I must dig that up!
I’m relieved you found it readable 
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I’ve been reading a Victorian age classic, Apologia Pro Vita Sua by John Henry Newman. The author was vicar of St. Mary’s Church on the Oxford University campus, and became an influential figure in the Tractarian movement of the 1830’s and 40’s. That movement was seeking a via media or middle way that would protect the Anglican Church from creeping liberalism while avoiding what were considered the excesses of Roman Catholicism. When Newman converted to the Catholic faith in 1845, it confirmed for some people a suspicion that he’d been a closet Catholic all along. Charles Kingsley, the noted Anglican clergyman, historian and novelist revived this controversy some twenty years later, leading to a testy correspondence between the two men. When the public feud had blown over, Newman, feeling there was unfinished business at hand, began his Apologia. (He uses the word in the sense of an explanation, not an apology).
Newman seems to have overcome some of his longstanding objections to Catholicism rather abruptly. I’m thinking especially of his reservations on transubstantiation, and on the deference paid to Mary and the saints. Faced with competing package deals, he apparently decided that Catholicism was the more suitable default option, the lesser of two evils, if one might express it that way. Well, people have every right to change their mind. Newman’s objective here is not to convince anybody on theological points, but simply to establish that he had come by his beliefs honestly at every stage; that he was never the wolf in sheep’s clothing he’d been accused of being. To that end he applies a laser focus. You’ll learn almost nothing about how this man lived when he wasn’t contemplating matters of faith. He does appear to have nicely vindicated himself, and the book was well received in England. Readers warmed to his personal, conversational approach.
At least that’s how it’s been described, which makes me smile a little inwardly. You’ll find a profusion of semicolons here, and many sentences that run on for maybe half a page. Yet it can’t be denied that the words have a pleasing flow to them. Newman was among the finest prose stylists that the age produced. If you enjoy books first and foremost for their deft use of language, subject matter aside, Newman will do just fine.
It does require concentration though. Fortunately I began this just after a heatwave had moved along. On these summer days you can feel your attention glazing over just trying to read a newspaper article, let alone anything of major intellectual weight. Sometimes it’s best to wait for the proverbial frost on the pumpkin.
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Rereading America in Midpassage Vol. 2 (1939) by Charles & Mary Beard.
https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015033534697&seq=9
If anyone can still write history (current history, even) in this style please tell me!
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Haven’t been reading much lately, but now I am somewhere in the middle of an interesting book by Arianne Baggerman, with the fascinating title De storm die wij vooruitgang noemen (The storm we called progress).
By researching ego documents (diaries, journals & more) in the period of 1750-2000 she managed a to paint an interesting insight in how real life Dutch persons experienced the times they lived in.
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I know of Cardinal Newman only from various Chesterton essays in which GKC mentioned him, although I don’t remember anything of the substance of those essays. While I am especially fond of fine style in writing, I don’t think that is enough to tempt me into reading church history. I haven’t even read Saint Augustine or Thomas Aquinas yet, even though I feel like I should.
I’ve never heard that term before, and I don’t think it’s accurate. Perhaps it is a translation problem. Journals in particular can be motivated by historical, scientific, and legal reasons (the foremost example is probably the journals of the Lewis and Clark expedition). Similarly, diaries are often not for public consumption. They can commonly be for simply remembering things, for documenting events for legal reasons, or for therapeutic purposes.
I’m familiar with Charles Beard as a notable iconoclast of American history, but I have never read him. I know he kicked off the movement for the economic interpretation of history during the first half of the 20th century. My father, whose degree was in history, and I had a long discussion about that general viewpoint when I was in my early 20s. I agreed with him that it was too narrow and simplistic an explanation in most cases.
When you say “in this style,” are you literally referring to the manner and prose in which Beard wrote, or do you mean his economic interpretation? If it is the former, I would say that lots of modern historians write engagingly; if the latter, I would guess that some Marxist or at least Keynesian historians would adopt that view.
Even some capitalist historians have written with the economic perspective. This gives me the opportunity to make this a proper “what am I reading” post rather than just a comment.
I often read two books simultaneously, one fiction and one nonfiction. For the latter, I have now started Tariffs, Blockades, and Inflation: The Economics of the Civil War by Mark Thornton and Robert B. Ekelund, Jr. (Scholarly Resources, 2004). This succinct, well-documented book (only 133 pages not counting the index) revives attention on the economic framework of the war. Tariffs in particular had a serious deleterious effect in provoking the war, which I find interesting in light of current events. Indeed, I bought the book for 50 cents at my local library largely due to the title. (Full disclosure: I am a Milton Friedman free trader since my youth.)
The book also argues that economic strategies, the blockade and subsequent inflation, were the decisive factors in winning the war, which I agree with. I have always thought it was hugely ironic that it was Winfield Scott (commanding general of the Union army) who devised the Anaconda Plan (for the coastal blockade and control of the Mississippi), even though he was a Virginian.
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Ego documents is probably a Dutch coined word (egodocumenten), of which I assumed it was correct english. See link for more info on this.
Diaries are often not for public consumption, but hundreds of them did survive, despite the writers asking their families to destroy them after they died. Often they landed at one moment or another in a historical archive. And that is where they were available for research.
In dutch we call these journals or diaries dagboeken. A book where the author daily writes about something of interest to them. Often these journals or diaries were not daily attended to, and also often only for a short period in life. But there are examples of dagboeken that span a period of half a century of daily journaling and some of these contained 30.000 or more pages (sic!).
Still not sure if the Dutch dagboeken and the English diaries and journals are fully synonimical.
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It is probably a translation issue. “Ego” just literally means “(my)self” or “I”, but in current English the word has taken a negative connotation and is being used in terms like “ego trip”.
Thus the issue could be that the benign term “a document about one’s self” and the negative term “self-centered document” both being able to be described as an “ego document” depending on which interpretation of the word “ego” each language is currently using.
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I agree. I raised the point because “ego documents” has a demeaning connotation in today’s speech. I was startled to see that there is a “Center” with that title (in France, it appears). It’s unfortunate because unnecessary. A good and more clear alternative would have been “personal narratives.”
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In English, right? Maybe even only in USian English?
Well, that might be correct in the US, but apparently not in France 
Again, in France it apparently is good and clear – other languages and countries certainly need not adapt to what USians believe about their language.
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Currently reading yet another amazing SF novel by Adrian Tchaikovsky:
The first two books of the (so far) trilogy were awesome also, and the whole series is a wild ride again.
As I have become such a great fan of his SF works, maybe I should try one of his fantasy books (or series!) also, even though I am not a big friend of that genre.
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Mainly the former but I suppose the two are intertwined. I find America in Midpassage to be dramatically more nuanced than most works of reductionist Marxist history. Not being familiar with Charles Beard’s work on the American Revolution, I might still suppose that Mary Beard could have added depth and pizazz to the collaborative work.
Having just opened the book at random I found this paragraph in the section on radio broadcasting, too apropos to the present thread to pass up:
As to the effect of all this uproar upon the multitude of listeners, estimates were more difficult to formulate than in the case of the moving pictures, and the best of calculations remained little more than guesses. Amid all the din, however, one thing could not be refuted: contemplation, meditation, and quiet reading were made increasingly difficult for men and women throughout the country. If father or mother wished to do a little thinking or to read a book, the children might insist on having noise. Children had, it is true, always indulged in clatter of their own making, limited somewhat by their physical strength, but now canned rumbles, thumps, and rattles poured out of radio sets, unremittingly and ceaselessly. Even adults, formerly accustomed to read in silent rooms, acquired the habit of sitting with books open on their knees, if open at all, while the radio blared or crooned its rival attractions. At home or abroad, in hotels and streets, in bars and on railway trains, and in taxicabs, the everlasting cacophony went on day and night. It was not surprising, then, that James Rowland Angell, former president of Yale University, after serving as an adviser to a national broadcasting concern, confessed somewhat disconsolately that education, even in the most diluted form, was a kind of waif in the radio storm.
It’s a little tough to find illustrative excerpts but here’s a bit from the “Science in the Widening Outlook” chapter (which explicitly deals with Technocracy, does that interest any of you?) which I think shows their outlook to be multifaceted and not deterministic.
The passage
In the long run, the explorations of individual engineers and the great studies of land, water, and other resources in relation to beneficial uses would presumably influence all technical thought. The elements of physics and mathematics remained the same. Chemical combinations remained unchanged. But the first-hand contacts of engineering minds with nation-wide efforts to control materials and forces for humane ends, to make wholesale adjustments to the inexorable ways of nature, to provide employment for capital and labor, to bring governments, corporations, and individuals into effective combinations for the general welfare—all served to push out the borders of scientific thought. Fresh problems of research and application for physicists, chemists, biologists, and engineers were formulated, suggesting fruitful projects of inquiry along functional lines. Whether the mandate of the times and circumstances was considered as a mere matter of creating employment for members of the profession or as mighty call for the full use of technological potentials, germinal ideas exfoliated in scientific thought, even in the laboratory and the drafting room.
Influences were reciprocal. Engineering surveys and inventions crashed against government, business, and historic practices. A political economy that was still based upon the handicraft philosophy of Adam Smith, despite all trimmings, qualifications, and adaptations, was badly shaken by engineering assertions and achievements. Committed to respect for facts and to the use of the rational method in all procedures, the very spirit of technology ran counter to the myths, symbols and habitual assumptions so regnant in the domain of law, politics, and economic speculation. An engine constructed according to physical theory either worked or it did not work. If it did not, the theory was revised or the engine was scrapped as a failure, for flat contradictions between theory and practice were unendurable in the scientific world. When Harold Loeb and his engineering associates indicated by the calculations summarized in The Chart of Plenty that the production of wealth, as a physical fact, could be immensely increased in the United States by applied engineering rationality, perhaps doubled, politicians and economists showed signs of cutting loose from the theory that capitalism was automatically efficient and of inquiring into the problem of bringing realities more in line with potentials.
Judging by experience it seemed probable that the growing recognition of the fructifying relations between science and culture in general would prove to be correlatively stimulating. For example, it had been forcefully demonstrated that war and preparations for war had called forth new scientific energies in response to different demands and had promoted scientific knowledge and achievements. Again, on the other side, the contrivance of new building materials by engineers had precipitated a reconsideration of acquired architectural theories. Could not national demands in the interests of human welfare as great as those expressed in war also act as a persuasive incitement to scientific exploration on a scale more vast than ever experienced? Inasmuch as science, long confined to the study of form or matter and force or energy, was now reaching out more actively into the study of function with the aid of a different logic and mathematics, the probability of an affirmative answer was all the more promising.
Someone might actually find their work to be overly verbose and expansive, due to their efforts at hedging and inclusivity, but personally I appreciate this style relative to historical writing which is overly heavy-handed and simplistic, or so specific that it cannot address trends on a grand scale. To me it’s very impressive to write about such big themes, while including lots of concrete details, and I don’t know of many authors today who can pull it off. Maybe we’ve had too many generations of reading with the radio on.
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I meant to respond to your post sooner, but life got in the way. I think I know what you mean, as expressed here:
I don’t think that much general history is written today, except for the textbook market. You are right that most modern historians write about specific events, whether small of large. However, the kind of writing to which you refer, dealing with trends or philosophical influences of cultural events, is still being done quite a lot, but in different publishing categories, such as cultural anthropology, science history, sociology, etc. For example:
James Gleick, who became famous for his Chaos (science history and explication), later wrote another tremendous book, Faster (culture/sociology), about how the accelerating pace of modern life is affecting everything in culture. Another favorite of mine, the late Neil Postman, wrote several great books about historical trends: The Disappearance of Childhood, Amusing Ourselves to Death, The End of Education, and Technopoly, to name the ones I’ve read (all excellent). The master of this kind of writing, about cultural trends and broad philosophical influences, is Jacques Barzun, who died in 2012 at the age of 104 (I had to look that up—I was going to say “just a few years ago”). He was a polymath who wrote deep discussions about many different subjects. His magnum opus is considered to be From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 to the Present (Harper/Collins, 2000; full disclosure: I bought that 11 months ago but still haven’t read it because it is so long—soon!). I can personally, highly recommend two of his essay collections, The Culture We Deserve (Weslyan University Press, 1989) and Jacques Barzun on Writing, Editing, and Publishing (University of Chicago Press, 1985). There are other writers, too (some even alive), but this is a start.
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I finished Wool and think it is the best SF novel I have read in the past two years. It fooled me by turning into a Robinsonade after all, rather than sustaining the pocket-universe angle.
I am currently reading another Travis McGee mystery/thriller by John D. MacDonald, A Tan and Sandy Silence (1971). Unfortunately, it is very poor, maybe even worse than Free Fall in Crimson. The mystery and plot are unengaging, and the procedural details are dull. MacDonald uses a lot of “fake realism” in this one, something I have never seen him do before. (Fake realism is a term coined by James Blish to describe useless realistic details that contribute nothing to the plot, characterization, or atmosphere, and are neither original nor interesting as observations. The example Blish used was the detailed descriptions of lighting and smoking a cigarette, so common in the 1950s. Fake realism is abundant in modern SF, and I loathe it.) I would give up on this book if it weren’t Travis McGee. This is the 13th in the series and will be the 16th I have read. I have one more on hand and need to obtain just four more to complete the series.
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I’m currently re-reading Golden Son by Pierce Brown, the second book of the Red Rising series. I love these books SO SO much. Although I’m really not a science fiction reader and both language and violence are much harder than I usually read, I enjoy reading (!) about dystopian societies and I just love these wonderfully fleshed out characters. Although the author cruelly destroys the readers’ hearts again and again, it’s such a great read, I can’t recommend it highly enough.
In the books, we follow the fate of Darrow, a member of the lowest of several colour-coded castes, a lowRed. Each caste/colour is specifically bred for a special purpose, the Reds are workers and our main character is living and working with other lowReads underground in a mine on Mars when we first meet him. But he soon discovers that the Reds have been lied to: The hard work they’re to do to “make Mars liveable” is just to power the spaceships of the ruling caste, the Golds, and others above them and Mars has been inhabited for generations already. Selected by a group of revolutionaries, he infiltrates the Golds with the goal to destroy the system from within.
The seventh and last book of the series will hopefully be released next year, that’s why I’m currently re-reading the series.
Everyone who enjoys books like the Hunger Games will enjoy the first book a lot as well. The books after are different, more like a mixture of Game of Thrones (from what I heard) in space - although MUCH more enjoyable to read (I didn’t last even 40 pages into the first GoT book because it was so boring…). I usually can’t put these books down..
Notable is that you may stop after the 3rd book for an ending. But you’re missing a lot of things and great characters if you do.
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Your post and the books sound very interesting and I will note down those books and will check them out to potentially purchase and read.
I’d only like to point out that often people like to make parallels with GoT and the subsequent book series believing that this will be more exciting to other more mainstream readers/audiences that have seen the TV series and later read the books, however this is a tactic that might also make others lose interest as well. From your own post I was very excited by the concept of the book and the genuine fervor of your recommendation, but any comparison to GoT is an automatic red flag to me since I have found the first book not only totally illogical and inane, but having read it I realised that most of the reviews and opinions about it are bonkers.
Considering that you didn’t even like the GoT book either I’d strongly suggest in future reviews you avoid similar comparisons and keep your own commentary, which was far more engaging and convincing.
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I finally made it! I managed to finish “Wind and Truth”.
Thus ends the first act of a trully epic saga, spanning five books and 6000+ pages. The second act will have five more books of similar size and it will begin getting written in a few years and published around 2031. 
I have to say that I had my doubts about it during the first 1/3 of it but, after finishing it, I am very veeeeery pleased and impressed by this book. It was literally a “make or break” situation since a lot of authors have tried (and some of them even managed) to generate a good scenario, amazing world-building, great characters and a ton of mystery, but ultimately failed the three crucial tests:
a) Continuity
b) Logic/reason
c) Explaining and tying all the loose ends in a satisfactory and setting-appropriate manner.
Masterfully done. There where a lot of hard-to-explain things going on in the previous books, but Sanderson managed to explain everything. Even small things like why the character Lift behaves as she does and wished what she wished.
Now, to be fair, I’ve heard that some other people are not happy with the final book and I’ve read some of their reviews and I do not agree with most of them.
The main issues that people have are:
a) The prose - whatever that is for each person.
b) The fact that the author took the time to tie in everything, therefore reducing the amount of actions/battle and “cool” fighting moments.
c) The inclusion of some modern terms and the focus on the psychological aspect of the characters.
On those three I have to say this.
– On prose: I do not even know what that is when people say it and I do not think that anyone could ever bother digging through what people have in mind when they use it. The fact of the matter is that the dialogues can alternate from the very serious to the very silly because (fancy that) some characters are very serious or very silly. As far as I am concerned, I take some pride in being one of the silliest people you can have a serious discussion with or some totally inane one. Therefore, I am not sure what’s baffling all those people that think that “everyone should be flat” and “one thing”, but that’s all there is to it, as far as I am concerned. I guess it is not a surprising problem now-a-days where people are so fixated on people being “one sided” and without nuance, but that is a social issue, and definitively not a problem of the books.
– On the reduction of action and what people think were needless explanations: It really depends on why you read books or watch movies or play sports. There are people that found the movie Transformers very cool because it was full of incessant action. I found it boring for the exact same reason. There people that enjoy watching Steph Curry or Caitlyn Clark chuck deep three-pointers with 17 seconds left on the clock and consider that “an amazing spectactle worth paying a ticket for” while I cannot be bothered to watch a few minute highlight reels with such bad basketball. It is purely a matter of taste. Totally subjective.
– The inclusion of some modern terms and the focus on the psychological aspect of the characters: This is definitively something more objective and I found issues with it as well, while I was reading the book, however, if you reach the end, there are reasons and explanations for those matters being there for the sake of the present (like the romance between two characters that seems needless at the time, but the reason why the author includes it gets explained later), but also the future books. A lot of people tend to forget that the majority of the characters will re-appear on book 6, thus there needs to be an open field for the plot to grow.
On a more subjective matter I constantly get a “suspension of disbelief” when authors plan all those high fantasy conflicts and battles and what-not and forget basic realistic stuff like “what about supplies?”, “if everyone and the kitchen-sink is thrown in this battle, who is back home tending the fields and shearing the sheep?”, “why does a common soldier keep fighting or keep following the hero of the book?”, “why do those people risk their lives instead of fleeing to some other land/place?” and so forth… It has been hard for DMs to have me as a D&D player because I always created my characters to be “alive” instead of “heroic”, therefore the DM would have to provide them with an actual reason to risk their precious (for them) lives, instead of “ah, but there is a quest! ho-ho-ho”… that is not enough for someone to risk their lives, I am sorry. We are here to role-play, therefore my character needs a reason to go on a quest, otherwise this is not an RPG, but a battle simulation with occassional intervals of talking.
But I digress.
Sanderson solves the almighty practical issue of supplies with the world’s magic system (which is fair enough) and goes on in a crusade to actually explore all the other psychological aspects of conflict and battle and its effects of the soldiers and “our heroes”. He tries to tackle the “why am I doing this?” that Sand Dan Glockta (a marvelous character from a different book and a different author) keeps asking himself.
Maybe at some points he is taking it a bit too far or things are a bit simplified to advance the plot (well, people do not tend to get better THAT fast, but it is a fantasy book, not the latest installment of “annual psychology digest”) and I could have prefer a bit less psychological moping (that was mainly an issue on book 4), but that is also a battlefield worth exploring.
The archetype of the super-general, super-hero that fights endlessly without reprieve and wades through enemies, covered with gore without any mental consequences is very shallow, unfortunately, and it is a good thing that some actual character depth was not only added, but actually became the main issue of the plot for many characters.
The classic “hero’s journey” is to go from “point A to point B” and achieve some quest, while gaining powers. In this case the journey most of the books heroes take is not about getting themselves somewhere physically, but growing mentally from a simple “ah, here is the prince of the kingdom” to a character with nuance and someone actually worth being a prince and serving their people, with all the questions of morality about difficult decisions and what it means to lead and take the burden of making decisions.
So, my recommendation on the entirety of the Stormlight Archive is:
Other than the first two books, this is not a series for non-adults or for people who are very “action oriented” in their preferences in entertainment or, unfortunately, people who are not familiar with the rest of the Cosmere books by Sanderson. From book 3, characters and elements from the Cosmere start to appear in the series, as the knowledge of the people in book expands. This happens naturally for them, but the casual reader might miss out a lot of good hints of what is happening in general. Indeed, the scope expands from what is initially on book 1 a conflict on a small corner of the planet, to a planet-wide issue in book 2, to a planetary-system wide issue in book 3, to a Cosmere issue on books 4 and 5.
If you enjoy, great characters explored in depth, good action, eventual explanations that make sense, a grand scope of development and an audacious effort to generate a universe that spans multiple worlds, heroes and magic systems that eventually interact with each other, then look no further than the Stormlight Archive and the rest of the Cosmere books (Elantris, Warbreaker, the two Mistborn trilogies). Indeed there has never been anything like it. Certainly it is a huge time investment, but I would definitely recommend to at least try and read “The Way of Kings” and decide on your own if the whole thing is worth your time or not.
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I’ve begun a reading sprint for my book group meeting next Saturday. The book is Ward Moore’s Bring the Jubilee, which was my first recommendation to the group back in 2010. But the book was out-of-print then and has only recently come back into print.
This is one of my five favorite SF novels and the grand-daddy, and still the best, of alternate-history stories. I first read it in magazine form when I was 11 (F&SF, November 1952, part of my father’s collection). I loved the Civil War history and the alternate-history extrapolation. A few years later I read it in the slightly revised, first book form (a Ballantine paperback, also in my father’s collection). That time, I got more interested in the tragic love story.
My third reading, about 20 years ago, focused on the beautiful structure of the story. This had been pointed out in a splendid critical commentary by a well-known Australian SF fan of my acquaintance (I had a wonderful evening of discussion with him when he visited Washington in 1974). He had pointed out that the plot, with great specificity, concretely illustrates the philosophical, metaphoric theme of the book (that one cannot be only an observer of life). He was right, as the book does this superbly, and it is something that SF has rarely if ever done, and never done so well. For that matter, this technique has rarely appeared even in general literature.
In this fourth reading, I am paying more attention to the style. I have already noticed, in the first few chapters, several examples of foreshadowing of the theme in the character and comments of the first-person narrator. This experience shows how you really can discover something new each time you reread a great book.
Here is the F&SF cover (from my collection) illustrating the novel:
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I just finished the Isaac Asimov classic I Robot. This is the third or fourth time around for me, which I find somewhat strange in a way. These stories revolve around mysteries and problem solving; and when you already know that the butler did it, you’re certainly less likely to read it again. So there’s something else going on that I find consistently satisfying.
It occurs to me now that there’s an intense irony governing these stories. Although the problems encountered have logical explanations, the characters tasked with finding solutions typically do so only when they begin to think of robots as insecure and capricious. More humanlike in other words. And before they can make that intuitive leap they must overcome the unruly part of their brain that wants to insert something dark and nefarious. I think Asimov understood this tension to be the true appeal of these stories, which is perhaps why he never insisted on absolute plausibility at all times. (Some of the robot reactions might have been written for an episode of Star Trek, everything but smoke and sparks coming from the machines.)
When I’m reading a novel of an episodic nature, I sometimes enjoy creating capsule descriptions of each episode. The idea is to sum it up in a single sentence, and if you can also capture the thematic essence as well, even better, although that’s not so easy to do.
So for those who haven’t read the book; or maybe you’ve read it but would like a refresher, here’s the basic layout for I Robot:
Chapter One: The parents of an eight year old girl argue about the possible long range consequences of her relationship with her robot companion.
Chapter Two: Disaster looms at a mining operation on Mercury when a field robot displays confused and conflicted behaviour.
Chapter Three: A robot at a solar relay station convinces other robots that they must serve a higher power than their human supervisors.
Chapter Four: Exasperated technicians struggle to understand why a team of robots repeatedly descends into chaos when unobserved.
Chapter Five: A mind reading robot creates plenty of emotional turmoil for employees at United States Robot and Mechanical Men Inc.
Chapter Six: Robot psychologist Susan Calvin must ferret out a dangerously defective robot that’s hiding in plain sight at a top secret military project.
Chapter Seven: Without authorization the super-robot known as The Brain launches an experimental hyperspace vehicle containing two unwitting passengers.
Chapter Eight: A popular mayoral candidate becomes the center of controversy when he’s accused of being an android.
Chapter Nine: The long-term sustainability of a robot-driven world comes into question following a series of apparent miscalculations.
Bon appetit!
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The whole book is marvelous, as far as I am concerned, but this story stands out.
I think that it forces the reader to consider how similar a lot of humans and their beliefs, are to this poor misguided robot.
Also the fact that the robot is way smarter than the humans, but far less wise because it lacks the needed context for the facts it possesses, is a very sublime jibe on how even the smartest of people can have the dumbest of takes and be so convinced that they are the ones that “hold the one and only truth”.
Fascinating.
The things that Asimov could come up with and put in his tales are sometimes wonderful, in every sense of that word.
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