I borrowed this ebook from the OPL, after reading a glowing review of it on Stuck in a Book.
Twenty-four year old identical twins, Judith and Cassandra Edwards, arrive at their retired alcoholic philosopher father’s ranch home (shared with their maternal grandmother) in the Sierra Nevada foothills to attend Judith’s wedding. This is after being apart for nine months for the first time, Judith at Juilliard in New York, and Cassandra in Berkley California. They then discover that they have bought the same dress for the wedding. For reasons that will be understood only by modern western female readers, this apparently is an absolute disaster, leading to confusing feelings, endless introspective, disconnected musings, guilt, self-doubt, alienation, conflicts, and even violence.
There are few characters, no foul language or sex (but with subtle hints of lesbian longing), and abundant symbolism and allusions to classical literature, philosophy, and music. The overriding theme is one of the ever-present philosophical difficulties of balancing one’s individualism with communalism. The writing is lyrical, almost poetic, with one section narrated by the bride-to-be, bracketed by two sections narrated by her single identical twin, Cassandra. There are a few surprising twists in a rather simple plot that is easy to follow.
The confusing 12 page Afterword by Deborah Eisenberg dwells on what it means to be a complete individual vs part of a nuclear or human family, and the unique challenges of identical twins. But it also makes generalizations about the characters that were totally lost on me.
A quite enjoyable period piece. I am sure that women will enjoy it much more than most men.
Between the writing and publication of Doubt is Their Product, in 2008, and the publication of this similarly-themed book, the American epidemiologist and academic at George Washington University author worked for seven years as assistant secretary of Labor for the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Association in the Obama administration
The tobacco and alcohol industries, DuPont and Dow Chemical’s “forever chemicals” used to produce Teflon among other dubious products, NFL deniers of chronic traumatic brain injuries in most players, diesel emissions assessment cheaters, opioids producers denying their addictive properties, the silica industry deniers of harm in the form of silicosis and asbestosis, Volkswagen’s cheating hierarchy, climate crisis deniers, and the sweets industry all come in for careful well-documented criticism. The product defence industry is huge but the same group of lobbyists, pseudo-scientists-for-hire, industrial organizations, lawyers, and front associations appear again and again to rework the findings of dedicated scientists and epidemiologists who assess consumer products for safety and usefulness. Post hoc data dredging to cast the products found to be harmful as safe or at least safer at the behest of their producers, often without revealing their source of funding, is a lucrative business for these unscrupulous organizations, often failing to disclose their conflicts of interest.
Michaels acknowledges that at least some of these individuals honestly believe the foregone conclusions they provide for their employers, being blinded by political ideology. To quote Sinclair Upton: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” But others are blatant liars available (for a hefty fee) to spout their lies. Media outlets without expertise, with their penchant for hearing both sides of an argument, help in spreading doubt and confusion.
The chapter on silica exposure in the construction industry is most instructive about the complicated, slow, and challenging process of getting any new standards through the maze of Washington bureaucracy.
I can relate to the difficult decisions about conflict of interest having participated in many clinical trials sponsored by pharmaceutical companies; I refused to participate in some if the publication of results was restricted a priori by the sponsors. But I have retrospectively concluded that the design of some studies was such that the conclusion the company wanted was all but assured.
The writing is dry and humourless but factual and richly referenced with thirty pages of references and notes. Endless acronyms for government agencies, lobby groups, and industrial associations disguising their aims with ingenious names can be confusing. The focus is almost entirely American, but the problems it addresses are certainly universal, although maybe not to the same extent. I suspect that there is a lot of duplication of material contained in his earlier book (I have not read it), although the problem of fake science and anti-science and anti-intellectual sentiments has gotten far worse in the interval between the two books, largely thanks to the election of Donald Trump.
This work is enlightening and sobering, a call to carefully review the source of any purported work of science, but to not reject good science with solid factual conclusions. It is difficult to determine who would enjoy this book, but fewer will read it than could be usefully educated by doing so.
Thanks,
Al. (He actually discussed the author’s earlier book.)
Instead of a book review, today I offer some thoughts about the situation we face with respect to the climate crisis. This just reflects my limited reading and understanding of the problem, not an expert opinion.
The eve of the shambolic Glasgow climate summit seems like an appropriate time to weigh in with some musings. On billboards, on line, in print magazines and newspapers, and on TV, we are constantly bombarded with endless commercials by all the big automakers glamourizing the use of their fossil fuel-powered vehicles. I have never seen such an advertisement for an all-electric car, nor even for a plug-in hybrid.
According to the United States Environmental Protection Agency, the average passenger vehicle in that country produces about 4.6 metric tons of carbon dioxide per year of use, not counting the amount produced by its factory production and the extraction, refining, and transport of the fuel. And this does not include the carcinogenic nitrous oxides spewed from diesel engines. Certainly some greenhouse gases are produced in the manufacturing of all products, but electric vehicles emit none on the roadways and even if the ultimate source of electricity is coal, gas, or oil, the efficiency of electric vehicles would still vastly reduce the net emissions, compared to fossil fuel vehicles.
While conflicted governments have been fiddling around the edges of the problem with regulations to decrease emissions by increasing the efficiency of burning fossil fuels, pretending to take the climate crisis seriously, they have provided support to the fossil fuel industry in various forms. According to a recent CBC report, in 2018-2020, Canadian governments and publicly owned entities provided almost $14 billion to this industry, leading the world on a per capita basis, while providing less than $1billion to support renewable energy sources, the least of any of the G7 countries.
Since 1971, Canadian government regulations have banned any advertising of tobacco products and forced producers to provide dire health warnings on all of their products. We are now in a similar situation with cars, the only difference being that the harm from fossil fuel car usage affects all of us, and will affect our children and grandchildren, not just the current users. Why do government regulators not ban advertising of new fossil fuel cars, as they belatedly did for tobacco products, or at the very least require that those commercials provide a warning similar to that required on tobacco products, something along the lines of “Use of this product is harmful to the environment and will contribute to global warming.”? And not just in small print. Then shame all countries with car manufacturing plants to do the same. A chance for Canada to lead the way. This will not resolve the climate crisis but is one small step that we owe to our descendants and a signal to the rest of the world that we are finally taking the problem seriously.
The setting for this very new epic tale is the Lincoln Highway stretching from Times Square in NYC to Lincoln Square in San Francisco, in 1957. Emmett Watson, Wolly Wollcott, and Duchess FitzWilliams escape from a juvenile detention facility in Salina, Kansas to Morgen, Nebraska. Along with them in their escapades as they travel the Lincoln Highway to NYC is Emmet’s orphaned precocious eight year old brother, Billy. More than a dozen other mostly shady secondary characters that they encounter along the way complete the cast.
The ten chapters are numbered in reverse order and divided into sections that are narrated by, or in the third person tense about, the few main characters. The plot is full of surprises but intricately interconnected with impossible-to-predict twists. Towles takes full advantage of the old literary device of ending sections of narration with a quirky surprise mystery to be solved only many pages later. He deftly intertwines connections to a great variety of characters and stories many readers will be familiar with, including Ulysses, Achilles, Jason, Ishmael, Sinbad, Karl Marx, Walt Whitman, Shakespeare, and Zeno’s paradox as well as that of Schrodinger’s Cat. The introduction of these at times seem like artificial means for Towles to present his own unique insights and universal truisms about human existence and interactions. The description of means of travel, including hobos hitching rides on freight trains is detailed and realistic with vivid descriptions of the towns and cities that they pass through. The plot twists can be confusing unless the reader pays close attention to seemingly irrelevant details. I had to reread a section to figure out why Duchess tracks down Townhouse to deliberately take a beating to even the score between them. We never are told exactly why Wolly is taking some potent medicine nor the name of it. The few women characters play generally minor but certainly not subservient roles.
Most of the story is within the realm of possibilities although Billy’s profound insights and knowledge seem a bit excessive for an eight year old. And it does not seem likely that corn on the cob would be available to anyone, no matter how wealthy, to celebrate the July 4th holiday in the Adirondacks, in 1957. The result of the black ex-soldier turned hobo, Ulysses’s ten year quest to find his wife and son, and Emmett and Billy’s quest to find their estranged mother in San Francisco could not be fitted into the short time frame of the story, but could well have been added as a useful two-years-latter postscript.
One of many good quotes. “Emmett was raised to hold no man in distain. To hold a man in distain, his father would say, presumed that you knew so much about his lot, so much about his intentions, about his action both public and private, that you could judge his character against your own without fear misjudgement.”
A very different story than Towles’ A Gentleman in Moscow, but equally entertaining, and far better in my opinion than his Rules of Civility.
Narrated in the voice of astrobiologist Theo Byrne, this very new novel, set in very modern times, is global in scope and an intriguing delightful read. The widowed Theo is left alone to raise his troubled nine year old son, Robin, who has what modern psychiatric dogma would label as some combination of Asperger syndrome, ADHD, and obsessive compulsive disorder, labels that Theo rejects. Robin is troubled by memories of his late environmentalist, wildlife preservation advocate scientific mother. When a neuroscientist friend of Theo’s connects Robin with his mother’s emotional states as she had recorded them in a functional magnetically resonance imaging machine, his brain wiring is altered to mimic hers with great improvement in his mental state. The technique called DecNef, (for decoded Neurofeedback) is promoted as a treatment for all kinds of mental disorders, and Robin becomes a media celebrity.
Donald Trump is never mentioned by name but his anti-science, anti- democratic, and environmentally destructive policies and legal maneuvers are enacted by the unnamed President, and he cancels the funding for the promising astrological search for life on other planets and the neuroscience research. Greta Thunberg is never named either but is clearly presented in the form of her fictional autistic European doppelgänger, environmental activist Inga Alder.
Interspersed with the earthbound science which may seem farfetched to many nonscientific readers, but which seemed like semi-realistic possibilities to me, Theo and Robin visit imaginary life-sustaining planets and exoplanets, at least in their shared imaginations.
The first and last parts of the story are set in the author’s home area in the Smokey Mountains around Gatlinburg, Tennessee, and the bulk of it is set in Madison, Wisconsin. I have explored both of these cities and can attest to the accuracy of the depictions.
The book has no chapter breaks, but spaces between short sections of narrative prose give it realistic natural breaks; there should be no difficulty for readers to keep track of the few characters. ScFi aficionados will love the visits to other planets. Beautifully integrated, the story leaves readers with no loose ends except for some doubt about Robin’s true paternity. (His animal-preservationist mother is killed in a car accident as she swerves to avoid killing an opossum)
Some great quotes. “The difference between fear and excitement must be only a few neurones wide.” “Life assembles itself on accumulating mistakes”.
A great read, at least as good as the author’s earlier Pulitzer Prize-winning The Overstory.
Political, economic and cultural developments, particularly in the United States, since this book was published only six years ago make much of it already seem hopelessly outdated. The Vancouver author and social activist provides an encyclopedic and depressing review of where we were six years ago in global efforts to combat climate change. It is much more depressing now when we consider that very little of what she forcefully documents we absolutely need to do “by the end of the decade” i.e. by 2020, was actually done.
Of hundreds of environmental organizations supposedly working to limit global warming, many are funded in part at least by fossil fuel companies and some are extending drilling rights on nature preserves and appointing extractive industry moguls to their boards. Klein’s skepticism is pervasive and there are great example of duplicity and false claims by many in the extractive industries. I particularly appreciated the irony of Rex Tillerson, then CEO of Exon-Mobile, opposing fracking near his multimillion dollar mansion because it would lower the value of the real estate in the area.
For the first two sections of the book, it seems that Klein is anti-everything- capitalism, consumerism, free trade, entrepreneurship, individual wealth, and modern technology. Her analysis clearly documents that most so-called solutions advocated or legislated by politicians, technocrats or business leaders like Richard Branson are mainly for “green washing” and fail to meet any meaningful targets. Her most scathing rebuke is directed toward the tech geeks who claim to be able to interfere more with nature, not less, as in geoengineering a global sun block. The industry claims for natural gas as a bridge from oil to renewable energy sources is exposed as a sham, and even nuclear power generation is claimed to be unhelpful, not because of the minuscule risks of radiation, but because of the amount of fossil fuel energy used to mine uranium and to convert limestone into concrete.
But in the third part, after about page 348, she becomes more upbeat with copious documentation of the potential for radical positive change-if and only if the tipping point and actions come from the common people around the world, not from billionaire philanthropists, corporate leaders or politicians. And since this book (and the documentary film based on it) was produced, there has been some progress, witness the cancellation of the Keystone XL and Northern Gateway pipelines as a result of such public protests, and even public protests against new coal mines in autocratic China.
‘Socialism’ has become a derogatory almost meaningless word, particularity in the U.S., applied by Republicans to any form of government that they don’t like. But the experience of Nordic cultures that tackle income inequality and climate issues with wide social support systems and limitations on unfettered capitalism should give all of us reason to reconsider radical cultural and political changes as we face the prospect of an uninhabitable world.
The authors self-assurance that she has all the answers to the massive problems we face as a species can become grating, but her arguments and recommendations are compelling, logical, and difficult to refute.
A couple of great quotes: “For a couple hundred years we have been telling ourselves that we can dig the midnight black remains of other life forms out of the bowels of the earth and burn them in massive quantities, and that the airborne particles and gases released into the atmosphere….will have no effect whatsoever. Or if they do, we humans, brilliant as we are, will just invent our way out of any mess we have made.”
“Step one for getting out of a hole. Stop digging.” (Not very original, but very appropriate.)
Along with Rachael Carson’s Silent Spring, Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, and the author’s brother, Seth Klein’s A Good War this tome provides a classic warning that we should all take seriously.
I started into this book because it is to be discussed at our book club, without realizing that I would miss that meeting because of another commitment.
A Calgary writer makes a valiant and quite compelling effort to restore the historical honour of the Orkney Scot, John Rae, as the Arctic explorer and adventurer who, in the 1840s and 50s, was the first to discover not only the Northwest Passage but to pinpoint the area of the Franklin expedition’s shipwreck and the fate of its members. That report of his, leaked to the British public, included evidence of cannibalism by the starving crews. The elite racist English noble classes encouraged by John Franklin’s widow refused to believe the evidence Rae provided from encounters with the native Inuits, and other adventurers and cartographers laid claim to the maps of the vast area that Rae had first detailed. The British Admiralty was in constant conflict with the more successful explorers of the Hudson’s Bay Company, Rae’s employer. Even racist Charles Dickens got into the act, describing the Inuit natives that Rae relied on as unreliable savages who probably killed the crew members of the Franklin ships, the Erubus and the Terror, although he probably never met an Inuit.
This documentary screedwas written thirteen years before the wrecks of the two ships were discovered; those discoveries completely vindicated the conclusions made by Rae sixty years earlier.
There are endless hard-to-believe stories of incredible hardship and endurance, long treks on snowshoes, and near-disasters but also remarkable loyalties and friendships. Few readers unfamiliar with the vast north will be interested in the minutia of confusing details of the geography and endeavours and the five faint maps in unreadable small print are of little help. Only two of the maps are readily relatable to the accompanying text. The exact mileages covered by the explorers, stated as fact, particularly in the Epilogue, are hard to accept as accurate, given the crude instrumentation of the day; they seem more like estimates.
Part of the difficulty in accepting John Rae’s account was the ingrained biases of the British aristocracy; as frequently happens, the history written by the powerful politically-connected was blatantly distorted to protect their interests, the truth be damned. But part is also because “Rae wrote so awkwardly. He had mastered the rules of grammar, more or less, but lacked style and flair; he had no sense of composition, of narrative.” I am tempted to apply the same characterization to the author of this humourless and unnecessarily detailed historical account.
This book is undoubtedly of great interest to historians of the north, and is very educational, but is not one that most readers would enjoy, even in Covid lockdown.
Full disclosure. This new independently-published book’s author is a friend and classmate from Western’s Meds ‘70 class. He has travelled all over North America giving almost 1000 entertaining talks to various groups, including our class reunions, on the nature and importance of humour in our lives.
Divided into 31 short, logically-arranged chapters, the insights Ken provides range from hilarious anecdotes to very serious discussion about different kinds of humour and his recommendations about how we can increase our collective and individual happiness quotient should be taken seriously. Many of the jokes and anecdotes, largely from his long career as a family doctor, were familiar to me but there are enough new ones to give me chuckles. The quotes from various historical figures and scholars, including Rod Martin, another friend from my days as a member of the now defunct London and Area Humanist Association give readers a thoughtful background into the nature of humour and its importance in our lives.
I noted several typos and grammatical errors that escaped the notice of the proofreaders, but they are probably less frequent and less significant than those in my own books-there are at least two geographic errors in my novel, mere mortals.
One relevant anecdote for Ken to ponder. I recall an American College of Physicians Ontario branch meeting at which the late Malcolm Muggeridge, of Punch magazinefame, was the guest speaker talking about the nature of humour. He related that he didn’t object to so-called dirty jokes because most humour depends on sudden incongruity. Then, with a sly smirk, looking at his wife sitting at the end of the head table, he said that nothing in nature was more prone to sudden incongruity than the way the human reproductive system was designed and functioned.
A thoroughly enjoyable and thoughtful analysis full of sage advice from a true expert. It is available from http://www.heathyhumor.ca.
Unlike the offbeat, witty, dark, Netflix fantasy series with the same name except for the added prefix, Un to the word Fortunate, giving it the opposite meaning, this is nonfiction science for non-scientists at its best. The author is a science writer with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and a humanist who convincingly rejects any suggestion of Design as the explanation for anything. From the impact of an asteroid on earth 66 million years ago that wiped out 75% of species then existing, to the serial genetic mutations necessary for the development of different cancers, chance events with astronomical odds against them happening explain how the world works.
The book is divided into three logical sections with touching personal anecdotes interspersed with the sometimes difficult science explanations.
The aptly named Kentucky Pentecostal pastor Jamie Coots died of a rattlesnake bite after mauling it while conducting a service, sure that God would protect him, and then refusing treatment. He should be a candidate for a posthumous Darwin Award, although it is apparently too late to award it to him- he has a son who took over doing the same stunts with rattlesnakes in the same church and continues the practice after almost dying from a bite. He should be considered for the stupidity prize.
From the evolution of species to the genetics of different diseases, the critical role of chance seems convincing. Carroll makes the brilliant analogy of the chances of one of millions of asteroids in the universe striking the Yucatan Peninsula 66 million years ago to the chances of one of hundreds of millions of sperm cells impacting a particular ovum in a Fallopian tube to create a unique organism like me or him or a one-of-a-kind elephant.
Some of the explanations of the genetics of evolutionary change may be difficult for some readers, but are greatly enhanced by accompanying simple line diagrams.
A thoroughly enjoyable and educational short read.
A Connecticut Yankee reporter and mother of four delves into the complex science of the influences of offspring on mothers and visa versa from conception to adulthood. Interviews and visits to numerous labs around the world and hundreds of scientific reports of studies on this relationship, not only in Homo sapiens but in many other mammals and even insects lead to startling conclusions, many of them counterintuitive and new to me. For example, an embryo sends cells into the mother’s circulation to permanently set up shop in various organs including her brain, altering her brain anatomy and chemistry in measurable ways, thus creating a form of chimerism. Reading about details of the changes in hormones in pregnancy and the roles played by the placenta was like an update to my med school embryology and endocrinology lectures in the 1960s, and the complex neuroanatomy and neurochemistry changes in pregnancy were almost entirely new to me.
Many of the social science studies cited can be criticized for bias by unblinded interpreters, questionable statistical analysis, equating correlation with causation, over-generalization from one species to another, and non-reproducibility. Nevertheless the many startling little-known indisputable facts will hold readers attention. Roe deer and brown bears “will not reproduce in the first place unless there is the right amount of food around. Their reproductive tracts feature a nifty safety-deposit-like structure called a ‘uterine crypt’ where they can stash their fertilized embryos indefinitely in a state of suspended animation, not progressing in pregnancy until the berries on the nearby bush ripens or the environment otherwise sweetens to meet their standards.”
Interspersed with the science are hilarious personal anecdotes relating to her own pregnancies and family life with some very serious topics such as postpartum depression discussed with great sensitivity.
Never directly discussed, the question of who is making decisions which seem to be often be made solely by a combination of genes, proteins and environmental influences raises the age-old question of free will, and the philosophical discussions of hard determinism vs compatabilism. Do any of us make decisions at all?
The latter chapters disappointed me a bit with less science and more discussion of her own stressful fourth pregnancy and rambling advice on child-rearing in various circumstances that is like an updated Dr. Spock.
The straightforward prose is sprinkled with quirky analogies and metaphors (she describes her husband as “a celebrated lunch box chef whose diaper-changing art borders on origami”), and should be easy for non-scientists to understand.
I learned a lot and enjoyed this book, always in awe of the wonders of nature. Mothers and mothers-to-be would probably appreciate it even more.
A young starving woman ekes out an existence on the shores of the Greek island of Thera, making a home in a cave and scavenging for food. Initially readers know virtually nothing about why she is there, her background, her past experiences, or even her age, nationality or race. Painfully slowly these bits of information are revealed with dozens of short interspersed flashbacks and introspective, nostalgic musings by the very insecure, lonely, and troubled protagonist. We only learn such details as her age 25 pages from the end. Her parents are constantly providing mental guidance and advice to her long after their violent deaths.
There is really only one character to keep track of, and she eschews any close relationships until the last chapter. The whole story could be seen as a commentary on the universal yearning for close connections versus the opposite common fears of self revelation and intimacy.
Divided into four unnamed parts, more untitled and unnumbered chapters and even more subsections within the chapters, the breaks seem to be placed capriciously, although the story does largely flow forward chronologically over the few months that it covers. No calendar dates are provided but, by the connection to the overthrow of Charles Taylor’s rule of Liberia, it seems to be set in 2003. There is no happy ending or resolution to the woman’s plight. The connection of such insertions as “Beauty or horror, my heart. Turning on a stone. Beauty or horror, it passes.” to the narrative was totally lost to me.
The endless insertion of such phrases with tenuous or no connections to the the accompanying proper sentences seems to be a feature shared by other fiction authors graduating from advanced creative writing schools, but I find this butchery of proper English to be just annoying, although it can be effective if used sparingly. I am slowly learning to avoid the dreamy, flowery fiction written by graduates of the Iowa Writers Workshop. If I remember correctly, I chose this one because of a rave review on the Goodreads website, but I did not enjoy it and cannot recommend it.
This debut novel is by a well-known British TV personality and the creator of America’s Survivor, and Deal or No Deal shows. In a large posh British retirement home, a group of quirky retirees including a nurse, a psychiatrist, an extensively-tattooed union agitator, and a detective, meet weekly to solve cold cases from the police files purloined by the ex-detective.
When two local people known to them are murdered in quick succession, their attention is diverted to solving those cases, with complex interactions with the inept and corrupt local police. Numerous suspects are ranked by the club members on a 1-10 scale as possible culprits. The main characters are all eccentric, bordering on caricatures, but are entertaining with a few great one-liners.
There is abundant humour in the first third of the story. “Father Mackie crosses himself by the plinth at Christ’s feet. No kneeling for him these days, though, arthritis and Catholicism being an uneasy mix.” However the humour largely disappears in the later chapters. In an apparent effort to introduce mystery and intrigue, the author makes the plot and the numerous peripheral characters become more complex and unrealistic, but this succeeded only to confuse me; even at the end, after many more deaths, I was left uncertain about who did in who and why.
I appreciate the vivid imagination of the author, and enjoyed parts of this story, but as it evolved it became unnecessarily complicated and confusing with impossible to follow false leads, loose ends, and unrealistic peripheral characters.
This Aussie’s debut novel is narrated by the ten year old protagonist, Rae, who is left with no family or close friends after her mother just disappears. We never hear anything about her father nor any other fathers for that matter It is set in an unspecified but modern time and in a suburb of Melbourne.The fate of her mother is gradually revealed to the reader although without much description of her personality. But everyone else is kept in the dark until late in the story as the protagonist succeeds in concealing the truth using various lies and deceptions-until Day 49 of the 55 days covered by the story.
Readers will have no problem keeping track of the few colourful characters, including a very eccentric elderly hoarding widow, Lettie, a nosy boy neighbour, Oscar, who tries unsuccessfully to befriend Rae, and her delightful big mongrel dog named Splinter. The language is true to that of any bright ten year old with short phrases and sentences and conversations that are true to the way that age group talks. There is nothing that is beyond the realm of possibility except for the forgivable description of impossible physiological responses to various emotional states. Olfaction plays a major role in the whole story.
What makes a house a home, the varied reactions to mental illness, and coping with loss are themes that recur but are never addressed directly.
This could be read as a dark, sad story of loss and grief or as a testament to the strength of the human spirit and the ingenuity of even ten year olds to cope with adversity. I chose to see it as the latter, and quite enjoyed it. It would be a good one to discuss at a book club.
A veteran political staff reporter for the very liberal The New Yorker magazine provides an exceedingly detailed account of the manipulation of U.S. politics by the billionaire Koch brothers Charles and David. In the name of philanthropy, with the help of many other billionaires, they have established countless opaque front organizations to advance a political agenda that benefits their diverse business interests and libertarian political philosophy. These include efforts to cripple the Environmental Protection Agency, and allow their companies to continue to produce toxic wastes, decrease taxes on the 0.1 % richest citizens, dismantle social support programs, oppose health care reform, cast doubt on climate science, and avoid criminal charges by the Justice Department (in the name of criminal justice reform).
The non-profit tax-exempt organizations include such think tanks as the Cato Institute, The American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and Americans For Prosperity. After the Supreme Court ruled on Citizens United, allowing unlimited corporate donations for political campaigns, their influence increased dramatically, to the point of even establishing higher education programs to promote their extreme libertarian agenda. Semiannual powwows of the secretive donors arranged for an ever-increasing number of opaque so-called charities intertwined with the moguls of the Republican Party. The major donors include the DeVos family of Amway fame, the American Chamber of Commerce, financial institutions, the owner of Home Depot, the Las Vegas Sands casino conglomerate, various hedge fund managers and billionaires from the oil and gas industry. By 2015, the voter database of the secretive organizations supplanted that of the Republican National Committee and they had effectively determined who ran in various electoral districts, as well as controlling the efforts to gerrymander electoral maps for the GOP.
Unfortunately the book was published before the 2016 election of Donald Trump, and before the death of David Koch, but the dirty tricks, deceits and outright lies of the far right libertarians clearly preceded Trump, and many familiar names of his era are discussed in this book.
The writing is humourless and it will be impossible for any but the most dedicated political scientists to keep track of all the players. The account may be a bit unbalanced as the dirty tricks are not limited to the libertarians and the Republicans and there is almost no discussion of foreign policy issues. But readers will at least learn to distrust the spewing from deceptively named think tanks and some so-called charities. (The Economist is particularly fond of quoting the reports from think tanks without revealing their funding sources.) If nothing else the documentation here will go a long way to disabuse anyone who still thinks that the U.S. is a democracy.
I certainly would not have read this ethereal fiction if it had not been for the recommendation of a friend who often shares my literary tastes. The Toronto author has had three books of poetry published and there are many places where this vague story could be considered to be poetry.
What little plot there is centers on the life of Jacob Beer, an orphaned Warsaw Jewish boy who escapes the Nazis to Greece, spending four years in hiding, then emigrating to Toronto, narrated in the first person singular. However the last 100 pages are narrated by a literary friend of his in the 1990’s as he searches for meaning in the lives of various characters, including the late Jacob Beer, their ancestors, and various other peripheral characters in the world of literature and music.
The time setting is constantly changing and I had some minor difficulties keeping the peripheral characters straight. However my main disappointment was the excessive sentimentality, introspection, and nostalgia and the vague often meaningless interposition of poetic schizophrenic gibberish such as:
“Complicity is not sudden, though it occurs in an instant.
To be proved true, violence need only occur once. But good is proved by repetition.”
or
“Tavern, oasis, country inn on the king’s highway. Way stations. Dostoyevsky and the charitable women in Tobol’sk. Akhmatova reading poetry to the wounded soldiers in Tashkent. Odysseus cared for by the Phaikians on Sheria.”
The latter quote is inserted in the middle of the description of the narrator’s exploration of the ancient streets of Athens.
Perhaps readers with an imagination that lets them make connections that are beyond those of us with more concrete ways of thinking could enjoy this book, but I cannot recommend it.
I recently reread (this time as an ebook) this gripping biography with a new Foreword from 2017, complete with almost 30 photographs. The title is supposedly the fifteen-year-old author’s answer to the inquiry of a Taliban terrorist seeking to find her and kill her. And it was all because she and her equally determined father were untiring advocates of education for the girls in her oppressed homeland.
The shooting on October 9, 2012, on the school bus taking her home, lead to critical brain injuries and a prolonged recovery as the whole world rallied to save her life and her cause, including skilled neurosurgeons in both Pakistan and Britain. It also lead to international recognition for her and her cause, the awarding of the Nobel Peace prize to the youngest person in its history, the Malala Foundation supporting education of children worldwide, and speaking engagements for her, including to the United Nations General Assembly. Her laudable work is ongoing. Her father is given due credit for her accomplishments but seems content to avoid the limelight.
Even with a British journalist co-writer, the writing is straightforward and like that of many other bright teenagers. And, remarkably, there is no braggadocio or sense of self-importance.
It is difficult for this anglophone to master the complex foreign names of people and places, and to understand the cultural norms, particularly with the frequently-inserted Urdu and Pashtun words and phrases. I suspect that many readers also share my difficulty in understanding the vast varied geography (although a map is included), the constant tribal rivalries and the dysfunctional ever-changing politics of her homeland. But the story is more relevant than ever as the Taliban take over neighbouring Afghanistan with inevitable cruel repression of women and girls.
I found only one clear error. Abraham is said to be told by God to sacrifice Ishmael, not Isaac. There are some seemingly unusual features. “The first [shot] went in through my left eye socket and out under my left shoulder.” Much later, a man is shot with a bullet that supposedly went in through his neck and out through his nose. What postures would allow that?
She constantly prays to and thanks Allah with the abbreviation PBWH (peace be with him) always following any mention of his name, and is apparently so indoctrinated into Muslim ways of thinking as to, in spite of her clear brilliance, never question why her prayers are never answered. I realize this form of cognitive dissonance is not confined to Muslims. And it disturbs this secular humanist physician that she heaps more praise on Allah for saving her life than the very skilled neurosurgeons who did all of the work.
This teenager whose brain had not yet even fully developed is a remarkable example of the power of one individual to better the world for all. I suspect this book will become as durable and important as The Diary Of Anne Frank, written by an equally remarkable teenage girl.
As a debut novel by a former flight attendant, this one is firmly seated in the thriller genre. A plane carrying 144 passengers from LAX to JFK is commandeered by suicidal Kurdish nationalists, while a co-conspirator forces the wife and children of the too-good-to be-true superhero pilot into suicide bomb suits while holding the detonators, back in their Los Angeles home. The pilot is given the choice of either crashing the plane into an iconic site of national importance that is not revealed until late in the tale, or choosing the option of having his whole family killed. Needless to say, neither endpoints the terrorists have carefully planned ensues-in such stories, unlike in the real world, the good guys always win.
I will not reveal more of the rather ingenious plot, with many unpredictable twists and false leads. Some of the fast-paced action is very realistic, and some is just so bizarre as to be laughable. Much of it seems like an rather too obvious attempt to build suspense in the reader, with the emphasis on time lines that seem impossible.
The author builds on her ten-year experience as a flight attendant to provide unique insights into the lives of flight crews, air traffic controllers, and the operation of commercial jets that few readers would otherwise learn about.
There is one feature here that is uncommon in thrillers- the lives of the terrorists are revealed in detail and the reasons for their actions are given a fair hearing. Their grievances with the U.S. abandonment of their former allies, the Iraqi and Syrian Kurds, to Turkish and ISIS forces with the resultant hundred thousand deaths (a historical detail most U.S. citizens will have never known or forgotten) is given a sympathetic treatment and some degree of understanding. The government of the U.S. does not escape unscathed. Although the president and the military get involved and the action is obviously set in the last year or two, no names are mentioned. (And, no, the Yankees have not won the World Series since 2009.) Most of the FBI agents are portrayed as almost clownish in their incompetence.
My inability to suspend analysis of realistic possibilities limits my enjoyment of such tales, much as I admire the imaginative possibilities of their authors, but for lovers of the thriller genre, I suspect that this is about as good as it gets.
A driven, overachieving, controlling, opinionated, self-assured and self-righteous Yale professor of law uses her own family biography, including her parents, siblings and two daughters to contrast the parenting style of Oriental cultures with the permissive Western philosophy of child rearing. An alternative title might well be “The Chinese Method of Ensuring That Your Children Never Have Any Fun”, although both daughters now insist that they had a happy childhood and express appreciation and love for their parents. Their Jewish law professor and author father clearly played a minor role in raising them. I note that a relative with Down syndrome is mentioned only once and worry about the Chinese attitude to and treatment of those who are constitutionally unable to attain the straight A grades they so value.
The description of the absolute control of the author over every aspect of her daughter’s lives, the shouting matches, and the abuse, and the gruelling drills in piano and violin demanded of the girls is foreign to all Western ideas of letting children choose their own paths and develop their own strengths. Although thanks to the author’s absolute dictatorship, the girls became celebrity child prodigies in music, I note that there is no mention of music at all in either of the girls’ most recent social media posts. They are both now Harvard students, following in their parents’ footsteps, probably into Ivy League appointments.
The media reaction to the book’s publication was harsh and perhaps a bit unjustified, and the author in numerous media interviews backtracked a bit, describing it as a self-parody.
Throughout the ages, adults, and elderly grandparents in particular, myself included, have railed against the child-rearing styles of younger parents. It strikes me that some balance between Western permissiveness and Oriental harshness is necessary, and the most important aspects of child rearing are consistency and setting a good example. On both accounts, I probably failed as a parent, but I doubt that any of my children would have found the fulfilling and meaningful work and roles they now excel in had I followed the controlling Chinese model of parenting.
This is an interesting and educational read and provides a lot of food for thought.
The first 120 pages are a mishmash of unconnected gibberish mostly consisting of schizophrenic conversations loaded with non-sequesters, as diverse demonic or angelic characters plan for Armageddon and the end of the world. It doesn’t get much better thereafter, although the fantasies of the four 11 year olds in a gang called The Them are at least entertaining and a bit more realistic. The search for the missing Nice and Accurate Prophesies of Agnes Nutter (in indecipherable Olde English) and the magical antics of some of the demons are just plain silly, although there are some great one liners.
The entire book is a less-than-entertaining comeuppance of everything British, but not nearly as enjoyable as Monty Python and the the Holy Grail. If you like reading about the communications of demons plotting evil acts, Screwtape Letters, by C.S. Lewis is far better, although he obviously meant it as a serious defence of Christianity.
This book has become a cult classic or more properly an occult classic with film and T.V. adaptations, but to me it is mostly meaningless gibberish. Although some reviewers describe it as hilarious, what humour there is is too slapstick for my liking. Garrison Keillor’s A Prairie Home Companion has much better wry humour.
I would not have read through to the end if it were not on the list for our book club discussion next month. I may need to revise my opinion of it after that discussion if someone can point out some redeeming features of it.
This unique new novel by the British Nobel laureate (The Remains of The Day), is set in some indefinite future in some anglophone country that is not England, and is narrated in the first person singular by Klara, a solar-powered AF (artificial friend) robot sold as a toy to a sickly young girl with a poorly defined illness. The various sentient, mobile, observant models of AFs are able to talk, learn, and experience deep human emotions, but most of their owners seem to have lost much of their human social skills. Klara addresses everyone, even herself, in the third person proper in stilted English, usually calling them by their occupation or some characteristic rather than a name.
When Klara’s teenage owner becomes deathly ill, Klara appeals to an anthropomorphized Sun that is capable of granting requests for healing and answering prayers. The limitations of AFs are demonstrated by their restricted speech and Klara’s vision which is often is broken into discrete boxes or overlapping pictures. Unlike later models of AFs, she lacks any sense of smell. There is some vagueness in the plot twists and ethereal musing on the part of Klara as she attempts to understand and help the real humans around her.
I referred to the vagueness of the setting and dates. Although there are references to Wisconsin and California, the scenes with cars appear to be in some country with the drivers on the right side, a la British and Europeans, and there is nothing to indicate that cars have become autonomous.
As science fiction, not my favourite genre, this is as good as it gets. Some aspects of the story are not far from where artificial intelligence has already taken us, witness David Nussbaum’s realistic, life-sized, 3-D, talking hologram-like reproductions of real people on his Portl. platform.
The Passionate Reader 