I read this book while a student in Miller's semi-infamous class "Blood Feuds" at the University of Michigan Law School. I went into the class thinking that it would be interesting and fun, but that I wouldn't learn much from it, since I already had such an extensive familiarity with the Icelandic sagas: as an undergraduate I had translated some of them from Old Norse to English, and I had read most of the rest of them several times over in English translation.

Yes, it was interesting and yes, it was fun, but man! were my eyes opened as to how much I had to learn about the sagas and about the culture within which they were written.

There are two main reasons to read this book. First, to learn history. The history of ninth to fourteenth century Iceland is incredible, and the culture fascinating. Theirs was a culture that knew no central or even local government, no law enforcement infrastructure, and no arms control. And yet the Icelanders developed a complex system of law, essentially codifying the blood feud (which tradition still governs dispute resolution in places like Afghanistan and rural Macedonia), according to which civil injustice could be roughly corrected. Their example has much to teach us about human nature unadulterated by the State.

Second, Bloodtaking is an unparalleled gateway into the sagas as literature. Despite my intimate familiarity with every line of, for example, Hrafnkel's saga, until I read Miller's book I had only the most inadequate appreciation for how tightly it is constructed, how elegantly and efficiently it was drafted. The sagas are only vaguely comparable to the very best English-language short stories; the skill that went into them is comparable to that of a Dante or a Shakespeare.

A modern reader is not culturally prepared to receive the sagas as they would have been by a medieval Icelander. Miller's book provides the small set of cultural factoids that create relevance where otherwise detail might seem pointless or obscure, and reveals the saga-writers' penchant for humorous understatement and emphasis by ellipse. Armed with a relatively small set of cultural facts and with an eye for a small set of saga tropes, the reader has access to a whole new literary world.

Whatever your bent, Bloodtaking makes for fascinating reading.

I had the privilege of studying the dynamics of the blood feud culture under Professor Miller. After the class I began reading some of his literature.
Miller's combination of historiography, psychological and philosophical analysis, and literary criticism results in an extremely perceptive look at emotions and impulses people would rather not admit to having. His frank but non-judgmental evaluation of his own actions and those of the people around him contribute greatly to the reader's understanding of shame and humiliation. His view of the world of gift-giving, both positive and negative, is a perfect explanation for much of human behavior and motivation.
A must-read for anyone who has ever inflicted humiliation on another, or had it inflicted on oneself, or for anyone interested in learning why human beings behave the way they do.

The unique genius of Professor Miller's work lies not in his ability to give new information to the reader. Indeed, most of his observations are instantly recognized by any perceptive reader as being things he or she already knew about the world. The genius of The Anatomy of Disgust, as with his other works, is his ability to recognize fundamental truths that most people never think about at all, or would prefer not to, and to organize these truths into a coherent system by which human behavior can be analyze and understood.
I strongly recommend this book!

One more "I loved it!" review? Yes, and here's goes. Mr. Miller does a marvelous job, writing in laid back but eminently readable prose that is also judiciously scholarly, describing, explaining, or just tossing up speculations about a culturally modified body of reaction that provokes the "Ee~oo,gross!". The subject has been handled before, obviously, judging by all the references he makes to the various studies, some recondite, some classic, including Mary Douglas' and Freud's. The book reads like an intimate seminar, with the author citing immediate examples from his own life, and casually but appropriately pointing out things done by his own children. Miller makes it clear from the get go that his study is necessarily restricted to the study of the phenomenon as shaped and defined by the culture and class to which he belongs: WASP with a roundedly informed grasp of his own tradition and values. In that sense, the book makes no claim to be universal, a disclaimer that stands out as an act of virtue in contrast to much of disgustingly pompous academic sweepers out there. Nonetheless, the author does manage to bowl pretty well, getting a strike here and there in terms of observation concerning the qualities that, for all practical purposes, are universally recognized to be those of the disgusting. I use the term 'universal' as it applies today, what with globalization and all. Yes, coprophagy (eating of feces) is indulged in by some for thrills, but I doubt anyone practices drooling saliva into a cup and then drinking it back up. The author suggests that it may not be too much to credit the invisible structure of human social evolution to the distancing of two points, YUCK and YUM. The culturo-environmental determination of the length between those two points may very well contain much of what it takes to delimit a culture's potential for art, science, and language as well. The book contains what everyone already knows (too well!) but never bothered to articulate for him/herself. There is much here to delight the inner pre-pubescent in us all, but it is a serious book, nevertheless. After all, in the grown-up world, it is not the gooey, slimy stuff so much as the ethical defect in the form of gooey, slimy character and corresponding actions that make us think,"EE~oo! Gross!" A nice companion to Sloterdijk's The Critique of Cynical Reason.

I can think of no greater praise to confer upon such a wonderfully erudite, wryly penetrating, and rigorously eloquent book than that Nietzsche's approval of it as a genuine contribution to the genealogy of morality can be readily imagined. Indeed, like his previous, and comparably trenchant, work, "Humiliation," his "Anatomy" deploys etymology, anthropology, social- and individual psychology, history, and inspired scrutiny of 'heroic' literature in order to, as Nietzsche characterized the task in 1887, "decipher" from "what has been documented, what is really ascertainable, what has really existed... the whole long hieroglyphic text... of humanity's moral past."

Once upon a time, there was such a thing as courage. It was at the center of all our stories. Now there are no more stories worth telling and all human beings are weak. At least we still have the stories and this book has some great ones, and true. For example, there's the one about the American GI on the Italian front who "charged" an enemy position on one knee and the stump of his other leg, shot off at the knee.

I had the privilege of studying the dynamics of the blood feud culture under Professor Miller. After the class I began reading some of his literature. Miller's historiography and use of primary sources is gripping, and his frank admiration and identification with honor cultures of the past is refreshing in this time of stifling political correctness.
Professor Miller has an extremely rare gift: He sees both himself and others as they really are. His self-examination is as important to his work as his historical analysis and philosophical musings. If you are honest with yourself you will recognize many aspects of your own psyche from Miller's writings.
"The Mystery of Courage" can tell you more about yourself than a thousand psychotherapists. This is a must read- you will never think of honor, bravery, fear, life or death the same way again.

This is a scholarly work that gives real insight into the nature of courage. It's very well-written. The book draws on soldier's stories from ancient Greece to Vietnam and shows how the concerns about measuring up "when the chips are down" have not changed much despite the passage of thousands of years.

What do I like about the Difference Engine? It's absolutely, beyond a shadow of a doubt, what the world of the Victorian era would have been like had mechanical computers been perfected in the early 1800s. The detail of the world is wonderful, from the kinescopes (similar to movie or slide projectors) to the pollution, the politics and the stark differences between our own history and what might have been.

What don't I like? Well, there isn't much of a plot. The most involved plot occurs where the book follows Mallory, and through those portions the book is somewhat enjoyable, but it never really gets to the meat. Why are these boxes of punch cards so important? Who wants them and why? What happened to the other elements of the story that got left behind?

The book gets lost along the way, and never really fully recovers. The end comes almost abruptly, just a few incidents that are supposed to wrap things up, but don't. At the very end, absolutely nothing makes sense, and I even reread the end several times to be sure of that; it reminds me a lot of when I watched the end of 2001 (the movie) for the first time, and didn't understand that either--and yet this was worse, for somehow I got the feeling that I was supposed to know what was happening and yet key pieces of the puzzle had been overlooked by the authors. (I suspect this was more Sterling's doing than Gibson's.)

As a curiosity, a look at what might have been, this book merits some attention. As a novel, it's just not so hot, though it has its moments.

It was such a great premise for a book-- what if the Babbage had realized his analytical engine and successfully created computer much earlier in our history? It was also encouraging that two of my favorite writers were involved. Unfortunately, _The Difference Engine_ never really delivers on its astounding amount of promise and the resulting book, while readable, doesn't hold together terribly well.

Three sets of very different characters' lives intersect when they all come in contact with a mysterious box of punch cards. Mix in an alternative history, lady Ada Babbage (with echos of Moorcock's Gloriana), and a staggering richness of detail and you have the book itself.

Unfortunately, it often felt like a huge amount of talent in search of a plot. The detailing was perfect, the characters were great, but the story just never came together.

Too bad.

Curious Steampunk foray, based on the wonderful premise that Charles Babbage's mechanical computer actually achieved practicality. As a consequence, the information age arrives concurrently with the industrial revolution. The plot consists of three vignettes that track the chain of custody of a case of valuable computer punch cards. The middle narrative dominates, and it's central character, Thomas Mallory, is the only character that achieves any depth, though Lawrence Oliphant is an intriguing historical figure. The story, it turns out, is narrated by Difference Engine itself, iterating the story of how it came to achieve self-consciousness. I liked the 19th century slang and historical detail. The alternative history touches require some knowledge of 19th century history and people; most are quite subtle and amusing. Not much by way of emotional payoff, though. Makes me want to read The Anubis Gates and Homonculus.