Summer Reading List

It’s back to H O T which is always a good time to catch up on reading. Or, in this case, enjoy a bit of pictorial history and read again a head-knocking, consciousness expanding tome.

Lost Shreveport : Vanishing Scenes from the Red River Valley is a delightful collection of history and photography compiled by historian Gary Joiner and history collector Ernie Roberson. The easy to read book follows the history of the city on the upper Red River from its founding following the Alamo (hence Texas Street, Crockett Street, Travis Street...) and the herculean efforts of Henry Miller Shreve in untangling the Red River from a hundred-miles long timber “raft.” It ends in the early 20th century with chronicles of visits to the bustling town by Booker T. Washington.

It’s always fun to probe behind the historical curtain and witness the enormous changes that have occurred in the Shreveport-Bossier City area since the “late unpleasantness” artfully told in Joiner’s One Damn Blunder From Beginning to End, noted last year.

Again I’m slowly, oh so slowly, turning the pages of Biocentrism, the masterful and daring excursion into reality that upends just about everything. It's an easy read - I go slowly to savor the ideas.  Robert Lanza, MD, and astronomer Bob Berman posit the simple concept that life creates the universe rather than life being a random consequence of a capricious universe. Let’s put it this way, Chapter One begins with John Haldane’s statement “The universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.”

Berman and Lanza move step by step presenting the concept of Biocentrism as a series of Principles. For example:

• What we perceive as reality is a process that involves our consciousness
• Our external and internal perceptions are inextricably intertwined 
• The behavior of subatomic particles – indeed all particles and objects – is inextricably linked to the presence of an observer
• Without consciousness, “matter” dwells in an undetermined state of probability

That's only a few of them, but you get the idea. Or, maybe you don’t. I think I’m getting the idea.

On the shelf:

Thomas Edison

"The Wizard of Menlo Park: How Thomas Alva Edison Invented the Modern World" by Randall Stross

This is GOOD

"The God Theory: Universes, Zero-Point Fields, and What's Behind It All"  by Bernard Haisch