La Peste
The Plague (French: La Peste) is a novel by Albert Camus, published in 1947, that tells the story of a plague sweeping the French Algerian city of Oran. It asks a number of questions relating to the nature of destiny and the human condition. The characters in the book, ranging from doctors to vacationers to fugitives, all help to show the effects the plague has on a populace.
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3mentions
3people
2014–2020years
33% recommend67% neutral
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What Hacker News says
- 1. La peste (Albert Camus) - entertaining if you're into French existentialism
2. Linked (Barabasi) - insightful and useful to understand that most phenomenon we see in real life follow a power law and what that means
3. Leonardo da Vinci (Walter Isaacson) - surprising how little of da Vinci's real personality is reflected in his modern image
4. Matrix computations – third edition (Gene Golub, Charles van Loan) - good read if you're into linear algebra
5. Giving effective feedback (Harvard business review) - useful for getting an understanding on how to handle human interaction
6. The old man and the sea (Ernest Hemingway) - enjoyed it a lot, a reflection of Hemingway's romantic spirit. Also, a quick read.
7. Screwjack (Hunter S. Thompson) - didn't resonate with me although I am a fan of existentialism
8. Sun and steel (Yukio Mishima) - raw and intimate. before reading this book I'd recommend reading up on Mishima's life
9. Stranger than fiction (Chuck Palahniuck) - somewhat entertaining, more so because it served as a glimpse into Palahniuck's creative process
10. Thinking in Systems: A Primer (Dana Meadows) - useful for understanding that in modern life we have complex systems at work with emergent behavior that we didn't expect. Trying to isolate / model a single component of one of these systems is a flawed approach.
11. Chaos monkeys (Antonio Garcia Martinez) - entertaining, but quite long
12. Weapons of math destruction (Cathy O'Neil) - in a way, similar to Thinking in systems, but at an applied level. Shows how rules in modern society can have unintended negative consequences when hidden negative feedback loops emerge from the complex system they are embedded in.
13. Lolita (Nabokov) - a brilliant novel from many points of view. Although the topic is controversial, it is a book that had to be written.
14. The prince (Machiavelli) - an interesting read. It was intended as a guide to the young price Cesare Borgia from his teacher Machiavelli. The secret to enjoying it is not to judge it by modern morality.
15. Give and take (Adam Grant) - psychology research about giving / taking / matching personality types presented in a book for the masses. I would not read it again; watching a presentation online should be enough to get the point across.
16. Mécanique (Landau, Lifchitz) - refresh of mechanics
17. Do androids dream of electric sheep (Philip K. Dick) - enjoyable and entertaining! I'm surprised how different the feel of the book is compared to the Blade runner films. In the book androids are purely rational beings, whereas the film wraps them in an aura of romanticism.
18. How we learn (Benedict Carey) - decades of learning research condensed in a book
19. Advanced Calculus: A Differential Forms Approach (Harold M. Edwards) - the best math book I've read so far! For me it was eye-opening in a fundamental way. Edwards is truly a gifted teacher.
20. Three men in a boat (Jerome K. Jerome) - enjoyable and amusing
21. Getting to yes (Roger Fisher, William Ury) - negotiation book, nicely written and structured
22. Without a word (Zhang Jie) - historical novel by one of China's most acclaimed modern writers. I don't have a good reference to compare against since this was my first Chinese novel, but overall I did enjoy it. It felt real and raw.
- If you were going to name one Camus novel to illustrate your point, why didn't you choose La Peste (The Plague)? The subject matter is even timely!
- "Why doesn't anyone ask the right questions?"
While we indeed don't want to get political, that's impossible and I have to point out Jim Treacher's comment on the role of the US national media:
https://twitter.com/jtLOL/status/501493192953319424
Modern journalism is all about deciding which facts the public shouldn't know because they might reflect badly on Democrats.
For example, yesterday I caught the Washington Post in a vile and consequential lie (CDC director Frieden is a political hack, going back to the ban on large drinks etc. in NYC, see also his contradictory comments in two back to back sentences on bus travel); the author is "a general assignment national reporter for the Washington Post":
http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/dallas...
From the beginning of the Ebola crisis, disease experts and Frieden in particular have insisted that U.S. hospitals have the training and equipment to handle a highly contagious patient. On July 21, Frieden said that “Ebola poses little risk to the U.S. general population.” Any advanced hospital in the country has the capacity to isolate a patient, he said. “There is nothing particularly special about the isolation of an Ebola patient other than it’s really important to do it right,” he said at the time.
Did you notice the quick shift from and to direct quotes with a paraphrase in the middle? I noticed that because the real quote is now infamous and disastrously proven false:
"Essentially any hospital in the country can take care of Ebola. You don't need a special hospital room to do it," Dr. Tom Frieden said Oct. 2. "You do need a private room with a private bathroom."
BTW, to my general knowledge, ER rooms do not have private bathrooms.
Anyway, my current research into this is reading Albert Camus' 1947 La Peste (The Plague); inevitable partisanship aside, I'm getting the impression a lot of this is universal when humans are faced with such a dire thing. It's not like we don't have millennia of experience with plagues.
