tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32121992024-03-08T14:43:32.819-05:00The Eccentric Reader's AdvisoryWhatever thoughts were inspired in me by some particular book I'm reading.Suzanne Saundershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01446806864238063728noreply@blogger.comBlogger115125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3212199.post-49694946906333096932016-05-04T18:12:00.000-04:002016-05-04T18:12:59.282-04:00<P><blockquote>Secretary of Labor James Davis conceded in 1927 that even if the U.S. government placed the Army on the Canadian and Mexican borders, “we couldn’t stop them; if we had the Navy on the water-front we couldn’t stop them. Not even a Chinese wall, nine thousand miles in length and built over rivers and deserts and mountains and along the seashores, would seem to permit a permanent solution.”<br />
</blockquote><br />
The more things change, the more they stay the same, huh? Ninety years ago, people in the United States were worried about illegal immigrants and suggesting things like giant walls to keep them out (and already being told how that wouldn’t work). However, the thing that’s changed is that the immigrants in question at that time were Asian, and that almost never gets mentioned in U.S. history classes. Indeed, in all the ones I’ve ever taken, the only Asian people in America to ever be mentioned were Chinese immigrant workers on the Transcontinental Railroad, and that was only a brief couple of sentences. </p><br />
<p>The source of the above quotation, Erika Lee’s <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1476739404/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=1476739404&linkCode=as2&tag=segnborasresourc&linkId=CMB22HVMZIBTOJ2Y"><i>The Making of Asian America: A History</i></a> begins to remedy that omission. It’s mostly focused on people of Asian ancestry in the United States, but there is also some coverage of Asian immigrants to Canada and Latin America (indeed, Asians came to Latin America almost as soon as Europeans did). It also covers a wide variety of Asians: people who came from China, the Philippines, Japan, Korea, India, Pakistan, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, and their American descendants. (It did occur to me that large portions of the continent of Asia aren’t mentioned — I suppose the Asian part of Russia and the former Soviet Central Asian countries may not have been the source of much immigration to the Americas, but that’s a little harder to believe of areas as populous as Indonesia and Malaysia. And then there’s the Middle East, which is mostly on the same landmass but somehow not thought of as “Asian” in the U.S. — that would make a longer book on its own.)</p><br />
<P>Anyway, Lee covers the history of Asians coming to America and how badly they were often treated by those of European ancestry; it’s quite interesting to someone like me, who grew up when (East) Asians were called the “model minority,” to see how people opposed their presence a century earlier, and how it was assumed people of Asian descent couldn’t possibly assimilate into the mainstream cultures of countries of the Americas. And even if you know of the incarceration of Japanese Americans in camps during World War II, it’s most likely a complete surprise to hear that Latin American countries sent their residents and citizens of Japanese ancestry to the United States to go into the same kind of camps. These are the kind of things that shouldn’t be forgotten, on their own account and because the knowledge can really affect how people look at current events, particularly immigration to the U.S. from anywhere, and relations with between different countries.</p>Suzanne Saundershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01446806864238063728noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3212199.post-10662546033727506392015-09-08T19:36:00.001-04:002015-09-08T19:36:46.962-04:00<P>Recently found on the new books shelf at the main location of the <a href="http://splibraries.org/">St. Petersburg Public Library</a>: Ann Morgan's <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1631490672/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=1631490672&linkCode=as2&tag=segnborasresourc&linkId=WDFHUN34XUI7TI6U">The World Between Two Covers: Reading the Globe</i></a>, a chronicle of Morgan's time trying to read a written work from every country in the world and blog about it at <a href="http://ayearofreadingtheworld.com/">A Year of Reading The World</a>. (The original British publication title is <i>Reading the World</i>.) This is mostly not, as some people writing <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23331535-the-world-between-two-covers">reviews at Goodreads</a> expected, a discussion of the individual books she read. (Those seem to be what's on the weblog, for people in search of reviews of world books; myself, I generally prefer when a book by a blogger isn't just a reprint of what I could read online.)</p><br />
<P>What this book covers is the doing of the project and thoughts on the issues that came up. The idea to "read the world" was inspired by an Australian reader recommending a book in the comments of her previous blog, and Morgan's realization that her bookshelves were "a host of British and North American greats...apart from a dog-eared copy of <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1631490672/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=1631490672&linkCode=as2&tag=segnborasresourc&linkId=WDFHUN34XUI7TI6U"><i>Madame Bovary</i></a> and a jumbled assortment of Freuds picked up during a student book-buying binge and barely touched since, there seemed to be nothing at all in translation." (Mine are hardly better, despite an interest in the history of all sorts of places -- almost all I've read seems to have been written by English speakers, mostly US and UK natives.) There's a lot of thought on why it's worthwhile to make the effort to branch out to works from different places, different cultures, different languages, even when it's intimidating to face settings so unfamiliar.<br />
<br />
Then came all the pre-reading tasks, such as: <br />
<ul><li>deciding what even counts as a country, which isn't always simple; <br />
<li>finding works from each of those countries, no matter how small (San Marino, just over 61 square kilometers/23.5 square miles in area, but only the fifth-smallest country <a href="http://www.infoplease.com/world/countries/smallest.html">according to Infoplease</a>) or brand-new (South Sudan had been independent less than a year when her project started); <br />
<li>and finding them in English (or for Sao Tome and Principe, getting them translated specifically for this project).</ul><p>These tasks lead into detailed considerations of the publishing industry around the world, the difficulty in getting things written down that originate in oral storytelling culture, and the official censorship of some governments. Once the reading part of the project starts, more things to think about arise: the culture shock of reading things that seem truly "foreign" to the reader's mind, the possible changes made when the translator is added to the author-reader connection, and the influence of technology on making written works available. I enjoyed the discussion of all these subjects, but I can understand why it might not be the right cup of tea for people who prefer just getting on with reading the stories.
</p>
<P>The bibliography of the 196 works that Morgan read <b>is</b> included at the end of the book. I was pleased to see a couple I was already familiar with: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1631490672/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=1631490672&linkCode=as2&tag=segnborasresourc&linkId=WDFHUN34XUI7TI6U"><i>Like Water for Chocolate</i></a> by Laura Esquivel (representing Mexico) and, for Latvia, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1631490672/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=1631490672&linkCode=as2&tag=segnborasresourc&linkId=WDFHUN34XUI7TI6U"><i>With Dance Shoes in Siberian Snows</i></a> by Sandra Kalniete, which I talked about in <a href="http://eccentricreader.blogspot.com/2010_03_01_archive.htm">March 2010</a>. I have already put in requests at the library for two more that sounded particularly interesting: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1631490672/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=1631490672&linkCode=as2&tag=segnborasresourc&linkId=WDFHUN34XUI7TI6U"><i>An African in Greenland</i></a> by Tété-Michel Kpomassie from Togo, and <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1631490672/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=1631490672&linkCode=as2&tag=segnborasresourc&linkId=WDFHUN34XUI7TI6U"><i>In the United States of Africa</i></a> by Abdourahman Waberi from Djibouti. Obviously these are not extremely obscure, in that they have both been translated into English and are physically available somewhere in the Pinellas County Public Library Cooperative, but I'd never heard of either book or author. But I'm glad to have had them pointed out for me; it's weird how a longtime science fiction reader like me can let slide the works of people from cultures that really exist and may be as different from how I live as anything set thousands of years in the future. </p>
<P>I would be interested to hear more about Morgan's project before this one, <a href="http://ayearofreadingwomen.wordpress.com/">A Year of Reading Women</A>, but I can see where there would be a lot less background of the selection process to talk about in a book about that project, so I'll just have to content myself with reading through that site.</p>Suzanne Saundershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01446806864238063728noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3212199.post-92207228074539788752015-03-11T14:26:00.000-04:002015-03-11T14:49:13.687-04:00<p>I would highly recommend <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0544535022/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0544535022&linkCode=as2&tag=segnborasresourc&linkId=SJRYR7NMW3Y5NMQJ"><i>When Books Went to War: The Stories That Helped Us Win World War II</i></a> by Molly Guptill Manning to anyone who cares about books, or about people in military service (and what kind of person are you if <b>neither</b> of those applies to you?). It covers a facet of daily lives of American service people in World War II that I had never heard of, despite having a degree in library science, and I easily imagine my grandfathers, both of whom served in WWII, reading Armed Services Edition books on Pacific islands. You don't often think about how people pass the everyday time away from home in a situation where everything has to be shipped to them (particularly at a time when the most advanced entertainment technology was the radio, and the broadcast with the best reception might be "<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokyo_Rose">Tokyo Rose" spewing propaganda</a>). First libraries' "Victory Book Campaign" donated books, and then Armed Services Editions printed especially to be sent out to GIs, gave a lot of Americans (and even other countries' service people, when they were working with Americans) a leisure distraction and chance at relaxation or education, whether in a trench or on a ship or even in a prisoner of war camp. As one sailor said about their value, no matter how beat up, "To heave one in the garbage can is tantamount to striking your grandmother."</p><p>That in itself is an important enough subject to know about, and think about for service people now. There are multiple charities and campaigns devoted to getting reading material to US military stationed outside the country, such as: <ul><li><a href="http://www.booksforsoldiers.com/">Books for Soldiers</a>,<br />
<li><a href="http://www.operationpaperback.org/">Operation Paperback</a>,<br />
<li><a href="http://www.booksamillion.com/booksfortroops">Books-A-Million's Books for Troops</a>,<br />
<li>two other different organizations called Books for Troops (<a href="http://www.booksfortroops.org">Books for Troops Tampa Bay</a> and <a href="http://www.booksfortroopscp.webs.com/">New York Books for Troops</a>), and even<br />
<li><a href="http://ebooksfortroops.org/">E-Books for Troops</a> and<br />
<li><a href="https://www.facebook.com/OperationEbookDrop">Operation E-Book Drop</a></ul></p><p>However, the Armed Services Editions' millions of copies of 1322 different books also influenced peacetime publishing and reading. They spread the idea of paperbacks, which had been previously been rare in bookstores and more likely to be cheap afterthoughts in a drugstore. They made some books and authors famous; the ones mentioned in particular are F. Scott Fitzgerald's <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0743273567/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0743273567&linkCode=as2&tag=segnborasresourc&linkId=XKKTPZ3MRS7TVX3N"><i>The Great Gatsby</i></a>, a commercial failure when it was first published, and <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0062096958/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0062096958&linkCode=as2&tag=segnborasresourc&linkId=337WSP6MURHTWM2M"><i>A Tree Grows in Brooklyn</i></a> by Betty Smith. There's an interesting story about the political wrangling before the 1944 Presidential elections where opponents of incumbent President Franklin Roosevelt attempted to limit the political discussions that could be part of the ASE books and other material available to the military, and the uproar over censorship that followed. And at the end of the war, there were continued readers who hadn't been before the war, some of whom used the GI Bill subsidies to go to college when they never would have thought of that before the war (and were good enough students to be called "Damned Average Raisers" by their younger classmates). These "books that went to war" ended up influencing the social and economic climate of the United States for decades.</p>Suzanne Saundershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01446806864238063728noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3212199.post-40198944237904182202013-10-30T15:59:00.001-04:002013-10-30T15:59:33.240-04:00<P>When I first heard that a "reboot" of H. Beam Piper's book <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0843959118/ref=as_li_tf_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0843959118&linkCode=as2&tag=segnborasresourc"><i>Little Fuzzy</i></a> was coming out, my first thought was "Why?" I first read Piper's Fuzzy stories as a young teenager and have come back to them over and over. Yes, the human society they take place in reflects the early 1960s when Piper was writing -- women are nearly all secretaries and nearly everyone smokes. (You get used to that kind of thing when reading a lot of science fiction classics.) But I think characters such as sunstone miner Jack Holloway, and the beings he discovers on the planet Zarathustra and names "Fuzzies" are timeless. At least one review I read compared Holloway to an old West prospector, and I can see a lot of parallels between human exploitation of other planets in these books and colonial exploitation of places inhabited by people with less technology and different skin colors.</p><br />
<P>Piper himself wrote a second book (<i>Fuzzy Sapiens</i>, originally published as "The Other Human Race") and a third manuscript at the time of his death, which was eventually published in 1984 as <i>Fuzzies and Other People</i>. (All three are now available in one volume, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0441005810/ref=as_li_tf_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0441005810&linkCode=as2&tag=segnborasresourc"><i>The Complete Fuzzy</i></a>.) However, before his manuscript was found, Ace Books had published two other authors' works on the Fuzzies: William Tuning's 1981 <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0441261817/ref=as_li_tf_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0441261817&linkCode=as2&tag=segnborasresourc"><i>Fuzzy Bones</i></a> and Ardath Mayhar's 1982 <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0441297269/ref=as_li_tf_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0441297269&linkCode=as2&tag=segnborasresourc"><i>Golden Dream: A Fuzzy Odyssey</i></a>. Both of those worked with what had been stated in the first two Piper books but not the third. And then there were two more sequels (which I haven't read yet) by Wolfgang Diehr: 2011's <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0937912174/ref=as_li_tf_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0937912174&linkCode=as2&tag=segnborasresourc"><i>Fuzzy Ergo Sum</i></a> and 2012's <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0937912220/ref=as_li_tf_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0937912220&linkCode=as2&tag=segnborasresourc"><i>Caveat Fuzzy</i></a>.</p><P>So there were 7 Fuzzy novels, though the timeline sort of divides in two after <i>Fuzzy Sapiens</i>. It seemed really pointless to start from the beginning again, and I didn't think I'd bother to read John Scalzi's 2011 <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0765367033/ref=as_li_tf_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0765367033&linkCode=as2&tag=segnborasresourc"><i>Fuzzy Nation</i></a> when I first heard of its existence. I hadn't read any of Scalzi's work before, so I didn't originally have an interest in seeing how yet another author would handle the story. This changed a bit after I read bits of <a href="http://whatever.scalzi.com/">Scalzi's blog</a>, specifically entries that some of my Facebook friends linked to in discussions about sexism in science fiction. After that, I felt positively enough about Scalzi that I was willing to try <i>Fuzzy Nation</i> when I happened across it in a library.</p><br />
<P>It's pretty good. Not as good as Piper's, but I'm aware that I may be taking off mental points for just trying to tell a version of the Fuzzy discovery narrative that isn't Piper's. Still, there were times when I kept the book open against my chest so I could read it while web pages loaded, because I was just that interested in what was happening. I don't <i>like</i> Scalzi's version of Jack Holloway as much as Piper's, but I can see how he's a more complex character in some ways and some readers will prefer that. The basic events are the same; the company exploiting the planet Zara XXIII is still willing to do almost anything to keep the discovery of the Fuzzies from interfering with their profits, but I think the Fuzzies actually come off as more intelligent in Scalzi's version, at least if you're only comparing with <i>Little Fuzzy</i> and not the parts of the sequels that delve into the Fuzzies' points of view. Piper spends more time developing other people besides Holloway, and I prefer that kind of detail, but Scalzi's version is equally readable. I am reasonably pleased to be proved wrong in my original opinion that there was no benefit to this reboot; it was both entertaining and brought me back to the previous Fuzzy stories, a good thing itself.</p>Suzanne Saundershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01446806864238063728noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3212199.post-5491366017740255922013-10-29T18:04:00.000-04:002013-10-29T18:04:08.726-04:00<blockquote>Also, do you knit toy/stuffed animal type things? If so, can you send me a link to the design? I'm interested in getting some knit monsters for my daughter.<br><br />
corvus</blockquote><br />
<P>So, after some back-and-forth with my friend about what kind of monster exactly, I started searching online for patterns with pictures of the finished work available. Of the possibilities I submitted, Corvus picked one for Dracula that had been in The Knitter magazine (issue 50) but was more widely available in the 2013 book <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1440557160/ref=as_li_tf_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=1440557160&linkCode=as2&tag=segnborasresourc"><i>Knit Your Own Zombie: Over 1,000 Combinations to Rip 'n' Reassemble for Horrifying Results</i></a> by Fiona Goble.<br />
</p><p>Goble has written numerous books of patterns for stuffed animals and people, such as <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B007HW5ZMC/ref=as_li_tf_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=B007HW5ZMC&linkCode=as2&tag=segnborasresourc"><i>Knitivity: Create Your Own Christmas Scene</i></a>, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0896897346/ref=as_li_tf_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0896897346&linkCode=as2&tag=segnborasresourc"><i>Fleecie Dolls: 15 Adorable Toys for Children of All Ages</i></a>, and even <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1449409245/ref=as_li_tf_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=1449409245&linkCode=as2&tag=segnborasresourc"><i>Knit Your Own Royal Wedding</i></a>. I think this book will appeal to a somewhat different audience. What's really fun is that all the figures are knitted in pieces, and you can actually attach arms, legs, heads, etc. with Velcro and snaps instead of permanent sewing. Therefore, you can tear your zombies apart for stress relief, voodoo doll usage, or just to make new combinations. The patterns included are:<br />
<ul><li>Classic Zombie -- dangling eye made from a bead, hole in his torso where little red guts can be visible or spill out, a little rat to nibble on him<br />
<li>Frankenstein's Monster -- hole in his neck for a nut and bolt<br />
<li>Zombie Cop -- blood-spattered uniform, one boot, truncheon made from a knit-covered drinking straw, even little handcuffs that can be made from two toggle rings and a short chain.<br />
<li>Zombie Fatale -- bandaged hand, chest pocket for removable heart, dress, hat, even little beads for painted toenails<br />
<li>Dracula -- I think the little white beads for fangs really make this pattern, but there's also the cape and the gentleman's cane<br />
<li>Zombie Chef -- leg with broken bone sticking out, little knit-over-cardboard cleaver and knife<br />
<li>Zombie Grave Digger -- more like a skeleton stitched on a dark gray body, with a rope and shovel accessories<br />
<li>Zombie Rock Star -- long hair, hole in the top of the head with removable brain<br />
<li>The Mummy -- technically this one is just a very long "bandage" to wrap around any of the figures to make it a mummy<br />
<li>There are also "zombie mashups" where elements from the different characters are combined to make additional characters, such as Village Idiot, Mother of the Bride, Biker Chick Zombie, and Yoga Zombie.<br />
</ul>If you have done any knitting, these aren't very difficult. The work is small (US size 2 or 3 needles) but not complicated most of the time. (The bit I found hardest was the ragged edge of one of Dracula's pant legs -- knitting something that looks like it's going to come apart but won't involved a sequence of stitches that took me a couple of tries.) I found the instructions pretty easy to follow, and a lot of the supplies can be found in many crafters' leftover supply stashes. I had to buy the pale green yarn for the skin, but clothes and accessories were all done with yarn and beads I already had.</p>
<P>The finished Dracula dissatisfied me slightly because the face didn't look much like that on the photo in the book, but it's recognizably a vampire. What's most important, Corvus and his daughter both like it. While I have the book from the library, I'm making a Frankenstein's monster as well.</p>Suzanne Saundershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01446806864238063728noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3212199.post-15424745320429502362013-07-16T16:04:00.000-04:002013-07-16T16:04:30.546-04:00<P>My grandfather died a month and a half ago, at the end of May 2013, at the age of 95. He was a World War II veteran. It's incredible to think about all the things that happened during the span of his lifetime.</p><P>And then I read <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0547554435/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0547554435&linkCode=as2&tag=segnborasresourc">The Last of the Doughboys: The Forgotten Generation and Their Forgotten World War</a> by Richard Rubin. Over the decade or so before this book was published in 2013, Rubin managed to find remaining members of my grandfather's <i>parents'</i> generation, all over 100 years old, and interview them about their service in the military and government during World War <strong><i>I</i></strong>. For Americans, the First World War, at the time "The War to End All Wars," is usually overshadowed by the Second World War, since the U.S. was in WWII a longer time and had American territory directly attacked. <i>The Last of the Doughboys</i> does a very good job of bringing focus back to the earlier world war, fought during the earliest years of modern technology (for example, one of the interviewees recalls delivering belts of ammunition to machine gun emplacements -- using a mule-drawn wagon). It's amazing to get personal perspectives on everything from trench warfare to race relations a century ago from people who were there, and were old enough in 1917-8 to fight or work but still lived into the age of cellphones and the Internet. (Rubin notes that he would never have been able to track down as many living veterans as he did without Internet resources, particularly lists from a French government program started in the 1990s to honor Americans who served on French soil).</p><P>There's also a fair amount of non-interview historical material which is also very interesting, particularly the sampling of sheet music art and lyrics for patriotic songs of World War I (and some less patriotic ones from immediately before the war). The book also covers stories such as those of the "Yeomanettes," women who were able to serve as members of the Navy (though doing work on land) during the war, and the treatment of war veterans after the end of the war and particularly during the Depression. In short, it covers a lot of ground, but this does a good job of introducing current readers to times that should not be forgotten, and providing a tribute to the individual people who fought or worked behind the lines in this important juncture of history.</p>Suzanne Saundershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01446806864238063728noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3212199.post-8802065936842851622012-07-04T19:23:00.001-04:002012-07-04T19:23:58.330-04:00<p>Charles Fishman's <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0055X6N9E/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=B0055X6N9E&linkCode=as2&tag=segnborasresourc">The Big Thirst: The Secret Life and Turbulent Future of Water</a></i> is a book full of things that will make you say "Wow . . ." or "My God!" or whatever phrase you use as shorthand for "I can't believe that's the way things really are!" Unless you work in water systems, you will probably find out a lot of surprising things -- maybe even if you do. Because here in the USA, and I expect in most developed areas, we just don't think about our water supply. You turn on the water and out it comes. (When Hurricanes Frances and Jeanne knocked out our electricity here in Tampa for two days each, the water was still fine. Despite the warnings when a hurricane is expected that people should stock up on bottled water, it has rarely been needed.)</p><p><i>The Big Thirst</i> shows how quickly, as history goes, we've stopped thinking about water, and how many problems that lack of thought can cause. In 2008, droughts caused Barcelona, Spain, sufficient water shortage that the city arranged to have supertankers full of water delivered to the city regularly. In the same year, the much smaller Orme, Tennessee, had to have fire trucks deliver its drinking (and bathing, and washing) water. Neither city is located in a desert, either. Las Vegas, Nevada, <i><b>is</b></i> in a desert, but 60,000 people move there annually anyway, never thinking about where the water they'll use comes from. Much of Australia has similar problems, particularly given the recent years of drought that have nearly shut down the Murray-Darling river system, which both southeastern cities and farmers rely on. On the other hand, most of India's largest cities only manage to pump water through their municipal systems for at most a couple of hours each day. Fishman talks to both the people in charge of some of these urban water systems throughout the world, and those who have to figure out workarounds or cope with not getting the water they need. It's a real wake-up call for people who have always had water available.Suzanne Saundershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01446806864238063728noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3212199.post-75430110937202193892012-06-16T14:29:00.000-04:002012-06-16T14:29:25.368-04:00<p>I've read some interesting and thought-provoking books recently -- thanks to the new stuff shelves at the St. Petersburg (Florida) main library.</p><P>The first is Judith Stacey's <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0814737854/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=segnborasresourc&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0814737854">Unhitched: Love, Marriage, and Family Values from West Hollywood to Western China</a></i>. I am not a marriage traditionalist: I think any consenting adults who want to marry should be able to, but on the other hand people who aren't interested in getting married (like myself and my boyfriend of 14 years) are fine without a ceremony or legal registration. However, I've only lived in this one culture, that of the modern U.S.A., and in an accepted-by-all-but-the-sternest-Biblethumpers heterosexual relationship. Stacey's book examines relationships and child-raising in different cultures -- first, that of West Hollywood gay men, but then some even less familiar to most Americans:</p><ul><li>South Africa, the only country in the world where same-sex and polygamous marriages are both legal, though with some limits on the latter, and<br />
<li>the Mosuo, a minority people of southwestern China who may be the only human group not to include couples living together in marriage to raise children in their traditional way of life. </ul><p>The book's exploration of these ways of life managed to bring new information and arguments to the sometimes repetitive discussion of what marriage and family can be and should be. It's really fascinating to read about how the non-heterosexual-monogamous minority groups interact with the different majorities around them; I was rather amused South African marriage law's attempt to accommodate the original African "customary" plural marriage while still encouraging European-style monogamous marriages, leading to the result (if I understand it correctly) that only a black man can legally have multiple wives, but not a white man or a woman of any race, despite the racial and gender equality legally prescribed in the South African constitution. (Future legal challenges may get interesting.) And then there's the Mosuo, who used to just leave everyone living with their family of origin, so children are raised by their mother, with her own mother, siblings, and extended maternal family, whether or not the father is continuing to see the mother or not (even if he is, he still lives with his mother and family of origin). To some degree this lifestyle has survived intense government pressure in earlier years of China's Communist government, and even become sort of a tourist attraction now under less-repressive regimes. These are cultures that might have something relevant to say in the modern U.S. marriage debates, as well as just being interesting examples of ways people live.</p>
<P>The next is <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1439110239/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=segnborasresourc&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=1439110239">On the Origin of Tepees: The Evolution of Ideas (And Ourselves)</a></i> by Jonnie Hughes. The author is a British man who frames his discussion of how ideas change and grow within his trip with his brother across the U.S. and Canada looking at such things as changes in barn architecture among settlers and differences in structure of Native American tepees between tribes. Parallels between how Darwinian evolution shaped the plants and animals of the Great Plains and how the needs of Westerners shaped the origin of the cowboy hat, or any of the many other examples of cultural changes Hughes cites, become clear when you look at them from this angle (and the author being British means he has a fresh view of some cultural things that North Americans are so used to as to never consider). Whether or not you can believe in the idea of a "meme" as an entity akin to a "gene" that can exist independently of the organisms that contain it, this book is a fascinating look at how things change.</p>
<P>The final book I felt strongly enough about to blog is Taras Grescoe's <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0805091734/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=segnborasresourc&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0805091734">Straphanger: Saving Our Cities and Ourselves from the Automobile</a></i>. I am an American rarity: someone without a driver's license. Outside of a few northeastern cities, it's commonly accepted that it is "impossible" to get by without a car in the U.S., and zoning, building, planning and transit work on this assumption. Of course, this screws over the too-young; too-old; people who are blind or otherwise physically unable to drive; and those who are too poor to afford car, insurance, and gas (plus weirdos like me who just never seemed to be able to learn for no obvious reason). Public transportation exists but rarely makes anything remotely convenient; even here in St. Petersburg, some areas of which pre-date cars, my "local" service center for the county Worknet program is an hour and 3 minutes away or an hour and 5 minutes by different bus routes. (Google maps says driving to the same destination would be 16 minutes, or 21 in current traffic conditions.) And my experience is that St. Petersburg has <b>better</b> transit than say, Tampa, which is a lot more spread out.<p><P>This is partly due to the cultural status attached to private car ownership. The book's introduction starts by quoting Margaret Thatcher: "A man who, beyond the age of twenty-six, finds himself on a bus can count himself as a failure." (Bitch.) These attitudes are preventing a lot of places from making it possible to reduce car pollution, urban sprawl that takes animal habitat, and even obesity rates by cutting down on individual car use.</p><p>So I like reading about places where non-private-automobile transportation (not necessarily "public transit") works, and Grescoe catalogs a wide variety of them, as well as a few where it's not so successful. Subways, trains, buses, and bicycle commuting work for people all around the world, allowing them to avoid spending on gas and parking even if they do have their own cars, spewing fewer pollutants per passenger-mile than individual cars, and in some cases even letting them get things accomplished during their commute because they don't have to spend that time controlling the car. But there's no one-size-fits-all plan for every area, and some of the functioning systems Grescoe visits were arrived at after trial and error led to urban blight and gridlock. So <i>Straphanger</i> is a very interesting historical-and-current look at how people get where they need to go, and something people should read in places (such as here in Florida) where transit systems like light rail are being suggested as possibilities.</p><br />Suzanne Saundershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01446806864238063728noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3212199.post-69014175292942141732010-03-08T18:44:00.000-05:002012-06-16T14:32:01.403-04:00<p>I haven't added to this blog in a long time, but some books have stuck in my head for months after I read them, which seems like true proof that they are worth blogging.</p><p>I can only remember three books in my life that made me cry. They are William Shakespeare's <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Romeo-Juliet-Folger-Shakespeare-Library/dp/0743482808?ie=UTF8&tag=segnborasresourc&link_code=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969"><i>Romeo and Juliet</i></a>, Albert Camus' <a href="http://www.amazon.com/justes-French-Albert-Camus/dp/2070364771?ie=UTF8&tag=segnborasresourc&link_code=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969"><i>Les Justes</i></a>, and Ted Kerasote's <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Merles-Door-Lessons-Freethinking-Dog/dp/B001TODO4A?ie=UTF8&tag=segnborasresourc&link_code=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969"><i>Merle's Door: Lessons from a Freethinking Dog</i></a>. The last is the only one in twenty years to make me cry, but the story of the life and death of Merle the dog and the depth of his relationship with Ted, hit my emotions in the same way as the life and death and love of Romeo and Juliet (or Yanek and Dora) had done in high school. I've read a lot of memoirs focusing on people-animal relationships, but this one truly stands out. Rather than just reminding me of the best relationships I've had with animals, the book made me feel like I was missing something by never having known this <i>particular</i> dog, and it also made it clear that dogs (at least some of them) have a lot of potential that their human owners don't allow them to live up to -- even though with the best of intentions to protect the dog's own safety. Ted had the good fortune to live in a relatively rural area, where adding a dog door could allow Merle to truly make his own decisions about where and when to be in any one place, what people to go visit, etc., making Merle "a responsible individual rather than a submissive pet," in the words of the <i>Publishers Weekly</i> review. While many dog owners would find this an uncomfortable situation because they have to rely on the dog's desire to come home and ability to avoid accidents, Ted seems to have been able to trust that Merle, who chose Ted as the one he wanted to stay with rather than the other way around, would continue loving him and always want to be with him, despite Merle's deep friendships with nearly every other person in the area.</p><p>The book also contains references to a lot of scientific work about dogs and other animals which back up the ideas about their abilities being greater than humans often realize, and at least one Amazon reviewer considered this to be a liability, but I think it's woven into the story very well; it did not seem at all intrusive, even though the real-life events made much a deeper impression on me. Merle was lucky to come across Ted Kerasote (and made a good choice in going home with him), but the rest of us are lucky that the person Merle chose to make his life with was also someone talented enough to tell the story so movingly.</p><p>On a very different note is Sandra Kalniete's <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Dance-Shoes-Siberian-Snows/dp/1564785459?ie=UTF8&tag=segnborasresourc&link_code=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969"><i>With Dance Shoes in Siberian Snows</i></a> (translated by Margita Gailitis) -- this book didn't make me cry but it kept me up at night. Kalniete's family were from Latvia, which was at the time of her birth a part of the Soviet Union. However, she was born in Siberia because both her parents' families had been moved there by the Soviet government; the title comes from the lack of supplies available to the deportees in the small towns where they were essentially dumped, far from home with no preparation for the very different conditions they had to live under. I read Esther Hautzig's <a target="_blank" href="http://www.amazon.com/Endless-Steppe-Growing-Up-Siberia/dp/006440577X?ie=UTF8&tag=segnborasresourc&link_code=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969"><i>The Endless Steppe: Growing Up in Siberia</i></a> years ago in elementary school, which tells the story of a similar Soviet deportation (Hautzig's family were Polish Jews sent to Siberia), so the fact that the Soviet Union did this was not new to me. But Kalniete's book seems more aimed at adults, first because she has to rely on her older family's stories of how things happened before her birth and when she was just a baby, and also because we know a little more, just from the book jacket, of Kalniete's adult achievements. Hautzig's story, on the other hand, is often given to younger readers because it's her own memory of her life from ages ten to fourteen, without mention of her adult self. But both books had the same effect on me that one of the Amazon reviewers says that <i>Endless Steppe</i> had on her: pondering how I would cope in that situation, what would I have thrown in a suitcase on short notice, <i>could</i> I have even gotten through what these people survived? These are the sort of questions a lot of people living comfortably in developed nations ought to think about at least once in a while.Suzanne Saundershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01446806864238063728noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3212199.post-43175505808406261622008-11-07T14:58:00.003-05:002008-11-07T17:46:28.356-05:00<P>The blog has not been forgotten. And these books are about people who should not be forgotten.</p>
<p>Dana Jennings' <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0865479607?ie=UTF8&tag=segnborasresourc&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0865479607"><i>Sing Me Back Home: Love, Death, and Country Music</i></a> hit me the most personally. Jennings talks about the role of classic country music in his life and that of his family growing up in rural New Hampshire -- not the location one most associates with country music, but his stories resonate with my North Carolina family. I remember a story about how my great-grandfather was apparently needy enough to trade his gun for liquor. That's the kind of people Jennings talks about, and he was there for some of it in his family; I just heard the parts people were willing to pass down (my great-grandfather and his daughter were both dead before my grandfather told me about his father-in-law's drinking). But these stories make the country records on my grandparents' turntable make sense to me in a way they didn't when I was a 12-year-old listening to Culture Club and Duran Duran. Not that growing up didn't make me realize how deeply the Osbourne Brothers' "Rocky Top" and such bluegrass and country were embedded in my brain from childhood hearings, but this book made me a lot more aware of the <i>emotional</i> purpose these songs served for their contemporary listeners. It's the same emotional purpose Suicidal Tendencies' "How Will I Laugh Tomorrow (When I Can't Even Smile Today)?" served for me when I was a depressed 17-year-old -- an age at which these rural girls were often coping with marriage and/or motherhood instead of my own problem of not being able to pay for college. And so the book made me feel a lot closer to people I only knew as elderly ladies bent over a quilting frame, or as names in genealogy records, and closer even to many, many Americans who didn't get much American dream for themselves in the past and even now.</p>
<P>But at least I always knew something about rural Americans. Despite spending a stretch a couple of years ago reading all kinds of books on Russian history, most of the place names I could name in the Asian part of Russia were learned off a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk_game">Risk</a> board. The conquest of Siberia, one-twelfth of the world's landmass, by Russians from the European side of the Ural Mountains was lucky to get a couple of paragraphs in those tomes. A partial fix for that is in <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0802776760?ie=UTF8&tag=segnborasresourc&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0802776760"><i>The Shaman's Coat: A Native History of Siberia</i></a> by Anna Reid, who journeyed across Siberia to see the homelands of some of the native peoples and survey what had happened to them under tsarist, Soviet, and now Russian Federation government. A single 200-page book can barely scratch the surface of the subject -- Reid points out that she only visited and interviewed members of nine of the thirty-one "Small-Numbered Peoples" of Siberia, as the Soviets labeled these ethnic groups. (As with Native American Indians, a few centuries of fighting with Europeans and getting exposed to their new diseases took quite a toll on the size of the original population.) Still, the book is a fascinating introduction to groups such as the Buryat, Tuvans, Sakha, and Chukchi, through both Reid's visits and the records from the Russians and other groups who showed up to live on their land. The collapse of Communism seems to have strengthened some of their ethnic identities, and it will be interesting to see if any of these groups show up as the next Chechens fighting for independence from Russia, or if they just quietly keep on trying to survive, with or without the culture and traditions that Reid searched for.</p>
<P>Perhaps the atrocities of Nazi Germany are in less danger of being forgotten or ignored than those perpetrated on indigenous peoples who had less chance to tell their stories. But that's no reason not to pay attention to the life stories of people who lived through World War II, and author Mark Kurzem's father Alex (anglicized from "Uldis Kurzemnieks") has had a fascinating, surprising, and sometimes horrifying life, chronicled in <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0452289947?ie=UTF8&tag=segnborasresourc&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0452289947"><i>The Mascot: Unraveling the Mystery of My Jewish Father's Nazi Boyhood</i></a>. As far as his wife and children in Australia knew for most of their lives, a five- or six-year-old Alex was found wandering alone in the forests near the Russian border in 1942 by Latvian soldiers. The trauma of surviving alone for an unknown time (the shortest possible time guessed in the book is several weeks; it might have been longer) had made the little boy forget his name and origin. The soldiers named the boy, kept him with them for a while as a sort of mascot, and eventually their commander arranged a foster home for him in Latvia's capital, Riga, with a family who kept Alex through the war, their time in a displaced-persons camp, and their emigration to Australia. It was not until more than sixty years after the war that Alex revealed to his son Mark that he remembers, not his name, but the circumstances that left him alone in the forest -- that he remembers seeing his mother and younger siblings killed by soldiers. Latvia was occupied by the Nazis at the time and its soldiers used as part of German forces invading Russia; it probably wasn't hard to get Latvians to help with that invasion, since the USSR had invaded Latvia barely a year before the Germans did. The Latvian soldier who saved Alex from being executed with other "partisans" when he was found in the forest undressed him to find that he was circumcised and therefore most likely Jewish, but nonetheless kept the boy with his group of soldiers (with a warning not to let anyone see him undressed). The things Alex saw while he accompanied the soldiers haunted him, and even long after the war and on the other side of the planet, pressure continued on Alex to keep quiet about anything he had seen as a child that might incriminate the people who had cared for him in war crimes. But eventually the Kurzems researched and traveled to confirm as much as possible of Alex's memories and find his birth identity, despite the pain involved in revisiting that kind of past. The mix of historical and psychological mystery made this a book that I could not put down and read all in a single morning; I can't agree with reviews on Amazon who found the beginning to be too slow.Suzanne Saundershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01446806864238063728noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3212199.post-72297758443480089702007-12-07T15:28:00.000-05:002007-12-07T16:15:23.900-05:00<p>A recent book to be surprised that this agnostic was interested in: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1414313314/segnborasresourc"><i>Jim and Casper Go to Church: Frank Conversation about Faith, Churches, and Well-Meaning Christians</i></a> by Jim Henderson and Matt Casper. I think all Christians who have the urge to preach to non-Christians should read this book. Jim Henderson is a Christian, former church pastor and co-founder of <a href="http://www.offthemap.com/">Off the Map</a>, which "helps Christians learn to communicate better with non-Christians, or as some of my more outspoken 'lost' friends put it, 'Off the Map helps Christians learn how not to be jerks.'" (I've got to support any organization with that aim!) Matt Casper, on the other hand, is a very well-spoken, outspoken atheist. And for this book, the two of them attended various churches and discussed their views of what went on in their services. (Off the Map runs a web site where anyone can do the same, <a href="http://churchrater.com/">ChurchRater.com</a>.)</p>
<p>"Casper the Friendly Atheist" says a whole lot of the things I always want to say when Christians try to preach to me, and Jim asks for his reasons, leading to some really interesting discussions. Jim is a somewhat unusual Christian in my view (which perhaps is why he's willing to take a nonbeliever to church without trying to convert him) -- he makes a distinction between simply having faith in Christ and actually performing behavior that Christ would approve of, and he seems to believe that faith is not enough, that Christians need to do good on this earth and not just by trying to forcibly save people's souls.</p>
<p>The two visit Saddlebrook, the California "mega-church" of Rick Warren, author of <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0310276993/segnborasresourc"><i>The Purpose-Driven Life</i></a>; the "Dream Center" and "Mosaic" in urban Los Angeles; another mega-church outside Chicago (Willow Creek); a medium-sized Presbyterian church and the more urban Lawndale in the Chicago area; a sort of casual church in the home of a friend of Casper's; offbeat "emerging churches" in the U.S. Northwest; Joel Osteen's Lakewood Church and T.D. Jakes' "Potter's House" in Texas. This is, as Jim points out, more types of churches than most Christians ever attend. So followers of Jesus might be interested in Jim's feelings on their own in this sampling of how Jesus is worshiped across the United States. (For that matter, non-Christians could find that interesting from an anthropological point of view as well; I certainly did.) But the person who wants to spread the "good news" of Christ -- well, honestly I think that person should let us non-believers alone to run our own lives. But for those who really don't feel they can give up on trying to "save" us supposedly "lost," considering the issues that come up between Jim and Casper will definitely reduce the likelihood of driving away the very people you want to attract. And that goes for attracting believers searching for a church that feels right to them, too.</p>Suzanne Saundershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01446806864238063728noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3212199.post-13790458360253647882007-08-21T19:48:00.000-04:002007-08-21T21:44:49.720-04:00<P>I've been busy packing, moving, and going on summer family visits for the past few months and have let the blogging lapse, but here I am again, finally. There are lots of things I want to mention.</p>
<p>I pick up pretty much anything written by the incomparably funny Daniel Pinkwater, and have done so for more than 20 years, even though I'm rather older than the intended audience for most of his books. His latest, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/0618594442/segnborasresourc"><i>The Neddiad: How Neddie Took the Train, Went to Hollywood, and Saved Civilization</i></a> is no exception; I bought it as soon as I saw it. It's set in the late 1940s, which is mostly obvious from the choice of a train for the rich Wentworthstein family's move
across the U.S. and the type of movies discussed, but it's just as wacky as other Pinkwater works, with an Indian shaman named Melvin, a ghost who enjoys sniffing people's meals, and a brief appearance of the fat men from outer space who show up in multiple Pinkwater novels. Schoolboy Ned has been given custody of a sacred stone turtle and is being chased across the country by an incompetent villain who wants to take it; luckily he meets new people who are on his side and their adventures are fun and ridiculous without seeming particularly unreal, like all good Pinkwater.</p>
<P>It was a much greater surprise to find so much fun in a history of 20th-century architecture, Tom Wolfe's 1981 <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/055338063X/segnborasresourc"><i>From Bauhaus to Our House</i></a>. Not only the subject, but the author didn't sound like easy reading to me; I had great difficulty managing to get through Wolfe's <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0553380648/segnborasresourc"><i>The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test</i></a>, even though normally reading about 1960s counterculture greatly interests me. But <I>From Bauhaus to Our House</i> was quite short, so I was willing to give it a try, and it turned to be a hilarious look at the people behind "glass box" architecture. Its point of view is obvious from the first sentence: "O BEAUTIFUL, FOR SPACIOUS SKIES, FOR AMBER WAVES OF grain, has there ever been another place on earth where so many people of wealth and power have paid for and put up with so much architecture they detested as within thy blessed borders today?" I suppose a lot has taken place in architecture in the 26 years since the book came out, so this is no longer completely current, but that doesn't make it any less applicable -- the buildings from the decades described are still looming over us. Wolfe manages to make reading about concrete cubes way more pleasant than looking at them.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1400044286/segnborasresourc"><i>Everything Conceivable: How Assisted Reproduction Is Changing Men, Women, and the World</i></a> by Liza Mundy was very interesting in a completely different way. It doesn't just go through the technology of in vitro fertilization, surrogate motherhood, donor eggs and sperm, and other relatively new ways of making it possible for people to become parents; it goes through the personal issues involved. How can a baptism ceremony acknowledge an egg donor? Should medical personnel be able to choose who they will help with fertility technology (single parents, same-sex couples, people they feel are too old?) Or how much help to give -- balancing the risk of in-vitro fertilized embryos not implanting in the uterus with the risk of too many implanting, which makes it harder for any of them to survive to an age to safely leave the uterus? I never thought of most of these risks, but I'm not planning to have children. Since I seem to be in the minority here, these are definitely issues that should be widely thought over, and Mundy makes it interesting to consider.</p>
Stuff I've only Read <a href="http://www.bzzagent.com/">BzzAgent</a> Excerpts of:
<ul>
<li>When I read an excerpt from Jen Lancaster's <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0451217608/segnborasresourc"><i>Bitter is the New Black</i></a> I found her dot.com-era rich self extremely annoying. However, the excerpt of her new book of personal essays, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0451221257/segnborasresourc"><i>Bright Lights, Big Ass: A Self-Indulgent, Surly, Ex-Sorority Girl's Guide to Why it Often Sucks in the City, or Who are These Idiots and Why Do They All Live Next Door to Me?</i></a> wasn't nearly so bad, even with the memory of not having liked the author as I saw her in her previous work. Anyone who is as annoyed by Rachel Ray as I am can't be all bad! Lancaster's living a life I have a lot more experience with -- riding the public bus, putting off medical checkups (though it's the dentist, not the gynecologist, who scares me) and so I find her snarky remarks much funnier now.
<li>The beginning of Leslie Kagen's <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0451221230"><i>Whistling in the Dark</i></a> is mostly concerned with setting up the situation of ten-year-old Sally: Milwaukee in 1959, jerk of a stepfather, mother entering the hospital for surgery, Sally and younger sister Troo are largely reliant on each other -- and a neighbor girl has recently been found dead. That summary is far too blunt to convey Sally's viewpoint, a realistic 10-year-old who doesn't always understand what adults are telling her and gets just as much of her information from children's gossip. I'm really curious to find out what happens.
<li>The excerpt from Patrick Rothfuss' fantasy novel <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0451221230/segnborasresourc"><i>The Name of the Wind</i></a> I read was actually chapters 13-17, but it's mostly a flashback to when the character Kvothe was twelve and so is a sort of beginning. There's only a few sentences in the setup of the flashback to indicate why we should be interested in Kvothe, although obviously the two characters he's telling the story to are very interested in his past. However, the look at Kvothe's growing up and the tragedy that happened when he was twelve make him seem a sympathetic character, and the rest of his life as told in the whole book and the two upcoming ones could certainly be worth reading.</ul>Suzanne Saundershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01446806864238063728noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3212199.post-82062013736481745352007-03-23T20:08:00.000-04:002007-03-30T20:33:10.810-04:00Another set of excerpts from <a href="http://www.bzzagent.com">BzzAgent</a>:
<ul>
<li>J.D. Robb's <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0399154019/segnborasresourc"><i>Innocent in Death</i></a>. Apparently this is the twenty-somethingth book in a series of crime mysteries set several decades in our future. I'd never heard of this series before but I might have to read more than just this excerpt; I like the science-fictiony aspect of the setting as well as the mystery. This future isn't overpoweringly different from the current world; Detective Eve Dallas is here investigating the sudden death of a history teacher in a private school who turns out to have been poisoned, and little differences such as "a tube of Pepsi" are the greatest reminders in the three chapters I read that this isn't modern-day New York. But writing a consistent slightly-different setting takes as much or more skill than creating a place where nothing at all is the same, and like all long-running series, the characters are what draw the reader in. The detective, her husband, the ex-girlfriend of his who turns up when they're out to dinner -- they incite as much curiosity as the murder investigation and I want to see how it all turns out.
<li>Steven White's <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0451220714/segnborasresourc"><i>Kill Me</i></a> didn't really grab me at all from the excerpt. In what I read, we see an unnamed man come to see Dr. Alan Gregory, a psychologist who is apparently a regular in White's books -- but nearly everything is told from the point of view of his "anonymous rich white guy" patient, who likes skiing unbroken slopes (even after getting caught in an avalanche) and driving fast cars and has a friend become a vegetable in a diving accident. It wasn't enough to give me any clue about what was going on. The Amazon reviews filled me in that the guy will be creeped out enough by his friend's condition and his brother's death from Lou Gehrig's disease that he will hire a group called the Death Angels to kill him if his own health and quality of life ever goes that far downhill. And he then he finds out he has both a possibly fatal health condition and some new reasons to want to stay alive. I suppose I can see where that could make an interesting thriller, but the supposedly-exciting scenes of the avalanche and avoiding car accidents and so forth in the excerpt didn't thrill me.
<li>J.R. Ward's <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0451412354/segnborasresourc"><i>Lover Revealed</i></a> didn't grab me either. Partly this is because it's book 4 in a series, and it doesn't seem like a series that one can pick up in the middle. I couldn't keep track of most of the characters, other than the protagonist, Butch O'Neal, apparently a human in the weird situation of working with vampires, and his ex, Marissa, herself a vampire and an unmated outcast in her own society. Everyone else swirled together; this might not have been the case if I had read their stories from the start.
<li>George Saunders' <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/159448242X/segnborasresourc"><i>In Persuasion Nation</i></a> is a collection of short stories, so what I read was two stories, both of which I enjoyed, just as I enjoyed Saunders' <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1594481520/segnborasresourc"><i>The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil</i></a> before. All of Saunders' work that I've read is absurdist and satirical and wickedly funny, whether it's a story about a device that makes babies seems to talk ("I CAN SPEAK(TM)," in this collection) or a country so small that only one of its citizens can actually fit into it at a time (<i>Reign</i>). Lots of pointed fun.
</ul>Suzanne Saundershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01446806864238063728noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3212199.post-81537269366041834342007-03-21T19:18:00.000-04:002007-03-21T19:55:55.972-04:00<P>There isn't really just one version of the Robin Hood story. The one I'm most familiar with is Howard Pyle's <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1595406557/segnborasresourc"><i>The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood</i></a> from 1883. In retrospect, it seems a little self-consciously archaic, with its thees and thous (but at least they're used correctly, unlike most people trying to fake archaic English, while still being easily readable to modern people, unline actual English of the period). However, having grown up with one version of the story can make it very difficult to accept a different variant. While reading Jennifer Roberson's <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1575667495/segnborasresourc"><i>Lady of the Forest</i></a>, I kept having "But that's not how it's supposed to be!" moments. The major one is the origin of Robin himself. Pyle has Robin as an ordinary yeoman who's particularly good at archery and becomes an outlaw when he's goaded into shooting some deer which turn out to be the King's and thus off-limits to all others. Roberson takes the tack familiar to viewers of the film <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0102798/"><i>Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves</i></a>, where Robin was born a nobleman and comes back to England after fighting in the Crusades to find that England is a harsh and unfair place, so he takes the side of the ordinary people, even if it means breaking the law to do so. I don't know if I prefer the version where Robin is of ordinary birth because it's most familiar to me, or because it doesn't seem to me that it should take a nobleman rebelling to lead a band of outlaws -- the idea of the yeomen being able to stand up for themselves appeals to me more. I guess what appeals to others is the self-sacrifice of a nobleman in abandoning his birth status and all the opportunity that might come with it -- more in Roberson's version, where Robin's father is alive and the family castle is intact, then in the <i>Prince of Thieves</i> version where the father has died and the castle is in ruins when Robin comes home from the Middle East. But stealing and giving the loot to those who truly needs it is self-sacrifice enough for one character, I'd say.</p>
<P>
Other characters in Roberson's version differ from the way I expected them to be enough that it irritated me -- it just seemed <i>wrong</i> for Guy of Gisbourne to be an insecure knight in love with Marian, rather than the cold-blooded hired killer sent after Robin Hood, or for Friar Tuck to be an idealistic young monk who can't even ride a horse instead of an independent friar who carries a sword and threatens to use it on Robin at their first meeting. And I'm not sure whether to trust Roberson or Pyle on one issue -- Pyle specifically has Friar Tuck perform a marriage, while Roberson just as specifically has Friar Tuck state that as a friar rather than a priest he doesn't have the authority to perform a marriage. (I'd be more inclined to trust Roberson, who seems to have done so much historical research, if it weren't that her book has an abbot and an educated woman talk about "adultery" when the subject is actually "fornication.") In a way, though, this difference says a lot about the difference between the the two approaches to the stories -- Pyle focuses on the simple lives of people in the forest and Roberson deals with the never-ending manipulation of nobles and gentry to get themselves status, money, power, or they woman they want to marry.</p>
<P>And a woman is the focus of the novel, and its sequel <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1575665875/segnborasresourc"><i>Lady of Sherwood</i></a>, as the titles indicate. Marian doesn't even appear in the earliest Robin Hood ballads -- she is a late addition, but a story without romantic love is unpopular these last few hundred years. Here, Marian is the only surviving child of a widowed knight who has died on Crusade, which makes Marian a ward of the King of England. She is a grown woman without control over her future; the only other major female in the first book, the Sheriff of Nottingham's daughter Eleanor, is a grown woman too, but with no more control because her father has the power to manage Eleanor's future as he wants to. As a woman, I became frustrated on these characters' behalf to see the men around them treat them like chess pieces. Robin is the exception, but Robin's father, the Sheriff of Nottingham, Prince John and Sir Guy of Gisbourne all have other plans. Again, this is more of a reflection of nobles' lives. Ordinary people -- the Saxons who were there before the Norman Conquest killed of many of the Saxon leaders -- didn't come across Normans under normal circumstances. When they did, the results were often unpleasant: pressure to pay higher taxes, or worse. (Perhaps this is why Roberson is careful to establish Robin and Marian both as of Saxon ancestry -- though being a Saxon doesn't make Robin's father any more pleasant or less manipulative.) Roberson's books spend some time on the concerns of others' lives, but they are instances like Will Scarlet, who here became an outlaw for murdering the Norman soldiers who raped and killed his wife. Pyle's version shows a few of the more pleasant sides of life outside the castles -- I expect both approaches have some truth to them. I found <i>Lady of the Forest</i> and <i>Lady of Sherwood</i> well-written and interesting, and they did make me think about the older versions too, but I doubt they can replace the stories I grew up on completely in my affections.</p>Suzanne Saundershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01446806864238063728noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3212199.post-58952945226370434692007-03-02T15:56:00.000-05:002007-03-02T17:26:10.893-05:00Another set of excerpts from <a href="http://www.penguingroup.com/">Penguin</a> and <a href="http://www.bzzagent.com/">BzzAgent</a>.
<ul><li>The first excerpt, from <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0451412311/segnborasresourc"><i>Unwound</i></a> by Jonathan Baine (who turns out to be filmmaker <a href="http://imdb.com/name/nm0064961/">Gorman Bechard</a>), was a bit difficult to look at as part of a novel for me; it seemed nearly complete in itself. So I can't quite vouch for whether the book is a twisty-turny thriller later on, though the Amazon reviews seem to imply that it is; what I read is the semi-normal setup that has to exist before shocking turns of events can shock anyone. The setup is that author Peter Richardson has flown to another city to see the premiere of a play based on his popular book "Angel," the story of a teenage prostitute, and meets a girl named Dina who seems to have taken on the persona of Angel and everything about her is created from his own fevered dreams, so of course he is attracted to her to the extent of cheating on his wife. It sounds like it could turn into "Fatal Attraction," but one Amazon reviewer says it's "not Fatal Attraction at all. Not even the same genre." I don't know if I am curious enough to see how it comes out.
<li>The next excerpt is from Jim Butcher's <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0451461037/segnborasresourc"><i>Proven Guilty</i></a>, the most recent in his Dresden Files series. Weirdly enough, these stories of Harry Dresden keep getting compared to Harry Potter (BzzAgent's blurb for <i>Proven Guilty</i> starts off "If you loved Harry Potter, but wish he had a little more edge and a few years on him, this is your kind of book.") Yes, Dresden and Potter are both good guys who can do magic in a modern world where some magic is evil. But I've read some of the earlier books in the Dresden series -- they have more in common with hard-bitten detective stories than the teenagers-in-a-boarding-school-fight-evil (though still lots of fun) Potter novels. The <a href="http://www.scifi.com/dresden/">Sci-Fi Network's <i>Dresden Files</i></a> show is probably most like the <i>Buffy the Vampire Slayer</i>'s spin-off <a href="http://imdb.com/title/tt0162065/"><i>Angel</i></a> would probably not make anyone think of the Harry Potter movies either. But this doesn't mean the Dresden books aren't good.
<P>
<i>Proven Guilty</i> is book eight in a series, so it might not be the best place to start, but some backstory is given as to the war going on between the White Council of good wizards and the Red Court of blood-drinking vampires (no, that isn't redundant; this universe also has life-force-sucking vampires). Harry Dresden is a wizard and a consultant for people who need a sort of detective in magical matters, and he hasn't always been on the White Council's good side, to say the least, but as of the time this book starts he's their Senior Warden for the Chicago area and int the excerpted five chapters, has been charged with looking into some black magic going on there. And he's been asked to talk to the leaders of the Faeries and see what their positions in the war are. And someone's tried to run his car off the road. So there's a lot on his plate -- and that's without his half-brother, the life-force-sucking wizard, and mental visits the dark angel trapped in a coin buried under his basement. There's guaranteed to be a lot happening in the rest of this book, and I expect I'll read it -- but I think I'll borrow my stepmother's copies of the earlier books I haven't gotten to yet before I do.
<li>The last book excerpted was <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1594482349/segnborasresourc"><i>Generation Debt: How Our Future Was Sold Out for Student Loans, Bad Jobs, No Benefits, and Tax Cuts for Rich Geezers--And How to Fight Back</i></a> by Anya Kamenetz. I myself have generally lived within my means even though I didn't earn much, but I can see how a medical or other emergency would screw up my finances completely and I don't like the picture. The excerpts were the chapters on marriage/family choices and worker organizations, which I found very interesting as sociology but not completely applicable to my life; I don't know how the rest of the book would strike me. It is written in a very readable style, though, unlike what one might think of books dealing with economic and political subject matter, and whether or not you agree with the suggestions for solutions, definitely makes the reader think.</ul>
<p>And finally, a book I chose myself and have read all of: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0886778999/segnborasresourc"><i>The Golden Key</i></a> by Melanie Rawn, Jennifer Roberson, and Kate Elliott, who are all fantasy authors in their own right but who I've never read anything by. Their work together, however, was seamless; a fascinating novel set in a sort of alternate Italy where some Renaissance-equivalent art masters can work magic with their paintings, and since paintings are how contracts and treaties are recorded, they have a lot of opportunity to do so. The book covers centuries of history of the city-state of Tira Virte, its ruling dukes and their official painters, and the women they love, since both ruling and professional painting are limited to men, and the twists and turns of the plot were unexpected but completely believable. The characters are also believable and well-drawn, and I enjoyed this book a lot and recommend it to people who don't like "sword-and-sorcery" fantasy, as this is something very different.</p>Suzanne Saundershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01446806864238063728noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3212199.post-68377334972263977342007-01-16T20:52:00.000-05:002007-01-16T21:15:08.260-05:00This Christmas, one gift from my dad was the science fiction novel <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/076531312X/segnborasresourc"><i>Variable Star</i></a>. The names on the cover are Robert Heinlein and Spider Robinson, but the circumstances of authorship are a little unusual, since "Grand Master" science fiction writer Heinlein died more than 15 years ago. The outline and notes for this novel were found in Heinlein's papers after the death of Heinlein's wife Virginia, and Spider Robinson, a well-known sf writer who was once called "the next Robert Heinlein" in a review that has probably been quoted on every one of his book jackets, actually wrote the book. My father, a dedicated Heinlein fan since childhood with no special preference for Robinson, said he found the book depressing -- not because of the events in the book (though some of them admittedly are depressing) but because it wasn't Heinlein. And it <i>isn't</i> Heinlein, though there are references and turns of phrase that will certainly recall his work. (The plot, however, is definitely 1950s/early '60s Heinlein, as well as many of the characters -- I can see echoes of <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1416505520/segnborasresourc"><i>Citizen of the Galaxy</i></a>, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0765314932/segnborasresourc"><i>Time for the Stars</i></a>, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0765314509/segnborasresourc"><i>Space Cadet</i></a>, and even the much later <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/034530988X/segnborasresourc"><i>Friday</i></a> in it.) I enjoy both authors quite a lot, and I enjoyed this book. But if both men get credit for this novel, then John W. Campbell's name should be on the cover of Heinlein's <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1416505520/segnborasresourc"><i>Sixth Column</i></a>, as the magazine editor Campbell gave Heinlein the plot outline for that book (which first appeared as a serial in Campbell's magazine, <i>Astounding Science Fiction</i>) with a request to write it. If Heinlein gets solo credit for that one, then Robinson should get sole credit for this book -- but Heinlein did not keep Campbell's contribution a secret and Robinson would not want to hide Heinlein's. However, the reader who looks at this as a Robinson work will probably enjoy it more.Suzanne Saundershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01446806864238063728noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3212199.post-59359300339573586682007-01-15T20:54:00.000-05:002007-01-15T22:04:16.733-05:00<p>I read a lot of history and a fair amount of medical books, so the combination of the two is something I particularly seek out. So I was particularly pleased to see one in the latest set of book excerpts I was provided by <a href="http://www.bzzagent.com/">BzzAgent</a>, Molly Caldwell Crosby's <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0425212025/segnborasresourc"><i>The American Plague: The Untold Story of Yellow Fever, The Epidemic That Shaped Our History</i></a>. I knew a little bit about yellow fever from the section on it and Walter Reed's proof that it was carried by mosquitoes in <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0156027771/segnborasresourc"><i>Microbe Hunters</i></a>, but Crosby's book gives a lot more historical surroundings for the disease. She opens in 1878, an extremely virulent year in the Americas for a disease that affected those of European ancestry far more than those whose African ancestors had developed the ability to deal with the virus, and affected those moving into the South more than those who had grown up there. The description of the great Mardi Gras celebration inaugurated that year gives a deeper understanding of what it was like for the people living in that time and place and the doctors faced with the epidemic. And the situations described once the epidemic hit Memphis resemble something from a horror novel. It is, however, a story I want to finish, rather than just reading the excerpt.</p>
<P>
Bill Lamond's <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1592575595/segnborasresourc"><i>Born to Lead: Unlock The Magnificence In Yourself And Others</i></a> was the next excerpt in the set, and it was definitely not my cup of tea. It is mostly aimed at women, to help them lead and accomplish things (the introduction says "You have a new assignment -- to save the world by ensuring that it goes on for your children and grandchildren.") through "a new style of leadership" that "combines the strengths of the feminine and masculine models to become whole." I've got no problem with any of those concepts, and I am a dedicated believer in women's equality. I just wouldn't normally choose to read a book about learning to lead and act -- I see myself as a member of the "geek" subset of humanity, where male and female stereotypes have less hold on our behavior and the difficulty in dealing with society is more likely to be learning to speak non-geek than crossing the gender divide. I agree with most of what Lamond says; it's just not all that new to me. This is a book for someone who hasn't read stuff about models versus reality, or about how gender differences may or may not be culturally prescribed.</p>
<p>
Elliot Perlman's <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1594482233/segnborasresourc"><i>The Reasons I Won't Be Coming</I></a> is a story collection; the excerpt I read was the story "I Was Only In A Childish Way Connected To The Established Order," narrated by a middle-aged poet who has had some psychotic episodes that landed him in a mental hospital -- but he doesn't sound all that abnormal to me. Stuck in a life where he doesn't fit in, certainly, but comprehensible and sympathetic. I read reviews on amazon.com which praise Perlman's ability to create distinctive voices in his work, and this story definitely fit the bill there; I believe I will have to seek out more of his work.Suzanne Saundershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01446806864238063728noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3212199.post-49946726945851057572006-11-28T20:52:00.000-05:002006-11-28T21:11:11.890-05:00Another set of excerpts from <a href="http://www.bzzagent.com/">BzzAgent</a> and <a href="http://www.penguin.com/">Penguin</a>. The only one I liked enough to talk about is Charlaine Harris's <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0425212033/segnborasreourc"><i>Grave Surprise</i></a>, the second in a series starring Harper Connelly as a woman who can supernaturally find bodies, or if their location is known tell how the person died. I haven't read the first book, but I have enjoyed Harris's Southern Vampire series starring Sookie Stackhouse as a Louisiana waitress who has a lot of vampires and similarly supernatural creatures in her life. This series seems to be set in a more normal setting, meaning that Connelly is surrounded by people who may not believe in the supernatural (rather than the supernatural being accepted as it is in the other series) and closer to a sort of detective story, though most detectives can't actually sense when they have found a buried body. The excerpt I got (the first four chapters, 68 pages) definitely made me want to read the rest of the book and find out what happens, or what <i>happened</i>, since the book opens with the discovery of a modern body in a centuries-old cemetery where Connelly is giving a demonstration of her ability for a college class.Suzanne Saundershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01446806864238063728noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3212199.post-10515632554342726332006-11-25T15:19:00.000-05:002006-11-25T16:44:40.984-05:00<p>I've been a fan of Lois McMaster Bujold since I read her book <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0743468414/segnborasresourc"><i>Barrayar</i></a> serialized in <a href="http://www.analogsf.com/"><i>Analog</i></a> magazine in, I think, 1992. That was science fiction, of course (or it would not have been likely to be in that magazine) -- the story of Cordelia Naismith of Beta Colony dealing with her new husband Aral Vorkosigan's backward home planet of Barrayar and the harsh politics of the aristocracy she's married to. </p>
<p>Bujold's newest, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0061137588/segnborasresourc"><i>Beguilement (The Sharing Knife, Volume 1)</i></a> is a fantasy novel, but it has a lot of similarities to <i>Barrayar</i>. It is, essentially, the story of a man from one culture and a woman from another figuring one another and developing a relationship. Here, though, it is magic rather than technology that forms part of the difference between Dag, a patroller from the Lakewalkers, and Fawn, a girl from an ordinary farm in a medieval or Renaissance-equivalent world. The other difference is that the Lakewalkers are a mobile force that protects people against soul-sucking monsters, and the rumors about Lakewalkers among the rest of the population suggest that they're nearly as bad as the creatures they fight.</p>
<p>
The comparison that actually came to my mind after finishing this novel was to Jean Auel's historical (or more accurately pre-historical) Earth Children's books, the series that started with <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN0553250426/segnborasresourc"><i>Clan of the Cave Bear</i></a> and continued with <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0553250531"><i>The Valley of Horses</i></a>, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0553280945"><i>The Mammoth Hunters</i></a>, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0553289411/"><i>The Plains of Passage</i></a>, and <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/055328942X"><i>The Shelters of Stone</i></a> (with one more eventually due). While Bujold is only supposed to make two volumes out of <i>The Sharing Knife</i> (and boy, is it obvious that the end of this first volume is far from the end of the story), the coming together of two people who originate in different cultures with deep distrust or even fear of each other is common to both authors' series. I found the views inside the main characters' heads to be very interesting as they figure out how to interact with each other and those who are close to their new friend, and Bujold's settings to be very well-thought-out and believable (so is Auel's, except for her tendency for Ayla and Jondalar to be the center of every new invention or advance in the entire prehistoric world, but then Auel has archeology to rely on while Bujold has to create everything). I will definitely read the sequel to <i>Beguilement</i> as soon as it is available.</p>
A completely different kind of story is found in <a href="http://www.juliafoxgarrison.com/">Julia Fox Garrison's</a> memoir <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0061120618"><i>Don't Leave Me This Way: or When I Get Back on My Feet You'll Be Sorry</i></a>, the story of the stroke she had at the age of 37 and the process of trying to get as much of a normal life back afterwards as possible. There are a lot of autobiographical books about recovering from physical problems, but this one has a black humor that isn't often seen in such "inspirational" stories. Nicknaming the professionals she deals with "Dr. Jerk" and "Nurse Doom," cursing at the aide who reprimands her for trying to get a drink of water during a transfer out of bed, and generally refusing to be treated like a child or an idiot, Ms. Garrison is much more how I would expect a normal human to act under the difficult circumstances of suddenly being half-paralyzed, and that makes her more interesting to read about than a saint who accepts every difficulty quietly. She makes jokes with family, friends, and hospital/rehab center staff and only cries in private, and so the doctors (and even one friend) feel she's in denial, rather than just trying to salvage a bit of dignity. This is difficult in a place where the start of menstruation makes the nurse get a diaper rather than a tampon. But Garrison is persistent and refuses to accept blanket predictions as to her future, and indeed is able to fight those of her doctors who want to push her into treatments for conditions she hasn't been shown to have. (And she and the one doctor who treats her like an adult turn out to be right, too.)</p>
<p>Coming home to her husband and preschooler son is not the end of difficulty, either. Her problems include dealing with a wheelchair, needing help in the bathroom in public places, not having her driver's license automatically revoked, and her husband having to be her caretaker ("The insurance company is unwilling to offer home nursing unless there is no other avenue for household needs. In other words, if you have relatives, you don't need a nurse.") Just making a bed is a major triumph. Getting more physical therapy than the doctors and insurance companies want to offer is a long battle. But she walks again, cooks again, and does nearly all the things that she was originally told she would never do again. Not everything -- eventually she accepts that she and her husband will not have any more children, for example. But her achievements make her an impressive example, and her advice at the end of the book on how to deal with medical professionals (and her open letter to doctors asking for patients to have an equal voice in the treatment of their own bodies) is a truly nice touch.</p>Suzanne Saundershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01446806864238063728noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3212199.post-1160955724314256492006-10-15T18:25:00.000-04:002006-10-15T19:42:04.326-04:00Another set of excerpts from BzzAgent to review:
<ul><LI>Maureen Dowd's <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/042521236X/segnborasresourc"><I>Are Men Necessary? : When Sexes Collide</i></a>
<P>The first chapter of the excerpt was not terribly interesting to me -- it just went on and on about the same thing over and over (how independent women are not finding relatonships with men). I've never been much for the mainstream dating scene. I find my fellow geeks are generally more interested in intelligent, talented women who understand geek conversation than in the stereotypical bimbo. (Of course, this may be because I select for a certain type in my friends and lovers pretty strongly myself.)</p>
The second chapter, painting the Bush administration and politicians in general as petty catfighters, was much more interesting and funnier. I like that kind of stereotype-breaking (and anything that makes fun of Republican politicians). If the book continues in a vein like that, I'd enjoy it. From just the two chapters, though, it seems like only a 50% chance that I would. I've gotta agree with the Amazon reviewer Kim Hughes' comment that "In the end, though, one wishes <i>Are Men Necessary?</i> went beyond simply grocery listing examples of sexual disparity to offer concrete suggestions for change."</p></li>
<li><a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0451219260/segnborasresourc"><i>Singing with the Top Down</i></a> is set in the 1950s and told from the point of view of 13-year-old Pauly Mahoney, the self-designated worrier of her family and eseentially the caretaker of her younger brother Buddy, even before her parents are killed in a freak accident. The four-chapter excerpt only gets as far as the kids' finding out that they will be living with their Aunt Nora, who they've never met before their parents' funeral, and leaving Oklahoma for Nora's California home, but I am genuinely curious about how things go with two scared children and the family free spirit, who decides that the drive to California will be a camping trip to see the sights of the western U.S. and a chance for everyone to get to know one another. Pauly is a very believable voice, the child who has had to be the parent, and I really want to see how her new experiences will change her.</li>
<li>I've enjoyed John Hodgman on <i>The Daily Show</i>, but <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1594482225/segnborasresourc"><i>The Areas of My Expertise</i></a> is the first time I've seen him in print. This almanac parody is definitely a book to enjoy on paper (tables printed in landscape orientation are difficult to read on a monitor where they are sideways). But I enjoyed the bits that were easier to read; I like this randomly wacky style of humor that takes the standard list of plot situations found in all fiction and adds an additional item: "Man vs. Cyborg." It's not for everyone, as the love-or-hate Amazon reviews indicate, but for the right audience it's really funny.</li></ul>Suzanne Saundershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01446806864238063728noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3212199.post-1159319460912912042006-09-26T20:57:00.000-04:002006-09-26T21:11:00.930-04:00I've read a lot of animal books, including several by veterinarians. However, Bradford Brown's <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0884482790/segnborasresourc"><i>While You're Here, Doc: Farmyard Adventures of a Maine Veterinarian</i></a> is the first one to make me think, "I'm surprised the vet is still alive after all that." Brown's practice was in rural Maine in the 1950s and 1960s, meaning that first, a large number of his patients were farm animals, and second, the weather could cause major problems getting to and from the farms, and third, the roads were not necessarily up to ideal standards. This book is not for the faint of heart, because not only does it deal bluntly with the medical problems the animals encountered, but the damage done to Dr. Brown by stubborn patients, winter weather, and being in a hurry to get to the site of an emergency. It's kind of amazing that bruised ribs are the worst individual injury Dr. Brown mentions suffering, but he does point out that the general stress of the work caused him to retire early when his own doctors said he would probably not live to fifty if he didn't slow down. Despite all that difficulty, Dr. Brown really seems to have loved his work and the help he could give animals and their owners; the title comes from the many additional tasks he was asked to perform for other animals on the farm, or even the neighbors' farm, after having already made a call for some specific reason, and he seems to have retained a wry sense of humor about all those extras and all the other things that could happen. The book is full of entertaining characters, not all of them human, and gives an interesting look at farm life when it was still a family endeavor.Suzanne Saundershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01446806864238063728noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3212199.post-1157608325742945812006-09-07T01:13:00.000-04:002006-09-07T01:52:05.833-04:00<p>More Penguin book excerpts from <a href="http://www.bzzagent.com/">BzzAgent</a> (who were cool enough to send me a full copy of <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0929701712/segnborasresourc"><i>Beneath A Marble Sky</i></a>, which I liked best out of the last batch of excerpts).</p>
<P>The first one in this batch is <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1594480710/segnborasresourc"><i>Goodbye Lemon</i></a> by Adam Davies. The excerpt was sort of horribly fascinating in its introduction to Jack Tennant, his two brothers, one of whom drowned in childhood, his mother, his father, from whom Jack is estranged, and Jack's girlfriend, who can't understand why Jack would even hesitate to go home (for the first time in 15 years) when the news arrives that Jack's father has had a stroke. A family this twisted is hard to look away from, like a train wreck. An Amazon reviewer comments that "You want to simultaneouly hug all of the characters and also shake them and kick them for their terrible decisions," and I agree. It's difficult to imagine what will happen in the rest of the book but I am kinda curious, though it might turn out to be the sort of book I have to put down because how stupid people are sometimes really gets to me.</p>
<P>I never read <A href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0307277674/segnborasresourc"><i>The Da Vinci Code</I></a> (out of a sort of snobbishness that if so many people who aren't big readers liked it, I probably wouldn't, as well as a general lack of interest in Christian-oriented books). So I can't judge the comparison to that book that <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0425210162/segnborasresourc"><i>The Begotten: A Novel of the Gifted</i></a> seems to invite. The BzzAgent site says that author Lisa T. Bergren wrote this <i>The Begotten</i> because of the "heretical 'truths' the author set forward" in <i>The Da Vinci Code</i>. I'm also not a Christian, so I can't vouch for heresy or lack of it, but a historical novel set in 14th-century Europe has to deal with Christianity to be accurate, and in the five chapters given in this excerpt I didn't find this book to be preaching to the reader. There are supernatural powers clearly related to the Christian God and Satan, though, so it's probably not a book for the sort of atheist who doesn't wish to read of something they'll consider fantasy. But as a fantasy novel, it seems pretty interesting.</p>
<p>I've also never been in a book club, and so my thoughts on <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/042521009X/segnborasresourc"><i>The Book Club Companion: A Comprehensive Guide to the Reading Experience</i></a> may not be the best quide. But I think this book would be a huge help to anyone wanting to start a book discussion group; it not only lists books and questions to prompt conversation on them, but issues like whether or not knitting during the group meeting is appropriate, and what to do about pets when meeting in a home they occupy, and it offers recipes for meeting foods and beverages. This wide range of suggestions and thought-provokers seems like just about everything a person would need to get a book club running and keep it going, rather than petering out as so many good intentions do.</p>Suzanne Saundershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01446806864238063728noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3212199.post-1155690403052539142006-08-15T20:22:00.000-04:002006-08-15T21:10:03.540-04:00<p>I've been visiting family for two weeks and I had a lot of time to read. I finished Janet Evanovich's <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?link_code=ur2&tag=segnborasresourc&camp=1789&creative=9325&location=%2Fexec%2Fobidos%2Ftg%2Fstores%2Fseries%2F-%2F89420%2Fmass_market%2Fref%3Dpd_serl_books">Stephanie Plum series</a>. Well, all that were on my father's shelves -- he says he might have gotten <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0312971346/segnborasresourc"><i>High Five</i></a> and <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0312976275/segnborasresourc"><i>Hot Six</i></a> fron the library, but other than that he's got all from <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0312990456/segnborasresourc"><i>One for the Money</i></a> to <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0312349483/segnborasresourc"><i>Twelve Sharp</i></a> (and the Christmas special <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0312986343/segnborasresourc"><i>Visions of Sugar Plums</i></a>). My dad recommended these after he saw me reading Carl Hiaasen's <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0446695564/segnborasresourc"><i>Skinny Dip</i></a>, because the Plum books share some of the same wacky humor.</p>
<p>
OK, these books aren't as wall-to-wall wacky as Hiaasen's work -- very few are. (Well, Tim Dorsey.) But the Plum series are interesting mysteries with fun characters. New Jersey native used to be a lingerie buyer, but she was laid off and needed a job. Since her cousin Vinnie runs a bail bond agency, Stephanie becomes a bond enforcement agent, also known as a bounty hunter, despite a lack of experience. Sometimes she's successful in tracking down people who didn't show up for their court dates, and other times she just gets violent criminals angry at her. And her mother makes the sign of the cross, her father buries his head in the newspaper, and her grandmother asks to come along (when her grandmother isn't trying to lift the lid at closed-casket funerals, that is). I couldn't put the books down, and as soon as I finished one I had to see what happened in the next volume, so I have to recommend these.</p>
<P><hr><P>
<p>
On the way home, I was reading a book I own, Norman Spinrad's 1969 science fiction novel <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1585675857/segnborasresourc"><i>Bug Jack Barron</i></a>. As happens eventually to all all books set in the future, enough time has passed to make this into an alternate history. The book was apparently quite controversial when it came out, and still has its moments, but not all of them are the type of controversy Spinrad wanted to provoke. The political ramifications of belief that science can achieve immortality for people (and a way to involve the corpses of those who could afford to have themselves frozen) and the effect of the media on people's political opinions -- all are still quite fascinating. But then on page 143, the main female character, Sara, comes out with this inner monologue:
<blockquote>"Power's a man's bag, she realized. Any chick that digs power, really feels where it's at, almost always turns out to be some kind of dyke in the end. Power's somehow cock-connected; woman's hung-up on power, she's hung-up on not having a cock, understands power only if she's thinking like someone who does. Power's even got its own man-style time-sense; man can wait, scheme, plan years-ahead-guile-waiting games, accumulate power on the sly, then use it for good -- if the man's good deep inside like Jack -- like a good fuck good cat can bring a frigid chick along, cooling himself, holding back when he has to, until he's finally got her ready to come. Man kind of love, man kind of delayed-timing thinking, calculated quanta of emotion and only when the time's right, and not like woman needs to feel everything totally the moment it happens -- good, evil, love, hate, prick inside her."</blockquote>
If I had met Norman Spinrad right when I read this, I'd have thrown the book right in his face and wished it were a hardback copy. On the next page, when Jack is telling a friend that he and Sara have reunited, "The thrill of being owned by her fated man went through Sara as he goosed her off camera." What kind of fucking slave mentality is this? I want to smack Sara too. None of this is necessary to her character; she is an idealistic person who retained her belief in the Committee for Social Justice left-wing political party and other progressive causes as she grew into her 30s. She's just not believable as willing to put herself into a man's power, and it would be so easy to have made her more believable by not putting in these lapses into submissive, sexist claptrap. If only she were 'supportive' of Jack rather than "worshipful"!</p>
<p>
The other problem this book for me is that I suspected the big denouement about the immortality treatment far before the characters did. Maybe I've just read too much other science fiction about life extension and immortality (particularly Robert Heinlein's <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0441810764/segnborasresourc">Lazarus Long</a> stories) and this made me able to guess something that 1969 fans (and the characters) might not think about. But for someone who makes a living asking awkward questions, Jack Barron seemed to miss some really important ones. However, the novel was gripping -- I read it in a day not only because I was sitting in one airport or another most of that day, since I had other books with me, but because the story, the world it's set in, and the characters were truly interesting, despite the problems I note above.</p>Suzanne Saundershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01446806864238063728noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3212199.post-1150574874584643342006-06-17T15:59:00.000-04:002006-06-17T16:07:54.596-04:00<P>These days, when we think of a "duel" in history, the vision is usually of two men settling some dispute of honor that could not be corrected by law. Indeed, over the years, dueling itself has been made illegal in many countries. So the idea of a duel being the <b>result</b> of a court case, instead of that case ending with a judge or jury's verdict, is somewhat of a surprise. Eric Jager's <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0767914171/segnborasresourc"><i>The Last Duel: A True Story of Crime, Scandal, and Trial by Combat in Medieval France</i></a> tells the story of how in 1386, Jean de Carrouges went through legal channels to seek a trial by duel for his former friend, Jacques Le Gris, accused of raping Carrouges' wife Marguerite. It was thought that God would arrange the outcome of the duel, that only the side that was telling the truth could win (and obviously Jean de Carrouges had a lot of faith, as these duels were fights to the death, and if Carrouges lost, his wife would also be executed for making a false accusation).</p>
<p>
This is a book that I could not put down. It combines the best parts of historical novels, non-fiction history books, and modern legal thrillers. Jager does extremely well in fleshing out the historical documents that are his sources into real people, while making it known what the records leave unclear. The politics surrounding these minor nobles and the legal system of the era are explained clearly without letting us lose sight of the individuals involved in the case and their real reactions, adding up to a truly fascinating story.Suzanne Saundershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01446806864238063728noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3212199.post-1147827638379034282006-05-16T20:25:00.000-04:002006-06-01T16:25:27.940-04:00<P>So I'm a BzzAgent at <a href="http://www.bzzagent.com/">BzzAgent.com</a>, and they have a set-up with <a href="http://us.penguingroup.com/">Penguin Publishing</a>, where one can sign up to get excerpts from to-be-published/recently published books. It's not the same as reviewing an entire book, but it's still fascinating and gives me some ideas on what to pick up at the library and bookstore.
</p><p>
<b>First Batch</b>
<dl>
<dt><a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0425207846/segnborasresourc"><i>Your Big Break</i></a> by Johanna Edwards
<dd>This was definitely my favorite of the first four excerpts available. The first three chapters gave the setting -- a modern-day city as seen by a women who works for "Your Big Break, Inc.," a company which will send someone to do the work of breaking up with a formerly beloved person in your life for you -- as well as the first-person narrator, Dani, who is quite likeable despite (or perhaps as a necessity for) this line of work that she hasn't even told her parents about. I'm definitely going to have to see how this turns out.
<br><br>
<dt><a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0451217608/segnborasresourc"><i>Bitter Is The New Black: Confessions of a Condescending, Egomaniacal, Self-Centered Smartass, Or, Why You Should Never Carry A Prada Bag to the Unemployment Office</i></a> by Jen Lancaster
<dd>This one didn't grab me as much. I just couldn't get into the narrator's snobbiness and self-centeredness, whether I thought it was fiction as I did at first, or later when I found out it was a memoir. But then, I have absolutely no interest in trendiness, expensive fashion, business ambitions, or any of the other things Jen talks about in the first 28 pages of the book. Even finding out more about her eventual downslide doesn't appeal to me -- but maybe it will be to people who are amused by her shallowness or enjoy the prospect of her getting her comeuppance.
<br><br>
<dt><a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1594481717/segnborasresourc"><i>A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future</i></a> by Daniel Pink
<dd>Business book. If it weren't talking about the workplace, it would probably interest me more, because I do like reading about how thinking works. Plus for some reason the available excerpt was chapters 3 and 4, so I was missing definitions of some of the terms Pink uses. While discussion of how design can influence not only business but history (the infamous "butterfly ballots" of the 2000 U.S. Presidential election in some Florida counties) is interesting, there wasn't enough of it in this sample for me to plan to run out and read the whole book.
<br><br>
<dt>I've managed to delete the PDF excerpt of the last book from the first batch, but I didn't like it either -- it seemed like someone trying to do the same old thing that's been going on for decades with a hardbitten private detective.
</dl></p>
<p>
<b>Second Batch</b>
<dl>
<dt><a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1573223077/segnborasresourc"><i>Everything Bad Is Good for You</i></a> - Steven Johnson
<dd>That people will memorize reams of information or go through the most complex processes if they consider it fun, I already knew. Whether it was my friends' confused expressions as I tried to show them what I was doing with my knitting needles (or for that matter, explaining 30 years of Doctor Who plotlines), or listening to my younger siblings spout off which Pokemon evolved into which other Pokemon, or my own confusion when exposed to the sports my father follows, it's amazing how complicated fun things can be. So Johnson's opening discussion of the statistics and paper-shuffling of the baseball simulation games he played with dice and charts as a child and his argument that this sort of brain exercise is becoming more common in entertainment pursuits was not completely foreign.
<dd>However, Johnson takes it into a lot more detail than I had ever seen before. While he points out that reading books is still a good thing to encourage as a leisure activity, video games and other games such as Dungeons & Dragons-type role-playing games have many of the same benefits of encouraging patience and effort (do you know how LONG it can take to beat just one level of a video game?) as well as working out the decision-making functions, understanding very complex "worlds," and other things that are difficult to teach by traditional methods. "My [seven-year-old] nephew would be asleep in five seconds if you popped him down in an urban studies classroom, but somehow an hour of playing <i>SimCity</i> taught him that high tax rates in industrial areas can stifle development," he points out, and then goes into biological and mental reasons why this is so, unlike most arguments against games, which rely on simplistic "its violence sets a bad example" arguments. (After all, the military setting of chess is just as bad an example if you think about it, and yet chess is praised for the thinking it inspires rather than the content.) Johnson compares the type of thinking encouraged by these games to that needed for word problems in math classes, in that one has to extract the important information needed for the problem, discarding irrelevancies, and figure out what methods are needed to solve the problem. It's not the same things one gets from reading great literature, but that's what most anti-video-game arguments compare it to.
<dd>Television may not be great literature either, but Johnson points out that TV shows with complex multiple-threaded narratives have been on the rise, as have plots dealing complex social issues; neither was common in the "Golden Age" of television's early years. Those older shows were "simpler" in the sense of not dealing with difficult ethical issues and also in the way they told the story, not requiring you to remember small details or draw your own conclusions. (And, of course, only the best shows of the past are remembered.) Johnson lists many comparisons between older TV shows and newer ones, and then does the same with movies, though their running time limits the amount of complexity that can be shoved into a single film.
<dd>The "excerpt" I received was 136 pages long -- half the book, essentially, since Amazon lists it as being 256 pages total -- and I'm certainly curious to see what else Johnson has to say (since the excerpt covered the benefits of video games, TV, the Internet, and movies; I'm not sure what's left to visit!)
<br><br>
<dt><a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/159448208X/segnborasresourc"><i>The Amazing Mackerel Pudding Plan: Classic Diet Recipe Cards from The 1970s</i></a> - Wendy McClure
<dd>Well, the idea is not new -- I was looking at James Lileks' <a href="http://www.lileks.com/institute/gallery/">Gallery of Regrettable Food</a> before a version of it came out in <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0609607820/segnborasresourc">book form</a>. But Wendy McClure's source for foods it's difficult to contemplate is a little more specific -- 1970s Weight Watchers recipe cards -- and recent, and just as amusingly offputting. McClure's site <a href="http://www.candyboots.com/">Candyboots</a> has most of the same previews, so you can check them out and marvel that these were once published as serious food offerings.
<br><br>
<dt><a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0929701712/segnborasresourc"><i>Beneath a Marble Sky: A Novel of the Taj Mahal</i></a> - John Shors
<dd>A historical novel, narrated by the daughter of the emperor of India who built the Taj Mahal. This is a place and time whose history I know only the vaguest outline of, so it's already of interest to me for educational purposes (even if it is a work of fiction, such novels provide a feeling for how things were, and a way to remember the names of important figures. And then the two chapters excerpted for BzzAgent readers definitely made me want to pick up the rest of the book, because we first meet Jahara in her old age, telling the story of her life to her granddaughters, and the information given there about how her life turns out differs so much from the setting of her childhood in the flashback that I really want to find out what happened in between.
<br><br>
<dt><a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/042521043X/segnborasresourc"><i>California Demon: The Secret Life of a Demon-Hunting Soccer Mom</i></a> - Julie Kenner
<dd>I'm far from the only one who thought of TV's "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" at the premise of these books (this is a sequel to <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0425202526/segnborasresourc"><i>Carpe Demon: Adventures of a Demon-Hunting Soccer Mom</i></a>): an apparently ordinary woman hunts demons and has to keep it secret from most of the people around her. However, instead of a high-school/college student with just a mother to deal with like Buffy Summers, Kate Connors is a mother of a teenager and a toddler and even a husband with political ambitions. That's a lot more responsibilities to juggle, and the opening of <i>California Demon</i> (where Kate's volunteer time at a local nursing home is interrupted by staff arguing over whether a resident who was recently in a coma could possibly be recovered enough to go on an outing, and Kate's suspicions are aroused) gives a quick view of a busy life with even more people to fight for and reason to rid the world of evil forces than Buffy's. I'll probably have to recommend this to my stepmother, who already reads Charlaine Harris' Southern Vampire novels, Laurell K. Hamilton's Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter books, MaryJanice Davidson's Undead books, and Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files books (and whose copies of these books I have enjoyed as quick reads when I'm visiting).
</dl></p>Suzanne Saundershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01446806864238063728noreply@blogger.com0