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030788788X
| 9780307887887
| 030788788X
| 3.86
| 4,345
| Jan 01, 2012
| Sep 11, 2012
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really liked it
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If you're my age [1], the first thing you think about when you hear Tony Danza's name is the show Who's The Boss? Honestly, I remember nearly nothing
If you're my age [1], the first thing you think about when you hear Tony Danza's name is the show Who's The Boss? Honestly, I remember nearly nothing about that show except that it was set in Connecticut (which I only remember because that's where I was living when it was on) and that Danza played some kind of live-in... servant? Housekeeper? For a divorced career woman? Hold on, let me check Wikipedia to see if I even got that much right. I did? Oh, good. Anyway, Danza kind of slipped out of my cultural viewfinder for a long while, so I was surprised to hear that he had not only written a book, but had done a stint as a teacher in a Philadelphia high school. Being a teacher myself, I was interested to see what his impressions were. He was, after all, coming to it from a very different background than most teachers, and with a different set of perspectives. On top of that, he had been convinced to do it as part of an A&E reality show - something I certainly don't approve of. Not just because the business of running a reality show would interfere with the class, or because they take work away from actors like my brother [2], but because I think reality shows are a scourge upon modern television. After going through training and orientation, Danza was put in charge of a double-period English class in Northeast High School in Philadelphia. It's a huge public school - about 3,600 students - and is made up of kids from radically diverse backgrounds. Some kids were motivated and hard-working, others saw school as an imposition on their lives. Some kids had stable, supportive families, some kids were being bounced from foster home to foster home. To say that Danza had his work cut out for him would be an understatement. He not only had to find ways to engage the students (a buzz-phrase that he - and every other teacher - would come to resent at some level) and make sure they were all committed to their education, but also handle the byzantine bureaucracy that comes with running a school, the politics of the teachers' office, union issues, getting parents involved, and negotiating the complex moods and interrelationships of hundreds of teenagers. He very quickly learned that being a teacher not only involves a significant investment of time and energy, but also of emotion. Reading through the book, there were a lot of moments where I nodded in complete understanding. Like Danza, I teach literature in a couple of my classes. He was working on making Of Mice and Men and To Kill a Mockingbird relatable to his students through constant activities and lecture sessions. I do the same with the books I teach. I might have the kids work on a timeline, or produce a short skit based on the story. They might make a poster or even a movie, if we have the time and the ideas for it. He often runs afoul of the basic principles of being a teacher in such a large community. For example, there's a section where he takes the students on a field trip to Washington D.C. It's a wonderful excursion and the kids have a great time, but when he returns he gets a wrist-slapping because he hadn't notified any of the kids' other teachers that they would be gone. As far as the rest of the school was concerned, the kids had skipped class. Danza's response was, "Well, I just assumed..." And that's where I felt very close kinship with him. One of the things I learned very, very fast when I started this job was to assume nothing. And that's hard to do, because the school assumes everything. In another section, the school is practicing for the big achievement tests that will basically determine the school's status as a failing or a successful school. During one of the tests he's proctoring, Danza goes out to get more calculators, and is immediately ripped into by the teacher who's running the test. This teacher says that if it had been the real test, Danza's carelessness could have invalidated the whole thing, costing the school time and money, and running the risk of making it a "Renaissance School" (a nice euphemism for a school that's failing so hard it has to be gutted and re-staffed from top to bottom.) My first thought when I read that was that the teacher in charge clearly didn't communicate the testing protocols clearly enough - he just assumed every teacher would know what to do. I think a large reason for this is because of the incredible investment in mental and emotional energy that every teacher must make if they're going to do their jobs properly. As human beings with puny human meat brains, there are only so many things we can keep track of at any given time, and for most teachers their students occupy the largest chunk of that attention. When you're thinking about a hundred kids or more, invested in the success or failure of each and every one of them, remembering who does and who doesn't know about some administrative detail is pretty far down on your list of things to care about. Near the end of the book, when Danza was asked if he would be interested in coming back the next year, he said, "At my age, I'm not sure I want to care this much about anything." And the teacher he's talking to just smiles and says, "That's what it takes." And it's true, that is what it takes. No one else would do it otherwise. Throughout the book, Danza looks at the reality of his colleagues' lives and compares it to the public perception of teachers in the media of the day. The fact is that teachers are in incredible positions of responsibility, yet they don't gain nearly as much respect and admiration (and money) as they deserve. When the students succeed, people praise their parents and their homes. When they fail, they blame the teachers, or call them "glorified babysitters." Programs like No Child Left Behind added to the already unbearable burdens of teachers by creating the constant threat of unemployment should the schools not pass a set of standardized tests that may or may not have anything to do with what the kids are already learning. I could go on, but I won't, since I have another blog where I bitch and moan about things that make me angry. What I will leave with is this - Danza did this as part of a reality show, one that was just as massaged, ordered, and manipulated as any other, though perhaps a little less than most. He was luckier than most at Northeast - only two classes a day instead of five, and he got the room with air conditioning, thanks to the influence of his network. His kids were chosen for the class, and he did the job without the threat of his career being brought to an ignominious end by some bureaucratic federal process. His experience was in no way representative of the other teachers at Northeast High or in fact many other teachers around the world. All that said, however, it is clear on every page of this book that he cared deeply about the kids in his class and their progress. He cared about how the school worked, about how the other teachers viewed him, and about how the parents were - or were not - involved in their children's lives. He almost immediately identifies and begins to struggle with one of the hardest problems in teaching - how to make the kids understand that they must be invested in their education. As easy as it is to tell a teacher that he or she must "engage the students," it is just as important that the students engage themselves. Throughout the book, Danza looks for ways to do this, and it's a constant theme. I finished the book with no doubt in my mind that Danza did the project in good faith and with full devotion to duty, just as any other first-year teacher would have done. He struggled and triumphed just as any teacher would do, and his sincerity comes across on every page. The title, too, resonated with me immediately, since that's exactly what I thought when I started teaching. On top of all that, he cries almost constantly, something I've never done in my career, so he's one up on me. It's a fast read, and very familiar to anyone who's become a teacher or knows a teacher, no matter where you are. Plus, there are a ton of ideas to steal, which is a tradition amongst teachers around the world, so I'm grateful for that. ------ "Teachers and students need help, not accusations and pay cuts. They need to be a national priority, not an experiment stuck into a late time slot and then canceled for underperforming." - Tony Danza, I'd Like to Apologize to Every Teacher I Ever Had ---- [1] ThirtyCOUGHCOUGHCOUGH [2] What, me? Oversensitive? Never... ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Sep 20, 2012
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Sep 29, 2012
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Kindle Edition
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0356500764
| 9780356500768
| 0356500764
| 3.96
| 22,077
| May 01, 2012
| May 01, 2012
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liked it
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I have two words for you: Ninja. Priests. There you go, that should really be enough for you to go out and buy this book. I suppose if you need more, t I have two words for you: Ninja. Priests. There you go, that should really be enough for you to go out and buy this book. I suppose if you need more, though, there is a whole "plot" and "world" and "characters" and stuff. But even Jemisin says that the initial idea that got her started writing was ninja priests, and everything else just kind of built up from there. Welcome, then, to the great land of Gujaareh, a land not entirely unlike our own ancient Egypt. It rests alongside a great river that floods periodically and brings great wealth and prosperity to the land. The whole world lives in the shadow of their great, striated Dreaming Moon, the perpetual manifestation of their goddess, Hananja. In this city, people live healthy, productive lives, and it is all thanks to Hananja's devoted priesthood and their arts of narcomancy. The Gatherers of Hananja are able to take dreamstuff from sleeping people, either willingly or otherwise, and their most honored task is to take from those whom their governing council have decided need to die. The terminally ill, perhaps, or the corrupt – these are the ones whom the Gatherers visit, giving them a final dream before sending their soul into the dreaming world embodied by their goddess. Ehiru is the best of these Gatherers, a man with a deft touch and absolute devotion to his cause. He is told to gather and he gathers, bringing back the various dreamstuffs to the temple, where the Sharers can use it to heal the afflicted of Gujaareh. Indeed, until now, Ehiru has never questioned his place in the world. But he soon finds himself wrapped in a terrible conspiracy that threatens to upend everything he's ever believed in, and may turn him into that which he has always despised. It's a really neat idea, with some very powerful characters and a well-built world. Clearly, Jemesin holds this world clearly in her mind when she writes, because the detail she gives, down to the smells and the surfaces, paint a wonderful picture. That said, though, this book didn't really come together for me until about two hundred pages in. I'm not sure why that was. Maybe I'm so deeply mired in the Alternate Europe mode of fantasy fiction that my brain had trouble adjusting to the deliberately different world that Jemesin built. Maybe she knows the world so well that she made certain assumptions about it that the reader – or at least this reader – couldn't readily put together. All I know is that I spent a good portion of the book trying to keep everything in order in my head. It was like doing one of those sliding-piece puzzles: immensely frustrating until you finally get a good idea of how it all works. Before you despair, however, note that number again: 200 pages. You would think that if a book baffled me for a while, I would probably put it down, but the fact that I was willing to keep going that far through my bafflement really does say a lot about the work that Jemesin did. The characters are interesting, and their relationships are intense – none more so than that between Ehiru and his apprentice Nijiri. While Jemesin states clearly that the people of her world aren't really concerned with labeling and compartmentalizing sexuality, Nijiri is definitely gay, and he is madly in love with his mentor, to the point where he is willing to give up his life to save him. The Prince is another good example of an interesting and complicated character. The Sunset Prince, avatar of Hananja, gives off Bad Guy Vibes from the moment we meet him. There's something about him as soon as he appears on the page that says he's going to be trouble by the end of the book. Despite that, you can kind of see where he's coming from, and you see the logic he's working from. It's deranged, yes, but in a very specific sort of way it makes sense. Another fascinating aspect of this book is that it presents contrasting and incompatible cultural values with a sense of honesty and truth. The formalized execution/euthanasia that the Gatherers of Gujaareh perform is considered by their own people to be the best way to handle things. After all, why suffer in agony when Ehiru can come along and drop you into a pleasant dream for all eternity? On the other hand, Sunandi Jeh Kalawe is of the Kisuati, and they view the Gatherer's narcomancy as a horrible power and their "gifts" as nothing short of institutionalized murder. The characters argue over this repeatedly in the book, and the best that comes of it is a certain mutual understanding. Not an agreement, mind you – neither viewpoint is either affirmed or torn down, but they eventually get to a point where they can start to see through the other's eyes. So as I said, it took about 200 pages for things to really click for me, but it was worth it when they did. Also, there's a very funny author interview at the end where Jemesin is given the rare opportunity to interview herself. Definitely not to be missed. This is a really interesting world built on unique and fantastic concepts. There are more, too, which I'll be looking forward to reading at some point in the future. ----------------- "You kill, priest. You do it for mercy and a whole host of other reasons that you claim are good, but at the heart of it you sneak into people's homes in the dead of night and kill them in their sleep. This is why you think you strange – you do this and you see nothing wrong with it. - Sunandi, The Killing Moon ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Jul 04, 2012
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Jul 10, 2012
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Paperback
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1596594322
| 9781596594326
| 1596594322
| 3.97
| 5,708
| Jul 17, 2008
| Jul 20, 2009
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really liked it
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Imagine, for a moment, one of our early human ancestors. A first-generation Homo sapiens, exploring his world with an amazing brain that would be the
Imagine, for a moment, one of our early human ancestors. A first-generation Homo sapiens, exploring his world with an amazing brain that would be the envy of the animal kingdom. If they understood envy. He, and his children, and their children and grandchildren will spread across the Earth as hunter-gatherers, the first beings (so far as we know) who can look at the world and attempt to pass it on. Their threats were simple: survive or don't. Find food or starve. Hunt or be hunted. And those fantastic brains did such a bang-up job that their descendants are still walking around, thousands of generations later. Now, take that Paleolithic man - swift of foot, sharp of eye, strong of hand - and drop him in the middle of modern-day Times Square. And, as his minder, give him a bored, easily distracted teenager - one who knows the world, but can't be bothered to do the work to make decisions. Congratulations. According to Daniel Gardner, we have just constructed a fine metaphor for how the human brain works. Part of it is very old, able to make decisions in an instant. The other is newer, more rational and savvy, but doesn't have the sheer speed and force that is prehistoric partner has. And as much as we want it to be true that the rational, modern part of our mind is in charge,the sad fact is that out inner caveman has far more influence over us than we care to admit. Gardner begins the book with an interesting story about the most terrifying thing to happen in the last decade - the attacks of September 11th in the United States. By the time the towers fell, people around the world were watching, and anyone who didn't see it live would surely see it soon enough as it was replayed over ands over again. It was truly terrifying to watch, unlike anything Americans had seen before in their country, and it scared the ever-loving he'll out of people. Many people, as a result, chose to forgo air travel in favor of driving. Now, as Superman famously told Lois Lane, flying is statistically the safest way to travel. In fact, the most dangerous part of any trip that involves flying is actually the drive to the airport. But, in those days and months after the attacks, people were scared to fly. So they drove instead. And, according to a five year study of traffic fatalities in the U. S. After 9/11 by German psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer, 1,595 people died on the roads who otherwise would not have. They were across, and that's understandable. But they were afraid of the wrong thing. Gardner sets out in this book to figure out why it is that people in the healthiest, safest, most prosperous nations on Earth - in the healthiest, safest, most prosperous era of human history - live in a state of near-constant fear. A lot of it, as the intro implies, comes down to the fact that our brains, which evolved over millions of years to be very good at judging risks that might be found on the savannah, are simply not prepared to do the same in a modern technological world. Our brains can't tell the difference between risk in fiction and reality, between something that happened to us and something we saw on the news. When it comes to risk, our brains play it very safe, which is great out in nature. Is that shadow in the bushes a tiger? Maybe, maybe not, but either way it's probably a good idea to get the he'll away from it. We can't say the same thing of that guy sitting on the bus who looks like maybe he might be a Muslim. We also tend to assume that if we've heard of something recently, then it must be more common. Again if you're out in neater and you saw a bear yesterday, there's a decent chance that the bear is still around today and you might want to be wary of that. But what if you see constant news coverage of a high-profile child abduction? It's on every show, being talked about on every blog - does that mean that the chance of your child being abducted has increased? Of course not, but your brain doesn't see it that way. One more thing: we don't get numbers. The news tells us that the rate of certain risks is up by 10%, but they don't tell us what the original figure was. We hear about millions of starving children in Africa, but don't do anything unless we get a personal story of one. We don't understand probability at all, we can't deal with randomness, and this lack of innate numeracy (compounded by an educational culture that makes it hard to teach kids to become numerate) costs us billions. Or more, as the recent economic. Clusterthing has shown. We think that correlation equals causation. We believe stories over facts. We think we don't have biases that we clearly possess. We assign high risk to things we don't like and low risk to things we do, regardless of how risky they actually are. And on top of all that, we know how to exploit others' fears in order to gain money and power for ourselves. It's easy to do, and it works like a charm. Reading this book won't make you into a magically unflappable person, mainly because all of this stuff is pretty well hard-wired in our brains. Even Gardner, who should have known better, tells a story about hunting through the slums of Lagos in the middle of the night to retrieve a photo of his children from the wallet that had been stolen from him. He had plenty more, but at that moment, his brain was convinced that losing the photo meant losing his children. Irrational, yes, and it nearly got him killed, but that's just one example of what a powerful force this primitive brain is. The good news, though, is that you can strengthen the newer, more recent brain - the lazy teenager from the initial example. By knowing how you make mistakes, how you can be fooled into fearing things that you don't need to fear, you can better understand your own reactions to events and make better decisions. You can educate yourself about the things that are actually dangerous, and stop losing sleep over the things that are not a threat. Being afraid is not your fault - it's an ingrained biological feature. Staying afraid, on the other hand, is something over which you have control. Are there terrorists who want to destroy the United States? Sure. But they won't, because doing so is indescribably harder than certain politicians would have you believe. Are there strange child molesters who want to abduct and defile your children? Yup. But the chances of that actually happening are so low that the odds of any specific child becoming such a victim are nil. Are there angry teens who want to come to their school and kill everyone they see? Of course. But when you look at the incidence of school shooting compared to how many kids go to school every day, you can see that the odds of your children being caught in a school shooting are slim to none. In fact, your children are probably safer in school than out of it. There are real risks in our modern world, but they're not spectacular and they're not viscerally terrifying. A car accident, a heart attack, a diabetic death - these things don't make the news. Imagine a 9/11-style attack happening every three days, 3,000 dead each time. It would be an outrage, a national disgrace, and people would be scared to their bones. But it would take just about 233 attacks to equal the number of deaths in 2001 that occurred from cardiovascular disease in the United States. The nearly nonexistent chance of being killed by terrorists is enough to get people to submit to any number of indignities and intrusions on their persons and liberties when they travel, but the very real risk of death from a heart attack isn't enough to get people to go take a walk once in a while or stop eating junk food. So enjoy that delicious moment of irony the next time you go through the TSA molest-a-thon and get a seriously overweight screener taking liberties with your person. "Anyone who has spent time in a Victorian cemetery knows that gratitude, not fear, should be the defining feeling of our age. And yet it is fear that defines us. We worry. We cringe. It seems the less we have to fear, the more we fear." - Daniel Gardner ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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not set
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Jan 06, 2012
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Audiobook
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0385529953
| 9780385529952
| 0385529953
| 4.16
| 9,497
| Sep 21, 2010
| Nov 02, 2010
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it was amazing
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This book made me want to get rip-roaring drunk, set a banker on fire, and kick a member of Congress square in the nuts, preferably from a running sta
This book made me want to get rip-roaring drunk, set a banker on fire, and kick a member of Congress square in the nuts, preferably from a running start. It put me one step closer to finally realizing my dream of living somewhere in the wilderness like the Unibomber (although without all the Unibombing). It took all of my already cynical ideas about how America works, patted them on the head and said, “You’re just adorable,” and then proceeded to tell me that Santa Claus is not only dead, but that his body was stuffed, covered in rhinestones and sold to the CEO of Goldman-Sachs to use as a towel rack in his guest bathroom. Much like The Great Derangement, wherein Taibbi explains how Americans have built new realities for themselves based on their politics, this book really seems to be aimed right at me. My natural distrust of the government and especially of business makes me a natural reader for this kind of thing, and that sets off my bias alarms. So keep that in mind – I’m probably having a hard time evaluating Taibbi and his claims fairly, in that I think they’re all absolutely correct. They may not be, but that’s how they felt as I read the book. Taibbi’s premise is disturbingly simple: the American political and economic system is set up to reward lying, cheating and grift. From the fraudsters who convinced poor families to take out loans on McMansions to the Great Greenspan himself, our economic engine has been running for years on an unstable fuel of high-octane mendacity. Every now and then, there is a hitch – the tech bubble of the late 90s, the housing crash, the oil price spike of 2008, the Great Financial Meltdown – but the engine keeps going. What’s more, the people who caused the bubbles and crashes manage to skate clear of damage and punishment, rewarded by lawmakers who are beholden to them. It’s a self-corrupting system that values short-term profit over long-term stability, and it’s probably going to be the ruin of us all. The mortgage fiasco is well-described here. Taibbi takes us from the bottom of the financial food chain – a low-income homeowner who thought he was getting a great chance for a home of his own, and follows the chain of deceit up and up and up, from the mortgage broker who sold the deal (and, incidentally both lied about his client’s credit score and got him an adjustable mortgage in order to garner a higher finder’s fee) to the banks that put all these rotten mortgages together, to the insurance companies and financial institutions that bought them, sold them and traded them. All across the board, they lied about what they had and made sure that they passed their rotten goods off to some other poor sucker before the whole thing went wrong. And when it did, it was like some horrible chain of dominoes that started with people who discovered they couldn’t pay $1,500 a month for their home, and ended with the failure of banks that had ruled the financial sector for decades. What’s more, the US government let this happen. Under the guise of being “pro-business,” politicians have been loosening restrictions and adjusting interest rates for decades under the willful delusion that the free market can manage itself just fine. Under the direction of Ayn Rand disciples such as Alan Greenspan, the power of the government to manage corrupt banks and insurance companies is about as impressive as an elementary school crossing guard. They wanted business free of its regulatory fetters, and that’s what they got. What everyone else got, of course, was screwed. Another example: during 2008, Taibbi noticed something weird. Gas prices were skyrocketing, but supply was keeping pace with demand. There were no lines at gas stations like there had been in the 70s, when OPEC refused to sell us oil. If you wanted to fill up, you could, as long as you were willing to pay a price that went up moments before you pulled into the station. Even people with the barest understanding of economics understands supply and demand – if the supply is lower than the demand, the price goes up, and vice versa. But here, neither the supply of gasoline nor the overall demand for it changed, yet prices were shooting up past $4 a gallon. What, as they say, the HELL was going on? Our politicians – especially the ones battling for the White House – had pat answers ready for the cameras. Obama blamed the Evil Oil Companies and wasteful SUV drivers. McCain blamed anti-drilling legislation and environmental regulation. Everybody blamed China for its accelerating growth. All of that, as it turns out, was misleading at best, bullshit at worst. The answer: oil speculation, the use of commodities futures to make a ton of money by driving the price of oil ever higher. Futures were originally intended to provide a safety net for buyers and sellers of commodities, so that neither one would lose too badly if supply or demand shifted unexpectedly. But a way was found to exploit this system, for profiteers to buy and sell massive amounts of stuff to each other, raising their profits to obscene levels. While a few clever people on Wall Street were getting rich through oil money, thousands of regular people were getting boned. The higher price of gas meant people with long commutes had to quit jobs and leave schools, which put them in ever-deepening financial straits. The price of oil has a very real effect on lives, but that was all ignored so that some high rollers could get rich. The close ties between the banking sector and the US government were what allowed this to happen, after decades of “pro-business” deregulation. The health care overhaul, the sale of American cities to foreign investors, the collapse of the stock market and the erasure of untold billions of dollars of savings and investments are all given a close, angry look in this book, and Taibbi does a good job at making it understandable to those of us who aren’t really good with the intricacies of the financial sector. He takes his time, breaking down each scam into its component parts, and makes sure you can see every piece of the puzzle as he puts it together. But what he also does – and I don’t think this is necessarily intentional – is paint a picture of hopelessness. At least, that’s how I saw it. The “great vampire squid” of the financial sector (a metaphor he used specifically with Goldman-Sachs) is inextricably attached to our government and the people who run it, sucking the blood out of the country that we thought we had. The more you see the connections, the more it seems like that squid simply cannot be removed and will never be sated. What’s more, our elected officials are doing a brilliant job at convincing the American people that removing the squid is not necessary. The Tea Party chants its simplistic message that the Constitution is all the law we need, and our leaders smile and nod and watch the money come in. Lawmakers rail against the evil of “earmarks” right up until the day they get elected, and then make sure they reward the people who got them into office. Every time someone tries to loosen the tentacles a bit, they’re attacked as anti-business or anti-capitalist or just out and out socialist, and they’re either shamed or threatened into submission. They tell us that it’s all really complicated, and we shouldn’t worry our pretty little heads about it – here’s another season of Jersey Shore. And the American people? We are, after all, the holders of sovereignty for the country – what about us? We’re idiots. We don’t want to spend the time necessary to understand a problem as ridiculously complex as the fraud that’s being perpetrated in our names, and the leaders we elected aren’t at all interested in making sure we’re educated. We’re instantly distracted by the new shiny thing and forget what happened only a few months ago thanks to smooth talking fraudsters who want us upset about gay marriage and Mexicans in our schools. We trust a media that needs us to be angry, but only just angry enough to keep watching. We’re tied up with businesses that see us as nothing more than a resource to be exploited. When the whole thing finally becomes unsustainable, when that final bill becomes due, they will slip away in the night with the wealth of nations in their pockets, leaving the rest of us to kill each other over refrigerator boxes and dogmeat. See? Told you this book made me angry…. ----------------------------------------- “This story is the ultimate example of American’s biggest political problem. We no longer have the attention span to deal with any twenty-first century crisis. We live in an economy that is immensely complex and we are completely at the mercy of the small group of people who understand it – who incidentally often happen to be the same people who built these wildly complex economic systems. We have to trust these people to do the right thing, but we can’t, because, well, they’re scum. Which is kind of a big problem, when you think about it.” - Matt Taibbi, Griftopia ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Aug 2011
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Aug 03, 2011
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Aug 01, 2011
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Hardcover
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0385525702
| 9780385525701
| B0013TX70M
| 3.94
| 3,598
| May 06, 2008
| May 06, 2008
|
really liked it
|
There is an essential flaw in human nature that makes us think we're special. It used to make us think that we were literally the center of the univer
There is an essential flaw in human nature that makes us think we're special. It used to make us think that we were literally the center of the universe, which it turns out we aren't. It makes us think that we're all going to grow up to be movie stars and astronauts, which we aren't; our children are all brilliant and well-behaved, which they aren't; and that God is on our side, which It isn't. Oddly enough, though, there is one place where this boundless optimism is flipped on its head. Every generation is absolutely convinced that this is the nadir of human accomplishment, that we are well and truly screwed and that there has never been a more messed-up, terrible time to live. The past was better, we think, and we look back on the days gone by as a golden age when things were simpler and no one had the kind of troubles that we have today. Of course, that's not true. We are healthier, freer, and generally better off than generations before us, who were healthier, freer, and generally better off than the ones before them, and so on. While things certainly aren't perfect, they're not nearly as bad as we like to think that they are. If people were able to look at their world with an unjaundiced eye and a fair heart, we would realize that and maybe start living our lives accordingly. Of course, if we were able to do that, then Matt Taibbi wouldn't be able to sell his books. To be fair, the first decade of this century was messed up on a grand scale. Not the same way the 60s were, or the 30s, or the 1860s, but truly twisted and burdensome in their own special way. We had been attacked, seemingly out of nowhere, by a shadowy cabal of extremists who managed to make a laughingstock of our supposed invulnerability. We reacted by flipping out and invading the wrong country and passing reams of knee-jerk legislation designed to chip away at civil liberties wherever they could. Our government, when it wasn't handing us lies that were about as transparent as a window where the glass has been removed and replaced with nothing but pure, spring-fresh air, was telling us that there was nothing to see here and that the best way to get involved was to go shopping. And if you did have to get involved, you'd better be with us. Because we know who's against us. The tehrists. Overseeing all of this was a simplistic frat boy idiot manchild of a President and the band of Washington technocrats who had been itching to bomb the hell out of the Middle East since the 70s. The media, for its part, was playing along, doing what it was told, and making sure that the people, with whom sovereign power resides in the United States, had no way of knowing what its government was actually doing at any given time. Americans had been lied to over and over again for decades, starting with the post-ironic age of advertising (which Taibbi pinpoints as the Joe Isuzu ads) up to the utterly unswallowable "They hate us for our freedoms" line that we were supposed to believe when it slid, wet, horrible and putrescent from the mouth of George W. Bush. And then, if you raised your hand and asked questions about the story you were expected to buy into, people turned around and accused you of being a faithless traitor. So what are people to do when they can't trust the narrative that their leaders are giving them? Why, they turn inward, of course, and build their own narrative. Their own bubble, as it were - a space within which everything makes sense. Everything can be explained, people can be trusted, and all the rules work. It is utterly incomprehensible to outsiders, but that's okay because outsiders are the whole reason the bubble exists in the first place. As Taibbi discovers, there is far more in common between the far right hyper-Christians and the far left conspiracists than you might expect, and that there are far more of them than you really want to know. This book is basically two interwoven parts, with a few interludes to keep the story on track. In one part, Taibbi goes down to Texas, uses a fake name and gets involved with a Megachurch in San Antonio. He joins the church to find out what brings these people together in a time when the government and the media can't be relied upon, and what attracts people to a live of fundamentalist Christianity in the first place. He goes to meetings where demons are cast out, to small group discussions in beautiful Texan homes, and listens to people explain why it is that they've given their lives to Christ, something that Taibbi would never do himself, were he not researching a book. He also finds himself drawn into the shadowy world of the 9/11 Truth movement, a group that believes that - to varying degrees - the Bush administration bears some of the blame for the attacks on New York and Washington D.C. Some believe they knew about it but chose to do nothing, so that they would have a reason to launch their war against Iraq. Others believe that they directly caused the attacks, mining the collapsed buildings and aiming the aircraft. The more elaborate theories involve holograms, missiles and a conspiracy of silence that is continually upheld by thousands of otherwise loyal Americans. Much like the fundamentalist Christianity, Taibbi immerses himself in Truther culture, trying to find out what it is that keeps them going, even when they - like the Christians - have no real evidence to support what they believe. Even moreso for the Truthers, there is actually a lot of logical, circumstantial and physical evidence that outright debunks their theories, but they soldier on anyway, utterly convinced that they are the only ones in America who haven't surrendered to the lies of the political and media machines. So what do these two groups have in common, and what do they say about America? American politics are, generally, about Us versus Them. All politics, really, but we do it really well. The parties in power do their best to say that they stand for Us against Them, regardless of which party you vote with, but it's become increasingly evident that the parties in power are not really for Us - they're for Themselves. They push the same canned platitudes and wedge the same minor issues every election cycle with the sole purpose of keeping their jobs, and that is finally becoming evident to the public. Rather than governing, which is ostensibly their jobs, Our Representatives in Congress are doing what they can to help themselves, their parties and their friends, and this is more and more evident the closer you look. To have them then turn around and say, without a trace of irony, that they're doing their best for the country they love, that they actually care about the concerns of the voter, is enough to make even the most optimistic Pollyanna turn into a Grade-A cynic. But rather than rising up as one and kicking the bastards out, the public turned inwards and went into their bubbles. If the game we're playing is Us versus Them, then let's do it right. Now we're not just one group of people with a certain set of political views, we are the anointed of God or, depending on where you are, the only intelligent people ina world of sheep. And who are They? They are not just corrupt politicians. They are agents of Satan, sent to bring about the end of the world. They are power-hungry chessmasters, bent on ruling with an iron fist. It's a world view that makes sense to the people who have chosen to live in it, more sense than the "real" world does. Now this book was written back in 2006 and a lot has happened since then, so it is very much a book of its time. Since then, we have seen our political theater change in many interesting ways, not the least of which is the Tea Party, which is kind of the coming-out party for a lot of the people who felt they had been left out of the discussion for so long. They've had their chance to incubate in the churches and on the internet, and now they're out in force and ready to change the way politics works. Whether they will ultimately be successful is still up for argument, but so far, well... They're kind of freaking me out. The take-home message from the book is this: There have been far worse times to be in the United States, and our nation has seen its way through far greater trials. But each one is different, born of different causes and with different effects, and we do not have the benefit of being able to look back and see how everything works out. It is much easier these days to find people you agree with and isolate yourself with them, and every time Congress or the President or the Media lets us down, it's more and more tempting to do so. But that way lies madness. The madness of an evangelical movement that is anticipating the end of days, the madness of a conspiracy of vast and perfect proportions. The answer is not to isolate ourselves with the like-minded but to seek out those with whom we disagree and make sure that we're all living in the same world, no matter what it's like. Rather than dividing ourselves into two giant camps of Us and Them, pointed and aimed by people whose only interest is in seeing us rip each other to shreds, maybe we can finally see what it is that unifies everyone. Once we can do that, once we can fight the derangement, perhaps we can see our way to making our country into the one we want it to be. ------------------------------------------- "Washington politicians basically view the People as a capricious and dangerous enemy, a dumb mob whose only interesting quality happens to be their power to take away politicians' jobs... When the government sees its people as the enemy, sooner or later that feeling gets to be mutual. And that's when the real weirdness begins." - Matt Taibbi, The Great Derangement ...more |
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0812550757
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| 0812550757
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| 263,995
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it was amazing
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In his introduction to the book, Card says that the main reason he wrote his most famous book - Ender's Game - was so that he would one day be able to
In his introduction to the book, Card says that the main reason he wrote his most famous book - Ender's Game - was so that he would one day be able to write this. I think this is something that probably happens a lot to authors. They get a Big Idea in their head, something with great depth and complexity and meaning, and quickly discover that they don't actually know what they're writing about yet. There's too much to say, there's too much that even the author doesn't know yet, and to go forward from that state of ignorance will result in what is, ultimately, an inferior narrative. Andrew Wiggin, the Speaker for the Dead, comes to the human colony Lusitania in order to speak the death of a local man, Marcão. While given the same reverence and privileges as priests, Speakers are not the same. Their job is to learn about the dead, to understand who they were and who they wanted to be, and then tell the truth as plainly and as clearly as possible. They do not give eulogies, where they try to paint the dead in as good a light as possible. They reveal who this person was, and in the process try to help those left behind understand them. It's a calling that requires an insightful mind, great empathy for others, and the ability to tell the truth despite how hard that truth may be to hear. As a Speaker for the Dead, Andrew Wiggin is very good at his job. It was he who was the first Speaker, who wrote a text that is as revered as the Bible - The Hive Queen and the Hegemon - in order to understand how humankind could kill the only other intelligent species it had ever encountered. The book reveals who the Buggers were and why they attacked humanity. It tells how their understanding of what it means to be intelligent led to a century of warfare and, ultimately, their own destruction. The book also reveals humanity, the dreams and fears that it faced when it met the Buggers. And it tries to understand why humans were so afraid that they took one of their own - a little boy named Ender - and turned him into the greatest monster in human history. The Xenocide. The one who destroyed an entire alien race. This book changed the way humankind saw the universe, and themselves. With the Buggers gone, but their technology still available, humans expanded out to a hundred worlds. Though their starships could only go just under the speed of light, the ansible provided instant communication between the stars. It formed a communications network that held the Starways Congress together and allowed humanity to become a multi-system species. Ender - Andrew - is ultimately responsible for all of this, and is therefore the linchpin of this entire universe. In order to write this book, to understand the culture and the history and the politics that would be necessary to write Speaker for the Dead, Card first had to understand who Ender was. So, with the blessing of his publishers, he was able to turn Ender's Game into a full-length novel. Once that was done, he was able to turn back to this book and craft it into what it has become. The colony of Lusitania is a small place, a group of Catholic settlers who live in a small and insular town. They have all the troubles that any new world would have, except for two that make it truly unique. The first is the descolada, a virus that nearly destroyed the colony and, thousands of years before, life on the planet. This illness literally unzips and recombines your DNA, ravaging your body utterly. If not for the dying work of the colony's two great xenobiologists, everyone would have died. As it turned out, Gusto and Cida were the last to die, leaving their sad, strange daughter Novinha behind. Even that wouldn't be enough to make Lusitania a truly remarkable place. No, for that, we must introduce the Piggies - the third intelligent life form known to exist in the universe. They're small, look like little pig-men, and are indisputably intelligent. They learn quickly, even despite the law forbidding xenologists from influencing their development, and present humanity with an important chance: the last time we encountered an alien intelligence, we obliterated it. Let's not do that again. This becomes harder, however, when the Piggies kill two of the xenologists in what appear to be a horrifyingly painful method. Now it looks like humanity may have to revert to type again, and that there truly is no way that humans can share the same space with other intelligences. Into all this steps Ender. His years of lightspeed travel have kept him young while three thousand years have passed, and he has wandered from world to world to speak for the dead. Now he is on Lusitania to speak for Marcão, an investigation that will lead him to uncover secrets kept for decades, and to once again change the way humans understand their universe. There's really so much to say about this book that it's hard to decide what to leave out and what to keep in. For one thing, Card is trying to write a very different kind of science fiction story. In his introduction, he says that a lot of fiction is adolescent in nature, science fiction especially. It's about adventure, about people seeing a way out of their conventional lives and going off alone. It's about being freed from responsibility and living a fast and crazy life. When that loneliness of adventure finally becomes too much, the hero settles down, but that's usually the last chapter of the book, if ever. Card wanted to go the opposite way, to take a lonely adventurer and show him trying desperately to become responsible, to become a member of a community. In class, where I'm teaching Ender's Game, we've identified isolation as being one of the overriding themes of the novel. Ender is constantly taken away from those he loves or held apart from others. In the end, he becomes a solo wanderer. Even more than that, he is made into a monster, a name on par with Lucifer itself. He is virtually thrown out of humanity, and it is only because no one knows who he really is that he can travel unmolested. So we're seeing Ender in that stage where the loneliness and the wandering have become an unbearable burden to him, and all he wants is a place to belong. But as a Speaker, as a man speaking a death that could completely upend the lives of everyone in the colony, he has his work cut out for him. There is also the element of redemption. In his years of travel, Ender has carried a very special package with him - the cocoon of the last Bugger hive queen. In exchange for her story, he promised that he would find a home for her, a place for her to rebuild her vast family. And on Lusitania, there is that chance. But first he has to save the Piggies, to prevent them from suffering the fate of the Buggers at the hand of a fearful and suspicious Humanity. If Ender can do this, perhaps he can make up for the horror that he unknowingly perpetrated. There's a lot going on in this book, to say the least. It's a great book, better in many ways than Ender's Game. It is more complex and adult and difficult, with moments of true emotion, a well-built socio-political system befitting a species that spans hundreds of worlds, and addressing the needs for changes in culture, politics and even language that would arise from the need to define relationships between worlds and between species. Fundamentally, though, this book is about what the Speaker for the Dead does best - understanding. It's about how we deal with The Other, even when that Other is completely alien to us. Humans and Buggers, Humans and Piggies - hell, Humans and Humans, we have a hard time understanding people who are not like us. We find it very difficult to look at the world from their point of view and to see the world through their eyes. Understanding what they love and fear, what they value and honor, or what they abhor - and more importantly, understanding what they see in you and how they understand you - is the best and surest road to making peace with those who are different from yourself. And that's a lesson that is valuable for all of us. --------------------------------------------- "No human being, when you understand his desires, is worthless. No one's life is nothing. Even the most evil of men and women, if you understand their hearts, had some generous act that redeems them, at least a little, from their sins." - Ender Wiggin, Speaker for the Dead ...more |
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0452295467
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it was amazing
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Imagine, for a moment, one of our early human ancestors. A first-generation Homo sapiens, exploring his world with an amazing brain that would be the
Imagine, for a moment, one of our early human ancestors. A first-generation Homo sapiens, exploring his world with an amazing brain that would be the envy of the animal kingdom. If they understood envy. He, and his children, and their children and grandchildren will spread across the Earth as hunter-gatherers, the first beings (so far as we know) who can look at the world and attempt to pass on what it knows and learns. Their threats were simple: survive or don't. Find food or starve. Hunt or be hunted. And those fantastic brains did such a bang-up job that their descendants are still walking around, thousands of generations later. Now, take that Paleolithic man - swift of foot, sharp of eye, strong of hand - and drop him in the middle of modern-day Times Square. And, as his minder, give him a bored, easily distracted teenager - one who knows the world, but can't be bothered to do the work to make decisions. Congratulations. According to Daniel Gardner, we have just constructed a fine metaphor for how the human brain works. Part of it is very old, able to make decisions in an instant based on the slimmest of clues. The other is newer, more rational and savvy, able to put together reasoned, logical arguments, but doesn't have the sheer speed and force that is prehistoric partner has. And as much as we want it to be true that the rational, modern part of our mind is in charge,the sad fact is that out inner caveman has far more influence over us than we care to admit. Gardner begins the book with an interesting story about the most terrifying thing to happen in the last decade - the attacks of September 11th in the United States. By the time the towers fell, people around the world were watching, and anyone who didn't see it live would surely see it soon enough as it was replayed over and over again. It was truly terrifying to watch, unlike anything Americans had seen before in their country, and it scared the ever-loving hell out of people. Many people, as a result, chose to forgo air travel in favor of driving. Now, as Superman famously told Lois Lane, flying is statistically the safest way to travel. In fact, the most dangerous part of any trip that involves flying is usually the drive to the airport. But, in those days and months after the attacks, people were scared to fly. So they drove instead. And, according to a five year study of traffic fatalities in the U. S. after 9/11 by German psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer, 1,595 people died on the roads who otherwise would not have. They were afraid, and that's understandable. But they were afraid of the wrong thing. So they died. Gardner sets out in this book to figure out why it is that people in the healthiest, safest, most prosperous nations on Earth - in the healthiest, safest, most prosperous era of human history - live in a state of near-constant fear. A lot of it, as the intro implies, comes down to the fact that our brains, which evolved over millions of years to be very good at judging risks that might be found on the savannah, are simply not prepared to do the same in a modern technological world. Our brains can't tell the difference between risk in fiction and reality, between something that happened to us and something we saw on the news. When it comes to risk, our brains play it very safe, which is great out in nature. Is that shadow in the bushes a tiger? Maybe, maybe not, but either way it's probably a good idea to get the hell away from it. We can't say the same thing of that guy sitting on the bus who looks like maybe he might be a Muslim. We also tend to assume that if we've heard of something recently, then it must be more common. Again if you're out in nature and you saw a bear yesterday, there's a decent chance that the bear is still around today and you might want to be wary of that. But what if you see constant news coverage of a high-profile child abduction? It's on every show, being talked about on every blog - does that mean that the chance of your child being abducted has increased? Of course not, but your brain doesn't see it that way. Your brain thinks that your child will be taken from you the moment you look away, and all the reasoning in the world won't change its mind. One more thing: we don't get numbers. The news tells us that the rate of certain risks is up by 10%, but they don't tell us what the original figure was. We hear about millions of starving children in Africa, but don't do anything unless we get a personal story of one. We don't understand probability at all, we can't deal with randomness, and this lack of innate numeracy (compounded by an educational culture that makes it hard to teach kids to become numerate) costs us billions. Or more, as the recent economic Clusterthing has shown, when you have people who are good with numbers deliberately exploiting this flaw in order to profit. We think that correlation equals causation. We believe stories over facts. We think we don't have biases that we clearly possess. We assign high risk to things we don't like and low risk to things we do, regardless of how risky they actually are. And on top of all that, we know how to exploit others' fears in order to gain money and power for ourselves. It's easy to do, and it works like a charm. Reading this book won't make you into a magically unflappable person, mainly because all of this stuff is pretty well hard-wired in our brains. Even Gardner, who should have known better, tells a story about hunting through the slums of Lagos in the middle of the night to retrieve a photo of his children from the wallet that had been stolen from him. He had plenty more, but at that moment, his brain was convinced that losing the photo meant losing his children. Irrational, yes, and it nearly got him killed, but that's just one example of what a powerful force this primitive brain is. The good news, though, is that you can strengthen the newer, more recent brain - the lazy teenager from the initial example. By knowing how you make mistakes, how you can be fooled into fearing things that you don't need to fear, you can better understand your own reactions to events and make better decisions. You can educate yourself about the things that are actually dangerous, and stop losing sleep over the things that are not a threat. Being afraid is not your fault - it's an ingrained biological feature. Staying afraid, on the other hand, is something over which you have control. With enough will power, even you can overcome great fear. Sorry. Nerd moment there. Are there terrorists who want to destroy the United States? Sure. But they won't, because doing so is indescribably harder than certain politicians would have you believe. Are there creepy child molesters who want to abduct and defile your children? Yup. But the chances of that actually happening are so low that the odds of any specific child becoming such a victim are nil. Are there angry teens who want to come to their school and kill everyone they see? Of course. But when you look at the incidence of school shooting compared to how many kids go to school every day, you can see that the odds of your children being caught in a school shooting are slim to none. In fact, there are many parts of the country where your children are probably safer in school than out of it. There are real risks in our modern world, but they're not spectacular and they're not viscerally terrifying. A car accident, a heart attack, a diabetic death - these things don't make the news. Imagine a 9/11-style attack happening every three days, 3,000 dead each time. It would be an outrage, a national disgrace, and people would be scared to their bones. But it would take just about 233 attacks to equal the number of deaths in 2001 that occurred from cardiovascular disease in the United States. The nearly nonexistent chance of being killed by terrorists is enough to get people to submit to any number of indignities and intrusions on their persons and liberties when they travel, but the very real risk of death from a heart attack isn't enough to get people to go take a walk once in a while or stop eating junk food. So enjoy that delicious moment of irony the next time you go through the TSA molest-a-thon and get a seriously overweight screener taking liberties with your person. The fact is that we have it damn good compared to our ancestors. We live longer, we live better, even in parts of the world that are still developing, and it looks like the future will progress that way. But we still insist on needing to be afraid, even as we have less and less to actually fear. So put down the newspaper, turn off the 24-hour news, and take some time to figure out what is actually a threat. Give that bored teenager something to do with his time and let the caveman go back to his cave. -------------------------------------------------- "Anyone who has spent time in a Victorian cemetery knows that gratitude, not fear, should be the defining feeling of our age. And yet it is fear that defines us. We worry. We cringe. It seems the less we have to fear, the more we fear." - Daniel Gardner, The Science of Fear ...more |
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3.98
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it was amazing
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Hey! Hey, baby, baby, waitwaitwaitwait. Wait. Wait! Baby, don't... don't freak out Okay, okay, I know what this looks like, but I can explain! Quiet, C Hey! Hey, baby, baby, waitwaitwaitwait. Wait. Wait! Baby, don't... don't freak out Okay, okay, I know what this looks like, but I can explain! Quiet, Chad, let me handle this. I can explain! I'm just - please, stop crying and listen - I'm just fulfilling my evolutionary heritage and helping to cement social bonds with... um... the pizza boy, but that'snotthepoint!! That's not the point! Look, before you do anything, y'know, drastic, you just need to read this book.... Humans are really good at figuring things out. As far as we go, we have a real knack for taking things apart and figuring out how they work. Though determined curiosity and perseverance, we know what's happening at the center of the sun, we know how the continents slide across the surface of the earth, how plants turn sunlight into potatoes. We can smash atoms and cure disease and peer back to the moment of creation itself. There is almost nothing that humans cannot comprehend if we put our minds to it. Except ourselves. Don't get me wrong - we have made great strides in philosophy and psychology, and come very far in understanding human origins and our spread across the planet. But there is a fundamental problem that we have when we study ourselves, and that is that we cannot do so objectively. Try as we might, it is impossible to completely put aside our own biases, judgments and backgrounds when we study how humans behave and try to understand why they do what they do. They are still there, if you look for them, and nowhere are they more evident than in the search for the origins of foundations of human sexuality. The standard model, as it's often called, goes something like this: ancient men and women established a pattern of monogamy based on mutual self-interest. The man would keep to one mate in order to be absolutely sure that he was dedicating his efforts towards raising his own kids and not someone else's. If a man had multiple partners, he wouldn't be able to provide for them all, and his genetic investment would die out. So, in terms of efficiency, it is much better for the man to keep himself to one woman, focusing all his attention on the children he knows he has fathered and making sure they live to have children of their own. As far as women are concerned, they require the resources that the men bring. When pregnant, a woman's physical capacities are reduced and she is in a vulnerable state, so by staying monogamous, she is essentially purchasing security and resources that would otherwise be unavailable to her in a world that brought quick and merciless death to the weak. If she slept around, the man wouldn't be sure that the child she bore was his, and would therefore have less interest in taking care of the both of them. Thus, monogamy is the best bet to assure the survival of herself and her child. This is the story that's been told for a long time, and it's considered by most to be the truth. Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jetha, however, disagree. Not only do they think the standard model is wrong, but they think it is nothing more than a relic of our own modern biases and hang-ups. The process, they say, can be referred to as "Flintstonization." As you know, the characters in "The Flintstones" were more or less just like us. They went to work, they had houses and appliances and domestic disputes. They had the same issues and amusements as we did, because we overlaid our own society onto a prehistoric setting. Now in cartoons, that's good entertainment, and in the right hands it can be used as powerful satire and commentary. In science, though, it's just no good. Starting with Darwin, people have imagined prehistoric humans to have the same sexual values that we have: a demure, reluctant female who is very choosy in deciding which male she will mate with. A bond forms, and they are faithful to each other until the end of their days. Later researchers, looking at our ape cousins, have plenty of observational research to support the idea that very early humans were monogamous. They look at chimps and gorillas and baboons and confirm what they had always suspected - that our natural sexual state is one of monogamy. The logical conclusion, then, is that our modern attitude towards sexuality, with the rising rates of divorce and teen sexuality, represents a deviation from the way things "should" be, and must therefore be fixed. A loveless marriage, a man's roving eye, a woman who cuckolds her husband, serial monogamists, all of these, according to the standard model, result from our attempts to go against our nature. Or is it the other way around? Ryan and Jetha have put together a very compelling argument that the standard model of pre-agricultural human sexuality is not only wrong, but dangerously so. By looking at modern foraging tribes and the way they live, as well as doing a comparative analysis of humans against our nearest ape cousins, they have come to this conclusion: our "natural" sexual state is one of promiscuity. Back in the day, communities were small and tightly bonded, and sex was one of the things that held those bonds tight. Rather than one man and one woman struggling to protect their own genetic line, their entire community made sure that children were cared for and raised well. Everyone was everyone else's responsibility, and in a world of plenty there was no reason to try and enforce any kind of sexual exclusivity. It was only with the rise of agriculture that it became important to know what was yours, as opposed to someone else's, and that quickly extended from fields and livestock to wives and children. Now that people were keeping their own food and making sure to divide their lands from their neighbor's lands, sharing went out of style. With so much work put into growing crops, that's where the standard model of economic monogamy settled in, and it's been with us ever since. The advent of agriculture changed everything, and not everything for the better. In addition, the very biology of humans, from the way sperm behaves to the shape of the penis, to the anatomy of the clitoris to the noises women make in the throes of orgasm - all of these point to an evolutionary history of sexual promiscuity. The evidence of our bodies tell us that being locked into a lifetime monogamous pair-bond is not what we evolved to do. Ryan and Jetha know that their view of the fundamental nature of human sexuality will not be popular, mainly because it completely undermines our vision of who we are. So much law, tradition, education, entertainment and just plain common sense relies on humans being naturally monogamous. It's something that seems so obvious to us that we cannot imagine a society built any other way. Unfortunately, if Ryan and Jetha are right, society is the problem. We have established a cultural norm that goes completely against our biological and evolutionary nature, and which makes people miserable on a daily basis. I bought this book mainly to stop Dan Savage from nagging me about it. If you listen to Savage's podcast - and you should - you will soon realize that monogamy is something that a lot of people aren't good at. We look at other people with lust in our hearts, we cheat, we stay in relationships where we're sexually miserable just because that's what we "should" do. For most people, our sexual urges are to be fought against, with everything from self-restraint to social shame to law itself. It seems like staying monogamous is one of the hardest things for many people to do. This, of course, raises the question: if it were natural, would it really be so hard? It is a fascinating read, which covers a lot of ground and makes some very compelling arguments. It's also quite funny in places, which was quite welcome. In discussing the standard model the authors note that this is, fundamentally, prostitution, wherein the woman uses sex for material resources. This sexual barter system has been assumed to be true for years, leading the authors to write, "Darwin says your mother's a whore. Simple as that." They also put in some special notes for adventurous grad students in the field of sexual research (especially genital to genital rubbing, something popular in bonobo apes, but which is rarely studied in humans) and re-titling the extremely popular song "When A Man Loves a Woman" as "When a Man Becomes Pathologically Obsessed and Sacrifices All Self-Respect and Dignity by Making a Complete Ass of Himself (and Losing the Woman Anyway Because Really, Who Wants a Boyfriend Who Sleeps Out in the Rain Because Someone Told Him To?)" I don't really know what can be made of the serious information proposed in this book. No matter how it may seem, the authors are not proposing a dissolution of marriage or compulsory orgies or anything like that, nor is this book a "Get Out of Cheating Free" card. We've spent thousands of years putting these restraints on human sexuality, and they're not going to come off anytime soon. The best we can do right now is to be aware of where our ideas about relationships come from, and stop to think about the difference between what is true and what we wish were true. This understanding might help to save relationships that would otherwise work. People cheat not because they're scum or whores, but because they're human. Being monogamous is really hard not because we're weak or flawed, but because it's not what our bodies want for us. The search for a better understanding of human nature should lead us to being better humans, and nothing should be left out. Not even our most sacred beliefs. Not even sex. ------------------------------------------------ "Asking whether our species is naturally peaceful or warlike, generous or possessive, free-loving or jealous, is like asking whether H2O is naturally a solid, liquid or gas. The only meaningful answer to such a question is: It depends." - Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jetha, Sex at Dawn ------------------------------------------------ Okay? Okay, baby? So you see, I wasn't really cheating - okay, I was, but you can see why, right? I was just acting in accordance with my fundamental humanity, following the biological impulses as determined by millions of years of evolution when we... Hey, where are you going? Where are you? Oh, hell, he's going for the shotgun. Run, Chad, leave your pants, you don't have time, run! ...more |
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Dec 24, 2010
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Dec 29, 2010
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Hardcover
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0982167121
| 9780982167120
| 0982167121
| 3.93
| 7,358
| Oct 13, 2010
| Oct 13, 2010
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it was amazing
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How would you live if you knew how you would die? The premise for this collection of short stories was introduced back in 2005, in an installment of Ry How would you live if you knew how you would die? The premise for this collection of short stories was introduced back in 2005, in an installment of Ryan North's popular Dinosaur Comics. In it, he presents the following premise: there is a machine which, with only a small sample of your blood, can tell you how you will die. But there are no dates, no details, no explanations. Just a few words, and that's it. The Machine is never wrong, but it is annoyingly vague and has a decidedly un-machinelike love of irony. So you might get OLD AGE and think you were set, right? Not necessarily. You could be murdered by an octogenarian while trying to steal their TV. Or you might get PLANE CRASH and decide never to fly again. Fine, but that won't stop the single-engine Cessna from plowing into your house one fine spring afternoon. Pulled GUILLOTINE, did you? Hope you know to stay away from heavy metal concerts. But it doesn't matter. The Machine, while perversely misleading at times, is never wrong, and like most prophets, its predictions often only make sense after the event has already happened. With that premise, hundreds of writers across the internet set to work. How would this Machine affect people? How would it affect society or business or politics? Would we become slaves to its predictions, or simply shrug it off and live our lives as we did before, knowing that we were going to die someday anyway? In "Flaming Marshmallow" by Camille Alexa, we see how the existence of the Machine has begun to shape youth culture. Carolyn is about to turn sixteen, the legal age at which one can be tested. A milestone equivalent with getting one's driver's license or being able to vote, kids monitor each other's fates with scrupulous detail. Your eventual manner of death brings you together with those of similar fates, and new cliques begin to form. Kids who are going to die violent deaths sit together in the lunch room, far away from the ones who get OLD AGE. The kids with DRUG OVERDOSE and fates like it all mill about with each other, and nobody talks to the ones who get SUICIDE. By finding out one's manner of death, a teenager gets what teenagers always want: a sense of belonging and inclusion. But will Carolyn's fate bring her closer to her fellow students or just leave her an outsider? "After Many Years, Stops Breathing, While Asleep, With Smile On Face," by William Grallo, continues that idea out into the adult world. Ricky is dragged out on the town to a nightclub where people flaunt their deaths. They wear fake toe tags with MURDER or HEART ATTACK on them. Or, if they're feeling impish, NEVER, or BOREDOM. But while everyone else is mocking their deaths, Ricky is in the odd position of knowing that he's got a good end to his life. What he doesn't know is what will happen between now and then, or with whom he will share it. David Malki ! explores the darker side of society's reactions in "Cancer." James is a young man whose father is dying of cancer. It's what the Machine had predicted, and it was all coming true. Despite the Machine's infallibility, however, his father was seeking out a cure, a way out from the fate that had been given to him. And he's not the only one - a new generation of hucksters and faith healers has sprung up, all claiming to be able to defy the predictions of The Machine. It gives James' father hope, but whether that hope is worth the price or not is something James is unsure of. "Nothing," by Pelotard, is a touching tale of a young woman who discovers a family secret that never would have been revealed before the Machine was invented. "Despair," by K.M. Lawrence, is an examination of how paralyzed people might become by the ambiguity of the predictions, unable to act lest they inadvertently fulfill them. "Improperly Prepared Blowfish" by Gord Sellar is an entertaining moment of secrets and betrayal among a group of yakuza in Japan, and Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw has some fun with the politics of Machine predictions by giving us a politician whose fate is to die from EXHAUSTION FROM HAVING SEX WITH A MINOR. Some stories are funny, others are touching, but they all center around that most existential of questions: how do we live, knowing that we will die? Without The Machine, we still know we're going to die. Every one of us has, somewhere in the back of our mind, that constant reminder that our lives are finite, that there is a limit to the amount of time we can spend on this earth. And, for the most part, we choose to ignore it. After all, if you spend your whole life obsessing over your own death, then you can't have much of a life, now can you? But add to that fundamental knowledge of finitude the extra awareness of the manner of your death. If you get CAR CRASH, what can you do with that knowledge? You know it's inevitable, that The Machine is never wrong, but you may still struggle with that fate. You may cut up your driver's license, move out to Amish country and vow never to be within striking distance of a car again. The entire course of your life will shift drastically, based on the two words printed on that card, but the end result will be the same: CAR CRASH. Knowing that, is it better to act on the knowledge you have gained, or to ignore it? Even worse, sometimes the very act of finding out your fate leads you right to it. In "Suicide" by David Michael Wharton, characters learn about their deaths only moments before experiencing it. Had they not gone to get tested on The Machine - had they not gone to that machine - would they have avoided their fate? The Machine would say no, but you'd have to ask it first. The best expression of this paradox is contained in the book's shortest tale, "HIV Infection From Machine of Death Needle" by Brian Quinlan, wherein the very act of discovering your fate causes that fate to happen, whereas you would never have had it if you hadn't gone looking for it. It's kind of a mind trip, if you think about it. What if you get something fairly straightforward, like CANCER, and you decide to, say, jump out of an airplane without a parachute? Will that even be possible, or will random events conspire to keep you safe until your proscribed end? And if you get SUICIDE, the one form of death you have absolute control over, do you fight against it or give in, knowing that nothing you do will change the outcome? And what could this tell you about the future for everyone? In "Heat Death of the Universe," by Ramon Perez, teenagers who reach the legal testing age start getting NUCLEAR BOMB as their means of death. The government springs into action, testing, re-testing, and vowing to corral all these kids into one place. But if their deaths are inevitably by NUCLEAR BOMB, what does that mean? It means that whether they're all in one place or dispersed across the country, that is how they will die. Acting on the information doesn't change its outcome, only what the manner of that outcome will be. Conversely, it might be impossible to predict anything from the predictions The Machine gives out. As was pointed out in the same story, the 3,000 victims of 9/11 probably wouldn't have all had TERRORISM printed on their little cards. They might have had FALLING or FIRE or PLANE CRASH - all true, but none of that would have helped anyone prevent that event. Even something as clear and unambiguous as GLOBAL THERMONUCLEAR WAR creates problems, as Cassandra finds out in the story of the same name by T. J. Radcliffe. If you tell people about this future, will they even believe you? Or will the actions they take to prevent it instead be what causes it to happen? There are no easy answers, at least not without electroshock. It's a fascinating group of stories, illustrated by some of the internet's best artists - Adam Koford, Kevin McShane, Aaron Diaz, Kate Beaton, Christopher Hastings, and too many others to mention. It will do what all really good writing should do - make you think. As seductive as it sounds, knowing the means of your death is information that you really can do without. It is the end to your story, whether you know it or not, but everything until then is still up to you. While you may not have any choice over how you die, you still have plenty of control over how you live. You can live in fear or hope, make plans and take risks and hope for the best. Just like we do now. I'll leave you with a joke from Steven Wright, one that was running through my head as I read the book: My girlfriend asked me if I could know how and when I was going to die, would I want to know? I said, "No, not really." She said, "Okay, forget it, then." Thank you, he'll be here all week. ------------------------------------------------------- "What good is knowing the future if you can't do anything with the knowledge?" Dad, from "Friendly Fire" by Douglas J. Lane ------------------------------------------------------- ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Nov 27, 2010
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Nov 27, 2010
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Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
0441359175
| 9780441359172
| 0441359175
| 3.67
| 12,383
| Dec 01, 1970
| Apr 15, 1987
|
did not like it
|
One of the things I enjoy about Heinlein is that he likes to play with Big Ideas. While he did dip into the well of action and adventure, especially f
One of the things I enjoy about Heinlein is that he likes to play with Big Ideas. While he did dip into the well of action and adventure, especially for his juvenile stories, he treated his readers like they were only slightly intellectually inferior to him, and so explored concepts that required a lot of heavy thinking. The need for war, the inevitability of messiahs, revolution, life, death, immortality - he's not afraid to shy away from some of the greatest philosophical topics that reside in the human heart, and this book is no exception. Johann Sebastian Bach Smith is a very old, very sick, very rich man. He built himself up from nothing and rose to financial prominence in what is a little more than a regular human lifetime. Smith had it all - a rich and exciting life, complete financial security, good friends and good memories in a world that had, frankly, gone to hell. He had very nearly everything a person would want to have. What he didn't have was time. He lived in daily pain, kept alive by only two things: an ever-increasing number of machines and a plan to release himself from the geriatric horror his life had become. He knew that this plan would probably fail. He knew that he was facing death no matter what happened. He knew that it was crazy, and not necessarily crazy enough to work. But it was all that stood between him and suicide. That plan was, in theory, very simple: transplant his healthy brain into the body of a healthy young person. By doing so, he would gain a whole extra lifetime to enjoy the fruits of his first lifetime's labor. Not being a monster, he was prepared to do this in a legal and ethical fashion. With his legal, medical, and judicial contacts, he made arrangements with a medical advocacy group to get the body of a healthy young person who died due to some massive brain trauma. And - and this is important - who consented to having their body used for medical experimentation. Everything would be above-board, legally sound and ethically certain. All Smith had to do was stay alive until a body became available. When it did, however, he was in for a double surprise. Not only was the healthy, youthful body that of a female, it was that of his healthy, youthful, beautiful secretary, Eunice Branca. Eunice had been murdered, but her body was in excellent condition. She had the right blood type, and had consented to have her body used for Smith's experiment. The one doctor in the world who could perform the surgery was brought in to perform it, and against all odds, it worked. Johann Sebastian Bach Smith was reborn as Joan Eunice Smith, and her new life began. But she was not alone. By some means, Eunice's mind survived to live with Joan, and tutor her in all the ways of being a woman. Joan dove happily into her new life, exploring her new femininity and sexuality as best she could. In that sense, this whole book is an exploration of sexual identity. Here we have a man who is now a woman, even though that was never his intention. He soon finds himself thinking like a woman, though, bringing up the question of whether gender is determined by a person's mind, or by the body it inhabits. If you put a male mind into a female body, with the vastly different hormones and sensory inputs, will that male mind start to act like a female? And even if it does, should it? Smith makes a decision to, with Eunice's help, be the best woman he can be, mostly because he feels that is what is expected of him. After a lifetime of conforming to male societal roles, Smith wholeheartedly embraces the female ones, up to and including seducing his best friend of many decades. Gender identity in this book is a tangled mess of biology and intention, and it looks at being female from a distinctly male point of view. Which brings me to my first problem with this book: the casual misogyny. I know it's a pretty loaded word to throw around, and it's not entirely accurate, but it was the one that kept coming to my mind. While Heinlein is certainly capable of creating strong and independent female characters, and emphasizes over and over again that both Eunice and Joan are actively choosing the lives they lead, those lives are almost entirely dependent on and revolve around men. One of Smith's first actions when he goes from Johann to Joan is to latch on to a man - her old friend Jake Saloman. She views her identity as a woman as incomplete without a man to base it on, and spends most of the book trying to figure out who she is in relation to men - Jake, her security guards, Eunice's widower, and more. She repeatedly mentions how helpless she is without a Big Strong Man in her life, and all of this culminates in what is possibly one of the most misogynist moments I have ever read in sci-fi: a spanking scene. And not a sexy one, either. In a moment of adolescent pique that Jake won't sleep with her when she wants him to, Joan throws a fit, disrupting their dinner plans. Jake proceeds to throw her over his knee and give her a spanking because, and I'm quoting here, "You were being difficult... and it is the only thing I know of which will do a woman any good when a man can't do for her what she needs." Joan accepts the spanking meekly, not only thanking Jake for his spanking, but also claiming that she had her first orgasm while he did it. Wow. That's nearly as bad as the other major female character, Winnie, who talks about a gang rape experience with what can almost be imagined as fondness. Oddly enough, this is not my biggest problem with the book. I mean, it was written in the late '60s, and it reflects the thinking of that era. For all his progressive beliefs, Heinlein was still a man of his time, and it really shows here. Legend [1] has it that he was really sick when he wrote this book, and that may have had something to do with the fact that no matter how many complex hot-button issues he touches (gender roles, homosexuality, same-sex marriage, overpopulation, government overreach), the fact remains that there is no story in this book. Let me explain. A story needs conflict. It needs not only a protagonist that is trying to achieve something, but obstacles that impede that achievement. There were so many potential goals and obstacles to be explored in this story - a man's brain in a woman's body - but Heinlein manages to artfully dodge all of them. The story of Smith's inner struggle to resolve the gender he grew up with with the gender he now possesses would have been fascinating. But it didn't happen. Smith pretty much accepts the change right away, with few if any reservations. Even so, he could have struggled with how to live as a woman – should he adopt the identity that a patriarchal society would confer upon him as a woman, or forge his own as a uniquely gendered person who has gone from the privileged to the unprivileged sex? Unfortunately, the conflict doesn't even occur to Joan. She decided to be the best woman she can be, constantly asking others what that entails, rather than asking herself. Or how about the concept of Identity itself? Smith is an old brain in a new body, so is he legally the same person he was before the surgery? That would be an amazing story as he tries to prove that Johann has become Joan, and that even though Eunice's body is still walking around, she's actually dead. But no - Smith has some powerful legal friends with ironclad arguments, and the legal proceedings are pretty much a foregone conclusion. Or how about rejection by society? Regular transgendered people have a hard enough time getting society to accept the modification of the body they were born with - what about when someone takes on an entirely new body entirely? Joan could have struggled to get her friends and family to accept who she has become, to stand before the world with her head held high. But no.... She has enough money that she doesn't really need society's approval, none of her friends have any trouble with what she's become, and even Eunice's widower has only a moment of uncontrollable emotion before accepting that his wife is dead, but still walking around. And he might get to sleep with her again. One last one - the soul. Joan hears Eunice's voice in her head, but it's unclear whether it is really Eunice or if it's just Joan's imagination. What's more, they never fight. They never have a serious disagreement and have to resolve their differences so that they can continue to occupy the same skull. Eunice and Joan live together like wisecracking sisters and never have to deal with the problem of living with someone you can't get rid of, even if you're not sure if they're real. In other words, there's no there there. It's a long, talky, philosophical exploration of some fascinating topics, but as a novel, it's incredibly dull. You keep waiting for the blow-up, for the accident, for the Big Problem that Joan and Jake have to struggle to overcome, and it never arrives. Everything works out either through money or force of will or Heinlein's trademark Sheer Damn Reasonableness. Between that and the constant thought of, "He did not just say that," I found this book rather stressful to plow through. It offers up a lot of big ideas to think on, raises some very important questions, and Heinlein's gift for dialogue makes some fun conversations, but I think I would have liked it more if it had been completely different. ------------------------------------------------------ "Sir, if you want to give me a fat lip, I'll hold still, smile happily, and take it. Oh, Jake darling, it's going to be such fun to be married to you!" "I think so too, you dizzy bitch." - Joan and Jake, I Will Fear No Evil by Robert Heinlein ------------------------------------------------------ [1] Wikipedia ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Oct 11, 2010
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Nov 06, 2010
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Mass Market Paperback
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1400066603
| 9781400066605
| 1400066603
| 3.80
| 619
| May 05, 2009
| May 05, 2009
|
it was amazing
|
I, for obvious reasons, have a great affection for the English Language. It's a rich and exciting tongue, with a history as tangled and strange as the
I, for obvious reasons, have a great affection for the English Language. It's a rich and exciting tongue, with a history as tangled and strange as they come. Over the last millennium or so, the language has gone through so many shifts and changes that people spend entire lifetimes trying to figure it out. Once they do, more often than not, they find that what once was true about their beloved mother tongue just doesn't hold up today. So there's a choice to be made by lovers of language: deal with the ever-fluctuating nature of English, adapt yourself to its changes and go on with your life, or do your damnedest to hold back the tide of error that is slowly overtaking your beloved tongue. For reasons that should be obvious, the former type of person is far less likely to write books. Their laid back, laissez faire attitude towards the world is less inclined to make them mad enough to sit down at a computer and pound out thousands of words on the state of the language today. The latter type of person - and I do occasionally count myself among them - are far more likely to sit up late at night and write scathing tracts about the utter and complete degeneration of today's language - about split infinitives and buzzwords and the ungodly Frenchification of English. If you listen to the sticklers, you might be forgiven for thinking that the very fabric of the English Language is in a state of decay, rotten and putrescent, and ready to fall apart any moment. Patricia O'Connor and Stewart Kellerman are here to give you some perspective, something in which language sticklers are usually lacking, and perhaps lessen the incandescent rage that overtakes you when you hear people use "infer" to mean "imply," or "unique" to mean "special," or say, "I could care less," even though you know it's supposed to be "I couldn't care less," because I mean my GOD, even a CHILD, even a half-trained, concussed MONKEY could see how that phrase works, what's so hard about a simple word, you MORONS, you gibbering pack of.... ****We are experiencing technical difficulties at the moment. Please stand by. We apologize for the inconvenience.**** And we're back. Sorry about that. This book is about errors in English, and not only the legitimate ones. It's also about how some of those errors aren't really errors, or how they used to be, but now they aren't. O'Connor and Kellerman are looking to give us a historical sense of how the language has evolved and changed over the centuries, and let us know that the rules of language can't be set by prim and stuffy grammarians from two hundred years ago. Those Grammarians, for example, are often called The Latinists, and a great many of them come from the 18th century. In those days, Latin was held up as being some kind of "perfect tongue," and there was a certain fetish for making English play under Latin rules. The authors wryly note that this would make "about as much sense as having the Chicago Cubs play by the same rules as the Green Bay Packers." For those of you who are rusty on your linguistic history, Latin split off into what are called the Romance Languages, which includes Spanish, French and Italian. English, on the other hand, has its roots in the Germanic side of the great language tree, and so is more similar to German, Dutch and Frisian. The vast number of Latin-based words we have are, technically, imports, as English is merely a cousin to Latin, not its descendant. But no, there were Those who wanted us to be more Latin-like, and so they imposed rules on English that made no sense whatsoever. Such as the Split Infinitive Rule (i.e. not putting a word between to and a verb - to boldly go would be considered an utter abomination to these people.) In Latin (and Spanish, and French, and Italian), the infinitive form of a verb is a single word - it is literally impossible to split. English, however, has two-word infinitives, and plenty of room to joyfully put in modifiers. Another good example is using the word "none" as a plural - "None of the ninjas are dead." The old grammarians would insist that the sentence be, "None of the ninjas is dead," because "none" is a compressed form of "not one." Even the venerable Stephen Fry can be caught pushing this one, in a rather hilarious outtake video from his wonderful quiz show QI. Fact is, people have been using "none" as a plural for centuries, and it was accepted language back then. The current fracas about it rose up in 1795 when a guy named Lindley Murray suggested that while "none" can be used as either a singular or plural, it is really best used as a singular. Which English sticklers all took as, "It really must be used as a singular." A hundred years later, and it's become an ironclad "RULE," with no more foundation than one grammarian's half-hearted opinion. There's also a great section on bad etymology - these are the stories about word origins that everybody knows, but which are most certainly wrong. For example, the origin of the word "Jeep" is usually attributed to a reading-aloud of "G.P.," meaning "general purpose," an appellation allegedly applied to these indestructible vehicles. Nope, sorry - it comes from Popeye comics. Or think about the Xmas season - whoops! I mean, Christmas season. Use "Xmas" today and you'll get lambasted for taking the Christ out of Christmas. The abbreviated word is now looked upon as a Secular Humanist Plot to ruin Christmas for all the good god-fearing folks. Nope - the letter X has been representing Christ for more than a thousand years, and comes from the Greek letter X (chi), which is the first letter of Χριστός, which means, yes - Christ. The venerable Oxford English Dictionary can trace "Xmas" as far back as 1551, in fact. One part of the book that really got my attention (other than Chapter 5 - the one on swearing) was the chapter on words that have fallen out of favor due to hyper-sensitive political correctness. Remember when Some People (they know who they are) started spelling the word for a female human as "womyn," so as to remove it from the male-dominating "man"? Well, as it turns out, back in the good old Anglo-Saxon days, "man" referred to a person, regardless of their sex. Over time, distinctions began to emerge, giving us waepman for males (lit. "weapon-person") and wifman for a married female. Change happens over time, and wifman became woman. Guys lost half their word and just ended up with "man." Poor us. The authors also touch on more charged language as well. For example, they recount the tale of a white city official who used the word "niggardly," meaning "stingy" or "tight with money" in a conversation about expenses. This caused a massive media storm because the word "niggardly" sounds really close to "nigger," a word that white people have to be really, really careful about using. For good reason, of course, but the fact is that "niggardly" and "nigger" are completely unrelated. The former goes back to old Scandinavian and the word "nygge," which meant a miser. The latter is a corruption of the Latin niger, meaning "black," which is turn gave us the Spanish and Portuguese "negro." Long story short (too late), that city official used the right word in the right context, but it wasn't a word that we let people use anymore. It's a a Fallen Word, joining other words and phrases such as "Call a spade a spade," "Rule of thumb," and "shyster." All of them have innocent origins, but have been inextricably linked with some of our worse human prejudices and practices. I could go on. The point is that this book is a great pleasure to read, and will give you a fresh new perspective on the English language. It's non-academic, so you have nothing to worry about there, well-organized and just plain entertaining. More importantly, while it may not be able to prevent you grinding your teeth when you see "Ten Items or Less" at the local supermarket, you may be less inclined to try and strangle the manager. Maybe. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Jun 07, 2010
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Jun 12, 2010
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Hardcover
| |||||||||||||||
0441783589
| 4.01
| 237,812
| Dec 1959
| May 1987
|
it was ok
|
This book is controversial. Says so right there on the cover - "The Controversial Classic of Military Adventure!" A quick look at its Wikipedia page s
This book is controversial. Says so right there on the cover - "The Controversial Classic of Military Adventure!" A quick look at its Wikipedia page seems to support this, claiming that the book has been criticized for its literary merit, its support of the military, up to and including fascism, racism, utopianism, and gods knows what else. What is certainly true is that it's a book that is guaranteed to make someone, somewhere very angry. In the unspecified future, humanity has taken to the stars. In our efforts to colonize planets that are hospitable to us, we have spread as far and as wide as possible. Unfortunately, this has brought us into direct contact with alien races who are not entirely keen on sharing land with us, and, as we have always done, we are willing to fight, bleed and die for every inch of it. Our main enemy is the Bugs, whose proper name we never actually learn, and they are a vicious enemy indeed. They possess a hive mind, made up of Soldiers, Workers and Brains. The Soldiers are, of course, the most dangerous, not least because they have no individual sense of self-preservation. Unlike the human soldiers, who value their comrades and brothers-in-arms highly, the Bugs will never go back for a fallen comrade and never consider the safety of their own when prosecuting a campaign against the humans. In other words, the Bugs truly are alien to us, and therefore need to be eliminated. The story follows a young man, Juan Rico, in his journey from enlisted grunt in the Mobile Infantry to Officer in the Terran Federation. Through his eyes, we learn about the technological lengths that we have gone to in order to be able to fight the Bugs. First among these is the powered armor that the Mobile Infantry wears - an all-purpose exoskeletal suit that vastly increases its wearer's speed and strength, in addition to providing him with instant contact with his squadmates and vital information that he needs to fight the enemy. Humanity in the future has made great strides in terms of warfare, all out of need to defeat the Bugs. You might be forgiven, then, for thinking that this was a grand military adventure. That we would feel the thrill and terror of a young military recruit as he experiences a universe larger and wilder than he ever could have imagined. You would be wrong. Not entirely wrong, of course. If you read it right, you can infer the newness and strangeness of the circumstances that Juan Rico finds himself in. But this book isn't about Juan Rico, even though he is the narrator. In fact, we don't even learn his proper name until nearly two-thirds of the book is finished. Before then he's just "Johnnie," which is one of the most generic soldier names out there. Juan Rico is so irrelevant to the story that we don't even find out that English isn't his native tongue until three pages before the end of the book. Juan Rico is nothing more than a cipher in this tale, about as important to the content of Starship Troopers as Glaucon is to The Republic. In the classic tale of Socrates, the philosopher talks about justice and politics and society, with his wisdom inspired by a question-and-answer session with his students. Somehow, the students always manage to ask just the right questions to allow Socrates to expound on his theories, and they're usually wrong in just the right ways to make Socrates look smart. So it is with Starship Troopers. Juan Rico is the means by which Robert Heinlein is able to put forth his opinions on war and society, politics, citizenship, crime, child-rearing and, of course, military service. Instead of writing a series of straightforward essays, unfortunately, he decided to make his readers slog through Starship Troopers. This book is a love letter to the military and all it stands for. Not just war and death and destruction, of course, but also loyalty, sacrifice and devotion to duty. It is an examination into why people become soldiers, why some succeed and others fail, and about the historical importance of the soldier class in human history. It's about war as a tool of diplomacy, both in its startling effectiveness and its unfortunate inevitability, as well as the importance of the chain of command and proper military discipline. It's about the comradeship of veterans and the lessons they learn during the service. There's a good reason why this book is on the reading lists for both the Navy and the Marines. What it is not about is any of the characters that are actually involved in the story. The only reason Juan Rico is who he is is because he is not someone else. He could have been Buddy St. Germaine or Phil Waxman or Marvin Crumplebottom and the story would have read exactly the same: son of a rich businessman who enlists in the armed forces just to tweak his father, learns a whole host of Valuable Lessons (tm) and eventually discovers his calling. There is absolutely nothing about Juan Rico than makes him any more interesting than any other character except that he happens to be the narrator of the story. If that were all, I might be able to let this book slide as just thinly-veiled military fetishism. But honestly, there's no veil there at all. The story stops in several places while Heinlein uses his characters as mouthpieces to tell us how he thinks society should be run. Ancillary characters - students, subordinate soldiers - ask just the right questions or are wrong in just the right ways so that Heinlein, much like Plato speaking through Socrates, can make the points he wants to make. Juan's professor, retired Lt. Colonel Dubois, and the other lecturers repeatedly point to the 20th century as a model of how not to govern, happily cherry-picking some of the worst results of our system of government and holding them up as the inevitable result of a society that is not run by veterans. For that is how he sees the best of all possible states - one in which only veterans are full citizens and in which only veterans can run the country. The logic being that only someone who has voluntarily enlisted and served in the military is able to truly put the needs of society before his own, and is therefore the best person to run a country. Heinlein, through his fictional avatars, then goes on to show how much more superior the Terran Federation is to its more democratic predecessors and how stupid we were not to see the obvious truth. The message, then, is that the reader is stupid if he or she does not agree with Heinlein. The ancillary characters who challenge Heinlein's thesis are written as obvious idiots and are roundly insulted and abused by their superiors, which effectively becomes Heinlein abusing his readers. In addition, Heinlein sets up so many straw men to knock down that it gets tiresome. Juan's father, for example, is almost stereotypical as a foil to Dubois. Mr. Rico is rich and aloof and sees the military as nothing more than a bunch of violent thugs who have outlived their usefulness. The first time we see him, he is a snob and a jerk, and Juan's decision to piss him off by joining is almost inevitable. The next time we see Mr. Rico, of course, he has joined the Mobile Infantry himself, and has seen the error of his ways. Other members of the cast are overtly written to embody certain themes in Heinlein's opinion of military rule, both positive and negative. Private Hendrick, for example, is a constant complainer, one who stands up for himself during boot camp and just barely escapes a hanging. He is not disciplined enough to be a soldier, and by extension a citizen, and therefore serves as a warning to others. Sergeant Zim [1:], on the other hand, is the consummate soldier - hard on his charges in boot camp, yet as concerned about them as a father would be to his sons. Zim, along with an array of Lieutenants, Captains and other officers, serve as blatant father-substitutes for Juan Rico, with all of the qualities that one would want in a father and absolutely none of the drawbacks. If anything, their only flaws are that they are too concerned about their soldiers. While reading, I wondered if maybe Heinlein was being sarcastic. If perhaps he was trying to demonstrate the true folly of military fetishism by taking it to its ultimate extreme. I have to admit, I didn't disagree with all of his ideas. His thoughts on juvenile delinquency, for example, really struck a chord in me - he maintains that treating young offenders as rational adults who can learn from their crimes is foolishness since, like puppies, young people are not inherently rational and have not yet learned the difference between right and wrong. The term "juvenile delinquent," he maintains, is an oxymoron, since a juvenile has not yet been able to learn of his duty to others, and therefore cannot be delinquent. To treat him as if he were is to fatally misunderstand human nature. And I think there is a grain of truth to the idea that someone who willingly puts her or his life and body on the line for his or her fellow citizens might indeed have the perspective necessary to govern a country. I would point out, however, that this argument rests on a flawed assumption - that service automatically confers selflessness. There may be correlation, but causation is not yet proven. But I don't think he's being sarcastic. The themes and ideas in this book resonate with those that permeate his other books. What's more, Dubois sounds like Jubal Harshaw, Lazarus Long and Professor De la Paz - other characters from other books who all served as mouthpieces for the author's political and social philosophies. And this is what makes Heinlein's books so special - he is not afraid to stand up for his ideas and put them right there on the page for the reader to see. It is not so much Heinlein's ideas that I object to in this book, even if I do disagree with many of them. It is his presentation of those ideas that bothers me. Flawed logical methods presented as irrefutable discourse, transparent characters with no life beyond their purpose as object lessons, and a dissertation on military supremacy that is just barely disguised as a science fiction novel. It is written from the presumption that the writer is right and the reader is, from the first page, completely and utterly wrong. I think the ideas that Heinlein presents in this book are important, and they are worthy of discussion. I just wish he had held his readers in a little higher esteem when he decided to discuss them. [1:] As a side note, the entire boot camp sequence is much, much more entertaining if you read Sgt. Zim with the voice of Invader Zim. It exponentially improves the book. ...more |
Notes are private!
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not set
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Mar 16, 2010
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Mar 18, 2010
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Mass Market Paperback
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0060723939
| 9780060723934
| 0060723939
| 3.81
| 9,704
| 2007
| Jul 24, 2007
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really liked it
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The world is a weird place. This is as true now as it was fifty years ago, but there's one big difference between us here in the twenty-first century
The world is a weird place. This is as true now as it was fifty years ago, but there's one big difference between us here in the twenty-first century and our primitive twentieth-century forebears: they didn't have the internet. With the democratization of information, what was once only whispered about is now available to anyone who wants to see it. What few people knew, they can now share with the world. This is certainly true of science and history, culture and arts, but what concerns most people on the internet is not the finer, more cerebral aspects of culture. It's the porn. Have you heard of Rule 34, for example? The Rule states that, if it exists then there is porn of it somewhere on the internet. Remember your favorite childhood TV show? The one that you used to look forward to every week, and which perhaps you watched with your parents and/or siblings? You have fond memories of those times, I'm sure, and cherish the characters in your heart - characters that you grew to love and thought of as, dare I say it, family. Well somewhere on the internet there's a picture of them engaged in acts that would make the Baby Jesus weep. Weep, I tell you. [1:] And that's not the worst of it. Warren Ellis is arguably one of the current superstars of the internet, with a huge online following. He produces content every day, and it's followed by thousands of readers all over the world. Much of the time it's talk about fiction and the industry of fiction, perhaps promoting up and coming artists or talking about the projects he's working on. Sometimes it'll be a commentary on the World Today, though that's less often. His output is varied and always interesting, and occasionally comes with a link that says, simply, "Don't look." You looked, didn't you? Serves you right. Well when Warren sends one out, the consequences are much more severe. He links to people who are doing things - usually to their bodies - that I would shudder to describe. There are graphic photographs and descriptions by people who willingly cut, mar, mark and sever things that (in my opinion) really shouldn't be cut, marred, marked or - and I'd like to stress this - severed. Should you be so brave as to click on one of Warren's links (these days usually reading as, "Conan! What is best in life?"), you will see something that you probably never wanted to see, and which you most certainly cannot un-see. Keep in mind that Warren doesn't create these people. He doesn't find them and put them on the internet, unless he is far, far more diabolical than we give him credit for. He simply shows us where they are and lets us make up our own minds. To look, or not to look. To condemn, or not to condemn. Regardless, what he's showing us is a side of the world that most of us never knew existed, and were probably happy to have been ignorant of. The question then becomes, what are we going to do about it? In his book, Crooked Little Vein, the U.S. government has the answer to the rising tide of deviation that seems to have engulfed the country in the latter days. There exists a book - a Secret Constitution of the United States. It was allegedly bound in the skin of an extraterrestrial and is weighted with exotic meteorite stones. The act of opening the book creates a sonic pulse that resonates with the human eyeball and forces you to read it. In it you will find the secret Constitution and its twenty-three invisible amendments that tells Presidents what the true intent of the Founders was. For nearly two centuries this hidden document governed the country, until it was lost in the 1950s. Since then, America has slid into perversion and degradation, and the White House Chief of Staff wants private investigator Michael McGill to track it down. For his part, McGill wants nothing to do with it. Despite the huge amount of money that he stands to earn, he knows that taking this case will refocus the Universe's attention on him and he'll start to draw the freaks like iron filings to a magnet. And since finding the book is all about stopping the freaks, Mike is in for all of the weirdness that America can throw at him. Before he can find the book, Mike will have to confront the twisted, kinky and perverted side of the country and decide what is to become of it. This book works on a lot of layers. For one, it's a fun read, and you'll probably get through it pretty quickly. Ellis is an accomplished writer, with a vivid imagination and an excellent ear for dialogue. He also has a very good sense of written rhythm, which probably comes from his main gig as a writer of comic books. Some of the chapters are single sentences, meant to be read and absorbed in a moment, but also to be thought on. When you get to Chapter 6, which simply reads, "I wish I still had that photo," you're meant to take a moment to think about what that means, both to the character and to the story. What this means is that not only does Ellis know that he's telling us a story, he's vividly aware of the medium through which he is doing it and exploits that very well. It shows an awareness that most authors lack, or at the very least don't often take advantage of. I have only one nit to pick about Ellis' writing, though, and I'm sure he will subject me to Horrors the likes of which you cannot fathom for pointing them out, but not to do so would mean I was shirking in my duties. This is how much I love you all. While it is set in the United States, and is something of a dirty love letter to the country, there is a distinctly British English tone to some of the writing. Not too much, just enough to make you notice, if you're the kind of person who notices these things. His narrator uses the verb "trod" at one point, as in "I trod on her foot," which doesn't sound very American to my ears. Likewise, he refers to wainscot and leatherette, words which ring with a certain amount of Britishness. Maybe it's just me, but they kind of stood out. Your experience may vary. [2:] Anyway, beyond the simple entertainment of reading the book, there are some very real things to think about in there. For example, in an age where anyone can put up a webpage, what does it mean to be "mainstream?" What's more, what does it mean to be "underground" these days? Fifty years ago, homosexuality was something that most decent, God-fearing people didn't even know about, much less experience. Now there are openly gay actors, athletes and politicians, and the "gay next-door neighbor" is already a character so common that it's become a cliche. Is S&M, for example, "underground" when we've been making jokes about it in TV and movies for years? How about swingers? Hell even the pedophiles are mainstream, which you'd know if you were a viewer of Family Guy. How long with it be until we see saline injection fetishists, macroherpetophiles or functioning heroin addicts as being simply part of the endlessly variegated crazy quilt that is American culture? What's more, should we allow all these people into the cultural mainstream? Is there a kink limit for society? Is there something that people can do to themselves, or to other consenting adults, that is just so Out There that we have to draw the line and say "No further, weirdo!" For those of us who are a bit more open-minded than most, can we turn around and decry the whitebread people who like their vanilla lives and sexual predictability? Who will make that judgment call, and how? In this book, it's the U.S. Government that's trying to do it, and they'll roll the country back to the Fifties if they can. One of the wonderful and scary things about living in the Internet Age is that these cultural rules have yet to set in. We're looking around and seeing all the strangeness that we never knew was there and deciding in the moment what's acceptable and what isn't. Should we appreciate these unusual practices for their creativity and for the flavor they lend our culture, or should we snuff them out in the name of some notion of "Decency?" Ellis' answer is pretty clear once you get through the book, and I have to agree with him. I've always been on the side of personal liberty, so long as you're not hurting anyone who doesn't want to get hurt. As for those of us who might be a little weirded out by knowing what it is that people get up to in their bedrooms, remember - you don't have to click on the link. Either way it's a serious philosophical issue for the 21st century, and Ellis has done a very fine job of presenting it to us. Beyond the book, I have no doubt he will continue to do so. [1:] Rule 35, by the way, states that the if no porn is found of it, it will be made. [2:] Warren's eels are doubtless on their way for me now. Run! Save yourselves!! ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Feb 19, 2010
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Feb 21, 2010
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Hardcover
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0393065200
| 9780393065206
| 0393065200
| 3.87
| 7,095
| Jan 19, 2008
| Jan 26, 2009
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liked it
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What was the biggest story of 2006? The arrest of the shampoo bombers in England? Small fries. The first World Baseball Classic? YAWN! The death of Do
What was the biggest story of 2006? The arrest of the shampoo bombers in England? Small fries. The first World Baseball Classic? YAWN! The death of Don Knotts? Nothin'. No, as interesting as they were, none of these generated nearly as much public interest and argument as the much ballyhooed "demotion" of Pluto by the International Astronomical Union in August of 2006. Poor little Pluto, hanging out there on the edge of the solar system, got bumped down to "Dwarf Planet," rousing much ire from people all across the United States. And, in a way, Neil deGrasse Tyson bears some responsibility for it. To be fair, stripping Pluto of its designation as a planet was never on his agenda. No matter what angry elementary school students may have thought, Tyson had no beef against Pluto. It was just that Pluto had the bad fortune to be an oddball planet, and Tyson was working on the redesign of the Rose Center for Earth and Space in the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Whether he wanted to or not - and I'm pretty sure he didn't - he became the public face of this issue, one which gripped the country. That in itself is weird. Americans are not the most scientifically literate of people. Sure, we like to use the fruits of science, but most people don't really pay attention to things like astronomy unless it's a shuttle launch or a pretty Hubble picture. What's more, the public in general has never really gotten involved in matters of taxonomy. If you went up to someone and said, "Hey, the scientific community is thinking about revising the nomenclature regarding the classification of anaerobic bacteria," they'd probably just walk away swiftly, looking back a few times to make sure the crazy person isn't following them. But tell them that the IAU is planning to demote Pluto, and what you have is a firestorm. This book is not so much about Pluto itself, but our relationship with that weird little ball of ice and rock. Tyson takes us through our history with Pluto, from its discovery back in 1930 to its demotion in 2006, and tries to figure out just what it is that has endeared it so to the American public. One possibility, of course, is the fact that Pluto was an American discovery. Percival Lowell was the one to start the hunt, and Clyde Tombaugh finally found it. While the name was suggested by a teenage British girl, everything else about the discovery of Pluto was American, and that was a point of pride. There were only three non-Classical planets in the heavens, and we had claim to one of them. So even if the average American doesn't know the history of Pluto's discovery, we still have a certain love for it. Despite its diminutive size, Pluto has loomed large in the American imagination. Perhaps there's something of the underdog love in there, too. Americans love to see the little guy win, and if you look at a lot of the pro-Pluto artwork from 2006, the theme of big planets ganging up on a little one was very popular. As odd as this perception might seem from a scientific standpoint, I think a lot of Americans were supporting Pluto because it was being pushed down by The Man, as it were. And so the country went a little nuts. Newspapers, blogs, websites - even sports reporting got in their digs on the Pluto controversy. There was something for everyone in this story, and everyone who could manage a Pluto reference did so with gusto. It was a mixed blessing, to be sure - the American public was finally excited about astronomy, but it was the excitement of a bar fight, rather than the highbrow intellectualism that many astronomers might have preferred. What was also interesting about this book was the look at the professional arguments that went on as well. Dispelling the dispassionate image of the astronomer, professionals got really worked up about this, on both sides of the issue. Grown men and women, many of whom were well-versed in many aspects of astronomy, spoke passionately about Pluto. Some called on our sense of tradition and cultural memory, acknowledging that while Pluto may be an oddball, he's our oddball. Others were more than happy to throw Pluto into the Kuiper Belt with the other icy mudballs. So often, Science is assumed to be some monolithic entity that describes the world with a unanimity of voice. It is supposed to be dispassionate and rational, and we don't really think about the reality of scientific progress. To use the analogy often given to marriage, science is like a duck - stately and sure on the surface, but with a whole lot of work going on down below. The history of science is full of more passion, debate and anger than you might suspect. In order to decide the issue, symposiums were convened, meetings were held, and finally the International Astronomical Union was forced to do something that had never occurred to anyone before: precisely define what is and is not a planet. In case you're wondering, the definition is quite simple: It has to orbit the sun, be big enough to have attained a spherical shape, and it has to have cleared out its orbit. Pluto fulfills the first two requirements, but badly fails the third. Therefore, it is not a planet. They created a new designation: dwarf planet, including Ceres in the asteroid belt and Haumea, Makemake and Eris out past Pluto. The public may not like it, but that's how it is. Tyson points out that this is not the first time we have done such a reclassification. With the discovery in the mid-19th century of objects orbiting between Mars and Jupiter, a new class had to be invented in order to keep the number of planets from rocketing into the thousands - and so asteroids were born. The Pluto case is quite similar. Long after Pluto was discovered, more objects, similar in nature, were discovered nearby - some even bigger than Pluto was. The region of rock and ice was named the Kupier Belt, and if Pluto were discovered today, it would most certainly be named as part of it. As much as it pains me to say it, the decision to reclassify Pluto was the right one. At least Tyson and I have revised the Planet Mnemonic the same way: My Very Educated Mother Just Sent Us Nachos. The rise and fall of Pluto is an interesting story, and a lesson for science educators. No matter how bad it may seem for science in the United States, people can still be surprisingly passionate about scientific topics. It's also a warning against resistance to change. With all that we are learning about the Solar System, to just rattle off a list of planets and be done with it is insufficient. There are so many other ways to look at it now, so many ways to group the hundreds of bodies out there, that perhaps Pluto is more comfortable out with the other Trans-Neptunian objects. With its own kind, as it were, instead of being shoehorned in with eight other guys that it doesn't really have anything in common with. Ultimately, of course, Pluto doesn't care what we call it. That point was often made on both sides of the argument, and they're right. We could call it Lord Snuggypants the Fourth and it would keep doing what it does out there in the cold and the dark. But it's important for us, and not just because science needs things to be organized so we know what we're talking about. Being able to reclassify Pluto is an indication of the breadth of our knowledge - had we not made such progress, Pluto's classification would never have been in doubt. The "demotion" of Pluto is a sign of our amazing achievements over the last eighty years. We have not lost a planet - we have gained understanding. So in the end, the Great Pluto Debate is one that we should look back upon fondly. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Jan 22, 2010
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Jan 21, 2010
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Hardcover
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0765319853
| 9780765319852
| 0765319853
| 3.93
| 52,485
| Apr 29, 2008
| Apr 29, 2008
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really liked it
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Probably the biggest hurdle to overcome when reading young adult fiction is the fact that I'm not a young adult. As most adults know, things look very
Probably the biggest hurdle to overcome when reading young adult fiction is the fact that I'm not a young adult. As most adults know, things look very different from this part of the timeline, and it's often very difficult to remember not only how you thought when you were younger, but why you thought the way you did. And it's not a matter of just denying the feelings and emotions of youth - it's that we literally cannot reset our minds to that state. We know too much, we've experienced too much. The best we can do is an approximation of how we think we remember how things were when we were still young enough not to know better. It was with this in mind that I started to read Little Brother, and while I thought the book was a lot of fun to read, it probably wasn't nearly as cool as it would have been if I were fourteen years old. Young Marcus Yallow, AKA w1n5t0n, AKA m1k3y, is a senior at Cesar Chavez high school in San Francisco, and he's what we used to call a "computer whiz" back when I was a kid. Marcus has an excellent grasp of how systems work, and finds great pleasure and thrill in either strengthening or outwitting those systems. Thus, he is able to fool the various security measures in place in his school building so that he can do the things his teachers don't want him to do - send IMs in class, sneak out whenever he wants, steal library books, that kind of thing. He's a hacker supreme, a trickster, and a very big fish in his little pond. He's so confident and cocky, in fact, that within twenty pages I wanted nothing more than to see him get his comeuppance. Which is pretty much what happens. A series of bombs go off, destroying the Bay Bridge and killing thousands of people in an attack that dwarfs 9/11. In the chaos that ensues, Marcus and his friends get picked up by Homeland Security, taken to an undisclosed location (which turns out to be Treasure Island) and interrogated within an inch of their lives. They quickly break Marcus' smug self-confidence and assure him that there is no way he can win against them if they decide he's a threat to national security. When he is sufficiently cowed, Marcus is released back into the city, which has become a zone of hyper-security. In this post-attack San Francisco, the police and Homeland Security have unprecedented powers to search and seize, access to every trace of electronic records of citizens' movements and transactions. In other words, everyone is a suspect until proven otherwise, and DHS is confident that the security they provide is worth the loss of liberty. Malcolm, of course, disagrees. His natural tendency to buck authority meets his desire to get back at DHS for what they did to him and his friends, and comes together in a plan to not only subvert the Department of Homeland Security, but to actively drive them out of his city. To that end, he creates a youth movement, powered by a secret internet known as the XNet and kept safe by means of complex cryptography. The youth of the city come together to cause chaos, to show Homeland Security that they are not all-powerful and that if anyone is terrifying American citizens, it's not al-Qaeda. In the end, of course, the good guys win, though not without some losses and some disappointment. Freedom triumphs over security, but how long that triumph will last is unknown. All we do know is that the right of the citizens to tell their government what to do - as enumerated in the Declaration of Independence - is maintained. So in that sense, all is well. It's a fun book to read, and I'll admit, there were times where I could feel anger building and my heart racing as the story moved along. Perhaps that's because, like Marcus, I have a solid distrust of authority. I don't automatically assume that governments act in their citizens' best interests, so in that sense, this book is targeted at people just like me. Or, if it's a younger reader, at creating more people like me. The narration is well done, a believable 17-year-old voice, and it's a pleasure to read. Moreover, it all holds together very well. In some ways, this book reminded me a lot of Neal Stephenson. Doctorow has clearly done a lot of research on security, both electronic and otherwise, cryptography, politics and history, and found a lot of cool stuff that he's incorporated into the novel. Unlike Stephenson, however, Doctorow makes sure the story is more important than the trivia. All the cool stuff serves to support the plot, rather than having a plot built up around all the cool stuff the author's found, which is what Stephenson seems to do a lot. So there are some asides where Malcolm takes a few pages to explain, say, how to fool gait-recognition software or how public and private keys work in electronic cryptography, but he does it in an interesting way and you can be sure that what he's telling you will feed into the story sooner or later. With a couple of caveats, and a pretty major plot hole, I'd be glad to hand this off to a nearby teenager and say, "Read this." But the caveats are kind of big. So let's get to them. First, the plot hole, which bugged me from the moment I saw it. And as with all plot holes, I may have missed something, so let me know if I did. After the bombing of the Bay Bridge, Malcolm and his friends are picked up by DHS and given the Full Guantanamo Treatment. While it looks like they were picked up randomly, the Homeland Security agent who puts them through the wringer implies that they were specifically looking for Malcolm and his buddies, seeing them as a very real and imminent threat to national security. My question is: Why? It's never explained why DHS picks them up, nor why they treat them as severely as they do. If DHS knew something about Malcolm's activities as a hacker, why weren't we told what they knew? It looked like DHS was just picking up random citizens and trying to scare the piss out of them. Which, given the characterization problem that I will discuss later, is entirely possible. Before that, though - this is a book of its time, and is ultimately less about Malcolm than it is about the time in which Malcolm lives, i.e. about ten minutes in our future. It was published in 2008, which means it was being written during a period in American history where the debate over privacy versus security hit its peak. After September 11th, after the creation of Homeland Security and the Iraq War, Americans had to answer a lot of questions about how safe they wanted to be. It was possible, they said, to be very safe, but only if we sacrificed some of our freedoms. Thus the no-fly list, warrantless wiretaps, and waterboarding. It's a dilemma that mankind has faced since we started organizing into societies, and it seemed, in the opening years of the 21st century, that America was willing to give up a good deal of its personal liberty in exchange for not having thousands of citizens die. Doctorow believes this is a very bad exchange to make, and has been publicly vocal in saying so. On Boing Boing, a webzine that is decidedly in favor of intellectual and informational freedom, Doctorow has repeatedly railed against ever-intrusive technology measures by both governments and corporations. He, and the other editors of Boing Boing, champion the personal liberty of people, both as citizens and consumers, and I tend to agree with them. But that makes Little Brother less a book about the issues that affect young people than a book about what it's like to live in a hyper-security culture. And that's not a bad thing, mind you - like I said, it makes for a very exciting book. I just don't know how long it will last once we stop having the liberty/security argument as vocally as we are now. Which brings me to my other caveat, and one that bothers me more than the book being period fiction - bad characterization. Malcolm is great, as are his close friends and his eventual girlfriend, Ange. They're real, they're complex and they're interesting. In fact, most of the "good guys" in this book are well-drawn. Depending on your definition of "good," of course - after all, Malcolm is technically a terrorist, so long as you define "terrorist" as "someone who actively operates to subvert, disturb or otherwise challenge the government by illegal means." If Malcolm and his subversive friends are the good guys, then that makes the Government the bad guys, and this is where Doctorow falls flat on his face. The characters who operate in support of security culture, whether they're agents of Homeland Security or just in favor of the new security measures (Malcolm's father being a prime example), are cardboard cut-outs that just have "Insert Bad Guy Here" written on them in crayon. There is no depth to their conviction, no complexity to their decisions. Doctorow makes it clear that anyone who collaborates with DHS is either a willful idiot or outright malevolent, without considering any other options. He gives a little in the case of Malcolm's father, but not enough to make me do more than roll my eyes when he came out with the hackneyed, "Innocent people have nothing to fear" line. Any character who acts against Malcolm in this book (and, it is implied, disagrees with Doctorow) is a straw man, a villain or a collaborator straight from central casting with all the depth of a sheet of tinfoil. They are all easy to hate and make Malcolm look all the better, even though he's acting as, let's face it, an agent of chaos. While this may make the story easier to tell (and, from my readings of Boing Boing, turning those who disagree with you into objects of ridicule is a popular method of dealing with criticism - see disemvowleing), it cheapens it. As much as I - and Doctorow - may hate the idea of security infringing on liberty, as much as we hate the reversals in personal freedoms that we've seen over the last eight years, and as much as we may want Malcolm to come out on top, it has to be acknowledged that sometimes people who want to restrain liberty aren't doing it out of malice. There are those whose desire to see a safe, orderly nation is so strong and so honest that they're able to make the decision to curtail those liberties that make order harder to attain. And they're not doing it because they hate young people, or because they're some cinema villain out for power or just to see people suffer. They're doing it because they truly, honestly believe it is the right thing to do. To write them off as "Bad Guys," as this book does, is to ignore the reality of the situation and boil it down to an "Us vs Them" scenario, which is not how the world works. Now it could be argued that this was a reasonable artistic decision - after all, Malcolm is the narrator of this tale, therefore we're seeing things through his eyes and his perceptions. But that doesn't wash. Malcolm is obviously an intelligent person who understands complexity, and if Doctorow had given him the opportunity to see shades of gray, he could have been able to handle it. More importantly, though, that argument is a cheat. A book like this is meant to open eyes and minds, and that can't be done by reducing the issue to us versus them. Doctorow does his readers a disservice by not allowing them the opportunity to question their own attitudes towards the issue. I really think the book would have been better, and had a deeper meaning, if Doctorow had made an honest attempt to show the other side in a more honest light. I still would have rooted for Malcolm, and hated the DHS, but his ultimate victory would have been more meaningful if it had been a fairer fight. Of course, I say this as an adult, who understands things in a different light than a teenager. Perhaps if I had had this book when I was thirteen it would have changed my life. And despite my misgivings about the characters and the universality of the story, I still think it's a great book and well worth reading - probably one of those books that will be a model of early 21st century fiction. Indeed, the core lesson of Little Brother - that citizens have the responsibility to police their government - is a lesson whose time has come. The G20 protests in London this year are a great example - many incidents of police abuse were clearly and unambiguously recorded by citizens armed with cell phones. The ability for information to be quickly and reliably distributed is the modern countermeasure against government abuse, though I doubt it'll end as cleanly as it did in this book. Reading this book in the context of the last ten years or so gave me some hope for the power of the populace. But it also served to remind me that I'm not that young anymore. The rallying cry of the youth in this book is "Don't trust anyone over 25," and I'm well past that stage in my temporal existence. The rebels of the day are young. They're tech-savvy and unafraid, with nothing to lose but their lives. In this age of rapidly evolving technology, in a time where youth is everything, is there a place in the revolution for people who have advanced in age to their *shudder* mid-thirties? Other people pull muscles trying to play sports like they did in high school, I have existential dilemmas reading young adult fiction. I never claimed to be normal. ...more |
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Aug 28, 2009
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Hardcover
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1592402917
| 9781592402915
| 1592402917
| 3.62
| 548
| 2007
| May 31, 2007
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You all know FARK.com, right? What? You've never heard of it? I'm honestly and truly shocked - unless, of course, you've been away from the internet f
You all know FARK.com, right? What? You've never heard of it? I'm honestly and truly shocked - unless, of course, you've been away from the internet for the last ten years, in which case you may be forgiven. For the rest of you - SHAME! FARK is a news aggregator website, though it differs from others in that it's entirely moderated. People submit stories that they think are interesting, add what they hope is a funny tag line or title, and see if it'll be green-lit to make the front page. Over the years, as FARK's audience has grown to make it one of the most influential websites out there, FARK has become a kind of go-to site for news and commentary, though probably not the erudite, level-headed commentary we all might want. Whether site creator Drew Curtis intended it or not, FARK has become a de facto source of news for many people on the internet who are looking not so much for the top stories of the day, but for all the strange, cool, heroic and Florida-centered news that CNN claims to have too much dignity to run. Over its decade-long history, Curtis has seen thousands upon thousands of articles, moderated countless threads about the day's news and, therefore, believes he has a pretty good idea of how the mass media works. In this book, Curtis uses his experience as a professional newshound to look at the trends in mass media, attempting to identify the reasons why there's so much irrelevant crap out there. We all know what he's talking about - the helicopter shots of motorcades, the Missing White Women, the shark attacks, internet predators and the top ten lists of household products that could kill you and your family. We've all seen this and asked, "Why are they bothering with this crap?" According to this book, there's two big reasons: the endless, 24-hour news cycle and sheer human laziness. There is only so much Real News in any given day, Curtis believes, and I agree with him. The question, of course, is "What is 'real news,'" and rather than try to determine what real news is, Curtis decides to explain what real news isn't. As for the rest, we'll know it when we see it. Of the many ways that the mass media tries to fill time and space, Curtis points out seven major ones, my favorite being Media Fearmongering. I suppose I like this because it's just so obvious and so easy. Examples include the current hype over where to relocate the world-devouring supervillains from Guantanamo, the perennial articles about how hidden earthquake faults could kill us all, and the airplane crash stories. The recent crash of Air France 447 is an excellent example. While it is certainly a terrible thing that the plane went down, and important to the families and friends of those who died on the plane, is it really a topic the needs a week of international coverage? 228 people died in that crash, and while it's not really fair to weigh one death against another, it is estimated that that many people die in car accidents every two and a half days in the United States. The same goes for suicides in Japan. So why does the media go nuts for a plane crash, but not for unsafe driving or suicide? My guess is that a plane crash is more spectacular, more mysterious and more likely to get people's attention. Reporting on the actual number of auto-related fatalities would hit too close to home. What's more, a plane crash story probably writes itself. Change a few names and numbers, and the reporting on one crash looks pretty much like every other. That combination of spectacle and sloth makes plane crashes a godsend for reporters and editors with time to fill. Fearmongering in the media isn't harmless either. Last year, in the run-up to the activation of the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, there were a lot of articles about whether or not the LHC would destroy the world. Rather than do some investigating, ask some experts and report back that it wouldn't, the media decided to teach the controversy. Matching another of Curtis' bad news categories, they gave Equal Time to Nutjobs who claimed that the work at the LHC would destroy the world. Rather than debunk the nutjobs, they played it for all it was worth, claiming that there actually was a controversy over the LHC, when in fact no such controversy existed. One of the effects of this was the suicide of a girl in India, who believed in the end-of-the-world scenarios. She was sixteen years old, and the news convinced her that she and everyone she loved was going to die. Can we hold the mass media directly responsible for this girl's death? Only if we can hold them responsible for the other deaths their fearmongering has caused - and here I'm thinking of the "controversy" over whether vaccines cause autism. They don't, but it's more fun for people like Oprah Winfrey to pretend they do. And so kids die. My other favorite Not News is Media Fatigue - what happens when the media eats itself. With twenty-four hours a day to fill, but without twenty-four hours of news to fill it, the competition for breaking news is incredibly fierce. The first network to report on a big story will basically own that story, and the other networks have to scramble to catch up. In that writhing, twisting nest of vipers, it's sometimes very hard for anyone to stop reporting on a story that has basically run its course - thus, media fatigue. Curtis has broken it down into five simple steps: 1. News breaks 2. Issue retractions 3. Talk it to death 4. Can't... stop... talking 5. Has The Media Gone Too Far? By the time they stop focusing on the story and start talking about themselves, you can be pretty sure that you're seeing the end of it. Examples of Media Fatigue abound, and Curtis uses Dick Cheney's shooting spree and Janet Jackson's wardrobe malfunction as examples. Really, neither of these events were news of any import. Hunting accidents happen all the time, and Jackson's boob-flash was so quick and so low-def that most viewers didn't know they had seen it until they were told they had (and probably didn't know they should be outraged until there were told they should be). But both stories generated media storms that didn't blow out until way past their expiration dates. The point is that while the concept of news on demand is good, the execution of it has been terrible. With networks talking about health care reform in the same breath as whether or not David Letterman made an inappropriate joke, it's hard for the audience to know what they should read and what they should ignore. While the news providers' position has always been 'We leave it up to the readers to judge what's important and what isn't," that flies in the face of what we all know about human nature: people can be really, really dumb. People don't have the time or the inclination to read every story, judge it on its merits and sort the wheat from the chaff, and to pretend otherwise reveals either a profound misunderstanding of human nature or a level of cynicism that makes me look like Pollyanna. While it may seem all patriarchal, I think we do need someone to draw the line and say what is news and what isn't. I don't know who, or how, but someone should do it if only so that we can have a news source that we can trust to give us what we need to know. Put the Britney and Elvis stories in the tabloids - if we buy those, we know what we're getting - and leave the real news alone. The book is a good, quick read, and while it's clear that Curtis may not have the academic or professional qualifications to be a media analyst, he has whatever the internet equivalent of "street smarts" is. He's snarky and cynical, in the mold of so many people whose job it is to sit back and observe society. You can only run a news-based site for so long without noticing some patterns. He also includes some of the stories featured on FARK and select comments from users, which are usually entertaining. While Curtis believes that there may be a way to fix the media, he doesn't believe it'll ever be done. As a fellow cynic, I have to agree - it would be far too much work and cost far too many advertising dollars to whip things into shape. The current system, from the point of view of the media outlets, works, and there's no point in tinkering with it. Perhaps the much-prophesied Death of the Newspapers will help some - the local news outlet can be resurrected by a kind of local bloggers' co-op or somesuch. I'm sure there are people out there who follow the journalistic tradition of wanting to tell people what's going on. Unfortunately, those aren't the people that the media wants right now. So give it a read, and keep your eyes open. When you see a story about something like "sexting" or whether Tom Cruise drinks puppy blood for breakfast, ask yourself - is this news, or is it just FARK? ...more |
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Jun 17, 2009
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Jun 17, 2009
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Hardcover
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0393062244
| 9780393062243
| 0393062244
| 4.10
| 31,556
| Nov 01, 2006
| Jan 22, 2007
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really liked it
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I have often lamented the passing of my favorite popular scientist, Carl Sagan, by talking about how necessary he is right now. We are at a point in o
I have often lamented the passing of my favorite popular scientist, Carl Sagan, by talking about how necessary he is right now. We are at a point in our history where scientific illiteracy is growing, where people are not only ignorant of how science works, but are proud of their ignorance. What we need is someone who can reach the majority of Americans who are not especially scientifically literate - the people whose automatic reaction to science is to think, "That's just too hard for me to deal with." Enter Neil deGrasse Tyson, an astrophysicist and the director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. He's appeared on countless television programs, including The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, to talk about the current state of astronomy and astrophysics. He's an engaging and entertaining man, who claims that Pluto was "asking for" its demotion, who seems to take perverse pleasure in describing all the terrible ways the universe could take us out. He knows that we're in a precarious position, here on Earth, and he revels in it rather than worrying about it. Whereas Sagan seemed to come from the point of view that the universe was a place of infinite wonder, where one could look anywhere and be awed and humbled, Tyson's attitude is more of the universe as an infinite theme park - a place where you could see your electrons stripped from your body, watch gas clouds larger than our own solar system collide and ignite, or see planets crumple under cosmic bombardment. Tyson's universe is an adventure, as big as it gets. This book is a collection of essays that Tyson wrote for Natural History magazine over a ten year period, on a variety of subjects related to science and scientific inquiry. In many ways, it's similar to every other pop science book out there - and there are so very many of them - but it is his perspective and his voice that makes this one stand out from the crowd. He's grouped his essays into seven sections, on topics ranging from the difficulties inherent in actually knowing anything about the universe to the understanding of how life went from little mindless bacteria to we clever Homo sapiens to the intersection of science and religion. Most of it is accessible to the average non-scientist, though he does get a little technical at points. But he understands that, and he tries to compensate for for the fact that, by and large, the public is intimidated by "real science." In the essay entitled, "Over the Rainbow," he discusses this particular challenge by using spectroscopy as an example. In spectroscopy, astrophysicists look at the spectrum of a star, hunting for telltale dark lines that indicate the physical properties of stars. It's like looking at a rainbow with bits blackened out of it, as though the CIA had somehow gotten to it first. Those black lines contain all the vital information about the star's composition and, more importantly, speed. Very little can be gleaned by just looking at the star, as it turns out. He notes five levels of abstraction, starting from the star itself: Level 0: A star Level 1: Picture of a star Level 2: Light from the picture of a star Level 3: Spectrum from the light from the picture of a star. Level 4: Patterns of lines lacing the spectrum from the light from the picture of a star. Level 5: Shifts in the patterns of lines in the spectrum from the light from the picture of a star. These descending levels of abstraction can apply to any branch of science, not just astrophysics. The challenge, as he notes, is getting people past level 1, which is easy to understand but is not the level at which true science is done. It is up to educators, he says, to help make people comfortable with looking at real science, and not just pretty pictures. Indeed, there are several sections of the book dedicated to the intersection between science and the public. He talks about how easily we are baffled by numbers (why are below-ground floors not labeled -1, -2, -3 etc?) and how casually we disregard actual scientific facts. He brings up some of his favorite moments in bad movie science, and how he single-handedly saved Titanic from ignominious astronomical shame. At least, on its DVD re-release. He addresses the historically shifting centers of science in human history, how things like NASA are truly a global endeavor. Without the discoveries made through history by people all over the planet - from England to Greece to Baghdad - there would be no NASA, nor any science that we recognize. And to assume that the United States will always be the center of scientific discovery is to willfully ignore history. And, of course, there's a section dedicated to the conflict between religion and science, a never-ending battle that has existed since science began. Tyson believes that there can be no common ground between the two - science relies on facts, religion relies on faith. This is not to say that one is better than the other, any more than, say, a hammer is better than a screwdriver. It's just that you can't use them interchangeably. And he points out that becoming a scientist doesn't require you to give up your faith. There have been, and still are, countless scientists who are believers in the Divine. It's just that most of them know enough not to confuse science and spirituality. The place where they meet, historically, is on the boundary of ignorance. Isaac Newton, having figured out gravity, couldn't quite work out how you could have a multiple-body system like our solar system without the whole thing falling into chaos. His conclusion - God must, from time to time, step in to keep things on the right path. Having done that, Newton went on to do other things, and it wasn't until the next century that Pierre-Simon laPlace decided that he wasn't satisfied with Newton's "Insert God Here" argument, and did the math for himself. In other words, God is a marker on the boundaries of ignorance, and the best of us are tempted to let Him answer the questions that we can't. To do so, however, impedes the path of science and stops progress in its tracks. What if Newton had said, "No, I'm going to figure this damn thing out." Would we be a century ahead in our technology by now? Maybe, maybe not. What if the Catholic Church had listened when Galileo said, "The Bible tells you how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go." Might more progress have been made? So many great thinkers have come up to the boundaries of their knowledge and, humbled by what they do not know, chose to allow The God of the Gaps reassure them. But that's the whole point of science, and it's what this book, and others like it, are trying to instill in people. The unknown is not horrible, it is not terrifying, and it's not a place to just stop. It's a place of awe and wonder and bafflement and opportunity. To say, "I don't understand it - it must be God" is short-changing ourselves and our heirs out of even greater knowledge of the universe. ...more |
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Apr 22, 2009
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Apr 22, 2009
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Hardcover
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0385513038
| 9780385513036
| 0385513038
| 3.58
| 915
| 2006
| Sep 19, 2006
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liked it
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One of the things you learn about Japan when you get here - and you learn it pretty quickly - is that there can be a vast difference between the appea
One of the things you learn about Japan when you get here - and you learn it pretty quickly - is that there can be a vast difference between the appearance of Japan and the reality of it. The faces that people show you, or even that the city shows you, is not necessarily their true face. Take Kyoto as an example: it prides itself on being a city of traditional culture, the touchstone of all that is Truly Japanese. When you first see it, though, you think, "Really? Because it looks like a big ol' jumbled-up city to me." And it does - aside from the temples, which remain more or less relegated to the edges of the city, the vestiges of Old Japan have been swept away in favor of concrete and glass. Kyoto Station is a glimmering lump in the middle of the city, and Kyoto Tower, as many have said, is a stake through its heart. But ask anyone and we'll say, "Kyoto is a beautiful city." Because that's the way it's supposed to be. This is how it is to live in Japan. There is a gulf between the true nature of things and the way we want them to be. For someone born and raised here, this kind of thinking is taught from birth, and without the ability to divide oneself in twain, life in Japanese society can be very difficult. These two states have names, too - tatemae is the face that you present to the world, the one that everyone expects of you. Honne is your "true self," the feelings and thoughts that you hold in reserve so as not to cause conflict with the greater society around you. The origins of this dichotomy are unclear, although there are those who attribute it to a culture with roots in collective agriculture. If your life and the lives of everyone in your village depends on getting the rice crop in, you have to learn to hold back certain feelings or desires for the good of the group. You sublimate yourself into the group structure, because that's what has to be done. So, tatemae isn't a lie, or a deliberate performance designed to deceive people. It's a bargain between oneself and society - "This is what society needs me to be? Fine. I can be that." What remains is honne, the inner self that society cannot touch, but can never see. So what happens when someone can't hold up their end of this social contract? What happens when the modern world makes demands of people that this ancient compact can't handle? Well, that's when things start to go wrong.... For many years, this bargain between the individual and society worked, mainly because society kept up its end of the deal. People were protected, employed, and given a place in the world, whether it was the feudal culture of the Edo era, the wartime mobilization of the 30s and 40s, or the indomitable Japan Inc. of the post-war years. As the world progressed, however, it soon became evident that the old ways weren't enough. Japan needed to change, or face stagnation and irrelevance. In this book, Zielenziger tries to figure out how Japan got into the state it's in - a decade and a half of stagnation, with no end in sight, and the very real possibility of a slide into graying irrelevance by the middle of the century. To do so, he looks first on the human scale, at the people who have given up on Japan's social contract - the hikkikomori. Like so many other things Japanese, the hikkikomori phenomenon is said to be unique to Japan. Not quite agoraphobics, not quite dropouts or depressives, the hikkikomori are people - usually men - who have given up on the world. They usually live in a single room, often in the homes of parents who enable their hermit lifestyle, and refuse to come out. They sit in there and read, or watch TV, or think. They see no place for themselves in the outside world, and so they give up on it. The men that Zielenziger interviewed suggested that the outside world was too much for them. In many cases they were bullied by others - a pattern of social control that is unfortunately ingrained here - or they simply looked at their parents and thought, "Is this what I will become?" An American child, faced with the knowledge that he doesn't fit with the rest of the world, will probably see it as an opportunity to shape his own identity. A hikkikomori sees it as a personal failure. He knows how Japanese society works, and rather than blame the world for not accepting him, he blames himself for not being able to fit in. Thus, retiring from the world is seen as the only option available, other than suicide. Some hikkikomori spend years in their rooms, refusing to speak even with their parents, who - often out of a sense of shame or the nurturing love known as amae - support their boys' choice of lifestyle. At the other end are the people who give their identity over to an outside source. In more dangerous cases, this outside source might be a cult, like the Aum Shinrinkyo group who carried out the deadly sarin attack against the Tokyo subway in 1995. A more benign manifestation, however, is brand mania. Zielenziger talks to women who identify themselves through the brands they buy. These people will spend money they don't have in order to get a bag from Louis Vuitton or Gucci or Chanel. They distinguish themselves with their brand identity, willingly giving up their own in the process. In a country where one can no longer trust the government to look after your best interests, or the media to tell you the truth, or business to give you a job, putting all your faith in Louis Vuitton - with its worldwide reputation for quality - seems to be a good idea. It's a nation in crisis, according to Zielenziger . It's a country that's gone from feudalism to full modernity in only a century and a half, but the culture hasn't changed nearly as much as the country has. It's a bustling, 21st-century nation built on a foundation that was laid in the 17th century, and things are starting to fall apart. It's a country that puts society before the individual, but that premise is cracking under the weight of a world that values individuality. It's a place where responsibility is distributed and accountability doesn't exist, where mistakes go unexamined lest they bring shame upon those who made them, and where the past is a thing that can be easily ignored if it troubles you. Zielenziger believes that the underlying social structure of Japan is holding it back, leading the entire country to another withdrawal from the world. Much like the hikkikomori that no one likes to talk about, Japan may one day find itself alone and isolated, not knowing its place in the world and not knowing how it can get back to what it used to be. The book is quite a read, going from small one-on-one interviews to historical and sociological analyses, but it is overwhelmingly negative in tone. Zielenziger isn't wrong, necessarily, but he is of the mind-set that Japan is irrevocably screwed and that only Western cultural intervention can save it. He lays the hikkikomori problem - and the problem of parasite singles, NEETs, and all the other dysfunctional youth - at the foot of Japan's collectivist culture, as well as the intense bond of amae that exists between the parent and child. While he doesn't say it in so many words, he does imply that the traditional social structure of Japan is simply incapable of keeping Japan competitive in the modern era. He believes that Western values, especially those stemming from Christianity, are what Japan needs to survive. The bit about Christianity seemed to come from left field, but he does make a case for it. Christianity, he believes, places the onus of salvation on the individual. It is a person's works (or faith) that ensure his place in the afterlife. This focus on one's personal responsibility, and ultimate judgment, fosters a Self that is harder to suppress. From that strong sense of individuality, a culture can foster more competition, thereby preventing stagnation. There's a long, not entirely interesting chapter on Korea that he uses to illustrate this point. Unlike Japan, Korea - once called "The Hermit Kingdom" - found itself facing economic turmoil and got themselves out of it. Not because Korean ways were better, but because they knew that if they stuck to their traditions they'd be screwed. Korea is a nation strongly influenced by Christianity, and the individuality that Christianity fosters, suggests Zielenziger, is what gave Korea the courage to risk social turmoil for the betterment of their nation. There may be something to this, but I doubt that adopting Christianity en masse will save Japan from Zielenziger's dire future. Honestly, it was tough to stay objective while reading this, mainly because of the gulf between what I see, having lived here for the better part of a decade, and how Zielenziger describes the place. If I didn't know better, I would have read this and thought that Japan was a zombie nation, populated either by hermits or soulless consumers. From what I've seen, I know that this is not the case. Granted, I haven't completely immersed myself in the culture, mainly because that's an extremely difficult thing for a non-Japanese to do. Most of the people I talk to are my students, and people with the desire and the resources to study English are probably not an accurate cross-section of the country. So I don't claim to have any more insight into the Japanese mind than Mr. Zielenziger does, but from my experience it seems that all hope is not lost. Yes, the government is a faceless bureaucracy, the media is completely complacent and the corporate community that once offered jobs for life has vanished. But Japan has proved resilient in the past, adapting to great changes that were thrust upon it from the outside. And a quick look at Japanese history shows that, when the times need it, people emerge to challenge the established order. That's what Japan needs now. Someone - or, more effectively, a group of someones - to stand up, stick out and risk themselves for the betterment of their country. It won't be easy - revolution never is - but it needs to be done. Perhaps one day, instead of shutting themselves in their rooms, there might be young men and women who take to the streets and show Japan that there is value in the individual. I hope I get to see it. ...more |
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Feb 21, 2009
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Feb 24, 2009
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Hardcover
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0345409469
| 9780345409461
| 0345409469
| 4.29
| 76,783
| 1995
| Feb 25, 1997
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really liked it
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I miss Carl Sagan. Ever since I was a kid, Carl Sagan has been the face of science for me. I would watch Cosmos and feel a sense of amazement that the I miss Carl Sagan. Ever since I was a kid, Carl Sagan has been the face of science for me. I would watch Cosmos and feel a sense of amazement that the universe was as wonderful as it was. He'd be there in his turtleneck and his blazer, smiling as though he'd just heard the coolest secret and he wanted to share it with you. And he did, except that it wasn't his secret. Hell, it wasn't a secret at all - it was the combined results of thousands of years of thoughts, deductions, mistakes, missteps, experiments, accidents and achievements. Whether he was talking about the orbits of the planets or the genetics of peas, you could feel an almost palpable sense of wonder coming from him. You'd listen to him and think, "Y'know, maybe we humans aren't too bad after all...." Then the smile would fade, his eyes would get serious, and he would explain how, for all our achievements as a species, humans were still terribly fallible creatures. Our knowledge has, perhaps, outpaced our morals, and we are only a few simple steps away from losing everything that we've gained. Our mastery of nuclear technology could wipe out civilization in a day. Our carelessness with industry could do the same in a century. His earnestness was clear, as was his disappointment. It was in this latter mood, perhaps, that he wrote this book. Simply by looking at the title, one can glean his attitude not only towards science, but towards the world around it. When he looks at the world, he sees a place filled with demons - not literally, of course - the demons of irrationality, superstition and an unfortunate willingness on the part of people to believe in things that just aren't so. This book is about the advocacy of skepticism and critical thinking. In a world where people are obsessed with celebrity, where people trust their feelings over their observations, where rulers make decisions based on the predictions of astrologers, Sagan feels rather threatened. I can certainly understand why. It still angers me that now, in the 21st century, we are still arguing about evolution over creationism. It amazes me that newspapers even print horoscopes, to say nothing of the fact that there are people who take them seriously. It horrifies me that evil men are still able to use fear and superstition to convince people that they should kill in the name of God. And it saddens me that so many people have given control of their lives over to a deity rather than taking responsibility for it themselves. Sagan's premise in this book is simple: knowledge is better than ignorance. Full stop. Whether it's witches, "intelligent design," UFO abduction or anything else, it is always better to find the truth rather than to rest comfortably in a lie. The truth is hard, yes, and it may feel better to stay wrapped up in our illusions, but no matter how comfortable they are, they're still illusions. Still lies. He spends a lot of time on UFOs and abductees, actually, and uses that as a bridge into other areas of skeptical inquiry. This is because UFO abductees (and the legions of enablers who encourage them - psychologists, writers, newspapers, and conspiracy nuts) exhibit the same behavior that allows unreason to flourish: an unwillingness or inability to consider other options. Yes, the UFO explanation would be a romantic and weird one, but wanting something doesn't make it so. There is probably a reason why you saw things out your window, and that explanation is probably perfectly terrestrial. Whether you're talking about UFOs, reiki, power crystals, witchcraft, tarot cards, channeling, telepathy, past lives, Indigo Children, psychic surgery, miracles, visitations by angels, demonic possession, the hollow Earth theory... The evidence just isn't there. As interesting and entertaining as a world containing such things would be, they're just not so. Wouldn't it be better, Sagan asks, if we could all dismiss such things? If everyone could think critically about them, dismiss them, and turn their vast amount of energy and resources towards actually making the world better? If, instead of putting together high budget shows about ghosts and Bigfoot, networks made programs about scientific inquiry and achievement? Or perhaps a show about mysteries that science has solved? Instead of portraying scientists as either nerds or maniacs, why not show the scientists who are looking for ways to make safer materials, better medicines and more efficient cars? I suppose that the Discovery Channel has done a very nice job of trying to realize this dream, with shows like Mythbusters, and Penn & Teller strongly advocate critical thinking in their Showtime program Bullshit! But I reckon Sagan would want more. This is where he does come across as something of a curmudgeon in this book. You get the feeling that if Old Man Sagan had his way, there'd be no X-Files or Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Flintstones. Science fiction would all be something like Contact - nothing that isn't reasonably explainable by our current understanding of science. No evil robots or planet-busting Death Stars would survive such skeptical scrutiny. Indeed, you get the feeling that he would not only disapprove of those shows, he would definitely look down on those of us who do. This is an attitude I've noticed a lot of in modern skeptics - a certain annoyance with fantasy and a rather condescending attitude towards those who haven't signed on to the skeptical view of the world. I am a regular listener of the Skeptic's Guide to the Universe podcast, and I enjoy it - except when they turn on the arrogance when talking about people who believe in things like religious revelation, UFOs and the like. I can understand the attitude towards scammers - they deserve nothing but contempt - but there are people who take real comfort in their world view, regardless of how irrational it might be. Sagan addresses this as well in his book: "All of us cherish our beliefs. They are, to a degree, self-defining. When someone comes along who challenges our belief system as insufficiently well-based - or who, like Socrates, merely asks embarrassing questions that we haven't thought of, or demonstrates that we've swept key underlying assumptions under the rug - it becomes much more than a search for knowledge. It feels like a personal assault."He goes on later to say: "In the way that skepticism is sometimes applied to issues of public concern, there is a tendency to belittle, to condescend, to ignore the fact that, deluded or not, supporters of superstition and pseudoscience are human beings with real feelings, who, like the skeptics, are trying to figure out how the world works and what our role in it might be. Their motives are in many ways consonant with science. If their culture has not given them all the tools they need to pursue this great quest, let us temper our criticism with kindness. None of us comes fully equipped."So in other words, even if you know a lot, don't be a know-it-all. Sagan had a lifelong love of science and the wonders that scientists have performed. The world today, every part and parcel of it from that computer that you're reading this on to the fact that you didn't die before you were five years old, is attributable to the work of dedicated scientists trying to better understand the world. And that is the key message of this book: knowledge makes the world better. Science has performed wonders that aliens, witches and apparitions of the Virgin Mary have never been able to do. A well-educated, rational populace is the greatest protection we have against tyranny, and it behooves every citizen to acquaint him or herself with the methods and principles that science uses. It is the greatest tool available to us if we want a better world. Yes, there will be missteps along the way, but the errors of science can - if we act out of clarity and reason - be repaired. Teach your children, encourage them to think critically about the world and no one will ever gain mastery over them. For an educated person is a free one. And if you can spread this kind of freedom, then perhaps Sagan can rest well. ...more |
Notes are private!
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Sep 19, 2008
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Sep 19, 2008
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0060528370
| 9780060528379
| 0060528370
| 4.08
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| Apr 01, 2003
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really liked it
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History is, in its way, a fiction. While it is made up of facts, things that are verifiable or at least reliably accepted as being what really happened History is, in its way, a fiction. While it is made up of facts, things that are verifiable or at least reliably accepted as being what really happened, our understanding of history rests on a certain assumption that doesn't always hold up - that what we are reading or hearing is The Truth. It's how we learn about history when we're kids - that this happened and that happened, and that's all we really need to know. The problem, however, is that what we got in our history books wasn't the entire story. Oh, it was true, for a given value of "true," but the historian who wrote the book did so with a specific narrative in mind, one that fit his or her perception of the past and which - more importantly - would sell textbooks to hundreds of schools across the country. The history that we get from those books is designed to appeal to the sensibilities of a populace that is already inclined to think well of its nation, and rarely deviates from the theme. While they do try to note the excesses, injustices and impropriety of the past, they tend to bury it in the glorious achievements of governments and industry. Unfortunately, doing so means that there's a lot of history that gets left on the cutting room floor. Incidents, people, whole populations get brushed aside because either there's not enough room for them or because telling their story in detail ruins the mood that the historian is trying to set - usually one of bright optimism for a good and just nation. There is nothing inherently wrong with this approach, either. An historian cannot practically include all of the historical viewpoints, good and bad, into a book meant to be used for only 180 days out of the year. So out of expedience, if not a conscious desire to tell an uplifting tale, they write books that look upon our past as favorably as possible, while including just enough criticism of our failures to fend off any serious accusations of bias. As Zinn tells us, though, there's no such thing as an historian without bias. Every historian has a story to tell, and Zinn has decided that he doesn't want to tell the one we're all used to hearing. He starts in much the same place as most American history books - with the coming of Christopher Columbus to the New World. Immediately he reminds us that Columbus' mission was not one of exploration but of commerce, and that the first question he asked the natives of what he would label Hispanola was, "Where is your gold?" It all went downhill from there. Reading this book, it would be very easy to get depressed. I can see how those who were brought up with a healthy dose of American Exceptionalism (the idea that the United States obeys different rules from the rest of the world and, more importantly, cannot do wrong) would really dislike this book. It is page after page of lies, misdeeds, cruelty, greed and deception. It is the story a nation built not on the principle that all men are created equal, but that all men must be leashed to the yoke of the capitalist overclass. It's a tale of genocide and oppression, of revolts both peaceful and violent, and it never lets up for a moment. To his credit, Zinn tells us right up front that he's going to take the side of the oppressed, the dispossessed and the put-down, and there's no way you can tell that story without it being really depressing. It's pretty clear pretty quickly, though, where his sympathies lie: My viewpoint, in telling the history of the United States, is different: that we must not accept the memory of states as our own. Nations are not communities and never have been. The history of any country, presented as the history of a family, conceals fierce conflicts of interest (sometimes exploding, most often repressed) between conquerors and conquered, masters and slaves, capitalists and workers, dominators and dominated in race and sex. And in such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, as Albert Camus suggested, not to be on the side of the executioners. His portrayal of the underclass, rebellious or not, is one of suffering nobility, and the System as a deliberately malevolent entity. Any good that it does is simply whatever was necessary to maintain its power, and the above quote speaks to that. The parallel structure that he uses effectively groups all of the upper class into the "persecutor" role, and the lower class into the "victims." And while there is some truth to that - human history, after all, is a long story of rich and powerful elites governing poor and powerless people - it is painting with too broad a brush, in my opinion. He seems to work from the premise that all those with power are bad, and so those without must therefore be good. As much as I wish that admitting bias was an excuse for it, it isn't. It does a disservice to all involved to flatten your view of the American class system into a two-dimensional shadow play. Not all of the populist agitators were good and noble people, nor were all politicians cunning manipulators. Just keep that in mind as you read. It's a sobering read, though, to say the least. The best simile I could come up with is that it's like watching your parents have sex. It's something that you always suspected went on, but you could have gone your whole life without being presented with the reality of it. So it is no surprise that, after reading this book, some people become absolutely insufferable, cynical and disillusioned. If you've already gone through that stage of your political thinking, however, you find something else in this book - hope. It's something you have to dig for, but it is there, buried in the larger narrative that Zinn is telling us. Given the amount of detail he goes into, it's very easy to lose sight of the larger picture at work. Zinn details slave rebellions, gives stories of workers pushed to the extremes of human existence, soldiers thrown away for nothing, and entire segments of the population ignored or actively persecuted. But alongside these horror stories come tales of resistance. Whether it's the quiet contemplation by a poor white farmer over whether he might have more in common with his black neighbors than his white landlords, riots of prisoners and guards against a corrupt prison system, or the militant, city-wide shutdowns organized by the Wobblies, the people can only be pushed so far. And while the Powers That Be are very good at figuring out how to distract, scare or defy the people, they eventually do make changes for the better, and everyone benefits a little bit. Inasmuch as this book is a chronicle of America's misdeeds over the last few centuries, it is also a tale of Americans' triumphs. It is a tribute to the will of the people who, no matter how difficult it may have been, decided to stand up and demand respect from the men who held the reins of power. It is a testament to the women who wanted equality, the socialists who wanted a better world, the workers who wanted safe jobs at living wages, the blacks who wanted to be full citizens, and the Indians who wanted the wrongs of the past redressed. Not everybody has gotten what they wanted - America is still very much a work in progress, and there is bound to be some backsliding as we go. What Zinn shows in this book is that no matter how bad the American government can be how greedy American business might become, the American people want what's best for themselves and, when the time comes, will stand up and shout for it. Given enough time, and enough courage, The United States will continue to be a better and better nation, and perhaps someday - someday - it will finally fulfill our expectations for it. ...more |
Notes are private!
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3.86
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really liked it
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Sep 20, 2012
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Sep 29, 2012
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3.96
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Jul 10, 2012
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3.97
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really liked it
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not set
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4.16
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it was amazing
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Aug 03, 2011
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3.94
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really liked it
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Jul 29, 2011
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Aug 01, 2011
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4.10
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it was amazing
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3.97
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it was amazing
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3.98
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it was amazing
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Dec 29, 2010
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3.93
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it was amazing
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Nov 27, 2010
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3.67
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did not like it
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Nov 06, 2010
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3.80
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it was amazing
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Jun 12, 2010
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4.01
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it was ok
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Mar 16, 2010
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Mar 18, 2010
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3.81
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really liked it
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Feb 19, 2010
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Feb 21, 2010
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3.87
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liked it
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Jan 22, 2010
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Jan 21, 2010
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3.93
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really liked it
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Aug 28, 2009
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Sep 03, 2009
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3.62
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liked it
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Jun 17, 2009
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Jun 17, 2009
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4.10
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really liked it
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Apr 22, 2009
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Apr 22, 2009
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3.58
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liked it
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Feb 21, 2009
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Feb 24, 2009
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4.29
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really liked it
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Sep 19, 2008
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Sep 19, 2008
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4.08
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really liked it
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Feb 12, 2010
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Jan 31, 2008
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