Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy, 1945-1975 by Max Hastings
My rating: 4 of 5 stars Comprehensive, Balanced, Absorbing, and Well-Written When two Vietnamese girls joined my high school French class in 1977, my classmates and I admired their beauty and cheerfulness and excellent French language skills, but we never thought to ask them why they had come to Orange County or what they had experienced before coming or if they missed their original country or if their families were all together or if they were fitting into school OK. Listening to Max Hastings’ Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy 1945-1975 (2018) made me regret my incurious teenage ignorance. I wish I could talk with them now. Hastings’ book provides a comprehensive and balanced account of three decades of the appalling wars in Vietnam, involving the French, Americans, Russians, Chinese, and, of course, North and South Vietnamese. He recounts corruption, incompetence, folly, carelessness, cruelty, atrocity, duplicity, and pusillanimity, but also integrity, sympathy, bravery, loyalty, capability, generosity, and understanding. From members of all sides and cultures, the full range of human behavior is on display. One of the most interesting things about the book is Hastings’ many quotes from diaries, letters, novels, documents, songs, poems, and interviews, from North Vietnamese, Viet Cong, South Vietnamese, and American soldiers, officers, doctors, leaders, advisors, politicians, etc., giving a comprehensive, absorbing, and poignant overview of what the people involved experienced and thought and felt about it. Hastings has his own view of things, presenting accounts of representative or (in)famous events and interpretations of them from the different sides involved and then giving balanced consensus or convincing conclusions. He evinces sympathy and empathy for nearly everyone, especially for the soldiers and civilians caught in the thirty-year hell of war. He is more critical of leaders, but still aware that they are human beings. He details many aspects of the war, like-- The different aircraft used (fighters, bombers, helicopters, etc.) and pilots and bases and aircraft carriers and sorties flown over hostile territory with “perilously beautiful” flak and SAMs, trying to avoid being hit and to decide when to eject from damaged planes. Being bombed, caught in an apocalypse, 30-feet in diameter bomb craters, everything shredded to pieces, ear drums bleeding, the shock and terror leading to a serene fatalism. Patrolling the jungle, foliage, rain, leeches, boobytraps, ambushes, poisonous insects, malaria. Comparing the communists’ AK47 to the Americans’ M16 (the former being superior for jungle fighting, the latter inferior for jamming). The Russian advisors teaching the North’s soldiers how to use SAM batteries. The Australian and New Zealand soldiers in the war (more careful than the Americans). The emotion felt toward a wounded soldier changing when he became KIA. Counting the days until one’s tour would be over. Using drugs, dividing by race, fragging officers, etc. Being an American prisoner of war or a South Vietnamese prisoner in a post-war re-education camp. Many appalling moments recounted by survivors: “No matter what their skin color had been in life, it all turned to tallow [in death],” looking like wax dummies. “The acrid stench of burning flesh mingled with that of cordite.” A U.S. soldier urinating into the mouth of a dead NVA soldier. A US soldier’s elbow getting shot and shattered, collapsing him in pain persisting through morphine. A U.S. soldier watching a comrade’s leg “cartwheeling through the air” after a shell hit their position. “The stench of death was everywhere. When you were eating your rations, it was like eating death.” Many memorable, impressive lines by Hastings: “Yet both Langlais and Bruno were better suited to enduring a crucifixion than inspiring a resurrection.” “Yet they persevered because a lethal cocktail of pride, fatalism, stupidity, and moral weakness prevented them from acknowledging their blunder.” “Some [US commanders] displayed folly of Crimean proportions.” “The vast majority of the three million Americans who eventually served in the country departed without holding any more meaningful intercourse with its inhabitants than a haggle about the price of sex.” “[McGovern was] oblivious to the fact that his opponent [Nixon] was at that very hour marinating the South Vietnamese leader to provide the principal dish at a communist barbecue.” “…information on North Vietnam’s wartime processes is spooned forth as meanly as gruel in a poor house.” “The just measure of any society at war is not whether soldiers spasmodically commit atrocities, but whether they are judged institutionally acceptable...” “Americans will forgive almost anything, save failure.” More things from the book will stay with me: The great degree to which decisions on the Vietnam War (by both sides) were made with an eye to domestic US election cycles. The American obsession with counting bodies (not taking and holding territory) as the measure of success, leading to falsely inflating numbers and counting peasants but not weapons among the enemy dead. The callous and duplicitous “real politic” of Kissinger. The intelligence gap whereby Saigon was a “Swiss cheese” of communist informants at every level of government and military, but the Americans had no assets in Hanoi. The North turning diastrous debacles like their botched invasions of the South in 1968 and 72 into PR victories. The ignorant, arrogant, and irresponsible behavior of the USA vis-à-vis Vietnam, leading to eerily similar tragedies in Iraq and Afghanistan. The reader Peter Noble reminds me of the superb Simon Prebble. He doesn't do anything fancy and doesn't change his voice for different figures and doesn't assume foreign accents for Vietnamese or French or Russian or American or British figures or imitate people with distinctive voices like Kissinger or Nixon. Instead, he just reads everything with great understanding and compassion. The book ends with these sobering lines: “’What was it all about,’ muses Walt Boomer. ‘It bothers me that we didn't learn a lot. If we had, we would not have invaded Iraq.’” View all my reviews
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Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
My rating: 5 of 5 stars “Oh, Ford, Ford Ford, I Wish I Had My Soma!” Brave New World is a bitterly funny and humorously tragic dystopian novel in which Aldous Huxley satirizes modern civilization’s obsession with consumerism, sensual pleasure, popular culture entertainment, mass production, and eugenics. His far future world limits individual freedom in exchange for communal happiness via mass culture arts like “feelies” (movies with sensual immersion), the state-produced feel-good drug soma, sex-hormone gum, popular sports like “obstacle golf,” and the assembly line chemical manipulation of ova and fetuses so as to decant from their bottles babies perfectly suited for their destined castes and jobs, babies who are then mentally conditioned to become satisfied workers and consumers who believe that everyone belongs to everyone. In a way it’s more horrible than the more obviously brutal and violent repression of individuals by totalitarian systems in dystopias like George Orwell’s 1984, because Huxley’s novel implies that people are happy being mindless cogs in the wheels of economic production as long as they get their entertainments and new goods. Michael York does a great job reading the novel, his voice oozing satire for the long opening tour of the Hatchery and Conditioning Centre, and then modifying in timbre and dialect for the various characters, among them the self-centered brooder Bernard Marx, the budding intellectual poet Helmholtz Howard, the sexy, sensitive, and increasingly confused Lenina Crowne, the spookily understanding Resident World Controller of Western Europe Mustapha Mond, and especially the good-natured, sad, and conflicted Shakespearean quoting “savage” John. I had never read this classic of dystopian science fiction, so I’m glad to have listened to this excellent audiobook, because it is entertaining and devastating in its depiction of human nature and modern civilization, especially timely in our own brave new Facebook world. View all my reviews
The Reverse of the Medal by Patrick O'Brian
My rating: 3 of 5 stars Jack and Stephen Mostly Ashore After the showy towing of a prize (a British whaler that’s been recaptured from the Americans during the ongoing War of 1812) into the West Indies squadron and the exciting chase after an American privateer, the eleventh novel in Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey and Maturin series of Age Napoleon British navy books, The Reverse of the Medal (1986), occurs completely ashore, back in England. The story mostly develops the spy side of O’Brian’s series, with a treasonous “rat” making trouble for British intelligence, Stephen Maturin, and Post-Captain Jack Aubrey. The prime odd couple and best friends Jack and Stephen are entertaining and compelling ashore, where Jack is a gullible mark for every “land shark” and is caught in a tangled web of legal and financial difficulties from which he expects to extricate himself by using his prize money to engage in a little “harmless” stock-purchasing, and where Stephen is much more in command of himself (at sea he is prone to mistaking starboard from larboard, falling down hatches, and drowning). Although it should be said that Stephen has been knocked a bit off stride by the burning down of his comfortable London lodgings and the absconding of his wife Diana to Sweden with a handsome young Lithuanian hussar. And yet… O’Brian’s novels lose much of their attraction (for this reader) when Jack and Stephen are on land. O’Brian is so good at evoking what it must have been like to be at sea in the early 19th century with sails propelling a ship through every kind of weather over every kind of water in every kind of spot on the globe. He does give us some of that good stuff early in this novel, as in the two following examples: Short and fast: “There was a pure keen delight in this flying speed, the rushing air, and the taste of sea in his mouth.” Long and slow: “There were mornings when the ship would lie there mirrored in a perfectly unmoving glossy sea, her sails drooping, heavy with dew, and he would dive from the rail, shattering the reflection and swimming out and away beyond the incessant necessary din of two hundred men hurrying about their duties or eating their breakfast. There he would float with an infinity of pure sea on either hand and the whole hemisphere of sky above, already full of light; and then the sun would heave up on the eastern rim, turning the sails a brilliant white in quick succession, changing the sea to still another nameless blue, and filling his heart with joy.” Ashore, the novels tend to turn one part comedy of manners and two parts cloak-and-dagger. And since about the eighth book in the series, we’ve known that the alcoholic, gambling blackguard Andrew Wray is in fact the “Judas” in British intelligence selling his country out to Napoleon and hatching schemes against Jack and or Stephen, so it’s increasingly hard to believe that Stephen, who in addition to being a famous naturalist and doctor is a veteran ace spy, never suspects the guy, and it increasingly feels like O’Brian is contriving Stephen’s obtuseness to generate conflict. So as I’ve read on in the series, I’ve been increasingly finding it flawed in this area, and here this book has seven of ten chapters devoted to this plot strand. Moreover, O’Brian is not averse to setting up a fine climax and then cutting it short and ending a novel without any resolution, so the reader is left having to read the start of the next entry in the series to find out what happened at the end of the previous one. This happens at the end of the tenth book, The Far Side of the World, when everything is leading up to a conflict between American and British sailors stuck on an otherwise deserted island in the Pacific, only to have a deus ex machina presumably save the day, but the novel ends so abruptly that we don’t know exactly what was going on with the American ship’s captain and crew, how the Surprise happened to show up at just that moment in the nick of time, and so on and so forth. This eleventh novel pulls a similar disappointing trick: abrupt climax and absent resolution. There are surely many virtues in this book. Plenty of interesting things about Jack’s natural dark-skinned son, the British legal system, about cricket played between two ships’ crews, about how quickly and competently sailors can renovate a cottage, about how to set up as a privateer, and of course about Jack and Stephen’s friendship (e.g., “Brother, I told you I had inherited from my godfather”). And O’Brian is a fine, wise writer, so of course there are nice lines revealing human nature, like “Ever since I had a great deal of money, I have found that I much dislike being parted from it, particularly in a sharp or overbearing manner,” as well as great descriptions of the natural world, like a “living silence” when “the green world and the gentle blue sky might have just been created.” But I’m hoping that the next book will mostly take Jack and Stephen to sea again! View all my reviews
The Scrolls of Sin by David Rose
My rating: 3 of 5 stars Necromancers, Ghouls, Thieves, Writers, Revenge, Sex, and Violence The Scrolls of Sin (2021) by David Rose is a set of gritty, graphic, grotesque, unpredictable, dark fantasy stories in the vein of Brian McNaughton’s splendid Throne of Bones. Rose’s six short stories and two novellas are set in a world of rival and mutually antagonistic cultures possessing magic and medieval technology. The narratives share characters and situations and plot lines, coalescing into a composite novel that paints a morbidly fascinating portrait of a fallen fantasy world with echoes of our own (e.g., religion, politics, corruption, class, education, crime and punishment, popular writing, war). The stories explore love, hate, revenge, greed, violence, sex, and power. They rarely end happily or feature protagonists who are paragons of virtue. Rose’s necromancers, students, scribes, prostitutes, soldiers, writers, conquerors, thieves, morticians, body snatchers, and ghouls are neither wholly abominable nor very admirable. A necromancer utters what may seem to be the credo of the book: “Do as you will. For inside Good’s gilded halls, hide, my son, the scrolls of sin.” Rose’s characters, however, tend to (finally) get what they deserve. And despite often feeling soiled by their exploits, I wanted to continue reading and cared what happens to the immoral people. Rose’s ironic, outre, and funny sense of humor runs throughout. His writing is muscular and tight and features big words and bad words and potent figures of speech, like “Toadly’s tower wasn’t so much a tower, more a farmer’s silo, complete with thatched rotting top, giving the whole thing the appearance of a giant’s refracting phallus that had caught Thina’s Poxy.” He writes some neat descriptions of fantasy elements, like “The statue, a hand itself, was made of pure lapis lazuli. The size of your average man’s, strains of gold feathered and swirled in the deep blue of its outstretched fingers. In its palm, three faces made a row. The outer two left trails at its base near the wrist, thus completing a long-agreed-upon murmur that they resembled haunted tadpoles. And these both seemed poised to circle the central visage; caught in an eternal, devilish sneer.” He imagines some remarkable names: for people and ghouls (e.g., Arcus Zevon, Somyellia Ordrid, Propagord Phern, Conabitt Lotgard, Aricow Amphilliod, Dandana Nix, Gorial and Ghila), countries and cities (e.g., Orisula, Azad, Nilghorde, Pelliul), and streets and districts (e.g., Do-Gooder’s Row, Burnt Beetle Lane, the Morgeltine, Laugher’s Lot) However, there are typos, and sometimes the writing gets ungrammatical (e.g., “Toadly was laying on the table”) or awkward (“Fire has seemed to have forgotten you the craft”). At times I was yanked out of the stories by pondering things like, shouldn't “You don’t look like a tradesmen” be “tradesman”? Or by rereading particular sentences, not to savor them but to figure out what they mean. The stories often barge across the gross-out boundary (e.g., “Irion had personally prepped the body, bathing it in a preserving oil that wreaked [sic] of amniotic fluid and semen”). But Rose has a big imagination and a big ambition to do something different with the traditional epic fantasy genre beyond depicting struggles between good and evil. He can construct an intricate plot, as in his composite novella “Revenge,” comprised of eight short story chapters, an involved chain of events that almost lost me but never bored me. His set piece scenes are often entertainingly imaginative in their over-the-top Grand Guignol invention. Here is an annotated list of the stories: “Black Magic Summer”: In a world of grim conflict, never trust your sadistic, imbecilic, necromantic twin. “The Leaf of the Palm”: What does a boy really want, home or adventure? Vibes of Conan in Zamboula and Solomon Kane in Africa crossed with The Jungle Book and The Sword in the Stone. “Arigol and the Parilgotheum”: The dangers of writers (“fictionalists”) getting inspiration for their stories from firsthand experience, especially of a subterranean sort involving ghouls. “A Conqueror’s Tale”: Even heroic leaders can’t control the stories that grow up about them after they die. “Revenge”: a novella comprised of eight short stories demonstrating that revenge is a dish best served necromantically: I: The Final Meeting: A slimy treaty with a necromancer patriarch who promises revenge. II: The Mortician’s Tale Part One: A hulking mortician called Smeasil recounts his youth: a whoring father, a necromancer prostitute, a beloved black sheep, and an interest in dissection. III: Maecidion: The contested will of His Virulence (a dread necromancer), a reanimated skeleton, a possessed dead baby, a tricky imp, and a grossly hidden and revealed lapis lazuli hand of power—and more—all ending perfectly. IV: The Mortician’s Tale Part Two: Smeasil recounts living with his prostitute lover while grave robbing and opium smoking with a dinky thief pal Snier. V: The Municpal Dungeon: Snier is in prison when rumors of a necromancer paying a visit start spreading, the moral being, Don’t go to prison, whether as inmate or guard. VI: All Malevolent Masquerade: A Halloween-esque costume party attended by Smeasil’s prostitute girlfriend. VII: The Mortician’s Tale Part Three: Venereal disease, necrophilia, patricide, grave digging, specimen taking, and opium smoking lead to a new career path for Smeasil. VIII: Snier’s Tale: Revenge is liable to end up entangling unexpected victims (like orphaned former rent boys now thieves posing as butlers). “Bosgaard and Bella”: A star-crossed romance featuring rival body snatchers, rival ghouls, a cemetery heist, and a morbid but touching resolution via identity and flesh. “The Archer and Adaline”: A veteran addicted to sex becomes the bodyguard/pet of a businesswoman who likes to send caravans into a desert renowned for its ghouls. “A Hero, Emerged”: a nifty novella tying up “Revenge” and “The Archer and Adaline” in a stained bow: a necromancer father and disappointing son; a hungry, curious, and clever ghoul; a former grave robber and mortician now cemetery master and wannabe writer; his cute, pure, and very unsqueamish little daughter; and a surprisingly good priest in hiding. If you like dark fantasy with plenty of sex and violence (and ghouls), The Scrolls of Sin should scratch your itch. View all my reviews
Tales of the Mysterious and Macabre by Algernon Blackwood
My rating: 4 of 5 stars Tales of the Sublime and Transcendent Most of the early 20th-century stories by Algernon Blackwood collected in Tales of the Mysterious and Macabre (1967) don’t suit the title of the collection or the lurid red and black and blue demonic face on the cover. Two of the twenty-three stories, “The Damned” and “The Transfer,” do build intense macabre suspense, but they don’t traffic in crude horror, and the other stories explore the supernatural or divine that lies just behind surface reality ready to burst through to challenge our preconceived notions of the universe and human experience. A better title for the collection would be Tales of the Sublime and Transcendent. Or Tales of Life and the Epiphanic. The collection gives a varied sample of Blackwood’s many kinds of psychological, supernatural, metaphysical, and sublime stories. They occur in England, Canada, Europe, Arizona, Switzerland, and Egypt; in sublime mountains, harsh deserts, dense forests, pastoral countrysides, and crowded cities; in an old chateau, a country estate, a Cairene hotel, a sea-side bungalow, and an alpine inn; in the present and the past; in situations of romance, male-bonding, haunting, dreaming, and dying. And so on. The stories feature either sensitive and imaginative or obtuse and practical people who experience some awesome supernatural phenomena, for “Science does not exhaust the Universe.” By the way, both Blackwood and H. P. Lovecraft wrote more-to-the-world-than-we-usually-see stories, but the former imagined a universal sublime life force behind the scenes, the latter a horrifying set of powerful and malevolent demonic aliens. Here is an annotated list of the stories. 1. Chinese Magic (1930): The conflict between Beauty and Reality, involving a bachelor psychologist, love at first sight, the allure of the orient, and the Perfume of the Garden of Happiness. 2. First Hate (1920): Just as animals instinctively and instantly know their dire enemies, so too do we humans. An unpleasant hunters’ story. 3. The Olive (1921): Italian olives, a mysterious girl, an erotic evening featuring fauns, nymphs, and Pan, and a desire to be altogether in life. 4. The Sacrifice (1914): Life is a Cecemony in the great temple of the world—if you can go mountain climbing during a time of crisis. 5. The Damned (1914): An increasingly suspenseful novella that demonstrates how the places lived in by strong-willed enough past people (especially the religiously intolerant) can influence (if not dominate) the present. 6. Wayfarers (1914): Time slips and eternally reincarnating lovers: “Have you so soon forgotten . . . when we knew together the perfume of the hanging Babylonian Gardens, or when the Hesperides were so soft, to us in the dawn of the world?” 7. The Sea Fit (1910): The Great Powers of Nature are still very much alive, and their appearance before us should not be a matter of terror but of triumphant singing. 8. The Attic (1912): A short, moving tale of a family (and cat) still grieving for the death of a beloved child, and of their haunted attic where a usurer hanged himself. 9. The Heath Fire (1912): An artist in Surrey, unlike most Englishmen, wants to embrace mystery, seeking in a burnt heath the “Soul of the Universe.” 10. The Return (1911): “The hierophantic, sacerdotal Power that had echoed down the world since Time began and dropped strange magic phrases into every poet’s heart” may touch even the most practical of middleclass businessmen. 11. The Transfer (1911): A governess recounts what happened when a successful vampiric uncle encountered a hungry patch of barren garden earth. 12. Clairvoyance (1912): A man who can hear but not see ghosts spends the night in a haunted room full of the ghosts of children in the house of a mismatched couple: the young wife is too sensitive and fertile, her old husband too obtuse and narrow. 13. The Golden Fly (1912): A devastated businessman observes the “lordly indifference of Nature,” so as to realize his “world of agony lay neatly buttoned up within the tiny space of his own brain. Outside it had no existence at all.” 14. Special Delivery (1912): When traveling in the mountains and staying in an inn, heed any warnings Nature might send your way. 15. The Destruction of Smith (1912): As a dying person may communicate with us in the moment of their death, so too may an entire town. An unlikeable “western” yarn. 16. The Tryst (1917): A complex psychological study of what happens to a person who works for fifteen years to become able to marry a sweetheart, with a horripilating climax. 17. The Wings of Horus (1914): The dangers of not having an outlet for one’s creative imagination, especially if one is a genius in Egypt under the influence of Horus. 18. Initiation (1917): The Beauty of nature transcends business, banks, and cities if you open yourself to it: “Fear slipped away, and elation took its place.” 19. A Desert Episode (1917): The desert outside Cairo is the perfect place to learn that through love, Life and Death are “unchanging partners” providing immortality. 20. Transition (1913): An ordinary man is bringing his ordinary family ordinary Christmas presents while remembering a play called Magic when a traffic accident provides him a moment of “hearty, genuine life at last.” 21. The Other Wing (1915): A brave, imaginative little boy has a real dream adventure in the closed wing of his family's mansion, and then decades later has cause to recall it. 22. By Water (1914): Vividly demonstrating what it's like to be lost in the Sahara and to drown there without knowing that one is drowning. 23. A Victim of Higher Space (1914): What happens when you become able to enter the 4th dimension without being able to control your coming or going? Better visit the Psychic Doctor John Silence for some advice and empathy. An unusually funny story. The Spring Books edition is well made (binding, pages, and print), but marred by jarring typos, at least one per story, whether the wrong words spelled correctly (e.g., the/that, tall/tell, if/it, etc.) or the right words spelled incorrectly (e.g., bpon/upon, dakrness/darkness, lefet/left, hitory/history, etc.). From the standpoint of contemporary mores, some of Blackwood’s stories have embarrassing elements of gender (e.g., twenty-five year old “girls” with “little” feet and hearts) and race (e.g., “Redskins, whatever they may feel, show little”), and he wasn’t at his best channeling Western pulps (e.g., “Ain’t it jest possible”), but given his era he open-mindedly viewed cultural, religious, scientific, and romantic matters, and his stories champion tolerance of different ways of understanding the divine or supernatural. And the stories here are mostly beautiful, thoughtful, powerful, and well-written fantastic literature. View all my reviews
Redemption's Blade by Adrian Tchaikovsky
My rating: 4 of 5 stars “The war is over… Isn’t it?” Imagine starting The Lord of the Rings after the war has ended, and Eowyn (shieldmaiden of Rohan) has taken up with two huge orcs (one of whom is her lover!), so they have to tell everyone they meet that 1) Sauron is dead, 2) the war is over, and 3) the orcs are with her. That’s a little like Redemption’s Blade: After the War (2018) by Adrian Tchaikovsky. In Tchaikovsky’s novel, the Grand Alliance of free peoples was fighting a losing war against the semi-divine Kinslayer and his monstrous armies, when a small band of heroes sneaked into his fortress and, with some timely help from a couple turncoat torturers, killed the immortal being. After the enemy of the world is dead, what happens to his leaderless armies, minions, and monsters? What happens to the human Grand Alliance after the enemy who united it is gone? What happens to the damaged and displaced war refugees? As the novel begins, Celestaine, the hero who killed the Kinslayer (with plenty of help, she wants to stress), is on a quest to try to right wrongs in the aftermath of the war. And her family/friends/comrades are two members of the Kinslayer’s most terrible minion race the Yorughan: Nedlam, an 8’+ tall female bruiser-fighter, and Heno, a 7’ heart-taker blood-magus, most feared and hated of all the Yorughan. Celestaine wants to find a way to restore flight to the Aethani people, whose wings the Kinslayer cut off. But how can she negotiate with former enemies or former allies bent on vengeance? The quest centers on the rumored Crown of the Kinslayer, which combines various powerful magical jewels in a potent artifact of making and unmaking. Like Tolkien’s ring, it may not have a salubrious effect on the person who carries it or uses it even for good purposes. A merciless mysterious figure seems to have taken it and is leading Celestaine and co. into increasingly dangerous places and situations. Is he setting a trap for them or testing them? The characters are interesting and convincing: Celestaine can’t be sure if she's trying to be a hero from guilt over having failed to save people during the war or from the need to stay relevant; her Yorughan lover Heno is a former magician torturer who freed Celestaine from the rack and helped her kill the Kinslayer and became her lover but is still eaten by anger and guilt; their Yorughan friend and companion Nedlam is a free spirit so puissant but so disobedient that her generals kept moving her from one army to another until she finally ended up in the Kinslayer’s fortress as an interrogator and now just wants to enjoy living; Amkulyah is a young Prince of the Aethani whose wings were amputated so young that he never actually flew but can use his excellent eyesight to be a formidable archer; Ralas is a bard who was repeatedly tortured, killed, and resurrected by the Kinslayer such that it's impossible for him to die or to heal; the Undefeated is a semi-divine Guardian who fled in fear from the Kinslayer and his armies during the war and who now wants to get a good reputation; and Doctors Catt and Fisher are clever, comical, and ethically ambiguous partners whose business is collecting, repairing, and trading magical artifacts and religious relics. Tchaikovsky explores the psychology of heroes and villains and figures falling in between, economically creates a convincing and interesting world with Gods, Guardians, humans, and non-humans and their fraught history, and stretches the boundaries of what very different kinds of beings can accept in each other. He runs a science fiction angle through his epic fantasy, in the great variety of races and species of mortals, including some fishlike river people, some spiderlike forest people, and some unhappy and ever hungry denizens of other worlds whom the kinslayer transported to earth, not to mention the little four-armed Grenishmen and giant Yorughan, peoples who never had Guardians to guide and advise them. Tchaikovsky obviously knows and likes Tolkienesque epic fantasy so that he can revivify genre tropes like motley fellowships, quests, and wizards. His depiction of Celestaine’s “infinitely sharp” sword is prime, as it too dangerously easily cuts through steel, stone, wood, and bone and even wears out dragon scale scabbards. He writes plenty of exciting genre action scenes, from small-scale skirmishes to a big boss fight. His characters’ personalities and interactions are pointed, entertaining, and moving. He writes nice lines of dialogue: “Little bastards will always follow a bigger one.” “I like you. You can shoot someone in the eye in the middle of a fight in the dark.” “I don't want to put you where you’d do things you're ashamed of.” “The best lesson of life… only give power to those who don't want it.” He does just enough description to make scenes vivid without overwriting. The following description is as fancy as he gets: “Night came on swiftly in the Forinthi valleys, the sun clipping the edge of the hills and then vanishing, like a drowning man, leaving only the stars. The last streaks of gold were just dying as she walked up the slope to him, a dark shape on a dark hillside, enlivened only by the silvery flash of his hair and beard.” The thrust of the book is towards tolerance, communication, and mercy against self-righteous justice and discrimination and hate. Perhaps the Kinslayer's most devastating action before he was killed was to separate the gods from mortals so that they have stopped communicating. But at one point in the novel, the gods may give a long-distance message like, “Now that it's only you, you must treat each other with kindness.” (Of course, that may be a con perpetrated by a roguish collector.) The appealing characters, like Celestaine, let go of grudges and prejudices and try to do something good in the world, while the least appealing ones, like the Liberator running a slave mine and some Templars performing public burnings, are out to pacify the world to suit their own intolerant visions. Nicola Barber enhances the story while giving different voices for the male/female and human/nonhuman and young/old characters without straining. I love her voice for the giant Yorughan warrior Nedlam, sounding like a good-natured, simple, and wise girl. Readers who like Tchaikovsky’s science fiction, like The Children of Time, or who like fresh, concise, standalone epic fantasy novels should like Redemption’s Blade. View all my reviews
The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow
My rating: 3 of 5 stars An Overwrought Reading of an Overwritten Story The Ten Thousand Doors of January (2019) by Alix E. Harrow has a promising premise, an ambitious attempt at a UFT (Unified Fantasy Theory): all the myths, legends, fairy tales and so on (including all their magical artifacts and supernatural beings, as well as much of the change, revolution, and evolution in history) derive from portals between worlds. Ten thousand such “Doors” (ten thousand representing an infinite number) exist connecting countless worlds, and “leakage” happens when inhabitants pass between worlds and bring or carry away artifacts and ideas and the like. Seventeen-year-old January Scaller is telling her story in 1911, starting with when she was a “temerarious” and imaginative seven-year-old girl of color and traveled in 1901 from Vermont to Kentucky with the wealthy white collector Mr. Locke. She left their hotel, wandered into a field, and found a blue Door, through which she briefly entered another world with an exotic and beautiful island city. Mr. Locke, her guardian while her father Julian is off looking for exotic artifacts, burned the blue Door and set about educating all such “fanciful nonsense” out of her and training her up to be a “good girl.” Increasingly unhappy, January’s life changed again when as a teenager she found a book called The Ten Thousand Doors of January in Mr. Locke’s house and discovered that it was written by her father about, at first, a girl from Kentucky called Adelaide “Ade” Lee Larson, and later about his own past and January’s mother and how they came to know Mr. Locke and so on and so forth. Chapters from his book read by January alternate with chapters of January telling her own story. Just what January’s father is doing for Mr. Locke and just what Mr. Locke’s creepy New England Archeological Society is up to are mysteries that January will find out about as she struggles to grow up and find her own voice and purpose. The writing by Harrow is often fine, with potent lines and similes describing characters and feelings and Doors and so on. The beginning is great: “When I was seven I found a Door. There—look how tall and proud the word stands on the page now, the belly of that D like a black archway leading into white nothing.” There are many other impressive similes, like “as if an invisible housewife was tugging at the corners of reality,” and “Both Bad and Sammy looked like they had died and been reanimated by a sorcerer of questionable skill.” She has a sense of humor, like “Good manners are advisable when dealing with strangers or ghosts.” The story’s heart is in the right place, criticizing gender and racial and class discrimination and promoting imagination, fantasy, and change. (It makes a couple nods to different sexualities while keeping the protagonist safely heterosexual.) Harrow writes pointed lines like, “You don't know how fragile your name is until you watch a rich man drag it away like signing a bank loan.” The book has other virtues, like being a compact stand-alone novel instead of a first doorstopper volume in a series. However, the novel also has numerous problems… One is that despite early 20th-century bêtes noirs of racism, sexism, and classism and references to early 20th-century fiction like Oz, White Fang, and Tom Swift, the story doesn’t FEEL like America circa 1910, unlike, say, The Golem and the Jinni (2013) by Helene Wecker. January talks like a contemporary girl (e.g., “The hell I will”). Why did Harrow set it a hundred+ years ago and not, say, now? To do race and gender commentary without criticizing contemporary American culture? Worse problems involve January being incredibly and unbelievably obtuse at key moments, so Harrow can make the plot go. She has January not realize important things like the identities and relationship to her of the young lovers in her father’s book and the identity of the rich white man who made an offer to Ade’s family etc. long after the reader has figured them out, such that when January finally has a moment of revelation, her surprise feels absurd. At one point, January knows an enemy has gotten the drop on her via a magical feather that bestows invisibility on the bearer, but when she gets the guy at her mercy, she only takes his magical compass. It seems like Harrow wanted January to be visible for the ensuing climactic showdown without thinking of a more believable way to make that happen. Furthermore, when you give a character a powerful ability like, say, being able to write anything she wants to change the world (short of bringing back the dead), you must then think of good reasons for her not to use that ability when she obviously could but doesn’t. Such mood breaking plot contrivances don’t only involve January. Jane has been hunting forest ogres in another world for 22 years or so and is super capable and alert, but at one point Harrow has her stay sleeping while January takes her heavy pistol from her waist and then has her not notice that the pistol is missing while pursuing a villain until she finally tries to draw it, all so Jane can be wounded for the plot. Exacerbating the unbelievable obtuseness of her characters is Harrow’s tendency to overwrite. She almost never meets a situation without thinking up a cool simile or metaphor to describe it, as with voices: “like a mummy clearing its throat of grave dust,” “like a disused hinge,” “as if he’d replaced his lungs with rusting iron bellows,” etc. Some of her metaphors feel strained, like “My thoughts were a flock of drunk birds ricocheting between despair… and a childish bubbling excitement.” Corny or absurd lines occur, like “Hearts aren't chess boards, and they don't play by the rules.” For dramatic effect, she starts overusing the rhetorical strategy of structural repetition, e.g., “I felt... felt... felt...” and “Away from... away from... away from...” The irritating effect of all that overwriting is exacerbated by the reader, January Lavoi, whose over-emoting, lengthening of vowels, and strenuously different voices (like January’s little girl voice) begin irritating the ears. The two overdone forces--Harrow’s writing and Lavoi’s reading--make each other seem ever more overwrought, until the whole thing is hard to continue listening to, especially when January is so often unconvincingly obtuse. Thus, this ambitious fantasy novel irritated more than impressed, and I felt relieved to finish the audiobook. View all my reviews
Beaks, Bones and Bird Songs: How the Struggle for Survival Has Shaped Birds and Their Behavior by Roger Lederer
My rating: 4 of 5 stars A Compact and Fascinating Overview of Birds Beaks, Bones, and Bird Songs (2016) by Roger Lederer is all about its subtitle: How the Struggle for Survival Has Shaped Birds and Their Behavior. Lederer covers Foraging, Sensory Abilities, Flight, Migration and Navigation, Survival Strategies for Weather, Communities, and Human Influence. The book percolates with interesting information on birds in general and on particular species. As he proceeds, Lederer also covers a bit of the history of ornithology, citing earlier landmark studies and explanations of birds that according to contemporary science are either woefully incorrect or still accurate. Throughout, the main point Lederer repeatedly demonstrates is that birds are amazing creatures of incredible diversity in their habitats, sizes, shapes, physiologies, lifestyles, abilities, and so on. While being perfectly adapted to their environments over millennia and even millions of years, birds’ existence is increasingly threatened and changed by human activity (cities, habitat degradation, hunting, etc. etc.). Everyday life is a struggle for survival which birds negotiate with all their intelligence, learning, and senses, making choices about how and where and when to forage for food, to nest and raise young, and to migrate, etc., all to maximize chances for success and minimize chances for failure. Although he does not push a didactic conservation agenda, he does reveal ways in which humans harmfully or helpfully affect avian life and concludes that “We have to be partners with birds.” Here are some examples of the interesting things I learned from the book: Why birds don’t have teeth and how gizzards partially replace them. How sandpipers detect prey deep in sandy mud without seeing or smelling them. Why woodpeckers don’t get headaches. Why vultures defecate on their feet and have bald heads. How birds see colors and UV etc. and use one eye or both eyes etc. Why birds sing (it’s not for joy). How birds fly (including soaring, gliding, diving, etc.). How flocks and formations work (including how birds in dense flocks avoid flying into each other). Why some birds migrate (and how they know when to go and how they fly such long distances). How birds use sun maps, star maps, geomagnetic crystals, olfaction, infrasound, and landmarks to navigate. How birds adjust their body temperatures to deal with cold and heat. How and why birds mob (gang up on larger predators). The Arctic Tern flies to the Antarctic and back, up to 66,000 miles per year, enough for three round trips to the moon if they live full life spans. Acorn woodpeckers wedge acorns into trees so tightly that no other animals or birds can remove them, so they themselves can later break them open to get the nuts. If other jays see them hiding their acorn caches, they’ll hide them again later, but only if they themselves are cache robbers. Babies still in eggs tell parents to turn them right side up or make them warmer etc. In each ecosystem and niche and guild, each bird plays a particular role in relationships with the other living parts of the environment. Birds can get drunk on fermented fruit. Diversity in an ecosystem is necessary, like a sophisticated and complicated watch with many functions and parts: remove enough of the parts and it will finally stop working. Evolution and natural selection are good at making creatures change to suit changing environments etc., but since industrial revolution the pace of change has outstripped what evolution can do. Birds in cities develop differently (behavior, color, wing size, song frequency, egg laying, singing, migrating or not, viability, etc.) from the same species in the country. Global warming is making birds migrate earlier and fly farther north and breed earlier, etc. Anyone interested in birds should read this book, though perhaps ornithologists and other experts might not find as much new interesting information as I did. The audiobook reader Charles Constant is professional and smooth, though perhaps he reads a touch more speedily than I’d have liked. View all my reviews
Malcom and Me by Ishmael Reed
My rating: 4 of 5 stars Revising “Cotton Patch” African American History Malcom and Me (2020) is Ishmael Reed’s concise memoir of his time in the early 1960s trying to make a living in NYC while trying to become a writer in the rich cultural milieu for African Americans then and there, particularly as all of the above were influenced by Malcom X. Reed has searing things to say about race relations and black history as lived and taught in the USA (“cotton patch history” as Malcom X called it or “We were taught that we had no history or culture” as Reed puts it), about the Nation of Islam (and its core creation myth), about police brutality in NYC, about the media’s depiction of Malcom X as a hater even after his post-Mecca transformation and assassination, about the divisions within the black community then as to whether to integrate with white culture or to separate from it, about the Europeanization of many African American writers and artists and activists in the 20th century, and so on. He recalls and recounts what forces drove many black people in the 60s to embrace Malcom X’s pre-Mecca, Nation of Islam messaging: “We wanted revenge” for a hundred years of white hate, brutality, rape, murder, and experimentation on black bodies. Here and there Reed does some name dropping, but it’s usually in the service of his memoir, and it’s good to learn the names of influential African Americans that one (from a position of white ignorance) doesn’t know about. And some name-dropping he does in the epilogue turns harrowing and inspiring as Reed introduces two of the original targets and unsung heroes of the appalling 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre and its aftermath. There is dry humor here, as, for instance, when Reed confides that a DNA test revealed that he has more Nordic genes than Steve Bannon. Reed reads his text with an appealing voice and manner: gravelly and witty and savory. I do have some sympathy with the criticism of this short (90 minute) audiobook that Reed after all doesn’t say SO much about Malcom X that one wasn’t somewhat aware of before and doesn’t go into SO much detail about him or about his interactions with him. But, again, the memoir is absorbing and illuminating about many important issues in African American culture in the 20th century. And he does convey how charismatic, articulate, and intelligent (“electrifying”) Malcom X was. And how photogenic and addicted he was to media coverage. And how complex and ambiguous his memory is: was Malcom X motivated by idealism or by ambition? And Reed has made me want to listen soon to The Autobiography of Malcom X. View all my reviews
Beezer by Brandon T. Snider
My rating: 3 of 5 stars Amusing, if a Little Damaged by Sitcom English The conceit of Brandon T. Snider’s Beezer (2019) is that Beezlebub, prince of demons and of hell (the Red Realm), so disappoints his father for lying around playing pranks or games instead of studying dark arts, cultivating supernatural powers, or desiring to destroy souls, that Lucifer banishes him to earth, where he wakes up as a newly adopted thirteen-year-old boy (called Beezer) in a quirky loving family comprised of mother Jessica Lewis and fellow adoptees eleven-year old Lucy and nine-year-old Dash, each of the three children being a different skin color. How will he fit into this multiracial “lovey dovey” family into group hugs and supporting and communicating with each other no matter what? Especially when Jessica is out of work, scrambling to get by, and receiving charity food. What will happen when Beezer goes to the mall or public library or meets kids from Lucy and Dash’s school? Will he ever be able to access his innate dark powers or open a portal leading back to the Red Realm? Will he ever get used to his human body, with its unfortunate needs and weaknesses? The best lines express Beezer’s perceptions of new experiences in his human earthbound body. He says things like, “Exiled to this backwater heaven-hole without powers,” “This human skin suit is so heavy,” and “Being human is so weird.” When hearing chirping birds, he says, “Quiet, you earth harpies.” When told about the mall, he says, “A meeting place where sad people buy things and eat slop in a court.” When trying to influence a worker to give him a red suit, he calls her, “Human saleswoman.” Such moments are one of the pleasures of the book. That said, it is geared too obviously for kids, with body humor aplenty--belches, farts, boogers, peeing, etc. As well as too much too speedy and righteous and definitive comeuppance for too obviously awful bullies. And the characters talk too much American sitcom English. Even before he is exiled to Earth, Beezer talks for some reason like a boy raised on American TV shows, saying things like, “What I’m telling you is that this place sucks” and “Get real,” and “Oh no no no no!” and “You’re the prince of fricking demons” etc. (This problem obtains with Disney movies like Moanna, Frozen, and Tangled, where the protagonist in a fantasy story with no narrative connection to America talks like they’ve been weaned on American sit com dialogue.) Furthermore, all the “We're here for you no matter what” and group hugs and deep breaths and express your feelings and be yourself can almost get cloying. Interestingly, some audible reviewers say the book is not for kids, and I have no idea what they mean. There’s no sex or graphic violence or swearing, so… Does the supposed problem for kids derive from the protagonist being the demon prince of hell and from the story featuring witchcraft, imps, goblins, demons, and hags, not to mention Lucifer himself? Why would those necessarily be bad things for kids to read about (or to listen to)? It must be a Christian thing? The story itself is all about finding one's own life-road in the context of a loving (multiracial) family (“Families come in all shapes and sizes”), about treating people with kindness and respect, and about getting outside your comfort zone to try new things. The only non-salubrious thing in it for kids I noticed was the sitcom American English! The concept is fun and there are funny moments and surprising developments (like Beezer’s “coming out” to the Lewises), and the voice acting by Fred Berman as Beezlebub, Janiece Abbott-Pratt as Lucy, and Margaret Ying Drake as Dash, is lively and smooth (once you get used to Berman’s overly dramatic flourishes as Beezer). The radio drama-like audiobook is entertaining and doesn’t overstay its welcome. I even want to listen to the sequel. View all my reviews |
Jefferson Peters
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Jefferson's books
by Sabaa Tahir
A Young Adult Epic Fantasy with Lots of Violence & Romance
Elias is an elite Martial soldier, Laia a naïve Scholar slave. As they alternate telling their stories (in trendy Young Adult first person, present tense narration), we soon rea...
"It must be due to some fault in ourselves"--
George Orwell's Animal Farm (1945) is an anti-totalitarian-communist allegory in which the exploited animals of the Manor Farm kick Farmer Jones out and set about running the farm. At first...
by Lu Xun
Perfect Stories of Life in Early 20th Century China
Chinese Classic Stories (1998) by Xun Lu is an excellent collection of seven short stories by perhaps the most important 20th century Chinese writer of fiction. Lu Xun (1881-1936) stu...
Fine Writing, Great Characters, Immersive World
The Surgeon's Mate (1980) is the 7th novel in Patrick O'Brian's addicting series of age of sail novels about the lives, loves, and careers of the British navy captain Jack Aubrey and the ...
An Overwritten, Oddly Compelling Gothic Father
Matthew Lewis' notorious and influential Gothic novel The Monk (1796) takes place during the heyday of the Spanish Inquisition. Ambrosio, the monk/friar/abbot/idol of Madrid, is nicknamed ...
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