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FICTION -- NON-FICTION -- GRAPHIC NOVELS
RATING SYSTEM:
BUYING A BOOK If you would like to buy any of the books reviewed below, simply click on one of the links below the book cover or at the end of the review, which will take you to the book at Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk, whichever you decide. There you will be able to purchase the book and I will get a certain amount back from it. Every book you buy will help me greatly. Thank you. |
BLAZE BY RICHARD BACHMAN: Stephen King puts the questioners – including those who might be wondering why the name Stephen King is larger than Richard Bachman on the front cover – to rest in his introduction explaining his use of the pseudonym during the 1970’s. He also goes on to explain how when he originally discovered the manuscript for Blaze, he wasn’t that impressed with it, and left it to “mature” with time, perhaps. Recently, King decided it worthy for publication with a few minor modifications; Simon & Schuster is now calling Blaze “Fargo meets Of Mice and Men.”
Clayton “Blaze” Blaisdell is not a very clever fellow, in fact you might go as far as saying he is mildly retarded, due to his father throwing him down the stairs when he was a kid, cracking his head, gaining an ugly dent in his forehead, and spending weeks in a coma. Upon finally recovering, Blaze was considered a “special” person. He is currently very much down on his luck, flat broke, and looking to make some money fast, whatever it takes.
Blaze is essentially two stories about one man’s life. One story is of Blaze’s history, his childhood, his life-changing experiences, his time spent in foster care, the good times, and mostly the bad. The other story told concurrently with his biography in separate chapters, is Blaze’s plan to kidnap a baby from a rich family, hold the child for ransom, and then make bank on it. The problem is that Blaze is a con artist; he’s never been a very good con artist, because he used to have a partner – George Rackley – who was his best friend and always looking out for him. George got killed in one of their cons and Blaze is all alone now. Sort of. Because in his mind, he hears the voice of George, telling him what to do, how to carry out the kidnapping, how to cover his tracks, and how to make the ransom. Only, as I said, Blaze is a few sandwiches short of a picnic, actually make that a few cups of coffee short of the thermos too; so he keeps making mistakes. He also starts to really like looking after the baby and even becomes pretty good at it. And now the police are on his tail and he’s not sure what he’s going to do. The made-up voice in his head – which he knows isn’t really George – isn’t helping. He’s going to have to make a decision for himself, which he hasn’t really done before.
After the unpleasant disinterest I had with Cell, and the unimpressive Lisey’s Story, Blaze is a welcome return to classic Stephen King with a gritty reality that we’ve all come to look for in his work. The characters are interesting and well created; the plot while somewhat predictable, still riveting. Blaze will probably go on to become a favorite novel for many King fans, and will no doubt start attracting movie producers for option rights in the near future.
Would you like to get yourself a copy? Click HERE for Amazon.com. Click HERE for Amazon.co.uk.
YSABEL BY GUY GAVRIEL KAY: Ysabel is a different kind of novel for Guy Gavriel Kay, because instead of being about a specific historical period and culture like some of his past novels: Song for Arbonne, The Last Light of the Sun, and The Sarantine Mosaic two-book series; Ysabel is set in the present day, a feat Kay has never attempted before, and while I don’t believe this book is in his top three best novels, it nevertheless possesses much of the charm, character, and creative skill that Kay brings to all his books.
Ned Marriner is a fifteen year-old boy with raging hormones, hanging out with his father who is a world-renowned photographer working on a new coffee table book in the south of France. Ned is used to this situation, hanging out with his father and his father’s assistants: Greg, Steve, and the overly organized Melanie who he kind of has a crush on. Ned’s mother, a member of Doctors Without Borders, is currently helping the sick in Sudan; each day Ned and his father, Edward, spend their spare time worrying about the safety of their mother.
The first fifty pages of the book run kind of slow, as we get to know the characters in this very ordinary setting for Kay with talk of Google, Ipods, and cellphones; but it is well balanced with the amazing and ancient architecture of the cathedrals and other beautiful locations Edward is photographing in Provence. Kay, like all good authors who really go out of their way with the research, spent time in Provence and the south of France, getting to know the people and the places, and the feel, resulting in an honest narrative that makes the reader imagine they’re really there. It is at the cathedral that he meets the nerdy Kate, a girl of equal age from New York and they immediately hit it off as friends, with perhaps something more to come. It is here also that Ned has his first weird and “psychic” feeling of someone close by, watching, whereupon they discover a man with a knife waiting to attack them, but they manage to escape.
These feelings that Ned has continue to get stronger and stronger, to the point where he has an extreme migraine and discovers it is because he is standing at the location where a great battle was fought over two thousand years ago. He feels the pain and suffering of all those who died with this new ability that he cannot control. As the story grows it becomes evident that he is involved in an ancient Celtic love triangle that is continuously getting replayed throughout history. The Celtic woman in question is Ysabel. On the eve of Beltaine the ritual begins, as the Celtic ghosts appear from thin air in their all too familiar roles. Ned and Kate find themselves drawn in, to the point where Kate is almost selected as a “host body” for Ysabel, but then Melanie arrives at the last second and is chosen. Ysabel – transformed from Melanie -- gives her two ancient Celtic suitors three days to find her, with the one who finds her first becoming her true love, and the other being sacrificed. It then becomes a chasing game, as Ned and his friends and family – with the arrival of a long lost yet powerful aunt and uncle – must find Ysabel/Melanie before it is too late.
While this is a classic Kay novel with the characterization, pacing, and action, along with a familiar magical element; the overall plot leaves the reader wondering what was the whole point: a Celtic love triangle that repeats itself? Coupled with modern day scenery as opposed to the familiar historical world we are so used to with Kay; Ysabel is an okay novel, but I hope Kay gets back to his regular historical fantasy with his next book.
Would you like to get yourself a copy? Click HERE for Amazon.com. Click HERE for Amazon.co.uk.
SALLY’S HAIR BY JOHN KOETHE: John Koethe, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee and the first Poet Laureate of Milwaukee, returns with his latest poetry collection, Sally’s Hair, now available in paperback. This slim but poignant collection takes you on a journey through Koethe’s past and present, his thoughts and philosophies; it also discusses and questions the fundamental nature of humanity’s existence: what’s it all for? Koethe is somewhat unique in being both a philosopher and a poet, where he is not only a master of the writing craft, but also the contemplative craft, presenting wonderful poems that also make you think and question your own reality.
The 96-page book is split into four definitive parts. The first part makes one feel as if they are sitting in a comfortable chair on a deck, the gurgling of a calming river in the background, as Koethe takes you through nature and its beauty, but also through the kaleidoscope of his life, his past, and what it means to him now. “To see things as they are is hard,/But to leaving them alone is harder;” he writes in “Morning.” In “Piranesi’s Keyhole,” Koethe leads you through his imagination, and what it means to have an imagination, to be able to disconnect from reality, but it leaves one vulnerable to questioning what reality is and how different is it from imagination? On this journey through the psyche, it is easy to get lost along the way, but Koethe guides the reader on through to the end where there is no definite answer, but a longing questioning which the reader is left with.
The second part consists of a single, extending poem called “The Unlasting,” where Koethe relives the important moments of his life, and he looks back on himself, questioning what it means. With this, he also discusses the meaning of death, the meaning of the end, questioning the different beliefs of people, their faith in the end that will supposedly continue with something. It forces the reader to not only enjoy this poem of Koethe’s life and eventual death, but their own, as they wonder philosophically what the end really means, when considering the whole from the past to the end. Again, there are no answers, but merely thoughts and ideas to expound upon.
In the third part, Koethe questions his life up to now, as he grows older. There is the discussion of age and the concept of accomplishment from a philosophical standpoint. While he never outright says it, he is ultimately asking: what does it all mean? This is best revealed in “Aubade”:
“It’s early, but I recognize this place.
I recognize the feeling, after an endless
Week of mornings in America, of returning
To the home one never really leaves,
Mired in its routines. I walk to what I try to
Tell myself is work, entering at the end of the day
The same room, like the man in Dead of Night –
The dinner, the DVD from Netflix,
The drink before I go to sleep and wake alone
In the dead of night like Philip Larkin
Groping through the dark at 4 a.m. to piss,
At home in the reality of growing old
Without ever growing up. I finally get up
An hour later, run, eat breakfast, read and write –
A man whose country is a state of mind,
A community of one preoccupied with time,
Leaving me with nothing much to do
But to write it off to experience – the experience
Of a rudimentary consciousness at 5 a.m.,
Aware of nothing but the drone
Of its own voice and a visual field
Composed of dogs and joggers in a park.”
With this discussion of age and time, the change from then to now, in the last few poems of the section, Koethe inevitable discusses the Iraq war and the pointlessness in its death and destruction. From “Poetry and the War”: “Some wars are fantasies. The bombs and deaths are real,/Yet behind them lies an argument played out in someone’s mind.” It is clear where Koethe stands on this point, but it also fits in with the questions he is asking when one reaches middle age in our current time.
In the final part of this collection, Koethe has traveled through his history, relived his past, and there is now an overwhelming feeling of nostalgia. The moments of the past are over, never to be replayed, but to be mentally relived. In the title poem, “Sally’s Hair,” Koethe relives a chance encounter with a girl when he was young, which resulted in a one night stand that was fully enjoyed on both parts. “And then I never heard from her again. I wonder where she is now,/Who she is now. That was thirty-seven years ago . . .”
Sally’s Hair is a collection of poetry not to just be enjoyed, but to awaken hidden and oppressed feelings of nostalgia and remembrance of the past, to force the reader to “take a trip down memory lane,” but to also question what they have accomplished so far, where they stand, and how they see their lives from beginning to eventual end.
THE YIDDISH POLICEMEN’S UNION BY MICHAEL CHABON: Michael Chabon is a writer that many other writers are envious of: he’s young, he’s brilliant, and his books will undoubtedly survive long after his is gone. Pulitzer Prize for The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay aside, Chabon’s writing seems almost effortless, but is pure craft and magic. Unlike John Irving, who plots out the complete story beforehand, and then meticulously crafts each sentence and paragraph to be perfect (which is why he can take up to five years to finish a book), Chabon has both the story and ability from the start in creating his piece of art.
The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, like his other books, takes you to a place you never could’ve imagined. In this alternate reality, during the time of the Second World War, two million Jews are transported from Germany to Alaska, where they invented their own small civilization meshed in the bitterness of their treatment in Germany and their treatment in Alaska, a cold and distant place from the contiguous United States. The main city is known as Sitka, but there is little independence, and any whisperings of nationalization are immediately quashed. Yiddish is the primary language, with very little American spoken. Little happens in this people’s history from World War II to the present, other than a pathetic World’s Fair that now only retains the constant reminder of the reaching stone structure known as the Safety Pin. Sitka is not a happy place for anyone, as they dream of Zion and their return to their true home.
Landsman is our main character, a policeman who’s been in the service for many years but has little to show for it, apart from a trashed hotel room, a failed marriage, a dead sister, and his own depression over the state of his life. And it is then that he finds out about the dead body in the room nearby. A man has been murdered and the case begins. With his partner, Landsman travels around the area, picking up clues, and trying to piece the every-growingly complex case together. At the same time, his ex-wife returns to the precinct now as his boss, with the news that big changes are happening and all outstanding cases must be dealt with post haste. But as Landsmen digs deeper, he finds a larger plot taking place, involving more bodies, and more importantly the death of his sister. The pressure increases from important people in high places, as Landsman with the help of his partner and ex-wife, who he is growing close to again, gets closer and closer to the truth.
While my hope is that Chabon will return to this incredibly developed world in future stories, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union is nevertheless a thrilling mystery; a Sherlock Holmes case with a Jewish twist, that keeps the reader hanging on until the end when the case is solved, and everyone seems happy. However, the state of Sitka and these many homeless Jews remains in jeopardy, to be resolved perhaps at a later date.
SEED TO HARVEST BY OCTAVIA E. BUTLER: Collected for the first time are all four of Octavia E. Butler’s Patternist novels: Wild Seed, Mind of My Mind, Clay’s Ark, and Patternmaster. Now you get to see this whole unique world from its beginnings hundreds of years ago to its conclusion hundreds and thousands of years in the future. Seed to Harvest will delight and terrify you in a way only Butler can.
Our main character and quasi hero is Doro, who is more like a god or perhaps a devil in a way, instead of a human. He has a special power: he’s immortal, only to continue living forever he has to consume other people’s souls and become that person, inhabiting that body. He has been doing this for a thousand years, and lives his life as he does until one day he meets a woman, Anyanwu, in Africa, in the seventeenth century. She is a shapeshifter and has unique powers of her own, such as the ability to heal by a kiss, and with an incredible strength, she can defend herself against anything. Wild Seed is their story, as they meet and get to know each other, fall in love, and travel to New Amsterdam, where they will start their own family of gifted children. Along the way they find other characters with special abilities, which Doro believes is somehow linked to his history and his own powers. But Doro is also creating this family for his own personal survival, so he will have more victims to keep him alive and immortal. Wild Seed ends with the family now quite large, and Anyanwu unable to live with Doro anymore, leaving him.
Mind of My Mind is close to the present day, Anyanwu has changed her name to Emma, wanting to separate herself from her past, but unable to. Doro now lives in Forsyth, California, where his family continues to grow with new individuals and their unique powers. It is here that the Pattern begins to emerge of this large family that is all interrelated, and that is in constant struggle with the paternal master, Doro. The book ends with the final death of Doro, who is sealed in his current body, cremated and no longer able to take another, ending the line. But the Pattern is not finished.
Clay’s Ark is set in the twenty-third century and it is here that the spaceship, known as Clay’s Ark, returns to Earth with an alien and a sickness that begins to infect everyone. But at the same time a new race is formed out of the sickness, out of those on the spaceship, who become known as “Clayarcs.” And as time passes, they establish themselves as a formidable force on the planet.
Patternmaster is the mighty conclusion to the long series, where the Patternists and Clayarcs fight against each other in a distant future time where evolution has made them look barely human. This is a hostile and tough world, where only one race can triumph, the question is which one will it be?
While Seed to Harvest can be boiled down to a simple summary, Butler has weaved many emotions and issues that are ever present in the current world, on the subject of race and evolution, on what it means to be human. The book merely continues to prove that Octavia E. Butler was one of the best science fiction writers of her time.
Click HERE for the first book in the series: Forty Signs of Rain
Click HERE for the second book in the series: Fifty Degrees Below
SIXTY DAYS AND COUNTING BY KIM STANLEY ROBINSON: Kim Stanley Robinson has released the conclusion to his trilogy, Sixty Days and Counting, just in time! The hardcover is out and the paperback will be out at Christmas, if not, early next year: just in time for everyone to buy it, read the trilogy, and decide who to vote for in the Presidential elections of November 2008. Again, Robinson is not look to wow and amaze readers with shocking sci-fi events, but keeping true to the close reality of his world.
The Gulf Stream is working well again, President Chase is just taking office, knowing that the absolute worse may have been averted for a little while, but that there is still very much to do. Selecting a cabinet composed of the many characters we have come to know over Forty Signs of Rain and Fifty Degrees Below, we know this administration is on our side and looking out for the world and its people. It is here Robinson really shines using his amazing knowledge of science and physics in coming up with ways to deal with the immense carbon dioxide volume being both pumped into the atmosphere and already there causing world temperatures to rise. The United States bands together with countries around the world, such as Russia and China, in the development of a fast growing lichen that will spread through a forest fast under the right conditions, and has an astonishing carbon absorption rate. Working in conjunction, the world slowly begins to heal itself. On a subplot level, Frank Vanderwal, who is now an assistant to a cabinet member, is looking for his quasi-girlfriend whose former husband was instrumental in a plot to rig the election that failed. It becomes a game of cat and mouse, as Frank and his girlfriend try to stay ahead of the chasing husband.
By the end of the book, some simple matters are resolved, while the world is a little calmer in their nonstop fight to “cool down” global warming. The one final consolation is the Tibet being declared independent once more from the Chinese and the close friends of the main characters who moved to DC at the beginning of the series because their island, Khembalung, was drowning due to rising ocean levels.
Robinson’s message is clear at the end: global warming cannot be completely stopped, and to slow it down will be a long and arduous struggle that will last through our lives and into our children’s and grandchildren’s lives, but there is hope for this planet, so long as we act now and soon. The series will make the next presidential election a very interesting time.
Would you like to get yourself a copy? Click HERE for Amazon.com. Click HERE for Amazon.co.uk
FIFTY DEGREES BELOW BY KIM STANLEY ROBINSON: Kim Stanley Robinson returns with the second in his trilogy on the current state of global warming and its possible ramifications. Robinson does a great job in making his world seem very much like our own, but his sequence of events are a lot more “down to earth” than The Day After Tomorrow.
Forty Signs of Rain ended with a flash flood drowning most of Washington DC and leaving the main characters to fend for themselves, having to travel around by boat. Some time has passed and the waters have receded and life is back to normal in DC. All that remains are faded muddy water lines on famous monuments to prove that the flood actually happened. But the mentality of the world is a little different now, as the weather begins to deteriorate: increased storms, hurricanes (with obvious similarities to Hurricane Katrina and that terrible Fall), droughts, and fluctuating temperatures. Meanwhile the main characters continue their plight to alert the world about global warming and to come up with ways to fight it, while the current administration struts blindly on, not caring.
Then the world changes. The crucial Gulf Stream that circulates around the Atlantic via the Gulf Coast, which keeps a balance of cold and warm waters, as well as setting an equilibrium of sorts with the weather, stalls. Having never happened before, the world is not sure what the results will be. Time slowly passes and nothing happens. Then the weather begins to change and the temperature drops and drops and drops. In the winter the western world is freezing, and DC reports a record temperature of fifty degrees below. Everyone’s lives are changed, as they accept the reality of global warming, even the current administration, soon to be out of office, accepts this fate, knowing they can do nothing in the immediate future to help. It is the National Science Foundation, working with different groups around the world, that comes up with a possible solution: dumping many of tons of salt in the north Atlantic to restart the Gulf Stream. It takes some time to mine the salt fields throughout the world and load the giant cargo ships with the precious material, but the plan is eventually successful and the catastrophe that would only have gotten worse is averted. But everyone knows this isn’t it, that there is more in store for the world at the hand of global warming.
Fifty Degrees Below ends with the successful election of Senator Phil Chase, the important environmental politician who the main characters have been working with the agenda to prevent global warming. It is in the concluding book of the series, Sixty Days and Counting, where all will need to be somehow resolved, and the new president will have to make some big changes to get the world back on its feet again.
Would you like to get yourself a copy? Click HERE for Amazon.com. Click HERE for Amazon.co.uk.
THE HEART-SHAPED BOX BY JOE HILL: One thing I admire greatly about Joe Hill King, son of famous bestselling author Stephen King, is that he didn’t get a leg up from his father like our President did. While I’m sure he’s had plenty of help and advice, Joe Hill has earned his own success through his own writing. Having won a Bram Stoker Award for Best Fiction Collection with his first book 20th Century Ghosts, he now returns with his first novel, Heart-Shaped Box, which was naturally making a tremendous amount of buzz before the book even came out. And the congratulatory quote on the back of the book from Neil Gaiman just made it that more popular.
Our main character, Judas Coyne, is a famous guitarist of a band that was once up there with Black Sabbath and Iron Maiden, but after the sudden deaths of two band members, the guitarist is now a successful solo artist whose eccentricities range into the banal, naturally. His favorite is to collect items and trinkets of the most unusual – the weirder the better! So when Jude sees a ghost for sale on an auction site, he immediately jumps on it, chooses the buy it now option and soon has the package on its way. The single mother is very happy to get rid of the ghost of her grandfather who has been haunting her and her son for so long, and Jude now has his very own ghost.
The package arrives in a large black heart-shaped box and inside he finds an ancient but impeccable suit. Judas is impressed by it, closes the box and soon forgets about it. Then the haunting begins: strange noises and soon they see the ghost, walking around. Then things take a turn for the worse, as the ghost comes after Judas and his friends.
Sadly, when it is revealed where this ghost has come from the story kind of goes downhill. It turns out the ghost is the deceased grandfather of the sister of a former girlfriend of Jude’s who killed herself after he dumped her. While the supernatural element of the ghost remains, and it is on their tail trying to catch them, the reasoning behind it is weak and destroys the foundation of the plot. Nevertheless there is a darkness and depth within this novel that reveals a talented writer with a bold future ahead of him. Like Carrie, this is not the best first novel, but with the talent in Hill’s genes, we know there will be many more stories for him to tell that will be great and terrifying.
LABYRINTH BY KATE MOSSE: If only Kate Mosse had published her novel not in 2006, but shortly after the astonishing success of the Da Vinci Code, it perhaps would’ve received the literary respect it deserves, instead of coming last in a slew of novels involving the subjects of the Holy Grail, the Knights Templar, and what they mean in the present day. The quote on the back of the paperback edition from the Kirkus Review really says it all: “A quickly paced adventure that wears its considerable learning lightly – and of higher literary quality than The Da Vinci Code, to which it will inevitably be compared.” And yet Labyrinth goes more than a few steps further, not just adding new and original twists to the myth of the grail, but adding a new depth and level that hasn’t been seen before. As for the truth behind it all, Mosse doesn’t offer a note of explanation, but leaves it to the reader’s imagination.
Labyrinth opens with one of the two main characters, Alice, working on an archaeological site in southern France, where she finds a hidden cave and two skeletons within. She also finds a unique ring bearing an unusual symbol: a labyrinth. Notifying the authorities of the discovered site, with the skeletons it suddenly becomes a crime scene, and the archaeologists are kicked off the site. The reader is then taken back in time to the thirteenth century, where they meet the other main character, Alaïs, a young girl held back by tradition and ritual in a chivalric society where the knight and the priest are strongest. For the duration of the book, the reader follows these two characters, as they live their lives in parallel.
As Alice returns to her hotel, strange things start to happen, as strangers contact her about what she found in the cave, police telling her to describe exactly what she saw and confiscating her sketches. Members of the dig go mysteriously missing, as people begin to die for unknown reasons. Finding pieces of evidence, Alice weaves together the story bit by bit, and as she does she discovers that she is intrinsically linked to it all, and most importantly to Alaïs. Her strange dreams of this unknown girl from the late Middle Ages are the least of her worries.
Alaïs finds herself caught up in the changing and challenging times when the pope launches a crusade against the Cathars, a declared heretic group who believe that while God is absolute and utmost, the work they do in their lives is by their doing and not God’s. It is a time when Christians are fighting Christians overtly because of their supposed heretical ways, but subversively because the northern French want the rich southern land of the langue d’Oc.
Wrapped in this dense plot is the story of the Grail, which every Christian of every group seeks, and it is only when the three ancient texts with the strange hieroglyphs are brought together, that the true way to the Grail will be shown. But the story of this Grail is not the one that we all think we know, but something deeper and more ancient that is tied in with this mysterious symbol of the labyrinth, and reaches back into Ancient Egypt and the founding of civilization.
While the last third of the book seems somewhat rushed, as Mosse forgoes the back and forth chapters through time, and relies on present day characters telling what they know of the past; there is an inevitable building that results in a climactic ending of not just character realization, but eye-opening shock on the reader’s part, as they finally know the whole story. Like the symbol, Labyrinth is a story that begins simple and straightforward, but grows more and more complex, until the denouement when all is revealed and finally understood. Check out www.labyrinthbook.net for more information.
FLEDGLING BY OCTAVIA E. BUTLER: In Fledgling, renowned science fiction author Octavia E. Butler, who sadly passed away last year, reinvents the idea of the vampire and their existence in history, putting her own original slant on it. While the book is complete in its rounded story, one is left wanting more of this very original creation on an archetype.
The book opens with what can only be termed an uncomfortable situation, at the very least. From the viewpoint of the main character, Shori, who has been horribly disfigured by some terrible accident, the reader learns she is a vampire as the character comes to realize this herself, feeding off another, and healing incredibly fast. She has also forgotten everything about herself and her history, and with the reader, slowly learns about this. She then finds herself what is termed a symbiont, which is one who provides a regular blood source to the vampires known as Ina. The man, brought under the power of Shori and the hypnotic venom in her bite, essentially falls in love with her and their relationship begins at full steam, even though Shori appears no older than a ten year old black girl, and he an adult. The reader is left feeling very uncomfortable about this Lolitaesque relationship.
Eventually, when Shori confronts the place of her accident and meets other Ina, the full story is revealed. It is thought that she and her whole family of vampires and symbionts were all killed in this terrible attack. The reason was that she was the result of a genetic experiment to make it possible for vampires to brave the sun. The result was successful, with Shori being able to travel during the day – although she must remain fully covered and will suffer burns. Nevertheless, there is someone who feels that Shori is an abomination and must be destroyed.
It is when this second group of Ina are killed with two symbionts surviving, that Shori and her group flees to another Ina family in California where she finds further answers. And when this group is then attacked, but due to Shori’s preparation, thwarts the attack and captures three of them, all the answers are revealed. Behind the attacks are a large family in Los Angeles who have always hated the idea of meddling with the pure race of the Ina. The book pushes forth its message here with the idea that these ancient Ina are angry not so much at Shori for being black, but at her genetically engineered nature of mixing human genes and Ina genes; they no longer consider her Ina, no longer pure.
Then in a three-day ceremony that harkens back to every form of town government and religious ritual, a judicial gathering is convened with members of many families of Ina represented, while the complete family of those who are supposedly behind the killings are put on trial. The question is whether the jury will side with a small black girl who remembers nothing of her past and heritage, or with the proud and ancient Ina family who have helped so many.
Butler skillfully and subtly asks questions of race and genetic alteration: what it is to be human, or in this case Ina, and how we as people see that, and what value we place on it. In a time when a cloned and/or genetically engineered human is not so much a future nightmare, but a worry we all wait to read about in the newspapers every day, Fledgling certainly does its job in helping those who are unsure on these matters make decision.
AHAB’S WIFE, OR THE STAR-GAZER BY SENA JETER NASLUND: Ahab’s Wife serves admirably as a companion book to Melville’s Moby-Dick and having read both, I think I can safely say that if Herman Melville were to read Ahab’s Wife, he would be more than happy with the duty and accuracy Naslund devotes to the period, the prose, and its homage to Melville’s opus.
This is the life story of Una, the wife of Ahab – the peg-legged determined-bordering-on-insane captain of the Pequod in search of his white whale. The cover of the book depicts a Puritan-clothed woman on a harsh beach looking out into a rough sea, while further down the beach lies the broken hulk of an old ship. It creates images and ideas of a worrying woman left at home for years at a time to tend to house and children, while her husband is out braving the sea, fighting giants monsters in his man’s world. One would think this a book about her everyday actions, her chores, her repetitive characteristics, and while this is part of the book, there is so much more going on in Una’s life with her triumphs and tribulations, her loves and deaths, her dangerous adventures, and her happy times at home. This is what makes Ahab’s Wife a welcome companion to Moby-Dick, for while Ahab’s is a story of adventure and danger, Una’s is just as much so.
The book begins, as all life stories should, with a birth, only Una’s mother is all alone in a cabin and naturally it is a birth that almost kills her. Una’s life is a harsh one in Kentucky and before she is ten, her mother sends her away to her aunt’s. Una’s father is a devout Christian, while Una is an atheist from a young age, choosing not to blindly believe in what her father tells her to believe. Her mother fearing for her life, sends her to the distant coast of New England to live with her aunt and uncle in a lighthouse. And so begins the next chapter in her life, with a different family, in a different place. With the arrival of two men who come to upgrade the lighthouse, she falls in love with both of them – even though she is still young – knowing that one will be her husband one day. At the age of eighteen, she leaves the island and the lighthouse for the mainland of Boston and then Nantucket getting by on simple work until she finds the same two men whom she loves on a whaling ship. Disguising herself as a young boy she joins the crew and experiences the whaling life of her future husband. It is here that she first sees The Pequod and meets Ahab, who by then is an old man but still respectable and honorable. Ahab is the one to marry Una to Kit when her existence on the ship, love for that man, and her femininity are all revealed.
A whale stoves in the ship and Una spends many days on a small boat with the remaining crew reduced to cannibalism – harking to the story of Moby-Dick as well as the story of the whale ship Essex, which was the impetus for Melville’s story. It is on the return journey to Nantucket that the other love of her life dies tragically and her husband Kit essentially goes insane. Upon returning to land and leaving her husband due to his condition, Una’s life slows down and her relationship with Ahab begins until their marriage and happiness together. It is here that the story of Moby-Dick truly begins and the reader gets to meet the familiar characters of the classic book. But while Ahab spends years away from home, Una’s life goes on with the birth of a child and the struggles of her life. It is upon the return and meeting of Ishmael that Una learns of the doomed story of Ahab, his white whale, and his death.
The book could be considered technically over at this point, but this is the story of Una, who is still very much alive. The rest of her life is spent interacting with Ishmael and even meeting and interacting with the slave who fought for his freedom, Frederick Douglass. And while she never forgets her life with Ahab, she eventually finds another husband and in the waning years of her life is happy once more.
What makes Ahab’s Wife a truly impressive book is not just its intended mimicry with Moby-Dick with the crossing over characters, similar layout of the book with many chapters and illustrations, and actual scenes involving the same location in both books such as the church with the pulpit carved to imitate the bow of a ship which the same preacher from Moby-Dick climbs the ladder to the top and scream of hellfire and damnation; it is the prose and how Naslund writes that truly emulates the style of Melville, making this a truly important work of literature deserving a place in the shelves with Melville, James and Hawthorne.
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THE GREAT AND SECRET SHOW BY CLIVE BARKER: In The Great and Secret Show, one of the greatest storytellers brings us the first volume of the Art Trilogy, taking readers to a place they’ve never been before. This book is not a fantasy book, not a horror novel, or a science fiction story; and at the same time it’s all these and much more. Barker takes you to a new plain of existence in The Great and Secret Show where you’ll laugh and cry, smile and scream; where unimaginable horrors and triumphs await!
Randolphe Jaffe is a loser who’s going nowhere fast, that is until he gets a job for the post office working in the dead letter room in Omaha, Nebraska – the nexus of the country where all lost and undeliverable mail ends up. Going through thousands of pieces of undelivered mail per day – money and everything of value is surrendered to his boss – he begins finding clues of an undiscovered power in existence beneath the realm of society. It takes time, but he puts the pieces together until he has a good idea of this power known as the Art, where he then receives a medallion, the very symbol of the Art. While it means little to him at first, he knows it is an important piece of the puzzle. Naturally, his boss wants the item and it is then that Jaffe takes the first step down his new path and kills the man in cold blood.
Collecting the important evidence together, with the medallion, he travels across America, living on the whim of the Art, letting it guide him where it will. Innocent bystanders are used by him, sensing the power of the Art and agreeing to whatever Jaffe tells them. It is in an alcohol- and drug-infused stupor that Jaffe conducts his pilgrimage into the desert and finds the Loop: a place out of time, and meets Kissoon, the last member of the Shoal. The Shoal was the group appointed to protect the Art. For the world is part of the Cosm, and beyond this is the Metacosm where the sea of Quiddity lies – a place visited by all when they are born, the night with their first love, and when they die – and within Quiddity lies the island of Ephemeris, the dream land. More importantly at the far edge of the Metacosm lie the Iad Uroborus, a great evil that is always looking to consume the Cosm. The Art is a way of getting to Quiddity. Kissoon tells Jaffe that he must occupy his body so he can leave the Loop and defend the Cosm. Jaffe suspects otherwise and flees, embarking on his own mission of discovery with Richard Wesley Fletcher as they research the Art in its entirety. Fletcher soon discovers a liquid form of the Art known as nuncio, testing it first on a chimpanzee who becomes a human with the ability of speech and thought, known as Raul. The nuncio will force the being to the next evolutionary step, but Richard also knows if Jaffe were to use it, it would focus on his urges of murder and revenge, making him a murder. But it is too late, for Jaffe discovers the existence of the nuncio and in a fight both are infected by it and become higher beings – The Jaff and Fletcher.
And then a great war is fought in the skies of America between these two gods of power until they are spent and plunge into a lake in Palomo Grove, California. There they both rest until four unsuspecting girls go swimming and are inseminated by The Jaff and Fletcher to create subjects to regain their power. And so the town is irrevocably changed for ever as the four girls are all changed forever, becoming pregnant, giving birth to the offspring of these deities. Only three survive: a son of Fletcher and twins of The Jaff, and it is when, years later, that Fletcher’s on and The Jaff’s daughter meet and fall in love at first sight that the gods are awakened and the town takes a turn for the worst. Using the life-force of a recent victim, The Jaff is able to regain his power and begin collecting minions that he calls terrata from the people of Palomo Grove, sucking out their souls and using their rage, evil and anger to fuel his creatures. Fletcher is left with the dregs and is barely able to leave the crevasse where the lake used to be and reveal what has happened to his son, then in a heroic effort, he gives up his life, spreading his power through the minds of the people of the town, who then have their dreams of meeting celebrities come true. These are the allies who must battle against the terrata in the mansion on the hill.
With help from a pulp reporter, Grillo, and his friend, Tesla, Fletcher’s son Howard with The Jaff’s daughter – who despises her creator – confront The Jaff and his son in the big showdown. Only the evil god takes it all to a whole new level when he rips a hole in the fabric of reality with the power of the Art, opening a widening doorway to Quiddity. Soon everything in the room is being sucked into this other realm, with only The Jaff, Grillo and Tesla making it out of the room alive. As the rest of the world comes to comprehend to catastrophic events taking place in Palomo Grove and take notice, a decision must now be made with how to solve this whole horrible mess, as the Iad Uroborus are on their way at high speed to pass through this rip and take over the world.
Time is of the essence, and Tesla – who has visited Kissoon herself – puts it all together and managed to move this trans-dimensional hole to the land of the Loop where time is stuck. Realizing that Kissoon chose Trinity, New Mexico – the location of the first detonation of the atomic bomb, where no one would think to check – she must kill Kissoon, who has already broken free due to his taken over of Raul’s (yes the evolved monkey) body, and with Raul’s body and Kissoon gone, all that remains in the Loop is Raul’s body. The only solution, which Tesla goes forward with, is for Raul to occupy her body: two spirits, two consciences in one body, but it works. The Loop collapses, time starts moving again and just as the Iad Uroborus begin spilling into this world, there is the bright light and giant mushroom cloud, and the world is saved this time, but the power of the Art is not over. The adventures of Grillo, Tesla and this crazy wacky and incredible world Barker has created continue on in the Second Book of the Art, Everville.
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A WIZARD OF EARTHSEA BY URSULA K. LEGUIN: If you call this a work of classic fantasy meaning it’s like every other fantasy series with its magic and wizards and made-up worlds, you would be wrong. If you call this a work of classic fantasy meaning it’s a great piece of work that set the foundation – like Lord of the Rings – for a lot of other series, you would be right.
A Wizard of Earthsea is the first book in the Earthsea series and as all fantasy series should, it begins with a young wizard, Ged, who knows nothing of magic and the ways of being a wizard, other than his innate ability promising him a career as a great wizard. First he lives with a wise mage, and learns much about the simple things in life and magic and that everything has a cost. He soon discovers this when he performs a dark spell from a book he shouldn’t have touched. A deadly shadow is summoned and then banished by his teacher, but Ged knows he will be facing it again.
Ged then travels to the isle of Roke where he spends years becoming a master wizard. Upon his graduation, he faces the dark shadow once more but is unable to hold against it and flees in terror. As a renowned wizard now, he travels around the islands helping those less fortunate, battling dragons and other monsters. Then again he faces the shadow and barely survives, fleeing once more. He returns to his old master, unsure what to do. The wizened wizard tells him he must face the shadow and in turn face his greatest fear. And so Ged heads out into the deep sea where none have gone before and there faces the shadow and wages a great battle, finally defeating him. The book ends with Ged returning to land with his friend, now a true and accomplished wizard with the thousands of islands of Earthsea before him.
What makes LeGuin’s fantasy series more meaningful than most is that all the magic performed here comes at a cost, which the main character has to deal with throughout the book. It requires time and energy, afterwards one is tired; to create illusions is much easier than to actually change or create matter. Unlike the world of Harry Potter, here there are rules; not everyone can be a wizard. Along with this is the magical world of Earthsea with the many many islands of different peoples, a lot of which know little of each other. And for a wizard to travel from one island to another is a great adventure. The next book in the series is The Tombs of Atuan.
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THE HISTORIAN BY ELIZABETH KOSTOVA: Welcome to a retelling of Dracula for the twenty-first century, only think much better and more interesting; less of the weak and pitiful women and demanding men; more history and research. Elizabeth Kostova, while no doubt being a very well off person who went to the best schools for writing, has nevertheless spent a long time researching and writing The Historian with the resulting book being little about vampires and undead and more about books and history and researching and following the trail; its an academic adventure novel.
Our narrator is a young girl in her teens traveling through Europe, following the letters of her father from his travels in the 1950s, who is following the letters of his mentor from his travels in the 1930s. While most of the book is in letter form – with speech quotes framing just about every sentence – Kostova forgoes the accuracy of the letter form and, like Bram Stoker in Dracula, makes the letters part of the novel with action, emotion, and character reaction – attributes that would not usually be in a letter, but for the sake of this book, they need to be.
The premise is that Dracula, or Drakulya, better known as Vlad the Impaler, who was killed in battle in the fifteenth century is still alive and well in the twentieth century. The three story lines of the narrator, her father, and his professor, all have an event in common: they each received a copy of an ancient book with an elaborate woodcut of a dragon, the symbol and emblem of Drakulya. Each of them travel throughout the many cities of Europe tracking Dracula and tracking each other through their letters; clearly Kostova herself traveled to each of this cities, for the book is partially a travel log of Europe, written in exquisite detail.
At the end of the book, when each person finally confronts Dracula in their time, it is revealed that Dracula himself is a lover of history and books and has been building up his library for hundreds of years with the hope of having every old book and important piece of writing in history at his finger tips, all he needs is a librarian to maintain it, of course they need to be turned undead so that their duties as librarian will last as long as Dracula is alive. The professor is turned and when this is discovered, is staked, while the narrator’s father leaves due to the loss of his wife – the narrator’s mother – thinking her dead. It is at the very end when the narrator finds Dracula, she also finds her father on the trail, and then her mother who all play a part in killing Dracula once and for all; the family united at last.
While this review may make The Historian seem trivial and “tied in a big red bow,” the author clearly worked very hard and long in her research of books and places; the result is a lengthy tome that takes you on a long journey through a well-described Europe, through old documents and books, to an adversary we have read and written about for hundreds of years.
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Click HERE for the second book in the series: Fifty Degrees Below
Click HERE for the third book in the series: Sixty Days and Counting
FORTY SIGNS OF RAIN BY KIM STANLEY ROBINSON: This is a series about global warming and what it might do to our planet, except it isn’t set in the distant future, like The Day After Tomorrow; this series is set a decade in the future at the most. While no date is given, the world is much like ours with its citizens enjoying the frivolities of life, the administration cares nothing about the planet, the Arctic is breaking up and melting while pieces of Antarctica are falling off into the ocean. Our main characters are Charlie Quibler, a Senate environmental staffer, and his wife Anna who works for the National Science Foundation.
Four fifths of the book are spent with the characters and their ordinary lives with their children. Charlie is a stay at home dad, working with a phone and an Internet connection, looking after young Joe who needs constant supervision, while Anna works hard every day in her office, using a breast pump to provide milk for Joe. As the book progresses the reader learns of our current reality: melting of the ice caps, rising sea levels, and increase in weather activity. In the last part of the book, the storms come to Washington DC with severe rainfall, there is flooding, the Potomac overflowing and soon the streets become flooded rivers and boats become the only form of transportation. The book ends with Charlie traveling home by boat with a great finishing line: “Are you going to do something about global warming now?” he says to his Senator.
What makes Forty Signs of Rain, especially for a science fiction novel, more enjoyable and realistic than most books I’ve read is the author make his characters constantly doing ordinary things like meeting new people, interacting with them, cleaning the house, shopping, the father looking after the children. The details of ordinary life that you and I go through every day are in this book and presumably the others in the series; it makes it very human. Robinson was mostly setting the stage in the book, making it seem much like ordinary life, and then with the onslaught of global warming, things are kicked into high gear and I can’t help but think when this big change or catastrophe is going to happen to us. With the Fall of constant hurricanes hitting the southeastern United States most notable with Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and with the severely cold winter we’ve had here in California, as well as record breaking warm temperatures on the east coast for this time of year, I can’t help but wonder if we are not already in high gear. Perhaps these books will serve as a guide for when things really start to go bad with global warming. Next in the series if Fifty Degrees Below.
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THE EAGLE: THE CONCLUDING VOLUME OF THE CAMULOD CHRONICLES BY JACK WHYTE: Jack Whyte has come a very long way from the crumbling empire of Rome many generations ago to the man known as Riothamus – Arthur. In this ninth concluding book in the series, we finally get the full story of Arthur’s life, and what makes this series interesting is that while our hero is obvious, in the context of the series, he is but one of the many players on the stage of early medieval Britain. This is what Whyte is saying with this series: that it’s not about specific individuals, but – as is the case with all history – it is a series of events over hundreds of years that lead to the establishment of Britain as a country putting itself back together as a sovereign nation after its abandonment by Rome.
Continuing on from the Lance Thrower, our narrator is Clothar, known as “Lance” by his friends because of his skilled ability to throw lances with precision at the enemy – a feat no other man, not even Arthur, can master. In the first part of the book, Arthur forms his knights – a term taken from the Roman élite, all with their own specifically designed swords in the form of Excalibur. The knights are addressed by the term “seur” from a Frankish term meaning one of noble or high stature. Whyte is impressive in his interweaving of parts of the Arthurian legend and fitting them in a realistic setting in fifth century Britain. In the second part of The Eagle, it is learned that the girl who Arthur considered his soul mate in the Lance Thrower was in fact his sister and that an act of naïve incest was committed. At the same time, Clothar has his own personal problems to deal with in falling in love with a woman who is to be married. After a long night of sharing their love, they must accept their fate and go their separate ways. In the final part of the book, Clothar must go with Arthur’s élite cavalry to Gaul where he will train thousands more men both to establish the authority of Arthur and his cavalry, as well as to prepare for any invading forces. Word has begun to spread of these invading peoples from the distant east known as Huns, led by a man known as Attila.
While the fate of Gaul with the invading Huns is never fully revealed, the book ends, naturally, with Arthur’s death from a wound in battle, while his son Mordred is next in line to rule. The book ends without any great summation of the mighty ruler known as Arthur who united Britain and made it a nation to be reckoned with, but tapering out like a long burning candle. Whyte’s point here is that the saga of Camulod is over, its characters now all dead, but they have done much to change Britain from the abandoned land after the fall of Rome. Their part is complete, and it will be up to other people, other kings, and other rulers to continue making Britain into a great nation.
THE RUINS BY SCOTT SMITH: For this book to be classed a mystery (at least it is at Borders) is a grave injustice to the genre community: The Ruins is outright horror, through and through; I mean it has a blood-sucking vine for crying out loud!
Scott Smith has written a most unusual book with The Ruins, starting off kind of slow with the necessary character set-up, but then suddenly kicks into high gear and goes from scary to crazy to outright impossible yet riveting. Our cast is a group of five twenty-something characters: two couples who went to college together (including a German and a Greek) hear about some ruins nearby while they are vacationing in Cancun. Following the paths, they end up on a plateau and find themselves trapped by a group of armed Mayans at the bottom of the hill who will shoot to kill if they come too close.
The next few days are an experimentation in the devolving of civilized humanity, as they soon find skeletons of past occupants in the area – all mysteriously stripped of any flesh. As water and food supplies dwindle, they must stick together and ration themselves to ensure survival, all with the hope that their friends back at the hotel will eventually come and find them. Then they discover that the dense green vine surrounding the camp area is not your usual foliage. As more is discovered about this plant, the story goes from bizarre to preposterous, as the vine eventually imitates sounds and smells, then their actual voices to pit them against each other. One by one, the vine gets them and causes a slow but painful death. Eventually there is one girl remaining who chooses to slash her wrists and die before she can feel the vine taking her. Three days later the friends arrive and the book ends with them being trapped in exactly the same predicament.
I have mixed feelings about this book, because there were certainly some good parts that had me wanting to keep reading on ahead, but near the end it really became far fetched from the emergency surgery that was performed – leg amputations and slicing open of bodies because of the vine – to the farcical nature of the omniscient vine that was actually speaking German to enrage the German character; though kudos are deserved for a book that dares to kill off all its characters. Nevertheless, no reason is ever really revealed for why the Mayans are keeping them there. One character hints that it might be that the vine is some sort of god that the Mayans have “sacrificed to” for hundreds of years, and this whole effort just comes off as racist.
But if it’s a blood and gore horror story you’re looking for that pushes you to your limits and makes you think how far you would go in this situation – even though nothing like this could ever really happen – then The Ruins by Scott Smith is the book for you. Now I’m just wondering why the slasher movie of this book hasn’t been made yet?
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LORDS OF THE NORTH BY BERNARD CORNWELL: In Lords of the North (coming January 23rd), the wonderful writer of great historical periods and characters brings us the third in his increasingly popular Saxon Chronicles series, as he tells the story of King Alfred the Great’s life and his work in unifying the many kingdoms into the country we know today as England.
We continue with our hero, Uhtred of Bebbanburg, who has just helped Alfred save and maintain control over the land of Wessex, therefore preventing the complete invasion by the Danes. Angered with Alfred’s piousness and making every decision according to God, Uhtred flees north to Northumbria, still hoping one day to defeat his uncle and take back his beloved Bebbanburg. It is here that he meets old Danish friends and before he realizes what’s going on, a deal has been brokered to maintain peace in Northumbria in return for Uhtred’s enslavement. With his blood-stained blade – Serpent-Breath – the many lords of the region are happy to get rid of this formidable warrior.
Uhtred, stripped of his title and power, then spends most of the book suffering the abuse and torture of a slave on a trading traveling along the Flemish coast, and back and forth between Britain and the mainland. On a number of occasions they face off again this “red ship” that is a trader like them. Upon returning to the original place where Uhtred was sold – so that more slaves can be bought – the red ship appears out of nowhere and beaches the shore. Foreign Danes stream out and Uhtred soon finds himself face to face with an even older friend who raised him.
Eventually he discovers that it is thanks to Alfred’s help that he has received his emancipation. With his title, weapons, and armor restored, along with more allies from the south forming a considerable army, they set out to defeat these lesser heathen lords and regain control of the kingdom of Northumbria. The book ends with the reader contemplating what is next for Uhtred in the further Saxon Chronicles: Will he regain control of his land? Will he remain a lone pagan among the many determined Christians? Sadly, we will have to wait another whole year before we can read more about Uhtred of Bebbanburg, slayer of the great Ubba Lothbrokson, and his adventures with the pious Alfred the Great.
THE PALE HORSEMAN BY BERNARD CORNWELL: In The Pale Horseman (sequel to The Last Kingdom), Bernard Cornwell surges on with his series on the life of Alfred the Great, but not simply with a furthering of the plot, but some clear development in both story, character, and the whole point Cornwell is trying to make with this series.
In Pale Horseman we now learn that our hero from the last book, Uhtred of Bebbanburg, while just as skilled in his knowledge of languages, way with words, as well as his ability with his trusty sword – Serpent-breath – is actually not that great of a guy. When he has to spend time at home with his child and pious wife who wants him to be a good Christian, he treats them with disdain and instead goes off with his buddies on one of Alfred’s ships, kills a lot of people, and steals considerable amounts of wealth, as well as kidnapping his very own pagan sorceress. While the pathetic excuse for this case can be made that “it’s what men did back then,” I find it an admirable move by Cornwell to make the protagonist out to be a character that most would find at the least disreputable. But ultimately these facets of Uhtred’s character only serve to make him more believable, which is certainly a critique of the characters in Cornwell’s other works.
At the same time, he magnificently captures the feel of the period. Here you have the Saxons trying to defend their country (which they invaded just four hundred years before and occupied) against the Vikings and Danes who all but succeed in their conquering of Britain. Cornwell even goes on to say in his elucidating “author’s note” that if it weren’t for Alfred’s decision, when all seemed lost, to still fight back and win, that Cornwell would be telling this story in Danish. Whether you’re a Saxon, a Viking, or a Briton; identity was something both questioned and sought after in this melting pot of a country. Cornwell cleverly reveals this with Uhtred’s ability to speak many languages, as well as being often thought a Viking or a Briton, but not a Saxon, which he considers himself.
At the end when all that remains of Saxon Britain is a small area of marsh in Wessex, Alfred unites his people who end up banding together from all areas of the surrounding country, and manages to defeat and push the Vikings out of his land, making Wessex the one strong remaining Saxon place left in all Britain. It was with this victory that Alfred earned the title “great.” The book ends with the future knowledge and hope that Alfred the Great will begin taking back the rest of Britain and pushing the Vikings out for good.
NEXT BY MICHAEL CRICHTON: I’m still trying to figure out how this manuscript landed in the hands of an editor and actually got the go ahead to be published in time for Christmas. I can’t help but think about all those dads that are going to be so disappointed on December 26th when they crack open the book and find a collection of plot lines with confusing characters and stories that seem to go nowhere.
In Prey and State of Fear, Crichton did what he does best in providing a well researched book with a riveting and thrilling plot, thought I felt the latter a little heavy handed with a viewpoint I didn’t necessarily agree with. Compared with Next, I seriously wonder what happened? The book seems barely half finished, even though if runs on for four hundred pages. There are around five to seven plot lines each with their own vague characters that the reader has to struggle to keep straight going on in their own seemingly inane direction. Near the end of the book a few of these plot lines cross over forcefully at the author’s hand, and then the book ends and the reader is left wondering where the rest of the book is. What happened to the basic rule of a story? Instead of a beginning, middle and an end, the reader gets a weak infrastructure of a beginning, with part of a middle which suddenly ends!
Combined with this is the overarching philosophy of this novel (which I hope Crichton doesn’t subscribe to himself) where every person is one who sees life only for personal gain, to be rich, and feel constant pleasure. The women are always bombshells to be used and discarded, while the characters in general will stop at nothing to satisfy their pathetic personal whims.
As for the learning portion of the novel – with Prey it was the risk of nanotechnology, with State of Fear global warming – Crichton is very heavy handed in the risks of gene therapy and engineering, running the gamut from talking (and by this I mean with extensive vocabularies) parrots and orangutans, to the risks of human cloning, to bounty hunters trying to kidnap and steal tissues from innocent people who simply happen to possess the same DNA as a family member who had his cells declared property of UCLA in a court of law. While Crichton is trying to make the blatant point of “Watch out, this is what can happen,” it comes off as over-the-top farce and tomfoolery. And if it wasn’t made clear for you, he ends the novel with his note about how patenting genes is bad, as well as a list of other matters involving gene therapy, followed by a bibliography, just to show he did the work, supposedly
It is sad really, for I’d hoped Next would be the return to the great author who gave us truly brilliant novels like Jurassic Park, Sphere, and The Andromeda Strain, but Next can’t really be considered an actual book now, because of its failure in the rules of a novel on so many levels.
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THE LADIES OF GRACE ADIEU AND OTHER STORIES BY SUSANNA CLARKE: While Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell is not required reading for this short story collection, it provides a fuller and more complete background to the stories you are reading, nevertheless, one can certainly enjoy them and understand what’s going on without having read the aforementioned 600+ page book.
Clarke spent a decade writing Jonathan Strange, so it is not surprising that in her spare time she wrote some stories set in this magnificent world, which while not directly involved in the actions and events of her opus, do play by its rules and restrictions. Some of the stories may even have been cut from the massive manuscript that was Jonathan Strange and now find themselves in this collection, finally in print.
These eight stories run the gamut of what Clarke might want to tell about her world, from what a couple of ladies with magical ability must do (from the title story); to a tale of Mary, Queen of Scots; to a story involving the same Jonathan Strange of her book. What links all these stories together is the reality of magic, whether the characters in the stories choose to accept its existence or not. The result is a delightful, seemingly romantic, and entertaining change to the glut of fantasy filling the book world these days. Magic in Clarke’s world cannot be done by everyone; it is subtle, exhausting, and hard to do. Like the Bartimaeus Trilogy, Clarke’s magical world presents something new and therefore captivating in its own way.
While my complaint of Clarke is that she can often be long winded and due for some heavy editing – both in this collection and in her weighty novel – in the end one is left with the wonderful feeling that one has just read something special and will delight in reading it again some day. Not to mention Ladies of Grace Adieu also features mesmerizing black and white illustrations by Charles Vess (who illustrated Neil Gaiman’s Stardust), the book is a worthy addition to anyone’s library. The question remains now: how long will it be before Clarke publishes another collection or novel? Does she have a box full of cut stories and material from Jonathan Strange waiting to be viewed by a reader’s eyes? Only time will reveal this truth.
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THE INTERPRETER OF MALADIES BY JHUMPA LAHIRI: This collection of nine short stories won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1999. The author, Jhumpa Lahiri, is of Indian descent, born in London and currently lives in New York, so each story is a look into a different part of Indian culture or into Indian people and their way of life. The first three stories were great and the title story was my favorite. The man literally is an interpreter of maladies, who works at a hospital translating patients’ symptoms to the doctor and in this it is revealed he has a lot of power and obligation in telling the doctor exactly what the patient is suffering from so the correct diagnosis can be given. After this story, I found the rest of book slow, kind of boring, and the stories just weren’t as engaging.
What started to annoy me as a I progressed through the book was that here you had a no doubt rich and well treated Indian woman who went to very good schools, lived in a good home in England, went to a good writing school for her MFA – probably in New York – and proceeded to publish her work in prestigious magazines like the New Yorker, and yet she is writing about Indian life and how hard it is for most people, especially those not as well off, and it just really got to me that she had succeeded in this way writing about a way of life she’d never experienced.
Now, having finished the book, my thoughts towards Lahiri have changed a little. For with her upbringing she was never able to experience Indian culture as an Indian living in India. This was no doubt a big deal to her, and is to Indian culture. A friend at work, who is of Indian decent, but born here, told me the other day that Indians don’t consider him Indian because he was born here. I realize now that this was probably the very thing that changed my mind about this book. It helped me realize that in writing these stories, Lahiri is living the lives of these people, getting the experiences, that she was never able to, and in doing so is helping to define her Indian heritage better.
The result is a collection of interesting and unique stories – perhaps not quite deserving of the Pulitzer -- about Indian people trying to live ordinary Indian lives.
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THE LAST KINGDOM BY BERNARD CORNWELL: I’ve been working on a novel for the last four years or so that’s been going pretty slowly. I’ve been doing it in chunks, mainly because it’s historical fiction and involves a lot of research and I’ve essentially been getting stuck at some point and needing to research more before I can get started writing again. Now I’m at a point where I need to read a few books to complete the current research. The book was called The Ruin, though I recently changed the title to Wyrd, which is Anglo-Saxon for destiny. While the book is set in the fifth century in England and has characters that may turn out to be Arthurian (I’m not sure yet), the intention of the novel is to encompass the feel and texture of the Early Middle Ages, at a time when society was essentially beginning anew for this forgotten island.
When I started reading The Last Kingdom by one of my favorite authors I got the chilling feeling that Cornwell had done what I was trying to do with my book. And after finishing it, there’s a lot in it that I can see coming out in my novel, and yet Wyrd will go in different directions and achieve different goals. Nevertheless, The Last Kingdom was a great book for anyone wanting to get a feel of the ninth century and what it was like for the Anglo-Saxons living there and having to deal with the invading Vikings who were trying to settle and do essentially what the Anglo-Saxons had done a couple of centuries before to the Britons. While the main character, Uhtred, is but a boy at the beginning and the narrator, our hero is Alfred the Great (the only British king ever to be called “the Great”) and while I’m not sure how long the series is going to be, the reader will see Alfred grow up and become the great king that earned him the title. I’m quite familiar with Alfred’s history and life and how he emulated Charlemagne in a lot of ways, and it’s really enjoyable to see this fictionalized account from one of my favorite authors, which has been well researched, and to see these historical characteristics in the people in the book.
I will freely admit that Bernard Cornwell isn’t exactly the most in depth and complex historical fiction writers, and his characters aren’t always the fully developed real people they should be, but he still does the job well and gets his point across in giving the reader a look into this life, just as he did with his Grail series set in the Later Middle Ages, and his Arthur series. It’s also the kind of book that anyone can pick up and get fully sucked into without getting confused or lost along the way with heavy history and jargon. Cornwell is also sure to point out as much of the native languages as he can, with plenty of translations, to clarify it all.
Next I have The Pale Horseman to read in the series, with Lords of the North to come in January.
JONATHAN STRANGE AND MR NORRELL BY SUSANNA CLARKE: This was my second attempt at reading this book. I'd tried when it first came out, with the heavy intimidating hardback (though sometimes a giant hardback that I can't hold in one hand is the best thing ever!). Since it was a fantasy novel with magic and wizards and set within a historical period, I was expecting something fast paced and somewhat action packed. So when I got 200+ pages in and had yet to have a scene where something physical happened involving some sort of action, I gave up.
When the paperback came out I was unable to stop myself from purchasing it. This is a thing that's developed in me over the years spent in the book business. When I see a book that I think should be good and has a really great cover (since I have seen many bad covers, such as all the Robert Jordan books), I need to own it. I'd told myself that I'd give this book another try at a later date and so before I left Copperfield's I bought it.
About a month ago I started listening to it on audiobook, got about fifteen minutes into it, and while the voices were very good and English, I could tell from the well developed language of the book that it would be better and deserved to be read in the paper form. I sloughed through it this time, finally rewarded with a few actions scenes, and some very interesting plot. I still felt it went on a little too long and there could've been an entire book of the same size with all the stuff that didn't get revealed in the book. When you create a unique world, I like to know how it came to be and a lot of the details of why it is this way, and there wasn't as much of that in Jonathan Strange. It centered more around two kind of lame magicians, one of which is an old annoying selfish fart, and an egomaniacal fairy who wants to control the real world as well as that of Faerie. Near the end some of the characters did some weird things as well that I thought were unwarranted and kind of came out of nowhere, which really bugs me with long books that have the room and the time to set this up.
Nevertheless, I'm definitely glad I worked through it and read the whole thing and that I own it and maybe, in five or ten years, I'll give it a reread and see it in a totally different way.
I've discovered in my reading that it really depends on my current mood and state of what I can get from a book. I can be impatient and want something to grab me right away, which is why I didn't like the book at first, but when I tried again in a calmer state, I was able to enjoy it. It's all very weird and probably a little OCD in some way, but over the many many years of reading and the many many books read, I've become picky in what I read and what I want to read and how I want to read it.
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THE WHEEL OF TIME SERIES BY ROBERT JORDAN: I tried. I gave it over two years of my life and I still couldn't keep going till the end. Of course, the real end will probably be book fifteen or twenty or, heaven forbid, twenty-five and up. I'm talking about Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series. Currently there are eleven books in the series, the latest, Knife of Dream, came out last October. The first book, Eye of the World, started out really well and I felt like I'd discovered a great new epic fantasy series similar to that of Lord of the Rings. The first book proved this and I thought it was great; I was also very excited at the notion of there being so many books in the series, with the story still incomplete. The second book, The Great Hunt, while not as mind-mashingly great as the first book, was still a great read, as was the third, The Dragon Reborn, where we find out that the main character is the guy prophesied to save the world, essentially. Eight books from th ere and the big showdown still hasn't come, while Jordan has continued to drag out into the hundreds and thousands of pages scenes, descriptions, and characters bickering at each other about the same thing while repetitively employing their annoying habits, to the point where I feel like I'm reading a children's nursery rhyme. Then there's the whole deal with the main character, Rand, having his undeniable love for three of the women characters, which he is okay with, and which they are okay with, apparently, and are quite willing to share him amongst themselves. I may have kept sloughing through the series better if there'd been a lot less purple prose and books four to ten had been condensed into say books four to six, which would've made more sense and made the stories move along better. Around book five I began spotting the routine the books go through: a few hundred pages of sitting around talking, explaining and regurgitating what's happened in the past books, bitching at each other; then about four hundred pages of people painstakingly crawling from a starting point to a destination (and bear in mind that these people can "travel" through vortexes real fast), and then the last hundred pages is a big action scene. At book seven, Crown of Thorns, halfway through, I decided I'd wasted enough time on Mr. Jordan and his wordiness, so I employed a slow speed-reading method which got me through them a lot faster. In about three days I reached the end of book nine and decided I'd had it and it just wasn't worth any more of my time. At this point I'd been able to summarize each book into three or four sentences, and I'd decided that if I can do that, maybe it's just not worth it and I should put my reading time to something more important that I'd enjoy reading more.
So here I am Mr. Jordan, signing off on your series that held so much promise and crashed and burned like a planet falling into a sun. Oh, and you know what, I'm not the only one who thinks this way. There are other people I know who've given up earlier than me, and others who've not even bothered to start because they know it's going to end bad.
On the plus side, I get to sell all my Robert Jordan books and make money off him!
Sayonara.
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CELL BY STEPHEN KING: Cell is Stephen King's first horror novel since he completed his epic "Dark Tower" series. In the middle of writing the last two books in the series he was asked what he'd be writing about next and his response had been something to the effect of: "I'm never writing another book again!" That's what happens when you ask a guy about writing when he's drowning in thousands of pages and hundreds of thousands of words. But now some years and much needed rest and recovery later, Cell takes technology and cell phones to a whole new level: zombies!
With the opening line, "The event that came to be known as The Pulse began a 3:03 p.m., eastern standard time, on the afternoon of October 1," the reader is immediately dragged into the thrall of the book, which is unusual since King usually takes up to fifty pages to get started with his books. "The Pulse" is an electromagnetic signal sent through cell phones, so anyone using their phone at that point is immediately affected, the result being their mind is completely wiped. What's left? Our primitive, primordial thoughts and reactions, which are little to none; the result: zombies!
Clayton Riddell has just landed his first huge lucrative comic book deal and is ready to return home to Kent Pond in Maine to his wife -- who is drifting away from him -- and his son to tell them everything is going to be okay, but then the pulse hits and pandemonium erupts: zombies!
Clay has only one goal in mind: to get to his wife, and more importantly his son and make sure he's alive and well. He consoles himself with the terror of knowing his son has a shiny red cellphone, though the last time Clay saw it, it was under his son's bed, forgotten; then again with everything that's happened, his son might have chosen to keep his cell phone handy. With the help of a homosexual middle-aged man and a fifteen year old girl, they make their slow journey north through New Hampshire and on to Maine. Somehow the reader is supposed to just take it for given the fact that the other two have little interest in going anywhere else except to see Clay's son and wife. They soon discover that the zombies are very human in one way: they sleep at night and for some reason like easy listening music while they are in this "resting state," which involves packing together like sardines in a big arena or gym and just lying there, eyes open, doing nothing. Strange zombies!
As the novel progresses, through a process of elimination, it is discovered that the zombies are telepathic, work on a "hive mind" system, and also possess some psychic power that allows the "phonies" to talk through "normies" using their mouths. It is also revealed that there is a protected reserve in Maine called Kashwak where there is no cellphone reception (KASHWAK=NO-FO), and therefore a place of refuge for the normies. It is there the group is headed (other members are added), destroying "flocks" of phonies along the way, and are in fact pulled there with the psychic power of the phonies, who's spokesperson is a zombie they call the Raggedy Man. As Clay discovers that his wife and son are already near Kashwak, they all head there, knowing that the reserve will be the final showdown between the normies and the phonies. The question is whether humanity will triumph, or whether homo sapiens sapiens will be reduced to zombies!
As Cell got into full swing, I was hoping for something a little more epic, though I kind of figured this wouldn't happen since the book was only 350 pages, I knew it couldn't get too "big." Nevertheless, I would have liked a little more depth to it. My biggest complaint with cataclysm stories is that they tend to focus on such a small scale. I know opening this up nationally or internationally would make the book three times the size, but I at least want to get an inkling of whether this is just happening in New England or whether the entire world has been affected. My other complaint, which is a common one with some of King's books, is I like explanations for how and why things happen. It is hinted that The Pulse might be a form of attack by terrorists, but that's as far as King goes to explaining why all this is happening. But this is a King novel and I certainly enjoyed it for his first big post-Dark Tower endeavor, and we musn't forget, following in the vein of George Romero, this is ultimately a book about zombies!
P.S. Favorite dead body description of the book: "He looked at a headless woman, a legless man, at something so torn open it had become a flesh canoe filled with blood." All I can say is: zombies!
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THE TRAVELER BY JOHN TWELVE HAWKS: This book actually generated quite a bit of buzz before it was released last June and I had it recommended to me by a few people saying that it was in the vein of Stephen King, and since I'm a fan I would probably enjoy this. I managed to get an ARC through the bookstore I used to work at and then it sat on my shelf for about six months until I picked it up and decided to start reading it last week. I finished it about four days later after pretty much eating it up. I would describe it as very akin to a Michael Crichton techno-thriller with some plenty of sci-fi mixed in. After getting about a hundred pages into it I was even wondering if Crichton much just be working on this same book currently because of its similarities with his story lines, the main difference being that this was a little slower and the characters had more depth to them. After finished this book I realize that this has certain elements that Crichton would never put in his book make this an enjoyable original piece of fiction. If the Matrix trilogy had originally been made into a book trilogy and done by a good writer, it would've been something like The Traveler.
The book is set near to the present day or perhaps twenty or thirty years into the future. The world is pretty much like it is now, except for being a little more high-tech and with better gadgets. There is a group of people known as Travelers who have the unique ability of being able to leave their bodies and travel to other worlds or realms. They have existed for many thousands of years, Jesus and Mohammed are though to have been travelers. There is a group of people known as the Tabula whose job it is to eradicate these travelers by whatever means necessary. They have also been in existence for a long time. Then there is a group called the Harlequins whose job it is to project the Travelers by whatever means necessary; again they have been around for a very long time.
In the present it is thought that no travelers are in existence anymore, having been wiped out by the Tabula, while the Harlequins have been reduced to very small numbers. Our main character is the daughter of a Harlequin whose father is soon killed in the book and while she had renounced her duty as a Harlequin, due to the lack of these people remaining, she has been summoned to become a Harlequin once more, because two offspring of a traveler have been found alive in California. The traveler's gift is usually passed down through genes, though this is not certain. It is her job to find those two brothers and keep them safe. The Tabula also know of the existence of these two brothers, but their modus operandi has changed dramatically. They no longer wish to kill the Travelers, but to harness their powers. The reason being that using past Travelers they have been in contact with another race living in one of the other realms that the Travelers go to, and this race is vastly superior and more intelligent and has been sending them new inventions and technology such as creating quantum computers that can measure how Travelers pass into these other realms as well as being able to send additional matter into these realms. So they want to use the Travelers as guinea pigs to work with this new race.
This the setting of the book with a lot more details than I have given and features great chase scenes and amazing fights. The Harlequins are taught from when they are children how to fight with different weapons. At the same time the Tabula basically have the Internet, all technology, the government, police, etc. under their control. So their world has its similarities to that of The Matrix, as well as to Stephenson's Snow Crash and Gibson's Neuromancer; and I also saw a lot of Blade Runner in the book too. With the world in its current state, it's not surprising that a book like this has been written. The good thing is that apart from being a really great read, it is the first book in a trilogy and hopefully unlike the Matrix trilogy, it will not doom itself to an ugly death before one is half way through the second book.
Interestingly, the author John Twelve Hawks is very much a recluse who apparently has never met with his agent, has been working on the book for a long time, and has never owned nor has he ever watched any TV. So there are some thought-provoking parallels to keep in mind, along with some strange websites that have been created for the book, though it almost seems as if some of them were created before the book came out, which is just plain weird.
Judith Strand
Judith Strand's Blog
An auto parts place that show's up in the book
The group that is controlled by the Tabula and features characters from the book
A martial arts place which appears in the book and is run by one of the characters
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A CLASH OF KINGS BY GEORGE R. R. MARTIN: A Clash of Kings is the second in the ongoing "Song of Ice and Fire" series, sequel to A Game of Thrones, and the series continues to be entertaining and interesting, one of my favorite ongoing fantasy series. What makes it different from other fantasy series is that Martin, instead of using chapter numbers and having everything be specifically chronological, has about five to ten characters whose heads you are in. So you can be immediately whisked away to another battle, another land, another family feud by the turn of the page. Plus Martin isn't afraid of killing of characters, which can be horrible if one gets really attached to certain characters, but I find it admirable that he has the bravely to do this. I think it isn't done enough in fiction, specifically fantasy. Sure the good guys need to win, but not all the time!
Near the end of A Clash of Kings there was a huge battle between two big armies: one attacking the other on a river, so starting as a naval battle, and then once the men landed on the ground moving on to trying to break into the fortress. Your regular historical or fantasy novel would have you in the head of your main character who would likely be one of the leaders of the armies. The P.O.V. might switch during the battle to the other leader's viewpoint on the other side and then come back to your main character. With Martin's literary device, the reader sees the battle unfolding from three interesting viewpoints: from the leader of the army in the fortress (who is an ugly dwarf); from one of the captains of the ships on the other side attacking the fortress, as he leads in the ship and engages the enemy (he ends up getting killed); and from a young girl who is a hostage in the fortress, under the watchful eye of the queen, in a room full of the important women who are just waiting around to find out if they are on the winning side, or if they are on the losing side and the enemy is about to break down the door and the knight will be ordered to kill them all so they won't end up as hostages. So instead of seeing the entire battle from one of possibly two P.O.V.s, the reader gets three totally different viewpoints, and it just helps to heighten the tension and suspense.
Next in the series is A Storm of Swords, with A Feast For Crows due out November 8th. As Martin was writing A Feast For Crows, passing the thousand-page mark a couple of months before the book was done, he was told by his publisher that they can't have one book be this long. He'd previously promised that his next book would not be as long as A Storm of Swords, which was 1216 pages in the mass market edition. Since he's going to long pass this, he negotiated with Random House to split the book in two. What he's decided to do, and as I get further into the series I can't understand how he's going to do this, is have half of the characters in one book, and the other half in the next book. Some of the characters can be on their own tangents, meeting different people, and not actually have anything to do with the other main character's whose heads the reader is in, but there are other main characters who interact with each other quite often, and I just don't know how Martin is going to reconcile this.
It's going to be interesting, that's for sure. And the good thing Martin said is that the new book comes out soon, and the next one is already half done.
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THE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF KAVALIER AND CLAY BY MICHAEL CHABON: Michael Chabon, author of Wonder Boys, brings us the Pulitzer Prize winning The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. A riveting novel of the comic book world set against the backdrop of the Second World War. Its two heroes, Joe Kavalier and Sam Clay, fight through the world of color, ink and writing, to compete with the likes of Superman and Batman - the result is an amazing story that has never been told.
This is a coming-of-age story for two very distinct characters. One is Sammy Klayman, an aspiring writer trying to make it in New York. Working for Empire Inc., the best he can do, in his diminished capacity, is come up with catchy ad slogans. Though he hopes for so much more, he seems stuck in this rut. During his spare time he draws pictures; though not excellent in skill and look, they are good enough for comics, one of his great loves.
Then there is Josef Kavalier: a boy born in the impoverished ghettoes of Prague, where every day is a fight for survival. Taken under the wing of a mentor, Bernard Kornblum, he is taught in the ways of the magician and illusionists - the immortal Houdini. As months pass, he is soon able to break out of any chains, and undo any luck with the help of his small tools (secretly stashed amongst his teeth and gums). Then he performs a might illusion: breaking free of a chained sack that has been hurled into an icy river; he survives barely, but his brother suffers a debilitating accident, and from then on Kavalier will have no more to do with this trickery.
His only hope of coming to true fruition is to get to America, where there is insurmountable opportunity. Having failed to get a visa, with the advent of the Germans seizing further control of Eastern Europe, h hides himself in the coffin of a golem and makes it to Lithuania, where he catches a ship bound for New York. There he meets up with none other than Samuel Klayman.
The two get together and propose their idea for the first comic book to the head men of Empire Inc. They are given the weekend to come up with the entire comic, and come Monday morning they deliver the first episode of the superhero known as the Escapist - his job: to disperse all evil; there is no lock he cannot pick, no bond he cannot break. And so begins the fulfilling career for these two young mean, covering many years and riches.
Chabon is a certified master of the language, taking the reader on sweeps and bounds through imagery set at a new level: "Thunder harried the building like a hound, brushing its crackling coat against the spandrels and mullions, snuffling all the windowpanes."
Once the reader finishes this book, they are left with the happy complacency that Amazing Adventure received one of the highest prizes possible. The story is of a quality that is a rarity in the literature of today's world. In short: everyone needs to read this book, be they reader or writer.
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BEOWULF: A NEW VERSE TRANSLATION BY SEAMUS HEANEY: Earlier this year a new version of Beowulf was published, translated by the Irish Nobel Prize Winner (for 1995) Seamus Heaney. Heaney has spent many years trying to get this translation just right, and I believe he hit the nail on the head in this case. This book presents a different insight into reading Beowulf, adopting a more archaic viewpoint in both language and imagery. Henry does not bother much with fancy words to make the poem seem more fantastic, but sticks to the original terms, translating them as closely as he possibly can. The book is set up so that on the left is the poem in its original Anglo-Saxon or Old English text and on the right is Heaney's translation.
For this translation, Heaney had to return to his long misused Irish tongue of Gaelic. He had learned the language when he was a boy, but has since spent more time using English. His main source was his grandmother, who is still fluent in the archaic language. In talking to her, he would hear strange words and terms that simply do not exist in modern English. Heaney would then turn to the original text of Beowulf. There he would notice similarities between these strange expressions uttered by his grandmother and the poem. In one case he found an exact match with the word "Þolian" which means to suffer and his grandmother's expression, "They'll just have to learn to thole"; here the thorn symbol Þ is pronounced with a "th" sound. Heaney considered these unique insights "loopholes" through which he was able to translate this magnificent piece of literature.
It remains unknown as to when Beowulf was written and by whom. Quite likely a monk wrote it, since monks were really the only people of the time who were able to write; also the poem was written by a Christian, since there are numerous points throughout the codex where the "Almighty" and "God" are thanked and respected.
The poem was composed first orally some time during the middle of the seventh century, and then written down in the eleventh century. It is a tale about a great hero of the Geats know as Beowulf, who travels to Denmark, where the king, Hrothgar, is being attacked by a monster in the night known as Grendel. Beowulf fights with the beat and rips off its arm, whereupon the creature flees into the darkness from whence it came. The next night, Grendel's mother comes to avenger her son; she takes a life and flees back to her lair beneath the mere (a lake). Beowulf pursues, tracks her down and with a magic sword decapitates her.
After being greatly rewarded by Hrothgar, Beowulf and his army return to their homeland in the south of Sweden. There, after years of attacks by enemies, he inherits the throne and rules for fifty years. In his fiftieth year, a dragon is disturbed from its lair, where it has been guarding a mound of ancient treasure, left by a long-dead warrior. Beowulf confronts the dragon but is gravely injured. Wiglaf, one of his soldiers, comes to his rescue and stabs the dragon in the stomach, killing its ability to make fire. Beowulf draws his dagger and stabs the dragon a lethal blow. But Beowulf has been poisoned by the dragon's bite and dies shortly after.
A great funeral pyre is built and set ablaze, while his many followers watch. His cremated remains are added to a special mound that is created on a hilltop overlooking the sea, where any ship passing will see the mound and know that Beowulf lies beneath. Thus, the poem ends with the forever-lasting memory of a great hero.
Heaney's new twist on this translation of Beowulf is through using the most exact word possible; the result are terms like "ring-hoard," "lake-birth," "shield-clash," and "sky-roamer." What makes this so magical is how the words fit so well, and flow like the soft voice that once spoke them. These specific terms help to create an image in the reader's mind of just what the original composer was intending: a story of gallantry, gold, fighting, Christianity, and the triumph of good over evil. As one begins reading, one can not help but be caught up in the thrashing current that pulls you along with the weight of the past, taking you step-by-step along Beowulf's paths, his wins, and his eventual loss. And at the pome's climax and conclusion one is left with a deep-set feeling of remorse for this might warrior, Beowulf, who most likely never existed, or at least has not existed for over a thousand years.
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WORLD WAR Z BY MAX BROOKS: I’ve read two books about zombies this year: one I found fascinating, incredibly interesting, and decreed it the best book of the year!; the other was formulaic, predictable, kind of failed in its goal, and ended terrible – one of them was written by Stephen King, can you guess which one? Being an avid King reader (yes, I’ve read it all!), you would expect the King zombie book to be the former, but alas. Cell was abysmal, World War Z is the best book I’ve read in a long time.
The key to World War Z is in its execution not as a horror book – even though it’s about humanity’s struggling war against zombies, and even though it’s most likely categorized as horror in every bookstore – but as a piece of thrilling and thought-provoking and contemplative fiction. Brooks’ genius with this book is in using a quasi-journal format where the narrator is traveling around the world interviewing a variety of different people from different backgrounds and cultures on how they managed to survive the war with the zombies. The book is set about a decade after World War Z, giving the reader the reassurance that we survived, and this book is about how.
Brooks’ first book, The Zombie Survival Guide, gave step by step preparedness for what to do when confronted by one or a host of zombies: it’s a humor book meant to make you laugh and snicker at this outlandish situation. World War Z is not a funny book, but a deadly serious one. It’s quite shocking to contemplate the extensive research Brooks must have done to find out crucial details not just about the thirty different countries the narrator visits, but to also find out specific slang and expressions to that country and culture, and to know how a member of the military would act as opposed to a ordinary person, or another specifically skilled member of society in that country. He must have gained a wealth of knowledge about the different societies of the world in general.
Brooks then takes it one step further in coming out with different operations and game plans for the different countries: what the government did, what the military did, and what its citizens did, all pertaining to the current regime of the time. The book is set not more than twenty years from the present time, so we are all familiar with the regimes and different governments of this world: from Bush’s conservative, military heavy America; to a clandestine and mysterious North Korea; to a potent and still racist South Africa.
World War Z is a book about zombies that changes the way you think about the world and its people. It makes you think about how we’re all in this together, we’re all the same – regardless of the world-threatening devastation, be it zombies, terrorism, or a pandemic virus. World War Z serves as a guide book to humanity, so that when the “big thing” – whatever it is – happens, we’ll be a little more caring of other people around the world, regardless of what god they believe in, or the color of their skin.
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GOD IS NOT GREAT BY CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Christopher Hitchens has spent some time in journalism: a book reviewer for the Times, a staff writer for the New Statesman, chief foreign correspondent for the Daily Express, a regular columnist for the Nation, and is a regular writer for Vanity Fair, Harper’s, and Atlantic Monthly. As a foreign correspondent and travel writer, he has written from more than sixty different countries. He is also the author of such books as Letters to a Young Contrarian and Why Orwell Matters. Hitchens now takes on a subject of growing discussion and debate in a time when the number of atheists in the United States, as well as the rest of the world, is apparently growing either because they are abandoning all religion or they are simply “coming out” and admitting to their atheist beliefs. A short time ago “atheist” was a hated label for one to admit to having, but now with a slew of atheist and anti-religious books, including Richard Dawkins’ God Delusion, Sam Harris’ End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation, Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell, to name a few, with no doubt many more to be published; Hitchens addresses a subject that is slowly creeping into mainstream media (Dawkins made Time’s Top 100 Most Influential People list this year) and becoming a commonplace conversation in many households across the country.
What I find quite uncanny, having read most of the books mentioned above, is how each author avoids covering the same examples and details when discussing the same subject matter. The authors find new and different ways of exposing the futility of religion and pushing forth their atheist beliefs. Hitchens joins the ranks here in presenting a new side to a growing subject matter. What makes God is Not Great different is that while many of the other books calling for the end of the religion gloss over the different faiths of the world, they ultimately focus on Christianity, being the largest and most visible faith in this country; Hitchens doesn’t hold back and has chapters not just on Christianity and its various denominations, but also extensively attacks the Muslim religion and its denominations, Buddhism, Mormonism, as well as small religious sects around the world such as Shintoism and Jainism.
Hitchens puts his journalistic background to good use here in citing many different examples of how each religion causes more pain and suffering than good. In most cases, these are examples that feature situations that Hitchens was either involved in or learned about it while in that specific country. He best illustrates this in the second chapter of the book when he talks about serving on a panel with Dennis Prager – one of America’s notorious religious broadcasters – who challenged him to responding yes or no to a simple question: Hitchens was to imagine himself in a strange city one evening whereupon he saw a group of men coming towards him; the question is would he feel safer or less safe if he was to learn that they were coming from a prayer meeting? Hitchens then spends the next five pages explaining specific situations from a list of places simply beginning with the letter “B”: Belfast, Beirut, Bombay, Belgrade, Bethlehem, and Baghdad. In each city, he gives examples of why he would not feel safe, and in so doing covers the world’s major religions.
Daniel Lazare of the Nation in the May 28th issue in the article “Among the Disbelievers” (http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070528/lazare) discussed the different atheist and anti-religious books mentioned above. Lazare’s problem with all these books is that when religion is done away with, there is nothing but an “empty vessel” to fill the vacuum. The point needs to be made here for all these authors who wish to see religion become less prominent and less powerful, and to be made clear to Lazare, which is this: the Dawkins, Dennetts, Hitchens, and Harris of the world don’t need something to fill the absence of religion. With science and empirical evidence, they have all the answers they need, and when a new scientific theory comes along with evidence to cancel out the old theory, then it is replaced, and science changes. The point that Hitchens repeatedly makes is that one big problem with religion is it being based on beliefs and ideas that were made and written down long ago, in some cases over thousands of years ago, when the world was an ignorant and very different place with very few true answers to everything. In the year 2007, it seems inconceivable that so many people in the world have complete and unquestionable belief in ideas and thoughts that were made in a time when thunderstorms and earthquakes could not be scientifically explained.
Hitchens ends God is Not Great with this ominous statement: “We have first to transcend our prehistory, and escape the gnarled hands which reach out to drag us back to the catacombs and the reeking altars and the guilty pleasures of subjection and abjection. ‘Know yourself,’ said the Greeks, gently suggesting the consolations of philosophy. To clear the mind for this project, it has become necessary to know the enemy, and to prepare to fight it.”
AUDIOBOOK VERSION: In some ways, the audiobook version of God is Not Great can be considered the superlative version by some. Christopher Hitchens, like Richard Dawkins, is originally British, who moved to the United States in 1981; nevertheless as all proud English do, his accent is still strong, his lip still “stiff and upper.” So when one listens to the thoughts and ideas, the hopes and dreams from Hitchens with his own words, the power and empathy comes across the speakers or headphones and one is hypnotized in some ways with the calm voice speaking clearly and intellectually about the state of religion in the current world. At the end of each chapter and section, there is a small string piece to perhaps clear one’s thoughts or to give one time to contemplate on what they have just been told. When the author is the reader of their own audiobook, one should also seek out that version and in that way they get the most out of the book.
1000 PLACES TO SEE IN THE USA AND CANADA BEFORE YOU DIE BY PATRICIA SCHULTZ: When travel writer Patricia Schultz published 1000 Places to See Before You Die on May 22nd, 2003, she expected the book to do relatively well like her other travel writings. She has written for Frommer’s, Berlitz, and Access travel guides, and has published articles in Condé Nast Traveler, Islands, and Harper’s Bazaar: a fairly accomplished travel writer in her field. This was the general idea for bookstores also: 1000 Places would do relatively well being a travel book and an original idea. No one predicted an amazing, bestselling success; one of the top gifts for Christmas of that year; and an unstoppable expansion into new uncharted territories: a calendar, a TV show, a registered trademark, a soon-to-be information-filled website (www.1000beforeyourdie.com), and an idea that will spawn countless sequels, such as Shultz’s latest release 1000 Places to See in the USA and Canada Before You Die, released almost exactly four years later.
What makes this new book unique for Americans and Canadians is that there is at least one chapter (if not more) in this book that each person will know very well, for it is about where they live. They likely will know the big tourist spots, the areas one must visit, and the locations that are known worldwide; these are all included in 1000 Places to See in USA and Canada Before You Die. However, Schultz takes you further with short detailed articles on areas you may never have heard of, even if you live in that particular area. I live in California and have for some time. I’ve seen a lot of the popular locations Schultz mentions: Alcatraz Island, Catalina Island, Yosemite, and the Mission Santa Barbara; but on reading this chapter I was thrilled to discover new locations I’d never heard of within California, such as Ojai, a delightful town located north of Los Angeles, as well as the annual Festival of the Arts, held in Laguna Beach each summer. Included in this chapter on California are also articles on popular restaurants for both Los Angeles and San Francisco.
Schultz takes you on a journey through every state of the United States, and every province in Canada, providing the reader with valuable information that doesn’t take up that much room. Each article is a couple pages long and ideal for reading in a brief space of time, say, waiting for a train or plane, or taking a cab ride across a city you’ve never been to before. One of the keys to this book and Schultz’s last, is the economical way they have been published in paperback form (however, 1000 Places to See in USA and Canada Before You Die is also available in hardcover), and while they may not fit in your pocket, they easily slip into a backpack or purse, weigh little, and are very easy to navigate with a table of contents and extensive index. Schultz goes one step further with her latest book in providing the reader with “special indexes” in addition to the regular one, which includes: first-rate hotels, resorts, and spas; lists of unique restaurants and places to eat; scenic drives; getaway islands; and where to take the kids, to name a few.
The saying is: “So many places, so little time.” But thanks to Patricia Schultz, travelers now have two invaluable resources that while not making it possible to see every important place in the world in one lifetime, nevertheless quantify and qualify what there is so see and why you should see it; whether you’re sitting on a couch in your home deciding where to travel to; or 35,000 feet up on your way to a new and never before seen country; or traveling along a rarely and hidden location you’ve never heard. Over a hundred years ago, every traveler was required to have their Baedeker on them at all times; in the twenty-first century, it is now 1000 Places to See . . .
COLLAPSE BY JARED DIAMOND: Jared Diamond, renowned author of the Pulitzer-winning Gun, Germs, and Steel, returns with another piece of mind-blowing work that will simply astonish any reader. In his last book, Diamond took us on a journey into the history of humanity, with cogent and logical answers for why our ancestors did the things they did, tying it in with geological and biological processes; how location matters very much for why certain of our ancestors did much better than others. Guns, Germs, and Steel serves as an excellent introduction to Collapse, though it is not required.
In his new book, Diamond tackles the overarching reason for why certain cities and civilizations decline and collapse, while others get through the hard times enough to get by and sometimes even thrive. What are amazing are the many case studies Diamond uses, ranging from early history with the Anasazi, Vikings, and civilization of Eastern Island; to the modern day cultures of Rwanda, Australia and the area of Montana where Diamond now lives for part of the year. In his introduction, Diamond clearly lays out his plan with the book – much like a scientist about to run a number of experiments – with a specific list of factors that determine a society's success or downfall, including: geographical location, amount of natural resources, amount of possible food, amount of trees. Some societies suffer from a lacking in just one of these factors and are still unable to survive, while others suffer from a lacking in a number of them. What's fascinating with these thoroughly researched and explained case studies is how two societies in close proximity to each other will have different outcomes: one may collapse, or barely survive, while the other thrives for many hundreds of years.
Diamond's reason for writing this book, he explains in the beginning and elaborates at the end, is to help the people of the present day realize the predicament we are in. With global warming, astronomically high carbon dioxide levels, overpopulation, and dwindling supply of nonrenewable energy resources; Diamond seeks to enlighten us in first world countries (those most likely to be reading this book) of collapses and failures of past civilizations – some in the distant past, some in the not too distant, some still ongoing today – as an educational lesson so that we may learn where others failed and why, perhaps then we can ensure our continued survival. With the factors mentioned above, like overpopulation and dwindling energy supplies, we are right on course with some other past civilizations that collapsed. The question is whether the governments of the world will realize this and react soon enough to halt us on this doomed path, and start us on a new and healthier one. Like many things in our lives: only time will tell.
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FIELD NOTES FROM A CATASTROPHE BY ELIZABETH KOLBERT: In Field Notes From a Catastrophe – dramatic title aside – Kolbert, a staff writer for the New Yorker magazine, offers readers not a telling off story about how the human race is steadily destroying the planet, but an up to date factual guide to the reality of the world. Kolbert simply offers the details and facts from first hand sources which can only be taken as truth and harsh reality.
Split into two parts, the first, “Nature,” offers four case studies into different parts of the worlds on the state of global warming and how it is affecting that particular area. Starting in Alaska where a scientific group researching the effect of the melting ice in the Arctic are for the first time unable to find a large enough iceberg and able to travel further north than ever before; on to the real world rising temperatures and its effects on the planet; to the melting glaciers of Iceland where life is changing for both the people and the animal and plant life; to an apparent evolution of a species of butterfly and toad in the last fifty years. “Nature” serves as a solid foundation on the current state of the world, segueing to the second part, “Man,” where the realities of our role in the current state of the world is fully revealed. Again, with little opinion or evaluation on Kolbert’s part, just the statement of facts.
It is in these last six chapters of the book that the reader sees how the planet has been changed, what history tells us, how this is a unique period in the history of the planet, and how exactly we are to blame for it. Juxtaposed with this are the steps that are being taken around the world to try to change this, as Kolbert returns time and time again to the United States and the Bush Administration’s blind eye to global warming, the greenhouse effect, and rising global temperatures. And when the Under Secretary of State for Democratic and Global Affairs, Paula Dobriansky, is asked to respond to these presidential decisions that seem to be made against the advice of the scientists and the will of the people, the repeated response – much like that on domestic and foreign policy – is: “We have a common goal and objective . . . Where we differ is on what approach we believe is and can be the most effective.”
Elizabeth Kolbert makes the reality clear and unquestionable. The facts are there, the sources for the facts are also there to be checked and confirmed. All that’s left is to accept blame and do something about it. The question is: by the time the world gets around to reacting on a global scare, will it be too late? There seems to be a focus in today’s day and age on the now, the current generation. This idea is no more prevalent than in governments and administrations. There’s little forethought or prediction on the part of our children and grandchildren; on the future generations who will be born into a world worse than ours and will have to fight harder to get by. It makes me sad and long for 2009, when hopefully big changes will be made.
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THE HISTORY OF THE ANCIENT WORLD: FROM THE EARLIEST ACCOUNTS TO THE FALL OF ROME BY SUSAN WISE BAUER: The History of the Ancient World is Susan Wise Bauer’s first book of a four-volume series, as she attempts to recount a complete history of the world. In this first tome, she covers humanity’s beginnings of civilization, as we changed our nomadic ways, on through the ancient world, up to Emperor Constantine and the fall of the great Roman Empire. Weighing in at 860 pages, including notes and bibliography, it’s the most detailed and complete history of the ancient world I have ever read.
Bauer’s insight in bringing this lengthy but important time in history to the reader is through her system of not having a section of the book dedicated to each civilization or ruler, but in recounting a chronological history of the ancient world, taking a chapter with each civilization as they rise, prosper, and then fall. In a time when history is not just about dates, conquerors, kings, and emperors, but pulling back and looking at the different regions on a wider scale, this book is indispensable It is in this way that historians discover why certain things happen, and why certain people do the thing they do: because they are related and dependent on all events and happenings in that part of the world, and not just their particular civilization. Bauer does exactly this by telling everyone’s story concurrently with everyone else’s. It is a magnificent feat, not just from the reader’s standpoint in learning the history, but on an editorial scale also. In this way, the reader’s sees that history isn’t just about one group conquering another for personal gain (though this is certainly a part of it), but humanity’s striving for an evolution of improvement.
Using obvious and clear chapter titles, along with a few sentences on what the chapter is about; navigating through this book is not a problem at all with these devices, as well as a lengthy and complete table of contents. The book is split up into five parts: The Edge of History, Firsts, Struggle, Empires, and Identity. In this way, Bauer is indicating the progression of humanity in the ancient world and making it clear what the reader should be taking from the book. Her only failing is in most of the book consisting of the history of the ancient western world. Leaving out the Americas – due to lack of historical evidence, I would presume – and leaving Africa for a later book; apart from the western world, Bauer also focuses on China and India, though not to the extent as with Western Europe and the Middle East. While I’m certain there was a lot more going on in India, China, and Asia for the most part, Bauer presents at best a survey of ancient times in this part of the world. Nevertheless, again she does an amazing job of covering each civilization in parallel, so that the reader knows what was happening in China, Asia, and Babylon during the rise of the Pharaohs in Ancient Egypt. Bauer even goes one step further with tables at the end of each chapter which cover the events in that chapter, as well as those in the previous chapter, listing them side by side with a timeline.
The History of the Ancient World is a necessary encyclopedia for any amateur historian with an affection for the period, and with the countless maps and pictures throughout the book, it is also an ideal albeit lengthy book for those wishing to learn more about the ancient civilizations across the globe. Now it is a case of impatiently waiting for the next volume in the series which will cover the Middle Ages throughout the world.
SPAIN IN MIND EDITED BY ALICE LECCESE POWERS: Take a trip to the wonderful and historical country of Spain, but not just the Spain of the present day, but of the past century, and the century before; as seen through the eyes of such renowned writers as Ernest Hemingway, George Orwell, Edith Wharton, Henry James, and many more. Presented in an almost pocket-sized wonderful paperback edition and edited by Alice Leccese Powers, who’s previous In Mind series have been very popular; Spain in Mind is the ideal book for those thinking to travel to Spain, those who are traveling, or those who wish to know more and just want something easy and interesting to read. The beauty of a collection of travel stories is that they can be read over short periods of time and enjoyed just as much as an entire travel book by one person. This is not just a travel book about Spain, but a historical, political, critical, and anthropological book about the country that more and more people visit every year.
Having just come back from a week’s vacation in Spain, on the Costa del Sol, this book was an ideal companion for the long plane ride over, and during the week I was able to sample and experience many of the tastes and sights Spain has to offer according to Spain in Mind. Calvin Trillin writes lengthy and descriptive about the famous Spanish peppers known as pimientos de Padrón which he only travels to Spain for, and eats in vast amounts. Trillin has even tried growing the peppers in his native New Jersey, but so far has failed, and has to return to Spain often to satisfy his addiction. On one family get together, I was able to experience these pimientos and while I don’t hold them in such high esteem as Trillin, it was wonderful to read about a famous dish and then be in Spain to try it for the first time.
I was born in Spain and spent the first eighteen years of my life there, before coming to California; I hadn’t been back in four and half years until this trip. Alice Leccese Powers starts the book with a comprehensive and enchanting introduction that brought back all the memories of Spain for me, and will serve as an excellent introductory course to those having never traveled to Spain or simply not knowing much about the culture. On the matter of the renowned Spanish siesta, Powers indicates that in this dynamic and modern world, it is still very much alive: “Although there are reports of the decline of the midday fiesta because of the pressures of modern life – commuting, two-family households, a bustling economy – it is still difficult to find an open pharmacy in Madrid in the middle of the afternoon.” I can attest to this with firsthand experience with regard not just to pharmacies, but to many different stores, even the parking! Between two and three in the afternoon, parking is free in my hometown of Fuengirola, presumably because the meter maids are taking their siesta.
Sadly, bullfighting is still very much alive in Spain, with the colorful posters covering every bare space of public wall with the lionized torero or bullfighter shown in regal splendor. Hemingway’s piece is of a long battle between two bullfighters in 1959 who challenged each other to kill the most bulls. While it isn’t my cup of tea, the writing is of course Hemingway: uniquely described with brevity and accuracy. Powers wonderfully balances this with a Henry James piece. The author has this to say on the subject of bullfighting: “Yet I thought the bull, in any case, a finer fellow than any of his tormentors, and I thought his tormentors finer fellows than the spectators.”
George Orwell writes of the civil war and the part he played in it. Barbara Kingsolver writes of the unique flora, fauna and way of life on the Canary Islands. Chris Stewart, a one-time member of Genesis and now British expatriate, writes of his experiences in living on a farm in Spain. There is even Rose Macaulay, traveling on her own by car in the 1940s – which was a rare thing – who does not seem to like Spain that much, choosing not to visit the tourist-clogged south, and voicing a distaste for many things; nevertheless providing a unique eyewitness account bursting with description and detail.
Powers also balances the prose with quite a few poems from e. e. cummings, Billy Collins, W. H. Auden, John Dos Passos, Langston Hughes, and Andrew Marvell. While a map of the towns along with some photos of places and things described in the book would’ve improved the book, Spain in Mind is a wonderful mixture of material covering three centuries from very different writers moving to or visiting Spain for many different reasons. It is through their experiences in their writing that we experience the true life of Spain, not just in describing the places, but in these people living their lives there. We see Spain through their eyes, and live Spain through their hearts.
DEATH BY BLACK HOLE AND OTHER COSMIC QUANDARIES BY NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: An astrophysicist for the American Museum of Natural History, director of the world famous Hayden Planetarium, and columnist for Natural History magazine, Neil DeGrasse Tyson brings to the non-scientific world the ideal book for those fascinated with space, the cosmos, black holes, and all the questions and wonders therein. Death by Black Hole is the perfect book for the reader who wants answers to questions about the universe in a simple and clearly defined way so that even if they know next to nothing about science and it’s jargon, Tyson makes it easily understandable.
While I was hoping for something a little more in depth in the style of Brian Greene’s The Fabric of the Cosmos or Lee Smolin’s The Trouble With Physics, Death by Black Hole nevertheless provides quick and simple answers to many questions everyday readers without a science background have about physics, the universe, space, and most matters dealing with the cosmos. The book is a selection of his columns in Natural History that are organized in a somewhat textbook fashion. Tyson starts with the idea of science and nature in its basic form, how humanity views Earth, the solar system, the universe. Along with this discussion, Tyson also gives minor history lessons on the development of different ideas in physics and astronomy, what people came up with what big ideas and how the progression led to the development of the big theories of our current time with string theory and relativity. Going on from here, Death by Black Hole address the crucial steps that led to the formation of the universe and its development over the many billions and billions of years, again explaining how it is that scientists know what they do and what instruments were used, as well as the history of who invented and used said instruments.
It is then that Tyson finally turns to the subject matter of the title of the book in the section “When the Universe Turns Bad: All the Ways the Cosmos Wants to Kill Us.” Here he addresses the complex and still relatively unknown subjects of chaos theory, dark matter (which constitutes over 90% of all matter in the universe, while we still know next to nothing about it), and finally black holes. Tyson takes the reader on a hypothetical journey with what would happen if one were to be sucked into a black hole and how as they approached the event horizon, they would become stretched until the elasticity point of their skin was surpassed and the body would be torn into thousands then millions of little pieces.
With many questions now answered, in the next section Tyson discusses how science is viewed by the media, Hollywood, and people around the world in general. The final section addresses the concept of science and religion, again taking the reader on a historic journey through the development of first religion, then science, and the struggle that has ensued for centuries. It is the perfect end to a book on science, as Tyson lectures the importance of supporting fact and reality in a time when there are many who believe more in faith, even when all the evidence is to the contrary.
THE INVISIBLE SEX: UNCOVERING THE TRUE ROLES OF WOMEN IN PREHISTORY BY J. M. ADOVASIO, OLGA SOFFER, AND JAKE PAGE: While the cover of The Invisible Sex indicates an interesting history book with its parchment design and implied cave painting of a woman, many may be deterred by the title and subtitle, thinking this a book championing the role of women only, pointing out chapter by chapter where all the men got it wrong in history. This would be an error on the reader’s part. The Invisible Sex is an amazing book that specifically charts humanity’s ancestry from the day when apes were the most evolved animal around, to some four to six thousand years ago when humanity settled down and began farming. What makes this anthropology book different is that the authors point out the known history on a certain period in time and then reveal the evidence and push forward the correct interpretation of women having a much larger role in civilization than was previously thought. Coupled with the up to date information and discoveries on our ancestry, The Invisible Sex is a great, easy to read book for any anthropology addict, or for anyone who wants to know what really was going on with our species in the last two million years.
Even though it is unclear which author is writing which chapters or parts, Adovasio, Soffer and Page are all working from their specified careers, drawing together their knowledge and talents to present a comprehensive meld of human history. The book begins at our beginning with the discovery of Lucy in Ethiopia and why this was such an important discovery – as to whether Lucy is actually female or just simply a male of small stature, remains unknown. While presenting a complete history of the Homo genus, they also take the reader through a history of the archaeologists, anthropologists, and historians who made the discoveries in the last couple hundred years. It is here that the essence of the book is revealed, as the authors point out the assumed role of men always conducting the hunting and gathering while the women stayed in the hut, looking after the children, and occasionally collecting the odd nut and berry. Coupled with this is the image of the brave and strong cavemen/hunters taking down woolly mammoths and giant sloths and providing the tribe with food for weeks. Coincidentally this ties in with the period in history when all the men were out working, bringing in the money, while the women stayed home, cleaning house and looking after the children.
They reveal the known history and then take it a part and got to the evidence, revealing what it says and what was really the dynamic of this time: that the men in fact weren’t killing wooly mammoths easily, providing all with bountiful meat, because the mammoth was the most feared animal around with its immense size and gouging tusks. In all likelihood the hunting was done in a large group involving women, children and other family members. They were not going after wooly mammoths and sloths, but were more focused on smaller animals like foxes, rabbits and other animals of similar size. Using large nets, they would scare these animals out from hiding, catch them in the nets, club them to death and then have a large supply of meat for some time.
The authors don’t hold back, revealing all the prevalent theories on what human species was the first to leave Africa, for example, and discuss their own theories. In some cases there is disagreement between them, such as over the development of language as to whether it was a quick or slow development. The reader can’t help but get lost in the details and ideas being thrown around, one of the most interesting being that the initial stages of language developed with the relationship between a mother and her baby, possibly communicating in “motherese.”
The Invisible Sex is a combination of books held together in one volume: there is the history of humanity covered from its early evolutionary stages as these ape-like creatures decided to start walking upright, to ideas on how language and then writing developed, to reasons for people ending their nomadic ways and beginning long-term farming; then there is the book where the role of women in prehistory is put straight, complete and clear for the first time, revealing that women had a far larger role than previously thought, and were in fact incremental in a lot of events in history that may never have happened.
SAXONS, VIKINGS, AND CELTS: THE GENETIC ROOTS OF BRITAIN AND IRELAND BY BRYAN SYKES: Bryan Sykes, author of The Seven Daughters of Eve and Adam’s Curse, professor of human genetics at Oxford university, has spent many years of his life studying genes, chromosomes, and DNA; specializing in collecting data from all over the world and tracing ancestral lineages back thousands of years. Sykes was one of the instrumental geneticists in tracing all Europeans back to seven ancestral women. From this, Sykes now takes on the challenge of determining the ancestry of the British Isles. How much Saxon, Viking, and Celtic DNA is left in a modern day Englishman? Saxons, Vikings, and Celts is a bold and ambitious embarkation that reveals the astounding results of Sykes many years of study; while the facts may present more questions of why than answers; Saxons is one of the most important books of the twenty-first century.
Do not be daunted by the prospect pages of DNA statistics, Sykes goes out of his way to break everything down and explain it in a detailed and simple way; he even warns the reader before the “part with all the numbers.” Saxons, Vikings, and Celts apart from being a book about DNA and genetics of the British Isles, is also an amazing source for history. The first chapter is spent setting the scene with Sykes’ career and research. Chapter two is one of the most brilliant summaries of British history: from the end of Roman rule, through the history of King Arthur, past each important monarch, on to the present status quo; Sykes has an innate ability for explaining things in a way that make their connections obvious to everyone. The next few chapters are spent explaining his process for collecting the genetic data throughout the British Isles, first with blood samples from schools and blood banks, and then with plastic brushes that are scraped on the inside of the cheek to get skin samples -- an easier method better received by the people donating their samples. Sykes then dedicates a chapter for each country covering it’s history of immigration with Celts, Saxons, Vikings, and Normans, with the successive chapters covering the genetic correlation of these specific countries.
The last five pages of the book are what the reader has spent the last two hundred and fifty pages reading to get to; here Sykes correlates all the data together and explains the results, which are astonishing to say the least. They essentially boil down to this: the genetic makeup of the British Isles mainly consists of the Britons and Celts who have lived there for thousands of years, while the invading Saxon, Viking, and Norman people are but a minor percentage of the total. What does this all mean? Sadly, Sykes doesn’t really explain this at all – perhaps he is saving it for another book? – nevertheless, the reader is left coming up with his or her own ideas of what these results mean. Were the invading peoples not that great in number? Did they not actually settle in such large numbers, as we think?
While Saxons, Vikings, and Celts may not answer every question you have, the facts that it brings to light with the irrefutable certainty of DNA evidence are enough to spend many years contemplating. Sykes has even started his own company, Oxford Ancestors (www.oxfordancestors.com), where one can sign up and with a sample can have their DNA traced through ancestors who lived, walked, and breathed thousands of years ago. For those seeking more facts and answers from Saxons, Vikings, and Celts, they should visit www.bloodoftheisles.net.
THE GOD DELUSION BY RICHARD DAWKINS: Dawkins latest book is as brutal and honest as its title. For those who aren’t looking to have their faith and beliefs gravely challenged, you may want to skip this book. Though Dawkins is looking for everyone to read this book with an open mind, whether you’re devoutly religious, agnostic or atheist. Having an open mind is actually one of the New Ten Commandments Dawkins cites.
The book begins in a calm and orderly manner, with an opening chapter on the “god hypothesis,” where Dawkins talks about the idea of a god through history and how we are now in a time where medicine and science have come such a long way from the days of thinking the world is flat, balancing the humors, and believing there was a demon or god causing a every catastrophe. And yet religion – especially Christianity – remains stagnated in the ideas of men from thousands of years ago. As the book progresses, Dawkins seems to grow more impatient with religion and its whole-hearted certainty in a book and a god.
He does an impressive job of going from chapter to chapter in defending different stances on science, always providing the evidence – a facet, he says, religion is lacking. One point Dawkins makes that I really found fascinating was his evolutionary reason for the existence of religion, in that it was a component of our very early societies in helping to unite communities and keep them together as a whole. As human beings, we strive for companionship and the evidence speaks for itself when we look back to the time when there was a shift from the nomadic hunting and gathering societies to settling down in groups and communities, which started farming, large scale food production, and ultimately leading to technology, writing, law, art and so on.
After this, Dawkins tackles the question of morality and makes it a very big deal that everyone understand we keep this separate from religion and not think them one and the same. The Bible is full of murder, rape, fratricide, torture – for a book on teaching us how to lead supposedly “good” lives, this book has a very strange way of trying to do that, says Dawkins. So he goes back into our ancestry to the days of Cro-Magnon, in the time when all humanity cared about was trying to survive. He posits that this was when we began to develop a sense of morality, because in being good to others, families and groups were formed, which helped improve survival. If we’d stuck to stealing and killing, we wouldn’t have lasted past that first winter.
Another big issue with Dawkins is the labeling of children as belonging to the religion of the parents without any consent from them: they’re Protestant children, or Muslim children, or Jewish children; even though in all likelihood they are far too young to comprehend what this applied label means. These children of heavily religious and fundamental families don’t have a choice. One of the most horrific groups I learned about in The God Delusion are the so-called “Hell Houses,” where children – ideally twelve year olds, because this is the perfect age for indoctrination – are taken through a labyrinth of horror revealing the terrible sins of sex before marriage, homosexuality, and abortion, and what happens in hell if one were to commit any of them. A cast of actors rehearse these scenes to create the greatest sense of terror in the children – yes, there’s even a tall and scary looking man playing the part of Satan.
At the beginning of the book, one can sense that Dawkins is open to accepting the existence of religion, so long as it gets modernized and becomes part of the twenty-first century. However, by the end of the book, Dawkins is fuming over the many pitfalls and handicaps of religion, especially where it causes pain and suffering to others. While the author’s hope is to make everyone agree with his ideas and opinions, Dawkins at least wants people to think about what he is talking about, to make people contemplate these ideas with the evidence, and then to make an informed decision on their beliefs. The existence of a god cannot be proved or disproved, Dawkins says, but the chances seem very likely that there isn’t one. He gives an example of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, which while most of the world thinks little more than a joke; if rumors of the Flying Spaghetti Monster had started thousands of years ago, might some of us be believing in this pasta god today?
While Dawkins didn’t set out to enrage people, with the title and content of this book, this was inevitable. Yet, I think some compliment is deserved for both Dawkins and the publisher in having the courage to put this book on the shelves, and since it’s publication, The God Delusion has spent many weeks on top ten lists across the country which, if anything, says a lot about people beliefs in this country at this time.
GUNS, GERMS, AND STEEL: THE FATES OF HUMAN SOCIETIES BY JARED DIAMOND: This is one of those books that takes you a while to read -- it's pretty heavy non-fiction -- and yet at the end of it, you feel like Hippocrates, a Muslim scientist, or Leonardo Da Vinci must have felt at the realization of a great discovery. The Eureka! moment. This book is kind of like the movie Hotel Rwanda: the movie was life-altering for me, and just made every other movie that came out that year seem tawdry and unimportant; it was one of those movies that everyone should see (especially Americans and Western Europeans) just to understand the world and its history better. Guns, Germs, and Steel is one of those books that everyone should read to better comprehend their existence at this specific moment in time.
The premise of the book is revealed in the prologue in a conversation between the author and a New Guinea native who lives his very simple life in Stone Age conditions. The thesis that arises in their conversation is what specific events led to the fact that Europeans were the ones to reach New Guinea and interact with its people, and why it wasn't the New Guinea people to develop the technology and abilities to travel the world and make first contact with the Europeans.
With the concept in place, Diamond sets about doing this in his conversational and, quite frankly, mind-blowing and ingenious way. As a professor, with studies in anthropology and biology, he has an astounding way of seeing things and being able to explain ideas in a simple manner that make so much sense and you're left saying to yourself: "Oh, that's how that happened," or "that's why it's like that." At times he can bog you down with details, mainly because he explains them on minutest and seemingly most insignificant level (such as different seeds around the world). And yet you are left with that adage of chaos theory: everything on this planet happens for a reason and has a knock-on effect.
Some of Diamond's ideas that I found and still find most astonishing include:
The reason the continent of Eurasia was able to develop to a much more advanced level than the rest of the world, with its complex empires, cradles of civilizations, and large amount of farming and domesticated species was due to its latitude on a specific east-west axis. The other continents -- North and South America, Africa, Australasia -- are all on a north-south axis. What does this difference mean? For one, climate is greatly changed the further north or south ones goes, which has an effect on the migration of people, animals, and plants, as well as the spread of information, technology and culture. Because of this, Eurasia was able to develop more crops and have them spread around the continent through trade, as well as the spread of domesticated animals, culture and more importantly, technology. The other continents did not have this ease, which Diamond explains in clear detail with facts and dates.
Of course, I am vastly over-simplifying the book and it's really necessary for one to peruse its pages to get the full understanding. Another concept that I was very happy to be made so clear is the explanation of why whites conquered most of the world was not because they were a superior race in any way. And how is this simply explained? To use Jared Diamond's example:
The Aboriginal people spent many thousands of years keeping to their simple ways due to the harsh conditions of Australia. When the Europeans arrived they were able to educate the Aborigines and share their technology and make it seem like these advanced whites were helping and "bettering" the Aboriginal people, and therefore making them civilized. And yet it was necessary for the Europeans to bring all their technology, culture and science with them for them to survive, otherwise they wouldn't have lasted a week in Australia. It had nothing to do with the Caucasian as a race, but everything to do with the specific parameters for living in Europe and developing the technology and culture under those conditions. This is made clear when Diamond talks about two European explorers from different background who set out, with all their technology and science, to cross the vast landmass of Australia. Neither of them made it to the other side; they both died under the severe conditions. However, the Aboriginal people frequently cross this landmass on their nomadic journeys and make it relatively unharmed.
Overall, what I get from this book is: Why are we all fighting and killing and hating one another? After all the seemingly random events over the last two million years that led from the ape-like hominid to the homo sapiens sapiens of today, it seems all we should be doing is hugging each other and patting everyone on the back for getting through the whole mess and still being alive to tell about it. A lot of animals and dinosaurs aren't.
But don't take my word for it: read and absorb the ideas of Jared Diamond and have your life and your ideas changed for the better.
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THE PLANETS BY DAVA SOBEL: This is another book I bought because of it's beautiful cover, especially in the hardcover edition, and one which, after reading, I thought had failed in it's job. I've read Sobel's Galileo's Daughter, which I really enjoyed with the mixture of history, science and story, so I had high hopes for The Planets. There was a chapter on each of the nine planets, along with one for the sun and the moon, and an intro and an epilogue. The book was under 300 pages and I felt didn't go into anywhere near enough depth on each of the planets. Sobel presented each planet with a story on how it came to be discovered and by whom and then with some story and mythology surrounding the planet and then moved on the next planet. I was expecting in-depth science with the planets and just far more than was given. There wasn't a single photo in the book, which seemed crazy: you write a book about the planets with a colorful and interesting cover, the least I expect is glossy color photos inside of the planets and moons. But nada. So if you're looking for a quick uninspired read that gives you some fun facts and quaint tales about the planets, go with this one, but if you're looking for something that educates you and inspires you about the planets, look somewhere else.
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THE LONG EMERGENCY: SURVIVING THE CONVERGING CATASTROPHES OF THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY BY JAMES HOWARD KUNSTLER: The Long Emergency is an eye-catching book with hits bright alarm-yellow cover and black and red title. It's a book about the future of the world, what's going to happen when we run out of oil, and what to do when this "Long Emergency" begins. The first part of the book goes into depth about when oil was discovered, how it was first used, when and how it was converted into the many products that use oil today. The reader learns what are the events that led up to the discovery of oil in the Middle East and the reason it is in its horrible state today.
After this enlightening history lesson, Kunstler goes on to explain that there is a specific oil production peak that will be reached, when half of the available oil would've been used up, and the other half -- which is harder to get -- will drive up gas and oil prices. According to a number of sources in the footnotes, this peak will be reached some time between the year 2000 and 2008. Kunstler says that they way we will be able to tell is through the oscillation of oil prices rising greatly, then dropping a little, then raising more, but only going down a little each time. Over the past year, this is exactly what has happened, and I'm pretty sure we're never going to see gas go below $2 again.
Kunstler goes on to point out that the supposed alternative forms of energy we're working on will be nowhere near to replacing the oil industry once we dispense with it. This is mainly due to the recent Republican Presidents, starting with Reagan who stopped most funding to alternative energy means and essentially killed the drive for it. Along with Bush Senior and our current idiot, they are all part of a white male arrogant group that believe we will never run out of oil, and it is merely a case of finding it in the earth, albeit by digging deeper and further (re: Alaska!); couple with this is these men's beliefs that the Rapture will arrive tomorrow and they'll be ascending to Heaven, leaving all their problems behind them. Though Clinton is also to blame for looking towards the future and working on prepare the civilized world for the inevitable.
Kunstler predicts all out pandemonium and chaos, worst felt in the United States, of course, where suburbia is in full force. When all the material goods and services we've taken for granted for so long collapse, and our society crashes around us, the Long Emergency will being. This is what Kunstler says. Though he provides little advice and assurance in how one can survive this event. Plus there's the fact that this nonfiction work doesn't have an index or bibliography at the end. I know all nonfiction works don't need this, but when it's a book predicting everything going to hell in my lifetime, I would at least like a list for further readings, or maybe some websites.
It will at least be interesting the see in the coming decades what will begin happening, and I know for now what I most want to get is a hybrid, because gas prices aren't going down ever again.
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CONVERSATIONS ON THE EDGE OF APOCALYPSE: CONTEMPLATING HE FUTURE WITH NOAM CHOMSKY, GEORGE CARLIN, DEEPAK CHOPRA, RUPERT SHELDRAKE, AND OTHERS EDITED BY DAVID JAY BROWN: Conversations on the Edge of Apocalypse is an interesting collection of interviews with a cornucopia of renowned people from all walks of life, although this group seems to consist mainly of scientists, Buddhists, and people of other alternative believes than Western Christian world.
While there's not really must I can say that the book gives the reader on the whole, there are a lot of interesting individual details with each person. Some I skipped past, because it just wasn't my cup of tea, or rather I had absolutely no inkling of belief in this person's seemingly crazy ideas. All the scientists were extremely interesting, giving up to date news of what they're working on: the cure for AIDS is around the corner, according to one of these scientists. A couple of the interesting questions Brown asked each person was: Do you think the human race will survive the next hundred years? And, essentially: What happens to you after you die. The general consensus to human survival is that we will survive the next hundred years (and according to some scientists, with upcoming advances in longevity, a lot of us will be around to see it!), so long as we don't blow ourself up with outright nuclear war or a bioweapons war, or SARS, of course. As for the latter question, the funny thing was that every single person first answered with "I don't know." Then they want on to give their afterlife beliefs, but it was just amusing to have everyone preface their ideas with the "I don't know" disclaimer.
On the whole, it's a book I recommend to people to read, just to read the variety of ideas from people in the world today, for all areas, and it opens one's mind and helps you understand that everyone doesn't think the same thing.
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WILL IN THE WORLD: HOW SHAKESPEARE BECAME SHAKESPEARE BY STEPEHN GREENBLATT: It's been a while since I finished this book, but my take on it is still the same -- mind you I did listen to the audiobook version as opposed to actually reading it. My complaint is that with the title, Will in the World, one would expect the book to be mostly about the great writer's life from birth to death, as well as covering his works, and while the book does certainly do this, there is a lot more emphasis on his works, with citations in the multitudes; Shakespeare's life is barely glossed over. A lot of this has to do with the fact that there is little evidence of his life, with most of his works surviving intact. Still, I wanted to know about his life and I didn't get enough. The image the book paints is a writer who cared little for his family, leaving his wife and child in Stratford-upon-Avon and spending the duration of his life in London ignoring them.
What I did like about the book was the way Greenblatt went through Shakespeare's life, revealing when certain plays were written and how they tied in with his life at that time, and possibly why he was writing them in the first place. It gave further meaning to the bard's works. It was also interesting to discover that at the beginning of the seventeenth century, Shakespeare, while renowed as a great playwright, had no competition: Marlowe and the other playwrights had all died, some quite mysteriously.
Overall, the book was lacking in informing the reader of Shakespeare's life, and in not being very linear in covering his life, one was often left confused as to what point in his life one was at. There were also a couple of times -- perhaps this is more the case with the audiobook version -- where there was a long citation from one of the plays and I was left wondering why the hell the author had used such a long quote and what the hell the point of it was.
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UNDER THE BANNER OF HEAVEN: A STORY OF VIOLENT FAITH BY JON KRAKAUER: I finished Under the Banner of Heaven two days ago now, and I haven't written the review yet, waiting to see if anything would change in my mind about Mormons, and so far nothing has. I still think it's a horribly misogynistic religion that goes even further than all other religions I know to take away all responsibility, independent thought, and individualism, and literally sacrifice oneself to god and whoever is your president and high lord protector (the title isn't exactly this, but is just as preposterous), whether you be regular Mormon or fundamentalist -- of course, he is a man, without a doubt.
The crux of the book is the deaths of Eric and her eight or so year-old daughter at the hands of the Lafferty brothers who still can't decide who officially slit the girls throats.
While the book managed to enrage me throughout, it did serve to educate and enlighten me on the religion in general, and on the important differences between the fundamentalists and the Latter Day Saints (LDS). The book also presents the history of Mormonism with Joseph Smith, Brigham Young and what led to the creation of the religion, its development through the decades and centuries, with the Mormons being ostracized wherever they went, until they settled in the deserts of Utah and set about completely ignoring the US government and living their lives as they saw fit. The Church of Latter Day Saints continues to do this to some degree today, and the fundamentalists especially, thriving on it.
So let's clear up the main thing first: polygamy. The Church of Latter Day Saints condones and doesn't allow polygamy, after changing this steadfast rule from the D&C (Doctrine and Covenants -- the rulebook which Mormons go by as put down by Joseph Smith, with additions made by Brigham Young and successive "prophets") in the nineteenth century when the government essentially pressured them into doing this, since polygamy was (AND STILL IS!) illegal in every state. But in a religion where everyone from the president to the lowly devout woman has the ability to talk with god and receive his instruction; splitting, and the formation of break-off sects and groups is as inevitable as night come sunset. And it it's these break-off groups that form their own churches and communes (Colorado City in Utah is one of these), and they are the fundamentalists groups who believe that the LDS have fallen from the true ruling of god and take it upon themselves to adhere to the D&C as they see fit. The result is a town like Colorado City, in the middle of the desert, isolated, as they like it. There polygamy is a way of life; if you don't subscribe to this way, you are pressured and then ostracized. It is also in this town where anywhere from thirteen to sixteen year-old girls are ordered, yes, ordered by the president to marry whatever man the president decrees, without any choice in the matter. Ordered to marry that man, live with him, and whose sole duty is to bear as many children as possible, no questions asked . . . or you're going to hell! This is the truth. This is life in Colorado City. It is also here that instances of rape and pedophilia are becoming common place, as fathers take a liking to their eleven year-old daughters (whether they be biologically or adopted through marriage), rape them, and them force them to marry their fathers.
And it seems pretty pathetic when our president makes it his duty to prevent homosexual marriage from ever being considered, even though homosexuality is a genetic predisposition and is what you simply are, while in Utah there are groups doing what I said above and millions of people worry that it is the homosexuals who risk destroying the sanctity of marriage. Fuck that, is my response.
One part of the book that struck me hard was the Mountain Meadows Massacre which happened in the nineteenth century in Utah. The Mormons had been settled for a while, Brigham Young was running the show, and they were happily going about their polygamous, incestuous, misogynistic, abusive business; then the gold rush happened along with the opening of the west happened in California. So you got a slew of people heading west. There was one group of 170 or so people with their wagons and thousands of cattle who were traveling through Utah. Mormons had been ordered to never feed or offer shelter to these Gentiles (as anyone who isn't is Mormon is referred to) and if they did, they would be excommunicated. And it was in the Mountain Meadows valley that the Mormons bribing the aid of the Paiute Indians, surrounded the group and proceed to wipe them out. But the Gentiles were able to hold their own, defending themselves behind the wagons, and this went on for days. So the Mormons finally held up the white flag of surrender, met with the group and said they would let them through Utah, not offering them any aid, but they would pass through Utah alive and unhurt. So the wagon train reformed and the Mormons surrounded them and they started off, then the order was given and the Mormons opened fire and slaughtered every man first, and then set about murdering every woman and child. When they were done they took what they wanted, stripping the bodies and taking the cattle, giving the Paiutes a menial and far less than agreed upon amount of the spoils, and left. The bodies rotted in the sun and the bones dried and whitened for decades, then a group of Gentile explorers came through, saw the graveyard and put up a stone monument of assembled rocks in commemoration. The next Mormons that came by (it may have been Brigham Young, I'm not sure), tore the moment down in delight. The Mormons never took any blame or punishment for this massacre and to this day essentially blame it on the Paiutes.
And then there's the story of how Joseph Smith made the rule of polygamy, because in the early days of the religion, each Mormon had one wife. But Smith got bored with his aging wife and wanted some younger flesh, and decided that god had told him Mormons were to be polygamous. But when he baited his people with this, they erupted in natural outcry, and so it was not added to the D&C, nevertheless Smith continued secretly to have multiple wives, even though his first wife who'd been with him a long time and supposed and believed in him and his religion the entire time was totally against polygamy and left him. The guy decided he wanted a younger girl and so made polygamy law, and that's what has led to the fundamentalist polygamous groups today and all that fun stuff I've been talking about above.
What was really interesting about the book was seeing the development of a religion from its conception to the fastest growing religion in the world today. Because it began in a time with the printing press, and the popularity and ubiquity of the written word, its growth has been well documented throughout, unlike most other religions that have been around a lot longer. Of course, much like the giant vaults of the Vatican, lots of material on the religion remains secreted in Utah.
I would recommend one read this book because it opens your mind. It's one of the those books that everyone should read to understand and realize what is going on in this country every day. Also it makes what happened to Elizabeth Smart clear and sadly makes perfect sense, especially since Utah covered it up at the time and little was known about it. Another thing that goes in Colorado City is whatever the president says goes, without question. He's said no one is to have television, read anything other than Mormon writings and not to wear red; this is life for these people.
And I never thought I would say this about any state in this country, but I now have no interest in ever going to Utah.
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THE BOUNTY: THE TRUE STORY OF THE MUTINY ON THE BOUNTY BY CAROLINE ALEXANDER: So I finally finished The Bounty which turned out to be a really great book about the mutiny on the Bounty, with Fletcher Christian and Captain Bligh, and much mass. I actually prefer these types of history books that give you so much more information than you could ever expect, like Krakatoa by Simon Winchester. So it wasn't just a book about the mutiny on the Bounty, but also about the lives of each of the crew, where they were born, where they grew up, and how they came to be on this fated ship. A good portion of the book also went to Bligh's history and life. Then there was after the mutiny, with Bligh and his few faithful crew surviving (although gettting malaria in Batavia and essentially being stricken with it in minor form -- sometimes flaring up and putting them in death's reach -- for the rest of their lives) and making it back to England. And what happened to the mutineers and those that eventually got caught and court-martialed and what happened with their lives. And then what actually happened to the Bounty post-mutiny, which was what I was really interested in.
Turns out, the ship went back to Tahiti, kidnapped some of the pretty promiscuous women and then sailed for somewhere they wouldn't be found; because Fletcher Christian had Bligh's good maps, he settled on Pitcairn Island, which was hard to find and had only been discovered a short while before. They settled there with the women and were only able to survive because the women knew how to live off the island, but it got to the point where they started treating the women as slaves (as well as wives) along with some of the Tahitian men they kidnapped, and in retaliation the Tahitians fought back, supposedly murdering Christian and eventually everyone else except for one English guy, continuing to eke out their lives on Pitcairn Island, growing in fame and renown as more ships visited and discovered them. There's even the harrowing tale of one Tahitian woman who fought for her life to return to Tahiti and eventually did.
The last fifty pages or so of the book ends with how the surviving members of the mutiny lived their lives in England, and also Bligh's life which was continually doomed: on another ship he was involved in a sort of mutiny by the British navy, though what was really more of a strike to get more rights to the sailors, where he was involved in the negotiations from the British navy's side; and then he took the position of governor of New South Wales whereupon there was an almost immediate coup that had him having to stay on a boat for two years, with the overthrowers eventually getting captured and having another trial in England, and then his wife dying . . . it's a pretty sad tale. Thought there was one point in Bligh's life where he was captain of a ship alongside Lord Nelson and was involved in a great victory at the battle of Copenhagan, and for that got to hang out with Nelson for a while.
My complaint with the book, first and foremost, is the "tag line" on the cover of the paperback (not sure if it was on the hardcover): Has history been wrong for 200 years? Mayhap it has, but Caroline Alexander makes no mention of any startling research she's discovered or something new that the reader doesn't know, unless she assumes that we all already know everything there is to know about Captain Bligh and the Bounty, and can pick out her additions and discoveries, which is preposterous. Also Alexander tends to shift back and forth a lot and isn't very linear, starting the book off with the capture of the mutineers and then going on to the beginning of the sailors' lives and the eventual mutiny, and continuing to go back and forth in time at certain points, depending on which person she is dealing with.
Overall though, it was a really enjoying, engrossing and interesting book that I will probably read again one day in the distant future, unless I should need to look up details earlier (perhaps for a book about what happened to the Bounty after the mutiny -- fiction -- which I'm kind of thinking about -- it depends on how much it wants to be written and how much it stays in my head and bounces around). There is, of course, about a hundred pages of bibliography, references, chapter notes, and an index.
I look forward to whatever Caroline Alexander has next to offer us, though as I check on Ingram, doesn't look like anything yet.
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NEIL GAIMAN’S NEVERWHERE WRITTEN BY MIKE CAREY & ILLUSTRATED BY GLENN FABRY: A most unique and magical book of fantasy and amazement has now been transformed into a beautifully illustrated and fantastically written graphic novel. Mike Carey, author of the successful Lucifer comic books series (from the Lucifer character in Neil Gaiman’s Sandman), brings his own slant and viewpoint with his graphic novel adaptation of Neverwhere. Together with Glenn Fabry, who also illustrated the comic book series The Authority, Carey has managed to not only skillfully adapt the book in a the graphic novel version, but also make the scenes run from one to the next and get the whole story told in under two hundred pages of graphic work, as opposed to the under four hundred page book. Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere serves as an excellent introduction for those who haven’t read the book but are interested, and it makes the perfect segue, after completing the graphic novel, to just go straight to the book. Being one of my favorite books ever written, I’m glad to say that this adaptation lives up to my hopes.
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CLIVE BARKER’S THE GREAT AND SECRET SHOW, VOLUME 1 BY CHRIS RYALL AND GABRIEL RODRIGUEZ: It’s always interesting to see how graphic novel adaptations of complex and long books are going to turn out. Thankfully, Ryall’s and Rodriguez’s adaptation of Barker’s book is one that he is proud of, and will make fans happy. For a summary of the novel, see my review for The Great and Secret Show.
The key here is that this is the first volume in an at least two-volume series, because the forty or fifty pages would not be able to cover the whole story. What’s so refreshing is the art. Clive Barker has a very vivid imagination and to see these crazy and complex images show in art form rich with color and detail is a truly enjoyable experience. Along with a brilliantly written script that manages to condense a six hundred page book, or three hundred in this case, into this slim graphic novel.
Clive Barker’s The Great and Secret Show is perfect for the fan of the book looking to see it done in a whole new way, as well as those not sure if they want to tackle a long dense book, and looking for a Cliffnotes version. Of course, once they’ve read it, they will probably want to read the novel version, which of course, is highly recommended.
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FABLES: 1001 NIGHTS OF SNOWFALL BY BILL WILLINGHAM, et. al.: Whether this is the first time you’ve looked upon the world of the Fables comic book series, or you’re an issue to issue addict (like me); 1001 Nights of Snowfall is a graphic novel that anyone can read and enjoy; Bill Willingham says exactly this in his introduction. Working with a host of different artists, including Mark Buckingham (who illustrates the series), John Bolton (Harlequin Valentine), Jill Thompson (Scary Godmother) and Charles Vess (Stardust, Ladies of Grace Adieu); 1001 Nights of Snowfall is the graphic novel you will want to own and show off to friends.
Featuring a collection of stories, the book is framed with Snow White’s meeting with a misogynistic Sultan who intends to kill her when he is through with her. To prevent this, Snow White must tell a new story to him each night to stay his lethal hand. From her stories we find out about Bigby’s (the big bad wolf from “Little Red Riding Hood” and “Three Little Pigs” fame) birth, his youth, and how he felt being the outcast of the family. We learn of an unusual story of a woman’s learning to defend herself with a sword coupled with the mysterious deaths of seven dwarfs. We learn about the life of a frog who was magically transformed into a prince, but then turned himself back into a frog to save himself as his wife and family were slaughtered. Then there is the story of the real Hansel and Gretel, showing in detail what really happened when the witch tried to cook them. The final story is about the animals of Fable banding together with Old King Cole to protect their realm.
With lots more stories to tell, 1001 Nights of Snowfall is the book you want for cold winter nights by the fire, when you can lose yourself in a world where the many characters you grew up reading about come to life and live everyday lives. And if, after this, you are looking for more, you might just want to start the Fables series from the beginning with Fables: Legends in Exile, available wherever graphic novels are sold.
PRIDE OF BAGHDAD BY BRIAN K. VAUGHN AND NIKO HENRICHON: When I heard about this title coming out I was immediately interested; apart from it being by the great writer and creator of the award winning Y The Last Man comic book series, the story sounded provocative, and being based on a true story made even more so.
The true story is a quick and simple one to tell: with the invasion of Baghdad in 2003, one of the first places abandoned was the zoo and when the bombs and destruction hit, a lot of cages and pens were broken open. A pride of lions escaped and began walking around Baghdad until they were found by US soldiers who were so shocked they just opened fire before the lions could do anything. With the mind and pen of Brian K. Vaughn and the beautiful and detailed artwork of Niko Henrichon, this is the lions’ fictional story.
The pride is composed of an aging male, his mother, his mate, and his single cub. In this world the animals can talk to each other and Vaughn does a great job of capturing attitudes and characters with the different animals. The pride leave the zoo, after rescuing the cub from a hoard of baboons who were about to tear him apart, and travel the streets of Baghdad, looking in houses and palaces, searching for food. In one great palace they find a mighty statue of a lion and take spiritual comfort from it magnitude and the respect that humans give it. In this palace they also find a chained old lion who was a pet, presumably one of Hussein’s sons or family members. There is also a mighty bear, another pet, who has broken free and there is a great fight between the bear and the lions. As the inevitable demise of the pride approaches, their last view is of a beautiful sunset on the city of Baghdad and before the cub dies, he gets to see his one and only horizon.
A very sad story, and yet moving in the way the writing and art adds such emotion and feeling to these animals that one can’t help but feel they deserved so much better than their horrible end.
PYONGYANG: A JOURNEY IN NORTH KOREA BY GUY DELISLE: This is another book -- recommended to me -- in a growing genre of what I guess can be called "illustrated journalism" or "illustrated memoirs": writers telling their stories of real life through the medium of graphic novels. Of course, another big author in this genre is Marjane Satrapi, with her greatest achievement being Persepolis, and her story of living in Iran when the Shah was overthrown and the country went through some devastating times. She followed this with Persepolis 2 -- which I have yet to read -- a sequel of her going back to Iran, and most recently Embroideries, which I did read and while I found it interesting -- a group of women meet for tea to discuss their lives as Iranian women and it seems much like one of the salons on the 1920's, where they discuss in secrecy things that shouldn't be talked about -- though I felt the book too short and didn't go into enough depth.
Nevertheless, Satrapi and Delisle are two of this growing genre and with the way graphic novels and comic books are continuing to increase every year in sales and support, I'm really happy that this nonfiction style is also continuing to grow because, much as you can say a lot with words and you can say a lot with pictures, uniting the true presents a whole new insight: not only do you hear the author through his or her words, but you see the emotion in the illustration and an empathic bond inevitably develops.
The author and artist of Pyongyang, Guy Delisle, works in animation and spends some time in North Korea where a part of animation has now been outsourced and there he works with a company, but the story isn't about the animated movie he is working on, it is much more about his experience in living in this relatively unknown country. One cannot help but get the feel of entering a new and undiscovered country for the first time.
North Korea caters, naturally, to its visitors and especially its tourists, so we see a world where there are buildings, towns and structures everywhere, and yet most are run down and have no power. Yet, when the tourists arrive, all of a sudden an entire floor of the hotel is filled with light and life, as well as two of the restaurants on another floor. While the menus aren't exactly five-star, they nevertheless have fresh goods and Delisle enjoys it, but after some weeks the quality goes down until the next group of tourists arrive, whereupon fresh melon is served once again! His most memorable description is of ordering French toast and being served with a slice of white bread on which has been sprinkled milk and warmed in the microwave.
But one really sees in this book the scary world that North Koreans are subjected to under the rule of their president Kim Jong-Il, and while this is a communist regime, one can't help but see stark similarities with just about every ruler, president, and emperor in the history of civilization. For example, the North Korean government goes to extremes to portray Kim Jong-Il and his deceased father and predecessor Kim Il-Sung as almost looking identical and perfectly alive and healthy. All supporters of the government wear pins of one or the other, or a pin of the two, as well as showing constant voluntary support of their government in building shrines to one, the other, or both, and making paintings and erecting statues, and improving their country by painting a bridge or cleaning a street -- it can be seen everyone, as Delisle travels around the country. The northeast part is off limits, government controlled and where, according to the rumors, are all the camps containing the prisoners and rebels. And each supporter constantly proclaims his blind faith to his president; on the radio are about three stations where songs are repetitively played that cry out the greatness of the government and the president, and the listeners are fully expected to sing along.
Tourists are not allowed to travel alone around North Korean and must be accompanied by an interpreter and staunch government supporter all the time (unless they are with the UN), who's job it is to respect the tourists beliefs and yet to convert and enlighten him or her to the ways of their great president and supreme government. One of the most entertaining chapters of the book is when Delisle visits the great museum made for Kim Jon-Il, where everything within extols his greatest and reveals apocryphal facts about his life, such as his penning over 15,000 works before the age of twenty, and how many leaders around the world support his ideal and think him great. What's funny is that Delisle, viewing these artifacts and gifts, is quick to point out how they are either inaccurate or not actually real. And yet the supporters believe without question and while they may listen to other ideas, never shirk their duty to constantly say good things about Mr. Jong-Il.
The book does fail somewhat in going into depth with this world, and it seems once the astonishment of this unknown land passes, Delisle tends to focus a little to much on his day to day machinations and trying to work with the North Korean people, which while interesting at first, tend to get repetitive when there is so much more to explore and see.
Near the end of the book, he focuses on how he makes paper airplanes out of scrap paper and throws them from his hotel window, hoping they will make it to the river and be free, which is the last image of the story, while a hulk of a building grows on the other side of the river where a movie theatre will be built, and even though Delisle has explained this is what this is, the reader knows it's not going to be used for Hollywood blockbusters, and had Delisle researched and investigated more, we would've been given further details of this mysterious country.
I will, however, add that since reading this, playing a new Xbox game called Mercenaries, where the point of the game is to make deals with all the different factions in the demilitarized zone of North Korea and capture all the wanted military of North Korea, it has at least opened my eyes and awareness of this oppressed and dark country.
It will be an interesting day, when the communist government either collapses, or is more likely overthrown, and the stories, experiences and information start pouring out about what life was like in North Korea during this time.
Would you like to get yourself a copy? Click HERE for Amazon.com. Click HERE for Amazon.co.uk.
THE 9/11 REPORT: A GRAPHIC ADAPTATION BY SID JACOBSON AND ERNIE COLON: Naturally, this graphic adaptation has been getting a lot of flack from different people related to the September 11th attacks, because they still feel that comics are for a child’s enjoyment, to entertain and encourage a child’s humor, and they don’t know that in some ways they can do more than books in both informing through words and explaining through art. Sometimes a lot more can be said through a picture with words.
I have to say though, after sloughing through this graphic adaptation of the 9/11 Report, I will not be reading that long and important source any time soon. The graphic novel is heavy and complicated enough to get through. But if one wishes to get the complete story of not just exactly what happened on September 11th, 2001, but all the events leading up to it with the terrorists and the state of our foreign policy with the Middle East, then pick up this graphic novel and take it all in . . . it’s all there.
Apart from the introduction from two of the commissioners of the 9/11 Report, the graphic adaptation begins with a four-way split streamline of the four planes, when they took off and under what circumstances, what happened on the planes with the hijackers, and what the eventual resulting attack was. What makes this quite fascinating is that by charting them all together one can see the initial plan of having all the hijackers carry out their plans at the same time, but due to different circumstances and delays this was not the case.
In the next chapter, the authors go into detail on how the FAA and different government bodies could have and should have done things differently according to all their previous regulations. It does prove that had everyone been doing what they should’ve, some of those planes may not have hit those targets, or at least something else and less devastating might have happened.
The rest of the book is spent in going into the history of the circumstances that led up to the hijackers boarding the planes. It’s heavy reading, but the pictures make it a lot clearer and easier to understand. One gets a full picture on everyone and what they were doing, and how many different people and places were involved. It’s actually quite surprising.
The book (as I’m sure the 9/11 Report does also) is clear in pointing out that while the Bush administration was certainly to blame in some cases, the previous Clinton administration was very much also, and even had everything been working smoothly, the attacks may still have not been prevented. One can say they would’ve never happened had Clinton carried out the assassination of Usama Bin Laden, as he’d planned in the late 90s; but one can also say had Bush focused on terrorism in the Middle East when he came into office, as all his advisors were telling him (specifically Richard Clarke), then again September 11th may never have happened.
While I’m sure the graphic adaptation covers nowhere near the same ground as the actual report, it nevertheless serves its own unique purpose in making everything more succinct and clearer and easier to understand as a whole. It’s the perfect book to keep in one’s library so that one day in the future one can pick it up again, read it, and understand exactly what happened and more importantly why on September 11th, 2001.
Would you like to get yourself a copy? Click HERE for Amazon.com. Click HERE for Amazon.co.uk.
