Unabridged Audiobook
Don't listen to this, as I did, because of the Helprin reference. It couldn't have been said about this book, if it was said at all. The book is a big disappointment by an author who has a little learning and a lot of opinions -- a number of which contradict the implications of his 30 truths about courage and his repeated appeal to the scientific method as the only path to truth. I learned nothing about courage from this book. I don't know that anyone would. It is not the practical work one would expect from the description, but is more a collection of the author's thoughts about war and the expression of his liberal politics. As an adopted child in search of my birth mother, I was touched by his letter to his found birth mother after her death, but saddened that, despite his near-abortion, he seems to have drawn an opposing conclusion about protecting the most vulnerable lives among us. To me, this is the primary example that shows the limits of his grasp of courage. It's easy to speak of the courage shown in the civil rights movement in the past. It takes courage today to honestly face the greatest civil rights tragedy of our time. There are other sad elements too, in the limits of his understanding or even desire to understand religion and higher theological thought. His bitterness gets in the way of a real examination of what has become 'non-scientific magic' to him. I would encourage him to dig deeper into the scientific method as a special formulation of the theological method. This is a book full of conventional wisdom, even as it rails on conventional wisdom. It is unscientific, even as it calls stupid anything outside a narrow grasp of the scientific method. Pontifications abound and illumination is absent.
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