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Young Adults by Daniel M. Pinkwater

2024 Contest•February 6, 2026•52 min read•11,524 words•View original

“What can I but enumerate old themes…”        –Yeats, “The Circus Animals’ Desertion” (1939).

Some artists return again and again to their favorite well, same old bucket in hand. Alfred Hitchcock never tires of reminding people that they are one false accusation away from being a fugitive from justice; Jane Austen has a hard time keeping readers in suspense about whether or not her heroes will get together in the end; J. W. Waterhouse will paint the same beautiful woman over and over and she will never have ears; Lord Byron didn’t get the Byronic hero named after him by, you know, mixing it up.

But few artists have hammered on the same theme as resolutely as Daniel Manus Pinkwater. And no artists I can think of have ever looked back at their particular obsession and commented on it so thoroughly, even savagely, as Pinkwater did in his 1985 volume Young Adults. In this review, I’ll (I.) look at the book in question, (II.) briefly touch upon Pinkwater’s favorite themes, and (III.) try to tease out how one book of dirty jokes reexamines and critiques these themes.

Part I: The Structure of the Work

All of Young Adults is divided into three parts: two novellas and one chapter of “a novel to be completed sometime or other.” [1] (The first novella was published three years earlier as a separate, apparently stand-alone work. The rest of the material appears in this volume for the first time.) Let’s take these parts one at a time.

a. The first novella, entitled Young Adult Novel

In this section we meet the Wild Dada Ducks, five high school students who are devoted to the early twentieth-century art movement Dada. They all have Dada names such as the Indiana Zephyr or Captain Colossal—Charles the Cat is our narrator—and these names are all anyone ever uses (with a lone exception: At one point a counselor lets slip that Igor’s “slave name” is Maurice). They dress, as befits serious artists, in a dignified fashion, meaning neckties and also perhaps baby carriage wheels and a banana on a string etc. The Ducks are aware that “Dada is generally a misunderstood art movement”; as might be imagined, despite their attempts to bring culture to Himmler High, the Dada Ducks are not very popular.

Young Adult Novel is quite explicitly a parody of young adult literature as it existed in the mid-eighties—or at least part of it is. The Ducks are engaged in an ongoing collaborative art project, a Dada young adult novel titled Kevin Shapiro, Boy Orphan. Several chapters of this art project are interpolated into the narrative of Young Adults Novel. As any YA protagonist of the time might, young Kevin Shapiro suffers through abuse, addiction, pregnancy (a surprise, that one), and then “instead of winding up with a lecture from some kindly adult about moral responsibility and another chance for Kevin, we [the Ducks] would just kill him off from time to time. [Later] we would just bring Kevin back for another chapter of tragedy and degradation, and kill him again when it got boring.”

The slim plot kicks off when the Ducks learn that a kid named Kevin Shapiro actually attends their school. This, the real-life Kevin Shapiro, is a shrimpy comic book nerd, and the Ducks decide to make him a local celebrity through their art. By miracle, they succeed, but an embittered Kevin Shapiro, who just wants to be left alone, uses his newfound popularity to lead the rest of the school in a lunchtime assault on the Ducks, in the course of which our heroes are coated with mushy Grape-Nuts.

Unable to fathom what went wrong, the soggy Ducks seek a moral from their experience.

“It has no moral,” their leader (known as the Honorable Venustiano Carranza (President of Mexico)) tells them. “It is a Dada story.” With these words, Young Adult Novel ends.

b. The second novella, titled Dead End Dada

Disheartened—explicitly by the looming threat of nuclear annihilation and implicitly by their humiliation at the hands of Kevin Shapiro’s followers—the Dada Ducks decide to give up on Dada and embrace Zen Buddhism instead.

Unfortunately, the newly rebranded Dharma Ducks know almost nothing about Zen, and have to cobble together an understanding from memories of kung fu flicks, one specific issue of a Dr. Wizardo comic, and (especially) a brown-rice-themed health food cookbook. [2] Aware that their comprehension is inadequate, the Ducks seek out a Zen master, homing in on the only Asian person they can find: Sigmund Yee, owner of the local laundromat. Yee wants no part of this; he calls the Ducks “little racist bastards,” accuses them of being addled by drugs, and chases them away, but our heroes decide that Yee is behaving exactly as a real Zen master would and search for coded wisdom in his statements.

The Dharma Ducks will need all their Zen fortitude, for a series of amusing mishaps soon gets them publicly labeled as chronic masturbators, whereupon they are forced to attend three periods of remedial gym every school day (ostensibly so they’ll have no energy left over for self-abuse). A litany of sufferings then rains upon our heroes: health problems; dead pets; academic failure; compulsory attendance at the Anti-Communist White American League Rifle and Machine Gun Class and Sunday School; “Captain Colossal’s parents announced they were getting a divorce. They told the Captain it was mostly his fault”; etc. The parallels to the sufferings of Kevin Shapiro, Boy Orphan, are right there on the surface to be picked up by any passersby.

Meanwhile the real Kevin Shapiro is dating three cheerleaders at once, drives a convertible, and has just been accepted into Princeton.

Finally, while meditating on the floor of a poultry slaughterhouse (the Dharma Ducks have been running out of places to practice their religion), our heroes achieve what a chapter title labels satori, or enlightenment. They realize that they have been wasting their lives on Zen, and that all this time they should have been focusing on…revenge! Revenge against Kevin Shapiro and Sigmund Yee and their high school principal. With their bloodthirsty vows, and with the implication that in the future the Ducks will emulate only Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, the novella ends.

c. The third part: “The first chapter of The Dada Boys in Collitch, a novel to be completed sometime or other”

Ostensibly a lone chapter from a hypothetical novel that has never materialized, this section is still half as long as either of the two novellas that precedes it; in other words, it is the single longest chapter in the whole volume.

Our heroes have now hied to the hallowed halls of Martwist College—two of them have enrolled, and the other three come along because “Wild Dada Ducks stick together.” They are all now resolutely devoted to their “ultimate hero” Mozart, and have reverted to their old name (Wild Dada Ducks) under the assumption that Mozart would approve.

In college, the Ducks find what they never could in high school—a kind of community of the damned, made up of fat kids, queer kids, “obnoxious” kids, etc., as well as one violent, frequently naked self-proclaimed genius named John Holyrood. When the Ducks’ dorm room cum Mozart shrine is trashed in a John Holyrood-centered orgy, our boys face expulsion—but by that point they have already met Henrich Bleucher, a forest-dwelling leprechaun with a thick German accent and ambiguous supernatural powers who gives lectures about prehistoric cave paintings at an outdoor classroom cobbled together out of kitchen chairs and a ping pong table. Realizing they can get a better education from this freakish little hermit than from their lame college classes, the Ducks rob Holyrood at knifepoint and flee, to live as outlaws in the woods. Here their education can commence. End chapter one. End the third section. End the whole book.

d. The book in toto

The arc that the Dada boys’ story follows is only mildly unconventional. They suffer and squirm through the vagaries of adolescence, and end up the first chance they get abandoning the civilization that has betrayed them. If you except the fact that there are five protagonists and not one, it’s not so different from a canonical bildungsroman such as Knut Hamsun’s Hunger.

And yet the Young Adults volume consistently frustrates any attempt to read it as a coherent whole. Even though only the first part was ever published separately, the second and third parts retain the fiction that they are discrete, autonomous units: Dead End Dada spends an entire chapter recapping the events of Young Adult Novel, and the opening chapter of Dada Boys in Collitch summarizes (more rapidly) both novellas. Furthermore, Hunger may have had an “open” ending, as its protagonist, in true bildungsroman style, sails off to new adventures—but at least it’s an ending! Here comes THE END, and you put the book down satisfied to have completed something. The Dada Boys in Collitch is just an opening chapter of a promised work. The one thing you have not done is finished reading…anything!

This is hardly accidental. When the Ducks put on a Dada play and read, card by card, a shuffled poker deck verrrrrry slowly—we are told that the audience (highschoolers trapped in a cafeteria) found it a frustrating experience. A Dada story should frustrate, should it not? Conventional YA novels come to a conclusion, but Kevin Shapiro, Boy Orphan reboots and goes on forever. As bonus material, Pinkwater includes extra chapters of Kevin Shapiro, Boy Orphan allegedly sent to him by young readers after the publication of Young Adult Novel. In one fan chapter, Kevin has his first-ever birthday party, and all the guests are poisoned and die. “How will I explain about the fiery angel that warned only me to eat nothing?”

e. A judgment

Young Adults is the funniest book written in the twentieth century, or at least one of the top five. [3] I hope I’ve made that clear. We live in a particularly humorless time, and I’m sure many readers will find the Ducks too unpleasant, too “unprofessional” or too “privileged” or too whatever their particular bogeymen may be. In the Ducks’ defense, they’re reacting against a world gone mad—on the macro level of geopolitics, they claim, but really on a micro level in the sense that every authority figure or system they encounter is corrupt, hostile, mendacious, or evil, and often all four. If you were just looking for a nihilistic book with a bunch of fairly dirty jokes and a vague tie-in to Modernism, I would recommend this one. You’ll be satisfied.

But that is if you read Young Adults on its own. Young Adults is merely a great book, but that is scarcely all it is; rather, it is a deconstruction and a confession and an analysis of Daniel Pinkwater’s entire oeuvre.

This is where things get interesting.

Part II: The Structure of the Structure

Every single novel-length book Pinkwater wrote before Young Adults [4] (and many he wrote after) follows an identical pattern. You can shoehorn his novellas into the pattern, if you want, as well, but the novels are clearer, and we don’t want to get bogged down in minutiae.

This is the pattern:

§1. A young man is dissatisfied with his life (sometimes suffering through a living hell, sometimes merely bored).
§2. He falls in with a slightly strange character.
§3. That character brings him into a world that is more than slightly strange. Somewhere around here we leave the fields we know.
§4. The protagonist has a mystical experience.
§5. In a state of enlightenment (or something!), the character returns to 1.

It would test the reader’s patience to endure my running through the plots of several more books, but look briefly at Lizard Music: Victor (the only Pinkwater protagonist this side of Charles the Cat to be deprived of a last name) is bored and listless when his family leaves for the summer without him (that’s item §1). He hooks up with the Chicken Man, a strange character based on a real-life Chicago eccentric (§2). Together they travel to an invisible floating island named Diamond Hard (§3), where Victor enters the House of Memory and has a unique experience he does his best to describe (§4). He brings home a stuffed animal he had lost somewhere in his childhood and a newfound desire to become something like the Chicken Man himself (annnnnd §5).

In Alan Mendelsohn, §1 is Leonard Neeble, and §2 is Alan himself. In Worms of Kukumlima, §1 is Ronald Donald Almondotter, and §2 is Sir Charles Pelicanstein. In Avocado of Death, §1 is Walter Galt (and his pal Winston Bongo), and §2 is Rat. You can work through these on your own.

But already you have whipped out your copies of Joseph Campbell and are insisting that this pattern is so ubiquitous as scarcely to need mentioning. This is the monomyth and blah blah Star Wars blah blah thousand faces. But Pinkwater’s books are unusual in that they never stop insisting that their heroes’ journeys are sometimes explicitly but always implicitly steps towards a transcendent, mystical experience. Perhaps the clearest explication of this experience comes in Borgel (the first Pinkwater novel published after Young Adults): Melvin Spellbound says, “I wanted to laugh. Or cry. I knew I could never figure out what was causing all these strong feelings in me. I wanted to stay there, looking at the shining Popsicle forever.” (It is more explicit in context; also the Popsicle part makes sense.) But you can see it in Ronald Donald Almondotter’s search for Kukumlima (which one can only find when lost) or Leonard Neeble’s crossing over into Waka-Waka (which can only be achieved by meditation).

The meditation Leonard Neeble uses to reach Waka-Waka is heavily coded as Zen meditation, and indeed Leonard leaves for Waka-Waka from a garden festooned with Buddha statues. Buddhism, and Zen Buddhism especially, is all over the Pinkwater canon: The Snarkout Boys shop at the All Night Zen Bakery; Harold Blatt (The Last Guru) invests in the Zen Burger; psychic Lydia LaZonga (Baconburg Horror) goes to a Zen Chiropractor. Dueling Buddhist and pre-Buddhist sects such a Blong or the Silly Hat Order make frequent appearances. Before Harold Blatt invests in the Zen Burger he makes his seed money at the racetrack, betting on a horse named after the Buddha’s own horse (Kanthaka). Pinkwater, in his autobiographical works, has made it clear what a great debt he owes to his readings in Zen. His apprenticeship to sculptor Navin Diebold [5] he codes as a Zen master/disciple relationship, complete with puzzling koans. When Pinkwater gets Diebold to read a copy of Zen Flesh, Zen Bones, Diebold exclaims, “Hell of a thing! I’ve been a Zen Master all this time and I didn’t even know it.”

I don’t want to press this too hard; certainly the Buddhist trappings are often just ornamental. But the mystical experiences at the heart of the Pinkwater novel are coded as satori frequently enough that the reader has to understand them through this lens. And I know I’m being slightly coy about what exactly a §4 “mystical experience” entails—but that’s part of the problem with mystical experiences! Georges Bataille wrote an entire book about transcendence (L’expérience intérieure) and I read the whole thing and didn’t understand a word of it.

One interesting aspect of these experiences as Pinkwater’s characters experience them: They’re often disappointing. Victor from Lizard Music is probably the only protagonist ever to be completely satisfied four stars would Zen again. Ronald Donald Almondotter meanwhile is threatened with a diet of nothing but crunchy granola forever, Eugene Winkleman (Yobgorgle) with a diet of fish flakes. The Snarkout Boys, like some kind of Lovecraftian narrator, learn of the cosmic peril that besets the earth and immediately fail to prevent or subvert it. Leonard Neeble drinks fleegix and it tastes “lousy.”

But afterwards Leonard Neeble, who had started the book in junior high school hell (§1) returns to our world from Waka-Waka and finds his place. “I was taking over Alan Mendelsohn’s old job.” As surely as Victor was seeking out the Chicken Man’s.

Part III. The work in the domain of the structure

This is, of course, not a review of a half dozen novels Daniel Pinkwater wrote in the ’70s and early ’80s. This is a review of Young Adults! So our job is to determine how Young Adults fits into what we might want to call the Pinkwater monomyth.

One thing to notice before we plunge in is that Young Adults is often a straightforward parody of tics or even scenes from these earlier Pinkwater books. Already mentioned is the fact that Pinkwater’s characters tend to flirt with Zen; and so the Dada Ducks declare it inferior to glorious revenge! Furthermore Pinkwater’s books often revolve around chickens, so the Ducks put on an unendurable play titled The Chickens of Uranus. The Balkan Falcon is a dark mirror of the Magic Moscow. Or: Leonard Neeble manipulates his therapist to get himself out of gym class, [6] so the Dada Ducks try to manipulate their therapist—that’s when they’re publicly branded as onanists and assigned extra gym.

But such trivia is merely cute. More importantly, each of the three sections of Young Adults engages with our monomythical superstructure in unique ways.

a. the first novella, YNA

In Young Adult Novel, Kevin Shapiro is placed in the role of the Pinkwater protagonist at §1: He is a dissatisfied, alienated, antisocial nerd enduring high school by keeping his head down. This situation is unusual, because Charles the Cat is narrating the story, [7] not Kevin Shapiro; and yet Kevin Shapiro, like any good protagonist, is the first character to appear in the book. In fact, the entire first chapter of Young Adult Novel is about Kevin Shapiro—it’s about how he’s a drug-addicted criminal who is murdered and fed to pigs (because it’s a chapter reprinted from Kevin Shapiro, Boy Orphan), but it’s still about him.

Kevin Shapiro meets some slightly strange characters (§2), and these are the Dada Ducks. In other words, while previous books had been from the (first-person) point of view of the alienated young man (§1), Young Adult Novel is from the point of view of the strange characters (§2) themselves.

And in this book, and in this book alone, the alienated young man wants nothing to do with the strange characters! He is openly hostile to them. “I’ll punch out your face, see?”

This hostility throws our monomyth off its monorails. Kevin Shapiro’s epiphany is not an internal one, but rather an elevation by popular acclaim to unprecedented power. “I think he may be God,” the Honorable Venustiano Carranza (President of Mexico)) says of Kevin Shapiro on first meeting him, and indeed Kevin assumes the status of a god-king whose “word was law.” But Kevin is a cruel, vengeful god whose sole motivation is to humiliate the Dada Ducks. The structure cannot continue.

Kevin barely makes it to §3, and if he goes further, he’s not telling.

b. The second novella, DED

By Dead End Dada, the Ducks, more alienated than ever, have assumed the role of §1. This is a reversal of other novels, in which the §1 figure takes the “old job” of the §2 figure. Our alienated Ducks need only to find a good §2 and they’ll be well on their way to experiencing a proper Pinkwater structure, and not the travesty of the first novella.

Unfortunately, they find no strange character. The individual they set their sights upon, Sigmund Yee, wants (like Kevin before him) no part of this plan. He, too, is openly hostile to the Ducks. (“Go do teenage crimes somewhere else!…Leave Yee alone!”) Once again the structure falls apart. The Ducks get no closer to §3 than a laundromat or a poultry slaughterhouse.

c. The chapter of an unfinished work

The Ducks come to college having failed twice to experience properly the book they are in. They are like characters who have blundered through a mystery novel without either leaving or finding any clues; characters in a romance novel who neither fall in love nor break a heart. They are genre misfits.

And at first it seems like they’re headed for a third strike, because the §2 they encounter is John Holyrood, a filthy, mooching poser who brings them nothing but trouble. There’s every evidence that he’s not even that strange—he’s a normie faking it to get girls and free liquor.

But Holyrood is a false flag. Holyrood is a red herring. As should be clear from the thorough Cliff Notes trot above, with the Holyrood situation falling apart around them the Ducks encounter the real deal in Henrich Bleucher. Bleucher does not hate the Ducks (as Yee or Kevin Shapiro did). Bleucher is not trying to use the Ducks (as Holyrood did). Bleucher leads the Ducks off into the woods to lecture them about art. Igor suggests that he already knows there is more to Bleucher than meets the eye—but of course there is! Soon, presumably, the Ducks will be abandoning reality altogether, well on their way to a mystical experience—but before that happens the book ends.

d. Come up with a clever title here. Don’t forget!

In this way the Ducks finally succeed, if only off the page, or in the hypothetical pages of a never-written work. It takes them three (or possibly three and a half) tries, but they are finally participating in the Pinkwater monomyth.

Later in his career, Pinkwater more and more often offered art as a way of experiencing whatever mystical event underpins §4. Recall that the soi-disant “Zen Master” Navin Diebold is a sculptor. In Pinkwater’s only personal account of a mystical experience (as related in the autobiographical Fish Whistle), it comes to him while he is contemplating a de Kooning painting. When Victor reappears years later in the novel Bushman Lives! he is the curator of an artists’ collective. In Chicago Days, Hoboken Nights, Pinkwater imagines a Vietnamese artist known as (significantly?) Duck having “ascended to Nirvana” because he managed to “completely comprehend the true nature of reality in the clear light of Buddha.” Pinkwater mentions that Duck is a better artist than he is. [8]

The Dada Ducks start out dedicated to art, specifically Dada, and end up dedicated to art, specifically Mozart. Is Dada truly (as the title claims) a dead end? Do the Ducks need Mozart to move along towards the mystical experience? Is it significant that, although he promises to speak on diverse academic subject, Bleucher’s opening lecture is an art lecture?

Perhaps it is foolish to look any deeper into what is, ultimately, “a Dada story.” Or perhaps a mystic always looks deeper. Three-quarters of a millennium ago, Izzidin Al-Muqaddisi wrote: “The man who fails to extract the significance from the sharp creak of the door, the buzzing of the bee, the barking of the dogs, the industry of the insects in the dust; he who knows not what is signified by the motion of the cloud, the shimmer of the mirage, and the shading of the mist; this man does not number among the perceptive ones.” I probably should have looked for a Zen quote instead, but let it stand.

e. “Salvabitur vix justus in die judicii; ergo salvabitur.” –Langland

Every once in a while a friend will recommend an anime to me, but grudgingly admit that you have to sit through twenty or thirty hours of mediocre episodes before it gets really good. There are comic book series I have pitched, in vain, to people in the same terms.

If you want a full appreciation of Young Adults, perhaps it is true that you should read a half dozen earlier Pinkwater novels, and then go on to read another dozen later books. You will never again find a work, I think—not Nabokov’s Look at the Harlequins!, not Bukowski’s Pulp—that so aggressively comments on and subverts a writer’s oeuvre. Victor’s life would have been very different if the Chicken Man had just been a jerk; or a loner; or an opportunist. Young Adults acknowledges this, and runs this plot that Pinkwater clearly loves so well through the wringer three different ways. But there is still a note of hope: The Dada Boys have to struggle through two books just to reach the spot Victor or Leonard Neeble start at—but they still ascend.

And that is the note of hope for prospective readers who do not want an assignment of nearly a score of books to plow through: As I mentioned, even when read alone and in complete ignorance of any other Pinkwater book, Young Adults is still one of the five funniest books of the twentieth century, so maybe just start there. You’ll want to keep going.

[Notes]

[1]
This structure is present in the 1991 mass market reprint of Young Adults. An earlier (1985) edition contained ~80 pages of supplementary material, most of it in the form of bitmappy comic strips illustrated with a very crude and early version of MacPaint. The comics are funny and in some cases overtly Dada-inspired (and in other cases just about Mozart being a bad superhero), but they do not inform my reading, so I have ignored them. Consider this a review of the mass market edition only.

[2]
Not the author of but the master of the author of the cookbook is Alan W. Watzuki, his name a portmanteau of two of the most prominent popularizers of Zen in America: Alan W. Watts and D.T. Suzuki. Alan W. Watzuki, we learn, “died of gastroenteritis…at a relatively early age.”

[3]
I don’t know, maybe (not in order):

Young Adults
Shirley Jackson, Life Among the Savages
David Sedaris, Barrel Fever
Martin Amis, The Information
Barbara Robinson, The Best Christmas Pageant Ever
?

[4]
The novels in question are:

Lizard Music (1976)Alan Mendelsohn, the Boy from Mars (1979)Yobgorgle: Mystery Monster of Lake Ontario (1979) [The weakest fit, in my opinion.]Java Jack (1980) [Co-authored with Luqman Keele.]The Worms of Kukumlima (1981)The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death (1982)The Snarkout Boys and the Baconburg Horror (1984) [A sequel, so a little different.]

Notice that many later books, such as Borgel (1990) or The Neddiad (2006) follow an identical pattern.

The novellas I mentioned would include Wingman (1975), The Last Guru (1978), and the Magic Moscow trilogy (1980–82), but these are not really considered (although occasionally referenced) in this review. But you’ll find they more or less fit.

[5]
Navin Diebold is Pinkwater’s thinly fictionalized version of one David Nyvall, Bard professor.

[6]
Technically Neeble manipulates the therapist into getting him out of school, with the eventual result that he is transferred out of gym class. Don’t you Encyclopedia Brown me, here!

[7]
All seven novels listed above (although not all the novellas), as well as almost every novel that follows, are narrated in the first person. Baconburg Horror, admittedly, has some third-person chapters, as an homage to Moby Dick, Pinkwater’s favorite novel and arguably one that fits his own particular monomyth (Queequeg is §2).

[8]
I didn’t want to overburden this paragraph with examples, but I also couldn’t resist pointing out that Robert Nifkin, trapped in a “realistic” novel (The Education of Robert Nifkin), and therefore unable to experience some Popsicle metaphor for transcendence, ascends quite literally from the lowlands of Chicago to Bard College (disguised under the most tissue-thin veil). Bard College is where Pinkwater studied art under Navin Diebold.

[1]A facile but irresistible analogy relegated to footnote status: I can’t help but read the call for presence and power over abstraction and reasoning as a call for some kind of deep learning over GOFAI; the focus on an orderly procession of data invites a similarly silly-yet-satisfying comparison with attention in transformers.

[2]Baron-Cohen makes a distinction between cognitive empathy, which is the classic theory-of-mind stuff, and affective empathy, which is the drive to respond to someone with an appropriate emotion. In this sense autists and sociopaths are inverted: autists tend to be bad at navigating social reality, but still care about other people's feelings, whereas sociopaths are unable to sympathise, but don't have problems modelling other minds.

[3]Every time I googled someone who I think fits this mould (Mozart, Aphex Twin, Stanley Kubrick, Ingmar Bergman), the Internet said they were on the spectrum. I don't put much stock in this kind of 'diagnosis' but it sure is suggestive.

[4]Another eleventh-hour addition to my reading list isRobin Hanson's glowing endorsement of Cecilia Heyes' Cognitive Gadgets: The Cultural Evolution of Thinking, which seems to argue that causal reasoning can arise from associative learning in combination with sociality.

[5]In my experience the problem of induction is hard to fully internalise.Deutsch's book gives the beginner-friendly version. For a shorter, more technical explanation, machine learning PhD Vaden Masrani asks"did Popper disprove machine learning, or does machine learning disprove Popper?"

[6] We might reconcile universality and the IQ literature in a similar way. I have some ideas about how to do this but it probably deserves a separate post.

[7] “The epidemiologists I spoke with for this chapter – in a refreshing contrast to their counterparts in some other fields – were strongly aware of the limitations of their models. “It’s stupid to predict based on three data points,” Marc Lipsitch told me, referring to the flu pandemics of 1918, 1957, and 1968. “All you can do is plan for different scenarios.” If you can’t make a good prediction, it is very often harmful to pretend that you can. I suspect that epidemiologists, and others in the medical community, understand this because of their adherence to the Hippocratic Oath. Primum non nocere: First, do no harm. Much of the most thoughtful work on the use and abuse of statistical models and the proper role of prediction comes from people in the medical profession. That is not to say there is nothing on the line when an economist makes a prediction, or a seismologists does. But because of medicine’s intimate connection with life and death, doctors tend to be appropriately cautious. In their field, stupid models kill people. It has a sobering effect.”

[8] While this is technically true, the reality is that the whole process was messy. Two senators had to fight legal battles before getting seated. By this time, one of the MA senators (Robert Kennedy) passed away. Massachusetts held a special election, where a Republican won. We’ll get into this more later, but this demonstrates how even an ‘accurate’ prediction of “Democrats will win 60 seats in the 2008 election” may not answer the question we really want to know, which is “Will Democrats win a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate?” The real world is messy.

[9] Fisher and his ilk don’t assume a normal distribution is some kind of universal law. They say, “where a normal distribution is assumed by the statistical test you’re using, applying any other distribution will yield the wrong results.” This is an important point stats professors across the globe try to drill into their students’ heads – often to no avail. Indeed, Silver’s casual dig against those darn frequentists and their ‘normal distribution assumptions’ doesn’t add to the real discussion that needs to happen here. Sure, you can assume a distribution, but there are tests to make sure you’re not making false assumptions of your data. (A test dreamed up by those darned frequentists? Oh no!) People should know about this. There are a lot of things they should know about their data before doing whatever random statistical test gives them an answer they like.

Was your survey based on a Likert scale? You’d better not use statistical tests that assume a continuous distribution. Students make this mistake all the time, because they don’t know there’s a difference. None these lessons are coming from Silver.

I’m not saying Silver should have written a statistics textbook. I’m saying that dismissing the textbooks that have been written is only going to compound the problem of statistical illiteracy that produces so many errors in both academic and everyday practice.

[10] Silver might object to the word “successful” here. He discusses in the book how difficult it is to make money at poker. He suggests he was never more than a middling player at best, and that once regulatory agencies drove away the big fish, it took him a few months to realize he was effectively the new fish the other players were feeding on. I’m certain Silver could beat me at the game, though.

[11] Not explicitly, but Silver spends a lot of time trying to get readers to retrain their minds and ‘think probabilistically’, by which he means adapt strategies like the betting heuristic.

[12] Nassim Nicholas Taleb does a good job of talking about this kind of uncertainty. Silver mentions his work in tSatN, but I don’t think he has the same grasp of the material that Taleb does. I recommend Taleb for understanding how to appropriately react to unknown risks, tail-end risks, survivorship bias, and a host of other ideas.

[13]In a clinical trial, you collect hundreds of different data points. And of those hundreds of data points, some are open-ended, like “have you experienced any adverse events?” If someone feels dizzy or has frequent headaches, those are reported. That’s good practice! Let’s say your drug causes a slight decrease or increase in blood pressure. We’ll see that in patients who get dizzy or get headaches reporting symptoms more frequently than placebo (on top of the frequent blood pressure checks). Some side effects can only be discovered after people start taking the drug, and this is how we discover them – by looking for patterns in the data.

But as tSatN points out, it’s easy to see signal when there’s nothing but noise. This is compounded in a pregnancy study, where the outcome of every pregnancy is followed to its conclusion, dramatically adding the number of potentially noisy data points dutifully collected by the researchers. Each new data point increases multiplicity and the possibility of seeing patterns where only chance is present. This isn’t just a problem with defining a p<0.05 threshold, and indeed the frequentists seem to have figured this part out. The Bayesian who refuses arbitrary definitions like p-value still has to figure out whether they’re looking at signal or noise. The typical Bayesian rejoinder, “we’ll just make more observations” is ignoring the most important part of the signal here.

If I make hundreds of observations, including open-ended observations with an uncountable number of chance coincidences, I’ve assured myself that I’m going to find some pattern in the noise. There may be signal there, but there is certainly noise. And if I’m not careful, I’ll waste all my time chasing noise.

[14]I’m not claiming Bayesian principles are never applicable. But Silver’s dismissiveness about Fisher and all principles of frequentist statistics makes it clear that he thinks everything but a Bayesian approach should be abandoned. Consider which of these two positions makes more sense:

  • Silver’s claim that there’s one equation that effectively eliminates a major branch of the field – one that developed far more recently, and on which thousands of scientific papers and discoveries have relied.
  • My claim that statistical models all have in-built assumptions. They apply only in situations where their assumptions can be demonstrated to hold. No one model is applicable in all situations. I’m sure there are even some situations that defy all current models.

[15] To be fair, Peter and the judges all updated to the same direction, which is what a good Bayesian would predict. But they did so after assigning significantly different probabilities to many different questions, such that Peter (the debate’s winner) ended up many orders of magnitude away from the judges, while Saar (the debate’s loser) was orders of magnitude in the opposite direction from the judges. Good Bayesian logic dictates this should only happen because everyone started off with wildly disparate priors. But the opposite is the case. They started off closer together than they did at the end. Bayesian logic isn’t supposed to cause divergent conclusions.

[16] I counted myself in this camp until quite recently. I’m not claiming to be rid of bad statistical habits.

[17] Silver attributes the financial crisis to ratings agencies failing to consult international data. He calls this a lesson on your data being “out of sample”, but Silver only knows what lessons to take because he knows what would have ‘fixed’ the sample. The lessons ratings agencies would have learned had they consulted international data ex ante are unlikely to be the specific ones Silver points out. There were many other factors/incentives that would almost certainly have led to the housing market crash no matter how ratings agencies built their models.

This is a repeating theme in the book. Silver will adjust his model, based on the current crisis, to match what he knows today. But he only knows what data to consult – and when it’s salient – because the failed prediction lives in the past.

[18] Silver calls Pearl Harbor a failure of prediction, but I don’t agree. The reason to discount it as highly improbable is that it was a really bad strategic move for the Japanese. It should have been considered low probability, based on what was known at the time. Meanwhile, the US was making the Japanese war effort more difficult, so sabotage was a much higher probability event.

Am I falling victim to past-casting here - considering things that wouldn’t have been obvious to the people at the time? I don’t think so, but I’m open to being proved wrong. What did the Japanese have to gain by an attack on the US, especially in 1941 – given what was known by the US at the time? US industrial capacity far exceeded that of Japan. The US had domestic oil production, which was not the case for Japan and was a tool the US used to apply pressure against Japanese aggression in the region. The US had increased their war production capacity for Europe but wasn’t directly engaged in the war against Hitler.

All these facts combined suggested it would be virtual suicide for an expansionist power like Japan to seek a direct confrontation with the US. It would be like a scrawny second grader going up to the biggest sixth grader on the playground surrounded by their friends and giving that kid a sucker punch. Would the  sucker punch work? Sure, but then there would be consequences. And that’s exactly what happened for Japan.

[19] In the section on computers that play chess, Silver exhaustively tells the story of how Kasparov played his matches against Deep Blue by specifically preparing for computer weaknesses in mind. Then, when the computer made a random move instead of the expected one, Kasparov interpreted this as ‘genius’ instead of seeing it as a bug the programmers had missed. Later, Silver discusses outputs of computer systems, and suggests that reading anything from them other than output (including anything approaching what I would call “theory of mind”) is in danger of over-reading computer algorithms. This is a fascinating take, and probably not something Silver would agree with today after many of the advances in AI that result in a less algorithmically driven approach to much of machine learning. At the least, I think it’s premature to conclude that AI will never be able to “think” in a way other than strictly algorithmically. While it’s still easy to see eccentricities in computer outputs as errors in code (e.g. the many-fingered hands of early AI image generation) the question of what is genius and what is a software bug is becoming much more difficult. Might Silver’s heuristic be overfitting?

[20] These are the missing stories: Censura in Bitinia (“Censorship in Bitinia”), a dystopian regime’s dry account on the outsourcing of routine censorship work to chickens; Il Versificatore (“The Versemaker”), about a machine that’s able to invent stories on behalf of The Poet – who still needs the convincing of an old-school/seasoned salesman to make up his mind and buy the thing; Quaestio de Centauris, in which the myth-respecting wisdom of a centaur named Trachi does not save him from going mad for love; and «Cladonia Rapida» («Fast-acting Cladonia»). If anyone has information on whether they ever got translated and where, I’d be interested to know!

[21]One Amazon reviewer notes Levi’s “relevance to us as science teachers”.

[22] Translations from Italian are mine.

[23]Among the ones that are included in the English version

[24] From The Monkey Wrench, 1978.

[25]Technically, Wikipedia includes a reference to "Have a Carrot: Oedipal Theory and Symbolism in Margaret Wise Brown’s Runaway Bunny Trilogy", which would probably count as a political analysis if it weren't a self-published e-book that that I doubt anyone has ever read and whose references on Wikipedia were probably added by the author.

[26] Phlogiston is basically negative oxygen. Per the theory, flammable materials have phlogiston that is released into the air during combustion, but air can only absorb a limited amount of it, so once air is saturated with phlogiston (we would say: once the air runs out of oxygen), combustion stops.

[27] All biology examples throughout are mine. As I’ve hinted at Kuhn doesn’t touch biology so I’m trying to be a little more balanced. The mutation theory of cancer is that cancer is caused by mutations that inactivate one or more “tumor suppressor” genes that limit abnormal cell growth (p53 and BRCA1 being famous examples) and hyperactivate one or more “proto-oncogenes” that drive cell division (KRAS, etc.), cells can grow out of control into a tumor. Mutations aren’t the full full story as other things like epigenetic disruption can drive cancer but mutations explain a hell of a lot.

[28] I’m not the first to point out that naive Poppperism has the issue that an experiment (almost) never falsifies one specific theory but rather a constellation of overlapping theories. See the Duhem-Quine thesis (I’d recommend Duhem personally since I can’t make heads or tails of Quine).

[29] This makes the corpuscular theory sound insane but per Kuhn it made sense at the time and Newton’s laws of motion were inspired heavily by the corpuscular paradigm.

[30] Same idea for the oxygen theory, which in contrast to phlogiston was initially less able to explain hydrogen combustion and features of carbon monoxide.

[31] Kuhn takes a pretty clean shot at people like me in his own footnote 3 here: “Historians of science often encounter this blindness in a particularly striking form. The group of students who come to them from the sciences is very often the most rewarding group they teach. But it is also usually the most frustrating at the start. Because science students “know the right answers,” it is particularly difficult to make them analyze an older science in its own terms.” It me.

[32] I could maybe be convinced there are two biological revolutions to be had: 1) understanding of consciousness, and 2) dissipation-driven adaptation as a generalization of the concept of life. But while admittedly only familiar with the broad strokes of the latter theory, I lean strongly toward putting it in the “incredibly cool but not exactly a change in worldview” category. Biophysicists have long thought of life in thermodynamic terms.

[33] I don’t want to get bogged down as I’m way out of depth here, but my understanding is string theory has another issue, the “string theory landscape” whereby there are > 10^500 possible sets of fundamental string theory parameters and we sort of randomly (??) ended up with one of them which is kind of unsatisfying and seems to present issues re the IC. Here I just want to point out that the unfalsifiability need not be damning.

[34] Consider the function f:TO→ℝ where TOis the space of theories that explain a set of observations O and f(tO) is the information required to specify theory tO (I’m including information required to specify initial conditions and correction factors within tO). Now let O be the whole universe U so our space is TU. Since information required to explain the universe is bounded below by zero, there exists a greatest lower bound (infimum) IUmin. If TU is compact and fU is continuous then fU must reach its infimum for at least one theory tUmin (i.e. f(tUmin) = IUmin) which is the true description of the universe. More generally, if these conditions don’t hold, we can still get arbitrarily close to IUmin, that is for any ε>0 there exists a theory tUε such that f(tUε) < IUmin+ε.

[35] Or in the parlance of the previous endnote, it’s the theory tOmin.

[36] You can see McCarthy’s drafts for yourself at the Wittliff Collection at Texas State University, or read a thorough investigation of them in Books Are Made Out of Books.

[37] Mostly due to its capitalism and decentralization, though other factors might have played a role, such as the US support and the fact that it did not have to pay as many reparations.

[38] Okay, this is not where the book begins. The book begins with a rather dry introduction into the methodology and an overview of the sources.

[39] Interestingly, but ultimately not importantly, the opposition had generally received the plan favorably, while also criticizing it for being too vague.

[40] As basically all Western European countries experienced a post-war boom, the degree to which this perception is accurate is debated.

[41] Just in German and without any interpunctuation.

[42] The fact that two of its members were theologians points to the role that the protestant church played during the revolution.

[43] Here, I am really disappointed with Böick because he just does not care about what the true exchange rate would have been. He is focused so much on the historization of the Treuhand, that he does not care about explanations of the problems it was facing if they are somewhat beyond the limits of his discipline.I had to take the black-market exchange rates from Wikipedia.

[44] The members of the government’s Expert Council for the Assessment of the Overall Economic Development are just called economic sages by the Germans. In that sense, the council’s president is the head sage.

[45] The phone network in East Germany was very bad, with only one in ten households having a telephone.

[46]One dataset is again from OWID for the years 1950 to 1989, the other is from the statistical offices of Germany starting in 1991. Neither contains data for 1990. Looking at the ratio is a bit weird, but because these adapt for inflation differently and I did not want to worry about converting their numbers, I opted for this, because the ratio should hopefully be invariant under inflation. However, this does not change the fact that these two data sets might measure GDP differently. Luckily, the drop between 1989 and 1991 matches the number I found elsewhere (unfortunately, this article does not provide a source for its GDP numbers). All of this is further complicated by Berlin, which like Germany was reunified in 1990, and the statistical offices do not break down the Berlin data into East and West. Because the GDP of West Berlin was roughly one fourth of the whole GDR GDP (pun not intended), adding the Berlin GDP to East Germany would paint a very rosy picture, so I included it in the West instead. This slightly lowers the per-capita Western GDP, but that probably does not fully compensate for the fact that the eastern GDP post-1990 in this plot does not contain its largest city and appears a bit lower post-1991 than it should be.

[47] Eventually, all companies with fewer than 1500 employees should be managed by the subsidiaries, with the exception of, among others, circuses.

[48]The black half should be pointing down and the white bit pointing up to be book-accurate, though.

[49] Excalibur is not the Sword in the Stone in all versions of the Arthurian legend, but you get the idea.

[50]If you’re picky, Elaida is actually the legal and legitimate Amyrlin Seat as far as the law goes, but she’s the “illegitimate” Amyrlin for the purposes of the story. One of the lessons of this story arc is that legitimacy and illegitimacy aren’t just decided de jure but also de facto. The “rebel” Amyrlin becomes de facto leader and her de jure installation follows.

[51]Some fans of the series might take offense at me seemingly praising Cadsuane, who many see as possessing the bad traits of the other Aes Sedai. She does share a lot of their flaws but in my estimation she is relatively good, as far as the faction goes.

[52] a title in Russian Empire, a layer between the nobility and merchants, less than 1% of the population

[53] taught by a niece of the poet Alexander Pushkin

[54] as of now, Mikhail Lvovsky does not have a page on English Wikipedia, but he wrote scripts for several films that do: “I Loved You”, “Point, Point, Comma…”, “I Ask to Accuse Klava K. of My Death”, “The Luncheon on the Grass”

[55] There is also a tangential story I found, which seemed too cool not to mention: In 1971, Levshin published an article about Mikhail Bulgakov, author of the famous novel “The Master and Margarita”, describing that they were neighbors and friends despite the age difference of 13 years, and providing some insight into Bulgakov’s writing. For some reason, this article caused a big outrage in the Bulgakov fans community. Bulgakov’s ex wife called Levshin a liar and retaliated by doxxing him. (She publicly revealed that Levshin’s original surname was Manasevich. I have no idea what negative consequences, if any, this had for him.) This is a reminder that art is a cutthroat business.

[56] as explained previously, the cat literally walked through a school and passed seven classrooms

[57] this is a pun in Russian: “складывать” = “to sum up”, but also “to put in a warehouse”

[58] At school they taught me that Constantine the Philosopher (a.k.a. Cyril) and his brother Methodius invented a new alphabet for Slavs, but they didn’t mention that they also invented new numerals. Unlike the alphabet, which is still used by some nations thousand years later, the numerals were later replaced by the Arabic numerals.

[59] The protagonists also meet Pierre de Fermat in his afterlife in Dwarfland, but he refuses to tell them the proof of his theorem, claiming that they are not ready yet. “After all, before listening to the proof, you need to get acquainted with the theorem itself! I'm only afraid that this is somewhat premature.”

[60] based on Al-Khwarizmi’s The Compendious Book on Calculation by Completion and Balancing

[61] the book was written for an audience using Cyrillic, so the Latin letters are a new thing for them

[62] he even used the metaphor of the sea in the third book

[63] What does all this mean? Why did it happen? What made those people burn houses and slay their fellow men? What were the causes of these events? What force made men act so?

  • Second Epilogue

[64] The first method of history is to take an arbitrarily selected series of continuous events and examine it apart from others, though there is and can be no beginning to any event, for one event always flows uninterruptedly from another. The second method is to consider the actions of some one man—a king or a commander—as equivalent to the sum of many individual wills; whereas the sum of individual wills is never expressed by the activity of a single historic personage. Historical science in its endeavor to draw nearer to truth continually takes smaller and smaller units for examination. But however small the units it takes, we feel that to take any unit disconnected from others, or to assume a beginning of any phenomenon, or to say that the will of many men is expressed by the actions of any one historic personage, is in itself false.

  • Book 11, Chapter 1

[65] The source of that extraordinary power of penetrating the meaning of the events then occuring lay in the national feeling which [Kutuzov] possessed in full purity and strength. Only the recognition of the fact that he possessed this feeling caused the people in so strange a manner, contrary to the Tsar's wish, to select him—an old man in disfavor—to be their representative in the national war. And only that feeling placed him on that highest human pedestal from which he, the commander in chief, devoted all his powers not to slaying and destroying men but to saving and showing pity on them. That simple, modest, and therefore truly great, figure could not be cast in the false mold of a European hero—the supposed ruler of men—that history has invented.

  • Book 15, Chapter 5

[66] [Pierre explaining his theory of Napoleon at a party] “The execution of the Duc d’Enghien," declared Monsieur Pierre, "was a political necessity, and it seems to me that Napoleon showed greatness of soul by not fearing to take on himself the whole responsibility of that deed….Napoleon alone understood the Revolution and quelled it, and so for the general good, he could not stop short for the sake of one man’s life."

“Won't you come over to the other table?” suggested Anna Pávlovna.

But Pierre continued his speech without heeding her.

"No," cried he, becoming more and more eager, "Napoleon is great because he rose superior to the Revolution, suppressed its abuses, preserved all that was good in it—equality of citizenship and freedom of speech and of the press—and only for that reason did he obtain power."

  • Book 1, Chapter 5

[67] The chief steward, who considered the young count’s attempts almost insane—unprofitable to himself, to the count, and to the serfs—made some concessions. Continuing to represent the liberation of the serfs as impracticable, he arranged for the erection of large buildings—schools, hospitals, and asylums—on all the estates before the master arrived. Everywhere preparations were made not for ceremonious welcomes (which he knew Pierre would not like), but for just such gratefully religious ones, with offerings of icons and the bread and salt of hospitality, as, according to his understanding of his master, would touch and delude him.

  • Book 5, Chapter 10

[68][Andrei predicts that the key action will be on the right flank] His idea was, first, to concentrate all the artillery in the center, and secondly, to withdraw the cavalry to the other side of the dip. Prince Andrei, being always near the commander in chief, closely following the mass movements and general orders, and constantly studying historical accounts of battles, involuntarily pictured to himself the course of events in the forthcoming action in broad outline. He imagined only important possibilities: “If the enemy attacks the right flank,” he said to himself, “the Kiev grenadiers and the Podólsk chasseurs must hold their position till reserves from the center come up.”

  • Book Book 2, Chapter 19

[69] [Andrei explaining his theory after recovering from Austerlitz] “I only know two very real evils in life: remorse and illness. The only good is the absence of those evils. To live for myself avoiding those two evils is my whole philosophy now.” “And love of one’s neighbor, and self-sacrifice?” began Pierre. “No, I can’t agree with you! To live only so as not to do evil and not to have to repent is not enough. I lived like that, I lived for myself and ruined my life.”

  • Book 5, Chapter 11

[70] “No, life is not over at thirty-one!” Prince Andrei suddenly decided finally and decisively. “It is not enough for me to know what I have in me—everyone must know it: Pierre, and that young girl who wanted to fly away into the sky, everyone must know me, so that my life may not be lived for myself alone while others live so apart from it, but so that it may be reflected in them all, and they and I may live in harmony!”

  • Book 6, Chapter 3

[71] [Natásha] was tormented by the insoluble question whether she loved Anatole or Prince Andrei. She loved Prince Andrei—she remembered distinctly how deeply she loved him. But she also loved Anatole, of that there was no doubt. “Else how could all this have happened?” thought she. “If, after that, I could return his smile when saying good-by, if I was able to let it come to that, it means that I loved him from the first. It means that he is kind, noble, and splendid, and I could not help loving him. What am I to do if I love him and the other one too?” she asked herself, unable to find an answer to these terrible questions.

  • Book 8, Chapter 13

[72] [Andrei on his deathbed] But after…he had seen [Natásha] for whom he longed appear before him and, having pressed her hand to his lips, had shed gentle, happy tears, love for a particular woman again crept unobserved into his heart and once more bound him to life. And joyful and agitating thoughts began to occupy his mind.

  • Book 12, Chapter 16

[73] [Shortly after Pierre’s marriage] Particularly vivid, humiliating, and shameful was the recollection of how one day soon after his marriage he came out of the bedroom into his study a little before noon in his silk dressing gown and found his head steward there, who, bowing respectfully, looked into his face and at his dressing gown and smiled slightly, as if expressing respectful understanding of his employer’s happiness.

  • Book 4, Chapter 6

[74]For a long while after [his Masonic Mentor] had gone, Pierre did not go to bed or order horses but paced up and down the room, pondering over his vicious past, and with a rapturous sense of beginning anew pictured to himself the blissful, irreproachable, virtuous future that seemed to him so easy. It seemed to him that he had been vicious only because he had somehow forgotten how good it is to be virtuous. Not a trace of his former doubts remained in his soul. He firmly believed in the possibility of the brotherhood of men united in the aim of supporting one another in the path of virtue, and that is how Freemasonry presented itself to him.

  • Book 5, Chapter 2

[75] [Natásha dancing in the countryside] Natásha threw off the shawl from her shoulders… and setting her arms akimbo also made a motion with her shoulders and struck an attitude. Where, how, and when had this young countess, educated by an émigrée French governess, imbibed from the Russian air she breathed that spirit and obtained that manner which the pas de châle would, one would have supposed, long ago have effaced? But the spirit and the movements were those inimitable and unteachable Russian ones…As soon as she had struck her pose, and smiled triumphantly, proudly, and with sly merriment, the fear … that she might not do the right thing was at an end, and they were already admiring her. She did the right thing with such precision, such complete precision, that [her aunt] had tears in her eyes, though she laughed as she watched this slim, graceful countess, reared in silks and velvets and so different from herself, who yet was able to understand all that was … in every Russian man and woman.

  • Book 7, Chapter 7

[76][Pierre experimenting with numerology] So he wrote Le russe Besuhof (The Russian Bezukhov) and adding up the numbers got 671. This was only five too much, and five was represented by "e", the very letter elided from the article le before the word Empereur. By omitting the e, though incorrectly, Pierre got the answer he sought. L’russe Besuhof made 666. This discovery excited him. How, or by what means, he was connected with the great event foretold in the Apocalypse he did not know, but he did not doubt that connection for a moment. His love for Natásha, Antichrist, Napoleon, the invasion, the comet, 666, L’Empereur Napoléon, and L’russe Besuhof—all this had to mature and culminate, to lift him out of that spellbound, petty sphere of Moscow habits in which he felt himself held captive and lead him to a great achievement and great happiness.

  • Book 9, Chapter 19

[77] See, e.g., Law and social capital: Evidence from the Code Napoleon in Germany, JC Buggle - European Economic Review, 2016

[78] Do you know what this summer has been for me? An endless ecstasy over Schopenhauer, and a series of mental pleasures such as I’ve never experienced before. I have bought all his works and have read and am reading them (as well as Kant's). And assuredly no student in his course has learned and discovered so much as I have during this summer. I do not know whether I shall ever change my opinion, but as present I’m confident that Schopenhauer is the greatest genius among men.

  • Diary of Leo Tolstoy

[79]If anyone doubted that the Christian world of today has reached a frightful state of torpor and brutalization (not forgetting the recent crimes committed in the Boers and in China, which were defended by the clergy and acclaimed as heroic feats by all the world powers), the extraordinary success of Nietzche's works is enough to provide irrefutable proof of this. Some disjointed writings, striving after effect in a most sordid manner, appear, written by a daring, but limited and abnormal German, suffering from power mania. Neither in talent nor in their basic argument do these writings justify public attention. In the days of Kant, Leibniz or Hume, or even fifty years ago, such writings would not only have received no attention, but they would not even have appeared. But today all the so-called educated people are praising the ravings of Mr N, arguing about him, elucidating him, and countless copies of his works are printed in all languages.

Turgenev made the witty remark that there are inverse platitudes, which are frequently employed by people lacking in talent who wish to attract attention to themselves. Everyone knows, for instance, that water is wet, and someone suddenly says, very seriously, that water is dry, not that ice is, but that water is dry, and the conviction with which this is stated attracts attention.

Similarly, the whole world knows that virtue consists in the subjugation of one's passions, or in self-renunciation. It is not just the Christian world, against whom Nietzsche howls, that knows this, but it is an eternal supreme law towards which all humanity has developed, including Brahmanism, Buddhism, Confucianism and the ancient Persian religion. And suddenly a man appears who declares that he is convinced that self-renunciation, meekness, submissiveness and love are all vices that destroy humanity (he has in mind Christianity, ignoring all the other religions). One can understand why such a declaration baffled people at first. But after giving it a little thought and failing to find any proof of the strange propositions, any rational person ought to throw the books aside and wonder if there is any kind of rubbish that would not find a publisher today. But this has not happened with Nietzsche's books.

The majority of pseudo-enlightened people seriously look into the theory of the superman, and acknowledge its author to be a great philosopher, a descendant of Descartes, Leibniz and Kant. And all this has come about because the majority of the pseudo-enlightened men of today object to any reminder of virtue, or to its chief premise: self-renunciation and love - virtues that restrain and condemn the animal side of their life. They gladly welcome a doctrine, however incoherently and disjointedly expressed, of egotism and cruelty, sanctioning the ideas of personal happiness and superiority over the lives of others, by which they live.

  • “What is Religion and of What Does its Essence Consist?”

[80] Like the old proverb about the month of March: In like a lion, out like a lamb.

[81] He is later haunted by its ghost.

[82] Learn about Pooh’s red shirt here.

[83] Devotees will know, of course, that the character of Pooh first appeared in the poem “Teddy Bear” from Milne’s poetry collection When We Were Very Young. It’s about Pooh joining the fat acceptance movement decades before it became fashionable. I recommend it.

[84] If you’ve been corrupted by Disney adaptations, you might protest that the adventures are supposed to happen in the Hundred Acre Wood. In the original books, though, the Hundred Acre Wood is just one small region of the Forest.

[85] Which means he has the name over the door in gold letters, and lives under it.

[86] These stuffed animals are now kept by the New York Public Library.

[87] The Forest may also house one or two Woozles, a Heffalump, a Jagular, and a Spotted (or perhaps Herbaceous) Backson—but the reader is given ample reason to Suspect Not.

[88] It’s in this context that Pooh writes his poem about being crushed under a chair.

[89] Interestingly, Eeyore, who is the one denizen of the Forest unwilling to accept anything short of Being Center Stage, is depicted as being uniquely isolated from the rest of the community. As Rabbit says, “You’ve never been to see any of us. You just stay here in this one corner of the Forest waiting for the other to come to you.” Eeyore’s unwillingness to accept being a bestower of honor rather than a receiver is reflected in his misanthropy.

[90] The details matter, though, to millions of people. Would the Civil Rights Act of 1968, which protected against housing discrimination, have passed with a different set of politicians and activists? That seems way more doubtful.

[91] Von Roon is not wrong about everything.

[92] Reflecting Nazi attitudes, von Roon is peculiarly obsessed with Roosevelt’s disability. No doubt confronting the fact that a man who in Germany would have been sent to the gas chambers was a key instrument of German defeat causes him serious difficulties.

[93] Quotations from the translator’s footnotes will be marked by his initials, VH.

[94] Herman Wouk, October 2001.

[95] The shame of Western nations not to offer sanctuary to the Jews of Europe is indeed a stain upon our conscience. But von Roon appears to forget that it was only because of the Nazis that that sanctuary was required.

[96] To be absolutely clear: I do not, and nor should any sane person, believe Roosevelt masterminded World War II to destroy the European empires and Germany and secure American dominance.

[97] Other than the fact that the Nazis liked invading people.

[98] As Groundsman Willie might put it.

[99] As one can tell from the ‘von’.

[100] It does not seem to occur to von Roon that these nations could have ruled themselves.

[101] The BBC have produced an outstanding docudrama of the Wannsee Conference, based closely on the detailed minutes that were kept. I would strongly recommend watching it. To see senior government discuss in calm, logical and bureaucratic tones how to exterminate millions of people, in a manner which - aside from its subject matter - could be any other high level government meeting - is utterly chilling

[102] There is a question as to whether or not the Soviet Union could have defeated Germany without the United States entering the war. My understanding is that this is an open question, with much depending upon (a) whether or not Britain, fighting alone, could keep open the sea lines, and (b) whether Japan, free of threat from America, broke its treaty with Russia. My own feeling is that the first, at least, is unlikely, given how close run a thing the Battle of the Atlantic was - even with American convoys.

[103] Anyone who has watched the 2017 film, Darkest Hour, will have a sense of the near despair of these times.

[104] This is simply not true.

[105] Technically speaking, Wouk breaks von Roon’s books into two, World Empire Lost and World Holocaust, to match his own structure. This felt an unnecessary complication for this review and I have referred to both books as World Empire Lost.

[106] The books are an epic in every sense of the word, including Scott’s: they begin in media res, take place in multiple lands, contain a long catalog of objects (various listings of military vessels), feature divine intervention (various characters prayers are answered) and include a journey into hell (Auschwitz). As Ana says, ‘THE TALKING SHIP IS OPTIONAL.’

[107] Indeed, whether or not one believes in the existence of literal devils.

[108] Which varied.

[109] Wouk, Herman. Sailor and Fiddler: Reflections of a 100-Year-Old Author.

[110] Wouk, Herman. The Will To Live On: This is Our Heritage.

[111] Wouk, Herman. Sailor and Fiddler: Reflections of a 100-Year-Old Author.