Skip to main content

Casino Royale by Ian Fleming

When I heard there was a coming bowdlerization of Ian Fleming's works, that our cultural overlords decided James Bond needed to be sanitized[1] for the dainty modern reader, I decided I'd better read some of these novels for myself before they got butchered.

Casino Royale is the first in the series, and it's well-told. The story is laid out at first indirectly, via intelligence reports and flashbacks; then when the action picks up, the author tells the story in real time. The book is better in some ways than the movie(s), not least because the written James Bond is a more credible character than the movie version[2]. Rather than the Mary Sue we know from the movies, here Bond is believably human: beset by doubts, uncertainties, even unease.

There's one silly deus ex machina event in the story, but it's made up for by an unexpected twist ending. All in all a readable, solidly three-out-of-five stars book. It won't change your life but it passes the time. 


[1] Yes, it's true, sadly. The institution that owns the rights to Fleming's work employed "sensitivity readers" to look through and remove anything "offensive."

[2] Unfortunately the movies have permanently altered my internal narrator: my brain plays Sean Connery's voice in my head for all of Bond's dialog. A similar thing happened to me when reading Arnold Schwarzenegger's (unexpectedly interesting) autobiography!

More Posts

The Stress of Life by Hans Selye

Gives a useful set of lenses for how to think about stress in all its forms and manifestations. The bulk of the book deals with stress in medical biology and human physiology, but there are applications beyond our bodies, to our lives, communities, even among civilizations. A very interesting work.  The chapter "When Scientists Disagree" by itself makes this entire book worth reading. It is an eloquent articulation of the nature of scientific debate (including implications of when scientific debate turns insulting and hostile), and the author quite humbly provides the reader *all* of the professional disagreements and contentions with his model of stress. This part of the book really sings out with humility, sincerity and a scientific rigor we seem to have lost in the postmodern era. Notes:  * General adaptation syndrome (G.A.S.): how we adapt to stressors: various shock therapies across history (fever treatments, electric shock, etc) provided improvement with no direct r...

Stress Without Distress by Hans Selye

A short book distilling Hans Selye's groundbreaking technical work The Stress of Life  into practical principles for handling daily life. Articulates a basic philosophy that can be boiled down to "earn thy neighbor's love." Selye calls this "altruistic egotism" and argues that satisfaction in life can be achieved by seeking genuinely satisfying work, earning the goodwill and gratitude of others through that work, and by living with a philosophy of gratitude. Not his finest book, but it is interesting and useful to hear the values and prescriptive statements of one of biology's most eminent scientists. The ideas in this book are not original--the author candidly admits as much--but offer helpful guideposts for how to live. Notes: 1) The first chapter is essentially a layperson's summary of Selye's main work The Stress of Life , defining key terms, what he means (in biological terms) when he talks about stress, describing the evolution of the stres...

Broken Money by Lyn Alden

Our money is broken, and the sooner we wrap our minds around the implications, the better. In Broken Money, Lyn Alden, a lucid writer and gifted teacher, offers a highly readable grand tour of monetary history: she explains the emergence of money, what makes a good or bad money, how money gradually became more and more "abstracted" away from gold, and how the modern fiat financial system evolved. Most importantly, she explains, clearly, how inflation, purposely designed into the modern system, is used as a wealth extraction tool: "...the financial system in its current form is designed in such a way that 1) the money supply continually inflates, 2) purchasing power is gradually siphoned away from savers and toward arbitrageurs who sit near the source of money creation, 3) the system rewards large and well connected entities at the cost of small and poorly connected entities, 4) liabilities gradually shift from the private sector to the public sector to keep the system f...