Six hundred years old and not a trace of rust, yet sharp enough still to shave by. Ockham’s razor, that is, as deftly plied by the former CBC journalist Wade Rowland in his book of the same name. If you don’t know about William of Ockham (c. 1285-1345), the English Franciscan theologian, you’ll want to know that his razor was a product of his philosophy, not his shaving kit. His technique – his logical razor – demanded that an argument be stripped down to the very bone. For Ockham, only facts apprehended first-hand, by the senses, were real.

Reality, if you follow that, could neither be deduced nor calculated, not by scientific means, not by any kind of technology – reality could only be experienced. In saying so and more – in exploring the separation between theology and philosophy, for instance – Ockham was playing with the big boys, contradicting Plato, building on the metaphysics of Aquinas. And, indeed, paving the way for Rowland who, in his own way, is just as eager to get in on the game. Unlike his philosophical forebears he may not be in on it 600 years hence, but that doesn’t mean he’s not a wise and passionate commentator on our times. And our times is exactly what Ockham’s Razor is about. Bold and incisive, full of smarts, wit, and self-awareness, it’s an erudite and entertaining inquiry into nothing less than what is in the modern, millennial world and what should be.

It’s a book that’s soaring with ideas and arguments, but it’s grounded in the comings and goings, the sightings and seeings, of a family vacation. In the summer of 1997, Rowland, the author of a popular history of communications technologies, Spirit of the Web (1997), went to France with his wife, Chris, and their two teenaged children. To vacation is to vacate: your home, your routines, your life. But it’s also to occupy, elsewhere: another country, other people’s history, a new (if only temporary) life of hotels, unfamiliar currency, and constant discovery.

Rowland’s occupations in France are multifold: he wants to eat well, relax, look at some architecture; he wants to jar his children out of the shallows of their TV-fed North American reality before it’s too late; he wants, maybe most important of all, to determine for himself whether the materialist and information-overloaded world we live in has any room for the unprofitable likes of poetry and values.

He gets plenty of help in his inquiring: France gamely offers up its history, art, cuisine; Chris and the kids play the parts of dialectical foils. Nothing is beneath his scrutiny; he’s a mental force field beaming in new questions and lessons on every hand. CNN is just as likely to interest him as Buddhism; a procession of ants may have as much to tell as the medieval world of the Cathars, Joan of Arc, Gödel, Einstein, and/or Descartes.

All of the reality Rowland experiences – along with the fiction with which he admits to tempering it – goes into the logical scaffolding he’s meticulously erecting. By the end, it’s an impressively – even dizzyingly – graceful structure in its own right. From the top, it also affords the vantage to see that there’s hope for us yet in this materialist mess we’ve made for ourselves. A friend of Rowland’s notes at one point that in the Old Testament, wisdom and salvation were the same thing. Ockham’s Razor says so, too, and Rowland is so exuberant and engaging in the saying, so sensible, you have to think he’s right.

Like Wade Rowland, Satya Das is a guy who believes in going out into the world and taking hold of reality for himself.

Born in Calcutta, Das came to Canada with his family in 1970. As a foreign affairs writer for The Edmonton Journal, Das has made it his business to figure out the ways in which the world works, not only for his own personal use, but for the uses of others, his readers. Dispatches from a Borderless World, his collection of columns and essays first published in The Edmonton Journal, makes clear just how far afield he’s wandered gathering these “images of people, countries, societies at given moments in time.” Mostly he’s filing from Edmonton; he also gets to the Ukraine, Indonesia, and England.

The idea behind collecting all these disparate pieces in one place, Das suggests, is that they’ll coalesce into a portrait of the new, borderless world order, where people and cultures mingle and mix more freely than ever before.

Trouble is, Dispatches never feels like it is amounting to more than the sum of its parts. Extracted from the pages of daily newsprint, those parts were made for the moment. Newspapers, they say, are history on the run, but newspapers are also written to the din of approaching deadlines, the cram of space restrictions, and they’re not known, specially, for long views, sobered second thoughts, or depth. Newspaper opinions, like newspapers themselves, tend to yellow and stale.

It doesn’t help that Das favours broad, flabby statements – “some people seem unable to separate Quebec from its political leaders” – more often than telling personal anecdotes. Sometimes he just plain runs out of words, as in his reference to the rock garden of the Canadian embassy in Tokyo: “it’s a sense of majesty that is better experienced than described.”

Das, as advertised, looks outward to the world; he also looks around, to celebrate Canada and Canadians. Hear, hear. And yet Das’s dispatches from home are all too simplistic, stuck on the surface. Writing of a friend who left French wine country to live in Alberta, he marvels that this man was “living in the landscape tourists pay thousands of dollars to enjoy, yet he chose to immigrate to Alberta.” Uh-huh. If the structure of Wade Rowland’s examined life towers high into the air, Satya Das somehow only manages to show us the few foreshortened feet directly in front of him.