Summary: Warning to Present-Day Readers
Comment: I liked GEB, and found it to have been a great influence in my decision to pursue computer science as a career. Much of this later book is similarly good. However, the political commentary that is interwoven throughout the book, and there is much of it, has not aged well. Dr. Hofstadter was a proponent of the popular (at the time) "Nuclear Freeze" Movement. Dr. Hofstadter pauses the narrative of the text often to expound on his beliefs in nuclear disarmament, nuclear war, and his support for activists like Dr. Helen Caldicott. Not only is this (arguably) off-topic and distracting to the narrative, but it seems somewhat aged (and naive) in the context of later lessons of history. These diversions would hardly be more distracting, and anachronistic, if he stopped every few paragraphs to laud how wonderful a President that Jimmy Carter was (or Walter Mondale will be), and why we should all vote for him in the next election, or even what a great invention brown polyester Sans-a-Belt (TM) slacks are, and why we should all wear them.
For example, we now know that this "Freeze" movement was influenced by the KGB, both via funding (cash, in U.S. Dollars, for full-page advertisements in the New York Times was air-lifted from Moscow in diplomatic pouches), and with personnel (lots of so-called "grass roots" local freeze groups were unknowingly populated by "agent provocateurs" who were members of the KGB. By way of analogy, imagine an "Inflation Freeze" movement heavily (and secretly) funded by corporations to influence labor unions by propagandizing such a movement as a grass-roots labor agenda. Consider the outrage among organized labor in response to a movement that used fear-mongering over inflation, economic recession, and potential job loss to pressure labor into rolling over and unilaterally accepting wage freezes and other labor concessions. Such freezes and concessions would be expected by management to be accepted without discussion or negotiation, including trying to correct present injustices, looking at the company's books, or verifying the future financial condition of the company. Look up the name "Lemuel Boulware" and the company "General Electric" for an example of how to negotiate in bad faith (and yes, I'm aware of the ironic connection to Ronald Reagan, see below).
If a nuclear freeze was adopted without question or consideration, or without even a workable verification system, it would have frozen into place a very tenuous situation with Soviet SS-20's poised over Western Europe and with nothing to counter them (or if countered, a hair-trigger nuclear standoff). What happened was that Reagan and Gorbachev negotiated a workable, verifiable, and stabilizing disarmament treaty that pulled back the SS-20's (and the U.S. missiles in Western Europe) and established a framework for realistic future treaty verification (leading to the establishment of a joint flyover program known as "Open Skies"). It was ironic that a individual recruited by Lemuel Boulware as a spokesman for GE would find GE Boulwarism and bad-faith "take it or leave it" negotiating tactics used against the United States by the Soviet Union. President Reagan's response, to approach from a position of mutual strength and dignity, and assure mutually-agreeable and verifiable terms, was almost pure anti-Boulwarism.
Very few people discuss, let alone advocate, a "Nuclear Freeze" today because the lessons of history have shown such a movement to be naive, tantamount to unilateral disarmament, driven mostly by emotion and FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt), infiltrated by foreign influences not in our best interests, intended by our adversaries as bad-faith negotiations, and substantially overcome by later events.
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Summary: When Martin Gardner needed a replacement . . .
Comment: In the days before Scientific American changed its focus, Martin Gardner wrote the long running "Mathematical Games" column. When he decided to move on to other projects, Douglas Hofstadter was asked to carry on in his place.
Hofstadter was up to the task and in an homage to his predecessor and in keeping with his unique vision, he promptly changed the title of the column from "Mathematical Games" to the anagram of "Mathematical Games": Metamagical Themas.
For the short time the column ran, it was my personal favorite.
Minds with the grasp of language, music, mathematics and humor are rare things. Hofstadter's work here is as crystalline in its beauty as it is fiendish in its play.
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Summary: Hofstadter's approachable collection
Comment: When I was in high school I discovered the joys of reading Martin Gardner's "Mathematical Games" column in Scientific American. After a few years of pleasure he was replaced by someone else who (among other things) wrote on the joys of Rubik's cube and I found myself wasting weeks of time and filling notebooks with my quest to explore and solve the cube.
That columnist was Douglas Hofstadter, who brought the same skill at sharing his enthusiam for his topic that created the amazing, mind shattering 'Godel, Escher, Bach'. His column, that occupied the same place as "Mathemetical Games", was called "Metamagical Themas" (looking closely at those two names will tell you a lot about Douglas Hofstadter) and lasted for 13 issues.
This book is a compilation of those columns, each with a new endnote by Hofstadter and some letters received by the magazine and his reply.
Together they cover a large range of topics while keeping to the central concerns of most of Hofstadter's work; consciousness, patterns, music, language and computer systems.
The combination works superbly. This volume is much more easily approached than 'Godel, Escher, Bach' while raising similar questions in the mind of the reader. For those that have read the earlier work there is not just the joy of more of Hofstadter's writing on diverse topics but the sheer pleasure of discovering another dialogue involving Achilles and the Tortoise.
I find it hard to define the set of people who would enjoy this book, but it would be a large and varied one.
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Summary: Cute, but lacking deep thought
Comment: Although relating many topics such as government, society, metaphysics, artificial intelligence, and other topics, this book (to me at least) fails to comment on any real deep philosphy. Upon the discussion of artificial intelligence, Hofstadter completely ignores the notion of emotion in AI, and ignores more specifically the emotions of greed and lust, that drives many people (such is the reason why if AI were to exist, man-kind would cease to exist.)He also fails to mention the notions of religion, and its implications to self-reference. In his discussion for Tit-For-Tat, Hofstadter also fails to mention that Tit-For-Tat is perhaps the most unrealistic scenerio in life, since many game winning algorithms exist. In essence, it is a thought provoker, but in the sense that it would be compared to a good crossword puzzle, while a real philosphy text would be paralled to solving a tough mathematical proof.
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Summary: One of those books
Comment: This is one of those books (like GEB) that you could own for a lifetime and refer to at random and always learn a new tidbit or be taken on a new tangent. A book that feels like being in someone elses mind (again like GEB). Excellent and worthwhile. I give it four (instead of five) stars only because the truly great books take you into someone else's mind and leave you thinking it was your own...