Book Notes: "A Farewell to Arms" by Ernest Hemingway

A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I must admit that while I have been mesmerised by anything Hemingway for some time now, it was a bit of an effort to get through the first half of this book. While my attitude towards the book changed each time I got back into it, I think the source of the problem for me was the emptiness that can only be expressed by those who have first-hand experience of large-scale conventional war. Nonetheless, and despite the historical background to the story, I found it to be written clearly in the present tense. Yet I couldn’t help but sense the emptiness I had once felt when I was about seven years old. I remember visiting, for no particular reason, an old war widow, who gave me two shillings (five cent pieces - one for me and the other for my sister) but then she cried and pointed to the faded photographs of her husband and her brothers who were all killed in the Second World War. The empty feeling of the interior of her dark house with its art deco furniture and the smell of stale tobacco smoke accompanied me throughout “A Farewell to Arms” and I think I avoided it until I decided that I would finish it off in one go. As the climax emerged suddenly towards the end of the book, I was hooked and couldn’t put it down. By this stage of the plot the war was almost an afterthought for the main characters and bits of classic Hemingway emerge (beards, boxing, and booze). But by the end, I needed some quiet time to emotionally recover. I’ve never cried from reading a book before. I still don’t like this book. Nevertheless, it is truly magnificent and how somebody in their mid-twenties could comprehend so much beggars belief. It can only be genius.



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Outlook: Political Science as a Profession

These are just a few websites I have been able to find relating to "political science" as a career. I will update this article as I find more.

It is that time of year again for planning and organising one's professional goals. I found this website while thinking about the direction for my research and publishing this year. I must admit I am surprised to see that political scientists in the US earn more than their economics counter-parts.

"The median annual wage of political scientists was $107,420 in May 2010".

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Department of Labor, Occupational Outlook Handbook, 2012-13 Edition, Political Scientists, on the Internet at http://www.bls.gov/ooh/life-physical-and-social-science/political-scientists.htm (visited February 28, 2013).

I suspect this website is the Australian equivalent to the above. However, the career is lumped under the term "social professionals" on the Australian Government's "job outlook" website.

For the UK job outlook, this site seems to be most helpful, and the Canadian Political Science  Association has this site.

Book Notes: "Communism and Christianity" by Martin Cyril D'Arcy

Communism And Christianity by Martin Cyril D'Arcy

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


In 1956, the Reverend D’Arcy was writing at a time when the Soviet Union was still regarded as a direct threat to capitalism and indeed, Christianity, and this work needs to be taken in the context of the times. One should not expect the Reverend to deliver anything short of an apologia, and in this he does not disappoint. While it was not uncommon for some, especially in the post-Stalin era (Stalin having died in 1953), to remain intellectually interested in the great socialist experiment, D’Arcy sees such entertaining of Communism as a direct threat to Christianity, in that Communism, in its Soviet guise, was regarded by some as a ‘religion’. D’Arcy makes the point of comparing Christianity and Communism as, ‘properly’, “faiths”, rather than religions. Extensive comparisons are drawn between the ideal societies which each proposes exist in the future, including some interesting views of the Kingdom of Heaven on earth versus the spiritual realm, some extensive coverage of the overlapping jurisdiction of Church and State in the temporal and spiritual realms, and a great deal of whitewashing of the history of the Christian Church, in many cases as if to say “we were intemperate in our youth but we have since matured”. What really stands out for me is the Orientalist attitude of the book – not in its Orientalist approach but in its lack of the Orient at all – stemming from the author’s monocultural view of the world including a belief that all that is good in civilisation stems from the West. The numerous biases made the final arguments quite tedious to read, but it is worth the effort nonetheless. For instance, the unpacking of the socialist aims of both Soviet-Communism and Christian Socialism provide much food for thought, as do the numerous references to other great works, albeit used in place of empirical evidence, but a useful compass for further exploration of the great works of famous authors. What I found most disappointing, however, was the lack of distinction between the Soviet-style Communism and the Marxian-style Communism (both are lumped together while being ‘cherry-picked’ ad nauseum to suit the author’s biases). Similarly, the Christian Church is portrayed as a monolith until it suits the author to criticise non-Catholics for their ‘erroneous’ views of the world. Despite my frustration with this work – it was a difficult read not because of the language but because of the agonisingly obvious biases supported by manufactured evidence – I have learnt a great deal from the synthesis the Reverend D’Arcy attempts to provide in bringing together the extremes of the materialist and spiritual realms into a shared space which neither occupies often enough to enable such comparisons to bear the fruit which D’Arcy arguably produces from amongst the rocks and sand of this polemic.



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