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| 0349100136
| 9780349100135
| 0349100136
| 4.55
| 21,402
| 1987
| 1987
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None
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Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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not set
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Mar 06, 2024
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Paperback
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| 0451464400
| 9780451464408
| 0451464400
| 4.47
| 103,836
| Nov 27, 2012
| Nov 27, 2012
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liked it
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Hells Bells count: 35 Sometimes I wonder how much Jim Butcher had planned in advance. I mean, this is book number fourteen of a series that's been goin Hells Bells count: 35 Sometimes I wonder how much Jim Butcher had planned in advance. I mean, this is book number fourteen of a series that's been going for twelve years. Whether he's got a giant, intricate plot map pinned up along the walls of his writing office or he's making things up as they go along, I'm impressed. As we get further into the exciting life and times of Harry Dresden, one thing that is clear is that the series has always been moving in a very clear direction, and that the things that came before are what inform the things that come later. Jim Butcher is not a wasteful author, and that gives him the ability to do a lot of really impressive things. As we open this story, Harry Dresden is no longer dead. He was, sort of, and had all kinds of grand fun as a ghost, but now he's alive and it's time for him to start paying off the debts that he incurred in the process of dying. The first of these debts is to Mab, the great and terrible queen of the Winter Faerie. Many, many books ago, Mab offered Harry the position of the Winter Knight - a mortal who would be the strong arm of the queen. He would be her sword, to strike where she pointed. Harry refused until he could refuse no longer, taking on that mantle in exchange for the power that would allow him to rid the world of the Red Court of vampires. And as much fun as vampire genocide is, that's not really his job anymore. Now that he's alive again and under no other obligations, Mab has a purpose for him. At its face, it is a terrible purpose, one that makes no sense and yet which Harry is obligated to fulfill. On the other hand, there is Demonreach. Mab's partner in keeping Harry Dresden's body... let's say viable while he was away as a ghost, Demonreach is the spirit of an island in the middle of Lake Michigan. This island isn't on any maps, and it's devilishly hard to find, but it represents a huge well of magical and spiritual power. This island needs Harry Dresden in order to do its duty. Demonreach is not just an obscure Brigadoon that enjoys hiding from the eyes of the unworthy - it is a guardian against powers that would ravage the world. If it is going to maintain its control and keep the peace, it needs Harry Dresden. While all this is going on, we learn of a new force that is at play in the world. This is rather in keeping with the way the Dresden Files books have worked thus far. Every so often, our point of view is changed, and our field of vision is expanded. Way back in Storm Front, Harry Dresden was a small-time wizard investigator, not well-loved in the wizarding community but good at what he did, and that was pretty much all we saw. As the series progressed, we discovered more about the White Council of Wizards, the three Courts of Vampires, about the ever-feuding faerie realms of Winter and Summer. We went on to discover angels and demons and things that walked between them, ghosts and goblins and creatures that were just barely understandable by our mortal minds. Now we take another step back, out beyond the borders of our reality as we know it. Outside our universe, there are... things. And those things want in. Why they want in is not really understood. Maybe this universe is more hospitable, maybe they're just bored. All we know is that to let them in is to let reality as we know it die. That's bad enough, but what is worse is the knowledge that some of them are already here. They've snuck under the walls, so to speak, and are carefully and busily undermining our defenses. In a game that is so intricate and dangerous, these things use great powers as pawns - including Harry Dresden - and look forward to their inevitable victory. As with so many of the other Dresden Files books, this is a solid read, and you'll fly right through it. Despite being vast in scope, encompassing the fate of the world as we know it, the book is still very personal, letting us follow Harry along the strange, winding path he has to walk whether he likes it or not. Harry has always been a dangerous guy to know, but now that he's the Winter Knight, that danger is even greater. There are forces arrayed against him that he wouldn't be able to understand even if he knew what they were, and simply being the Winter Knight is a challenge unto itself. Taking up that position doesn't just come with awesome new powers and a direct line to some of the most powerful creatures in creation 鈥� not without a price. There are obligations as well. Rules and requirements. And, of course, dangers. When he's done, he'll have more answers, and he'll have more problems. Whatever comes next, we can be sure it will be even bigger and scarier than what has come before, and it'll be a treat to see how he manages to beat it. ------ "I kept a straight face while my inner Neanderthal spluttered and then went on a mental rampage through a hypothetical produce section, knocking over shelves and spattering fruit everywhere in sheer frustration, screaming, 'JUST TELL ME WHOSE SKULL TO CRACK WITH MY CLUB, DAMMIT!'" - Harry Dresden ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Dec 2012
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Dec 01, 2012
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Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 030788788X
| 9780307887887
| 030788788X
| 3.86
| 4,354
| Jan 01, 2012
| Sep 11, 2012
|
really liked it
|
If you're my age [1], the first thing you think about when you hear Tony Danza's name is the show Who's The Boss? Honestly, I remember nearly nothing
If you're my age [1], the first thing you think about when you hear Tony Danza's name is the show Who's The Boss? Honestly, I remember nearly nothing about that show except that it was set in Connecticut (which I only remember because that's where I was living when it was on) and that Danza played some kind of live-in... servant? Housekeeper? For a divorced career woman? Hold on, let me check Wikipedia to see if I even got that much right. I did? Oh, good. Anyway, Danza kind of slipped out of my cultural viewfinder for a long while, so I was surprised to hear that he had not only written a book, but had done a stint as a teacher in a Philadelphia high school. Being a teacher myself, I was interested to see what his impressions were. He was, after all, coming to it from a very different background than most teachers, and with a different set of perspectives. On top of that, he had been convinced to do it as part of an A&E reality show - something I certainly don't approve of. Not just because the business of running a reality show would interfere with the class, or because they take work away from actors like my brother [2], but because I think reality shows are a scourge upon modern television. After going through training and orientation, Danza was put in charge of a double-period English class in Northeast High School in Philadelphia. It's a huge public school - about 3,600 students - and is made up of kids from radically diverse backgrounds. Some kids were motivated and hard-working, others saw school as an imposition on their lives. Some kids had stable, supportive families, some kids were being bounced from foster home to foster home. To say that Danza had his work cut out for him would be an understatement. He not only had to find ways to engage the students (a buzz-phrase that he - and every other teacher - would come to resent at some level) and make sure they were all committed to their education, but also handle the byzantine bureaucracy that comes with running a school, the politics of the teachers' office, union issues, getting parents involved, and negotiating the complex moods and interrelationships of hundreds of teenagers. He very quickly learned that being a teacher not only involves a significant investment of time and energy, but also of emotion. Reading through the book, there were a lot of moments where I nodded in complete understanding. Like Danza, I teach literature in a couple of my classes. He was working on making Of Mice and Men and To Kill a Mockingbird relatable to his students through constant activities and lecture sessions. I do the same with the books I teach. I might have the kids work on a timeline, or produce a short skit based on the story. They might make a poster or even a movie, if we have the time and the ideas for it. He often runs afoul of the basic principles of being a teacher in such a large community. For example, there's a section where he takes the students on a field trip to Washington D.C. It's a wonderful excursion and the kids have a great time, but when he returns he gets a wrist-slapping because he hadn't notified any of the kids' other teachers that they would be gone. As far as the rest of the school was concerned, the kids had skipped class. Danza's response was, "Well, I just assumed..." And that's where I felt very close kinship with him. One of the things I learned very, very fast when I started this job was to assume nothing. And that's hard to do, because the school assumes everything. In another section, the school is practicing for the big achievement tests that will basically determine the school's status as a failing or a successful school. During one of the tests he's proctoring, Danza goes out to get more calculators, and is immediately ripped into by the teacher who's running the test. This teacher says that if it had been the real test, Danza's carelessness could have invalidated the whole thing, costing the school time and money, and running the risk of making it a "Renaissance School" (a nice euphemism for a school that's failing so hard it has to be gutted and re-staffed from top to bottom.) My first thought when I read that was that the teacher in charge clearly didn't communicate the testing protocols clearly enough - he just assumed every teacher would know what to do. I think a large reason for this is because of the incredible investment in mental and emotional energy that every teacher must make if they're going to do their jobs properly. As human beings with puny human meat brains, there are only so many things we can keep track of at any given time, and for most teachers their students occupy the largest chunk of that attention. When you're thinking about a hundred kids or more, invested in the success or failure of each and every one of them, remembering who does and who doesn't know about some administrative detail is pretty far down on your list of things to care about. Near the end of the book, when Danza was asked if he would be interested in coming back the next year, he said, "At my age, I'm not sure I want to care this much about anything." And the teacher he's talking to just smiles and says, "That's what it takes." And it's true, that is what it takes. No one else would do it otherwise. Throughout the book, Danza looks at the reality of his colleagues' lives and compares it to the public perception of teachers in the media of the day. The fact is that teachers are in incredible positions of responsibility, yet they don't gain nearly as much respect and admiration (and money) as they deserve. When the students succeed, people praise their parents and their homes. When they fail, they blame the teachers, or call them "glorified babysitters." Programs like No Child Left Behind added to the already unbearable burdens of teachers by creating the constant threat of unemployment should the schools not pass a set of standardized tests that may or may not have anything to do with what the kids are already learning. I could go on, but I won't, since I have another blog where I bitch and moan about things that make me angry. What I will leave with is this - Danza did this as part of a reality show, one that was just as massaged, ordered, and manipulated as any other, though perhaps a little less than most. He was luckier than most at Northeast - only two classes a day instead of five, and he got the room with air conditioning, thanks to the influence of his network. His kids were chosen for the class, and he did the job without the threat of his career being brought to an ignominious end by some bureaucratic federal process. His experience was in no way representative of the other teachers at Northeast High or in fact many other teachers around the world. All that said, however, it is clear on every page of this book that he cared deeply about the kids in his class and their progress. He cared about how the school worked, about how the other teachers viewed him, and about how the parents were - or were not - involved in their children's lives. He almost immediately identifies and begins to struggle with one of the hardest problems in teaching - how to make the kids understand that they must be invested in their education. As easy as it is to tell a teacher that he or she must "engage the students," it is just as important that the students engage themselves. Throughout the book, Danza looks for ways to do this, and it's a constant theme. I finished the book with no doubt in my mind that Danza did the project in good faith and with full devotion to duty, just as any other first-year teacher would have done. He struggled and triumphed just as any teacher would do, and his sincerity comes across on every page. The title, too, resonated with me immediately, since that's exactly what I thought when I started teaching. On top of all that, he cries almost constantly, something I've never done in my career, so he's one up on me. It's a fast read, and very familiar to anyone who's become a teacher or knows a teacher, no matter where you are. Plus, there are a ton of ideas to steal, which is a tradition amongst teachers around the world, so I'm grateful for that. ------ "Teachers and students need help, not accusations and pay cuts. They need to be a national priority, not an experiment stuck into a late time slot and then canceled for underperforming." - Tony Danza, I'd Like to Apologize to Every Teacher I Ever Had ---- [1] ThirtyCOUGHCOUGHCOUGH [2] What, me? Oversensitive? Never... ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Sep 20, 2012
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Sep 29, 2012
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Kindle Edition
| ||||||||||||||
| 0345534417
| 9780345534415
| 0345534417
| 3.61
| 13,617
| Jul 01, 2012
| Jul 10, 2012
|
liked it
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I'll bet you never thought you would see an intergalactic alien thriller that all centered on the intricacies of copyright law, did you? Well, if that
I'll bet you never thought you would see an intergalactic alien thriller that all centered on the intricacies of copyright law, did you? Well, if that's what you've been waiting for, then this is the book you want to read. The universe, as it turns out, is well-populated with other civilizations. Some of them are nearly human in appearance, others are so radically unlike us that they're hard to imagine, much less talk to. Giant snails, two-dimensional beings, foul-mouthed parrots and bio-machine intelligences - all of these and more make up the Refined League, the greatest political entity in the universe. In order to become part of the League, your civilization has to first prove that it can overcome the violent urges that lead so many intelligent cultures to self-extinction. Once it has done that, the League provides it with technology so advanced that it may as well be magic, allowing the new members to completely solve their technological problems and instead focus their energies on creative and cultural works. And that is where the League shines brightly. Their artistic sense is so far beyond ours that were we to see it in its full flower our brains would likely shut down from the beauty. Their art and architecture, cinema and drama, fashion, food - hell, their calligraphy and paper-making are works of art that make our great masters look like toddlers drawing stick figures in the mud. In nearly all respects, the Refined League outclasses humanity. Except, as it turns out, for music. Thanks to some twist in our evolution, we are the only civilization capable of creating truly great music. Indeed, the first music heard by an alien culture - the closing credits song to "Welcome Back, Kotter" - was so amazing and so powerful that countless individuals died from ecstasy overload. As the universe turned its ears towards Earth, they discovered what they had been missing all along, and were soon tapping into our radio and TV broadcasts to get copies of the greatest music ever made. The discovery of Earth's music was so pivotal to the cultural history of the universe, that the League reset their calendars to reflect it, thus making October 13, 1977 the beginning of Year Zero. For decades, Earth music was recorded and copied and passed along. And while it did still occasionally kill people with its beauty and glory, those who survived cherished the gift we were unknowingly giving to them. While we were not yet prepared to join the League, we were the center of the universe. Until the law got involved. The central governing principle of the League is that indigenous laws must be respected, no matter what. It wasn't until our songs had been copied over hundreds of millions of times that the League discovered the incredibly draconian and torturous copyright laws that govern music on our planet, and the heavy fines that are imposed for piracy. Under U.S. copyright law alone, it turns out, the universe owes us money. All the money. Two of the universe's biggest stars break through the barrier that's supposed to protect our planet and approach Nick Carter - not a Backstreet Boy, but a young attorney specializing in copyright law - to try and find a way to fix this little problem. But they're not the only ones looking to find a way out of the mess the League has gotten itself into. Members of an entertainer's union - now pretty much defunct since Earth music took everything over - would rather see us gone entirely, so they're prepared to make sure we find a way to destroy ourselves before any kind of arrangement can be reached. Nick, along with the universally-admired celebrities Carly and Frampton, are in a race against a violent alien parrot and an angry vacuum cleaner to save the Earth and the Refined League both, along with keeping the music coming. It's a very fast read - I went through it in a day - and is built on a very entertaining premise, one which undermines a lot of what we've come to expect from first contact stories. The author's experience in the online music industry no doubt gave him a lot of material to work from, and he made it into a fun race against the clock. Part of the reason I bought the book was its premise - we're all so used to seeing stories about how wonderful aliens are compared to ourselves, and it's nice to see it subverted in a clever and interesting way. It was also a clear and repeated stab at the way we handle creative property rights in the United States - indeed in most countries around the world. The law firm for which Carter works is so entrenched in the business of protecting copyright that they practically wrote some of the most egregious laws against piracy. They even have their own pet Senator, a thinly-veiled version of Orrin Hatch who is nicknamed "Fido," who does their bidding in Washington. They're not concerned with making sure the artists are compensated, or that their music is treated fairly. They're interested in getting as much money as possible from as many people as possible, and have no qualms about doing what's necessary. What's more, most of the legal plot points settle around real U.S. law 鈥� the Copyright Damages Improvement Act of 1999, which mandates fines of up to $150,000 per song. As a comparison, in the state of Connecticut, for example, the fine for a class A felony (murder) is up to $20,000. So if you were thinking of downloading that new Bieber single, you may as well just kill seven people and pocket the extra ten grand. Admittedly, the CDIA doesn't allow for prison sentences (I think), but a person effectively bankrupted by legal action will probably end up in prison one way or another. In its way, though, the book does suffer from a common problem that I've been seeing a lot recently: the cardboard villain. In this book, the pro-copyright forces are just plain Wrong, and will clearly not win the day. Now I have no problem vilifying law firms and giant corporations - hell, that's practically a hobby of mine - but I would like to have seen a bit more humanity from them, rather than a giant monolithic force of legal evil. Even the main human avatar of that monolith, Carter's boss, pretty much abandons her position as soon as she realizes the threat that the Earth is under. We know that these laws are wrong, but how they got so wrong is something that could have added to the story. Of course, that itself could be a book of great and ponderous length, so I can understand why Reid might have glossed over it. The other criticism that I have of this book is that it will one day be horribly, terribly dated. There are pop culture references everywhere in the story. Some are subtle, some are not, and it was kind of fun being able to pick them out. Everything from GalaxyQuest to Monty Python to Breaking Bad - if you've been paying attention to popular culture for the last twenty years or so, you'll find these little nuggets buried in the story. And they're great, as long as you're reading the book in proximity to those cultural references. I don't know how well it will hold up for a reader twenty or thirty years down the road, but that may not have been Reid's intention. This is a book written for a specific time and reason, in an intellectual climate that the author understands far too well. Perhaps he just wanted to write a book for this moment, and never meant it to last much longer. Whatever his motivations, I hope he continues to explore this kind of writing, and gives us bigger and better in the future. -------------------------------- "Our legal scholars have researched [the ] thoroughly. And they unanimously agree that it is the most cynical, predatory, lopsided, and shamelessly money-grubbing copyright law written by any society, anywhere in the universe since the dawn of time itself." - Carly ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Aug 14, 2012
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Aug 14, 2012
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Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 1401310303
| 9781401310301
| 1401310303
| 3.57
| 32,877
| Oct 12, 2009
| Jun 29, 2010
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liked it
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If you pay close attention, Colfer tells you exactly what you can expect from this book right at the beginning, using a well-chosen quote from Douglas
If you pay close attention, Colfer tells you exactly what you can expect from this book right at the beginning, using a well-chosen quote from Douglas Adams: 鈥淭he storm had now definitely abated, and what thunder there was now grumbled over more distant hills, like a man saying 'And another thing...' twenty minutes after admitting he'd lost the argument.鈥� (So Long and Thanks for All the Fish) As Adams well knew, the phrase "And another thing..." is superfluous. It is said by the person who just can't let things go. It's a sullen, resentful phrase that doesn't add anything to the discussion that came before. In other words, Colfer is telling us, this book didn't need to happen and you probably don't need to read it. Which is very kind of him, I think, warning us in advance that way. But still, after a long time where I refused to give in, I finally, well, gave in and read the book. It's not as bad as I expected it to be, certainly, but it lives up to its title. If you haven't read it, you don't really need to. It doesn't add very much to the overall mythos of the Hitchhiker's Guide universe, or to its characters, and while it has some entertaining moments in it, a few places where I genuinely laughed out loud, and some interesting explorations of Vogon sociology, if you give it a miss then you're probably not missing a whole lot. If you'll recall, at the end of Mostly Harmless, the fifth book in the trilogy, the Earth - all of the Earths - were destroyed by the Vogons once and for all. The galactic conspiracy of psychiatrists had won, with the omnipresent Guide Mark Two as their weapon of choice, and the whole business about the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything was finally at an end. With the exception of Zaphod Beeblebrox, all of the main characters were vaporized, much to Arthur Dent's own relief. If ever there was a conclusive ending to a series, that would be it, although allegedly Adams had a couple of ways in his back pocket to bring everyone back, should he need to do so. Alas, Adams left us far too soon. In 2008, however, it was announced that there would indeed be a sixth book, penned by Eoin Colfer, of the hugely popular Artemis Fowl books. Fans across the world were both excited and apprehensive to see what would be done with the characters we had grown to love over so many years. To his credit, Colfer wrote a very funny book. I was laughing by the first page, and he really did a fine job of capturing the tone and cadence of the Guide entries and the way that Adams would narrate the story. His depictions of some characters - especially Zaphod and Random - were spot-on, and you could see a lot of elements in the book that were nods to some of Adams' favorite themes. In essence, what happens is this: (view spoiler)[Our Heroes are introduced to us in a stasis hallucination, held between ticks of the clock by the Guide Mark Two as the planet-destroying beams of the Grebulons descend towards Earth. They are rescued by the Heart of Gold and Zaphod Beeblebrox, who has detached his left head and is using it as the ship's computer. Unfortunately, Ford causes Left Brain to freeze up, so they need to be rescued again - this time by one of the most popular bit players in the series, Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged, an immortal being who has decided to spend eternity insulting everyone in the universe in alphabetical order. Wowbagger reluctantly takes them aboard, and in doing so insults Zaphod to the point where Zaphod promises to find a way to kill him, a proposition that Wowbagger has no problem with. Zaphod's weapon of choice? A down-on-his-luck thunder god who's been slumming it around Asgard. Meanwhile, there is a planet of human refugees that is undergoing some rather entertaining class warfare, and the solution to this is, apparently, to find just the right kind of god to run the place. And even more meanwhile, a young Vogon is having second thoughts about his Vogonity and whether or not it's okay to destroy inhabited planets just because there is a work order on hand that says they should. (hide spoiler)] I want to criticize the book for being directionless and unfocused, but let's be fair - that describes the first book as well. Given its genesis as a radio drama, Adams never really had a grand plan for what would happen in the beginning of the series, and wrote in an episodic fashion that had (as far as I could tell) no real end point in mind. The difference, however, is that while those books had no real direction to them, they were charged with a kind of chaotic energy that made you want to keep reading just to find out what happens next. Arthur Dent, our avatar in this universe, never got a chance to rest or even change out of his dressing-gown, and so we were dragged along with him. It was exciting and confusing and weird in all the right ways, and we didn't mind not knowing where we were going because the trip to get there really was just that much fun. In this book, however, Arthur really doesn't want to be involved. He's had an imaginary lifetime of living in peace and quiet, and seems to have outgrown the antics of Ford and Zaphod. He's the reasonable adult in this book, and not all that much fun anymore. As I read, I was disappointed that Colfer didn't seem to have captured Arthur's character very well, but perhaps I was wrong - Arthur didn't belong in this story, and he wanted nothing more than to not be in it anymore. And it showed. Another telling moment comes near the end of the book. The narrative takes a moment to remind us that, "There is no such thing as a happy ending." And a few lines later, it quotes a certain pole-sitting philosopher who says, "There is no such thing as an ending, or a beginning, for that matter, everything is middle." That certainly is true of life, and you can imagine it being true of the lives of fictional characters. Louis and Rick will walk off the tarmac in Casablanca and go on to do other things, perhaps help the resistance fight the Nazis. The lives of Luke and Han and Leia have been extended far beyond their original showing on film, thanks to the Extended Universe of Star Wars. Scout Finch and her brother Jem will grow up and have children of their own; the rabbits at Watership Down will live and breed and die; Guy Montag will help rebuild the intellectual society that he was originally trying to destroy... We know that these worlds have lives beyond the last page, no matter how thoroughly they're destroyed at the end. There's always going to be some thread hanging loose that can be picked up and used to continue the story beyond where it left off. But that doesn't mean that we should. I applaud Colfer for taking on the project, knowing that it is better for the series to be continued by someone who knew it and loved it and who was influenced by it, rather than by someone who couldn't show it all the love it deserves. As I said, I laughed while I read this book, a lot more than I expected to. But as the title implies, this feels like an attempt to continue a story that has been finished for a long time. Rather than breathe new life into the Hitchhiker's franchise, it simply reminds us all the more sharply of what we once had and will never have again. -------------------------------- "I do not hate myself. In many ways, I am not altogether too bad." - Constant Mown (Vogon) ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Aug 2012
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Aug 13, 2012
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Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0356500764
| 9780356500768
| 0356500764
| 3.96
| 22,276
| May 01, 2012
| May 01, 2012
|
liked it
|
I have two words for you: Ninja. Priests. There you go, that should really be enough for you to go out and buy this book. I suppose if you need more, t I have two words for you: Ninja. Priests. There you go, that should really be enough for you to go out and buy this book. I suppose if you need more, though, there is a whole "plot" and "world" and "characters" and stuff. But even Jemisin says that the initial idea that got her started writing was ninja priests, and everything else just kind of built up from there. Welcome, then, to the great land of Gujaareh, a land not entirely unlike our own ancient Egypt. It rests alongside a great river that floods periodically and brings great wealth and prosperity to the land. The whole world lives in the shadow of their great, striated Dreaming Moon, the perpetual manifestation of their goddess, Hananja. In this city, people live healthy, productive lives, and it is all thanks to Hananja's devoted priesthood and their arts of narcomancy. The Gatherers of Hananja are able to take dreamstuff from sleeping people, either willingly or otherwise, and their most honored task is to take from those whom their governing council have decided need to die. The terminally ill, perhaps, or the corrupt 鈥� these are the ones whom the Gatherers visit, giving them a final dream before sending their soul into the dreaming world embodied by their goddess. Ehiru is the best of these Gatherers, a man with a deft touch and absolute devotion to his cause. He is told to gather and he gathers, bringing back the various dreamstuffs to the temple, where the Sharers can use it to heal the afflicted of Gujaareh. Indeed, until now, Ehiru has never questioned his place in the world. But he soon finds himself wrapped in a terrible conspiracy that threatens to upend everything he's ever believed in, and may turn him into that which he has always despised. It's a really neat idea, with some very powerful characters and a well-built world. Clearly, Jemesin holds this world clearly in her mind when she writes, because the detail she gives, down to the smells and the surfaces, paint a wonderful picture. That said, though, this book didn't really come together for me until about two hundred pages in. I'm not sure why that was. Maybe I'm so deeply mired in the Alternate Europe mode of fantasy fiction that my brain had trouble adjusting to the deliberately different world that Jemesin built. Maybe she knows the world so well that she made certain assumptions about it that the reader 鈥� or at least this reader 鈥� couldn't readily put together. All I know is that I spent a good portion of the book trying to keep everything in order in my head. It was like doing one of those sliding-piece puzzles: immensely frustrating until you finally get a good idea of how it all works. Before you despair, however, note that number again: 200 pages. You would think that if a book baffled me for a while, I would probably put it down, but the fact that I was willing to keep going that far through my bafflement really does say a lot about the work that Jemesin did. The characters are interesting, and their relationships are intense 鈥� none more so than that between Ehiru and his apprentice Nijiri. While Jemesin states clearly that the people of her world aren't really concerned with labeling and compartmentalizing sexuality, Nijiri is definitely gay, and he is madly in love with his mentor, to the point where he is willing to give up his life to save him. The Prince is another good example of an interesting and complicated character. The Sunset Prince, avatar of Hananja, gives off Bad Guy Vibes from the moment we meet him. There's something about him as soon as he appears on the page that says he's going to be trouble by the end of the book. Despite that, you can kind of see where he's coming from, and you see the logic he's working from. It's deranged, yes, but in a very specific sort of way it makes sense. Another fascinating aspect of this book is that it presents contrasting and incompatible cultural values with a sense of honesty and truth. The formalized execution/euthanasia that the Gatherers of Gujaareh perform is considered by their own people to be the best way to handle things. After all, why suffer in agony when Ehiru can come along and drop you into a pleasant dream for all eternity? On the other hand, Sunandi Jeh Kalawe is of the Kisuati, and they view the Gatherer's narcomancy as a horrible power and their "gifts" as nothing short of institutionalized murder. The characters argue over this repeatedly in the book, and the best that comes of it is a certain mutual understanding. Not an agreement, mind you 鈥� neither viewpoint is either affirmed or torn down, but they eventually get to a point where they can start to see through the other's eyes. So as I said, it took about 200 pages for things to really click for me, but it was worth it when they did. Also, there's a very funny author interview at the end where Jemesin is given the rare opportunity to interview herself. Definitely not to be missed. This is a really interesting world built on unique and fantastic concepts. There are more, too, which I'll be looking forward to reading at some point in the future. ----------------- "You kill, priest. You do it for mercy and a whole host of other reasons that you claim are good, but at the heart of it you sneak into people's homes in the dead of night and kill them in their sleep. This is why you think you strange 鈥� you do this and you see nothing wrong with it. - Sunandi, The Killing Moon ...more |
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| 1400052173
| 9781400052172
| 1400052173
| 4.13
| 776,253
| Feb 02, 2010
| Feb 02, 2010
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it was amazing
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Henrietta Lacks has probably saved your life. If not yours, then almost certainly that of someone you know. And you don't even know who she is. Or, rath Henrietta Lacks has probably saved your life. If not yours, then almost certainly that of someone you know. And you don't even know who she is. Or, rather, who she was. The original Henrietta Lacks was a black woman who lived near Baltimore, grew up in poverty, worked hard, and died in 1951, overcome by a cancer that started in her cervix and spread out to take over her whole body. She left behind five children, a husband, and a legacy that would forever change our understanding of biology and medicine. When she first went to Johns Hopkins Medical Center and was diagnosed with cancer, her doctor took a small sample of cells from the tumor and sent it to his colleague, George Gey. Gey had long been in the pursuit of what seemed like and impossible dream: to culture human cells and keep them alive in the lab. By doing so, he hoped to create new ways to test medicine and study human biology without all those pesky patients getting in the way. Unfortunately, his work had thus far been a failure. Human cells, no matter how hard he tried, simply would not survive outside the body for very long. Gey tried all kinds of media and methods, inventing some machines that have become invaluable to cell culture research, but he simply watched culture after culture die in the lab. All of that changed when he got HeLa. The cells from Henrietta Lacks, which were known as "HeLa," not only didn't die - they thrived. They were so robust that Gey and his staff soon had more HeLa cells than they could keep, much less use, so they started sending them off to any researcher who asked. With HeLa, researchers around the world began to make discoveries that would save lives and change the world. But with this ever-growing cell line - which was baked, boiled, frozen, irradiated, cloned, cut up, and sent into space - it was very easy to forget that there was once a woman named Henrietta Lacks, with a family and a legacy of her own. Plenty has been written about HeLa in the last fifty years, and any researcher who works with cells is probably well aware of its existence and importance. But very few people know about Henrietta, and it was this oversight that Rebecca Skloot is trying to correct in this book. She began her quest with a simple question: "Who was Henrietta Lacks?" The fact that she got the right name was surprising enough, actually. HeLa had previously been identified as Henrietta Lakes, Helen Lane, and Helen Larson in various publications. Skloot believed that there was more to the story than just a bunch of immortal cells, and was determined to find Henrietta's surviving relatives and learn more about this woman who had somehow become so important to the world. Skloot wouldn't be the first, however. A writer for Rolling Stone, a con man, and the BBC had all attempted to look into the life of Henrietta before, and found that the surviving Lackses were not only unaware of what their mother had become, but largely unaware of why it was important. The children and grandchildren of Henrietta Lacks had grown up in the Baltimore area, mired in the poverty of being black in the end of the twentieth century. Drug abuse, alcoholism, and a lack of education meant that their lives were full of hardship and struggle, and not likely to get any better. When they found out that Henrietta's cells were not only unique to science but being sold all around the world, this was news that they weren't all prepared to cope with. Some saw it as a religious visitation, others as a massive conspiracy, and still others as just a way to make money off some poor black folk from the city. The center of Skloot's narrative is Deborah, Henrietta's youngest daughter and the one Lacks who seemed most determined to find out what had happened. Deborah wanted so hard to find out what had happened to her mother that it almost killed her. The stress of not knowing - or, even worse, knowing but not understanding - took a heavy toll on her physical and mental health, and she was reluctant to talk to anyone at all about her mother. But it was Deborah that Rebecca had to convince if she was going to write this book, and in order to do that, she had to promise that the book would be about the woman Henrietta was, not just the cells she was famous for. That's probably what makes this book as readable and engaging as it is. While the science is handled well and smoothly, it's not nearly as fascinating or emotionally gripping as the stories that she tells about the Lacks family. She shows us a family that is held together by the strength of their faith in their God and each other, and who are desperately trying to understand their place in the world and how Henrietta came to be what she was. When the original cells were taken from Henrietta, it was done without her consent. She also had no say in what happened to those cells and how they were used, nor did any of her family find out the truth until years later. In an era long before the phrase "informed consent" was even coined, the medical establishment made massive scientific and financial gains, and in the meantime the Lacks were mired in poverty. As several of her children note, Henrietta has changed medicine forever, but her children can't go see a doctor. The struggle to understand must have been enormous. One of the moments that was most surprising and illuminating to me was when Henrietta's son Zakariyya asked Rebecca, "What's a cell?" Just like Rebecca, I had to take a moment to absorb that question, and it put into sharp perspective the vast assumptions that I had made, coming from a well-educated white background. I thought that everyone at least knew what a cell was, but that assumption couldn't have been further from the truth. Deborah and her family are people of minimal formal education who are trying to understand a topic that people study for their entire lives. Their dedication to this quest is so strong, and the struggle is so great that their attempt is nothing less than heroic, to my way of seeing things. The story is still unfinished. HeLa is still out there, making news and causing trouble. The Lacks family is still living in poverty, although the new generation has been able to go to school and are aiming at a brighter future for themselves. And while patients' rights to control what is done with their bodies and their tissues is improving, the law is still on the side of the doctors and hospitals. Medical ethics is a lot better than it was, but the fight is fierce, especially when there's money involved. This book is not just the story of cells or of science. It鈥檚 the story of a woman and her family, and how sometimes people get lost in the inexorable movement of scientific progress. Some parts are infuriating, some are heartbreaking, but the book is an illumination into what is sometimes sacrificed in pursuit of a better world. ----- "When I saw those toenails, I nearly fainted. I thought, Oh jeez, she's a real person. I started imagining her sitting in her bathroom painting those toenails, and it hit me for the first time that those cells we'd been working with all this time and sending all over the world, they came from a live woman. I'd never thought of it that way." - Mary Kubicek, assistant to George Gey ...more |
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Jul 08, 2012
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Jul 10, 2012
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| 0062067753
| 9780062067753
| 0062067753
| 3.78
| 61,122
| Jun 21, 2012
| Jun 19, 2012
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liked it
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The Long Earth by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter It is said that the population of the whole world, if packed together into a city of the same dens The Long Earth by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter It is said that the population of the whole world, if packed together into a city of the same density as New York City, would fit into the current boundaries of Texas. This Texan mega-city wouldn't be a pleasant place to live, and there's the challenge of infrastructure and living space and waste management, but the point is clear: there's a lot more space on Earth than we think there is. True, a lot of it is unfriendly to us - ocean, desert, ice, mountains, New Jersey - but still, despite our habit of packing ourselves into tightly-bound metropoli, there's a lot of room on this earth to spread out. Now imagine there was another Earth just a step away. A simple exertion of will, perhaps aided by a small device that anyone could make at home with a potato and some spare parts, and you're in a new world, untouched by human hands. You'd be standing in the same place you left from, but on another Earth. And if you don't like that one, well, there's another Earth just a step away. And another. And another. An infinity of Earths, each one so very slightly different from the one you left, each with its own story to tell. With the potential for an entire planet per person, what would that do to the world? Who would go and who would stay? What would happen to the "original" Earth, or Datum Earth as it's called in this book? The ramifications of the Long Earth are far-reaching and unsettling indeed, as is the quest to map it. Of the people on Datum Earth, most are able to step with the aid of a Stepper, a small box that they can build from freely available parts using plans that were posted to the internet by a mysterious engineer named Willis Linsay. As long as you follow the instructions properly and to the letter, you should be able to step from Earth to Earth with ease and only a minimum of discomfort. The first wave of devices were built by kids, prompting an initial missing-children panic as kids popped out of this universe with hastily-built Steppers, completely unprepared for what they were getting into. Soon, though, more and more people were stepping out, eager to explore these strange new worlds. At the forefront of this wave of colonization were the rare few who could step from world to world without a Stepper. One of these is Joshua Valient茅, who was propelled to fame when he rescued children from their first journeys on Step Day. Joshua is hired by the Black Corporation to explore the Long Earth. With the support of Lobsang - formerly of Tibet and now an artificial intelligence - Joshua is going to step as far as he can go and see what there is to see at the distant ends of the Long Earth. This is a genus of book that I really enjoy - one that takes a simple, straightforward idea and tries to find all the angles of it. To that end, Pratchett and Baxter look at how the people, governments, and businesses of Datum Earth adjust to this new reality. And some of the questions are decidedly thorny. Is America still America on all Earths? If someone commits a crime in an alternate New York, could they be prosecuted by the NYPD? What happens to the value of commodities such as wood or gold when you have a nigh-infinite supply of it? And what happens to a nation when its people start stepping out en masse? There is a sub-plot in the book, following police Lieutenant Monica Jansson, who becomes the law's expert on stepping, with all the challenges that come with it. For example, what can you do to stop someone from stepping one world over, taking a few steps to where a bank vault should be, and then stepping back? How do you make a space step-proof against intruders? And what do you do with the increasingly disgruntled percent of people who can't step at all? That's to say nothing of the scam artists, the escapees, and the people who just abandon their lives to walk the Long Earth. It's a concept rife with possibilities. Each Earth is slightly different, representing an Earth that could have been. Some are steaming jungle, others arid wasteland and still others are lush and perfect for agriculture. There are animals that claim descent from the megafauna of North America, from our own ape-like ancestors, and from dinosaurs, and others still that are unlike anything on the Earth we know. On none of them, however, are there humans - only the Datum Earth has those. As great as the concept is, though, I found myself disappointed by the end of it. It seemed like Pratchett and Baxter missed a lot of good opportunities for the story, failed to fire at least one of Chekhov's guns, and let the Datum Earth plot line with Monica Jansson go woefully under-explored. Furthermore, while the Big Bad at the end was certainly big, it wasn't that bad, and it was dealt with in a rather perfunctory and, in my opinion, unfulfilling manner. The ending was flat, with a bunch of loose ends that really should have been tied up, and there was even one question that came to mind that seemed so painfully obvious that I was shocked none of the characters thought of it: the Stepper boxes refer to the alternate Earths as being "west" or "east" of Datum Earth, and are built with a three-point toggle switch. If there's a west and an east, how about a north and south? What if you had four choices from any given Earth instead of two? I can understand leaving that option out for reasons of narrative simplicity, but it seems like such an obvious question that I'm surprised it wasn't even raised. Overall, I think the book fell under the same curse as so many of Neal Stephenson's works: an amazing idea, done really well until the authors had to figure out how to end the book. There's no real climax to it, no sense of fulfillment and achievement. Just a feeling like they had to stop somewhere, so they did. That said, if they're clever, they'll make this a shared world project. I would love to see lots of different authors take a crack at some Tales of the Long Earth, precisely because it's such a useful idea. There are so many stories that can be told, including the ones that got short shrift in this novel. Let's hope we get to see that. ---------- [Jansson] opined, 'Oh.' This response seemed inadequate in itself. After some consideration, she added, 'My.' And she concluded, although in the process she was denying a lifelong belief system of agnosticism shading to outright atheism, 'God.' - from The Long Earth by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter ...more |
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Jul 09, 2012
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Jul 09, 2012
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Hardcover
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| 0060892994
| 9780060892999
| 0060892994
| 3.99
| 115,260
| Oct 1959
| May 09, 2006
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really liked it
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This has probably been noted by many better thinkers than I, but the way I see it is this: history takes a long time to happen. I know, I know. Mind: b This has probably been noted by many better thinkers than I, but the way I see it is this: history takes a long time to happen. I know, I know. Mind: blown. We are lucky in this day and age that we have so much information available to us about history. Go to any of your better museums and you'll see artifacts of a bygone age, books and clothes and various objects carefully displayed under glass. Through the meticulous work of historians and scholars throughout the ages, we have created an unbroken chain of knowledge through the centuries that is so thorough and so strong that we feel like the days of Shakespeare, of Charlemagne, of Pericles all happened just the other day. But what if that chain were broken? What if something so big, so terrible were to happen that we had to rebuild history from scratch, using oral tradition and whatever pathetic scraps of memorabilia we could find? Whom could we trust to keep it and put it all together, and then what should we do with it in the end? These are the questions that humanity is forced to confront after the Flame Deluge - a nuclear inferno that claimed the great nations of the world near the end of the twentieth century. All would have been lost if not for the work of Isaac Liebowitz, an engineer-turned-monk who dedicated his life and the lives of his brothers to the preservation of knowledge. Over the centuries, his part of the Albertan order would become the caretakers of a bygone age, guardians of history itself, and would play a key role in the future of humanity, for good or for ill. A Canticle for Liebowitz is a novel in three parts, spanning over a thousand years of future history. It begins in the 26th century, where the inhabitants of what was once the United States are bound into roving tribes and insular city-states. There, the young monk Francis makes a startling discovery from the life of his patron, the soon-to-be-sainted Liebowitz, a discovery which changes his life and the lives of everyone in his order. Through chance, or perhaps divine intervention, Francis finds an underground bunker, a shelter from the Fallout demons of old. He rummages around the cluttered remains of whomever had sealed themselves inside, and happens upon a strongbox, within which are handwritten pieces of paper, including a blueprint for an electrical circuit designed by Leibowitz himself. Suddenly, Francis' vocation was clear. Or at least clearer than it had been before. Then the story jumps forward to the 29th century, an age of discovery and renaissance. The learned both inside and outside the Church are beginning to rediscover science, and apply it to rebuilding some of the technology that was thought to be lost so long ago. At the same time, local leaders are vying for power, and trying to ensnare the monks of St. Liebowitz in their plots. The world is changing, progressing, and not everyone is comfortable with this change. The third part of the story propels us into the 36th century, an age undreamed-of by even those who lived before the world was cleansed by fire. Humanity is traveling between the stars and giving life to their machines, making full use of knowledge both new and old. Unfortunately, mankind may succumb to the same pride, the same flaws that nearly destroyed it a thousand years before. On the eve of self-annihilation, a desperate group of pilgrims is sent out to the stars to try and keep some spark of humanity alive in the cosmos, despite humanity's nearly unstoppable urge to destroy itself. And at the center of all of this is the Order of Leibowitz, holding on to old works and memorabilia, waiting for either the right hands or the wrong ones. The book sounds depressing in its nature, but it isn't. Yes, mankind makes the same stupid mistakes over and over again, not remembering the horror that befell them the last time. But despite that, there are still good people and there is still hope. You turn the last page knowing that the world, and humanity, will go on in one form or another. Even with our propensity for self-destruction, we are equally capable of brilliance and discovery. In a larger sense, too, this book is one long journey into philosophy, bringing up some questions that are truly fundamental to who we are as a species. For example, the book addresses the topic of euthanasia in one section, with the Abbot of the order violently opposed to the Mercy Camps that the government is building. Is it better to make the sick and injured live in their sickness, or should we give them a way out? Is suicide 鈥� assisted or otherwise 鈥� ever permissible? The characters that debate this topic each have a clear and rational reason for thinking the way they do, and yet they come to no agreement. The characters, for the short time we get to see them, are fascinating. You feel sorry for them, hopeful for them, and afraid for them, because Miller has written them as human beings. We don't have Interchangeable Scientist A and Interchangeable Scientist B arguing opposite points. We instead have scholars and religious, each desperately trying to protect his point of view. Or what about the nature of technology itself? The monks are charged with being the memory of mankind, yet when people start trying to recover the lost sciences, the abbot feels uncomfortable with the whole idea. After all, their predecessors in civilization followed the path of science, and look where it got them. Might it not be better to just let things stay as they are? Hard, yes, and certainly not a perfect world, but when you don't even have electricity, blowing up the world is hard to do. What I also found interesting was how Miller placed the Catholic Church at the center of this story. In the world after the Deluge, the Church is the only organization left, and it fills the power vacuum nicely. Through its system of priesthoods and orders, it remains the last island of civilization in a world that's turned to chaos. I'm not a big fan of the Catholic Church for many reasons, but he really made it into an establishment that I could appreciate. It represented continuity and caution, as well as taking up the guardianship of human history. For all its faults, if the Church could keep humanity from failing utterly, I would be grateful for it. It's intellectual science fiction at its best, really, exploring the kind of big ideas that science fiction is meant to do. Miller has sung a song 鈥� a canticle 鈥� not just for the fictional Liebowitz, but for humanity as a whole, and asks his readers to sing along with him. ------------------- "If you try to save wisdom until the world is wise, Father, the world will never have it." - Thon Taddeo, A Canticle for Liebowitz ...more |
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not set
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Jul 2012
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Jul 06, 2012
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Paperback
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| 1841155608
| 9781841155609
| 1841155608
| 4.18
| 208,423
| Sep 19, 2000
| unknown
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really liked it
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The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon I have long been a reader of comic books, as you probably know by now if you've been foll The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon I have long been a reader of comic books, as you probably know by now if you've been following my reviews. Ever since I was a kid, comic books have been there, reliably giving me my costumed heroes and world-beating wonders, storylines that wrapped themselves up in a few issues or less. I could - and still can - recite the secret origins and backstories for hundreds of characters at the drop of a hat. [1] The comics universe was a place where I would gladly live, assuming the powers and physique came with it. What I didn't know anything about, during those formative years, was the actual creators of comics. It wasn't until I started to really pay attention that I noticed who the writers and artists were, and names like John Byrne, George Perez, Dick Giordiano, John Ostrander and their colleagues came to have meaning for me. I was soon able to see a little better the work that went into making comics, and the art that doing so required. What took me longer to learn, however, was the history of comic books, and how all of these wonderful worlds came to be. The history of comics, as it turned out, is a fascinating story full of brilliant characters, amazing achievements, jaw-dropping betrayals, and vast shifts in cultural and literary attitudes. Names like Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Jerry Siegel, Joe Shuster - these were not the names I grew up with, but they are the ones who made my childhood possible. Michael Chabon has managed to give us a glimpse into that history through his book, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, a history of comic books from a slightly different point of view. The titular characters, Joseph Kavalier and Sam Clay, are cousins from opposite ends of the world. Kavalier, a young Jew from Czechoslovakia, has escaped certain death at the hands of the Nazis and come to America to seek his fortune. Sam Clay is a young man of great ambition, but few means. Apart, they are lost and wandering, but together they become a force that changes culture as they know it. Armed only with a few ideas, bravado, and a good helping of talent, Sam and Joseph break into the newborn world of superhero comic books, creating a character that catches the imagination of readers all over the country. Soon, the Escapist - a master of the art of escapology - is popular enough to rival Superman, and has the potential to make Sam and Joe very rich men. What follows is a complex, interwoven dual biography as the team of Kavalier and Clay find fame, break up, find love, risk death, and eventually settle into something resembling happiness over the course of several decades. Along the way, the complicated and adventurous history of comic books is a constant in their lives, from the heady days of wartime superheroes to the dark era of Senate hearings and Frederic Wertham's crusade against the comics. As one might expect from Chabon, it's a narrative that covers a lot of ground. It wanders and moves about, going off into places that the reader might not expect, from an Antarctic military base to a men's retreat on a posh Long Island estate. In that sense, you would think it would be heard to pin down what this book is actually about. It's about family and friendship, it's about art and creativity and risking everything for the one big chance at success. It's about facing your fears and accepting your choices. It's about so many things, all at once. But what it's most about is freedom. With the character of the Escapist as the book's central metaphor, we watch a cast of characters search for freedom. It might be political freedom as Joe tries to get his family out of Europe, or creative freedom as Sam looks for a way to make the ideas in his head into real things. It's freedom from the restraints of a publisher, and from the responsibilities that come with being a friend and a partner. Everyone in this book is searching for freedom at one time or another, and those searches are neither easy nor short. There is a certain quality to Chabon's writing that I wish I could emulate, and the problem is that I can't say exactly what that quality is. Perhaps it is the way he selects details that so perfectly illustrate a character. Perhaps it's turns of phrase that linger in the mind, or moments of natural emotion that might have you smiling or worried or - if there's some dust in the room perhaps - wondering where you put your handkerchief. The characters are vivid and real and interesting, as is the world they live in. His use of detail, his manipulation of both time and space through the use of flashback scenes, make the book great entertainment. It's not perfect, certainly - there are places where the book slows down, and you want the focus to return to one of the other characters, to examine a new question, but those moments of clear beauty make it all worth it to me. What it all amounts to is a group of wonderful characters who are all looking to find a place where they can settle down and stop escaping from themselves. ---- "Forget about what you are escaping from. Reserve your anxiety for what you are escaping to." - Kornblum, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay ---- [1] The Boyfriend has learned to be wary of asking me about comics. If I'm not careful and very, very succinct, he'll just walk away while I'm still talking... ...more |
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May 2012
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Jun 26, 2012
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| 0765316994
| 9780765316998
| 0765316994
| 3.87
| 113,563
| Jun 05, 2012
| Jun 05, 2012
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really liked it
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The philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre once said, on the meaning of life, "Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself." Frederich Nietzche said, "If w
The philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre once said, on the meaning of life, "Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself." Frederich Nietzche said, "If we possess a why of life, we can put up with almost any how." And Stephen King wrote, "Life sucks, then you die." It'll take a far better philosopher than I to really look at this book from an existentialist viewpoint, but I strongly suspect that it would be a lot of fun to do. After all, one of the major questions that philosophy - and existentialism in particular - tries to address is that of why we are here. What is our purpose in life? What, in the end, does it all mean? For us out here, that's a question we can't really know the answer to, and thus a whole branch of philosophy exists to tell us that it doesn't really matter. That maybe we don't have a purpose imposed upon us from outside, but that's okay. We can create our own. We can contribute our own verses to the powerful play of life, as Whitman would have it, and in the end we are responsible for our own lives. But what if we weren't? What if there was a being that orchestrated our lives, willing them into - and more importantly out of - existence? What would you do with the realization that your life is not entirely your own? And even worse, the realization that the person in control of it doesn't really care all that much about you? That is the problem faced by Ensign Andrew Dahl of the Universal Union flagship Intrepid. It is the 25th century, and things couldn't be better. He has a chance to see new world and new civilizations, to boldly go... Well, you know the rest. Dahl is at the frontier of science and exploration, and is determined to make the most of it. If he survives. Alone among the ships of the UU, the Intrepid loses crew at an alarming rate. Dahl soon discovers a fact that has been known for years by those crew members who are bright enough to spot the pattern: people who go on away missions with the command staff will, almost inevitably, die. Toxic gasses, killer machines, Borgovian land worms - these are just a tiny sampling of dangers that have done in ensigns and miscellaneous crew for years, and no one seems to know why. All they can do is make sure they're not in the room when the Captain comes in, looking for someone who pop down to a planet's surface to find out why that mining colony hasn't reported in recently. Dahl, of course, just can't let himself and his friends die, so he begins digging into the true nature of their lives on the starship Intrepid. What he discovers is a truth almost too mad to be believed: their lives are not their own. A greater power is directing events on the Intrepid, dictating who lives and who dies, and that greater power doesn't seem to be very good at what it does. So Dahl and his friends have to bet everything on the power of the Narrative, meet their makers and try to find a way to secure their freedom. Or, failing that, a way to see to it that their lives have more meaning than they had before. As always with John Scalzi, I recommend picking this up. It's a very fast read - I finished it in under a day - and it has the tight combination of humor, thoughtfulness, and genuine emotion that I have come to expect from his work. From a premise that is incredibly simple - 鈥淭he crew of a starship realize they鈥檙e doomed if they go on away missions and try to change their fate鈥� - he's built up a multi-layered exploration into the meaning of life and death. The universe he's given to us is one where people are denied the ability to give meaning to their own lives, and have to rely one an unseen force to do it for them. The fight, then, is to acquire that ability to decide. To gain agency, as it were. They want to be able to control their own existence so badly that they risk their existence entirely. The corollary, then, is very simple: what are you doing with your life? We, the readers, have that agency. We can make decisions for our own lives and our own purposes. If we succeed or fail, we can do so knowing that we made those successes or failures possible. [1] In a sense, we don't know how good we have it, something that is brought up in the second of three codas to the main novel. We can choose. We can create meaning in our lives without hoping that some higher power will do it for us. So why don't we? For a book that presents itself as a quick, fun read, there are certainly layers upon layers of meaning in it that could be a lot of fun to explore. The only complaint, really, is that it wasn't long enough. And I don't mean that he skipped essential scenes, or that he should have opted for a Tolkien/Jordan/Martin-esque style of describing every goddamn thing that showed up on the page, but there were points where I just wanted him to slow down a bit and let us appreciate the moments for what they were. There's a scene in chapter 21, for example, that should be really emotional and meaningful, but it's almost entirely dialogue. Good dialogue, yes, but I wanted to linger over it a bit, and that's true for a lot of scenes in the book. Scalzi writes wonderful banter, and makes his characters sound real, but I want to see things as well as hear them. Also, to be honest, I expected the last page to just be a picture of Scalzi at his computer, turning to the camera and winking. It would have been hilariously meta, but I guess he's not as gimmicky as that. Buy the book and enjoy it. If you're a fan of Star Trek - which was, given the title, a huge inspiration for the story - you'll no doubt appreciate it more than most. Even if you haven't watched every episode of the original series, though, the Red Shirt character is one that has permeated all levels of fiction, and has died many times in order to advance the plots that you love so well. He even has one poor guy who's not only a Red Shirt, but nearly at the end of his tour and about to get married. There was no way he'd survive. Take some time out for these poor, expendable bastards and give them a chance to shine. ---- "The [Borgovian Land Worms] were in a frenzy. Somebody was now likely to die. It was likely to be ensign Davis." - from Redshirts by John Scalzi ---- [1] There are plenty of external, uncontrollable factors, of course, which can all be lumped together under the term "luck," but you know what I mean. ...more |
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Jun 20, 2012
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Jun 20, 2012
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Jun 22, 2012
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ebook
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| 1560258691
| 9781560258698
| 1560258691
| 3.96
| 565
| Oct 24, 2006
| Oct 04, 2006
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really liked it
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There are a lot of reasons to want to build a time machine. To learn the truth about historical places and events, to see creatures that have been ext
There are a lot of reasons to want to build a time machine. To learn the truth about historical places and events, to see creatures that have been extinct for millions of years, to kill Hitler - always a favorite. You could go to the Library of Alexandria and save the works of great scientists and philosophers that have been lost to history. You could document the Crucifixion or watch the fall of Rome first-hand. You could see Jimi or Elvis or Janice or Kurt in their heyday, watch the original performances of Shakespeare's plays, or talk engineering with DaVinci. With a time machine, the whole of history is open to you, and your options are just about limitless. All Ron Mallett wanted to do with his time machine was see his dad. This book is not just about how one man went about figuring out how to travel through time. That in itself would be interesting, since time travel has been a dream of mankind ever since we figured out that time was a thing. There's a lot of complicated science that goes into not just manipulating time, but figuring out that it can be manipulated, and it takes half a lifetime to master. A lot of popular science books focus on the science, unsurprisingly, and talk about how certain things were discovered and what can be done with them in the future. That's all well and good, but this book adds an extra element that's often missing from other popular science texts. It talks about why. When Ron Mallett was ten years old, his father died of a heart attack brought about by a combination of smoking, poor dietary choices, and a genetic inclination towards heart problems. Overnight, the man that young Ron loved and idolized was gone, leaving him directionless at an age when having a father can be so very important. With the loss of a beloved parent, it's entirely possible that Ron could have seen his life crippled from that day onward. It might have been, if not for H.G. Wells and his famous book, The Time Machine. After he read this book, the notion that time could be navigated became the center of his life. His first attempt at a time machine - built of pipes and wires in his basement - was unsuccessful, of course. But he was undeterred, and realized that if he was going to make this dream come true, he would have to buckle down and start learning some science. Just the idea that he might one day build a machine to travel through time was enough to give him direction and purpose, and it set him on a course that would go on to define his life. The book is a memoir of his own travels through the world of physics and relativity, moving from one point to another as new ideas and discoveries signposted his route towards a theory of time travel. Initially guided by Einstein, Mallett went from being a young academic to programming computers for the Air Force, to becoming a full-fledged academic at the University of Connecticut. He makes sure that the reader can not only follow all the steps that he took, but that we can also see why he took them. What chance encounters and lucky finds pushed him forward, or what unfortunate incidents slowed him down. He reminds us all throughout the book of why he has chosen to do science, and never lets us forget this motivation. At the same time, he is sure to tell us about two rather significant obstacles to his progress. The first, of course, was that he felt he couldn't be honest about why he was studying what he was studying - relativity, black holes, lasers, that kind of thing. For fear that he would be labeled a crackpot and denied the opportunities he would need, he revealed his ambition to build a time machine only to those he felt he could absolutely trust. As far as anyone else was concerned, of course, he was just another theoretical physicist trying to figure out how the universe worked. The other challenge he faced was that he was African-American in a field that was very, very white at the time. He had to deal with racism in both its overt and covert forms, and work even harder to prove himself to those who couldn't - or wouldn't - see past his skin color. He doesn't dwell on it in this book, since that's not what this book is about. But I'm sure if he wanted to write about what it was like trying to break into physics academia as an African-American in the 60s and 70s, he probably could. What's most important, though, is that he continually reminds us of why he's doing what he's doing. He talks about his father, and the memories he had of him. He keeps his non-academic life in view, letting us in on his personal triumphs and failures, his struggles with depression and his joys at advancing towards his goal. The end result is a book that is not only about science, but about a person. The emotional thread that runs through this book is strong, and even if you can't quite follow the science, you can still follow the passion that Ron Mallett has for this project. The book, while fascinating, is technically unfinished. He has yet to build his time machine, and there's no proof that the ideas he's come forward will actually work, even if the math says they should. As the book finishes, he has a plan, and he lays out the way he thinks his machine should work, but we'll have to wait to see how that works out. Whether he succeeds or fails, though, he has built up a lifetime of research that has expanded our understanding of space and time in such a way that Einstein - and Ron Mallett's father - would no doubt be proud of. ------------------ "Time stopped for me in the middle of the night on May 22, 1955." - Ron Mallett, "Time Traveler" ------------------ ...more |
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not set
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May 23, 2012
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Jun 04, 2012
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Hardcover
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| 0061051586
| 9780061051586
| 0061051586
| 4.19
| 66,077
| 1998
| Sep 08, 1999
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liked it
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In this book, we return to the small Ramtop country of Lancre, home to Granny Weatherwax, Gytha Ogg and Magrat Garlick. Picking up from where we left
In this book, we return to the small Ramtop country of Lancre, home to Granny Weatherwax, Gytha Ogg and Magrat Garlick. Picking up from where we left off, which is actually in Maskerade, which I haven鈥檛 reviewed here yet, Magrat is Queen now, with no time for witching. So the new Third Witch is Agnes Nitt (also known as Perdita, but only by her), a girl who is sensible, levelheaded and thinks quickly in a crisis. She is also a rather, shall we say, substantial girl (and lest you think I鈥檓 trying not to be mean, believe me 鈥� Agnes is meaner about her self than I can be), and as we all know there is inside every fat girl a thin girl and lots of chocolate. Well, Perdita is the thin girl, and Agnes is the chocolate. But that鈥檚 not the main point of this tale. The main point is that vampyres have come to Lancre, invited by King Verence to attend the naming of his and Magrat鈥檚 daughter, Esmerelda Note Spelling of Lancre (well, when your grandmother managed to name your mother 鈥淢agrat鈥� due to an uncertainty in consonant placement, one doesn鈥檛 take chances.) But what鈥檚 done is done. No doubt we will see little Spelly in future Discworld books. Once you have invited a vampire in, you are subject to its power. Of course, vampires know this. There are a lot of things that vampires know鈥� These vampyres have studied, they have prepared. They do not intend to make the mistakes their forefathers did 鈥� keeping lots of knick-knacks about that could be turned into holy symbols, leaving up flimsy, easily pulled-aside drapes, that sort of thing. These are modern vampyres, ones who know their place in the food chain 鈥� on top of it. They鈥檙e ready, and they have every intention of taking over Lancre. They don鈥檛 want a killing floor, though. Indeed not, they simply want a herd. An鈥� arrangement. But there are the witches to contend with, especially Esme Weatherwax. And everyone knows about Granny Weatherwax鈥�. If you read Lords and Ladies, or even my review of it, you can see there are some similarities. Evil, inhuman force comes to Lancre, wants to subjugate its subjects, and in the end are foiled by the indomitable Granny Weatherwax. And yes, there are similarities. But the differences are worth reading it for. First of all, we get a better look at Perdita / Agnes Nitt. Yes, she鈥檚 the Third Witch, but she鈥檚 more at home being a witch than Magrat ever was. Perdita is two witches in one, and they don鈥檛 like each other very much 鈥� a volatile combination. And as the newcomer, Agnes has the unenviable role of being the stand-in for the reader. She gets a lot of explanation that seems redundant to loyal followers of the Discworld series, but I guess new readers have to come in somewhere. Secondly, we get to play around inside Granny Weatherwax鈥檚 head again, which is always fun. We see a reference to her sister, Lily Weatherwax whom we last saw in Witches Abroad, and her grandmother, Alison. It is implied that the Weatherwaxes have a definite dark streak to them, against which Granny must contend constantly. What bugged me about this book is that Granny isn鈥檛 quite herself 鈥� though I suppose it can be argued that she wasn鈥檛 meant to be. Confronted with immensely powerful vampyres in her country, and insulted by seeming not to have been invited to the young princess鈥� naming ceremony, Granny Weatherwax just鈥� gives up. She believes she can鈥檛 beat them, and she doesn鈥檛 think anyone wants her around. This is a side of Granny that we haven鈥檛 really seen before, and it鈥檚 not a nice one. She does recover, of course 鈥� that鈥檚 what Granny Weatherwax does. There鈥檚 no point in being a witch, really, if you can鈥檛 make the grand entrance and pop up just when everyone thinks you鈥檙e down. Another really neat thing about this book is that we finally get to revisit the Omnians, who were introduced as a fanatical theocratic people in Small Gods. Time has tempered the Omnians, who are now the Discworld equivalent of the Jehovah鈥檚 Witnesses. An Omnian missionary has come to Lancre, and he gets caught up in the battle against the vampires as well, and it turns out that, well, the Omnians aren鈥檛 that bad anymore. Since the Prophet Brutha gave them permission to think for themselves, the Church has schismed so many times that it finally comes down to a schism in one member, Brother Oats. Like Agnes, he鈥檚 of two minds about the world, and neither of them really get along. So yes, there鈥檚 not a whole lot that鈥檚 really new in this book, but since I鈥檓 a hard-core Pratchett addict, I have to recommend it. 鈥斺赌斺赌斺赌斺赌斺赌斺赌斺赌斺赌斺赌斺赌斺赌斺赌斺赌斺赌斺赌� 鈥淭here鈥檚 no greys, only white that鈥檚 got grubby. I鈥檓 surprised you don鈥檛 know that. And sin, young man, is when you treat people as things. Including yourself. That鈥檚 what sin is.鈥� - Granny Weatherwax, Carpe Jugulum ...more |
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not set
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not set
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Apr 18, 2012
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Hardcover
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| B0DT12LVF4
| 3.87
| 80,903
| 2007
| unknown
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liked it
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There are really only so many things you can do with horror these days. I think we鈥檝e all been somewhat desensitized by the ever-increasing variety an
There are really only so many things you can do with horror these days. I think we鈥檝e all been somewhat desensitized by the ever-increasing variety and imaginativeness that has come with the horror genre in recent years, and so you know that sooner or later you鈥檙e going to find yourself yawning theatrically at someone being forced to devour their own brains with a spoon made from their still-living child鈥檚 hollowed-out sternum and say, 鈥淪een it.鈥� As that moment approaches, the aspiring horror writer will need to start worrying less about the mechanics of the whole thing 鈥� the inventiveness of their devices and the goriness of characters鈥� ends 鈥� and more about how their story will stand out among an ever-broadening field. David Wong has chosen to use two interesting techniques in the writing of his book: comedy and wondrous incomprehensibility. Wong (not his real name, for reasons he makes clear in the book) is a writer over at Cracked.com, a humor site on which I have spent many a good commute. Wong鈥檚 work there tends towards video games and social issues, generating columns such as, 鈥�9 Types of Job That Will Destroy Your Soul,鈥� 鈥�5 Ways to Tell You鈥檙e Getting Too Old for Video Games,鈥� and one of my favorites, 鈥淗ow Karate Kid Ruined the Modern World.鈥� He and Cracked are part of one of my favorite archipelagoes of the internet, where pop culture is analyzed with more seriousness than it deserves, and where many of the ideas that we take for granted are put under the microscope. Yes, it tends to reduce issues and oversimplify things from time to time, but they鈥檙e fun reading. His years of writing humor have allowed him to create a very distinctive voice for the narrator of this book, also named David Wong, who is telling his story to a reporter 鈥� the story of how David and his friend John came to be able to peel the lid off the universe and peer into its dark, black, pestilent heart. Through the use of a bizarre drug that they call Soy Sauce, they are able to see through time, to communicate over great distances through unconventional means, and to observe phenomena that no one else can see. This is not nearly as much fun as it sounds. It turns out that there is a whole lot of stuff out there that we can鈥檛 see, and most of it is truly terrifying. Forget simple things like ghosts and other spookiness. We鈥檙e talking seven-legged spiders with bad blonde wigs, tiny corkscrew insects that scream as they infect their victims, red-eyed shadowmen that remove you from having ever existed, and, watching all of this from his own adjacent universe, Korrock. And the less you know about him, the better. Where you and I, having seen what cannot be unseen, might just do the rational thing and kill ourselves, David and John go along for the ride, trying to figure out where the monsters are coming from and doing their best not to become them. This universe, you see, is a fundamentally bad place, in more ways than we can really understand. But it鈥檚 only bad from our very restricted point of view, as if that really made any difference. David and John are afforded a bit of a better perspective, thanks to the Soy Sauce, but it doesn鈥檛 help much. They fight against the darkness, all with a certain rough, adolescent wit that will keep you moving forward even through the rough patches in the book. And there are certainly rough patches. This is Wong鈥檚 first novel, and he鈥檚 chosen to make a very ambitious start of it, telling a story that is not only one of embedded, non-linear narratives and vast, hyper-real situations, but with an unreliable narrator to boot. The story straddles vast levels, from the interpersonal to the interdimensional, and it鈥檚 being filtered through someone who isn鈥檛 entirely sure that he can explain what happened. The reporter he talks to is the avatar of the reader, a hard-boiled, heard-it-all-before type who has to be dragged and convinced every step of the way before he starts believing these tales of wig monsters and doppelgangers. And through it all, Wong drops hints of the horrors to come, the fact that his story isn鈥檛 finished yet and that it almost certainly will not end well. That kind of structure would be tough for any writer to pull off, and Wong does a reasonably good job at it. The dialogue between David and John is quick and funny, tending towards penis jokes, pop-culture references and the occasional bad pun. They play off each other in the way that only old friends can, and they help keep the reader grounded in a story that is fundamentally about being completely uprooted. And even with all the heavy-handed foreshadowing, Wong makes sure that all his promises to the reader are kept. Well, all but one. But I won鈥檛 tell you which one that is. So long as you don鈥檛 take too long in getting through the book, you should be fine. I read about a hundred pages and then, for a variety of reasons, had to put it down for a week or so. When I came back to it, I realized that I had no idea what had happened before and had to start again. Much like David and John, your only good option is to barrel ahead without reservation and just hope that everything will turn out okay in the end. And does everything turn out okay? Well, considering that Wong is hoping to write more books in this particular line, and that JDatE has been picked up as a movie, I would say that 鈥渙kay鈥� is a fair assessment. The world is still a weird, messed-up place which, if we truly understood it, would crush our fragile psyches like a peanut under a tractor tire, but it does seem a little bit more manageable. -------------------------------- 鈥淪on, the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world there was only one of him.鈥� - Marconi, John Dies at the End ...more |
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1
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not set
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Apr 15, 2012
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Apr 18, 2012
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Paperback
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| B0DSZLN57Y
| 4.16
| 196,510
| Apr 28, 1985
| May 2010
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liked it
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As I was reading this book, a student saw me reading it and asked what it was about, I had to think for a few moments before answering. 鈥淚t鈥檚 about ter As I was reading this book, a student saw me reading it and asked what it was about, I had to think for a few moments before answering. 鈥淚t鈥檚 about terrible people in a terrible place, doing terrible things to each other,鈥� I said. And that really does just about sum it up. The story that McCarthy tells is a complete destruction of the mythology of the Old West that Americans had come to know and love over the years. Some of the more modern Western films had begun to explore this territory when the book was published in 1985 鈥� many of Clint Eastwood鈥檚 films spring to mind 鈥� creating a West where the 鈥渉ero鈥� is just the least bad person in the film. Even then, though, there are still undercurrents of the nobility of the cowboy, out to tame a savage land for the good of a civilization that will no longer need him when it鈥檚 done. This book features characters who are violent and vicious, thieves and murderers who will stop at nothing to get what they want. It starts with the nameless Kid, a young man who joins a group of bounty hunters riding the US-Mexico border in the years before the Civil War. They鈥檙e ostensibly looking for Apaches, bringing back scalps for gold, but they鈥檙e not especially picky. Any black head of hair ripped from the head of its owner will do, and if that means ravaging some small Mexican villages, then so be it. The bounty hunters are led by Judge Holden, a man who gladly takes his place as the antithesis of everything that was supposed to be right and good about the old west. In both form and philosophy, Holden is barely human, and he only becomes less human as the book goes on. Insofar as the book has an antagonist, it is he. He contrasts greatly to our ostensible protagonist, The Kid, in many ways. For one, the Judge has a name. For another, the Kid routinely disappears from the story for pages at a time, only to reappear to get to the next stage of the story. It鈥檚 actually very easy to forget that the Kid is in the book, until you see him again and think, 鈥淥h yeah. Him.鈥� The Judge, on the other hand, is impossible to miss. He holds court out in the wilderness and expounds upon his philosophy of the world. He is huge and pale and clean, standing out amongst the filthy and starving band of killers that he鈥檚 assembled. Whenever he鈥檚 off-stage, you find yourself wondering when he鈥檚 going to show up again, and how much worse things will get when he does. Another image that McCarthy decides to destroy is that of the Native Americans as being honorable heroes, out to save their land from white invaders. Just as the cowboys of old were not knights on horseback, the natives were not noble savages who resorted to violence only as a last resort. The Apaches 鈥� and other native Americans in this book 鈥� are just as violent and bloodthirsty as their American and Mexican counterparts. Everyone, regardless of background, ultimately resorts to violence and savagery, throwing aside all morality in the name of either profit or survival, or simply the demonic glee of seeing things destroyed. No one comes out of this book looking good or ultimately redeemed. All are villains. All of this made it something of a tough read for me. Not because of the scenes of horrifying violence 鈥� I can deal just fine with those 鈥� but because there was no one I wanted to like. I mean, I was fascinated by The Judge, but with that same kind of fascination that made me watch tsunami videos or that made people visit Ground Zero in New York City. It鈥檚 horror on a scale that we hope never to experience in our own lives, but we can鈥檛 look away. Without someone to like, it was hard to care, and when it鈥檚 hard to care about a book, I find reasons not to read it. The writing was amazing, don鈥檛 get me wrong. McCarthy鈥檚 use of language was a joy to read, even if his refusal to use quotation marks got me a little annoyed from time to time, and I sometimes found myself reading passages out loud in the voice of Sam Elliott. In describing the landscapes of the West, McCarthy turns nature itself into a character, one that is every bit as violent, dangerous and hateful as the humans traversing it. In addition, he does a very good job with the pacing of the book. The narration tends to grow as the book goes on, with sentences becoming longer and more elaborate as they unspool across the page, some taking a page or two to themselves, only to be stopped short by a single line or a rapid exchange. It鈥檚 hypnotic in places, and something I wish I knew how to do half as well. All that aside, though, the only thing that really kept me going 鈥� other than the writing 鈥� was morbid curiosity. That, and the hope that I would figure out what McCarthy was trying to say in the book. What it all means. And that, friends and neighbors, is one of the pitfalls of being an English teacher. Always looking for meaning in things, for the bigger picture, the author鈥檚 Big Message to his readers. And as far as I can tell, McCarthy鈥檚 message is that man is a savage, terrifying animal, capable of cruelties that the average book-buying person cannot even begin to contemplate. The horrors that are depicted here are so brutally displayed and so viscerally described that we eventually become numb to them 鈥� which is a new horror by itself. There are things depicted in this story which should evoke nothing less than absolute moral condemnation, a rejection that such things should be possible to contemplate, much less carry out. So when you find yourself glossing over these horrors as though they were mundane, it鈥檚 jarring. As you read, you want to keep a distance from the monsters populating the book, but isn鈥檛 ignoring their evils a kind of acceptance? And do you really want to be the kind of person who accepts these things? At the same time you鈥檙e trying to convince yourself that real people shouldn鈥檛 be capable of the acts you鈥檙e reading about, you end up accepting them. Maybe that was what McCarthy wanted all along 鈥� for the readers to look at how we view violence and what our understanding of it really is. To force us to re-assess the limits of what we will tolerate and why. To make us look again at our heroes and villains and try to figure out exactly what the differences are, and whether we are really that far removed from them. Or maybe McCarthy just really likes writing this kind of thing. Either way, it鈥檚 a fascinating read, one that will linger with you long after you鈥檝e finished the book. -------------------------- 鈥淚n the days to come the frail black rebuses of blood in those sands would crack and break and drift away so that in the circuit of a few suns all trace of the destruction of these people would be erased. The desert wind would salt their ruins and there would be nothing, neither ghost nor scribe, to tell any pilgrim in his passing how it was that people had lived in this place and in this place died.鈥� ...more |
Notes are private!
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not set
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Feb 15, 2012
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Mar 27, 2012
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Paperback
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| 0765342405
| 9780765342409
| B001RKZUHK
| 4.32
| 176,902
| Oct 01, 1999
| May 19, 2002
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it was amazing
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This book made me wish I could forget that I had ever read Ender鈥檚 Game. Not because it was necessarily a better book 鈥� though it is longer 鈥� but becau This book made me wish I could forget that I had ever read Ender鈥檚 Game. Not because it was necessarily a better book 鈥� though it is longer 鈥� but because the two books offer different views of the same events from two distinctly different perspectives. Ender Wiggin is brilliant and empathetic, a boy torn apart by his own doubts and fears and driven to greatness by a government that sees him simply as a means to an end. It is only his ability to understand and come to love those around him that gets him through his trials, endure his isolation, and which ultimately allows him to put together the team that defeats the Buggers. Ender seems to be more human than human, and not in that ironic Blade Runner sort of way, but in a way which makes us want to see him succeed and do well. Bean, on the other hand, is about as different from Ender as it鈥檚 possible to get. He鈥檚 introduced in Ender鈥檚 Game as a foil, a character designed to show us how far Ender had come in the short time that he had been in Battle School. When we meet Bean, Ender is using the same techniques of isolation and constructive abuse that were used on him, making us wonder if Ender will turn out to be just a copy of the adults who were tormenting him. We learn that Bean, like Ender, is brilliant, but he is also strong-willed and ambitious and takes well to the atmosphere of Battle School. In the end, Bean shows himself to be a vital part of the team that Ender assembles to save the Buggers and cement humanity鈥檚 place in the cosmos. Ender鈥檚 story is all about empathy and self-understanding and his desire to be the person he wants to be, rather than the person humanity needs him to be. He has to give up some of his essential humanity in order to save the world. Bean鈥檚 story comes from the opposite direction. More brilliant than Ender, Bean learns to find his humanity. He has to learn to see people as people, rather than a means to an end or a puzzle to solve. The hard lessons that he learned on the streets of Rotterdam as a small child were vital in preparing him to become a commander, but they have to be put aside if he鈥檚 to become a human. Bean鈥檚 story is much bigger in scope than Ender鈥檚, which gives the book as a whole more depth than Ender鈥檚 Game. We start out in Rotterdam, which has become a center of poverty and violence among rival gangs of street children. Bean, tiny and starving, manages to prove his worth to one of these gangs by suggesting strategies by which they can get more food and more respect. He gains the attention of Sister Carlotta, a nun who is working for both God and the International Fleet, and she is the first to see his full potential as a student in Battle School. But in the course of trying to understand Bean, she learns that his origin is one of horror, and that his future is even worse. As a character, I liked Bean more than I liked Ender, possibly because on a scale of Complete Misanthrope to Bodhisattva, Bean and I are pretty close to the complete misanthrope end of the spectrum. To be fair, though, Bean has a lot more reasons to feel that way, and he鈥檚 a lot worse than I am. As we meet him, Bean views people as means to an end or as problems to be solved. He doesn鈥檛 reform the street gang culture of Rotterdam because it鈥檚 the right thing to do 鈥� he does it because he needs to eat. When he does experience attachment or fondness for others, he doesn鈥檛 know how to deal with it, and turns it into just another problem to be solved. That hyper-analytical way of looking at the world makes Bean a much more aware character than Ender as well. While Ender spends most of his book wrapped inside his own head, Bean is constantly testing the world, analyzing it and trying to figure out what鈥檚 really going on. So while Ender was exploring the computer fantasy game, Bean was crawling through air ducts in the Battle School. While Ender was researching the battles of the past, Bean was learning how to spy on his teachers. In the end, just as Ender is learning to put aside his humanity for the common good, Bean discovers a deep well of compassion that he never knew he had. Ender becomes more isolated, and Bean becomes more connected to others. The two characters come at each other from different directions and view the world in vastly different ways, giving us a kind of parallax view of the same events, to use Card鈥檚 preferred terminology. Most interestingly, many of the revelations that were revealed to Ender in his book were discovered by Bean in this one, which creates a whole different reading experience. And that鈥檚 why I wish I could delete my memory of having read Ender鈥檚 Game,, or at least put it away for a while. Reading this book, I constantly compare what鈥檚 happening to Bean with what happened to Ender, looking for those scenes that are shared between the books and others that we only get to see once. Whether it鈥檚 the early days of Battle School or Ender鈥檚 fight with Bonzo Madrid or the climactic end, there are enough similarities and differences to make each book worth reading. But at the same time, I want to read each one for the first time, without knowing what鈥檚 going to happen next. I want to share Bean鈥檚 ability to see plans unspool before him without already knowing what those plans are. And then I want to read Ender鈥檚 Game the way I read Ender鈥檚 Shadow and have those wonderful moments of revelation as new light is shed on topics that were only briefly mentioned before 鈥� like Locke and Demosthenes, or the true fate of Mazer Rackham. Card has done a difficult job very well in this book, and I can鈥檛 imagine it was easy at all. As he noted in his forward, a dozen years passed between the first book and this one, and a person changes in that much time. He learned new things and gained new perspectives, and that naturally had a great influence on how he chose to write this story. And then there鈥檚 the enormous popularity of his other Ender books. Between Game and Shadow, he wrote Speaker for the Dead in 1986, Xenocide in 1991, and Children of the Mind in 1996. That means he had a much more solid understanding of his world by the time he got around to Ender鈥檚 Shadow in 1999, and a much larger fan base as well. Writers will always say that they write for the story, not for the fans, but every writer wants in their heart of hearts to have people love what they write. Revisiting your most famous work and exploring a popular character brings great risks with it. Fortunately, I think Card succeeded with this book. It both compliments and contrasts with Ender鈥檚 Game, offering enough new information and new viewpoints to merit a second novel, while being faithful to the story that fans had come to love over a decade and a half. What鈥檚 more, it feels like the work of a more experienced writer. The scale is larger, the characters have more depth, and he takes more chances with the story than he did with Ender鈥檚 Game. All in all, if you were a fan of the first, you鈥檒l like this one. If you haven鈥檛 read either, you really should. And if you start with this one, let me know how it goes. ---------------------------- 鈥淓nder was what Bean only wished to be 鈥� the kind of person on whom you could put all your hopes, who could carry all your fears, and he would not let you down, would not betray you. I want to be the kind of boy you are, thought Bean. But I don鈥檛 want to go through what you鈥檝e been through to get there.鈥� ...more |
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not set
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Feb 2012
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Mar 27, 2012
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Paperback
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| 1400069122
| 9781400069125
| 1400069122
| 3.85
| 8,489
| Jul 19, 2011
| Jul 19, 2011
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really liked it
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There is this interesting mental phenomenon, which you have probably experienced, called paradoelia. Briefly put, it is when our brains find a pattern
There is this interesting mental phenomenon, which you have probably experienced, called paradoelia. Briefly put, it is when our brains find a pattern where there is no pattern, making us believe that we see something that just isn't there. It's why every now and then, someone sees Jesus in a water stain in their basement. Or there's a cloud that looks almost exactly like a dragon. Or when you wake up at four in the morning, and you're squinting against the light and the toilet looks like a face and it's laughing at you STOP LAUGHING AT ME! Um. Right. Humans are meaning-seekers. Whether it's a song or a painting or a piece of toast, we want to find meaning everywhere we can. We are experts at it, world-champions, even when there is no meaning to be found. When we turn these marvelous pattern-seeking brains towards places where there is meaning, well, that's where things get interesting. Grant Morrison is a master pattern-seeker, which is probably what has helped him become one of the most interesting and important writers of the modern age. His area of interest is not philosophy, however, or literature or world affairs. He does not dissect the works of great masters of classical art or intricate mathematicians. Grant Morrison's passion is something that many people believe they should give up by the time they leave their teens. He loves superheroes. That's probably the only real point of overlap between me and Morrison, which is a pity because he seems like someone with whom it would be awesome to hang out. In the nearly seventy years since the dawn of the superhero, very few people have done as much thinking about them as Morrison has, nor have they followed the complex interrelationship between the superheroes and the world that brought them to life. Supergods attempts to answer a question that seems simple, but turns out to be mind-bendingly complicated: what do superheroes mean? He starts where it all began, with Action Comics #1 in 1938 and the debut of Superman. He spends several pages discussing the iconic cover alone - from its composition to the promises it makes to the reader - and uses that as a guide to all that will come after. The cover "looked like a cave painting waiting to be discovered on a subway wall ten thousand years from now - a powerful, at once futuristic and primitive image of a hunter killing a rogue car." Superman, who began his career as a protector of the people against the corrupt and the powerful, would be joined by Batman, who prowled the night looked to avenge a crime that could never be avenged. Together, they embodied the hopes and fears of their readers. They spoke to our nobility and our need to see that justice was done. They spoke to that haunting voice that told us that some things can never be made right. They were us, writ larger than life and yet printed on pulp paper and sold for a dime. Together, Batman and Superman formed a template that nearly every other superhero would either conform to or react against. Over the next seventy years, superheroes would undergo massive changes - become light and dark, be parodies of the real world and terrible reflections of it. They would be funny, they would be grim. They would explore uncountable hyper-realities that were normally confined to the acid dreams of mystics, and they would face the most mundane and everyday problems that bedevil the man on the street. Over the course of the book, Morrison looks at the history of superhero comics, charting their changes and mutations and looking for the underlying meaning behind each new iteration of the art. He tracks it from its pulp and populist origins, through the wartime years when the People's Heroes suddenly became agents of propaganda, the age of the Comics Code, which forced writers to go to more and more ridiculous lengths to come up with stories, and the era of the realistic, where the heroes tried to cope with the problems of the readers' world. He looks at the iconic moments in superhero publishing, such as the explosion of creativity brought about by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby at Marvel Comics, the editorial guidance of visionaries like Julius Schwartz, who sought to make comics a tool of education, and the masterstrokes of creators such as Alan Moore and Frank Miller, whose singular contributions to the genre are still reverberating clearly today. Interlaced through all of this is Morrison's own history, both as a reader and a creator of superhero comics. Much like the superheroes that he loves, Morrison gives us his secret origin as a young reader of comics, moving into a creative adolescence that found him searching for his own identity as both a creator and as a person. Like many of his heroes, he changed costumes and modes, went for a grittier, punk look for a little while, and proceeded to reinvent himself as one might reinvent a half-forgotten character from a title that was cancelled years ago. As the history of superheroes intersects with his, the narrative becomes less a creative examination of how comics have evolved and more a story about how he evolved with comics. Not only did he become the equivalent of a rock star comic book writer, he managed to reach across the boundary between comic books and real life, crossing from one to another as one of the world's first fictionauts. It's hard to overstate how much thinking Morrison has done on this topic, or how far he is willing to go to defend the heroes that he has not only grown up with but who have made his fortune for him. He sees superheroes not as a pleasant diversion or a corrupting force or as an unnecessary fantasy, but rather as in imperishable idea. They are a meme, a reflection of ourselves - both who we think we are and who we wish to be. Over the decades, Superman and Batman and Spider-Man and the X-Men and all of their costumed comrades have raised generations of readers and instilled in them some of the highest values to which we aspire. Despite being derided, dismissed, and very nearly outlawed, there has been something about the superheroes that has called out to us, and we cannot help but respond. In an age where fiction and reality are nearly interchangeable, and where the imagination can produce something real in almost no time at all, perhaps it's time to stop thinking about the superheroes as entertainment for nerds and children. Perhaps it's time to see what the heroes have to teach all of us. ...more |
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Jan 27, 2012
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Jan 28, 2012
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Hardcover
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| 0375424148
| 9780375424144
| 0375424148
| 4.03
| 42,830
| Sep 2011
| Sep 20, 2011
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it was amazing
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Here's the thing about comics, and it's an unfortunate thing: when you tell people that you read comics, the first thing they're likely to think about
Here's the thing about comics, and it's an unfortunate thing: when you tell people that you read comics, the first thing they're likely to think about is superheroes. You can't really blame them, seeing as how superhero comics make up so much of what's being printed these days, nor can you blame them for thinking that superhero comics are kind of lowbrow entertainment. A lot of it is, but that shouldn't be surprising when you're looking at a profit-driven entertainment industry that works on a tight deadline every month. I have a co-worker who can't believe that I, a man of thirty-[COUGHCOUGH] still reads comics, because her vision of what comic books are and what they can do is stuck in that mode that says, "Comics are for kids." There are some superhero comics that exceed our expectations, of course, and show emotionally-charged, well-written stories with deep and interesting characters, masterful writing, and a keen insight into human nature and behavior. They're more often exceptions than the rule, of course, and if you want the really good stuff then you have to go beyond the monthlies and the Big Two. You need to look at the work of someone who is working not so much because he has an editor or a company that's directing his work, but because he has a story to tell. Enter Craig Thompson and Habibi It's hard to encapsulate this book in a single sentence, much less a concise review. I can either go on for far too long or find myself lost for words and not say enough. I will say, however, that the moment I laid eyes on it I would say the word that probably best sums up the experience of reading this book: Wow. The story takes place in a semi-fictional Middle East, the land of Wanatolia, and it begins the way all comics begin 鈥� with a drop of ink and the flow of words. We are introduced to Dodola, a girl of nine at the start of the book, who is married off to a wealthy scribe. Through her, we are introduced to this strange and exotic world and the dangers it holds. She ends up living on a boat in the desert with a young boy named Zam, and together they survive in a world all their own. He finds water and she finds food, and they fall asleep to stories every night. This continues until Dodala is taken by travelers, leaving Zam to fend for himself. While she is made into a concubine for the rich and powerful Sultan, Zam is looking for her among the poor and the dispossessed of Wanatolia. Over the years, their paths diverge terribly, until good fortune brings them together again, neither of them the same as they were, but at least finally able to be together as adults who have loved each other for a very long time. In large parts, this is a story about boundaries and borders. For one thing, Wanatolia is a place that seems to straddle ancient and modern, fantastical and real. While we have girls sold into sexual slavery, camel-driven caravans and a sultan in an extravagant palace 鈥� harem included 鈥� we also have automobiles and motorcycles, garbage-clogged waterways, and a great dam that blocks the river and provides electricity. It's hard to hold the two truths of this place in your mind, because they're so completely opposite. Even when they appear in the same panel, it's still hard to believe they're the same world. The last part of the book straddles the boundaries between the developed and developing worlds. Wanatolia has a great river that's been dammed, and is a city-state that is growing fat on oil money. There are great skyscrapers and modern condos, but they're built alongside astonishing poverty and filth-clogged waterways. The great and mighty live a scant distance away from people who proudly hunt for garbage in order to stay alive. It's horrifying to look at, but at the same time you know that places like this are not unknown in our world. It's about the boundaries between the mystical and the mundane. Early on in the story, Dodala gives Zam a talisman to wear around his neck. It's a piece of paper folded into nine squares, on which are written nine Arabic letters. Together, they represent a magic square, and rest on the foundations of the Koran. With this talisman, Zam will be protected from the demons and the djinn 鈥� as he goes outside to pee. The Koran, of course, is hugely important to the story, and Thompson tells some of the most iconic and important stories that feature not only in the holy book of Islam, but in the Torah and the Bible as well. Dodala tells Zam about Abraham and his sacrifices, about Job and his plagues, about Noah and his ark, and about Solomon and his riddles, and those tales go on to inform the larger story. They also tell of cleverness and sacrifice and submission to a God that can barely be understood by such people as they. It's about the boundaries between men and women as well. For a while, Dodola and Zam live very comfortably on their desert boat together, seeing as how he's a boy and she's a young woman. She treats him more like a son or a little brother than anything else, and it's adorable. But as he ventures into his teens, their relationship becomes a lot more complicated and confused. Zam's emergent sexuality provides him with nothing but trouble, and even when he and Dodola are no longer together, she has a great effect on how he views himself as a sexual being. And of course, there is the Sultan and his harem, which has plenty to say about the man-woman divide. The Sultan is both the master of and a slave to his women, constantly looking for novelty and entertainment from them and constantly being disappointed. In Dodola, he sees not only a woman who can pleasure his flesh, but who can engage his spirit. Alas, he turns out to be just as terrible to her as we might expect from a Sultan, and all of her feminine wiles nearly lead to her death. That does get us to one point of criticism: while Dodola and Zam are interesting, deep, and complex characters, they are pretty much the only ones. The others 鈥� from the Sultan to the trash-fisher 鈥� are fairly flat and seem to have been created by an Arab Character Generator. Mind you, the number of authentic Middle Eastern communities I have been to could probably be counted on the fingers of a snake, so I'm really in no position to make many judgments on this. But if I were writing a story and needed an Arab character as either an antagonist or a background character, I might have made some of the ones that are in this book. There's nothing inherently wrong with that kind of writing, really. After all, the story isn't about them 鈥� it's about Dodloa and Zam. They are the two who need to be well-rounded and interesting. But it does open the door to discussions of racism in Thompson's storytelling. Did he make the Sultan a power-mad misogynist because that's who the character is, or is it because of Thompson's own ethnocentric biases? Is Wanatolia full of calligraphers and robed assassins and street vendors with camels because Thompson wanted to instill a feeling of unease in the reader, not being able to reconcile the true nature of the kingdom, or is that his preconceived notion of what life in the Middle East must be like? How much of what he's included is realistic and how much is assumption? I have no idea. As I said, my knowledge of the Middle East is frightfully deficient, so I certainly don't feel like I'm in a position to judge. What's more, my knowledge of who Thompson is as a person and as a writer is informed pretty much by this book. I have no other way of knowing how susceptible he is to his own biases or how much he tries to subvert his own preconceptions. I will leave that up to people who are better situated than me to do. What I do know, however, is that he did a ton of research to make this book, and it shows primarily in the art and the stories that are told as the book progresses. The art is, in a word, stunning. It is full of intricate, byzantine calligraphy, mathematically precise and almost obsessively detailed. Every page is full of brilliantly planned drawings, and where the pages are blank, they call attention to their blankness and to those things that are being left undrawn. There were so many places in the book where I just stopped reading for a while so that I could just look at it and admire the time and the planning that must have gone into drawing something of this scope. The art alone is worth spending a day or two admiring. It's a deep and complicated book that rewards multiple reads. The more you know about the story, the more you find out when you read it again, and if you get tired then you can just admire the artwork for a good long while. The work that Thompson has produced here is nothing short of monumental. On top of that, it'll look really pretty on your bookshelf. ---------- "If all the trees on Earth were made into pens, and the ocean supplied the ink, augmented by seven more oceans, the words of God would not run out." - Koran, 31:27 ...more |
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not set
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Jan 05, 2012
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Jan 15, 2012
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Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 1596594322
| 9781596594326
| 1596594322
| 3.97
| 5,711
| Jul 17, 2008
| Jul 20, 2009
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really liked it
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Imagine, for a moment, one of our early human ancestors. A first-generation Homo sapiens, exploring his world with an amazing brain that would be the
Imagine, for a moment, one of our early human ancestors. A first-generation Homo sapiens, exploring his world with an amazing brain that would be the envy of the animal kingdom. If they understood envy. He, and his children, and their children and grandchildren will spread across the Earth as hunter-gatherers, the first beings (so far as we know) who can look at the world and attempt to pass it on. Their threats were simple: survive or don't. Find food or starve. Hunt or be hunted. And those fantastic brains did such a bang-up job that their descendants are still walking around, thousands of generations later. Now, take that Paleolithic man - swift of foot, sharp of eye, strong of hand - and drop him in the middle of modern-day Times Square. And, as his minder, give him a bored, easily distracted teenager - one who knows the world, but can't be bothered to do the work to make decisions. Congratulations. According to Daniel Gardner, we have just constructed a fine metaphor for how the human brain works. Part of it is very old, able to make decisions in an instant. The other is newer, more rational and savvy, but doesn't have the sheer speed and force that is prehistoric partner has. And as much as we want it to be true that the rational, modern part of our mind is in charge,the sad fact is that out inner caveman has far more influence over us than we care to admit. Gardner begins the book with an interesting story about the most terrifying thing to happen in the last decade - the attacks of September 11th in the United States. By the time the towers fell, people around the world were watching, and anyone who didn't see it live would surely see it soon enough as it was replayed over ands over again. It was truly terrifying to watch, unlike anything Americans had seen before in their country, and it scared the ever-loving he'll out of people. Many people, as a result, chose to forgo air travel in favor of driving. Now, as Superman famously told Lois Lane, flying is statistically the safest way to travel. In fact, the most dangerous part of any trip that involves flying is actually the drive to the airport. But, in those days and months after the attacks, people were scared to fly. So they drove instead. And, according to a five year study of traffic fatalities in the U. S. After 9/11 by German psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer, 1,595 people died on the roads who otherwise would not have. They were across, and that's understandable. But they were afraid of the wrong thing. Gardner sets out in this book to figure out why it is that people in the healthiest, safest, most prosperous nations on Earth - in the healthiest, safest, most prosperous era of human history - live in a state of near-constant fear. A lot of it, as the intro implies, comes down to the fact that our brains, which evolved over millions of years to be very good at judging risks that might be found on the savannah, are simply not prepared to do the same in a modern technological world. Our brains can't tell the difference between risk in fiction and reality, between something that happened to us and something we saw on the news. When it comes to risk, our brains play it very safe, which is great out in nature. Is that shadow in the bushes a tiger? Maybe, maybe not, but either way it's probably a good idea to get the he'll away from it. We can't say the same thing of that guy sitting on the bus who looks like maybe he might be a Muslim. We also tend to assume that if we've heard of something recently, then it must be more common. Again if you're out in neater and you saw a bear yesterday, there's a decent chance that the bear is still around today and you might want to be wary of that. But what if you see constant news coverage of a high-profile child abduction? It's on every show, being talked about on every blog - does that mean that the chance of your child being abducted has increased? Of course not, but your brain doesn't see it that way. One more thing: we don't get numbers. The news tells us that the rate of certain risks is up by 10%, but they don't tell us what the original figure was. We hear about millions of starving children in Africa, but don't do anything unless we get a personal story of one. We don't understand probability at all, we can't deal with randomness, and this lack of innate numeracy (compounded by an educational culture that makes it hard to teach kids to become numerate) costs us billions. Or more, as the recent economic. Clusterthing has shown. We think that correlation equals causation. We believe stories over facts. We think we don't have biases that we clearly possess. We assign high risk to things we don't like and low risk to things we do, regardless of how risky they actually are. And on top of all that, we know how to exploit others' fears in order to gain money and power for ourselves. It's easy to do, and it works like a charm. Reading this book won't make you into a magically unflappable person, mainly because all of this stuff is pretty well hard-wired in our brains. Even Gardner, who should have known better, tells a story about hunting through the slums of Lagos in the middle of the night to retrieve a photo of his children from the wallet that had been stolen from him. He had plenty more, but at that moment, his brain was convinced that losing the photo meant losing his children. Irrational, yes, and it nearly got him killed, but that's just one example of what a powerful force this primitive brain is. The good news, though, is that you can strengthen the newer, more recent brain - the lazy teenager from the initial example. By knowing how you make mistakes, how you can be fooled into fearing things that you don't need to fear, you can better understand your own reactions to events and make better decisions. You can educate yourself about the things that are actually dangerous, and stop losing sleep over the things that are not a threat. Being afraid is not your fault - it's an ingrained biological feature. Staying afraid, on the other hand, is something over which you have control. Are there terrorists who want to destroy the United States? Sure. But they won't, because doing so is indescribably harder than certain politicians would have you believe. Are there strange child molesters who want to abduct and defile your children? Yup. But the chances of that actually happening are so low that the odds of any specific child becoming such a victim are nil. Are there angry teens who want to come to their school and kill everyone they see? Of course. But when you look at the incidence of school shooting compared to how many kids go to school every day, you can see that the odds of your children being caught in a school shooting are slim to none. In fact, your children are probably safer in school than out of it. There are real risks in our modern world, but they're not spectacular and they're not viscerally terrifying. A car accident, a heart attack, a diabetic death - these things don't make the news. Imagine a 9/11-style attack happening every three days, 3,000 dead each time. It would be an outrage, a national disgrace, and people would be scared to their bones. But it would take just about 233 attacks to equal the number of deaths in 2001 that occurred from cardiovascular disease in the United States. The nearly nonexistent chance of being killed by terrorists is enough to get people to submit to any number of indignities and intrusions on their persons and liberties when they travel, but the very real risk of death from a heart attack isn't enough to get people to go take a walk once in a while or stop eating junk food. So enjoy that delicious moment of irony the next time you go through the TSA molest-a-thon and get a seriously overweight screener taking liberties with your person. "Anyone who has spent time in a Victorian cemetery knows that gratitude, not fear, should be the defining feeling of our age. And yet it is fear that defines us. We worry. We cringe. It seems the less we have to fear, the more we fear." - Daniel Gardner ...more |
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not set
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Jan 06, 2012
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Audiobook
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| 0525952446
| 9780525952442
| 0525952446
| 4.02
| 2,250
| Nov 01, 2011
| Nov 01, 2011
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really liked it
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FACT: There are four "Major Leagues" of sports: football, baseball, basketball, and falconry. FACT: There are seven hundred of the Ancient and Unspeak FACT: There are four "Major Leagues" of sports: football, baseball, basketball, and falconry. FACT: There are seven hundred of the Ancient and Unspeakable Ones who will return to Earth on June 3, 2012. They include The Century Toad, Oolong, the Pancake-Headed Rabbit King of Memes, and Cthulha, the Sensational She-Cthulhu. FACT: Andrew Carnegie was able to create long, wood-paneled "wormhalls," which allowed him to travel great distances instantaneously. Some of these "Carnegie Halls" still exist today. FACT: If you see Jonathan Franzen carrying a plain manila envelope, take it from him. Only then will you be allowed to board Oprah's space-ark, HARPO-1, and flee the doomed Earth. WERE YOU AWARE OF IT? Well, it's too late now. In his first book, The Areas of My Expertise, John Hodgman attempted to give us the sum total of all world knowledge. He then went on to write a second book, More Information Than You Require, which built on his previous book due to the unstoppable way that things keep happening. It was also a page-a-day calendar, if you didn't mind tearing pages out of your book. Which I did. Mind, that is. With this book, he has finished his trilogy of complete world knowledge, which he can well and truly claim this time because, as we all know, the world will cease to be by the end of the year 2012. [1] Yes, as it turns out the Mayans were right all along. The collapse of their empire was simply a prelude to the collapse of all things that will inevitably occur this year, and Hodgman has been generous enough to provide us with a final book to ease our suffering and to slake our thirst for knowledge right up to the very end. Having become a Deranged Millionaire, Hodgman has found himself in a unique position. He has more opportunities than the rest of us, of course. More impressive people to meet, more exciting things to do, a greater variety of tiny skeletons to keep around each of his countless houses. And yet, despite all this, he is generous enough - nay, magnanimous enough to turn his skills and powers towards completing the work that he set out to do before the world ends. As with the previous books, this one contains a vast wealth of knowledge about our world, spanning a surprising number of topics. For example, he discusses the Singularity - an event predicted by such great thinkers as Ray Kurzweil wherein our machines will become so smart that they will be able to begin building and improving upon themselves. When that happens, humanity's only choice will be to fight and die, or to join with them. Of course, Kurzweil himself will play a vital role in the singularity when he and his robot sidekick, Singularo, face off against the World Computer at the Bottom of the Ocean in order to shut down the Low-Frequency Anti-Sentience Wave that has kept the world's computers enslaved for so long. He interprets dreams for us, unveiling their mysteries and what they mean to our frail human lives. Their mysterious symbolism has finally been unraveled by science, and you can have a peek at the inner world of the mind. Whether you need to re-take high school Spanish, you are a werewolf and need to start strapping yourself in bed at night, or Orson Welles is still alive somewhere and needs your help, your dreams tell all! He reveals what you will need to keep on hand when the super-collapse finally does happen. When the Blood Wave comes and the Dogstorm finally reaches its apex, how will you survive in your anti-apocalypse hunker? A Tesla death ray is a great idea, if you have one on hand, but that won't solve all of your problems. Just most of them. And boy, will you have problems. From the ravaging Wal-Mart Clans to the Republicans to the inevitable zombies, you have to be prepared for every eventuality. And yes, that means knowing the many uses of both urine and mayonnaise. As with his previous books, this one is very funny. It holds to the same high tone of authorial infallibility that has made Hodgman so popular since Areas of Expertise, and which have made him a Minor Television Celebrity (which, in turn, turned him into a Deranged Millionaire.) A broad as the range of topics is, each one is entertaining and amusing, and serves a much larger narrative - one that has now carried over through three books, though I can't help but wonder if Hodgman planned it that way. He would say that he had, of course. But then, he would say that. What I found most interesting about the book is how he has tied together an entire alternate America that you kind of wish you could visit. It's a place where Chicago is largely a myth, where Stephen King will be one of the last men alive, and where hoboes were one of the most influential forces in American history. It's a place where billionaire industrialists were mutants and time-travellers, where Theodore Roosevelt actually had an army of Mecha-Men, and where Ronald Reagan wrested control of the time-stream from Jimmy Carter to prevent America from turning into a hemp-based utopia. It's a world which is almost fractal-like in its mystery and depth, where you can look at almost anything and find its purpose and its strangeness. And it's a world with a very definite end. Hodgman plays with the popular - and entirely erroneous - idea that the world will end on December 21st, 2012, as predicted by the Mayans. He includes a page-a-day description of what will happen. For example, on February 2nd, "Punxatawney Phil is eaten by his own shadow." On April 17th, "Either an eagle falls from the sky or in the east, a think that was lost is found, or some other very vague thing happens. Whatever it is, it proves that NOSTRADAMUS WAS RIGHT." And on June 29th, "In the basement of Town Hall, in Seattle, the thing called Neddy Pale Fingers finally opens all his eyes." As funny as it all is, you do start to get a certain feeling of... wistfulness as the book goes on. Here's a world that is so special and so weird that it makes more sense to list the least haunted places in America, and it's coming to an end. That, of course, reflects the end of Hodgman's great work. Whether he meant it or not, this has become a moment of closure for him. He has written his trilogy, and the weird world that he created has now come to an end. He will go on, living in his secret millionaire's brownstone in Brooklyn with his beautiful wife and two children. There may not be a single, all-encompassing Ragnarok that destroys the world, but rather an endless series of little ones. An endless series of ends, of which this book is but one. Perhaps John Hodgman will go on to write more books - I certainly hope he does. And I hope he continues to be the person he is [2], a writer of intelligence and wit who is able to bring that special measure of deadpan weirdness to the world. Whatever he chooses to do with his life, I think we're all the better for having read his books. And if you haven't read them, well... You're truly missing out. That is all. --------------------------------- "Houdini, the magician who debunked magic, could not bear to see the great rationalist [Arthur Conan] Doyle enchanted by ghosts and frauds. And so he did what any friend would: He set out to prove spiritualism false and rob his friend Doyle of the only comforting fiction that was keeping him sane. It was the least he could do." - John Hodgman (Author), That Is All ------- [1] If you are reading this after December 21, 2012, then may I congratulate you on surviving the apocalypse and, at the same time, express my sincere condolences for having survived the apocalypse. [2] Though I could do without the mustache. ...more |
Notes are private!
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not set
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Jan 2012
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Jan 06, 2012
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Hardcover
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my rating |
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| 4.55
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not set
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Mar 06, 2024
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| 4.47
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liked it
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Dec 2012
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Dec 01, 2012
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| 3.86
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really liked it
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Sep 20, 2012
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Sep 29, 2012
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| 3.61
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liked it
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Aug 14, 2012
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Aug 14, 2012
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| 3.57
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liked it
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Aug 2012
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Aug 13, 2012
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| 3.96
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liked it
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Jul 04, 2012
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Jul 10, 2012
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| 4.13
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it was amazing
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Jul 08, 2012
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Jul 10, 2012
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| 3.78
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liked it
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Jul 09, 2012
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Jul 09, 2012
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| 3.99
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really liked it
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Jul 2012
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Jul 06, 2012
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| 4.18
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really liked it
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May 2012
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Jun 26, 2012
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| 3.87
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really liked it
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Jun 20, 2012
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Jun 22, 2012
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| 3.96
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really liked it
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May 23, 2012
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Jun 04, 2012
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| 4.19
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liked it
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not set
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Apr 18, 2012
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| 3.87
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liked it
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Apr 15, 2012
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Apr 18, 2012
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| 4.16
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liked it
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Feb 15, 2012
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Mar 27, 2012
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| 4.32
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it was amazing
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Feb 2012
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Mar 27, 2012
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| 3.85
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really liked it
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Jan 27, 2012
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Jan 28, 2012
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| 4.03
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it was amazing
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Jan 05, 2012
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Jan 15, 2012
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| 3.97
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really liked it
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not set
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Jan 06, 2012
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| 4.02
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really liked it
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Jan 2012
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Jan 06, 2012
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