Small World
English professors are on the loose. In this second installment in the delightful trilogy of academic satires, the sun has not quite set on the sexual revolution, while political correctness has not yet reared its humorless head.
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2019–2022years
80% recommend20% neutral
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- Fiction:
Changing Places and Small World by David Lodge. Quite old, quite funny, lots of boys (professors) behaving badly stuff.
History:
War of the Running Dogs by Noel Barber. A history of the communist insurgency in Malaya in the 1950s. At one time the British efforts were thought to provide a model for the US to follow in Vietnam; but the circumstances were so different that it is hard to imagine how anyone thought so.
Philosophy:
On Human Freedom and The Unconditional in Human Knowledge: Four Early Essays by Schelling. Schelling was one of the German Idealist that I had never tried to read (well, there was one volume that I couldn't make headway in ten years ago).
The Science of Knowledge by Fichte, which had always defeated me in intermittent attempts to read it over forty-five years.
A Concept of Justice by John Rawls. Everyone talked about it, I hadn't read it. I do need to read it again.
Natural Goodness by Philippa Foot. An argument for a more or less Aristotelian understanding of ethics.
On Beauty and Being Just by Elaine Scarry. I find her writing on beauty more convincing than her attempt to tie it back to a development of a sense of justice.
- In David Lodge's novel, "Small World," there's a great scene where one character chases another through a paternoster. The one being chased thinks that the compartment will flip over when it reaches the top, and comes down standing on his head!
- The Campus Trilogy (Changing Places, Small World, Nice Work), by David Lodge.
DO IT!: Scenarios of the Revolution, by Jerry Rubin.
The Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking A Spy Through The Maze Of Computer Espionage, by Cliff Stoll.
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams.
Logicomix, by Apóstolos K. Doxiàdis and Christos Papadimitriou.
Other books that I strongly recommend can be found here (some of them are in French): https://pablo.rauzy.name/miscellaneous.html#books
Update: Pirates de tous les pays, by Marcus Rediker is a translation of Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age which you can thus read in English :). It really is an awesome read! After I finished it I immidiately ordered 5 more copies to give them to friends.
- A pretty sombre article. In what were the "go go" days of academe, the MLA was the target of some fairly comic parodies and ridicule. A standout was David Lodge's "Small World" which formed part of his campus trilogy. [0][1]. Still a great read today.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_World:_An_Academic_Roman...
[1] https://www.amazon.com/s?k=campus+trilogy&ref=nb_sb_noss_1
- This sound literaly like a subplot of the famous 1984 book by David Lodge Small World: An Academic Romance
In the book professor Robin Dempsey almost become mad by chatting with ELIZA and gradually begin to believe it's sentient to the point of being ridiculous.
PS: Apparently it was also adapted in a British TV serie in 1988, but unfortunately at that time they tended to reuse magnetic band and it's improbable that we can dig a clip out of that. Would have been appropriate an illustration!
