What are you about to read?

[Student of Trinity]

I emerge from a hiatus dominated by separatrices and branch cuts (please do not garble that) to make a shameless commercial plug. It's not for any product in Spiderweb's line. It's for a book.

 

I have not actually read the book yet: I pre-ordered it months ago, but it has yet to arrive.

 

A friend of mine has written a book about the 1935 invasion of Ethiopia by Fascist Italy. The book is entitled Prevail, and it's available on Amazon and wherever else. It's not self-published; Jeff Pearce is a successful commercial author and an actual publishing house has given him money.

 

Thing is, this is a history book, and Jeff is not an academic historian. In fact he never graduated from college. I know the guy, though, and he's intelligent, very seriously interested in this topic, and very articulate. He has done a lot of homework on this book. He has gotten a foreword from the leading academic historian on the topic. He has also published many other books (many of them under pseudonyms); "but" they're all relatively low-brow. This one is serious. I make this plug for two reasons.

 

1) I'm persuaded of Jeff's main thesis, that this 1935 conflict really was a chapter in human history. On the one hand it was the pathetic failure of the League of Nations, the crushing end to all the hope that World War I had been a war to end wars. On the other hand, it was the end of colonialism. Ultimately, the Africans prevailed.

 

2) My job is to train PhDs, and/but the reason I think this job is worth doing is that what it really means is nothing but serious and intelligent study. There is no magic; there is no priesthood. If higher education means anything, then it means nothing that someone could not do without any degrees, if they just worked hard and thought carefully. So it may sound perverse, but for me it's a sort of acid test for the whole concept of higher education, that we can recognize insight when it comes without the formal credentials. I haven't read the book itself yet, but I know the author. From knowing him I feel that this is a test case. If you also happen to care about this issue, this is a book I think you'll want to check out. By all means wait until you see some actual reviews of the book before buying it, but make a note now to look out for reviews of this book.

 

With recent controversy here in mind, about sciences versus humanities, let me emphasize that I would be every bit as hopeful about an un-degreed physicist, if they really were serious and intelligent and articulate. I can definitely imagine amateur books on physics that would impress lay people but actually be worthless; I can also imagine that a professionally trained historian might declare this book to be like that, even if it impresses me. If that happens, I will of course defer to the professional authority, who may be as expert in their field as I am in mine; though, if it comes to that, I'll also insist that there can be intelligent lay views on science that will attract scorn from many professional scientists, but admiration from others, and these others might be the best. 'Professional' and 'degreed' are broad categories. Even from the most hieratic of experts, it can be reasonable to consider a second opinion.

 

The larger principle remains, and it's really important, that academic credentials exist to represent realities that can exist without the degrees. If I shoot an amateur physicist down, it'll be for errors, not for being an amateur. I can say nothing about whether Prevail will be free of errors that a professional would recognize, but I can say that it won't just be garbage. It'll be a test case at the very least, and worthwhile in some meta kind of sense just for that.

Edited September 20, 2014 by Lilith
Links removed

[Lilith]

Sorry about this, but we've talked this over in the mod forum and concluded that posting what is admittedly a "shameless commercial plug" for a friend's book that you haven't even read and including a referrer link that gives you money if someone buys the book clearly crosses a line as far as our advertising and solicitation policy goes. The links have been removed.