.

These examples entail some difficulties, but none are impossible. In fact, I came away from the book thinking I may already be living the Benedict Option without even realizing it!

Great Emergence: How Christianity is Changing and Why

By: Phyllis Tickle

Published: 2012

220 Pages

Briefly, what is this book about?

Every five hundred years Christianity goes through a transformative crisis. Five hundred years ago it was the Great Reformation. Five hundred years before that it was the Great Schism. Five hundred years before that it was the Fall of Rome, Gregory the Great and the beginning of monasticism under… wait for it… Benedict. (More connections!) Tickle says we’re in the midst of another transformative crisis which she calls the Great Emergence.

What's the author's angle?

Tickle is Christian, so this is a sympathetic perspective. But that perspective also means that she has a dog in this fight, i.e. she is pulling for a more liberal version of Christianity to emerge. 

Who should read this book?

If you’re interested in the current problems faced by Christianity and looking for historical analogs, this is a decent book for that, otherwise I would skip it. 

Specific Thoughts: Old Folks Arguing

Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to the doors of the Wittenberg Schlosskirche in 1517. Five years later, the Wars of Religion began with the Knight’s Revolt. One hundred and twenty-six years later these wars (mostly) ended with the Peace of Westphalia. Over the course of these wars, somewhere between 8 and 18 million people were killed, or about 20% of the population. In parts of Germany, this was as high as 60%.

Comparing whatever is happening with Christianity today to that is either naive, a gross overreach, or an apocalyptic prophecy. If it were an apocalyptic prophecy, at least it would be interesting, but it’s not. What Tickle describes is only the palest imitation of the previous world-shattering conflicts. The Great Reformation is like someone going to war when they’re young. The Great Emergence is like complaining about what channel the TV is on in the old folks’ home. They’re both conflicts, but other than that, any comparison is offensive. Arguably the Great Emergence’s lack of the violence is a good thing. This is progress, but if so I don’t think it’s progress towards a more perfect Christianity, but progress away from religion altogether. 

As a result of all this I have two principal criticisms of this book. 

First, while it’s worth examining how modern Christianity is changing, comparing these changes to past changes confuses more than it illuminates. 

Second, while Tickle asserts that each of the previous religious revolutions brought about a new and more invigorated Christianity, which means this latest one will as well, I don’t think that’s necessarily true. What this book chronicles is not the reinvigoration of Christianity, but rather its fatal illness.

In particular we’re running out of sources of authority. Catholics have the Pope and Mormons (my own faith) have the Prophet, but as Tickle points out anyone who relies on sola scriptura is having a rough time of it, and even the Catholics and the Mormons have not emerged unscathed.

I understand an old man’s desire to watch Matlock instead of the evening news, but the mere presence of desire does not say anything about his vitality.

Investigating the Book of Mormon Witnesses 

By: Richard Lloyd Anderson

Published: 1981

206 Pages

Briefly, what is this book about?

An examination of the lives and testimonies of the witnesses to the Book of Mormon, with particular attention paid to the Three Witnesses.

What's the author's angle?

Anderson is a faithful member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, so this is definitely an apologetic work, and one of the best.

Who should read this book?

I think anyone even remotely interested in Mormonism should read this book, it belongs in the pantheon of excellent books in that genre.  

Specific Thoughts: How Much Weight Should We Give to Witnesses?

A friend of mine is thinking of joining the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Several months ago he texted me asking for recommendations on good apologetic works. This being an area where I have access to true experts I decided (for once) not to rely on my own pseudo-expertise, and I sent out some texts. I texted maybe a half dozen people and all of them recommended this book (among others). Unforgivably, while I was aware of it, I had not myself read it, so I did.

The book does an excellent job of illustrating exactly how unswerving each of the Witnesses were when it came to their testimony of the Book of Mormon. I think as a result of this book, and others like it, no one argues that the witnesses denied their testimony, they argue that witnesses are no big deal. The vast morass of claims made by anti-Mormons on this front, along with the apologetic responses to those claims by the Church’s defenders are far too lengthy to get into here. However, having read this book, it does seem like the simplest interpretation of all these claims is that the Witnesses saw what they claimed to see, with all of the amazing ramifications which derive from that fact. 

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I had hoped by labeling this series as “short” book reviews that I would give myself permission to not spend quite so much time and words, but here we are again at over five thousand words. I may have a problem with brevity, or maybe I just like talking about books.