This actually started twelve years ago as a recomendation from my daughter a grad student at NYU. She suggested The Battle for God. I read it for the second time about a year and half ago in an effort to understand what was going on in the world. I followed with A History of God and Islam: A short History. I think the thing that amazes me is in the field of religion we have more in common rather than differences. This quest was not done in persuit of a chosen faith. As a twelve year old raised in the Christian tradition I was, what had become a forever fact, dislodged as a believer. I lived through a transition from a Pastor Moore, who for as long as I could remember had been teaching me to be a better human and so a better Christian. One Sunday I was sitting in church waiting for the Pastor to talk and a Reverend Niven started to scream at me that I was a sinner and there wasn’t anything I could do about that so I had better just submit and do whatever the church would decide that I needed to do to gain forgiveness. I decided right then I was in trouble because I wasn’t going to submit to anyone. Now back to the subject at hand. Just because I don’t exactly believe doesn’t mean that the rest of the world doesn’t and make decisions based on what I have come to call magical thinking. Being reasoned is hard work and I struggle with it all the time and I don’t have a tradition telling me otherwise. Then I read Armstrongs’ The Great Transformation which is about the beginning of our religious traditions. As I was reading this book it all seemed so familar. I couldn’t recall when I might have been reading about these times. I remembered reading the college textbook called the History of Western Civilisation but this was a long time before times that covered. As I searched my book shelves for what it could have been I spotted H.G. Wells The Outline of History. I remembered receiving that in the mail from a bookclub when I was living on a huge ranch and the mother of two toddlers. There it was he was going as far back as any book of history that I know about. He doesn’t pretend to be a historian, he say he is a story teller and the history is the information that he gets from actual historians. I sat down and read it again for the first time in fifty years. I enjoyed every word. I was able to see how much that book influenced the next ten years of my life, my reading, my appreciation of art and artists, my appreciation of jazz and classical music. It was incrediable what my mind could remember after fifty years. After finishing I went back to Armstrongs book. The question I am asking is who are we and how did we get here? I saw Thomas Cahill on Charlie Rose talking about a new book he has out about the death penalty but Charlie wanted to talk about another series he had written. The first of which was How The Irish Saved Civilization. I went to Amazon and ordered all five of the ones written for less than $30. However the hardbound books are beautifully done and I wouldn’t just take whatever if I were to do it again. They an easy read as Cahill has a casual style unlike Armstrong who knows she is teaching you something, Cahill is entertaining as well as teaching. I think she is a scholar and he is a teacher. You’ll know what i mean when you read them. History can be an ongoing beautiful thing what studied from many different perspectives. Right now I’m reading a set of books I bought ten years ago and read in bits and piece through the years Now I’m reading it straight through. It is called The History of Private Life. And it is facinating. I still don’t really know how we got here but it does make me more open minded than I might have been otherwise. However I do get frustrated with stupidity and closed minds.

Such “fiascos” are called politics as usual. What does this have to do with books?