tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-39161348685166399212024-03-18T13:56:07.816-04:00Expendable Mudge Muses AloudRichardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15481936090455797869noreply@blogger.comBlogger1413125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3916134868516639921.post-81312307290411714572024-03-18T06:26:00.036-04:002024-03-18T06:26:00.263-04:00THE BLUE BUTTERFLY OF COCHIN, sweet story with gorgeous Siona Benjamin artwork<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjYXxnde6mn8T6J2HNhPi7AXrKVVAvNxJBuF8HvrVXwxsozQYN1lzSccjNT4uR5H8Zz2y6PLKuhikx8jWsp-cu0QPKvQnIpCBXDmvb9vYt5a87xyhVQzYN8F_dhKddmCTqTZTRtglMzOkoh7SR_YlGAclnBffWcRUFBjWcdEFbi21wydEgD1e7eRONz9nSI/s400/blue%20butterfly%20cochin.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; clear: right; float: right;"><img alt="" border="0" height="320" data-original-height="400" data-original-width="313" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjYXxnde6mn8T6J2HNhPi7AXrKVVAvNxJBuF8HvrVXwxsozQYN1lzSccjNT4uR5H8Zz2y6PLKuhikx8jWsp-cu0QPKvQnIpCBXDmvb9vYt5a87xyhVQzYN8F_dhKddmCTqTZTRtglMzOkoh7SR_YlGAclnBffWcRUFBjWcdEFbi21wydEgD1e7eRONz9nSI/s320/blue%20butterfly%20cochin.jpg"/></a></div><br />
<br />
<b>THE BLUE BUTTERFLY OF COCHIN<br />
ARIANA MIZRAHI (illus. Siona Benjamin)</b><br />
<a href="https://kalaniotbooks.com/blue-butterfly-of-cochin-the-hardcover/" target="_blank">Kalaniot Books</a><br />
$19.99 hardcover, available tomorrow<br />
<br />
Rating: 5* of five<br />
<br />
<b>The Publisher Says</b>: <i>The Blue Butterfly of Cochin</i> is the story of the ancient Jewish Indian community’s mass immigration to Israel in the 1950s. We follow Leah as she struggles to come to terms with leaving her beloved India and moving to the newly-formed country of Israel. Accompanied by a magical butterfly and through dream-like illustrations, both Leah and the reader, are transported from the lush Indian coastline to the awesome beauty of the Israeli desert.<br />
<br />
<b>I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.<br />
<br />
My Review</b>: Decades ago, I saw a documentary at the American Museum of Natural History about the Cochin Jewish community, of whose existence I had been utterly unaware until then. It was a typical documentary of its era, the 1990s, with the expected non-commercial production values; what came bursting through the auditorium screen was the gorgeous, lush architecture, evocative of great wealth; now, however, empty and becoming shabby with neglect. The community that had been so rooted in the tropical coastal state of Cochin for over a millennium and a half had just...vanished.<br />
<br />
The beauty they left behind was haunting. The documentary set out to make a visual record of it before entropy carted its magnificence away entirely. This made a deep and lasting impression on me. (Clearly.) I saw this book on Edelweiss+, and of course had to have it for that reason first. Then I noticed the illustrator’s name: Siona Benjamin! <br />
<br />
I had discovered how much I loved her Indian-miniature style images in the early Aughties, when I ran across her New York gallery’s website. Although these illustrations are not in that same style, they are just as beautiful, just as intricate, just as emotionally impactful.<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjoPz0DRicKcvaYisjao3_TeG5RDKG32HwjanpuVAO8VQe0bq8Xv0b6KuYiWAcXAtI8kmV0EOYtMVZJOiOVfSzherIiWBRdVoeSil4ZJ-_8hrCvRQtrjZc9owxwua1ucRPBV5aCHTNQv5JQQXs0C8vhYwbDOwC1VzXiXQF1ky3hkzXdcGCScEWZQWNPSXUh/s1000/Cochin%201.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" width="600" data-original-height="652" data-original-width="1000" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjoPz0DRicKcvaYisjao3_TeG5RDKG32HwjanpuVAO8VQe0bq8Xv0b6KuYiWAcXAtI8kmV0EOYtMVZJOiOVfSzherIiWBRdVoeSil4ZJ-_8hrCvRQtrjZc9owxwua1ucRPBV5aCHTNQv5JQQXs0C8vhYwbDOwC1VzXiXQF1ky3hkzXdcGCScEWZQWNPSXUh/s600/Cochin%201.jpg"/></a></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHcb9bc48RxsxlJBgbXNM6BqizaB2JfaKpsrrefT-fxtFzkt9geBQ1g0-ttMnSv-0c1kTK8IIW1RM5Y2Tk8JtJEuxOxDyfMIwIpZKw_qPNzSARkZzTCc7Wb1ijt3ybym-DquQznPHWO7pzj24OgL_g16cIKWwKHyq4RRPWSpIwGrNV8gNc0BmDRbVuadTO/s1000/Cochin%202.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" width="600" data-original-height="652" data-original-width="1000" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHcb9bc48RxsxlJBgbXNM6BqizaB2JfaKpsrrefT-fxtFzkt9geBQ1g0-ttMnSv-0c1kTK8IIW1RM5Y2Tk8JtJEuxOxDyfMIwIpZKw_qPNzSARkZzTCc7Wb1ijt3ybym-DquQznPHWO7pzj24OgL_g16cIKWwKHyq4RRPWSpIwGrNV8gNc0BmDRbVuadTO/s600/Cochin%202.jpg"/></a></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjErvMLezi-_NEo4Dg_Ma_faPrWDCUGfTr8nNLAoPUnZPcygkVw18Ij3KLkkSg5cfKToWowJKdKYDHEnr-mbuV2CEs5QDQM_wMOXod0MkxnyD8RSI74DOTBgQZ9UUWE8ZExLneZOpBDknljEZirlmTeMlQho8953YvGyI4RFEYwFvn-BFDrV70_Jm08YMiZ/s1000/Cochin%203.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" width="600" data-original-height="652" data-original-width="1000" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjErvMLezi-_NEo4Dg_Ma_faPrWDCUGfTr8nNLAoPUnZPcygkVw18Ij3KLkkSg5cfKToWowJKdKYDHEnr-mbuV2CEs5QDQM_wMOXod0MkxnyD8RSI74DOTBgQZ9UUWE8ZExLneZOpBDknljEZirlmTeMlQho8953YvGyI4RFEYwFvn-BFDrV70_Jm08YMiZ/s600/Cochin%203.jpg"/></a></div>
These images all evoke in me the same energy that Marc Chagall’s 1960s paintings evoke:<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhyx8lO6p_t_Nwoo6Eg41kZPncHnE6pOtdEHIBij3GRKL9Hq8oqJj4t5QKSb6AXmjXqS3MludYyW7Q_ZM6n89oOWp49afaV2_THl8LUFbaAJu_kM9nBPlq8xZL1sLsY9WqDgKs6U3dhsekwiGNd86LCFJRyewrOGrYIWayECMNTrCUz4wauf2WxgY9nItWC/s353/Chagall_Circus.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" width="600" data-original-height="282" data-original-width="353" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhyx8lO6p_t_Nwoo6Eg41kZPncHnE6pOtdEHIBij3GRKL9Hq8oqJj4t5QKSb6AXmjXqS3MludYyW7Q_ZM6n89oOWp49afaV2_THl8LUFbaAJu_kM9nBPlq8xZL1sLsY9WqDgKs6U3dhsekwiGNd86LCFJRyewrOGrYIWayECMNTrCUz4wauf2WxgY9nItWC/s600/Chagall_Circus.jpg"/></a></div>
<i>The Circus Horse</i>, 1969; via Wikimedia Commons<br />
I don’t know about you, but I feel there is a creative DNA connection between these artists’ œuvres. Much joy, then, for me on the visual level; the story, with which I was familiar from that long-ago introduction, was here made personal through telling it from a displaced child’s viewpoint. That worked as a means to particularize the community’s collective decision’s personal cost.<br />
<br />
The global rise in antisemitism is something I deplore. I think, quite apart from the State of Israel’s appalling actions in Gaza in 2023-2024, the threat of antisemitism is in its turn appalling; we have, in the last century, seen where that has led. Better by far in my view to oppose ethnic hatred wherever we find it. How better to start than with teaching children that Humanity is one race, made up of all kinds of people, and they all have very interesting stories to read, tell, and learn about.<br />
<br />
Starting here, with this beautiful book, would be a great introduction.<br />Richardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15481936090455797869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3916134868516639921.post-3575012357311906822024-03-14T06:38:00.189-04:002024-03-14T06:38:00.133-04:00THE SIEGE OF BURNING GRASS, complex consideration of the moralities around war<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjB_vESmqHQuxTiJdh-NXMlnSK_yIvtrZVlbZnmqe6s_JtAWg4u3Oq-433A30vmJSoPzk4s77vU-456R3rZvdyUmxLUFiTfb_ObwOomp3HXjuBpBENfCp82nQeIuBVAv08AYhHOICwo9X-nyZM-qyR-VSowamOHGM8hHFZnueZwNV5BiLe5srjyB-7aQgsE/s2266/burning%20grass%20mohamed.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; clear: left; float: left;"><img alt="" border="0" height="320" data-original-height="2266" data-original-width="1400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjB_vESmqHQuxTiJdh-NXMlnSK_yIvtrZVlbZnmqe6s_JtAWg4u3Oq-433A30vmJSoPzk4s77vU-456R3rZvdyUmxLUFiTfb_ObwOomp3HXjuBpBENfCp82nQeIuBVAv08AYhHOICwo9X-nyZM-qyR-VSowamOHGM8hHFZnueZwNV5BiLe5srjyB-7aQgsE/s320/burning%20grass%20mohamed.jpg"/></a></div><br />
<br />
<b>THE SIEGE OF BURNING GRASS<br />
PREMEE MOHAMED</b><br />
<a href="https://rebellionpublishing.com/product/the_siege_of_burning_grass/" target="_blank">Solaris Books</a><br />
$8.99 ebook platforms, available now<br />
<br />
Rating: 4* of five<br />
<br />
<b>The Publisher Says: A stunning meditation on war, nationalism, violence and courage by a rising star of the genre.</b><br />
<br />
The Empires of Varkal and Med’ariz have always been at war.<br />
<br />
Alefret, the founder of Varkal’s pacifist resistance, was bombed and maimed by his own government, locked up in a secret prison and tortured by a ‘visionary’ scientist. But now they’re offering him a chance of freedom.<br />
<br />
Ordered to infiltrate one of Med’ariz’s flying cities, obeying the bloodthirsty zealot Qhudur, he must find fellow anti-war activists in the enemy’s population and provoke them into an uprising against their rulers.<br />
<br />
He should refuse to serve the warmongers, but what if he could end this pointless war once and for all? Is that worth compromising his own morals and the principles of his fellow resistance members?<br />
<br />
<b>I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.<br />
<br />
My Review</b>: As you would expect from Premee Mohamed, this is a carefully constructed secondary world, with a deeply tendentious story playing out inside its rules. Moral greyness and relativistic morality are always welcome sights in the secondary-world fantasy genre. Meditating on what makes a villain villainous, what makes it possible to fight and kill in service of peace (as George Carlin famously observed, "Fighting for peace is like fucking for virginity"), all the while still feeling Very Certain of one's own cause's Rightness. No one in one of Author Mohamed's worlds is Right. That being the reality of life on the Earth I like seeing it shown this way in very appealing fiction.<br />
<br />
Bioengineering plays a very significant role in this fantasy world. (Including a use of wasps that absolutely *never* would've occurred to me!) I think it is best to leave the whats and hows of that fact alone, as there are surprises in store that hang on those hooks. If I am transparent about it, I would have been five-star warbling my fool head off had some of those fascinating facets found even greater, and sooner, uses in the story.<br />
<br />
While I comprehend the metaphorical use of a flying city, I am deeply skeptical of any use of them because they use unrealistic tech to solve...nothing. There is no actual, practical benefit to a flying city that is not outweighed by real, unaddressed increases in the complexity of urban living. I guess the metaphorical "coolth" and visual appeal is just too much to resist, and the people with the flying city in this story definitely seem like the sort of culture that would develop one. Still...just no. Resist the pointed contrast of tech "coolth" to natural development and augmentation!<br />
<br />
The absolute joy of the read is the very carefully natural debate between the competing moral certainties of pacifism and Security Über Alles from the alleged same side of the war. This is, to me, the best use of fiction: Don't give one side the monopoly on the good stuff or the bad stuff. Humankind doesn't, hasn't, and won't ever work like that. As you are telling this story, albeit set on a different world, to Humankind, follow our rules when it most counts. This being one of Author Mohamed's storytelling's strong points, I always enjoy her stories.<br />
<br />
So, while not a masterpiece, this story of pacifism and its moral greyness, warmongering and its honest, if misguided, aims, and what men will do to WIN, is one fine read, indeed.<br />Richardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15481936090455797869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3916134868516639921.post-44290728877122790162024-03-14T05:44:00.108-04:002024-03-14T05:44:00.143-04:00AND WHAT CAN WE OFFER YOU TONIGHT, multi-award-winning novella and damning takedown of a hypercapitalist hellscape<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiWFGCk1wFxkWHhPgqv2JH2hmWDnV_L_hVSedDfXVWObVxvxOeoiaOb5CmaQ1-OymjZHWY7s3zwkAohxzDDYr3tE6VygSXLBSJ_2jE7v9Ks-S_E4px6en9X4VdaQ3XDzPqQMNJX-mmSut4U3bFDaTz3eJZUojaFAq4IG5zdYphRnQUiTWbNN7cZxmqbqKsF/s1600/and%20what%20can%20we%20offer%20mohamed.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; clear: right; float: right;"><img alt="" border="0" height="320" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1000" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiWFGCk1wFxkWHhPgqv2JH2hmWDnV_L_hVSedDfXVWObVxvxOeoiaOb5CmaQ1-OymjZHWY7s3zwkAohxzDDYr3tE6VygSXLBSJ_2jE7v9Ks-S_E4px6en9X4VdaQ3XDzPqQMNJX-mmSut4U3bFDaTz3eJZUojaFAq4IG5zdYphRnQUiTWbNN7cZxmqbqKsF/s320/and%20what%20can%20we%20offer%20mohamed.jpg"/></a></div><br />
<br />
<b>AND WHAT CAN WE OFFER YOU TONIGHT<br />
PREMEE MOHAMED</b><br />
<a href="https://www.neonhemlock.com/books/and-what-can-we-offer-you-tonight" target="_blank">Neon Hemlock Press</a><br />
$12.99 all formats, available now<br />
<br />
Rating: 5* of five<br />
<br />
<b>The Publisher Says: Winner of the 2022 Nebula Award <i>and</i> World Fantasy Award for Best Novella</b>.<br />
<br />
In a far future city, where you can fall to a government cull for a single mistake, <i>And What Can We Offer You Tonight</i> tells the story of Jewel, established courtesan in a luxurious House. Jewel’s world is shaken when her friend is murdered by a client, but somehow comes back to life. To get revenge, they will both have to confront the limits of loyalty, guilt, and justice.<br />
<br />
<b>I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.<br />
<br />
My Review</b>: Self-esteem, self-love, class solidarity, friendship, Love...big, big themes to tackle in under a hundred pages. Yet as one expects from Premee Mohamed, tackled they are, and indeed pinned to the mat of argument.<br />
<br />
There are those who say they have no patience for future-set stories, yet who will gobble the stories that center amateur sleuths who are not arrested and abused by police and courts who do not approve of this behavior...inconsistent much? Each is unbelievable in its own way, and this story’s amateur sleuths have some *very* powerful motives for their far higher stakes poking around. I know others whose taste in storytelling excludes tales that begin in medias res. That being a taste that can not be argued with, I warn those folk that this is not one for them.<br />
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The authorial voice here, Jewel’s stream of consciouness and self-aware of its floridity, would wear on my nerve if it lasted more than the eightyish pages that it does. In this size of a dose, it counterpoints the horrifying, bleak dystopia that these young people are...existing is a better fit than living...within. The brothel where they work is a reputaable one, yet a client murders one of them and no one in power cares, or pursues justice.<br />
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Sound familiar, y’all?<br />
<br />
Unlike boring old twenty-first century reality, though, the murdered party returns for revenge, not as a zombie or vampire but simply undead. Go with it. As the co-sex-worker Winfield sets about getting the revenge that I myownself feel is richly deserved, the story meditates on the larger, darker themes of living in a hypercapitalist hellscape. The ending is, as expected, satisfying. The truths Author Mohamed tells us in the course of this bleak vision of a future where money = justice, where might = rights, where even the meagerest of existences is contingent on selling one’s own body for the gratification of others, are readily applicable to the world around us.<br />
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That horrifying truth is how this very short, sharp shock to the reader’s system won the very high-powered awards that it did. Very highly recommended.<br />Richardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15481936090455797869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3916134868516639921.post-71986806764558097622024-03-13T11:08:00.001-04:002024-03-13T11:08:40.501-04:00THE NEW TRUE CRIME: How the Rise of Serialized Storytelling Is Transforming Innocence, just what it says on the tin<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg4jg0Jv-GSmRxgWEmHVg03ilqjdcbH9QvTYIJZ8A-VA1xJynVdmZAw1_YNVXd1ezovvO310rM7cIwHqvLlMP102RGBv2E-Q0Hs4MCC1nFv-7xx8rcrOH-Sv52LmkyrI78qlHV6RbTMwL5LmrpBS5s75XLYKT2Iro56GSZE3g36S0OwAs3JZDvraxgS9tcV/s400/new%20true%20crime%20rickard.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; clear: right; float: right;"><img alt="" border="0" height="320" data-original-height="400" data-original-width="265" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg4jg0Jv-GSmRxgWEmHVg03ilqjdcbH9QvTYIJZ8A-VA1xJynVdmZAw1_YNVXd1ezovvO310rM7cIwHqvLlMP102RGBv2E-Q0Hs4MCC1nFv-7xx8rcrOH-Sv52LmkyrI78qlHV6RbTMwL5LmrpBS5s75XLYKT2Iro56GSZE3g36S0OwAs3JZDvraxgS9tcV/s320/new%20true%20crime%20rickard.jpg"/></a></div><br />
<br />
<b>THE NEW TRUE CRIME: How the Rise of Serialized Storytelling Is Transforming Innocence<br />
DIANA RICKARD</b><br />
<a href="https://nyupress.org/9781479816040/the-new-true-crime/" target="_blank">NYU Press</a><br />
$30.00 hardcover, available now<br />
<br />
Rating: 4* of five<br />
<br />
<b>The Publisher Says: How serialized crime shows became an American obsession</b><br />
<br />
TV shows and podcasts like <i>Making a Murderer</i>, <i>Serial</i>, and <i>Atlanta Monster</i> have taken the cultural zeitgeist by storm, and contributed to the release of wrongly imprisoned people―such as Adnan Syed. The popularity of these long-form true crime docuseries has sparked greater attention to issues of inequality, power, social class, and structural racism. More and more, the American public is asking, Who is and is not deserving of punishment, and who is and is not protected by the law? In <i>The New True Crime</i>, Diana Rickard argues that these new true crime series deserve our attention for what they reveal about our societal understanding of crime and punishment, and for the new light they shine on the inequalities of the criminal justice system. Questioning the finality of verdicts, framing facts as in the eye of the beholder―these new series unmoor our faith in what is knowable, even as, Rickard critically notes, they often blur the lines between “fact” and “fiction.”<br />
<br />
With a focus on some of the most popular true crime podcasts and streaming series of the last decade, Rickard provides an in-depth analysis of the ways in which this new media―which allows for binge-listening or watching―makes crime into a public spectacle and conveys ideological messages about punishment to its audience. Entertainment values have always been entwined with crime news reporting. Newsworthy stories, Rickard reminds us, need to involve sex, violence, or a famous person, and contain events that can be framed in terms of individualism and conservative ideologies about crime. Even as these old tropes of innocent victims and deviant bad guys still dominate these docuseries, Rickard also unpacks how the new true crime has been influenced by the innocence movement, a diverse group of organizers and activists, be they journalists, lawyers, formerly incarcerated people, or family members, who now have a place in mainstream consciousness as DNA evidence exonerates the wrongly convicted.<br />
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<i>The New True Crime</i> questions the knowability of truth and probes our anxieties about the “real” nature of true crime media. For fans of true crime shows and anyone concerned about justice in America, this book will prove to be essential reading.<br />
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<b>I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.<br />
<br />
My Review</b>: I chose to read this in spite of my serious problems with making victimhood the center of yet another cultural conversation. The howls of outrage when another Black man is convicted, on the flimsiest of evidence, of raping a white woman, center her whiteness and the racism of the laughingly labeled criminal-justice system.<br />
<br />
Many parts of the conversations we <b>should</b> be having are entirely missing, eg, Black women raped by white men get no podcasts, murders of Black men and male adolescents get fewer than the statistically appropriate number of hours devoted to them, and let us not even bring up trans folk and/or sex workers of any skin color or gender...why go on, it is all part of the entertainment industry and its long, deep relationship with Othering.<br />
<br />
This is not, however, the story...or even more than a glancing part of the story...that Author Rickard tells in this book. It was not intended to be, so this is not a failing of execution but of design.<br />
<br />
There is no point yelling at someone for not doing what *you* want done.<br />
<br />
The book, as written, makes a strong case for the net positives of a field of entertainment that focuses cultural attention on the failings of a system designed to operate out of the majority’s sight. The techniques of the entertainment industry...heightened language, elisions of tediously bulky chains of evidence into more narrative-friendly sound bites...mirror the long-standing prosecutorial tricks of evidentiary manipulation that these podcasts and shows highlight, only from the other side.<br />
<br />
Since the system we have is an adversarial one, with rules that...while on the surface even-handed...frequently get bent or ignored when convenient for those representing institutional authority, we will always need independent actors with the access and the desire to turn over the rocks plopped on top of the holes in evidence in service of the narrative needed to get a conviction. Everyone is guilty if the right/wrong storyteller gets hold of the narrative. (Side note: <U><i><b>NEVER TALK TO COPS WITHOUT A LAWYER. NO ONE IS INNOCENT IF THEY SAY YOU ARE NOT.</b></i></U>)<br />
<br />
So this new use of the entertainment media does indeed do Society a solid service by shining harsh and unflattering light on the actors for the State. It highlights the miscarriages of fairness and honest dealing that are so very common in US society. These are net positives for all concerned. Right?<br />
<br />
Crimes have victims or they are not crimes. Victims, living or dead, have no say in who, or how, or why, their trauma is presented, whether during or after the crime, its investigation, or its rehashing. Very few people are <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Sebold#Exoneration_of_Broadwater" target="_blank">Alice Sebold</a> or <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._Jean_Carroll" target="_blank">E. Jean Carroll</a>, those eloquent enough, well-favored enough, or just willing enough to see processes like those needed to re-investigate their horrific personal and, all too often, intimate violations bandied about in public again and again. I dont know if you are aware of this,but there are truly shitty people out there on the internet who absolutely **love** making their ugliest opinons public. These already-traumatized people are all too often targeted by those rotten-souled jerks.<br />
<br />
This book is not intended to solve these issues. That it does not is not a reason not to read it. This new use of entertainment to correct flawed narratives instead of spread <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copaganda" target="_blank">copaganda</a> is, in my own view, a net positive for society. It comes with problems and abuse vectors that are, sadly, not new. The possibility is that the new true crime could shine a bright enough light on those cyberissues that they will get onto the radar of the ones who can solve them, too.<br />
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Ain’t holdin’ my breath, mind you, but the possibility exists, and that is a good thing. Author Rickard makes the outlines of the emerging true-crime media landscape clear and comprehensible to non-expert readers. Her prose is up to the reportorial task at hand; her eye for the narrative strand is at the least as good as the podcasters and showrunners she reports on.<br />
<br />
A read I recommend to any media junkies, all leftists, and the passively consuming podaholics who might read this review.<br />Richardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15481936090455797869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3916134868516639921.post-82711943115559475612024-03-11T13:46:00.004-04:002024-03-11T13:49:32.498-04:00ONCE UPON A VILLA: Adventures on the French Riviera, a vicarious stroll among the one-percenters<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhvPdUikA_0CBvb-IP1UBl4KD_m11sEa8GeCC7OY3R5NwIqUrOY2FoeBNfM0lUXHjIFP0ZQ7x2auWLnyqG9BS2CDkDSvquXDMn_t96pnV8WQZAaw20qCdunDatUi5FkDBYr9M4RMgaDhLF47inl8j_Ii_W5Xc_MjkPmdXwJK2a05_4uaDcGdgtwZqM5xema/s500/once%20villa%20andrew.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; clear: right; float: right;"><img alt="" border="0" height="320" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="333" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhvPdUikA_0CBvb-IP1UBl4KD_m11sEa8GeCC7OY3R5NwIqUrOY2FoeBNfM0lUXHjIFP0ZQ7x2auWLnyqG9BS2CDkDSvquXDMn_t96pnV8WQZAaw20qCdunDatUi5FkDBYr9M4RMgaDhLF47inl8j_Ii_W5Xc_MjkPmdXwJK2a05_4uaDcGdgtwZqM5xema/s320/once%20villa%20andrew.jpg"/></a></div><br />
<br />
<b>ONCE UPON A VILLA: Adventures on the French Riviera<br />
ANDREW KAPLAN</b><br />
<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Once-Upon-Villa-Adventures-Riviera-ebook/dp/B0CQPJ3L7F/" target="_blank">Smuggler’s Lane Press</a><br />
$9.99 Kindle edition, available now<br />
<br />
Rating: 3.75* of five<br />
<br />
<b>The Publisher Says</b>: In this wise, warm-hearted, witty, and LOL hilariously funny true account, <i>New York Times</i> bestselling author Andrew Kaplan tells what it’s like when he, his wife, and two-year-old son decided to chuck it all and live the fantasy in a villa by the sea in that extraordinary corner of the world—part international café society, part billionaires’ playground, part provincial France—that is the French Riviera.<br />
<br />
Whether it’s matching wits with French bureaucracy, searching for the perfect bouillabaisse, encounters with con men, eccentric ex-pats, and Monaco’s royal family, partying with the international set on Onassis’ yacht, playing chess with a philosophical police chief, or adventures and friendships with the rich and famous and the presumably standoffish French, <i>Once Upon a Villa</i> will transport you to a fascinating and shrewdly-observed world that you will savor like your first-morning bite of pain au chocolate.<br />
<br />
<b>I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.<br />
<br />
My Review</b>: No idea if it’s just me or what, but I still crave comfort reads.<br />
<br />
The world’s gotten way meaner here lately. It takes more and more effort not to simply check out and leave the awfulness to its own devices, perpetuating itself being its best-ever trick. Thus I approached this read with all the fervor I would’ve lavished on the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4QCWgrUYnQ&ab_channel=Looper" target="_blank">Best-Costume Oscar</a> had I known about the bit John Cena committed to this ceremony. The man’s fifty-five, y’all, give it up for growing old gracefully...and hotly.<br />
<br />
Ahem. Focus, Mudge, focus!<br />
<br />
So, back to Author Kaplan, and the idea of relocating to the Riviera. Short of money, the author clearly is not...and there’s my sticking point, the reason for my missing stars. The part of the read that was charming, the French and their cultural schizophrenia of warm, generous, welcoming people and cold, maddening bureaucracy, was outweighed in my pleasure-reading by a very <i>arriviste</i> kind of name-dropping and hobnobbing with the Society Set that has long made the South of France its own. So much of the book is about who the author and his shopaholic wife went around and about with that I lost my warm happy glow.<br />
<br />
That was not fatal...the story is a lot of fun to read...it just hits me, the leftist redistributionist, in the wrong way. I do not care about Princess Caroline of Monaco. I do care about the neighbors who were kind.<br />
<br />
I am not everyone, and I am quite sure many of y’all will not feel my collywobbles about the snobbery on view. I urge y’all to go to it, go get it, and enjoy its very real writerly pleasures. I felt uneasy about my own trip, but that is no reason you should. This tour of the land of naked privilege should entertain and distract (most) anyone.<br />Richardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15481936090455797869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3916134868516639921.post-45247019884032849112024-03-07T06:48:00.174-05:002024-03-07T10:30:07.998-05:00SAY HELLO TO MY LITTLE FRIEND, trauma victim’s voyage of discovery<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJ1GO4A4_ytvKQREHQZ1Nca0mNvUV7tlO7rJ3S4TD1sB4HNp014s_xfFl6kiE0jYEdvc__ezB7UbhYhks01O2r6XVeBiuldHQvNfCd_Ea3YbEt5II29DAUL-JZnDMTz5_k6aZyuKE8QpCOfn4ImcKfC8Vr2xbzokCk_GD1Uq-NzEPVkw-UrcX6J0Kt_cU2/s2113/say%20hello%20to%20my%20little%20friend.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; clear: left; float: left;"><img alt="" border="0" height="320" data-original-height="2113" data-original-width="1400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJ1GO4A4_ytvKQREHQZ1Nca0mNvUV7tlO7rJ3S4TD1sB4HNp014s_xfFl6kiE0jYEdvc__ezB7UbhYhks01O2r6XVeBiuldHQvNfCd_Ea3YbEt5II29DAUL-JZnDMTz5_k6aZyuKE8QpCOfn4ImcKfC8Vr2xbzokCk_GD1Uq-NzEPVkw-UrcX6J0Kt_cU2/s320/say%20hello%20to%20my%20little%20friend.jpg"/></a></div><br />
<br />
<b>SAY HELLO TO MY LITTLE FRIEND<br />
JENNINE CAPÓ CRUCET</b><br />
<a href="https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Say-Hello-to-My-Little-Friend/Jennine-Capo-Crucet/9781668023327" target="_blank">Simon & Schuster</a><br />
$27.99 hardcover, available now<br />
<br />
Rating: 4.25* of five<br />
<br />
<b>The Publisher Says: <i>Scarface</i> meets <i>Moby-Dick</i> in this groundbreaking, darkly comic novel about a young man’s attempt to capitalize on his mother’s murky legacy—a story steeped in Miami’s marvelous and sinister magic.</b><br />
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Failed Pitbull impersonator Ismael Reyes—you can call him Izzy—might not be the Scarface type, but why should that keep him from trying? Growing up in Miami has shaped him into someone who dreams of being the King of the 305, with the money, power, and respect he assumes comes with it. After finding himself at the mercy of a cease-and-desist letter from Pitbull’s legal team and living in his aunt’s garage-turned-efficiency, Izzy embarks on an absurd quest to turn himself into a modern-day Tony Montana.<br />
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When Izzy’s efforts lead him to the tank that houses Lolita, a captive orca at the Miami Seaquarium, she proves just how powerful she and the water surrounding her really are—permeating everything from Miami’s sinking streets to Izzy’s memories to the very heart of the novel itself. What begins as Izzy’s story turns into a super-saturated fever dream as sprawling and surreal as the Magic City, one as sharp as an iguana’s claws, and as menacing as a killer whale’s teeth. As the truth surrounding Izzy’s boyhood escape from Cuba surfaces, the novel reckons with the forces of nature, with the limits and absence of love, and with the dangers of pursuing a tragic inheritance. Wildly narrated and expertly rendered, <i>Say Hello to My Little Friend</i> is Jennine Capó Crucet’s most daring, heart-breaking, and fearless book yet.<br />
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<b>I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.<br />
<br />
My Review</b>: Izzy is as average a guy as you will ever find. He has a crazy-ass inner life which suggests to him that making a living as a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitbull_%28rapper%29" target="_blank">Pitbull</a> impersonator:<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgF4hyphenhyphenWC1L2ObIo3EtADxMGh3ZMX3UKmgngUC2nrSa4RwyjkA0FpGYkjNRVI0B5x5TdJU7GFOzh5UHiqHeahvR6BOY8Gk9xRN6WKFgnDtNQTjijJSN0VOmKlJU83LqzogGvgMriDbJuFR3p8pGIJpq6QwXUJlo_tRe3jEw_KVl34VH3ICP9qcDTeSBXsNdQ/s1140/Pitbull%20my%20little%20friend.jpeg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" width="400" data-original-height="787" data-original-width="1140" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgF4hyphenhyphenWC1L2ObIo3EtADxMGh3ZMX3UKmgngUC2nrSa4RwyjkA0FpGYkjNRVI0B5x5TdJU7GFOzh5UHiqHeahvR6BOY8Gk9xRN6WKFgnDtNQTjijJSN0VOmKlJU83LqzogGvgMriDbJuFR3p8pGIJpq6QwXUJlo_tRe3jEw_KVl34VH3ICP9qcDTeSBXsNdQ/s400/Pitbull%20my%20little%20friend.jpeg"/></a></div>
...so we have a visual lock on Izzy from the off. Though, speaking of "off," the novel opens with Izzy getting his life rearranged by a lawyerly letter telling him to cease-and-desist with the Pitbull-y stuff. Now he has to figure out a way to make a living, and a life. Where is his family, you ask. Nowhere. He’s got none.<br />
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That central reality, that lack of mooring chains, allows Izzy to follow his inner voice’s promptings to do the absolute most batshit-crazy nonsense...remember he *was* a Pitbull impersonator until forced not to be...like, oh, let’s say, model the entire rest of his life on the character in the film <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scarface_%281983_film%29" target="_blank"><i>Scarface</i></a>.<br />
<br />
Follow the links, notice the patterns...this is not random pop-cultural detritus the author has randomly picked up.<br />
<br />
Then comes the plot twist <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lolita_%28orca%29" target="_blank">Lolita the Orca</a>. How in the name of all that is holy did an ORCA show up in a novel about a Cuban-American man’s identity crisis?!<br />
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You really need to follow those links. Do some surface-scratching into the culture not already familiar to you. The word "reggaeton" will enter your vocabulary painlessly this way, and you will need it and the ideas it fronts for to wedge into your brain. The world is changing, and unless you intend to try to stop it by joining the banners and deniers on the radical right, you had best expend some brainergy getting convesrant with Izzy and his world. <br />
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Do it painlessly by reading this novel. <i>Moby-Dick</i> was nowhere near this much fun to read, and Izzy beats Ishmael all hollow as a cicerone through all things whale-y. The resonances with the culture of the past make the culture of this century accessible for us midcentury moderns. The read is fun, it’s fast, it’s trenchant...it’s saying a lot more than the words mean.<br />
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Isn’t that more or less a novel’s brief? This one does make you work. It requires some effort to get the pop-cultural zeitgeist. It does not pretend to be all about you and center your experience. That novel exists in droves, elsewhere. THIS novel takes you inside the head of a man so traumatized by his past that he can not afford to go deep into anything. This novel parses the cost of cheap thrills and entertainment. The plot, the spine, is the voyage of discovery that we take with Izzy. Like any voyage of discovery, it is not a straight line from start to finish, so douse that expectation right away. Go on the trip as Author Crucet planned it and it will reward you with knowledge and information about the world of a trauma survivor. That can only be a net gain to your own world, because you are statistically likely to know a trauma survivor.<br />
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You might not know it yet, but you could easily pick up on signs you would not have seen before if you get your hooks into this story and its meanings.<br />Richardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15481936090455797869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3916134868516639921.post-2017214611644610102024-03-06T09:20:00.007-05:002024-03-06T09:24:36.952-05:00A SHORT HISTORY OF FLOWERS: The Stories that Make Our Gardens, pretty pretty pictures celebrating springtime in the Global North<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEic0y5vr2WB8xZFtiYiHcPDRv53L6Jx63LhyWrK73E7KF4tJbBUKOfRvWvKPDFnPAKAMHNnuoNPej_sBvbEQ-8c9elO2rqKhh5mRHeNhQ7czC1HV4RQ2-BLq2YarNiime4Ew1oGlThSEBPeWG9dqd1JI38pVbUed2i4sJGgYYA_pK4kvNRQNeLQ_JdH5wAQ/s400/short%20history%20of%20flowers.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; clear: right; float: right;"><img alt="" border="0" height="320" data-original-height="400" data-original-width="287" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEic0y5vr2WB8xZFtiYiHcPDRv53L6Jx63LhyWrK73E7KF4tJbBUKOfRvWvKPDFnPAKAMHNnuoNPej_sBvbEQ-8c9elO2rqKhh5mRHeNhQ7czC1HV4RQ2-BLq2YarNiime4Ew1oGlThSEBPeWG9dqd1JI38pVbUed2i4sJGgYYA_pK4kvNRQNeLQ_JdH5wAQ/s320/short%20history%20of%20flowers.jpg"/></a></div><br />
<br />
<b>A SHORT HISTORY OF FLOWERS: The Stories that Make Our Gardens<br />
ADVOLLY RICHMOND</b> (illus. Sarah Jane Humphrey)<br />
<a href="https://www.quartoknows.com/books/9780711282223/a-a-short-history-of-flowers" target="_blank">Frances Lincoln Ltd</a><br />
$24.99 hardcover, available now<br />
<br />
Rating: 4* of five<br />
<br />
<b>The Publisher Says</b>: Garden and social historian Advolly Richmond (of <i>Gardener’s World</i>) unravels the surprising histories of 60 flowers that shape our gardens.<br />
<br />
Have you ever wondered where your favourite garden flowers came from? Where their names derived? Or why some cultivars go in and out of favor? Every flower in your herbaceous border has a story, and in this book Advolly Richmond takes you on a tour of the most intriguing, surprising and enriching ones.<br />
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Tales of exploration, everlasting love and bravery bring these beautiful flowers to life. Advolly has dug down to uncover the royalty, scholars, pioneers and a smuggler or two that have all played a part in discovering and cultivating some of our favourite species. From the lavish and exotic bougainvillea, found by an 18th century female botanist in disguise to the humble but majestic snowdrop casting a spell and causing a frenzy. These plants have played pivotal roles in our societies, from boom to bust economies, promises of riches, and making fashion statements. These unassuming blooms hold treasure troves of stories.<br />
<br />
With specially commissioned artworks from award-winning botanical illustrator Sarah Jane Humphrey, which sumptuously bring each flower to life – this is a beautiful compendium for every garden lover.<br />
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<b>I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.<br />
<br />
My Review</b>: I needed something uncomplicatedly pretty. I expect y’all do, too.<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgUn3-qeYCAc-P5ItaBZySMojnJ5gdeTOMIP0UPkni9COBsxixlqTpicRtNPW1FxQre2HN3bXUwxpd2bx3ulMMCYO1YabtiTBP-0kazhgUTMS87JRDF_uFzoGS4y7zJT7Hn9XnrBxbmx-0bXrXHuI-YZ_7E_IPyZYBc19ojRKFH8ayemf9qjElQfnZ4L0er/s1000/flowers%20advolly%201.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" width="600" data-original-height="713" data-original-width="1000" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgUn3-qeYCAc-P5ItaBZySMojnJ5gdeTOMIP0UPkni9COBsxixlqTpicRtNPW1FxQre2HN3bXUwxpd2bx3ulMMCYO1YabtiTBP-0kazhgUTMS87JRDF_uFzoGS4y7zJT7Hn9XnrBxbmx-0bXrXHuI-YZ_7E_IPyZYBc19ojRKFH8ayemf9qjElQfnZ4L0er/s600/flowers%20advolly%201.jpg"/></a></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhT_UhDMBGmB8QtN7k8124JLpC5Lw_4iAS-_G2GewYSibpa9ktSKL_HI8Uo94Qa1d1Uzh3GgBQyEpoC5OI7I9F01p2KH_EsEpMNklkMsfvIKY76qonLeOxwQVUz1sv-xBqI7HydVAFHpxG_YEY_6vxubFEQ4Obdk7LOlG1iFBxj6qYx1DA7vQcbaEWmtRCM/s1000/flowers%20advolly%202.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" width="600" data-original-height="713" data-original-width="1000" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhT_UhDMBGmB8QtN7k8124JLpC5Lw_4iAS-_G2GewYSibpa9ktSKL_HI8Uo94Qa1d1Uzh3GgBQyEpoC5OI7I9F01p2KH_EsEpMNklkMsfvIKY76qonLeOxwQVUz1sv-xBqI7HydVAFHpxG_YEY_6vxubFEQ4Obdk7LOlG1iFBxj6qYx1DA7vQcbaEWmtRCM/s600/flowers%20advolly%202.jpg"/></a></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiUTMWB4ccUyaknhLUL_-ughotHAWR7_AnHfnYqQtnHvIJmgEWnZOzhT4Y36uktZSRlwF2Hk1kCL7YEEEY38-wL_FdweoxTjkhCG_l-gqDwxNUQRPd3YLUuJGth2WXD-idQNvPfzGeF6qi6YmoU9KiGHW8LnLbnRnm877W6raW6yFHhLVyqhjskLb8-bJJ0/s1000/flowers%20advolly%203.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" width="600" data-original-height="713" data-original-width="1000" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiUTMWB4ccUyaknhLUL_-ughotHAWR7_AnHfnYqQtnHvIJmgEWnZOzhT4Y36uktZSRlwF2Hk1kCL7YEEEY38-wL_FdweoxTjkhCG_l-gqDwxNUQRPd3YLUuJGth2WXD-idQNvPfzGeF6qi6YmoU9KiGHW8LnLbnRnm877W6raW6yFHhLVyqhjskLb8-bJJ0/s600/flowers%20advolly%203.jpg"/></a></div>
There. Springtime sorted.<br />
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Of course, this being Reality, there are no uncomplicated pleasures. The stories of how your favorite flowers got to your garden is tied up with colonialism, capitalism, and the endless intertwining of greed and ownership between them.<br />
<br />
Advolly Richmond does a far more deft job of making the connections than I have. She had a lot more room than I did:<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh-CFYzyd0MXFgK8dG9LKjXRcGiKC1A8r1BAZicWL3sIFC9OxpA8xp1NBgWRRHNG3TaLclHKSo_X07RzPWcOA6TfSvi0SV09QWBO12bK4TSA8lQ9EPznSXjU58ivMsBK8tQ2O9xJYnSxY69lRAv8l2uqwjYPHPOXOnsjARYF7bwO_KqYLj48TRygrCN4i-_/s1000/flowers%20advolly%204.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" width="600" data-original-height="698" data-original-width="1000" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh-CFYzyd0MXFgK8dG9LKjXRcGiKC1A8r1BAZicWL3sIFC9OxpA8xp1NBgWRRHNG3TaLclHKSo_X07RzPWcOA6TfSvi0SV09QWBO12bK4TSA8lQ9EPznSXjU58ivMsBK8tQ2O9xJYnSxY69lRAv8l2uqwjYPHPOXOnsjARYF7bwO_KqYLj48TRygrCN4i-_/s600/flowers%20advolly%204.jpg"/></a></div>
This table of contents is like a really good garden’s plan, expansive and filled with beautiful sights. Richmond’s expertise is writing about the domesticated plants we adorn our built environment with, aka gardening. She has practiced the craft long enough to have honed her execution of it into art.<br />
<br />
The fact that I myownself find the flower-gardening madness that so many of y’all suffer from inexplicable, and the money y’all lavish on it borderline obscene, does not mean I do not see and appreciate the beauty of the plants themselves.<br />
<br />
I still think that the water, fertilizer, and hours of labor *should* be spent on growing vegetables.<br />Richardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15481936090455797869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3916134868516639921.post-75618454128053844872024-03-01T18:06:00.208-05:002024-03-05T09:27:08.838-05:00THE SIX: The Lives of the Mitford Sisters, bringing Us-v-Them all the way home<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh3ixtv6-P0CuXKEFxrO_kMqghjpeGHki5umQllM5MHA_fh2lC0BjzewKtLif1Jfz6i7r7gNoZhkh3TS8QG1pPqr52tPUW-zHxAjfwAzFddoJO-2ar3H7aez4pnr-L2bdelOspjxOn3xk_Po2yQbfFmvHpguzfwbfXnM3UcJm3ew0lqfQWsWJmdPfgcXZ5D/s1350/The%20Six%20The%20Lives%20of%20the%20Mitford%20Sisters.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; clear: right; float: right;"><img alt="" border="0" height="320" data-original-height="1350" data-original-width="900" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh3ixtv6-P0CuXKEFxrO_kMqghjpeGHki5umQllM5MHA_fh2lC0BjzewKtLif1Jfz6i7r7gNoZhkh3TS8QG1pPqr52tPUW-zHxAjfwAzFddoJO-2ar3H7aez4pnr-L2bdelOspjxOn3xk_Po2yQbfFmvHpguzfwbfXnM3UcJm3ew0lqfQWsWJmdPfgcXZ5D/s320/The%20Six%20The%20Lives%20of%20the%20Mitford%20Sisters.jpg"/></a></div><br />
<br />
<b>THE SIX: The Lives of the Mitford Sisters<br />
LAURA THOMPSON</b><br />
<a href="https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250099549/the-six" target="_blank">Picador</a><br />
$20.00 trade paper, available now<br />
<br />
Rating: 4* of five<br />
<br />
<b>The Publisher Says: The contrasting lives of the Mitford sisters—stylish, scandalous and tragic by turns—hold up a mirror to upper-class life before and after the Second World War.</b><br />
<br />
The eldest was a razor-sharp novelist of upper-class manners; the second was loved by John Betjeman; the third was a fascist who married Oswald Mosley; the fourth idolized Hitler and shot herself in the head when Britain declared war on Germany; the fifth was a member of the American Communist Party; the sixth became Duchess of Devonshire.<br />
<br />
They were the Mitford sisters: Nancy, Pamela, Diana, Unity, Jessica and Deborah. Born into country-house privilege, they became prominent as ‘bright young things’ in the high society of interwar London. Then, as the shadows crept over 1930s Europe, the stark—and very public—differences in their outlooks came to symbolise the political polarities of a dangerous decade.<br />
<br />
The intertwined stories of their lives—recounted in masterly fashion by Laura Thompson—hold up a revelatory mirror to upper-class English life before and after World War II.<br />
<br />
<b>I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.<br />
<br />
My Review</b>: I have read <i>The American Way of Death</i>. I have read <i>Love in a Cold Climate</i>. That these books were written by sisters never fails to astonish me. If you have not yet, read them to see just how little two sisters can share...the folks in Nancy’s novels own the corporations that rip off the bereaved in Jessica’s book.<br />
<br />
The gossipy goodness of a big family that has oodles of money and wildly talented members is a cultural icon these days, thanks to <i>Succession</i> and its imitators...but honestly, what kind of world would we live in if we couldn’t look at the source material with a more compassionate eye? The Mitford sisters were not villainesses. They disagreed on a lot of things...but won’t any six people when examined as closely as their fame enabled the Mitfords to be? Nancy, the eldest, was not overtly political, yet spent her life among the people she grew up among, the wealthiest in the world. That did not prevent her from shopping Diana and her repugnant fascist husband Oswald Mosley to the Intelligence services during WWII. She might have been rich and upper class, but she had limits that could not be transgressed, including treasonous actions against the UK that the fascists led by her brother-in-law were planning. That did not extend to Decca, Jessica’s family nickname, and her leftist principles...despite Jessica being so committed to those principles that she allowed her own child to die rather than accept help from her family.<br />
<br />
So, clearly, this is a juicy, gossipy read. Does that make it a worthwhile one? We are, as of this writing, in a time of wealth inequality as stark as the one in the Mitford sisters’ lives. The natural consequence of battle-lines being drawn is depersonalizing the Other Side, attributing inhuman levels of focus to Them, all against what Our Side...clearly the side of God and the Angels, self-evidently Right in all ways and destined to prevail over Them...thus excusing ourselves in advance from the annoying burden of empathy with people we disagree with.<br />
<br />
What Author Thompson does in this book is give us the gory details of rich people’s lives, while bringing our attention to the immutable nature of Family in forming its members...would Nancy, the eldest, ever have been able to turn into the radical that late-in-order rebel Jessica, or middle-child Diana, did? Likely not. Her world, Thompson shows, is that much different from theirs. Like any big family, the Mitfords were a very mixed bag of people formed by the pressure cooker of differing expectations and opportunities into very, very different people. What looks from the outside like a bloc of wealth and privilege is, from a closer view, a forest of unique trees.<br />
<br />
This is a useful reminder now, when we look at the Othering that is so prevalent in modern society. They are not Them, they are all part of Us. We are, in fact, always an Us, just like the Mitfords were.<br />Richardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15481936090455797869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3916134868516639921.post-88475222783659759662024-02-29T04:02:00.224-05:002024-03-05T12:49:44.215-05:00INSIDE THE MIRROR, a feminist tale in 1950s newly independent India<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg14lz6PRKnCLe7q8DQhg0rSKHHldE9S619rGuisnJWBpRW5WJAlFb4tbabNbx5SeonUf2BSx0WUKXMc-NWaveAlFnGB917IJrPY5sMw4hXli2ncgCPMk_vAJbMWiuPwr5HT73KOEnqBAPKqwuVVidv-MsZqKzZV7lY-ivcRG-zNCXIcZlDYJ2XkYoeIM6M/s1500/Inside%20the%20Mirror%20%20Parul%20Kapur.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; clear: left; float: left;"><img alt="" border="0" height="320" data-original-height="1500" data-original-width="1000" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg14lz6PRKnCLe7q8DQhg0rSKHHldE9S619rGuisnJWBpRW5WJAlFb4tbabNbx5SeonUf2BSx0WUKXMc-NWaveAlFnGB917IJrPY5sMw4hXli2ncgCPMk_vAJbMWiuPwr5HT73KOEnqBAPKqwuVVidv-MsZqKzZV7lY-ivcRG-zNCXIcZlDYJ2XkYoeIM6M/s320/Inside%20the%20Mirror%20%20Parul%20Kapur.jpg"/></a></div><br />
<br />
<b>INSIDE THE MIRROR<br />
PARUL KAPUR</b><br />
<a href="https://t.e2ma.net/message/r86z2j/3trbmq7" target="_blank">University of Nebraska Press</a><br />
<b>NOW $16.17</b> trade paper until 30 April 2024<br />
<br />
Rating: 4* of five<br />
<br />
<b>The Publisher Says: Winner of the <a href="https://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/series/awp-prize-for-the-novel/" target="_blank">AWP Prize for the Novel</a><br />
Ms. Magazine's Most Anticipated Feminist Books of 2024</b><br />
<br />
In 1950s Bombay, Jaya Malhotra studies medicine at the direction of her father, a champion of women’s education who assumes the right to choose his daughters’ vocations. A talented painter drawn to the city’s dynamic new modern art movement, Jaya is driven by her desire to express both the pain and extraordinary force of life of a nation rising from the devastation of British rule. Her twin sister, Kamlesh, a passionate student of Bharata Natyam dance, complies with her father’s decision that she become a schoolteacher while secretly pursuing forbidden dreams of dancing onstage and in the movies.<br />
<br />
When Jaya moves out of her family home to live with a woman mentor, she suffers grievous consequences as a rare woman in the men’s domain of art. Not only does her departure from home threaten her family’s standing and crush her reputation; Jaya loses a vital connection to Kamlesh.<br />
<br />
Winner of the AWP Prize for the Novel, Parul Kapur’s <i>Inside the Mirror</i> is set in the aftermath of colonialism, as an impoverished India struggles to remake itself into a modern state. Jaya’s story encompasses art, history, political revolt, love, and women’s ambition to seize their own power.<br />
<br />
<b>I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.<br />
<br />
My Review</b>: A debut novel that won the right to come out from a very distinguished press (see the link to the prize details above), this read is treading a well-worn path in its use of twin sisters on opposite sides of the eternal struggle for freedom of self-definition. Resisting patriarchy, Jaya refuses to knuckle under to her father's will for her future. It is of course the case that she suffers personal and social consequences for her self-willed rebellion.<br />
<br />
Her obedient sister Kamlesh suffers, too...but the issues she faces down count for less in the storyverse because they are those faced down by multitudes of women around the world. The main take-away for me was that the father's quite surprising resistance to the women's desire for autonomy came from a genuine concern for them and their future happiness, not from mustachio-twirling meanness. He did, after all, make a radical (for the time) choice to educate his daughters. It isn't a development completely out of the blue, though...their grandmother was an active anti-colonial force, and the old saying about apples and trees is an evergreen for a reason...and still they face intrafamilial resistance to their using their educations for themselves. <br />
<br />
Author Kapur is a former travel writer, UN press officer, and a current resident of the US. Her travels and her extended residence in Mumbai have all honed her observational skills to a great degree, resulting in a read that feels more immersive than I ever expected it to feel. Evoking so vividly a place as alien to my privileged white US upbringing as the India of the 1950s is a great feat of craft. To do this as deftly and effortlessly as Author Kapur does is to feel myself in talented hands indeed.<br />
<br />
The feminist agenda in the story is the best bit for me. I am all in on the role of patriarchy being limned in completely unflattering shades. It does not like gay men, possibly even more than it does not like women. We have a common enemy. As the possibly well-intentioned old man tries to squash his already-unusually educated daughters' desires for control over their own futures, I nodded along and even felt a lot of empathy for Kamlesh...I too knuckled under for the sake of harmony and found only dissatisfaction and a deep sense of injury.<br />
<br />
So why am I so mingy with my stars? I admire the story, the storytelling voice, the character-building...sounds like a solid five, right? Nope. I rolled my eyes so hard I saw my brain at the fact that the women formed a love triangle with a man I can't even recall the name of. I was actively irked by the powerful, freedom-fighter grandmother's odd powerlessness in guiding the women to more, and better, uses of their minds with full family support.<br />
<br />
It just didn't come across as well thought-out to me. So the inevitable first-novel longueurs are indeed present. The fact of them means I really can't give the last star. It is a read I recommend because it hits more sweet notes than clanging ones, and tells a very interesting, involving story well.<br />Richardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15481936090455797869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3916134868516639921.post-52381814240284541992024-02-28T06:24:00.372-05:002024-02-28T06:24:00.132-05:00BLUE LARD, transgressive Russian SFF oddity<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiM1kQ3JL3Sxz03Jm05ibvVfn8odmRtcQO4GdkVxj1K4wBtfNdWElnKP6l4dikumGUZNQb-vm75apQoK83mjjI2u9-SK6LnJEC2zb9ji73Gnm5tZkxuhlVq_PZ5PaO9fjRm8ZzK-KpWWEQ0dJ-ODx_7lJ0gFKGYde5LVHmvwzQnDuqPoDDkt9-Nis2rSYIu/s2400/blue%20lard%20sorokin.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; clear: right; float: right;"><img alt="" border="0" height="320" data-original-height="2400" data-original-width="1500" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiM1kQ3JL3Sxz03Jm05ibvVfn8odmRtcQO4GdkVxj1K4wBtfNdWElnKP6l4dikumGUZNQb-vm75apQoK83mjjI2u9-SK6LnJEC2zb9ji73Gnm5tZkxuhlVq_PZ5PaO9fjRm8ZzK-KpWWEQ0dJ-ODx_7lJ0gFKGYde5LVHmvwzQnDuqPoDDkt9-Nis2rSYIu/s320/blue%20lard%20sorokin.jpg"/></a></div><br />
<br />
<b>BLUE LARD<br />
VLADIMIR SOROKIN</b> (tr. Max Lawton)<br />
<a href="https://www.nyrb.com/products/blue-lard" target="_blank">NYRB Classics</a><br />
$18.95 trade paper, available now<br />
<br />
Rating: 4.5* of five<br />
<br />
<b>The Publisher Says: The Russian master's most infamous novel, a dystopian fever dream about cloning, alternative histories, and world domination.</b><br />
<br />
Vladimir Sorokin’s <i>Blue Lard</i> is the most iconic and iconoclastic Russian novel of the last forty years. Thanks in part to its depiction of Stalin and Khrushchev having sex, which inspired a Putinist youth group to throw shredded copies of the author’s books into an enormous toilet erected in front of Moscow’s Bolshoi Theater, <i>Blue Lard</i> is the novel that tore Sorokin out of the Moscow Conceptualist underground and into the headlines.<br />
<br />
The book begins in a futuristic laboratory where genetic scientists speak in a Joycean dialect of Russian mixed with Chinese—peppered with ample neologisms—and work to clone famous Russian writers, who are then made to produce texts in the style of their forebears. The goal of this “script-process” is not the texts themselves, but the blue lard that collects in the small of their backs as they write.<br />
<br />
This substance is to be used to power reactors on the moon—that is, until a sect of devout nationalists breaks in to steal the blue lard, planning to send it back in time to an alternate version of the Soviet Union, one that exists on the margins of a Europe conquered by a long-haired Hitler with the ability to shoot electricity from his hands. What will come of this blue lard? Who will finally make use of its mysterious powers?<br />
<br />
<i>Blue Lard</i> is a stylistically acrobatic book, translated by Max Lawton into an English idiom just as bizarre as the Russian original. Evoking both <b>Pulp Fiction</b> and the masterpieces of Marquis de Sade, Sorokin’s novel is a brutal, heady trip that annihilates all of its twentieth- (and twenty-first-) century competition in the Russian canon—and that annihilates Russia itself in a resounding act of heavy-metal dissidence.<br />
<br />
<b>I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.<br />
<br />
My Review</b>: Unquestionably the weirdest NYRB book I have yet read...and the second-weirdest alternate history book I have read this century.<br />
<br />
It requires serious effort to engage with the first third or so of the book, as you are in medias res without even the usual linguistic snowpoles showing you where the obstacles are. You are, as is so often the case in Life, in a strange place with strange people you do not know or even understand as they have conversations around you.<br />
<br />
After that point, there is a shift in the linguistic register that brings us closer to normal conversational tones. Not normal-normal, mind you, though closer. (There is a partial Glossary at the end for the desperately confused.) But, like <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_Simon" target="_blank">Claude Simon</a>’s <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nouveau_roman" target="_blank"><i>nouveau roman</i></a> novels, there is a difficult beginning that requires you to make an investment of concentration. We have left the normie-world of relatable plots, ordinary characters you could meet at the supermarket, sentences that start and finish in the same paragraph, and other such bourgeois fripperies. This is not a read that rewards being treated as a novel. This is writing that needs to be experienced and absorbed for itself not its meanings.<br />
<br />
Sorokin, like so many truly inventive folk, is a natural iconoclast. At twenty-five, in 1980, he was baptized into the Russian Orthodox Church, at that time still under Communist-Party suspicion. The nature of iconoclasm is always to resist, so in this era of Church/state rapprochement, he opposes Putin’s war against Ukraine. It is not as though his work work was ever popular with the regime, what with Hitler raping Stalin’s daughter, Stalin and Khruschev sexing it up (ewww!), and a variety of body-horror tropes, that Little Vladdy Pu-Pu just could not ever be on board with. This, among other not-socialist-realist flourishes, will mean no invite-to-dinner from the Kremlin. Now, being good little bourgeois decoders, we too like our novels to Mean Something, like socialist realist work...but that is not on offer here.<br />
<br />
Sorokin does not Make Sense, he makes you think about how a story is more than just the beginning-middle-end structure we are ingrained to expect. He offers not one kind of Sense, but multiple ways to experience words and ideas forming into stories. This, and the transgressive nature of the words and ideas he does present us, makes a lot...A LOT...of people really, really angry. This being a feature of the Sorokin brand. I do not get the point of their outrage and negativity being performed. Giving the man the thing he tried to get from you? The point of that is...?<br />
<br />
A read that demands effort, does it an awful lot of the time, and allows you to decide for yourself if it means anything at all.<br />
<br />
Like Life itself, it makes you the Author’s apprentice. You can decide if that is your jam, but I am here to say that it is a read very much worth my time and effort and could be for you as well. Remember how mad it made the Russian overlord. Buy it to be ornery, to oppose the banning/forbidding/controlling ethos that increasingly envelops the information-delivery world.<br />
<br />
I bet lots of y’all end up liking it.<br />Richardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15481936090455797869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3916134868516639921.post-90099529871316656482024-02-26T06:08:00.063-05:002024-02-26T08:46:16.244-05:00THE BUTCHER OF THE FOREST, Premee Mohamed's body horror/dark fantasy novella<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgWh_n_4qqF2xBCA4aVIVAYTn4_WrLvt1KnX0AIRdl3PJNnVvnKpSAu3wAvEO1D8pfkbMSLDdARdIIpVa6Qrqb_q9hZ_d54AdjW5WZAJQ2Y8dMz_NWFNYbWHJ81E8xGfsux-NEwpH2lPGyV8RJF6JS4gSw_1l-tTr0Z681nUg0ybzn-zF9il14urOy_YEGA/s1761/butcher%20forest%20mohammed.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; clear: right; float: right;"><img alt="" border="0" height="320" data-original-height="1761" data-original-width="1100" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgWh_n_4qqF2xBCA4aVIVAYTn4_WrLvt1KnX0AIRdl3PJNnVvnKpSAu3wAvEO1D8pfkbMSLDdARdIIpVa6Qrqb_q9hZ_d54AdjW5WZAJQ2Y8dMz_NWFNYbWHJ81E8xGfsux-NEwpH2lPGyV8RJF6JS4gSw_1l-tTr0Z681nUg0ybzn-zF9il14urOy_YEGA/s320/butcher%20forest%20mohammed.jpg"/></a></div><br />
<br />
<b>THE BUTCHER OF THE FOREST<br />
PREMEE MOHAMED</b><br />
<a href="https://torpublishinggroup.com/the-butcher-of-the-forest/" target="_blank">Tordotcom Publishing</a><br />
$18.99 trade paper, available tomorrow<br />
<br />
Rating: 4.5* of five<br />
<br />
<b>The Publisher Says: A world-weary woman races against the clock to rescue the children of a wrathful tyrant from a dangerous, otherworldly forest.</b><br />
<br />
At the northern edge of a land ruled by a monstrous, foreign tyrant lies the wild forest known as the Elmever. The villagers know better than to let their children go near—once someone goes in, they never come back out.<br />
<br />
No one knows the strange and terrifying traps of the Elmever better than Veris Thorn, the only person to ever rescue a child from the forest many years ago. When the Tyrant’s two young children go missing, Veris is commanded to enter the forest once more and bring them home safe. If Veris fails, the Tyrant will kill her; if she remains in the forest for longer than a day, she will be trapped forevermore.<br />
<br />
So Veris will travel deep into the Elmever to face traps, riddles, and monsters at the behest of another monster. One misstep will cost everything.<br />
<br />
<b>I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.<br />
<br />
My Review</b>: Being one who really internalized the truism "No good deed goes unpunished" and its corollary "Never reveal how competent you are because then you will always get the job," I was all set to like this iteration of these aperçus. I am happy to say, nothing in the read convinced me otherwise.<br />
<br />
Veris, whose shocking, likely unique ability to survive a trip into Elmever forest has landed her the unenviable and possibly lethal job of rescuing kids lost in there, is a good person. Her exploit in Elmever was not last year, or even last decade...she is solidly in her middle years now. She would also like to enter cronehood, thank you very much, and that might not happen unless she gets the stupid kids out of this haunted, evil forest. The stupid kids that belong to the local wicked overlord. The foreign, wicked overlord.<br />
<br />
Of course this woman of middle years and possessed of close loving ties to her community of friends and family will drop everything and rush off to rescue this awful man's kids at risk of disappearing into the horrors she overcame before. You just need to ask! <br />
<br />
And threaten everyone she loves with horrible deaths.<br />
<br />
Thus are the stakes established. This is going to be a Quest with a difference in dramatis personae. Since Quests are about inner discovery through outer-world problem-solving, we are accustomed to seeing them feature young people. This time Verity, who has already solved the puzzle of surviving a day in accursed Elmever forest, must return to figure out the mystery of the place. The difference? A puzzle has one correct answer, a mystery has many possible solutions, varying shades of Rightness.<br />
<br />
Part fairy tale with its lessons quietly taught, part adventure horror story with its body horror lightly sprinkled in, part cosmic horror with its universal stakes salted on...this novella packs a lot into its one-sitting length. Enough that it might repay breaking the read into two sessions.<br />
<br />
While the ending fits with the story, and concludes the stakes satisfyingly, I do not think the usual audience for Quests will be all that pleased with this iteration of the storyverse because its stakes are...mutable. Veris faces down lots in this tight package. She makes her peace with the past, as all of us around her age must; she does the right thing by her lights, as we all hope to do in life; she learns that her life of answering puzzles and solving mysteries can not prepare her for anything to come except in habits of mind. The answers are, maddeningly, never the same.<br />
<br />
Sound like my forties. Yours too, I wager.<br />Richardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15481936090455797869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3916134868516639921.post-50182054793849185742024-02-25T10:53:00.001-05:002024-02-25T10:53:14.247-05:00SEARCHING FOR VAN GOGH, coming-of-age novel set in 1960s Michigan<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiPsgkLnvxXXYzGiwFTx2Gv9-MZ99LiZLk348jMk17yCRc_6oJIUHtHA2Dxv0Lz_G9J4NnrssIcA3GG7ZSwucLvYpSLnSGIX9Mn_GxOBTLtA3UAoQzF8JF7i5q3epq10LkituW8PYqbMID9qJ1elOAJZx4TO9sbTpG_du1yYnmCosswnYjh32Lf2c-O0Hh2/s500/van%20gogh%20lystra.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; clear: left; float: left;"><img alt="" border="0" height="320" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="333" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiPsgkLnvxXXYzGiwFTx2Gv9-MZ99LiZLk348jMk17yCRc_6oJIUHtHA2Dxv0Lz_G9J4NnrssIcA3GG7ZSwucLvYpSLnSGIX9Mn_GxOBTLtA3UAoQzF8JF7i5q3epq10LkituW8PYqbMID9qJ1elOAJZx4TO9sbTpG_du1yYnmCosswnYjh32Lf2c-O0Hh2/s320/van%20gogh%20lystra.jpg"/></a></div><br />
<br />
<b>SEARCHING FOR VAN GOGH<br />
DONALD LYSTRA</b><br />
<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Searching-Van-Gogh-Donald-Lystra-ebook/dp/B0CQQ49L7P/" target="_blank">Omena Hills Press</a><br />
$5.99 Kindle edition, available now<br />
<br />
Rating: 4* of five<br />
<br />
<b>The Publisher Says: Set in Michigan during the tumultuous closing weeks of 1963, "<i>Searching for Van Gogh</i>" is a heart-wrenching story of two young souls bravely navigating life's challenges.</b><br />
<br />
A young woman is inspired by a cinematic heroine to find meaning in a world that has cast her aside.<br />
<br />
A teenage math and science prodigy turns to art as he struggles with the pain of losing his beloved elder brother.<br />
<br />
Their unlikely friendship is a beacon of hope, reminding us that in tough times the best defense is the help we can give to one another.<br />
<br />
Reminiscent of timeless classics like <i>Ordinary People</i> and <i>To Kill a Mockingbird</i>, this story celebrates the power of friendship and understanding in an often unforgiving world.<br />
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<b>I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.<br />
<br />
My Review</b>: Do you need a break from the nastiness and unapologetic hatemongering of the world outside your door? Do you want to take a trip back to a world still slowly moving into full awareness of how cruel it has become?<br />
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Here's you a read.<br />
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Two people carrying a lot of sadness find each other at very vulnerable moments in each one's life. Their entire worlds have narrowed into coping with loss and loneliness. Then...they meet, they connect, and they tentatively learn to communicate.<br />
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<i>What on Earth is happening to this old man</i>, I can hear you wondering. <i>This kind of story never appeals to him!</i> Quite true, it is not my native land, well-trodden paths to and fro everywhere one looks in my catalog of reads. I was pleased to read something with the personal stakes of this story...grief, loss, coming to terms with the way the world works, how families fail each other at crucial times. The prose is direct and unpretentious, the voices of the characters distinct, and that plus the storyline and setting gave me what I craved most: Investment and involvement with neither anger nor outrage, just the pleasant sense that this time the world handed these two hurting souls the balm instead of the liniment.<br />
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I needed an emotionally real story, uncomplicatedly told, with people in believable emotional pain that was not going to cause Disaster. I needed that story to end believably well without absurd, over-the-top machinations, like it does in the happier passages of Real Life. And I got what I needed. I am glad I read this direct, involving, kind story.<br />
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So, kindness seekers, come to Donald Lystra's doorstep and be fed.<br />Richardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15481936090455797869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3916134868516639921.post-64997903104620637212024-02-25T07:13:00.352-05:002024-02-25T07:13:00.127-05:00February 2024's Burgoine and Pearl-Rule reviews<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiltyh3C7OECrznLAse-woDzY34KGRnt0RDzdg4gH5l4JW2iqfVdChLrzQdrA67X5Lh2ClvtoEaxxhFROqanZtWK3ujNesulMNq2F-XB26_CTkB1jAAcOxyoQ_e1wnOeMAx196AAH6IdqDwSkwBOIMHx7mk6GLcxj2-5JDy9GgMJSKTolVXxXm1joe-BA=s640" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" width="400" data-original-height="480" data-original-width="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiltyh3C7OECrznLAse-woDzY34KGRnt0RDzdg4gH5l4JW2iqfVdChLrzQdrA67X5Lh2ClvtoEaxxhFROqanZtWK3ujNesulMNq2F-XB26_CTkB1jAAcOxyoQ_e1wnOeMAx196AAH6IdqDwSkwBOIMHx7mk6GLcxj2-5JDy9GgMJSKTolVXxXm1joe-BA=s400"/></a></div>
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Author 'Nathan Burgoine posted this simple, direct method of not getting paralyzed by the prospect of having to write reviews. The Three-Sentence Review is, as he notes, very helpful and also simple to achieve. I get completely unmanned at the idea of saying something trenchant about each book I read, when there often just isn't that much to say...now I can use this structure to say what I think is the most important idea I took away from the read and not try to dig for more.<br />
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Think about using it yourselves!<br />
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<b>When Grumpy Met Sunshine</b> by Charlotte Stein<br />
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Rating: 3.5* of five<br />
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<b>The Publisher Says: A steamy, opposites-attract romance with undeniable chemistry between a grumpy retired footballer and his fabulous and very sunshine-y ghostwriter.</b><br />
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When grumpy ex-footballer Alfie Harding gets badgered into selling his memoirs, he knows he’s never going to be able to write them. He hates revealing a single thing about himself, is allergic to most emotions, and can’t imagine doing a good job of putting pen to paper.<br />
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And so in walks curvy, cheery, cute as heck ghostwriter Mabel Willicker, who knows just how to sunshine and sass her way into getting every little detail out of Alfie. They banter and bicker their way to writing his life story, both of them sure they’ll never be anything other than at odds.<br />
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But after their business arrangement is mistaken for a budding romance, the pair have to pretend to be an item for a public who’s ravenous for more of this Cinderella story. Or at least, it feels like it’s pretend―until each slow burn step in their fake relationship sparks a heat neither can control. Now they just have to is this sizzling chemistry just for show? Or something so real it might just give them their fairytale ending?<br />
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<b>I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.<br />
<br />
My Review</b>: Mabel and Alfie, whose names sound like an English music-hall duo, also sound like an English music-hall duo while they bicker and banter. This is an uncomplicated, pleasant iteration of the evergreen romance trope, executed without unnecessary fuss and with the panache one expects from an experienced practitioner of the Art of Romance. The only minor whinge I have is that the pace of this story is not as snappy as the copious dialogue...really more like exchanged monologues, if I am in full-disclosure mode.<br />
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If you like your romance reading without male knuckle-dragging, female high-horsing, or mutual sexist disrespect...as I do...you will very likely enjoy this read.<br />
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<a href="https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250867933/when-grumpy-met-sunshine" target="_blank">Our friends at St. Martin's Griffin</a> want $18.00 for a trade paper edition, and it is worth it.<br />
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<b>The Bastard Prince Of Versailles: A Novel Inspired by True Events</b> by Will Bashor<br />
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Rating: 3.5* of five<br />
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<b>The Publisher Says</B>: A historical novel inspired by real events, <i>The Bastard Prince of Versailles</i> narrates the escapades of a misborn "prince" during the reign of Louis XIV in seventeenth-century France.<br />
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Louis de Bourbon wasn't a real prince—even though his father was King Louis XIV. The illegitimate son of the King and his mistress, Louise de La Vallière, young Louis has been kept far from the court's eyes until summoned to bid adieu to his mother. To atone for her adultery, she joins a convent, abandoning Louis to an uncertain future.<br />
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When Louis is humiliated by his father for his role in a secret gay society, he struggles to redeem himself through heroism and self-sacrifice in the king's army on the battlefield.<br />
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<b>I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.<br />
<br />
My Review</b>: What surprised me most about this read was that it is based on fact. I was unaware of the existence of the bastard son of the Sun King. I was more surprised still that there was a gay demimonde at this intolerant, aggressively cishet jerk's court. The last jaw-dropper for me was the way the author treated the subject of "gayness" in a time when that identity had not been invented. While being honest and true to the historical record, Author Bashor allows us twenty-first century snowflakes to feel connected to, and hopeful for, the sodomitical young bastard prince.<br />
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History buffs, as much as historical-fiction fans, will find much to enjoy in this evocation of a brutal, glamourous past. The gay themes should be a draw, not a bar, as the light the author sheds on the subject is welcome indeed...even if the life it illuminates is very, very saddening to modern eyes.<br />
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<a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0CH6TWX79/" target="_blank">A Kindle edition</a> (<b>non-affiliate</b> Amazon link) is a mere $4.95 and worth every dime.<br />
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<b>Sea Fever</b> by Elsie Sze<br />
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Rating: 3.5* of five<br />
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<b>The Publisher Says: Mystery and Suspense in Kazakhstan!</B><br />
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<i>Sea Fever</i> is a mystery thriller surrounding clandestine activities on Voz Island in the desiccating Aral Sea of Kazakhstan, when Ayan Kazbekov was growing up in a fishing village by the Aral in Soviet time. When two locals are murdered while taking a couple of strangers to the now-abandoned Voz Island in the post-Soviet era, Ayan and his friend Grace, the wife of an American expatriate, are incited to decipher a coded note secretly passed to Ayan before the fall of the Soviet Union by Victor, his Russian scientist friend from their university days in Moscow.<br />
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Victor is not heard from again, but his note may hold clues not only to solving the locals’ murders but also thwarting life-threatening dangers to humankind.<br />
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<b>I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.<br />
<br />
My Review</b>: I strongly doubt most of us have heard of the Aral Sea, or its impending disappearance. I will bet my life that not more than one or two of my readers have heard of Voz Island...at the most. Kazakhstan, very likely to be likewise. So there are the exotic locale, effectively limned, boxes ticked...the stakes have to be high to get the uninformed interested in the subject of such a setting. <br />
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How does environmental catastrophe causing multiple disease outbreaks ring your bell? Unfolding over decades, including huge world-changing events like the fall of the USSR, the discovery and possible exposure of its ugliest secrets puts lives at risk decades later. <br />
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I won't say this is the fastest-paced thriller I have read, but I will encourage anyone who likes Robert Ludlum's geopolitical plots to give this one a whirl. It is more than engrossing enough on its merits to deserve our attention just for its factual basis.<br />
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<a href="https://greenleafbookgroup.com/titles/sea-fever" target="_blank">The trade paper edition is $17.95</a>, available from the publishers website.<br />
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<b>Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science</b> by Benjamin Breen<br />
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Rating: 3.5* of five<br />
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<b>The Publisher Says: A bold and brilliant revisionist take on the history of psychedelics in the twentieth century, illuminating how a culture of experimental drugs shaped the Cold War and the birth of Silicon Valley.</B><br />
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"It was not the Baby Boomers who ushered in the first era of widespread drug experimentation. It was their parents." Far from the repressed traditionalists they are often painted as, the generation that survived the second World War emerged with a profoundly ambitious sense of social experimentation. In the '40s and '50s, transformative drugs rapidly entered mainstream culture, where they were not only legal, but openly celebrated.<br />
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American physician John C. Lilly infamously dosed dolphins (and himself) with LSD in a NASA-funded effort to teach dolphins to talk. A tripping Cary Grant mumbled into a Dictaphone about Hegel as astronaut John Glenn returned to Earth. At the center of this revolution were the pioneering anthropologists—and star-crossed lovers—Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson. Convinced the world was headed toward certain disaster, Mead and Bateson made it their life’s mission to reshape humanity through a new science of consciousness expansion, but soon found themselves at odds with the government bodies who funded their work, whose intentions were less than pure. Mead and Bateson's partnership unlocks an untold chapter in the history of the twentieth century, linking drug researchers with CIA agents, outsider sexologists, and the founders of the Information Age.<br />
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As we follow Mead and Bateson’s fractured love affair from the malarial jungles of New Guinea to the temples of Bali, from the espionage of WWII to the scientific revolutions of the Cold War, a new origin story for psychedelic science emerges.<br />
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<b>I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.<br />
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My Review</b>: What a complete clusterfuck the right wingnuts made of the 20th century. There were glimmers of a better, more open world that could have been...then the generals and religious nuts got hold of it, and choked it into the pale, selfish idiocy of the New Age. <br />
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What did not work for me was the sense that Mead and Bateson were ciphers...what about them made them worth setting at the center of a book, I do not know, because it felt like they were not there. The research, and its aims, are very interesting. The opponents to the use of this research are more carefully, and luckily damningly, limned than the people whose names are on the jacket.<br />
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Interesting story with a weird hollow at its core, yet still worth reading for the facts you are very likely not to have known before regarding the US attitudes towards psychedelic drugs and their theraputic uses. A story steeped in tragedy for cures and benefits lost.<br />
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<a href="https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/benjamin-breen/tripping-on-utopia/9781538722374/" target="_blank">A hardcover is $30 </a>and a Kindle edition is half that.<br />
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This space is dedicated to <a href="https://lifehacker.com/read-50-pages-before-deciding-to-drop-a-book-1660458546">Nancy Pearl's Rule of 50</a>, or "the Pearl Rule" as I've always called it. After realizing five times in December 2021 <I>alone</i> that I'd already Pearl-Ruled a book I picked up on a whim, I realized how close my Half-heimer's is getting to the full-on article. Hence my decision to track my Pearls!<br />
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As she says:<br />
<blockquote>People frequently ask me how many pages they should give a book before they give up on it. In response to that question, I came up with my “rule of fifty,” which is based on the shortness of time and the immensity of the world of books. If you’re fifty years of age or younger, give a book fifty pages before you decide to commit to reading it or give it up. If you’re over fifty, which is when time gets even shorter, subtract your age from 100—the result is the number of pages you should read before making your decision to stay with it or quit.</blockquote><br />
So this space will be each month's listing of Pearl-Ruled books. Earlier Pearl-Rule posts will be linked below the current month's crop.<br />
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<b>The Beautiful Land</b> by Alan Averill<br />
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PEARL RULED @ p38<br />
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<b>The Publisher Says</b>: Boy meets girl. Boy loses girl. Boy steals a time machine that’s low on batteries and attempts to save girl from impending annihilation. ...You know how this goes.<br />
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Tak O’Leary is a Japanese-American television host who vanished off the grid after a failed suicide attempt. Samira Moheb is an Iranian-American military translator suffering from PTSD as a result of her time in the Iraq War. They have been in love from the moment they met, and because they never told each other, they are destined to be apart forever. But thanks to a mysterious invention buried deep in the Australian Outback, they now have one more chance to get it right.<br />
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Of course, it won’t be easy. Love never is. First they have to avoid being captured by a powerful and mysterious corporation. Then they must take down a deranged scientist who is trying to unleash a monstrous creature upon the world. Finally, there’s the matter of the invention—an impossible machine with the ability to destroy time itself. If Tak and Samira hope to reunite and save the world, they must use this machine to find a theoretical reality constructed by the thoughts of whoever is inside it. They must find the Beautiful Land.<br />
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Skillfully blending non-stop action with compassionate characters and a sharp sense of humor, <i>The Beautiful Land</i> is a novel unique in style and scope. It’s a love story with time machines. A science-fiction novel for people who don’t read science fiction. And an elegantly timeless tale about the nature of memory, heartache, and redemption.<br />
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<b>I RECEIVED AN ARC FROM THE PUBLISHER. THANK YOU.<br />
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My Review</b>: Ten years ago, I’d’ve lapped this up...strange timeline shenanigans, portentous foreshadowing, and so on...but now, this manic pixie girl as love object of depressed dudebro makes me want to scream. I would probably not *love* the same basics with two men in the leads, but in the intervening time, that has become something I can actually find.<br />
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Off to the Little Free Library with you, tedious cishet stereotypes-from-the-1990s. Bring me the SFF with men in love, lust, or even just a defining partnership with each other. Maybe I only need queer SF now, and for sure I need SF for people who DO read SF.<br />
<br />Richardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15481936090455797869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3916134868516639921.post-82135001357143868372024-02-24T10:03:00.001-05:002024-02-24T10:03:55.867-05:00AN UNTOUCHED HOUSE, a flawed Dutch gem via Archipelago Books<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDWMZBfz8HiwcrswKUX9tqN0Ck7GlnZI08n3necZM-ySb3CkNxnr9zzMY7AQNPb-bIDYB91SHu2y8cDYeQbH2QWOk3KjoR3HGDorXWURw52cTEu7SeySfoSXYFXIUFYZsQ3d45p4YDtGXzs0vOGo__PNwKeLeq1DicYdXOwlPNNP3aez1s6bNeqkKUNhoQ/s986/untouched%20house.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; clear: left; float: left;"><img alt="" border="0" height="320" data-original-height="986" data-original-width="850" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDWMZBfz8HiwcrswKUX9tqN0Ck7GlnZI08n3necZM-ySb3CkNxnr9zzMY7AQNPb-bIDYB91SHu2y8cDYeQbH2QWOk3KjoR3HGDorXWURw52cTEu7SeySfoSXYFXIUFYZsQ3d45p4YDtGXzs0vOGo__PNwKeLeq1DicYdXOwlPNNP3aez1s6bNeqkKUNhoQ/s320/untouched%20house.jpg"/></a></div><br />
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<b>AN UNTOUCHED HOUSE<br />
WILLEM FREDERIK HERMANS (tr. David Colmer)</b>, <i>introduction by Cees Nooteboom</i><br />
<a href="https://archipelagobooks.org/book/an-untouched-house/" target="_blank">Archipelago Books</a><br />
$16.00 trade paper, available now<br />
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Rating: 4* of five<br />
<br />
<b>The Publisher Says</b>: In this dark, unnerving work of wartime fiction, W. F. Hermans exposes humanity’s essential savagery, barely concealed by its mores and morals. The year is 1944, and a Dutch partisan chances on an abandoned estate, where he decides to take refuge during a lull in the hostilities. The house seems untouched by the war, a kind of haven, its ornament and grandeur intact (not to mention its walls), clothes and sheets to spare, a kitchen stocked with food and drink. He settles in, and begins to consider himself the owner. When the Nazis recapture the village and come knocking, they similarly assume the house to be his; they assume, also, its spare rooms, which they outfit as barracks.<br />
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It is all and well until the true owner and his wife return to their estate. Horrified at the thought of being caught in his subterfuge, our protagonist finds himself drawn into further deceit—and swept up in the violence that ensues.<br />
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Civilization comes face-to-face with brutality, truth meets the duplicity that has upended and challenged its certainty—Hermans’ prose searches for an order to the chaos and nihilism of war and life. What he cannot find is as telling as what he uncovers.<br />
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<b>I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.<br />
<br />
My Review</b>: Novellas are, by definition, brief and gestural as opposed to the novel in its deeper dives, its wider emotional landscape. These general observations are, of course, not true of every novel or novella. They serve to define nothing but an expectation of the reasonably experienced reader when picking up one or the other.<br />
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I went into this read, then, expecting to get a glancing blow to my interest in the topic of what the Second World War was like for those who lived it, who were involved in the conflict and not observing events from afar. That was an expectation met...but exceeded, at least as the read settled into my brain. The prose, as translated, was not showy or terribly Writerly; the story itself was simple enough, really more suited to a short story than a novella; but as I sat stunned after finishing the read, I realized why the author chose this length of telling for a story this uncomplicated.<br />
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Without the novella’s-worth of buildup, the ending would feel artificial and out of proportion to the story itself. As it is, the ending is a shocker. It arrives without fanfare and smacks the complacent, even slightly bored, reader in their readerly chops. At the end of a trip through one devious survivor’s opportunistic manipulations of everyone around him, all in service of maximizing his immediate personal comfort, the situation he has created from his selfish, self-serving and utterly believable actions comes to a loud, permanent conclusion.<br />
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The issue I had been nursing against this overgrown short story exploded in the events of the ending. There is a reason for the length the author chose to tell his simple tale. I was not ready for the impact of the ending, which to be clear would always have been powerful. The novella before it, however, was exactly right to create its seismic shifting of my emotional response. An entire novel with this ending would, honestly, have vitiated its power to stun; a short story, even a long one, would make the ending feel artificial and tacked on.<br />
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This read is an excellent example of what a novella can do best, when used to best advantage: satisfy the reader’s hunger for a powerful emotional experience in a one-sitting package. So why only four stars? In the end, the manner of telling the story, the simple unfussy writing, works against the needed investment in the story being told. It gets to the stage of thinking, "Really? is this IT?" before the truly impactful payoff occurs. That I soldiered on, finishing the read, was not assured by the manner of storytelling the author used. At times I was ready to jump ship just to be done with this really dislikable man, this solipsistic selfish creep. I am glad that I persevered, but also a little surprised that I did with the truly staggering number of reads I already have lined up.<br />
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So, to all who start this read, I say: Do stick it out for the whole distance. It *is* worth your time. But because I feel the need to say that, I can only in honesty rate it four of five stars.<br />Richardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15481936090455797869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3916134868516639921.post-18414896543795903172024-02-23T06:06:00.222-05:002024-02-23T06:06:00.233-05:00MONKEY GRIP: A Novel, a loud BANG! of brightly-colored paint in a very pale cultural landscape<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgGLar7yBeE90iy3nuEi9PTkI-Sxg2rqUEuXKT17_OHqviD39gRnms-ZVeia1wbrMrhxajezFg05LP_aoIXyErFwOBlTdx_fuoE4O3KcoV8ZL2Exj7s8N-cTPt96eQxxFS_lhL7-ydzwj7ZvfWN3vHtZL6gcIxHjW11-kbojUnIe_UPXWyS_t-xNOLGW5KY/s400/Monkey%20Grip%20Garner.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; clear: right; float: right;"><img alt="" border="0" height="320" data-original-height="400" data-original-width="263" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgGLar7yBeE90iy3nuEi9PTkI-Sxg2rqUEuXKT17_OHqviD39gRnms-ZVeia1wbrMrhxajezFg05LP_aoIXyErFwOBlTdx_fuoE4O3KcoV8ZL2Exj7s8N-cTPt96eQxxFS_lhL7-ydzwj7ZvfWN3vHtZL6gcIxHjW11-kbojUnIe_UPXWyS_t-xNOLGW5KY/s320/Monkey%20Grip%20Garner.jpg"/></a></div><br />
<br />
<b>MONKEY GRIP: A Novel<br />
HELEN GARNER</b><br />
<a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/722286/monkey-grip-by-helen-garner/" target="_blank">Pantheon Books</a><br />
$28.00 hardcover, available now<br />
<br />
Rating: 4* of five<br />
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<b>The Publisher Says: The novel that launched the career of one of Australia’s greatest writers, following the doomed infatuations of a young, single mother, enthralled by the excesses of Melbourne's late-70s counterculture</b><br />
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The name Helen Garner commands near-universal acclaim. A master novelist, short-story writer, and journalist, Garner is best known for her frank, unsparing, and intricate portraits of Australian life, often drawn from the pages of her own journals and diaries. Now, in a newly available US edition, comes the disruptive debut that established Garner's masterful and quietly radical literary voice.<br />
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Set in Australia in the late 1970s, <i>Monkey Grip</i> follows single mother and writer Nora as she navigates the tumultuous cityscape of Melbourne’s bohemian underground, often with her young daughter Gracie in tow. When Nora falls in love with the flighty Javo, she becomes snared in the web of his addiction. And as their tenuous relationship disintegrates, Nora struggles to wean herself off a love that feels impossible to live without.<br />
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When it first published in 1977, <i>Monkey Grip</i> was both a sensation and a lightning rod. While some critics praised the upstart Garner for her craft, many scorned her gritty depictions of the human body and all its muck, her frankness about sex and drugs and the mess of motherhood, and her unabashed use of her own life as inspiration. Today, such criticism feels old-fashioned and glaringly gendered, and <i>Monkey Grip</i> is considered a modern masterpiece.<br />
<br />
A seminal novel of Australia’s turbulent 1970s and all it entailed—communal households, music, friendships, children, love, drugs, and sex— Monkey Grip now makes its long-overdue American debut.<br />
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<b>I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.<br />
<br />
My Review</b>: Novels belong to times and places. This novel is absolutely a product of its time...the 1970s...and place, settler-colonial Australia. Now we are fifty years (close enough) on from that time, we see it very differently. The term "settler colonial" as an example had not been articulated in any but the most ardently leftist circles and is now much more a part of the cultural conversation. What Garner has to say about a liberated woman of the 1970s hits very differently now than it did then. Nora’s descent into sexual obsession and drug abuse was transgressive in a different way. Now, in a conservative social landscape developed in reaction to that bright bohemian moment, Nora seems appallingly neglectful, pretty much criminally culpable for her treatment of Gracie as an expendable accessory to her own life. We think that differently about children and their needs. Thank goodness.<br />
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A point that was clear then that we of the 2020s often seem to ignore is that Gracie...of necessity...has a dad. Nora is living her own life without so much as a thought for Gracie. And so, I remind is all in our desire to tut over this, is Gracie’s dad. In the 1970s that was so ordinary an outcome that nothing whatever is made of it, nor is Javo’s hostile indifference to anyone’s needs except his own. He is, after all, A Man. Nora, by the end of the tale, is the only sufferer for her actions. Her resentful neglect of Gracie, product of an unhappy stab at marriage, really stood out for me as she simultaneously pined after the job of riding herd on Javo of the wild blue eyes and the clearly terminal smack (heroin, for the youths who might read this) addiction. As always, the inconvenient thing about children is that they need meals, clothes, baths, every day. Junkies like the adult-but-younger Javo, in contrast, can be left in their own mess, and no one does a double-take.<br />
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The reason this book sprang out at people back in the day was that it was still very much Not Done for a woman to write about women’s desires for sex, and about the bright shining fact that the reason drug culture took hold was that taking drugs feels really good. It gets a user out of their doubtless boring and routine life. That it also takes them over and ruins that boring tedious necessary engagement with living one’s life slowly emerges as Nora stays focused on herself and her addictions to sex and drugs. The shock value of this, then, was that it was a woman writing about it without stuffy moralizing and overt message-making. Yes, she has been in this out-of-control relaationship but she does come to know it must, and is at the, end. Nora does not ever think about the impact of any of this on Gracie.<br />
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I do not pretend to like Nora, or to think I would voluntarily pick up a book about her. I’m glad that I read <i>Monkey Grip</i> because the prose is terrific...elliptical, imprecise, and poetic...and the fact that this is based off Garner’s own life is much better known now. This adds a depth of field to my reading of the nearly plotless events that occur. The fact that Garner spent her energy in this difficult-to-sell way, then transmuted that sort-of wasted life into a work of very loud art in a very beige cultural landscape, made me admire her for her honesty, and for her clarity of purpose in writing it as a novel. She could have written a mea-culpa memoir, and been forgotten in a year.<br />
What we get instead is a book that, for its story and its storyteller, was a loud BANG! of brightly-colored paint in that very beige cultural landscape. It would take over a decade for Australian writers to follow Helen Garner into the Fitzroy Baths and soak some of the settler-colonial stiffness out of their storytelling muscles.<br />Richardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15481936090455797869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3916134868516639921.post-36784107050150143922024-02-21T13:33:00.000-05:002024-02-21T13:33:08.999-05:00TOLKIEN: Lighting Up The Darkness, or me recommending a comic book to you. No, really!<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjiu91os5Su60caLFgoR0sJrVFj2zzVztMJtKGWEARqZG-UOD-G-Ie2eFQsR5BrQpm3LmMbjmjBPLnDA-ry7jahefO2fo_r7IlE4bSkTO53ZXVtOeQZYizlPPYxyflaQPCK2A7A2_Cuor2PXYLbTv25X4bMSKXd7Ie6IWltkRC3dgG8_IezaYzt2RS3_rS_/s1366/TOLKIEN-HC-COV.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; clear: right; float: right;"><img alt="" border="0" height="320" data-original-height="1366" data-original-width="900" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjiu91os5Su60caLFgoR0sJrVFj2zzVztMJtKGWEARqZG-UOD-G-Ie2eFQsR5BrQpm3LmMbjmjBPLnDA-ry7jahefO2fo_r7IlE4bSkTO53ZXVtOeQZYizlPPYxyflaQPCK2A7A2_Cuor2PXYLbTv25X4bMSKXd7Ie6IWltkRC3dgG8_IezaYzt2RS3_rS_/s320/TOLKIEN-HC-COV.jpg"/></a></div><br />
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<b>TOLKIEN: Lighting Up The Darkness<br />
WILLY DURAFFOURG</b> (illus. Giancarlo Caracuzzo)<br />
<a href="https://ablaze.net/products?p=G168497187X" target="_blank">Ablaze Publishing</a><br />
$16.99 hardcover, available now<br />
<br />
Rating: 4.5* of five<br />
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<b>The Publisher Says: JRR Tolkien was not always the old Oxford professor, pipe in the mouth, refining his extraordinary work.</b><br />
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In 1915, at age 23, he left for the front with his high school friends, whom he loved like brothers. They take part in the Battle of the Somme which will kill 450,000 people. The horror of war will brand his relationship to friendship, love and creation.<br />
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This graphic novel explores the youth of the author of <i>The Lord of the Rings</i>, and his traumatic experience of the battlefields of the First World War, which will forge the imagination of his literary work.<br />
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For fans of <i>The Hobbit</i> & <i>Lord of The Rings</i> looking to learn more about the genius behind their favorite epics.<br />
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<b>I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.<br />
<br />
My Review</b>: Okay. <i>This</i> is how you know for certain that we are in the End Times.<br />
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I am recommending to you, dear blog reader, a comic book. A format I avoid because I do not "get" it. One that is, to boot, about the author of <i>The Lord of the Rings</i>. A book series that I famously dislike with the utmost vigor.<br />
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Have the GQP released some personality-altering chemical into the atmosphere? It feels like that is not out of the realm of possibility, given how many of my shibboleths I am smashing by recommending this read to you. The issues I have with graphic works always comes down to, what am I supposed to do, read its words or look at its art? I am not wired to do both...I read fast, so am the right audience for subtitled film and TV, and less so for sequential story-telling which is, of necessity, light on words.<br />
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Then we come to Tolkien. Not my jam, as the middle-aged whippersnappers say. I never caught the Middle-Earth bug, despite my love for <i>The Hobbit</i> in childhood. I seem to have acquired sterile immunity to Tolkien from that story-inoculation. No idea why, really. It should have been so totally my thing, only it wasn't.<br />
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What led me to get this DRC was the fact that, despite my dislike of his stories and his conservative, anti-progressive politics, I think I need to know about the man that changed the entire publishing industry, and the popular culture I grew up in, with the stories that were inspired by his experiences in the Great War. The fact that this is a translation from the French, and is illustrated by an Italian master of sequential storytelling art, made the prospect of reading the story much more attractive to me.<br />
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The artwork speaks for itself in the samples from the publisher posted below. It is, to my art-savvy eye, lovely stuff. It is well-chosen to make its storytelling points succinctly, and very aesthetically pleasing.<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhkpa2CSqSxSB2tVM1obof3qepmhajONXgTjjNaozEPuwHQueN5Fklbo4K_MjFQnRS8CSP20DZR5Ouo84C-y2Y5VVQSliB7cEYsnXzbB52umI3DPbKC9Nz75GsplvvXlgINM2amlOHeCPSzcZKZUSZDs2pCkvv7NuI50FjHlLEexO6KNmyB_cYLMvhQvGQQ/s1383/TOLKIEN%201.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" height="600" data-original-height="1383" data-original-width="1000" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhkpa2CSqSxSB2tVM1obof3qepmhajONXgTjjNaozEPuwHQueN5Fklbo4K_MjFQnRS8CSP20DZR5Ouo84C-y2Y5VVQSliB7cEYsnXzbB52umI3DPbKC9Nz75GsplvvXlgINM2amlOHeCPSzcZKZUSZDs2pCkvv7NuI50FjHlLEexO6KNmyB_cYLMvhQvGQQ/s600/TOLKIEN%201.jpg"/></a></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEguyL-AEHbFKryBgvWq54esXn6n0-AHEjNiud8bJkh5nxfSxk4DBKqa8FuXJkHx5VaIUJR3OedZQgu9Y0Enk5KHpt_rHHJ-NtMaq3qawoe9hrP_NXg_JZPt-4HeCrzbzqzKxakaFJDbL2YJN7NJNDh7AKUjACrYNbKKlOt65vXHH0Ro9d8Pm4LxXdBPAyhL/s1383/tolkien%202.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" height="600" data-original-height="1383" data-original-width="1000" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEguyL-AEHbFKryBgvWq54esXn6n0-AHEjNiud8bJkh5nxfSxk4DBKqa8FuXJkHx5VaIUJR3OedZQgu9Y0Enk5KHpt_rHHJ-NtMaq3qawoe9hrP_NXg_JZPt-4HeCrzbzqzKxakaFJDbL2YJN7NJNDh7AKUjACrYNbKKlOt65vXHH0Ro9d8Pm4LxXdBPAyhL/s600/tolkien%202.jpg"/></a></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgm1nVZhg6kqJa_bc74iQg3Hi5G5qdeP4myXuGGNHrisgxEnBofdBwg6cyHUylMukvOm13sMlqSuOUh5Trkdd3BZ9maRgMabRL4Rxk8FHvzpzo4S7XZg9IvxqNDMmPDT69Jm4eLYreSsDVL3CpIItBUdeELfQ01KiYkDgu11xjYORFLI51EWbIwqPIaxC0m/s1383/tolkien%203.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" height="600" data-original-height="1383" data-original-width="1000" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgm1nVZhg6kqJa_bc74iQg3Hi5G5qdeP4myXuGGNHrisgxEnBofdBwg6cyHUylMukvOm13sMlqSuOUh5Trkdd3BZ9maRgMabRL4Rxk8FHvzpzo4S7XZg9IvxqNDMmPDT69Jm4eLYreSsDVL3CpIItBUdeELfQ01KiYkDgu11xjYORFLI51EWbIwqPIaxC0m/s600/tolkien%203.jpg"/></a></div>
I think the light shined on the origin of the world-beating work done by Tolkien makes this graphic treatment of his life all the more interesting. The plight of a WWI soldier is, as always, interesting to me. That it is the story a soldier who went on to use the horrors of his time at war to write effectively of the cost of battles on the unprepared and unsuited people who always have and always will predominate among the combatants...priceless.<br />
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Kudos to the writers and to the publisher for seeing that this take on the life of JRR Tolkien is important, illuminating, and quite beautiful.<br />Richardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15481936090455797869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3916134868516639921.post-57430495595834458672024-02-19T10:00:00.067-05:002024-02-19T10:09:22.531-05:00THE WISDOM OF PLAGUES: Lessons from 25 Years of Covering Pandemics, best to learn from someone who knows because he was there<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiuRfKjkuyw9eMFy63ikEsS15D-9uMVcTMcb15GfbHJ8a8ttUu54Ip2NJvGrNkxFBArrAaiMeGnTBfPRgKpLjajwBBsLRRSp77wEoK_HU7tKC4Ue92wFt5rZ4HoIktcT6s83SLdiCfrUWpgbQuAeSuwF_r0p8rwO89GWCDKIuuXC_al3rJWeKsu6W-u3F_3/s2114/Wisdom%20of%20Plagues.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; clear: right; float: right;"><img alt="" border="0" height="320" data-original-height="2114" data-original-width="1400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiuRfKjkuyw9eMFy63ikEsS15D-9uMVcTMcb15GfbHJ8a8ttUu54Ip2NJvGrNkxFBArrAaiMeGnTBfPRgKpLjajwBBsLRRSp77wEoK_HU7tKC4Ue92wFt5rZ4HoIktcT6s83SLdiCfrUWpgbQuAeSuwF_r0p8rwO89GWCDKIuuXC_al3rJWeKsu6W-u3F_3/s320/Wisdom%20of%20Plagues.jpg"/></a></div><br />
<br />
<b>THE WISDOM OF PLAGUES: Lessons from 25 Years of Covering Pandemics<br />
DONALD G. McNEIL, Jr.</b><br />
<a href="https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Wisdom-of-Plagues/Donald-G-McNeil/9781668001394" target="_blank">Simon & Schuster</a><br />
$28.99 hardcover, available now<br />
<br />
Rating: 4.75* of five <br />
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<b>The Publisher Says: Award-winning <i>New York Times</i> reporter Donald G. McNeil, Jr. reflects on twenty-five years of covering pandemics—how governments react to them, how the media covers them, how they are exploited, and what we can do to prepare for the next one.</b><br />
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For millions of Americans, Donald McNeil was a comforting voice when the COVID-19 pandemic broke out. He was a regular reporter on <i>The New York Times</i>’s popular podcast <i>The Daily</i> and told listeners early on to prepare for the worst. He’d covered public health for twenty-five years and quickly realized that an obscure virus in Wuhan, China, was destined to grow into a global pandemic rivaling the 1918 Spanish flu. Because of his clear advice, a generation of <i>Times</i> readers knew the risk was real but that they might be spared by taking the right precautions. Because of his prescient work, <i>The New York Times</i> won the 2021 Pulitzer Gold Medal for Public Service.<br />
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<i>The Wisdom of Plagues</i> is his account of what he learned over a quarter-century of reporting in over sixty countries. Many science reporters understand the basics of diseases—how a virus works, for example, or what goes into making a vaccine. But very few understand the psychology of how small outbreaks turn into pandemics, why people refuse to believe they’re at risk, or why they reject protective measures like quarantine or vaccines. The COVID-19 pandemic was the story McNeil had trained his whole life to cover. His expertise and breadth of sources let him make many accurate predictions in 2020 about the course that a deadly new virus would take and how different countries would respond.<br />
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By the time McNeil wrote his last <i>New York Times</i> stories, he had not lost his compassion—but he had grown far more stone-hearted about how governments should react. He had witnessed enough disasters and read enough history to realize that while every epidemic is different, failure was the one constant. Small case-clusters ballooned into catastrophe because weak leaders became mired in denial. Citizens refused to make even minor sacrifices for the common good. They were encouraged in that by money-hungry entrepreneurs and power-hungry populists. Science was ignored, obvious truths were denied, and the innocent too often died. In <i>The Wisdom of Plagues</i> , McNeil offers tough, prescriptive advice on what we can do to improve global health and be better prepared for the inevitable next pandemic.<br />
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<b>I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.<br />
<br />
My Review</b>: "The innocent too often died" in plagues...that is one of those evocative sentences that sound good until you start unpacking them. Does this excuse the public-health indifference around the fate of the incarcerated, as we presume them to be guilty? (Of what, and why, let’s leave for another book review.) Of course not...at least I hope those reading my reviews agree that this is not acceptable...but it illustrates a fact of the author’s writing such a book reveals.<br />
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How we talk about plagues, and public health in general, is deeply fraught and will, no matter how carefully phrased, offend and insult someone.<br />
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What Author McNeil chose to do with that realization was write the facts of plagues...origins, spreads, containments...in the context of a long career’s take-aways about what works, what doesnt, and how to effectively stop the inevitable rise of some highly infectious and contagious disease from becoming another pandemic. I tell you upfront, you will <i><b>hate</b></i> the answer. It involves infringing, to an astonishing degree, your liberties.<br />
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The author has covered the topic for an adult human lifetime. He has seen what effective responses look like. The US did not mount an effective response to COVID, and many died who need not have done. I live in an assisted-living facility with many, many smokers. Over thirty of the residents...out of two hundred-ish...died. Many, including me, got sick. Many of those, though not me, went to the hospital to treat their infections. We were lucky it was not a lot worse because the leaders locked us down, passed out masks like candy, made social-distancing rules that they enforced, and still people got infected.<br />
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But we live in a state where those measures were put in place quickly and enforced. Fewer died, and got seriously ill, because the patchwork of regulations and responses worked in our favor. That was good luck, which was in short global supply. But we live in a state where those measures were put in place quickly and enforced. Fewer died, and got seriously ill, because the patchwork of regulations and responses worked in our favor. That was good luck, which was in short global supply. There were even then other challenges concurrent with COVID, eg monkeypox, that never became pandemics despite having the makings of such. One big reason is the public-health response was faster, more openly communicated, and more united. This limited the pathogens’ natural ability to spread.<br />
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What the author says to us is that solipsistic selfish behavior in defense of your little "liberties" is fatal in the context of a pandemic. Sometimes Life is not fair, but to save the lives of others you must be ready and willing to accept the loss of unlimited, unrestricted personal "liberty." Sarcastic tone implied by quotes very much intended.<br />
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Author McNeil is a bona fide expert on this subject. He knows from being there what is needed to stop a pandemic from arising. I sometimes found his explications, deeply grounded and reported with clarity, to be repetitive, so can not offer a perfect five-star rating. I devoutly hope that some who did not read <i>The Daily</i> during 2022 will still find this book and respond to his "I was there, I saw it happen," account of pandemics past, and re-evaluate their stances on responding to the absolutely inevitable and guaranteed recurrence of a pandemic.<br />
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A boy can dream.<br />Richardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15481936090455797869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3916134868516639921.post-14673120506321032302024-02-18T06:21:00.081-05:002024-02-18T07:55:05.965-05:00SALEM'S CIPHER, or "What the Patriarch Will Stoop to"<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjN-xAFVzfRjlU0c3kCFbyZWEdJh5nVmTzNVuRwrJUWT7Uaqtj4_qZxZublC9bSHIp0VBv2DRasnYBNVM18PKkxY5Fdm8HxZKVhOHDhwc9C8i92xLreMzeKj1d0lku2rWqMLoJiilAPx-gjBJLae5XSUolDIFLEowo5X41qsQqYwDo4VqrWK11AZgFg7HEq/s1500/salems%20cipher.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; clear: left; float: left;"><img alt="" border="0" height="320" data-original-height="1500" data-original-width="971" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjN-xAFVzfRjlU0c3kCFbyZWEdJh5nVmTzNVuRwrJUWT7Uaqtj4_qZxZublC9bSHIp0VBv2DRasnYBNVM18PKkxY5Fdm8HxZKVhOHDhwc9C8i92xLreMzeKj1d0lku2rWqMLoJiilAPx-gjBJLae5XSUolDIFLEowo5X41qsQqYwDo4VqrWK11AZgFg7HEq/s320/salems%20cipher.jpg"/></a></div><br />
<br />
<b>SALEM'S CIPHER<br />
JESS LOUREY</b><br />
<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Salems-Cipher-Jess-Lourey-ebook/dp/B0CKY2LNMF/" target="_blank">Thomas & Mercer</a> (<b>non-affiliate</b> Amazon link)<br />
$4.99 Kindle edition, available now<br />
<br />
Rating: 4* of five<br />
<br />
<b>The Publisher Says: A troubled codebreaker faces an epic plot reaching back through centuries of America's secret history</b><br />
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Salem Wiley is a genius cryptanalyst, courted by the world's top security agencies ever since making a breakthrough discovery in her field of quantum computing. She's also an agoraphobe, shackled to a narrow routine by her fear of public places. When her mother's disappearance is linked to a plot to assassinate the country's first viable female presidential candidate, Salem finds herself both target and detective in a modern-day witch hunt.<br />
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Drawn into a labyrinth of messages encrypted by Emily Dickinson and centuries-old codes tucked inside the Beale Cipher, Salem begins to uncover the truth: an ancient and ruthless group is hell-bent on ruling the world, and only a select group of women stands in its way.<br />
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<b>I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.<br />
<br />
My Review</b>: Secret history novels are always fun for me...they put a spin on the facts that usually makes very little sense, but has the lovely quality of being off-the-wall...and this outing into that garden of fantasy is no disappointment.<br />
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If <a href="https://jamesrollins.com/" target="_blank">James Rollins</a> had written a woman-centered story, this is what it would feel like. Since I like James Rollins, I think of that as a compliment. Salem and Bel, with their matrilineal cultish secret society, The Underground, are in opposition to the male-dominated world-spanning cult, The Order...don't you love the harkening back to the antique world's division of authority into women/Earth::men/land?...each side ready to lie, cheat, and kill to accomplish their goals. The two (so far) stories in Salems world make it clear that the nightmare of christian nationalism and fascistic order/totalitarianism are only going to be effectively opposed by women organizing and taking their power back into their own hands.<br />
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This being a message I am totally on board with, I say go get you a copy and learn what one intelligent, observant woman thinks is worth fighting for, and how to do it. I won't say it's a roadmap since we live in mundane reality not Conspiracytopia, but I will say I agree that the stakes are existential.<br />
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When the next woman is nominated to run for president I will not be surprised if she faces some sort of threat very similar to this story's plot. There is no reason to think that the incels and MAGAts will change in the next four years. I hope that somewhere there is an actual real-life cabal of powerful women ready to blast the patriarchy that will come gunning for her. If they had the quasi-mystical powers that the Underground...do you not just love the echoes of Persephone in that name?...and if they could just use Emily Dickinsons poetry a a cipher, too....<br />
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The idea of power in the hands of women scares some men so badly that they will stoop to anything to stop it from occurring. This being amply demonstrated by the events of 2016, when the first version of this book came out, the anxiety that propeled this story reads as relevant today as it ever has. Absent some Great Dismantling of the patriarchy, the plot of this story will remain evergreen.<br />
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An excellent investment of a minimal amount of money, for very solid return of pleasure in the read.<br />Richardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15481936090455797869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3916134868516639921.post-73642034275457697552024-02-16T06:37:00.163-05:002024-02-16T06:37:00.241-05:00THE PERFUME THIEF, WWII espionage in a beautifully evoked Paris setting<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgqdVH-k0J-zKSmvz6jPWPFLL06zmrREbAgUJBEb2SPMQXcxo6bUv4ldVJ7jYZmgOPag_mgjFNn9vpfAu81kRGuGhdCseUyj7vnM-X9MvHMhlT_Na1wt8xJq76MzjG-zO6k6AY6Cbd8kr_qMScAYv36O57w_VbAIchk90OQUtgXp3BhaFmUb89_mx3oHsvv/s2560/schaffert.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; clear: right; float: right;"><img alt="" border="0" height="320" data-original-height="2560" data-original-width="1696" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgqdVH-k0J-zKSmvz6jPWPFLL06zmrREbAgUJBEb2SPMQXcxo6bUv4ldVJ7jYZmgOPag_mgjFNn9vpfAu81kRGuGhdCseUyj7vnM-X9MvHMhlT_Na1wt8xJq76MzjG-zO6k6AY6Cbd8kr_qMScAYv36O57w_VbAIchk90OQUtgXp3BhaFmUb89_mx3oHsvv/s320/schaffert.jpg"/></a></div><br />
<br />
<b>THE PERFUME THIEF<br />
TIMOTHY SCHAFFERT</b><br />
<a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/617431/the-perfume-thief-by-timothy-schaffert/" target="_blank">Doubleday</a><br />
$17.00 trade paper, available now<br />
<br />
Rating: 3.8* of five<br />
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<b>The Publisher Says: <i>A Gentleman in Moscow</i> meets <i>Moulin Rouge</i> in this stylish, sexy page-turner about Clementine, a queer American expat and notorious thief of rare scents, who has retired to Paris, only to return to her old tricks in hopes of protecting the city she loves when the Nazis invade in 1941.</b><br />
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Clementine is a seventy-two year-old reformed con artist with a penchant for impeccably tailored suits. Her life of crime has led her from the uber-wealthy perfume junkies of belle epoque Manhattan, to the scented butterflies of Costa Rica, to the spice markets of Marrakech, and finally the bordellos of Paris, where she settles down and opens a legitimate shop bottling her favorite extracts for the ladies of the cabarets.<br />
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In 1941, as the German's stranglehold on the city tightens, Clem's perfume-making attracts the notice of Oskar Voss, a Francophile Nazi bureaucrat, who comes to demand Clem's expertise and loyalty in his mysterious play for Hitler's favor. Clem has no choice but to surrender fully to the con, but while she knew playing the part of collaborator would be dangerous, she never imagined it would be so painfully intimate. At Oskar's behest, and in an effort to win his trust, Clem recounts the full story of her life and loves, this time without the cover of the lies she came to Paris to escape.<br />
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Complete with romance, espionage, champagne towers, and haute couture, this full-tilt sensory experience is a dazzling portrait of the underground resistance of twentieth-century Paris and a passionate love letter to the power of beauty and community in the face of insidious hate.<br />
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<b>I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.<br />
<br />
My Review</b>: Lush, lovely prose telling a story that made me squirm so hard I wore a hole in my upholstery.<br />
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Stories about coercion of trans folks using their identity as trans are not comfortable reads. I do not think this was intended to be a comfy-cozy kind of a read but it was clear in its empathy for its trans main character. So, blessedly, I was not left with the rather unclean film of exploitive appropriative use of trans identity as a negative signifier on my lens into the story.<br />
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Still, this story causes me horripilation. As things that have Nazis as the antagonist should.<br />
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The felt-like-he-was-factual Oskar Voss, nasty boss Nazi spymaster, based like the rest of the story—as per the author—on real people who were in Paris to escape the judgments of Society in the safety of the big city. Then, the worst-possible worst result happens to them all when the vileness of the Nazis come barging in with their giant, outsized hatreds, and their very overblown sense of purpose. Oskar is typical of the cynical bandwagon-hoppers that puritanical movements attract like horse apples attract dung beetles. He is very much not interested in the ideology of his paymasters. He wants power over others. His means of getting more of his drug is to use whoever and whatever he can to buy himself a seat at a higher-placed table.<br />
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Enter Clem(entine). And a lot of Clem's fellow misfits. They need to survive, and their Otherness has equipped them to do this any and every way they possibly can including stealing and blackmailing any and everyone they need to. Oskar wants to ensorcel Hitler with some super-special scent, which TBH just fell flat for me as a motivation...but it led to butch lesbian/transman Clem recounting, for honestly flimsy reasons, her lifetime's-worth of stories to the rapt Oskar. Whatever excuse made that happen is good enough for me.<br />
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Clem, a very old person for that era at seventy-two, has Lived A Life, maybe three or even four, in those years. A born tale-teller, as anyone making a living as a con artist and thief operating among the very rich must be, Clem completely wraps Oskar up in the memory palace of the past. How much of it would pass the fact-checking of the internet age, well...who cares. I do not really buy into the motivations of Oskar for any of his actions, but that left me no less delighted to spend time with Clem.<br />
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The horrors of Nazi-occupied Paris, the horrors that were to come, all seemed to Clem to be clear because these puritanical control freaks are just like the others from the past. None of it is downplayed, and there are terrible passages in this story, but the way it is presented feels...convenient. Oskar is easily led by his greed for power, Clem is easily swayed by a murky sense of responsibility that all just jelled a bit too patly for this reader.<br />
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I will not, though, say anything to discourage anyone who longs for ancestral representation for their own kind to get stuck in right away. I think the transmasculine Clem, while imperfect, is perfectly delightful to spend page time with. The hurts and betrayals of lives long over make for great stories, even knowing they were painful and hard to live. You will come away edified for knowing the honorable, sensible, deeply relatable hero that is Clem.<br />Richardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15481936090455797869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3916134868516639921.post-91756534829970517462024-02-12T06:52:00.077-05:002024-02-12T06:52:00.137-05:00THE FIELD GUIDE TO THE DUMB BIRDS OF THE WHOLE STUPID WORLD, great Valentine gift for your birder love<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3lrO7vviL48FadDWfS3fJ9ZndVDUTiXzLsxM8ZB2TVA6jxfU-07tm0whu4YhSK4GOBlZUjSYEqJHNmsglx-9tbRA6FHF3oRXQMbDTTyI9txVLoglU2cv_yUJ2powyU46le2553zDdJ24gekRgs8-53oSd23rdj3MswtzCgSUbkMUkUae5cYwANwkeYHus/s500/dumb%20birds.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; clear: right; float: right;"><img alt="" border="0" height="320" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="359" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3lrO7vviL48FadDWfS3fJ9ZndVDUTiXzLsxM8ZB2TVA6jxfU-07tm0whu4YhSK4GOBlZUjSYEqJHNmsglx-9tbRA6FHF3oRXQMbDTTyI9txVLoglU2cv_yUJ2powyU46le2553zDdJ24gekRgs8-53oSd23rdj3MswtzCgSUbkMUkUae5cYwANwkeYHus/s320/dumb%20birds.jpg"/></a></div><br />
<br />
<b>THE FIELD GUIDE TO THE DUMB BIRDS OF THE WHOLE STUPID WORLD<br />
MATT KRACHT</b><br />
<a href="https://www.chroniclebooks.com/products/the-field-guide-to-dumb-birds-of-the-whole-stupid-world" target="_blank">Chronicle Books</a><br />
$15.95 trade paper, available now<br />
<br />
Rating: 4.5* of five<br />
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<b>The Publisher Says: This must-have sequel to the bestselling parody book <i>The Field Guide to Dumb Birds of North America</i> proves that all birds are fascinating, wonderful, idiotic jerks—no matter where in the world they reside.</b><br />
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Following in the tracks of the first uproarious and beloved bird book in the series, this hilarious sequel ventures beyond to identify the stupidest birds around the world. Featuring birds from North and South America, Africa, Asia, Europe, and Oceania, author Matt Kracht identifies the dumb birds that manage to live all over the freaking place with snarky yet accurate names and humorous, anger-filled drawings. Offering a balance of fact and wit, this uproarious profanity-laden handbook will appeal to hardcore birders and casual bird lovers (and haters) alike.<br />
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ENTERTAINING AND EDUCATIONAL: This laugh-out-loud funny spoof guide to all things wings includes a matching game, a bird descriptor checklist, and tips on how to identify a bird (you can tell a lot by looking into a bird's eyes, for example). Plus, each entry is accompanied by facts about a bird's (annoying) call, its (dumb) migratory pattern, its (downright tacky) markings, and more.<br />
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POPULAR AUTHOR: Matt Kracht is an amateur birder, writer, and illustrator who enjoys creating books that celebrate the humor inherent in life's absurdities. Based in Seattle, he enjoys gazing out the window at the beautiful waters of Puget Sound and making fun of birds. Other amusing titles from Matt include <i>The Field Guide to Dumb Birds of North America</i> and <i>OMFG, BEES!</i><br />
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<b>I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.<br />
<br />
My Review</b>: Do you love a birder? You do?! Why? Couldn't you find a normal person, one that doesn't glue (super expensive, need upgrading all the time) binoculars to their face at the smallest rustle of a leaf?<br />
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Well, it's your life, you do you. Or them, I suppose....<br />
<br />
As Valentines Day is coming up very, very quickly, you might need a last-minute gift idea since you have the terrible taste to hang out with a bird nut. No doubt forgetting it's the romantic holiday is completely within such a goofball's capabilities. If the hinted-after super-de-dooper binocs are outside your budget, but something bird-y is still required, believe me when I tell you a reference book ain't a lot cheaper than the binoculars. Go for this book, it's more fun than you usually have with the bloody birds, and it's about $20.<br />
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Enjoy the artwork.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg00uswAmdezfCtiXLyzU1fm3nbyy-TV5JUiKCV1Hm8vwm1opJo0ZmnTzvreFqvn7yS1sJj884_ASvszv2aq6fznN1rbATvbneVisKbUjMhk36gopO08hZ0Kgjmf0buWma_EcxYj3i7WrDZDFDj8pkL_bykkm0AchYSv4EHDtUCbb7JxAzHaam12nmAU3zU/s1000/dumb%20bird%204.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" width="600" data-original-height="700" data-original-width="1000" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg00uswAmdezfCtiXLyzU1fm3nbyy-TV5JUiKCV1Hm8vwm1opJo0ZmnTzvreFqvn7yS1sJj884_ASvszv2aq6fznN1rbATvbneVisKbUjMhk36gopO08hZ0Kgjmf0buWma_EcxYj3i7WrDZDFDj8pkL_bykkm0AchYSv4EHDtUCbb7JxAzHaam12nmAU3zU/s600/dumb%20bird%204.jpg"/></a></div>
Even *I*, no bird-fancier bones in me anywhere, got a ton of good laughs at the expense of all these dumb birds from all over the entire stupid world.<br />Richardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15481936090455797869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3916134868516639921.post-27448368632196887972024-02-08T06:06:00.002-05:002024-02-08T08:39:29.876-05:00THE STORMLESS SERIES: Stormless #1 & The Fire King #2<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi6ko_i9UAVZp1HVSDc9GykMsyxqVySFyezdHPZxLVZF0F1pVBERxIHmjtgdDxt-bSItmcoH_62tWr0zR5qKK6SnEIhELpPzlYx9JzWBvfcUQ_L2acb7yessGEqso2qYGthYRe0fT_naOe_oM-b6B1JTfTDkqcFcG-DjCEjopxI-9WczSz_H3CvW_Xbjr7o/s2560/Stormless%20%231.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; clear: right; float: right;"><img alt="" border="0" height="320" data-original-height="2560" data-original-width="1707" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi6ko_i9UAVZp1HVSDc9GykMsyxqVySFyezdHPZxLVZF0F1pVBERxIHmjtgdDxt-bSItmcoH_62tWr0zR5qKK6SnEIhELpPzlYx9JzWBvfcUQ_L2acb7yessGEqso2qYGthYRe0fT_naOe_oM-b6B1JTfTDkqcFcG-DjCEjopxI-9WczSz_H3CvW_Xbjr7o/s320/Stormless%20%231.jpg"/></a></div><br />
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<b>STORMLESS (Stormless #1) <br />
NICK STITLE</b><br />
<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Stormless-Thrilling-Adventure-Formidable-Summoners-ebook/dp/B0BZFDHBJH/" target="_blank">Blazecrest Publishing</a> (<b>non-affiliate</b> Amazon link)<br />
$6.99 Kindle edition,available now<br />
<br />
Rating: 3.5* of five<br />
<br />
<b>The Publisher Says: The world you are about to enter is very different from the one you know.</b><br />
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Auris is a place of storms and chaos where seven violent Tempests rule the land, wreaking havoc across the continent. Only the Summoners, bearers of powers not unlike those of the divine Tempests themselves, have the strength to stand against the tyranny of the storms. Society depends upon the enigmatic Summoner-empowering Crystals for survival... Yet when a Summoner bearing powers that should not exist appears on Arvendon’s doorstep, the world begins spiraling into chaos.<br />
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Castien Varic, a common soldier, finds himself in the throes of a coming war. He embarks on a mission with the most legendary of Auris’s Summoners, hoping to discover the truth behind the resurfacing of the Ancient Summoner.<br />
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Faelyn Titansworn, heir to the largest of Auris’s empires and one of the most powerful Summoners in the world, finds himself lost in his father’s shadow. When a conspiracy threatens to destroy all that he knows and loves, Faelyn takes it upon himself to save not just his kingdom, but all of Auris.<br />
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Asteros Silverglade bears the powers of a god. Two years in the past, he, along with five others of his Sect, uncover the hidden secrets that the world has tried to erase. Yet they soon learn that the mysteries of the baffling event known as the Vanishing—the war that somehow caused over half of Auris’s Summoners to disappear without a trace—run far deeper than they could’ve ever imagined.<br />
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These three heroes walk the threads of fate, together weaving an epic tale of magic, war, love, and loss. Together these individuals will forever change Auris’s future. Empires will shatter, Tempests will be Unbound, but destiny will prevail as these heroes face their fated ends.<br />
<br />
This is <b>Stormless.</b><br />
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<b>I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.<br />
<br />
My Review</b>: First novels usually have issues...this one has mostly fantasy-novel ones. Male characters predominate, and they are the ones we get to know. The female characters, therefore, are there to dress the stage up for the males...sadly all too typical in most genres, especially Chosen One fantasy narratives like this. The author, as a counterweight to this, understands pacing quite well. He uses the templates of fantasy that are well known and well developed. This is not a knock, since there really is little reason to mess with a generations-old template unless you have to. Many others do not bother to do so, and they have far less command of their material than Author Stitle does.<br />
<br />
And now a word about our author: He is all of seventeen. For someone that age to have the fluency and the grasp of the mechanics of storytelling that he does is *remarkable*. If you need a good reason to read this particular fantasy novel, there it is. Will you come away from the read enlightened and changed by the power of the storytelling? No. Will you be entertained for the trip you take with these dudebros through Auris? <br />
<br />
Fantasy fans surely will. I came to this read expecting to be annoyed and frustrated, but willing to try because someone seventeen does not lightly just write a novel. I was ready to applaud him for doing this difficult task, but criticize his output. Here I am, not his natural reader, saying you should give this book your time.<br />
<br />
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhj768qFcUluIbWxZu4WZFI-5x-uyDZ9pR4jn7yE39OksZ96rsVkGMyU5NZgskshVr9eQlnlcOOlIMtJ_I_EfbZUk8L0R2yqGdkhGD6uqJ_9vAKwT7QlVUeht-jc2hawxJ4u11-OudegaOFnsNO1Cdv6eGXUqSTMWNuERVbWiX-hp8Lq2phDdX8_GLyj-8p/s500/the%20fire%20%20king%20stormless%20%232.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; clear: left; float: left;"><img alt="" border="0" height="320" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="333" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhj768qFcUluIbWxZu4WZFI-5x-uyDZ9pR4jn7yE39OksZ96rsVkGMyU5NZgskshVr9eQlnlcOOlIMtJ_I_EfbZUk8L0R2yqGdkhGD6uqJ_9vAKwT7QlVUeht-jc2hawxJ4u11-OudegaOFnsNO1Cdv6eGXUqSTMWNuERVbWiX-hp8Lq2phDdX8_GLyj-8p/s320/the%20fire%20%20king%20stormless%20%232.jpg"/></a></div><br />
<br />
<b>THE FIRE KING (Stormless #2)<br />
NICK STITLE</b><br />
<a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0CNGVDBZK" target="_blank">Blazecrest Publishing</a> (<b>non-affiliate</b> Amazon link)<br />
$6.99 Kindle edition, available now<br />
<br />
Rating: 3.5* of five<br />
<br />
<b>The Publisher Says</b>: Immediately following the shocking events of the Solstice, Castien Varic finds himself forced to leave his home city for good. With an unlikely team, Castien sets off for the city of Celes, hoping to find an explanation for Ilyana’s betrayal.<br />
<br />
Arvendon’s crown falls to a grieving Faelyn Titansworn as the young king grapples with his father’s death. At the guidance of the treacherous Illusomancer Eithor, Faelyn travels to Cyfalion in a misguided attempt at revenge.<br />
<br />
Finally, the Emissary shows Asteros Silverglade the secret histories of Auris, revealing that there is far more to the continent’s past than Asteros had believed.<br />
<br />
<b>The Fire King</b> brings the Stormless Series to new heights, elevating the stakes and bringing Auris to life like never before. Surprising twists and riveting action sequences build toward two spectacular battles involving all of Auris’s greatest forces. The world of Stormless will evolve in unimaginable ways, forever changing the rest of the series.<br />
<br />
This is <b>The Fire King</b><br />
<br />
<b>I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.<br />
<br />
My Review</b>: Literally picks up where the previous book leaves off. Feels more like one long book simply cut in half, in which case I say good decision! This afforded me the chance to rest between battles. This is a thing that the characters get little chance to do.<br />
<br />
We are still within the male-dominated narrative of Western European high fantasys Chosen One plot. Betrayal, sadness, and loss are the dominant modes for most of the book. I think it bears repeating that Author Stitle is a seventeen-year-old writing sensitively and well about heavy, hard topics that many much older can do less with than he does. This is very impressive inner-directed writing, given the general trope of fantasy for tormented heroes. These men grieve realistically.<br />
<br />
Still fully within genre conventions, though. Nothing breaks the mold...but it does not need to when it is molded so well.<br />
<br />
A new fantasy author is born. Try him out.<br />Richardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15481936090455797869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3916134868516639921.post-76444036218541403452024-02-07T06:15:00.108-05:002024-02-07T06:15:00.155-05:00MAGE OF FOOLS, SF novel by Black woman creator tha SLAPS<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEj0LpMA5B-4MERtKDRyskUvUdiF1vdWjVWQGYSIW5Q9j_eOkgbp4Esr55eBOvfuqymQySXpzjpvUWjszPkQTw8UtvKcW0In5YEbluaefko4w97JQxaUQjwnVaVUJ-0X8et_hPcfgb03eOo01-4pk4-eFNd8hYziWF2-w28JaMUPMjeSONqNYzXAGXjkYA=s1024" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; clear: left; float: left;"><img alt="" border="0" height="320" data-original-height="1024" data-original-width="683" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEj0LpMA5B-4MERtKDRyskUvUdiF1vdWjVWQGYSIW5Q9j_eOkgbp4Esr55eBOvfuqymQySXpzjpvUWjszPkQTw8UtvKcW0In5YEbluaefko4w97JQxaUQjwnVaVUJ-0X8et_hPcfgb03eOo01-4pk4-eFNd8hYziWF2-w28JaMUPMjeSONqNYzXAGXjkYA=s320"/></a></div>
<br />
<b>MAGE OF FOOLS<br />
EUGEN BACON</b><br />
<a href="https://meerkatpress.com/books/mage-of-fools/" target="_blank">Meerkat Press</a><br />
$15.95 trade paper, available now<br />
<br />
Rating: 4* of five<br />
<br />
<b>The Publisher Says: In the dystopian world of Mafinga, Jasmin must contend with a dictator’s sorcerer to cleanse the socialist state of its deadly pollution.</b><br />
<br />
Mafinga's malevolent king dislikes books and, together with his sorcerer Atari, has collapsed the environment to almost uninhabitable. The sun has killed all the able men, including Jasmin’s husband Godi. But Jasmin has Godi’s secret story machine that tells of a better world, far different from the wastelands of Mafinga. Jasmin’s crime for possessing the machine and its forbidden literature filled with subversive text is punishable by death. Fate grants a cruel reprieve in the service of a childless queen who claims Jasmin’s children as her own. Jasmin is powerless—until she discovers secrets behind the king and his sorcerer.<br />
<br />
<b>I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.<br />
<br />
My Review</b>: Lyrical prose...maybe sometimes <i>too</i> lyrical for its own good...telling a tale of monopoly, abuse of power, an apartheid of haves and have-nots, that not coincidentally resembles the modern technological world metastasizing across the agrarian peasantry of Africa and keeping its fruits entirely apart from those who feed them.<br />
<br />
The worldbuilding is *stellar*, the narrative drive does not let up, and the plot speaks to my Social Justice Warrior soul. So what happened to that fifth star, you wonder. The story is told in eight parts, each of many chapters, and in almost as many viewpoints. I get that this is a choice made to facilitate the slightly seasick sense of the story’s walled-off world, where nothing is shared, nothing is given away, and the walls that enclose you form strict limits that are transgressed at the greatest possible risk to life and limb. When we learn that technology emanates from actual aliens, it comes less as a surprise than as a peek over a wall...not, for this reader, the best way to induce full investment. The upside of the structure for me was that I was always in a state of readiness for the next shift, the next magical revelation, and the horrors that always lurk where magic and technology collide. But I was always riding along, moving forward, keeping up...never getting to know anyone well enough to feel deeply with them in their tragedies, not even Jasmin.<br />
<br />
In a time where the tsunami of Information is drowning the wisdom and the guidance humans need by replacing stories with infotainment, this book’s lushness of both imagination and prose, its demand for you to pay attention to where you are, who is speaking to you, and what they want you to know, is very evocative. It summons darkness, it rings the feeding bell for the monsters implicit...even inherent...in totalitarian systems. Learn what those who least want you to resist least want you to know if you plan to live instead of exist.<br />
<br />
Resistance is not, in fact, futile.<br />
<br />
Costly. Dreadfully painful. But never futile. Villains can, and must be, fought at every level and with every atom of one’s being. The price is awful, but the price of submission is even worse.<br />Richardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15481936090455797869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3916134868516639921.post-26822269276895495582024-02-05T06:14:00.176-05:002024-02-05T06:14:00.132-05:00BE NOT AFRAID OF MY BODY: A Lyrical Memoir gives us a view of life that is triple silenced, Black & queer & male<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgAejQAzRfJAoqaaxBaEJHKz1537XtSKBHjMLNiR8e41GLO2HD_Af3Svcz2MUHLYHXVglNV88dBlZ2txEWGzJg6z4VNP70dmk5H6zUE72ZndamX7kOpAC1tB3lKp255RihzNhzAOgROWpPbT4duMNYrr8hl-GPGaDSOCBkI_mY5ahPbwV-aYISuze0zhBri/s400/be%20not%20afraid%20stewart.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; clear: right; float: right;"><img alt="" border="0" height="320" data-original-height="400" data-original-width="290" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgAejQAzRfJAoqaaxBaEJHKz1537XtSKBHjMLNiR8e41GLO2HD_Af3Svcz2MUHLYHXVglNV88dBlZ2txEWGzJg6z4VNP70dmk5H6zUE72ZndamX7kOpAC1tB3lKp255RihzNhzAOgROWpPbT4duMNYrr8hl-GPGaDSOCBkI_mY5ahPbwV-aYISuze0zhBri/s320/be%20not%20afraid%20stewart.jpg"/></a></div><br />
<br />
<b>BE NOT AFRAID OF MY BODY: A Lyrical Memoir<br />
DARIUS STEWART</b><br />
<a href="https://beltpublishing.com/products/be-not-afraid-of-my-body" target="_blank">Belt Publishing</a><br />
$19.99 trade paper, available tomorrow<br />
<br />
Rating: 4.5* of five<br />
<br />
<b>The Publisher Says: From an exhilarating new voice, a breathtaking memoir about gay desire, Blackness, and growing up.</b><br />
<br />
Darius Stewart spent his childhood in the Lonsdale projects of Knoxville, where he grew up navigating school, friendship, and his own family life in a context that often felt perilous. As we learn about his life in Tennessee—and eventually in Texas and Iowa, where he studies to become a poet—he details the obstacles to his most crucial hiding his earliest attraction to boys in his neighborhood, predatory stalkers, doomed affairs, his struggles with alcohol addiction, and his eventual diagnosis with HIV. <br />
<br />
Through a mix of straightforward memoir, brilliantly surreal reveries, and moments of startling imagery and insight, Stewart’s explorations of love, illness, chemical dependency, desire, family, joy, shame, loneliness, and beauty coalesce into a wrenching, musical whole. A lyrical narrative reminiscent of Saeed Jones’s <i>How We Fight for Our Lives</i> and Kiese Laymon’s <i>Heavy</i>, <i>Be Not Afraid of My Body</i> stands as a compelling testament to growing up Black and gay in America, and to the drive in all of us to collect the fragments of our own experience and transform them into a story that does justice to all the multitudes we contain.<br />
<br />
<b>I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER. THANK YOU.<br />
<br />
My Review</b>: Honesty, the true and fully realized kind, is often not kind to the subject or the teller. Author Stewart is fully honest in this memoir of Black male gayness.<br />
<br />
The light it shines on himself, and Black culture’s fraught relationship with masculinity, queerness of all sorts, and what we seem unable to stop calling "race" despite the term’s horrifying baggage and unscientific pallor, is unsparing. It does no one any flattering favors to be seen in a searchlight’s beam. What Author Stewart set out to accomplish, so it seemed to me, was to make the cost of Othering...to the Othered as well as those who do the othering...personally real. Memoir only accomplishes that when it is honest and not self-serving. <br />
<br />
The honesty about his sexual nature is both refreshing and difficult to read. The author’s Blackness was a lure and a weapon in his sexual arsenal. He details his encounters with white men who fetishized his skin color and their perceptions of who and what that meant he was. He does not fail to address the reciprocal fetishization, and honestly, so it did not come across in the reading as a scolding or a condemnation. His great anxitey about being perceived by others as effeminate, which is perceived as unforgivable in hypermasculinized Black culture, informs his sexual behavior. Being penetrated is the Ultimate Awful Sin against masculinity in US culture in general. Being penetrated by white men is the Ultimate Taboo for Black gay men. So, of course, what could possibly be more thrilling and desirable?<br />
<br />
It should be to no one’s pearl-clutching amazement that young Darius Stewart found himself in the demimonde of social and sexual transgressors; and that he began to address the pain and self-image issues of being Other among those culturally Othered with self-medication aka drug and alcohol abuse. As is so often the case, this came with the risky sexual behavior that, in the 1990s, was almost certain to result in HIV infection. It does for Author Stewart, and while he is of the generation where HIV infection is a treatable, manageable condition and not a death sentence, it still had..and has...consequences that are unpleasant to cope with.<br />
<br />
No part of Author Stewart’s journey was spared in his remembering eyes. He is unflinching in telling us how horrified he was to realize his undeniable gayness would not go away no matter how hard his childhood self prayed for it to. He could not pass as straight no matter how hard his teen self tried to. He was always, irreducibly, himself.<br />
<br />
It takes a long time for that realization to become okay. More especially when even the Others your skin color places you among then Other you for your essential self, and heap hatred and abuse on you for this other Othering. It feels like no small miracle that Author Stewart chose to survive instead of taking the high-speed exit of suicide.<br />
<br />
A deep self-reckoning like this book is, is a rare reading pleasure. I encourage all y’all not to miss this one.<br />Richardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15481936090455797869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3916134868516639921.post-85960400999793979902024-02-02T06:29:00.254-05:002024-02-02T06:29:00.139-05:00THE CANCER FACTORY: Industrial Chemicals, Corporate Deception, and the Hidden Deaths of American Workers<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRkDsknuQ8NtjDizZ-V5FYgLVO-_VwQ-9Knf5uacQNEBzjC-brL-7qusg6xxUqVjK4KFM_QnWrSh3iHSKTQ5vPlZRyaLGjfnP6GOJl7LQ0jDFMK5WVADt469HTdC-FAD5t4s0F6dLoLvzHNeEBK42jMFszgs4ba7QkzxEpnjja6MBEFTSKrB6c_5PoF8aD/s400/cancer%20factory%20morris.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; clear: right; float: right;"><img alt="" border="0" height="320" data-original-height="400" data-original-width="267" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRkDsknuQ8NtjDizZ-V5FYgLVO-_VwQ-9Knf5uacQNEBzjC-brL-7qusg6xxUqVjK4KFM_QnWrSh3iHSKTQ5vPlZRyaLGjfnP6GOJl7LQ0jDFMK5WVADt469HTdC-FAD5t4s0F6dLoLvzHNeEBK42jMFszgs4ba7QkzxEpnjja6MBEFTSKrB6c_5PoF8aD/s320/cancer%20factory%20morris.jpg"/></a></div><br />
<br />
<b>THE CANCER FACTORY: Industrial Chemicals, Corporate Deception, and the Hidden Deaths of American Workers<br />
JIM MORRIS</b><br />
<a href="https://www.beacon.org/The-Cancer-Factory-P1977.aspx" target="_blank">Beacon Press</a><br />
$29.95 hardcover, available now<br />
<br />
Rating: 5* of five<br />
<br />
<b>The Publisher Says: The story of a group of Goodyear Tire and Rubber workers fatally exposed to toxic chemicals, the lawyer who sought justice on their behalf, and the shameful lack of protection our society affords all workers</b>
<br />
<br />
Working at the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company chemical plant in Niagara Falls, New York, was considered a good job. It was the kind of industrial manufacturing job that allowed blue-collar workers to thrive in the latter half of the 20th century—that allowed them to buy their own home, and maybe a boat for the lake.<br />
<br />
But it was also the kind of job that gave you bladder cancer.<br />
<br />
<i>The Cancer Factory</i> tells the story of the workers who experienced one of the nation's worst, and best-documented, outbreaks of work-related cancer, and the lawyer who has represented the bladder-cancer victims at the plant for more than thirty years, as well as the retired workers who have been diagnosed with the disease and live in constant fear of its recurrence.<br />
<br />
In doing so it tells a story of corporate malfeasance and governmental neglect. Workers have only weak protections from exposure to toxic substances in America, and regulatory breaches contribute to an estimated 95,000 deaths from occupational illness each year. Goodyear, and its chemical supplier, Dupont, knew that two of the chemicals used in the plant had been shown to cause cancer, but made little effort to protect the plant's workers until the cluster of bladder cancer cases—and deaths—was undeniable. Based on four decades of reporting and delving deeply into the scientific literature about toxic substances and health risks, the arcana of worker regulations, and reality of loose enforcement, <i>The Cancer Factory</i> exposes the sometimes deadly risks too many workers face.<br />
<br />
<b>I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.<br />
<br />
My Review</b>: The problems of a corporatized economy are multitudinous. One of the biggest is the existence of actual, unkillable zombies: the artificial persons we call corporations. The existence of corporations is not, by itself, evil or even provocative of evil. What happens, though, when one endows a legal fiction with personhood without accountability or mortality is that it never develops morality or empathy.<br />
<br />
No entity that could look at the actual people whose lives were ruined, or ended, by the awfulness that is bladder cancer, know that the actions to prevent others from suffering like fates were within its power to enact, and not do it because it might hurt profits, has any business whatsover being given "rights" to free speech or anything else. But that is what the legal fiction of corporate personhood does. The managers and legal eagles who fought the enactment of even the most minimal safety regulations are actual people and can be held accountable. The corporation is the source of the culture that encouraged these people not to see the suffering of actual human beings as a reality to be valued as highly as they saw more money...money they would share in minimally, if at all. They, in their fiduciary duty to the corporation, did not see human life as more worthy of protection and duty of care than corporate profits, and as these corporations are not real people but only fictions, this is utterly outside any system of moral accountability.<br />
<br />
Fines, sanctions, no kind of economic penalty can train a corporation not to see its eternal quest for MORE as evil and as detrimental to the world as it is, because it is a gestalt, a culture, not a human being. The human beings who make up the corporations' staff and management can all, plausibly, point to the fact they are just following orders.<br />
<br />
So was <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_Eichmann" target="_blank">Adolf Eichmann</a>.<br />
<br />
This book, using decades of reporting, writing, and reasearch of the author's own and also from many sources, makes the case for abolishing corporate personhood indirectly and compellingly by bringing to life the consequences of profits before people in a dangerous, necessary business through personal stories of its victims. There are no innocents here...people needed jobs and ignored the evident consequences to get the paychecks. The problem isn't one way only. The problem is the widely pervasive mindset that enables such oblivious, unchecked greed to flourish.<br />
<br />
But what about the law, the regulations that exist to protect the people who handle dangerous chemicals? Yes, indeed...what about them. First, does the substance meet the standards to have a regulation in place to restrict who can handle it and how they can do it? The steps needed to prove that exact regulation is needed must take place in specific ways and have specific thresholds of evidence met for regulations to be drafted at all...that involves both the maker and the user of the substance, who have entire law firms lying, obfuscating, paying off whoever needs paying off to prevent the regulations from taking place for as long as it can be avoided while more profits are stockpiled. Then there are the regulators...subject to bought-and-paid-for politicians' oversight, aka interference, delaying and derailing as much as possible while more profits are stockpiled. More lives lost, more havoc rained on the workers, who don't leave their jobs desite the evident hazards because they need the paychecks, even though evidence mounts that the jobs are killing them...literally. All while more profits are stockpiled.<br />
<br />
So a regulation finally, grudgingly, attenuatedly takes effect. Who enforces it? The corporation, and this obvious conflict of interest is lightly supervised by a staff of very very overstretched regulatory enforcers usually drawn from the regulated industry...as often as not from the violator corporation. All of whom answer to the corrupted-by-corporate-money politicians and their appointees.<br />
<br />
Does the magnitude of the problem begin to dawn on you?<br />
<br />
This book does what I can't do in a review. It marshals sources and resources for you to look at the facts and make your own judgments about the nature of the corporate entities, as they present themselves in relation to workers they can no longer deny harming. It's been established in courts of several levels of jurisdiction. The journalists, activists, and the lawyers who worked with the victims to get them justice and compensation for the abusive practices used by their employers are much to be lauded. They are not, however, teaching a human being by imposing consequences on them. They are inconveniencing entities that are without minds or consciences in their profit-taking, and in their one effectively attackable weak spot: public reputation.<br />
<br />
Bad reputation is the one way to punish the entities who remorselessly, repeatedly, and knowingly enact all the harms detailed in this book. They have used giant, costly media campaigns...that you pay for with higher prices...to distract and misinform you as they move the plants that cause this havoc to powerless minority communities, or countries that have even less regard than the US for their peoples' health.<br />
<br />
If there is a solution to this problem, I do not know of it.<br />Richardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15481936090455797869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3916134868516639921.post-55416412317417376962024-02-01T05:17:00.228-05:002024-02-01T05:17:00.137-05:00HOW WE NAMED THE STARS, sweet first novel about first love<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiXxbKYQ2Y6xyNJ_DclTQlaEmIlK5D1-_s9wcbsBpDODcbT47bnE-TaP25GgIDMqMF7eyzcFGZKmjL7VXOL1MM4GLWyHE8Imfasv2hO5zeV9Rh50rnvaizly7uQ5z9TKKPdXsD-se9L0mEtm9k4K4383OHNWBWgElTMewZvXjVXHsHu-KFicNF0g6qBTn22/s1200/named%20the%20stars%20ordorica.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; clear: left; float: left;"><img alt="" border="0" height="320" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="776" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiXxbKYQ2Y6xyNJ_DclTQlaEmIlK5D1-_s9wcbsBpDODcbT47bnE-TaP25GgIDMqMF7eyzcFGZKmjL7VXOL1MM4GLWyHE8Imfasv2hO5zeV9Rh50rnvaizly7uQ5z9TKKPdXsD-se9L0mEtm9k4K4383OHNWBWgElTMewZvXjVXHsHu-KFicNF0g6qBTn22/s320/named%20the%20stars%20ordorica.jpg"/></a></div><br />
<br />
<b>HOW WE NAMED THE STARS<br />
ANDRÉS ORDORICA</b><br />
<a href="https://tinhouse.com/book/how-we-named-the-stars/" target="_blank">Tin House</a><br />
$17.95 trade paper, available now<br />
<br />
Rating: 3.75* of five<br />
<br />
<b>The Publisher Says: Set between the United States and México, Andrés N. Ordorica’s debut novel is a tender and lyrical exploration of belonging, grief, and first love―a love story for those so often written off the page.</b><br />
<br />
When Daniel de La Luna arrives as a scholarship student at an elite East Coast university, he bears the weight of his family’s hopes and dreams, and the burden of sharing his late uncle’s name. Daniel flounders at first―but then Sam, his roommate, changes everything. As their relationship evolves from brotherly banter to something more intimate, Daniel soon finds himself in love with a man who helps him see himself in a new light.<br />
<br />
But just as their relationship takes flight, Daniel is pulled away, first by Sam’s hesitation and then by a brutal turn of events that changes Daniel’s life forever. As he grapples with profound loss, Daniel finds himself in his family’s ancestral homeland in México for the summer, finding joy in this setting even as he struggles to come to terms with what’s happened and faces a host of new <br />
<br />
How does the person he is connect with this place his family comes from? How is his own story connected to his late uncle’s? And how might he reconcile the many parts of himself as he learns to move forward? Equal parts tender and triumphant, Andrés N. Ordorica’s <i>How We Named the Stars</i> is a debut novel of love, heartache, redemption, and learning to honor the dead; a story of finding the strength to figure out who you are―and who you could be―if only the world would let you.<br />
<br />
<b>I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.<br />
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My Review</b>: Books about first love are, I think we can all agree, among the most relatable stories there are. Everyone not a sociopath has had a First Love. We can all recall the feelings, the sensations, the sheer exhilaration of falling in love for the first time, and I suspect most of us not sociopaths also recall the returned love from the one we just fell in love with, even if not the first time. So, when choosing a story to tell, a debut novelist really starts out on a higher slope if they choose first...and for added charm forbidden...love.<br />
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What a shame I was not utterly ensorcelled by this iteration of the story.<br />
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I suspect some of this is due to the author's use of the character's journal as a narrative frame. This necessitates alternating first- and second-person narratives, sometimes in the same sentence; I assume this was an attempt to create a sense of immediacy unavailable in third-person omniscient narration. What happened instead was a sense of muddledness, a lack of clear character-building through different, or just differentiated, voices. The result was that I felt like this was an audiobook. Someone reading to me, unless I am in love with him, makes me utterly fuddled, and sends me into a defensive coma. It took me two weeks to read this not-very-long book.<br />
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My last critical comments are about the use of description: I am a lot less interested in rocks than the author appears to be. Is the color green talismanic for some reason? Why? If I am not given a hook to hang my response on, all it does, when a motif is repeated like the use of green is here, is start feeling like I am missing something. That is never a good thing.<br />
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So, for the sin of writing a first novel without some very firm editorial guidance, I docked stars. But that said, there are things I loved about this tale. I was particularly pleased that Spanish appeared throughout the read. The chapter titles being in Spanish when Daniel is in Mexico was a lovely touch, and offered me a distinctively culture-specific frame for those chapters. Daniel feeling his way through the bewildering maze of the US culture, through the school's culture, and through his forbidden love for another man, was absolutely terrific. It was, at times, unfocused due to the issues I mentioned above, but never so much so that I was unaware that Daniel...and Sam...were enmeshed in their emotional growth into love. Self-love, as always, has to precede lasting love for others. That is the universal agony of first gay loves, I fear.<br />
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Speaking of which...Sam being seen in all his waffling glory only through Daniel's eyes was, at first, odd...back the narrative framework issue...but ended up feeling so exactly like the first-love malaise that I quickly began to warm to it. First love is, of necessity, solipsistic. We can never really get out of that self-referential stage of being in love with love until, and unless, we go all the way through it. Daniel going home to stay with his abuelo and delve into his namesake uncle's life and times was a really suitable way to guide him through the thicket of his self-absorption. His emotional flowering struck me as both truthful and effective...I believed it, and I believed he was changed in the ways shown, by the discoveries he made.<br />
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While I am on the subject, I feel the necessity to address a critique of the author's handling of societal homophobia that I have seen brought up several times. It can seem as though the inevitable experience of others’ hateful judgments of himself and of Sam were lightly brushed off. I did not read them this way. As the novel is framed as a journal, the lack of sustained responses to and obsessions with homopohbia struck me as Daniel having, developing, and imparting to the more-affected Sam, a sense of homophobia being an external not internal problem...something imposed from outside. That is exactly how I think homophobia *should* be perceived. It is only a problem for one when one is interacting with the homohobes. That is a major positive in my opinion of the read because it shows the need to decenter the hate.<br />
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A mixed reading experience, one with major positives and a bunch of small negatives. A first novel, I hope not an only novel, from a man whose emotional journey is, quite clearly, only beginning, and which I am glad I can share. <br />Richardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15481936090455797869noreply@blogger.com0