TITLE:  Our Dolphin Ancestors: Keepers of Lost Knowledge and Healing Wisdom

AUTHOR:  Frank Joseph

DATE PUBLISHED:  2016

FORMAT:  ebook

ISBN-13:  9781591432326

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DESCRIPTION:

"Reveals the shared ancestry behind our affinity with dolphins and our shared destiny

• Explains how we are both descendants of the aquatic ape and still share many physiological features with dolphins that set us apart from other primates

• Explores dolphins’ communication with other species and how dolphin therapy has miraculous effects on people with autism, cancer, stroke, and depression

• Explores the connections between dolphins and Atlantis and Lemuria

Wild animals avoid contact with humans, but wild dolphins seek us out to play and socialize, even going so far as to voluntarily rescue people from drowning. What explains this remarkable natural affinity?

Revealing the evolutionary basis for our special relationship with dolphins, Frank Joseph explains how we are both descendants of the same ancient branch of human-ity. Building upon the aquatic ape theory, he details how we both began on land but devastating floods forced our distant ancestors into the seas, where humanity developed many of the traits that set us apart from other primates, such as our instinctive diving reflex and our newborns’ ability to swim. But while some of the aquatic apes returned to land, later evolving into modern humans, some remained in the cradle of Mother Ocean and became our dolphin cousins.

Integrating scientific research on dolphin intelligence, communication, and physiology with enduring myths from some of the world’s oldest cultures, such as the Aborigines, Norse, Greeks, and Celts, the author examines our physical commonalities with dolphins, including their vestigial thumbs and legs, birth processes, and body temperature. He explores dolphins’ uncanny ability to diagnose disease such as cancer in humans and how dolphin therapy has had miraculous effects on children with autism, victims of stroke, and those suffering from depression. He provides evidence for dolphins’ different attitudes toward men, women, and children, their natural affinity with cats and dogs, and their telepathic communication with other species, including ours. He explores dolphins’ mysterious role in the birth of early civilization and their connections with the Dog Star, Sirius, and Atlantis and Lemuria--a bond still commemorated by annual gatherings of millions of dolphins.

As Frank Joseph shows, if we can learn to fully communicate with dolphins, accessing their millennia-old oral tradition, we may learn the truth about humanity’s origins and our shared future, when humankind may yet again quit the land for a final return to the sea."

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REVIEW:

This is an odd book.  There is some interesting information about dolphins, and some information that needs extra research on my part.  But there are also a few oddball speculations of the author's and a section on Mermaids, Atlantis and Mu at the end.  En enjoyable reading experience none the less.

Here's a conundrum: how to review a book that's all about how people judge (and review) things? It's well-researched, really interesting, and has the potential to be widely popular. It's fascinating stuff about literal and figurative taste, what we like, and how we like. It is a dense book, full of information, but entertaining nonetheless. I also really like his book Traffic.

What follows is a very specific example of how my attitude towards this book is colored by an unrelated aside, and is not intended to be part of the actual review of the book, but just the bit that sticks out at me as an illustration of some of the concepts he writes about, and that I feel compelled to write about because while I'm aware that other people might read my reviews, they are primarily a journal of reading for me to look back at. So feel free to skip the following.

 <spoiler>I generally like it when nonfiction writers let a little of their personal lives bleed into their work: the pretense of detachment and disinterest and "fair and balanced" is bogus and everyone knows it. And mostly it works well here. But early on he casually observes how his neighborhood in Brooklyn happens to be mostly thin people. Okay, this is a guy who should know that thinness correlates with wealth and that fat people are penalized to hell and gone in the US in healthcare, education, advancement at work as well as the ubiquitous fat-shaming. It's not some kind of statistical fluke that his neighborhood is thin: it's thin privilege letting him be oblivious. Like I said, this is pretty early on, like the introduction or first chapter. So he kind of accidentally mentioned a topic that I know a fair bit about, and that brief flash of annoyance became attached to the signifier Brooklyn. And then (it seemed like constantly but couldn't possibly have been), he kept mentioning Brooklyn. So now even though I really appreciate his writing I'm left feeling really hostile towards smug Brooklynites, which by exposure to only possibly one is unfair both to the innocent smugless residents of one of New York's five boroughs, and probably to the author in particular as well. But there it is: my opinion of the book might well be forever colored by a casual aside and I'm quite likely to always be put on edge when I come across Brooklyn as well. And now I've written about three times as much about my emotional reaction to this aside as I have about the book in general, because that's how people's taste and discussion of same tend to roll. And if anyone else bothers to read this little spoiler, they will probably have an emotional reaction towards what I've written which could easily go "The hell?" or "Oh, me too, I hate that" and life is really complicated isn't it?</spoiler>

Library copy

TITLE:  The Six Secrets of Intelligence:

             Why Modern Education Doesn’t Teach Us How To Think For Ourselves

AUTHOR:  Craig Adams

PUBLICATION DATE:  2019

FORMAT:  ebook

DESCRIPTION:

"Some people have something to say in any conversation and can spot the hidden angles of completely unrelated problems; but how do they do it?

So many books, apps, courses, and schools compete for our attention that the problem isn’t a lack of opportunity to sharpen our minds, it’s having to choose between so many options. And yet, more than two thousand years ago, the greatest thinker of Ancient Greece, Aristotle, had already discovered the blueprint of the human mind. Despite the fact that the latest cognitive science shows his blueprint to be exactly what sharpens our reasoning, subtlety of thought, and ability to think in different ways and for ourselves, we have meanwhile replaced it with a simplistic and seductive view of intelligence, education and the mind.

Condensing that blueprint to six 'secrets', Craig Adams uncovers the underlying patterns of every discussion and debate we’ve ever had, and shows us how to be both harder to manipulate and more skilful in any conversation or debate – no matter the topic."

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REVIEW:

Craig Adams 'six secrets of intelligence' are deduction, induction, analogy, reality, evidence and meaning.  Adams provides the definitions and examples of the basic concepts and shows how this knowledge is useful in spotting and dismissing illogical statements.  The second half of the book deals with the modern education system and how it fails to teach the trivium (grammar, logic, rhetoric).  There is some interesting stuff in this book, but the organisation is a bit erratic with too much repetition and not enough examples.

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It managed a 4, in spite of itself.

I don't understand how readers are able to read a book in a series on its own merit without factoring in things that make it not fit right, or raise questions elsewhere. I always make note on how the book fits in the series. This one, because it essentially combines 2 series while setting up a third, will get more comments.

The book:
I'd said after the last one that if Victor wasn't crawling on broken glass, I was going to be upset. He didn't and I am. I feel like the h's being an empath and his bombarding her with a whole lot of emotions, coupled with the Prakinski bond, was used to sweep everything under a rug (I actually hlf expected him to use that to get in her pants at that point, even though she was freaking out and telling him to leave NOW). The only way she had of keeping him at bay was to disappear. No idea where she disappeared to as we aren't privy to that info.

And then...they have sex and everything is all better now. Not magic pen so much as MWOP in this instance.

Of course, the elephant in this particular room - why the guy who, along with his band of merry men, slipped into a house and executed her stepdad's partner, needed to USE her (yes; I did that use that word) to get close to dear old step dad in the first place, let alone how he carried out his assignment - blow the guy away right there at the dinner table - was never covered. He felt...horrible...that the h's mother (alcoholic, mentally imbalanced Sister of the previous generation of Drakes) attacked her several months later and beat her so badly that she lost their baby. He was...upset...that crazy mother had passed the letter on to stepdad's friend (that he'd laid in the middle of the bed? Why? For a supposedly intelligent man, that was rather stupid).

Tie-up to Sisters series...ok. I mean; I could do without his threatening his brothers, etc. And I'm really tired of the whole human trafficking/pedophile theme. In this book, I think I could have gotten utterly plastered drinking every time the word "pedophile" appeared.

Tie-up with both series:
Both elephants in those particular rooms are finally addressed - how 13 psychic women could live in close proximity with each other and form 2 bands whose paths never crossed, and how 6 brothers could also live in the same area and never see each other. That said, while I might believe Blythe's reason for avoiding her cousins, I fail to understand how the other 5 have avoided the Drakes, and I really don't understand how the brothers have managed to avoid a meeting before now. But then again...

We're told that the 6 Sea Haven books took place in the 2 months following Ella's book. Seriously? Does she realize that's a new Prakinski arriving every 2 weeks? That Rikki's book alone took longer than that? That there's no way the brothers couldn't be tripping over each other while trying to solve their women's problems *and* meeting their women? Actually, that's not 2 weeks, more like a week and a half, and we know there was more time because Victor had seen Casimir in Europe several weeks ago, along with Lissa, and Lissa was still around for the previous book. Not to mention all this psychic activity within such a short time period would have clued the bad guy in that there was some serious psychic competition here (and laid waste to the town, seeing as how it came in so many bursts in such a short time period)

And now, I'm done. No interest really in reading any more. I mean; the characters from the new series sound interesting, and at least they aren't all men BUT...I've had a bellyful of overbearing, borderline psychotic men browbeating women into accepting them.