Tag Archive: History

Hidings in Plain Sight

Saturday, June 13, 20200

We’re in quarantine, and what is there to do besides lots of TV, movies, online surfing, gaming, and reading. A couple of friends recommended the new book Hiding in Plain Sight, by Sarah Kendzior, a journalist, about the “rise of” Donald Trump. When I sought it out, it turned out there a whole slew of books with the title Hiding in Plain Sight, and what the heck, it was a “project”.

Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America 

Sarah Kendzior

I hate to say it, but… yawn, and no. Given her background in journalism and her history of pointing to “the dark times”, I have to say I expected a hell of a lot more. Basically the book is a bunch of repackaged info from various articles and opinion pieces we’ve been subjected to over the last four years plus since Trump became a prominent figure in the political world. Her primary news source seems to be Buzzfeed, and while not to denigrate them as a news source, they’re certainly not the be all and end all of political and economic news. Other than a brief glance at Trump’s early years, one would think on reading this book that he, the state of the U.S. both economically and politically, all began somewhere around the year 2000, during the Bush 2 years, and that it all came as a complete shift in the landscape of America from that moment on, and took everyone by surprise. Except her, of course, because she’s been sounding the alarm since then, basically the year she graduated from college. How prescient. The book focuses much on Trump’s connection to Russia, both to the Putin government and to shadowy crime figures in the Russian mafia in New York City, some named, some not – the vast majority of it based on his real estate dealings with various Russians, and little else. She also stoops to the tired, anti-semitic tropes of various “Jewish” finance figures – and before anyone jumps to point out that some of those figures Trump dealt with were, indeed, Jewish, let me just point out in return, she doesn’t refer to any of the myriad of other finance figures he’s dealt with over the years as “Christian”, “Muslim”, “Hindu”, “Buddhist”, or any other religions – but she makes sure to identify each Jew as a Jew, even down to reminding us more than once that Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, is “one of them”. I finished off the book feeling like a needed a shower. Not just from the possibility that some or even all, of what she wrote might be true (I’m not discounting that it may well be), but from her blatant biases. ☆☆

Hiding in Plain Sight: A Street Kid’s Journey from Female to Male

Zane Thimmesch-Gill

Not a book I would normally gravitate towards, but I’m glad I read it. It was a fascinating first person memoir of a “FTM”, or female to male, transgender teen, ostracized from, at the time, “her” family, following through to a mix of attempts at foster home living, living on the street, living in shelters, and more. All the while, she does her best to maintain high school and later, college studies, while coming to grips with one form of gender dysphoria that ultimately leads her partially down the path to a transition to being male. While we don’t know the eventual outcome, it’s clear that there’s no one path for him. For the most part the book is highly engaging, and paints a picture of a life that most of us can’t begin to imagine. At times it seems a bit overblown, and I found myself thinking, “how could you react to this situation like this, where someone is trying to help/be kind”, but, I’ve also never been in the situation, and no doubt there are psychological and physiological factors that I can’t fathom without having lived it. Worth a read. ☆☆☆☆

Hiding in Plain Sight: Eluding the Nazis in Occupied France

Sarah Lew Miller

A quick read. Understandably, given the subject matter – a teenage Jewish girl’s story of her family’s survival during WWII, it’s kind of hard not to compare it to the more famous work of Anne Frank. But it’s not the same story – different countries, different situations, different outcomes. It lacks some of the intensity of the famed Diary, mostly because she, and her family, are able to basically continue to live their lives. They get jobs, they find places to live, they have neighbors and friends, they have people who help them and care for them. It’s still a very poignant story, and a reminder of a time not all that long ago. And, of course, given the times we’re living in, it’s difficult not to also consider the lives of people around the world during the current pandemic, and the different levels of existence that different people, in various cultures, are experiencing. Well worth a read. ☆☆☆☆

Hiding in Plain Sight: The Incredible True Story of a German-Jewish Teenager’s Struggle to Survive in Nazi-Occupied Poland

Betty Lauer

Staying in virtually the same theme, we once again have a teenager’s diary, in essence, of the same. So, I’ll start it with the same opening as the previous review…. Understandably, given the subject matter – a teenage Jewish girl’s story of her family’s survival during WWII, it’s kind of hard not to compare it to the more famous work of Anne Frank. But it’s not the same story – different countries, different situations, different outcomes. The book is well written, and although phrased in first person, is, as above, an “as told to”, by the author. The life of young Berta Weissberger, and the place and time that the book covers, are actually pretty interesting, a bit more so, or perhaps it’s just the quality of the writing, than the previous book. The biggest issue in this book is that the book is almost as interminable as the six years it covers – it goes on for nearly 600 pages, detailing day to day life in, at times, excruciatingly unnecessary detail, as one day after another often looks much like the previous day. Still, I found it an engaging read and worth recommending. ☆☆☆☆

Hiding in Plain Sight: A Shelby Belgarden Mystery

Valerie Sherrard

Without meaning to be flip about it, this is the sort of book that people who like this sort of book will like. It’s a cute mystery, a bit “Nancy Drew” – all teenage girls and giggles and crushes and the like. As such, it’s not my cup of tea, but then, I’m not the target audience for the book either. It’s clearly a “YA” book aimed at the teen set of the female gender. Maybe because I read a lot of mysteries, or maybe just because the author makes sure to point out the clues, several of them repeatedly, in a sort of “this will be on the test” manner, but I’d basically worked out the whole thing by a little over halfway through the book. If you’re a teenage girl who likes easy reading mysteries, you may well enjoy this. ☆☆☆

Hiding in Plain Sight

Lucy Felthouse

I… just can’t. I’m not even sure if it was well written, it was just so far outside my personal comfort zone to read that I couldn’t give you an honest assessment of that. Nothing red flagged me with major grammar or spelling typos, so, there’s that. But, basically, it’s a soft-porn novel that pretends to be about a supposed professional, experienced spy. One who just turns to jelly when a handsome man looks at her, and a) can’t get her and his clothes off fast enough, b) immediately heads into the “oooh, a man likes me and he’s sexy and kisses well, maybe I should give it all up for love, and c) can’t keep her mind on her job. Professional…? I don’t get the hype and high reviews for this book – unless they’re all coming from very, very, lonely people. ☆☆

Hiding in Plain Sight

Mary Ellis

A well written, fast paced, easy read of a private detective novel. I like the style, I found the principal characters likable. And, I don’t mind that there’s a clear Catholic bent to both the writing and the story – I assume that that’s the author’s background and she brings what she knows to make the novel work. But, there are negatives. The secondary characters are a bit caricatured, right out of central casting stereotypes for Italian Americans; the Catholicism takes momentary negative turns with snide or disparaging remarks or thoughts on the part of the principals towards other Christians, and, no doubt the horror to end all horrors, those of either lapsed faith, or… can we use the word, atheists; and last, while not limited to this author, why does it seem like every female detective needs to fall head over heals in love with some guy who she randomly meets on a case? (If anyone can point me to a detective series with a strong female protagonist who doesn’t go that route, I’m interested!) It was still an enjoyable read, though the negatives are enough that I don’t find myself moved to continue on to other books in the series. ☆☆☆

This seems a good place wrap up this post, with a septet of books delved into. There are plenty more of the same name, plus a slew of Hide in Plain Sight, or just In Plain Sight. On the fiction side they seem to bounce between romance and detective novels, while on the non-fiction side, there’s a hunt for Nazis, a bible truths tome, a book of investing essays, and more. Whether I come back to this venture remains to be seen. It was an interesting approach to finding things to read that I might not normally be on the lookout for, and instead, I might just try something similar with another title. Time will tell.

 

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Two Thousand Seven Hundred and Eleven Leaves

Saturday, January 4, 20200

The Talmud. You might have heard of it, you might not. I grew up knowing that it existed, but within the Reform and Conservative Jewish traditions, it’s not something we spend a lot of time studying. We more or less stick with the Torah, the first five books of the Bible. If you’d have asked me, even a couple of days ago, what the Talmud is, I’d have said it was a collection of laws and commentary on the Torah. Turns out, that’s only partially right. It’s a collection of laws and commentary on Jewish life, back in the day, though it derives its essence from the Torah. I imagine it as a somewhat dry reading, but then, when one (or at least I) casually thinks about reading the Bible, that same thought comes to mind, though the reality is anything but – having read through it many a time in my life.

It looks daunting. It is daunting. You can see how it’s sort of divided into sections. If I understand it correctly, in the center is the heading, that part is obvious. It’s immediately followed below by the Mishnah, which is a written down version of the halakah, rabbinic law, as it was codified in the early 3rd century CE. Huh, I always assumed the Talmud was far older than that – that’s surprise number one, what’s known as the Babylonian Talmud, which is sort of the official one (I gather there’s an earlier one called the Jerusalem Talmud) came together in the 4th century. You can see that the style of writing changes about halfway down, and then lopes off into an L, that’s the Gemara, which is the rabbinical analysis on the Mishnah it follows, and is written in Aramaic. The inverted L to the upper right of this is Rashi, who was a medieval French rabbi who wrote, I gather, the single most authoritative and complete commentary on the entire Talmud and Torah. The L to the left and below is the Tosafot, commentary by rabbis and sages from roughly the 12th and 13th centuries. Some pages have another L outside of that one with more, and, I guess, lesser rabbinical commentaries, which would be placed below those margin notes on the left. Those margin notes are cross references to other texts for “further reading”. The margin notes to the right are – if at the top, further cross references, but ones that were added centuries later, and if down towards the bottom, “glosses”, or “short comments” by later rabbis who felt they had to get their two cents in – sometimes, apparently, useful, sometimes, cryptic. Did I mention, daunting?

I had vaguely heard about Daf Yomi, which means, loosely, “a page a day”. It’s a sort of loose knit, world wide community of people, some of them avid scholars, many, however, not, who undertake to read (and gain some understanding) one page of the 2711 double paged leaves (the photo above is just one side of “a page”) of the entire Talmud. Every day, without exception. It takes around seven and a half years. I’ve heard various estimates – some people spend 10-15 minutes a day doing it, some spend an hour. Given that most who undertake this are not ancient language scholars, and the Talmud is written in a combination of ancient Hebrew and Aramaic, most – probably all – people who head down this rabbit hole read the Talmud in one translation or another in their native tongue.

When it popped up as a conversation on one of my favorite podcasts, Unorthodox, sponsored by Tablet Magazine, I thought… why not? I mean, I could have as easily asked, why? One of the podcasts members, Liel Leibovitz, was diving in, and setting up a new podcast, where he would, five times a week, take 5-10 minutes to discuss the day’s (or two days’ at a time in two cases a week, I assumed one was because of not wanting to record a podcast episode on the Sabbath, I’m not sure what the other one is) tract. At the least, I could commit to listening to a 5-10 minute podcast, and see how it goes. He also recommended following along on the webpage or phone app called Sefaria, which provides a lightly annotated version of the Talmud in English. I downloaded it and took a look, and it looks to be about 10 minutes of reading, maybe less, each day. So, at least at the start, I’ll give that a shot, listen to his podcast – and hey, 15-20 minutes a day, I can do that… right? We shall see. [I later added in the short emailed commentary from MyJewishLearning which you can subscribe to.]

I’m not going to do a daily post on this, as I don’t feel like filling this blog up with 2711 mini posts. So I’ll create a page with a sort of Twitter, or slightly longer, comment on what I thought of the day’s venture (link below).

I guess (assuming this goes well), I’ll divide this up the way the Talmud is divided – it’s in six sedarim – “orders”, or “books”, each divided into masekhot – tractates of varying number (but 63 in total), and each of those is divided into chapters that cover, if I am getting this, a particular overarching topic (525 in total), and each chapter is then divided into the different pages, each one featuring one or more mishnah (remember, the rabbinic law or Torah bit that’s being discussed, and 4,198 of them in total split up on those 2,711 pages). So, away we go….

Link to my Daf Yomi commentary

 

 

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You Can Keep Your $3 Bill

Friday, October 18, 20193

I’m not Queer. I’m Gay. Clinically, I suppose Homosexual. But, I’m not Queer.

I was recently chastised for not “being woke” and “accepting my Queer identity”. Well, sorry, but I don’t have one of those. “If you’re Gay, you’re Queer, you just haven’t accepted it yet” was the response. Well, no, if they were the same thing, if it wasn’t a separate identity tag, we wouldn’t need both a G and a Q in that ridiculous alphabet soup of 2SLGBTQIA+. We’d pick one and stick with it. We’d come up with one term to encompass us all, and we could have one letter. Maybe a superfluous letter like C. I don’t know what it would stand for, but it would be far easier.

Sidebar: When I first moved to NYC in 1982, I was fairly active politically in gay politics, and I became a volunteer at what was then NGTF, the National Gay Task Force. I became part of the “inner circle” of people who met at least once a week, usually twice – I was one of the two people who setup, ran, and trained the staff for the “crisis hotline” that we started around that time. And, I was part of the debate that went on for many long hours in 1985 over whether or not to change the name to NGLTF, the National Gay & Lesbian Task Force. I came down on the side of no. Not because I didn’t understand the argument from the lesbians who proposed it, but because I felt that it was a slippery slope to ending up with, as I put it above, a ridiculous alphabet soup, as one group after another came forward to demand an addition to the name. Those of us in that group ended up being the minority, and the executive board passed and changed the name. We were assured that it would “never happen”. Thankfully, somewhere along the line, as it did actually happen, the board decided against ending up with the N2SGLBTQIA+TF and the organization became simply known as The Task Force. I think it kind of loses something there, but maybe that’s just me.

See, I’m from a generation where the word queer was an epithet, something that got said to you while you were being slammed up against a locker in the hallway. It was used just as often as fag, the other major slur thrown out as a fist smashed into your jaw. It was, perhaps, a trifle more polite among genteel society, who might never tell a fag joke, but held nothing back when telling a queer one. Sort of the equivalent of sambo, spook, or spade for Black people in place of nigger (I’m going to use a few terms in this post that I would never normally use, because I want them to make a point – I hope never to use them again).

And perhaps that’s why it was “chosen” as one to create a political/social identity. “Reclaiming the word” from the haters, much as some in the Black community reclaimed the word nigger, though at times modifying into nigga, perhaps to show some sort of difference, or evolution, or perhaps it’s just an Ebonic shift [Edit: John McWhorter, one of my favorite linguists, has a whole section of one of his podcasts devoted to the difference, I stand corrected.]. The problem is, as it is for many Black people hearing that word, that queer to me still brings up all those old associations of hate. I’m not interested in putting in the work on my psyche to shift my view and make it a positive thing, burying the past. It’s no surprise that while this movement started in the 1980s, the word queer has primarily been adopted by younger generations, ones for whom the word already has begun to lose its sharp edge while they were growing up. Someone throws it at them and they can proudly claim it for themselves.

But for me – hey, let me adopt the vernacular of the day – it’s a trigger word. You get to have yours, you want me to be woke enough to accept that there are words that trigger you? Fine, you better woke up yourself and accept that your word choice is one for me. I’m not going to demand that you don’t use it, I am going to demand that you accept that it’s not the word for me, and that no matter how many times you say it proudly, I’m going to cringe, and find it offensive. And while I understand your desire for me to use it when I refer to you, it’s a word that I simply won’t use – I’ll do my best not to offend you by using a word that’s not your preference, but I’m not going to use a word that for me, retains its derogatory meaning.

But, even more so, in this presidential campaigning season, I’m finding it offensive from those who are not a member of either the Queer or Gay or Lesbian or… you get the idea… communities. Elizabeth Warren, who is not my “cup of tea”, I often agree with her on what the problems are, but rarely on what the solutions are, is the worst offender. She stands up in front of crowds and bursts out with how happy she is to be in front of her “Queer brothers and sisters” or some such. Not 2SLGBTQIA+, or any variation of, or speaking those out in their individual words. No, she just lumps us all as one big Queer Community. And it grates on my nerves every time. I mean, even Mayor Pete doesn’t do that, and he at least would have some claim to be a part of the generally identified group.

Now, let’s try a thought experiment. Or two. Let’s go to a Trump rally. Remember when Trump said that he was “a real friend of the gays”? Imagine that he said “I’m a real friend of the queers”. Imagine that he stood in front of a group of Black voters and said, “I’m a real friend of the niggas”. Or the Jewish community and said, “I’m a real friend of the kikes”. Etc., etc. But okay, I get it, Donald Trump is way and below “not my cup of tea” for many of us. So let’s go back to Warren, or one of the other Democratic candidates who has, on occasion, thrown out the word queer (though as best I can think of, she’s the only one who has used it on its own, a couple of others have either used the acronym or spelled it out with gay, lesbian, bi, queer, trans…). Imagine Warren standing in front of a group of “ethnic” voters of appropriate stripe and saying, “I’m so happy to be in front of a proud group of my nigga/kike/spic/wop/towelhead/nip/chink brothers and sisters”?

I’m guessing you can get that that wouldn’t go over well with a whole lot of them. And you know what, “queer” doesn’t go over well with a whole lot of us.

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The Book Stack #9

Sunday, June 11, 20170

jumbled books

Forbidden Thoughts, editor Jason Rennie (2017).

This book got a lot of play in the last year or so as “Milo” rose to (in)fame with his various political antics. And antics they are, watching him speak or reading his rants, it’s pretty clear that regardless of whether he believes what says or not, he’s not actually interested in anything but self aggrandizement. Mostly his positions are pretty poorly formed and rely on the misdirection of using non-PC language and/or personal attacks, taking everyone’s attention off of the lack of substance to anything he’s saying. Yet somehow, the editor and publisher of this collection of short stories, decided that his name on the cover would be an attraction. It worked. But then, for those seeking to read more of his work, the disappointment of finding that all he did was write a foreword note at the beginning of the book that has little if anything to do with the content. He asserts that there’s never been a collection of such revolutionary non-PC science fiction in all of history. Obviously he’s clueless to the Libertarian origins of much of modern Sci-Fi, or even the genre as a whole. But let’s set all that aside and get on to the meat of the book itself.

There are some great stories in here that save the book from being worthy of nothing more than the scrap heap. The problem is, there are also a bunch, probably more than half, of the stories, that do little more than attempt to incense the reader by being as non-PC as they possibly can, throwing in words and thoughts and actions that are guaranteed to horrify anyone with leanings to the left. But they go way too far, and I don’t mean that because I’m incensed by them, but because they’re little more than the same as I accuse Milo of above. They’re distractions, they’re glaring baubles, designed to do nothing more than distract the reader from the fact that the stories have no substance. They’re just ranting and exaggeration designed for effect and show the authors’ complete lack of story telling ability.

In the end, there’s just not enough to recommend the book. There’s far better, shall we say, non-leftist, non-PC science fiction out there than anything in this book. ☆☆

Infomocracy by Malka Older (2016).

It’s an interesting read, relatively fast paced, and I enjoyed it. On the other hand, it was a little like going to an all you can eat buffet, where you take some of everything, get back to your table, and it’s both too much food to eat, and not all of it quite goes together on the same plate.

Taking the level of suspension of disbelief into the political and information realm, it requires that you believe that countries that currently exist still kinda sorta do, but not exactly, and are instead now connected not by cultural or racial heritage, but by a mosaic of political viewpoints, scattered across the globe. Often they’re completely disparate to their neighbors, and even within individual countries, broken up into a mess of political parties, some run by corporations, some by de facto governments, some by grassroots organizations.

And somehow, within all of this, we’re expected to buy into that all of these same factionalized and fractionalized groups of people and political organizations have agreed to have everything coordinated by one single entity that provides them with filtered information so they can make a decision where they want to live and work at any given moment. Throw in a gratuitous romance with two high powered individuals, who somehow decide, in the midst of all this Information overload, to not bother to check each other out but just go on gut feeling, and then proceed to violate the principles of their careers just because each other was good in bed.

It doesn’t make it a less fun read, but it does make it a little hard to swallow. ☆☆☆☆

The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu (2014).

This one was a slow slog to get started on, and several times during probably the first half of it I was tempted to just give up and set it aside. Much of that, I think, is that it felt like a slightly stilted translation – as if the translator was searching for a way to express concepts that he didn’t quite know how to put into English fluidly. I’m glad I stuck through it, as in the end, I liked the way it developed and will probably go on to read the rest of the trilogy. I wasn’t wowed, but I was intrigued.

It’s interesting, given the political climate in which we’re living these days, in various parts of the world, how the premise of first contact is handled. The idea that humans basically divide into two camps (three in the book, but still more or less fall into two ideals) – those who see contact as a threat (in this case an explicit one) and do all in their power to resist, and those who see it as an inevitability with which they collaborate. Kind of reminds me of the current sci-fi television show Colony.

I also liked the undercurrent of the conflict between science and religion, though I think it’s perhaps drawn as too starkly a black and white issue, one or the other. That probably fits more the Chinese cultural model of what science and religion are all about (though I’m no expert on Chinese culture), at least from what I’ve gleaned over the years. ☆☆☆

The Gourmet Detective mystery series (8 volumes), by Peter King (1996-2003).

Okay, hmm… I’ve read the whole series now. I’m not going to do individual book reviews, some of them are better than others, but they’re all enjoyable, quick reads. Then again, throw gourmet food and wine into anything and I’m likely to add some points to it in my mind. Bizarrely, though, given that I gave all the books three stars, I don’t know that I recommend them. Had they been written fifty years ago, I’d give them some more slack, but here are my issues with, well, all of them:

The gourmet detective himself, our protagonist, is an unlikable twit. He’s a middle aged, pretentious white man, with delusions of self importance. He fancies himself a ladies man and, of course, manages to get one or another into bed (trailed off, never portrayed, just make sure we know it happened, wink, wink) in all or almost all the books. He’s misogynistic, racist, and classist. He fancies himself a connoisseur of all things food and wine, and throws about names and terms, most of which the average reader will not have heard of, and will probably just move past without much thought. The problem is, he’s pretty much clueless and the mistakes in his descriptions of various ingredients, dishes, and bottles of fermented grape juice are legion.

In short, and yes, I realize I’m generalizing and could be accused of bias myself, he’s the sort of detective that a 70+ year old retired upper middle class British metallurgical engineer (who apparently at some point went to the Cordon Bleu cooking school to be trained as a chef, though my bet is he just took a few cooking classes for home cooks, then again, who knows, but it seems he did it after retiring at some point in his 70s) would reimagine himself to be if he were to become a food detective. In short, a sort of Walter Mitty alter ego. ☆☆☆

Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis by J.D. Vance (2016).

You know the running joke where people start comparing how hard they had it growing up… it starts with something like “we had to walk 5 miles to school every day…” and ends up with things like “uphill both ways” “cardboard boxes for shoes”, etc., etc.? This book is that done in long form. It’s an ostensible memoir from someone who grew up in a disadvantaged, poor community (except he really didn’t, he grew up skirting around it, because he actually spent most of his childhood living with or near relatives or step-relatives who were fairly well off and encouraged him to stay away from that community) who spends nearly 300 pages trying to convince us that his particular disadvantaged, poor community has it worse than any other one. And he also ricochets between being pretentious about his own life and condescending about his roots and the people who still live there, and trying to hold them up as somehow better by virtue of being in worse straits than how he imagines (with no evidence that he has any experience of) other disadvantaged, poor communities to be. Basically it’s a barely veiled tome touting “Hillbilly (i.e., poor white) Lives Matter More” and as such is just as egregious as much of the BLM movement comes across at times. ☆☆

Daimyo by S. Lee Lyndon (2014-2015).

Really enjoyed this entire trilogy. It was an interesting glimpse into a culture and period that I’m not overly familiar with, other than just peripherally from being into the martial arts world. It would be a complete spoiler to tell you what the overall arc of the story is, so let’s just say it covers the adventures of a young Japanese fisherman as he matures in life. In the end, while a totally logical step by step, the overall arc of the three books is a bit far-fetched, but fun to follow along. It’s a sort of novel form of the theory of inheritance of acquired characteristics, or adaptation, sometimes called Lamarckism, i.e., that somehow or other non-biological accomplishments and internalized histories can be passed down genetically to the next generations (pretty much a dismissed idea in the genetic world). Still, a very enjoyable read. ☆☆☆☆

Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right by Arlie Russell Hochschild (2016).

This one was as difficult to read as it probably was to write. An outsider attempts as close as possible, an insider view of a particular culture, in this case, far right wing, for the most part fundamentalist Christian, Tea Party voters, from an industrial area in Louisiana. She ingratiates herself into their world and admirably does her best to tell their stories, particularly what has led to their political alignment and voting (what’s often talked about in left wing media as “why do these people vote against their best interests?”). She succeeds in making it interesting, and even in giving a decent view into the logic and thought that these folk use. At the same time, if it was at any point her intention to make them look actually logical or sensible, she fails, because bluntly, they come across looking more moronic than the so-called “liberal media” has ever portrayed them. Maybe that was her real, behind the scenes intention from the start. ☆☆☆

Sixteen books seems enough to give you some reading material for now…. Enjoy!

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The Book Stack #4

Sunday, May 15, 20160

jumbled books
The brunt of my reading over the last many weeks since my last post (and it actually started before that last post) was binge reading through Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files (April 1, 2000 – May 27, 2014) novels.
dresden files
It’s going to seem short shrift to place them all into one small review, but I’m not going to go through and review each individual one of the fifteen. I found them to be fun, irreverent, easy reads, the basic premise, the exploits of an openly proclaimed wizard in Chicago, as he fights demons, ghouls, and more, alongside the local police department’s division for handling stuff that no one can explain, no one wants to handle, and no one wants to talk about. Harry Dresden is a wisecracking magically endowed private investigator who loves nothing more than bringing in cult movie and television references, more or less just to see if anyone around him is paying attention. I found the series to get a bit off the rails in books 13 and 14, where it seemed like Butcher was taking it in a totally new direction, and the writing seemed a bit lost, but it all came back on track in the current last novel. Overall, a great series to get started on if you like the world of magic, the paranormal, crime, and punishment! The series was turned into a not short-lived enough, and truly, appallingly, bad television show that shouldn’t have lasted through the first season that it did. ☆☆☆☆

Several years ago someone recommended Robert Harris’ historical novel Imperium: A Novel of Ancient Rome (September 19, 2006) to me. Given my love of things Italian, history, and fiction, it was a match made in heaven. It’s basically a fictional account of the life of Marcus Cicero, the famed orator of the Roman senate, as he first came to power. The book is written as an eyewitness account from his personal slave and secretary, Tiro. Historical fiction is a favorite genre of mine, and this was completely engaging, and more or less a “couldn’t put it down” kind of read. My recollection is I read through it in a matter of a couple of days. And, obviously, I loved it. As to why I didn’t jump right into the next book in the series, I truly can’t tell you. But, it suddenly occurred to me that I hadn’t, and I rectified that with a plunge into Conspirata: A Novel of Ancient Rome (March 30, 2010) right after finishing the Dresden Files. Equally as good, the story continues with Cicero’s political career as he encounters some of the best known figures of that time, including Julius Caesar. Political machinations are the core of the second novel, and it’s surprising in many ways how little the world of political intrigue has changed in the millenia since (then again, the novels are written by someone living in today’s world, so it may be that Harris simply borrows from that which is familiar to a modern audience). In the world of “court politics” or “palace intrigue” this easily rivals the intricacy of well known pop culture references like Game of Thrones, House of Cards, or Scandal. Looking forward to the next novel! ☆☆☆☆

Neal Stephenson, Seveneves, (May 19, 2015)

One of the things that’s count-on-able with Stephenson’s longer novels is that they follow a predictable pattern. If you assume roughly 900 pages or thereabouts for most of them, there will be an initiating event, something that starts the entire story in motion, something to grab your attention, and it will take up the first 150-200 pages. Then there will be roughly 400-500 pages of character development, lots of explication, lots of looking at how motivations develop, lots of “here, let me explain why the story, when we get to it, is going to go the way it goes”. And then it’s finished off with what amounts to the “real” novel, about 250-300 pages where all the action that was set in motion, and influenced by all the motivations developed during the entire middle section, happens. I hear time and again how people launched into one of his books with fascination at the premise, and then gave up 100 or so pages further on when it just got too tedious to continue. And they miss out on all the good part when the story takes off again.

This book is no different. I read through section 1 in under two hours, a complete page turner. Then it took me a month to get through to “section 3” (pages 567-861), because I found I couldn’t read more than a few pages of section 2 (pages 227-567) at a time without drifting off. And then I read through section 3 without pausing in roughly two hours.

Loved sections one and three. I appreciate the info in section two, but my god there’s got to be a way to do that midsection of all of his books in half or fewer of the pages. ☆☆☆☆

Lucy Burdette, Killer Takeout, (April 5, 2016)

Last year I whizzed my way through the six novels of the “Key West Food Critic Mysteries”. Basically, I’d refer you to that review, particularly the last couple of paragraphs where I summed up the series. Much the same holds true for this seventh novel, a fun read, but showing a decided lack of knowledge in the food world.

Although I’ve liked this series a fair amount, something about this latest volume just felt a little thrown together, as if it wasn’t thought through as well as the others, and that’s saying something given my thoughts about the series. I still enjoyed it, just not as much as the rest.

I hadn’t done any research into the author, and “Lucy Burdette” turns out to be a pen-name for Roberta Isleib, a clinical psychologist, also known for writing a series of golf-mystery novels, and who writes an advice column under the title “Ask Dr. Aster”. A psychologist with three different identities… just something to muse upon.

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Books (Reviews)

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The Book Stack #2

Tuesday, January 5, 20160

jumbled books
What have we this time around?

You look at the title, Bread Wine Chocolate, and you’re already engaged. I mean, what’s not to like? Clearly three items selected from the book to grab our attention, since in reality, the book is, in order, Wine Chocolate Coffee Beer Bread Octopus. The book came highly anticipated, with suggestions being bandied about that this would be the next big, amazing food book. I clicked a link, put in my Kindle cue to be purchased when it was released, and more or less forgot about it until it showed up one day. I might have left my cursor hovering over the button rather than clicking, had I taken a moment to check out the author, Simran Sethi, a former MTV producer turned news anchor for, oh, MTV, who has gone on to continue work in the media world for various… how can I put this politely… touchie feelie outlets like Mother Earth News and TreeHugger. I’m not, at all, against the environment, sustainability, or anything else of the sort, don’t get me wrong, but it might have had me wondering about her bias in advance, rather than after the fact.

Though in truth, it’s not her bias that ruins this book for me. It’s her writing. I really wanted to like the book. There’s some great, well researched information in it. The problem is, it’s presented in a manner that ping-pongs back and forth between journalistic factual reporting and breathless golly gee whiz wow teen girl gossip style at a pace that would make the cut editors of Reality Bites envious. She also comes across as really, really, self absorbed, self indulgent, and self anything else you might care to insert, as she wings her way across the world with hand-grinder for coffee beans in one hand and an Aeropress brewer in the other, ruing that she isn’t back home with her Keurig machine (oh yeah, all those K-cups are just great for the environment) and her $13 designer chocolate bars. She spends the first couple of chapters of the book outlining what she’s going to cover and why she’s the one to do so, and how much we’re going to appreciate her having done so. Yes, yes, she got down and dirty with the folk who produce these various products, and sampled and tasted and learned to appreciate things at their source. And then promptly trundled back to her hotel to soak in the tub and anxiously write her next words on the balcony at sunset and then jet off to another exotic locale. If you like to hug trees, you’ll probably like this book.

I mentioned in the last book round-up that I had started working my way through a proposed list of the 51 Best Fantasy series. I’m not sure why it didn’t occur to me, that if they’re rated from best, #1, to least best, #51, that progressively, I might like these series less, and less. I’m not sure that will hold true completely – after all, as I mentioned then as well, the Discworld canon wouldn’t even make it onto my list of good, let alone 7th Best. But there does seem to be a slight decline each round. I’ve started in on Joe Abercrombie’s The First Law trilogy, beginning with The Blade Itself. It’s a relatively easy read.

There are things about it I really like – it’s written in a light-hearted tone, with a bit of humor. The series is often compared to Song of Fire and Ice, the Game of Thrones inspiring stack of books, and in some ways, I can see that – the action sequences, the bloody, grisly, details. But in other ways, not so much – the political manipulations and intrigue are there, but more or less ho-hum, there doesn’t seem to be any big, sweeping vista – within the first few chapters it’s obvious that all the lead characters’ lives are going to quite quickly intersect, in a pretty predictable way. Some reviewers have said that that gets turned on its head as the trilogy progresses, and by the end of the third book, nothing will be as anticipated. I can only hope so. It’s interesting enough to continue forward.

One of the finest books from one of the early crafters of modern science fiction, Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination is a long time favorite that I hadn’t read in quite some time. Another list of “bests”, this time from io9, The Essential Cyberpunk Reading List starts off with this one.

Filled with Evil Corporations, interplanetary intrigue, bio-engineering, power, greed, revenge, and the obligatory Sub-Culture, this has all the elements that make for a great cyberpunk read. Given when this was written, in the early 1950s, it’s a brilliant precursor to that movement at a time when “cyber” didn’t yet mean anything and “punk” meant something completely different. Gripping story, fast paced action, and even it’s own “street” language that fits the genre perfectly. It’s a relatively short book (or at least in comparison to some of those I’ve been reading recently), and with its pace, it’s the sort you can sit down and read through on a rainy afternoon.

A couple of years ago I read the book Of Dice and Men, a look back at the early days of Dungeons & Dragons, and, those of us nerds who played it. I was an avid player of the game back in the mid to late 70s, and have continued a fascination with the world(s) created by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, the original duo behind the game. I’ve gone on to play computer based games, both early ones that were limited to being installed on your computer and played by one or a couple of people, and on, to MMORPGs, the massive universes created online like Everquest and Worlds of Warcraft.

The earlier book I mentioned was mostly focused on the game itself, and the gamers who took it and ran with it. There was plenty of biographical information about the creators, but you couldn’t call it biography. Michael Witwer’s Empire of Imagination takes another run at it. As he says in the introduction, he couldn’t believe when he started researching the book that no one had ever written a biography of Gary Gygax, who, while not a household name except to those of us in the gaming world, created something that went on to be the foundation for things we take for granted in modern day life, everything from the use of computers for games, to the advent of social media. As he also points out, it’s telling, that in an episode of the pop-culture show Futurama, Gygax’s character is paired up with Lieutenant Uhura, Al Gore, and Steven Hawking – taking on the universe. The book is well written, completely engaging, and for anyone with an interest in the topic, a must read.

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Books (Reviews)

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The Book Stack #1

Sunday, December 27, 20150

jumbled books
A selection out of what I’ve been reading recently. They don’t really need an introduction.

I like Charles Pierce’s writing, and he often hits the nail on the head. This book, Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free, is no exception. For the most part, he just lays it out there and shows just how idiotic many things in our country have become. Do I always agree with him? No. But it’s always thought provoking. Does he always make his case? No. He does against the “easy” targets, where he can just point out flaws that probably any thinking person would immediately see. But when it comes to making fun of, which is really what the book is, targets where there are philosophical, moral, ethical, even intellectual debate (particularly with arenas that broach into the world of religious faith), he points, but doesn’t provide the backup evidence, making the assumption that anyone reading his book is of like mind with him, and will simply agree that whatever he’s pointed to is worthy of mockery. For those of us who struggle at times with reconciling science, logic, and faith into a composite whole, those chapters come across a bit smarmy. Still, a recommended read, just to get the mental cogs turning.

Secretly, I grew up kind of wanting to be Alexander Mundy. He was the cat burglar turned spy-thief for the Secret Intelligence Agency of the US government in the late 60s television series It Takes a Thief. The show was inspired by the Hitchcock film To Catch a Thief (1955) starring Cary Grant, and on the flipside, while not acknowledged, is probably in the background of things like the late 2000s show White Collar, and certainly has some influences from the life of Frank Abagnale, whose life then went on to inspire the Spielberg film Catch Me If You Can. All that aside, I had visions of being a cat burglar, when I wasn’t entertaining visions of being a forest ranger or FBI agent. How things change as we grow up. I’ve always maintained a fascination with the news of jewel and art thieves, and while now there’s simply no likelihood of taking either up as a profession, I enjoy reading about the heists. Still one of, if not the largest, diamond theft in history, the story in Flawless: Inside the Largest Diamond Heist in History is a reasonably in-depth analysis of the most likely scenario for how the theft went down. Some of it is clearly speculative, especially attributions of motivations and thought processes lent to the main actor, Leonardo Notarbartolo (after whom I’ve named a Pandaren rogue in World of Warcraft, for those into that sort of thing). And some of it is pieced together from what evidence and testimony was available to the authors, Scott Andrew Selby and Greg Campbell. It’s clearly well researched and very well written. If I have any quibble with the book is that the ending is an awfully quick wrap-up – akin to the sort of thing one sees at the end of a competition show, where the eliminated contestant’s picture is shown for a moment along with a caption of “John Smith is happy back with his family and thinking about what to do next.” One wants to know, “Where are they now? What are they up to?” Well worth a read.

A few months back, Buzzfeed published a list of what they considered the 51 Best Fantasy Series ever written. Now, there’s nothing that says that anyone at Buzzfeed is an expert on the topic, nor that the choice of 51 (why 51?) series was a good one, but I was casting about for somethings interesting to read and thought I’d start in on the list. I quickly read through the first couple of series, I’m not going to go back and review them now as my memory is already getting hazy on them, but I highly recommend all of Patrick Rothfuss’ The Kingkiller Chronicles, Brandon Sanderson’s The Stormlight Archive, and Brent Weeks’ The Lightbringer series, particularly the first, which was one of the best fantasy series I’ve ever read, though the next two series are almost as good. All captured my attention and engaged me, and I was glad to have discovered them via the list. I skipped over A Song of Ice and Fire by George R.R. Martin (the books behind Game of Thrones) and Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings, simply because I’ve read them in the past. And I’m going to skip the 41 novels of the Discworld saga from Pratchett, because I’ve given them a try, and after 1½ of them, read a year or two ago, I just gave up on them as simply not my cup of weak tea.

Now, to this series, His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman, including three novels, The Golden Compass (aka Northern Lights), The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass. It feels a bit more like a teen read than an adult fantasy read. Some of that is simply the characters, the primary ones being children in their early teens. But more of it is that it’s written in a borderline puerile style. I found that although I enjoyed them, I wasn’t particularly engaged by them. There’s a lot of railing against what is an awfully thinly veiled Catholic church, and of a government influenced by religious leaders, clearly the author isn’t a fan of either. There’s a lot of moralizing, but it’s very superficial. And in the end, the ostensible resolution is pretty insipid. The first volume has been turned into a movie of the same name, and albeit also pretty kid-oriented and “Hollywood”, is actually better than the book, a rarity in my experience. While not bad reads, there are certainly other books in the genre more worth putting your time into, as noted above.

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Politics – same pitch, different day

Monday, April 20, 20150

Joffe, Josef (2013-11-04). The Myth of America’s Decline: Politics, Economics, and a Half Century of False Prophecies

Quite possibly the best debunking of the misuse of statistics and political rhetoric I’ve ever read. For anyone who laments the loss of bipartisan cooperation in America, and the rise of shrill extremism, this is a must read. I’m just going to include a little excerpt from the book here rather than carry on with my own opinion:

Actually, “the sky is falling” should not be a very lucrative pitch. Such alarms stoke fear and panic; why invest in the future if the clock is running down? But the message has worked wonders since time immemorial because doom, in biblical as well as political prophecy, always comes with a shiny flip side, which is redemption. Darkness is the prelude to dawn. The gloomy forecast reviles past and present in order to promise the brightest of futures. Start with fire and brimstone, then jump to grace and deliverance in the here and now. Listen to Jeremiah as he thunders, “Turn from your wicked ways and reform your actions; then you will live in the [promised] land.” Jeremiah may have been the father of modern campaign politics.

Preachers and politicos take naturally to this one-two punch because ruin followed by renewal is the oldest narrative in the mental data bank of mankind. The device is even older than the verdict of doom— the Mene, Tekel on the palace wall— revealed by Daniel. Start with the Flood, a universal theme played out over four chapters in Genesis, but found much earlier in Sumerian and Babylonian myth, as related in the Gilgamesh Epic dated 2700 BCE. Genesis, written in the fifth or sixth century BCE, expands and embellishes the original. It relates how “the Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth.” So He decides to “blot out man whom I have created from the face of the land, for I am grieved that I have made them.” The end is nigh, but don’t despair. Mankind will be spared after all, because the Lord selects Noah, who has “found favor in His eyes,” and commands him to build an ark that will save mankind.

So after death by Deluge, it will be rebirth for the righteous led by an ordinary mortal who knows the future, and how to act on it. This story never ends. The Children of Israel were punished for the Golden Calf, the idol that embodied a wicked past, with forty years in the wilderness. Yet if true to the Law and to God’s messenger Moses, they will be rewarded with the Promised Land. As the Resurrection follows the Crucifixion, so misery will segue into salvation, but there has to be a leader, spiritual or political, to show the way: Moses or Jesus, John F. Kennedy or Ronald Reagan or Barack (“ Yes, we can”) Obama. The pairing of doom and deliverance defines the eternal archetype.

…

In all these narratives, ruin is the means, and rescue the end. Terror is the teaching device that will change the course of history. For all his tirades, every Jeremiah actually wants to be disproved by making his errant flock atone and amend. “Declinism is a theory that has to be believed to be invalidated,” explains Samuel Huntington. It is the opposite of the familiar “self-fulfilling prophecy,” a term coined by the sociologist Robert Merton. The alarm starts out with a “false definition of the situation” and then triggers “new behavior which makes the original false conception come ‘true.’ ” To predict a bank failure is to unleash a run that will actually cause the collapse.

Declinism markets a “self-defeating prophecy.” Since these predictions deal with humans, and not planets or protozoans, they are designed to trigger reactions that lift the curse. Merton puts it thus: Evil does not come true “precisely because the prediction has become a new element” that changes the “initial course of developments.” So to foretell is to forestall— that is the very purpose of Declinism. Take the “impending exhaustion of natural resources” from Malthus to the Club of Rome, which foresaw the end of global growth some forty years ago, especially because of dwindling oil reserves. Myriad changes in behavior— from conservation to exploration— followed, causing oil gluts on the market in the 1980s and a gas glut in the 2010s. The world economy grew twentyfold in this period (nominally). Would that all catastrophes had such a short shelf life!

None of America’s Declinists over the past half century, as presented in the preceding chapter, actually wanted the country to suffer its foreordained fate. The prophecy is designed to be self-defeating, and the structure of augury is always the same: This will happen unless . . . Holding up another nation as a model is to correct one’s own, not to condemn it— from the Sputnik Shock of the 1950s to Obama’s “Sputnik moment” in the 2010s. To praise others is to prod America. Russia, Europe, Japan, et al. will overtake us, unless we labor hard to change our self-inflicted destiny. The basic diagnosis remains constant; only the prescription will vary according to the ideological preferences of the seer.

In politics, “the sky is falling” has yet another purpose. It is no accident that the figure of the prophet, in the legend or on the stump, stands at the center of the narrative. We have to believe in the messenger so that he can rise above us and guide us to a better tomorrow. Hence dramatization and exaggeration, fibbing or even outright falsehood, are part and parcel of the prophecy. To hype is to win. Never mind that the Missile Gap and the Window of Vulnerability were mere myths. Expediency beats veracity in campaigning and sermonizing. And so, hyperbole paves the road from the vale of tears— or to the White House. “Follow me, and ye shall be saved!” is the eternal message. Or in Kennedy’s words, borrowed from Churchill, “Come then— let us to the task, to the battle and the toil. . . .”

Prophet or politico, the strategy is to paint the nation in hellish colors and then to offer oneself as a guide to heaven. The country is on the skids, but tomorrow it will rise again— if only you, the people, will anoint me as your leader. It worked for both John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan, who rode all the way to the White House on nonexisting Soviet missiles. Shakespeare wrote the original script. To “busy giddy minds with foreign quarrels” was Henry IV’s advice to his son and successor. The democratic equivalent is to scare up votes with foreign threats. After the election, dawn always follows doom— as when Kennedy called out, “Let the word go forth that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans.” Gone was the Soviet bear that had grown to monstrous size in the 1950s. And so again, twenty years later. At the end of Ronald Reagan’s first term, his fabled campaign commercial exulted, “It’s morning again in America. And under the leadership of President Reagan, our country is prouder and stronger and better.” In the fourth year of Barack Obama’s first term, America was “back” and again on top. Collapse was yesterday, today it is resurrection. This miraculous turnaround might explain why Declinism usually blossoms at the end of an administration— and wilts quickly after victory.

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Books (Reviews), Commentary

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