Magic Book

Every so often, I run across a book that is so good that before I am halfway through, I am already mourning the fact that it must eventually end. This is one such book.

The first half is devoted to short stories, and they are some of his most amusing, the "George and Azazel" collection, an excellent homage to the works of tongue-in-cheek masters such as P.G. Wodehouse and Jerome K. Jerome. The second half comprises nonfiction, with essays drawn from his various editorial columns. It is unnerving how many of his commentaries on politics, race, education, and society generally are relevant today, at least two decades after they were written.

This is Asimov at his best (although, really, when isn't he?): witty, enthusiastic, insightful, intelligent (even as he debates the definition and relevance of intelligence), and outspoken. I am terribly sad that I never got to meet the guy.

Quotes:

"What characterizes the value of science, however, is /not/ the particular conclusions it comes to. Those are sharply limited in number and guesswork will get you the 'right' answer with better odds than you'll find at the racetrack.
"What characterizes the value of science is its /methodology/, the system it uses to arrive at those conclusions...
"Scientists... begin with observations and measurements and deduce or induce their conclusions from that. They do so in the open and nothing is accepted unless the observation and measurement can be repeated independently. Even then the acceptance is only tentative, pending further, better, and and more extensive observations and measurements. The result is that despite controversy in the preliminary findings, a consensus is arrived at eventually." p238-9, in "The Right Answer"

"No one wants to search out superiors to one's self-- only inferiors." p256, in "Knock Plastic!"

"The whole world over, there are confrontations between sections of humanity defined by race, nationality, economic philosophy, religion, or language as belonging to different groups, so that one is not "neighbor" [in the Biblical "love they neighbor" sense] to the other.
"These more or less arbitrary differences among peoples who are members of a single biological species are terribly dangerous and nowhere more so than here in the United States where the most perilous confrontation (I need not tell you) is between white and black." p270-1, "Lost in Non-translation"

I'd like to quote almost the entirety of "Thinking about Thinking" too, but let's see if I can pick just the best bits:
"What, after all, does such an intelligence test measure but those skills that are associated with intelligence by the individuals designing the test? And those individuals are subject to the cultural pressures and prejudices that force a subjective definition of intelligence." p 295

"This is similarly true of tests of mathematical knowledge, of logic, of shape visualization, and all the rest. You are tested in what is culturally fashionable-- in what educated men consider to be the criteria of intelligence-- i.e., minds like their own." p295

"The whole thing is a self-perpetuating device. Men in intellectual control of a dominating section of society define themselves as intelligent, then design tests that are a series of clever little doors that can let through only minds like their own..." p295

In response to a study showing Black students to have lower IQs: "What we are saying is that black culture is substantially different from the dominant White subculture and that the Black values are sufficiently different from dominant white values to make blacks do less well on the carefully designed intelligence tests produced by the whites." p297