Richard Clarke's Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror is an illuminating look at the U.S. government's response to terrorism. Clarke worked for the Reagan, Bush Sr., Clinton, and Bush Jr. administrations; presumably he's pretty good at his work to have lasted and kept getting promoted through 20 years under both major parties. However, George W. Bush's administration's response to September 11, 2001, disappointed him, as it will anyone who reads this behind-the-scenes look at officials (Secretary Donald Rumsfeld) who "complained that there were no decent targets for bombing in Afghanistan and that we should consider bombing Iraq instead, which, he said, had better targets." (Clarke compares this to "invading Mexico after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.")

Clarke explains much of the recent history of Islamic fundamentalism in the Middle East, starting with the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the revolution in Iran which replaced the U.S.-friendly Shah with the Ayatollah Khomeini. Most Americans at the time focused on these events only as they immediately affected the Cold War balance of power and the U.S. (the Iranian hostage crisis, for example) and not how the changing politics in these largely Muslim countries affected the attitudes toward the U.S. of a huge block of people. U.S. military forces being moved into the Persian Gulf area in the 1980s did not help matters, even though the Reagan administration felt it necessary to counter the possibility of Soviet forces doing the same. U.S. forces were placed in Lebanon to try and help stabilize the country during the partially Iran-instigated turmoil, but were withdrawn after car bombings of a Marine barracks and the U.S. embassy killed several hundred people. In the eyes of the bombers and many others, this was proof that terrorism worked as desired against the U.S. Clarke tracks the shifting alliances through 25 years which included continued Afghan fighting, the Iran/Iraq war, the Iraqi takeover and expulsion from Kuwait, and the results of U.S.-Israeli cooperation. He gives his opinions about about which things the U.S. did were good and which made things worse in the long run. Whether or not one agrees with his opinions, his behind-the-scenes looks at international politics are fascinating.

'"Well, something just exploded. We don't know if it was a bomb, sir. The World Trade Center," a young Navy officer replied. "I know you handle terrorism, sir, and we're supposed to tell you when something happens that might be terrorism, but do you want to know when things happen in the United States too? Do you guys handle domestic crises too?" The notion that might occur in the United States was completely new to us then.'
Clarke, then working for the National Security Council, calls the government Situation Room on the day of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

This seems to have been just the beginning of difficulties in figuring out who was responsible for doing what during crises affecting the U.S. This as well as money -- "There was not one fund for counterterrorism, but several department budgets. We sought to fund programs in the Department of Energy, the Health and Human Services Department, the Defense Department, the Justice Department, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and other departments whose Congressional appropriators did not see 'their' agencies as being counterterrorist departments." -- seem to have been great difficulties in 1990s attempts to be on guard against terrorism.

Clarke has a tendency to say "we" did this or that, and one is often not sure if it's the U.S. government, the agency he's working for, or even an informal group of people he'd put together. It's easy to feel that he's saying he was personally involved in every single thing he's discussing, which he may or may not have meant to imply. However, the personal look at individuals he worked with, particularly presidents (Clinton and Bush Jr.) makes the names and faces from the news a lot more human.

When he talks about the George W. Bush administration, Clarke gets much firmer in saying that the wrong things were done and that Iraq was not the place to focus. And though I believed that already, this book gave me a lot more evidence that the top levels of W.'s administration ignored what the people working for them were trying to tell them. Maybe Clarke's ideas on what can be done to better the existing mess would work, maybe not. But both the government and the people voting for that government need information to work with, and this book provides a lot.

I never thought a book in support of a position that I believe in could make me so angry. But Jonathan Rauch's Gay Marriage: Why It Is Good For Gays, Good For Straights, and Good For America pissed me off far more times than I could count.

Rauch's basic position is that marriage is desirable for everyone, that alternatives to marriage are bad (for gay or straight people), and thus that gay marriage should be made legal and as acceptable as straight marriage. My position is that marriage is fine for people who want it, and anyone who wants it, straight or gay, should be free to enter into a marriage, but that alternatives are the better choice for some people and those alternatives should not be legally frowned upon. Dorian Solot and Marshall Miller of the Alternatives to Marriage Project represent my views very well in their book Unmarried to Each Other: The Essential Guide To Living Together As An Unmarried Couple: that unmarried (gay or straight) couples should not be discriminated against in such matters as:

• Housing: it is technically illegal in many U.S. states for different-sex couples to cohabit; Florida, where I have lived with my beloved Jon for six years, is one of those states. This isn't enforced, obviously, but it leaves us without legal recourse if we encounter a landlord who wouldn't rent to an unmarried couple. And of course, in places without any laws against discrimination against sexual-orientation, a gay couple could encounter the same problem.
• Insurance/benefits: Domestic partner benefits are not that common (and when available are often limited to same-sex couples on the theory that they cannot (currently) marry legally, and different-sex couples could)
• Taxes: Married couples shouldn't be penalized financially on their income taxes, but neither should unmarried couples take a hit in the finances.
• Children's issues: a married step-parent can adopt their partner's child, becoming a "third parent" -- this has been denied to both unmarried gay and straight couples wanting the person who is raising the child but is not a genetic parent to legally adopt.
• Hospital/Inheritance issues: Unmarried couples have to jump through all sorts of hoops, filling out many, many legal forms to get the next-of-kin rights that legal marriage automatically confers. Hospital visits, health power of attorney, guardianship of children, inheritance, and many other relics of the legal system's former view of husband as wife as legally only one person still exist.

These are just the immediate legal inequalities of unmarried couples. Rauch acknowledges them when he says that marriage creates kinship; however, he seems to think that everyone should just be able to marry someone they love (and I certainly wouldn't deny him the right to marry the "Michael" mentioned in the book's dedication: "Marry me, when we can.") However, his view of traditional marriage's rights and responsibilities as something preferred for everyone is outdated. As Solot and Miller point out that the "wife" and "husband" roles put pressure on people to be a certain way; people they interviewed experienced this outside pressure: "It might be OK for a girlfriend to wear bright sweaters and crack lots of jokes, people seemed to be saying, but a wife should dress appropriately, speak appropriately, and behave altogether differently," or "a few men say they're uncomfortable with assumptions about what husbands 'ought to' do or be." I've seen it myself, at a friend's wedding shower: the assumption that the bride was going to change her surname, and when she said that she was hyphenating their surname, getting a response along the lines of "We'll see how long the groom lets that last!" (Despite the fact that this groom had seriously considered taking his bride's surname.)

And frankly, I don't think the government should have anything to do with my love life at all. Legal marriage is a contract between two people and one government, and I don't want that. Even if I wanted a contract with Jon (and neither of us see any compelling reason to have one), neither local, state, nor federal government need to have anything to do with it. If people want to marry according to the rites of a religion they believe in, they can do that. (If they are not religious and want to marry, let them figure out what it would take for them to feel married, but not force it on everyone else.) Christianity did not write out any rules for marriage until 770 A.D. (and kept rewriting those rules for at least 500 years), Judaism historically accepted unmarried relationships called "pilagshut," and many other societies of the past did not distinguish between marriage and cohabitation. Essentially, the bulk of the marriages of the past, around the world, were what would be considered "common-law marriages" in modern terms -- there was no ceremony, no paperwork; a couple moved in together and started calling themselves married. It is only in the past few hundred years that governments have involved themselves in marriage by limiting what types were acceptable or recording when a marriage took place.

Rauch, however, talks about the history of marriage as if since the dawn of time, there had always been white wedding gowns and marriage licenses, and so draws a distinct line between cohabitation (which he seems to consider at best a poor substitute for marriage and at worst a threat to the stability of society) and marriage. In the book's introduction, he states first, "True love means, first and foremost, a love which ends in lasting marriage" and later:

'Marriage depends for its success on its uniqueness and its universality. Those in turn, depend on two principles. One is "If you want the benefits of marriage, you have to get married." the other is, "Marriage is for everyone -- no exclusions, no exceptions." Gay marriage reinforces both principles. It makes marriage not just a norm (the one for heterosexuals) but the norm (for everybody). In doing so, it offers the best hope of stopping the proliferation -- aided, perversely, by the anti-gay-marriage movement -- of marriage-like and "marriage lite" alternatives.'

I found those statements to be as excluding of me, and everyone else who is in a long-term loving relationship without any desire for marriage, as the anti-gay-marriage movement is of Rauch and all other gay people who want to get married. Later in the book, he continues in an even more insulting vein: "It certainly would be convenient if your employer and society and the law simply provided recognition and benefits for whatever relationship you happened to be having ... a lot of people, gay and straight, would like a halfway house: or, to be more blunt about it, a free ride. Throughout most of history, society has been smart enough to deny it to them." No, throughout history, nobody got any "benefits" from employers except everyday pay (if that, given the existence of slavery in a fair number of cultures) and, as I said before, society and the law considered you married pretty easily.

Rauch is right in that gay people have almost always been denied any recognition, not even of their existence, much less their relationships, and he is correct in that this needs to be corrected. Many of his rebuttals of arguments against gay marriage, such as the idea that marriage must be between people who can have children, are well-thought-out and serve his cause well. However, his conservative view of what marriage is may drive away his possible supporters who started out with liberal social views, without necessarily winning over anyone whose opposition to gay marriage is essentially "God said marriage has to be male-female." (Though Rauch does point out how many things have been in the past said to be God's will and people have nonetheless changed; I particularly like his reference to 19th-century lawmakers opposing laws allowing married women to control their own property on the grounds that it was "contrary not only to the law of England but to the law of God.") And he may be right in saying that having states individually recognize gay marriage, one at a time, would work better in public acceptance than having it federally imposed on all states at the same time. In his example world where Maryland has legalized gay marriage and Virginia has not, "Even in Virginia, people who saw my ring and learned I was 'Maryland married' would know I had made the Big Commitment in my home state and thus in the eyes of my community and its law." (However, I am not as sure that this would help acceptance in other states -- Americans may recognize that a rich Saudi is legally and societally committed to four wives, but how likely is it to make them think of allowing plural marriage in the U.S.?)

Rauch says that gay marriage in a few states would be better than gay marriage in none and "marriage lite" in many. Some supporters of gay marriage agree with that, and others accept "civil union" or some other not-quite-the-same option. David Moats' book Civil Wars: A Battle For Gay Marriage deals with that issue and many others as it chronicles the attempt to establish legal gay marriage in Vermont and the state legislature's substitution of "civil union" for gay couples as a compromise. This book, being true story rather than hypothetical argument, is far more human than Rauch's book; we hear about the lives of the three couples who brought the gay marriage suit to the state Supreme Court, the lawyers who argued the case, and the legislators who had to deal with the court's decision to say that it was against the state constitution to deny gay couples the benefits given married couples, but that it was the state legislature's job to figure out and enact laws extending those benefits to gay couples. Some of those legislators wanted gay and straight marriage to be the same, some wanted a parallel structure for gays, some didn't want anything remotely like marriages for people they considered to be doing wrong, and some were completely undecided. Even knowing what happened in the end, the reader gets a new, close view into how it happened -- and what the results were.

I found it a more pleasant read (in that the author doesn't say anything that made me want to throw the book across the room, though some of the words of opponents of gay marriage certainly did) than Rauch's book, and even though many of the same points are made, the two books still differ greatly in their approach to marriage in general and gay marriage specifically. For example, Moats draws many parallels to the civil rights and gay rights movements, and the civil union option is even compared to the "separate but equal" setup for black and white Americans that was ruled legal by the Supreme Court in the 1890s and then overturned by the a different Supreme Court in the 1950s. Rauch barely mentions race as a possible comparison to sexual orientation when he talks about the discrimination of excluding gay couples from marriage.

Both books are necessary, because the issue of gay marriage is one that it is simply no longer possible to ignore, and they can both provide information to base one's position on. Many people do not want to think about it and say they'll go with their "gut feeling" on the issue, but political issues should not be decided by "this turns my stomach." Just because the mere smell of asparagus makes me want to vomit doesn't mean I should deny other people the right to eat the stuff, and the same applies to other issues -- think with your brain, not your stomach.

It's hard to write for another author's characters and setting; the more interesting they are, the more this is so. The comparatively colorless Nancy Drew or Bobbsey Twins don't lose much by being handed over to whatever author the Edward Stratmeyer organization had available, while even as a child I found that any attempt at Oz books by writers other than L. Frank Baum were unreadable.

Sherlock Holmes has for a centurty been popular enough for other authors to try and write him, and eccentric enough that most have failed to capture his essence. Nicholas Meyer's The Seven Per Cent Solution was once the only novel-length story that I felt stood up to the work Sir Arthur Conan Doyle dashed off to support his more serious writing. Meyer's Holmes and Watson differed from the original, but it was explained why -- the consequences of increasing use of the cocaine that Holmes had indeed taken occasionally in Conan Doyle's stories.

My father, also a Holmes buff, a few years ago showed me The Beekeeper's Apprentice by Laurie King. He'd enjoyed the story of a retired Holmes entertaining himself training the mind of a fifteen-year-old girl living near him, once she'd shown herself worthwhile material for training. However, my father will not read the sequels that Laurie King has written featuring a Mary Russell who has grown older, because Holmes and Russell have married. For my dad, a married Holmes is just unacceptable. To me, though, it follows perfectly from the relationship they have in the first book -- hardly romantic, but a marriage of best friends and working partners. Conan Doyle's Holmes only ever respected one woman -- Irene Adler, who outwitted him. King's Holmes has found another mind he can respect carried in a female body, and their partnership is merely made formal (and more convenient, given the era) by a marriage certificate. Russell even keeps her maiden name.

The Beekeeper's Apprentice, A Monstrous Regiment of Women, A Letter of Mary, The Moor, O Jerusalem, and Justice Hall have been my reading material for the past week and a half, and I just started the latest in the series, The Game. Previous books in the series have been all over England with sea journeys to Palestine and Canada; this one heads towards an India still under British rule, thirty years after that of the frequently-referenced Kim by Rudyard Kipling (which I have yet to read, but will probably track down after this). So far I am enjoying this well-researched story as much as the previous ones. Like O Jerusalem, it takes place amongst the difficulties of international politics of the era (Holmes' older brother Mycroft, major figure behind the scenes of English government, appears more often in King's works than in those of most others who've tried their hand at Holmes) and the non-English cultures Holmes and Russell must disappear into.

Throughout the series, any differences from the Conan Doyle canon are explained -- there is no feeling of disregard for the original. I couldn't stop re-reading the first six of the series (hence the finishing them all in ten days) and I look forward to finishing the seventh.

Gorillas and autism. The two topics don't immediately seem to go to together. But then, most people have preconceived ideas about both: hostile King Kongs and children who can't be brought into human communication by any means. Dawn Prince-Hughes' book Songs of the Gorilla Nation: My Journey Through Autism dispels both stereotypes.

OK, so I'd read enough animal books to know that gorillas are not all that violent -- nothing compared to humans! And I was familiar with the idea that what most people think of as "autism" (specifically identified as Kanner's Syndrome) is just the far end of a spectrum with "normal" at its near end, with some of the middle areas identified by such names as "Asperger's Syndrome." That middle ground is "characterized by difficulties in processing stimuli, sensory oversensitivities, and challenges in social interaction." And who hasn't encountered those things some of the time? The author describes rituals from her childhood: "I also wanted to keep as many of my own accoutrements as possible the same. This meant that I did not want a new toothbrush, new clothes, new shoes. I continued to drink out of my favorite blue baby bottle until I was almost four, when it was replaced with a deep violet tumbler made of aluminum. I wanted to drink only root beer at that point . . ." I don't think this will sound particularly unusual to a lot of parents -- the concept of "security blankets" spread from the Peanuts comic strip because being attached to an object is common among kids -- and even adults; I'm reminded of the movie Pulp Fiction and its character Butch who risks his life to go back for a family heirloom, the watch owned by four generations. An incredible number of the traits the author describes from herself can be found in people who would never be considered, and many people who are eventually diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome are not diagnosed until adulthood. "Most high-functioning autistic people, not knowing what is "wrong" with them, develop a lifetime pattern of using their intelligence to appear normal," Prince-Hughes points out, and this reinforces the public image of what constitutes autism.

(However, some of the ways people cope with problems, be they neurological ones like this or any other kind, are not necessarily healthy in the long run. Drinking at a young age, dropping out of high school, and becoming homeless may have been the best ways available at the time for her, but one really wishes there had been other options.)

Price-Hughes' description of her earliest attempts at romantic and sexual relationships are particularly interesting because they bring up what everyone expects from first impressions of a person and how easy it is to mistake lust for love. The author compares herself to Seven of Nine from Star Trek: Voyager -- "I find that I am only part "human" and very much something altogether different; I am overwhelmed by the social demands of "normal life"; and I am lonely." Then a visit to the zoo leads to her great interest in watching the gorillas -- their own interactions, and how zoo visitors act toward them. "The gorillas don't speak human language, look the way humans look, move the way humans move. They are stupid. This is why gorillas are captive. This is why crazy people are captive.We are the animals who don't speak the language, look the looks, move in the right ways . . . It is easy for those who are not captive to forget that those who are remain individuals."

Price-Hughes' interest in the zoo gorillas led her first to read on her own and then to seek out academic programs that would let her learn about them and gorillas in general. This book details the individual gorillas at this zoo and tells about their behavior; I found this particularly interesting because all the other books I've read on apes have either involved observation of them in the wild, or in laboratory environments where they are not in family groups. This different setting allows for more detailed observation of their interactions and their individual differences -- the story of the different gorillas' tactics when given the Halloween jack-o'-lanterns on the first of November was fascinating: how this one went for the biggest pumpkins, those two for whichever were nearest, another seemed to test them to find the best quality in a similar way to grocery shoppers in the produce department, and still another chose the one with the nicest carving. And human similarity to our ape relatives actually helped Price-Hughes: "I tried to apply the things I'd learned from the gorillas in social situations. I tried to put people at ease by acknowledging them with quick sideways glances and smiles -- which evolved from submissive primate grimaces and are intended to convey that no harm is meant." And so on.

The gorillas became the author's friends to such a degree that when one called Congo died, she took some of his hair to Africa to bury, as Congo's body was going to be dissected and analyzed in the U.S. Price-Hughes was also able to continue a long personal relationship and continue academically through a Bachelor's, a Master's, and eventually a Doctorate degree. None of it was easy -- could it be for anyone? -- and only through researching a younger relative's condition did she find out a name for what might be her own condition. However, just having a name and a diagnosis to point to does sometimes help in dealing with other people, and sometimes also with one's own emotions.

Price-Hughes is a proud parent of a son, but she is still also connected to gorillas and other apes. The single most amazing thing in this book for me was her story of meeting Kanzi the bonobo (the species formerly known as pygmy chimpanzee):

"When I first met him, he asked me to play chase, and so we ran up and down along the fence, back and forth, him with a big bonobo smile and me slipping into my natural gorilla ways. Suddenly he stopped, grabbed the lexigram board containing the symbols he uses to communicate with, made a series of gestures, and then pointed to the lexigram board. I had to explain apologetically that I didn't understand what he was saying. Sue and I discovered that he had realized I was a "gorilla," had remembered seeing videos of Koko the signing gorilla, formulated the hypothesis that gorillas use signs to communicate, and then employed accurate ASL signs to ask, "You . . . gorilla . . . question?" No one, not even Sue, knew that he had retained signs from watching the Koko video. He had gone through all of these cognitive and emotional steps to try and bridge the communications gap between us."

Wow. It would be impressive for a human to pick up enough words of a foreign language from a (non-language-teaching) video to form a new question (not just parroting the same sentences already heard), not to mention the chain of thought. It isn't always easy for humans to realize consciously what it is that someone's physical mannerisms remind them of, either. Even if Kanzi is the Einstein of bonobos, his example shows us how much thought the furrier beings on this planet can be capable of, and justifies a lot more respect for apes and contemplation of the similarities between the human and the other higher primates. Price-Hughes' book will stretch your mind on these subjects.

I've read a lot of books about child abuse. (There's a stack of papers on the floor by my computer of reviews and comments that I need to add to my bibliography of children's and young adult books about abuse.) However, this is the first time I've read the story of a child abused through Munchausen's syndrome by proxy. I had actually heard of that particular mental disorder before, but then I have a brain full of all kinds of obscure things. "Munchausen's syndrome," named after the exaggerating Baron von Munchausen, is a disease where people fake illness or do things to make themselves sick, so that they will receive sympathy or care from others. "Munchausen's syndrome by proxy," or MBP, takes the deception one step further: a caretaker lies about the illness of someone dependent on them and may induce symptoms in the dependent person. The doctor who wrote the foreword to this book says that approximately 1,200 new cases of this are reported annually in the U.S., which seems like a lot if you look at it from the point of view of the people, mostly children, who suffer so that some adult in charge of them can get emotional satisfaction.

In Sickened: The Memoir of a Munchausen by Proxy Childhood, Julie Gregory tells the story of growing up "fragile as a microwave soufflé," being forever tested for heart problems, migraines, food allergies, and anything else that her mother or whatever doctor is seeing her this month can think of. Being given medication that never cures anything, just makes her sicker than she was before. Being told, "I'm the mom: I know what's going on here. So if he asks you questions, you just let me answer" before doctor appointments, even though the elementary school girl already notices that "as she runs down the symptoms, I know some of them aren't all the way true." And when something is really wrong, her mother makes it worse: waiting hours to take her to have her broken wrist set (one during third grade, the other during fourth grade). Even a couple of incidents of misdiagnosis or parental error might befall any family. But Julie, and her younger brother, and even the foster children who arrive later, all seem oddly prone to all these different illnesses, and perhaps someone might have noticed this if it weren't for the secluded country house and the changes of doctors. (Or perhaps not; all the abuse stories I've read make me very sceptical about what people are willing to notice.) Her parents are hardly healthy in other ways either; her father makes her eat used tissues after she leaves them on the floor; her mother threatens suicide on multiple occasions.

Selections from Gregory's medical records throughout childhood are included in the book (doctors' names blacked out) and it's amazing how many can be summarized as "patient reports such-and-such symptom but we can't find anything wrong." Or perhaps it's not surprising at all; the parent is considered the authority, the one who knows when a child is acting cranky because they're tired and all those other not-obvious connections between outside and inside the offspring they're raising. If only all parents were really trustworthy interpreters.

Mom thinks I'm allergic to the new carpeting in our house, but Dr. Phillips puts me on an elimination diet to see if it's something I'm eating. He tells her to take chocolate, meat, eggs, dairy, and bread out of every meal I eat.

After our appointment, Mom and I amble down the aisles of the supermarket, my fingers looped through the metal slots of the cart as I watch what she pulls off the shelves: Oreo cookies, pork chops, Grade A eggs, two-percent milk, and a couple loaves of Wonder. Bay's Grocery doesn't seem to have any of the foods Dr. Phillips wants me to eat.

At sixteen, Julie is the one who discloses enough of what's happening to get the foster children taken away from her parents; she spends some time in foster care for her own safety ("And I wasn't sick anymore. The whole time I was in foster care, I didn't take any heart medications because they all got left behind when I ran away. Instead of seeing doctors, I spent my free hours jumping off the diving board and the public pool and shopping for clothes with my hospital [summer job] paycheck. It was going on six months since I'd seen a cardiologist...") but her parents go to court to get her back. "It was probably me, I told myself, just having a rough time adjusting to adolescence. Or, as Mom and the school counselor had decided in tenth grade, just an incredibly fertile imagination." Even once she's away from home, her upbringing hangs on: "The skinny and ravenous hospital girl of thirteen, the girl whose mother would not feed her, has given way to the skinny and ravenous girl of twenty-three, who cannot feed herself. [...] He [the doctor] doesn't ask me if I am eating. I don't know that I'm not. The way I care for myself is no different than the way Mom taught me to, following the doctor's advice."

Julie is in her mid-twenties and in a college psychology class before she ever hears of Munchausen syndrome by proxy. When she sees talk therapists, they are nearly as ignorant: "Most times I do not feel like a client, but an educator who pays to teach my therapist about MBP." But she identifies what has happened, faces her past and, unlike her brother and many others who were abused as kids, does not push all the bad times out of her mind. And she continues to take the brave steps of keeping children out of her mother's hands, when she finds out that her remarried mother has taken in children of her husband's relatives, putting up a web site, and eventually writing and publishing this book. I hope it spreads awareness of this condition and saves others from going through anything like her own experience.

Recently I picked up my big old omnibus volume of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series for relaxing reading while I was fighting a cold. I'm not all that picky about format (but I have had very little money for much of my life) so it's quite rare that I buy a hardcover version of something I already own in paperback. This series, Gone with the Wind, and Alice in Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass are the only ones I can think of where the paperbacks became so battered that I bothered to replace them with hardbound versions. For the Hitchhiker's books, the omnibus volume offers an author's introduction explaining why the books, the radio series, and the BBC television show have somewhat different plots, as well as an additional short story, but it's for the texts themselves that I acquired it.

Re-reading the Hitchhiker's books reminded me of how wonderful they are. Well, the first four. I read them out of order originally (second, first, fourth, third, I think) back in middle school, these stories of everyday Earthling Arthur Dent and his unwilling journey through time and space with Ford Prefect, an alien who got to know Arthur while stranded on Earth; Ford's two-headed, three-armed semi-cousin Zaphod Beeblebrox; Tricia "Trillian" McMillan, astrophysicist and mathematician who met Zaphod at a costume party in London. Douglas Adams was the master of digression, adding in random short chapters about planets entirely inhabited by pens or other gleefully ridiculous topics that somehow seem to explain a lot about how the universe works. Sometimes the digressions even ended up relating back to the main plot later, but that was a bonus. The fifth book, Mostly Harmless, doesn't live up to the others; it has its funny bits and if it hadn't followed such outstanding books it would probably rank above average, but compared to the first four it seems forced. However, I am thinking that my younger brother is about the age now that I was when I encountered the series, and perhaps I should buy him a copy of the first book and pass on the hilarity to a new generation.

I went on to read Adams' underappreciated Last Chance to See, a very different type of story because it's true. Adams and zoologist Mark Carwardine journeyed around the world to visit the habitats of various endangered animals (many of which, like the kakapo and the baiji, you may never have heard of if you haven't read this). However, Adams' "ignorant non-zoologist" narration is very reminiscent of Arthur Dent's bewildered Earthman at times. The book has its humor, but not like the Hitchhiker's books; it may be easy to laugh at the idea of ill-tempered aliens blowing up the Earth and all its creatures to make a hyperspace bypass, but not so when real-life humans drive the Yangtze river dolphin (baiji) to near-extinction through pollution and boat accidents. Adams was justifiably proud of this book for increasing awareness of the situation of many beings on this planet among readers who might not have picked up a book on wildlife otherwise.

And after I finish that, I'll probably pick up Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency and its sequel The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul, going back to the humor but in a more convoluted way than the Hitchhiker's books. Because reading some Douglas Adams always makes me sorry when it's over.

Khassan Baiev is a man with all the bravery his Chechen ancestors could have wanted. Yet amazingly, growing up among the stories of Russian and later Soviet attempts to subjugate the Chechens, including his own parents' deportation to Kazakhstan after World War II, and encountering prejudice during sports competitions and medical training in different parts of the Soviet Union, did not seem to have left him bitter. He returned to Chechnya from a Moscow practice when the likelihood of a Chechen-Russian war became apparent, and rather than taking his own family and fleeing as so many did (and they can hardly be blamed for it!) he stayed in Chechnya, first in the capital city of Grozny and then in his hometown of Alkhan Kala, to provide medical care -- and not just for the Chechen wounded, either; he treated Russians, soldiers and civilians, despite risk to himself from Chechens who considered this traitorous. As he says at one point, "Speaking to the Russian doctor felt perfectly normal, yet there was something strange about it because we were supposed to be on opposing sides. However, we were really both on the side of the wounded." Though with years of fighting destroying his homeland, it is understandable that "there were times . . . when I was tempted to exchange my scalpel for a gun," Baiev stuck to his resolve to try and protect life, even though "sometimes I felt as though I was the little Dutch boy with his hand in the dyke, only I was holding back blood."

Even when peace had been declared, medical work did not stop -- disease was rampant, both from germs and from stress. Baiev speaks of his own depression amongst the ruins, and it is certainly an example of what many, many others are going through in Chechnya and other war-torn regions once there is time to think of more than daily survival. Baiev's Islamic faith, and the opportunity to visit Mecca as Muslims are supposed to do at least once in their lives, provided a lift to his mental state. (And his mentions of the differences between Chechen and Saudi Muslim practices may help Westerners remember that Islam is no more an undivided movement than Christianity.)

After fighting started again, Baiev had several narrow escapes from both Chechen and Russian fighters who felt he was serving the other side and deserved execution. Eventually he was forced to leave Chechnya and serve his country differently by telling the story of events there. (His nephew Adam had worked for some time videotaping events in Chechnya and getting the tapes out to the rest of the world, and was killed because of it.) Baiev says speaking out to foreigners allowed him to feel "I was doing something useful to Chechnya." Eventually his family was able to join him in the United States, and he chronicles the difficulty of starting over in a new place, going from being a skilled surgeon to someone who doesn't speak the language or have the certifications to be allowed to practice medicine, adapting to a new culture, and recovering from the trauma of war. His work with Ruth and Nicholas Daniloff on this book, The Oath: A Surgeon Under Fire, serves as an overview of Chechen culture and its survival despite Russian control, a window into a war many Americans couldn't find on a map, and what a single determined human can achieve in the midst of the worst carnage.