JANUARY 6TH: 24 HOURS AT THE CAPITOL: An Oral History of the January 6th Insurrection; THE CONSPIRACISTS: Women, Extremism, and the Lure of Belonging

24 HOURS AT THE CAPITOL: An Oral History of the January 6th Insurrection
NORA NEUS
Beacon Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: The 24 Hours in Charlottesville author offers a minute-by-minute account of the January 6 riots through the never-before-heard stories of those who were there Neus’s progressive lens goes beyond mainstream reporting to reveal important truths about racial justice and the US white nationalist movement

Drawing on the collaboration and support of Tim Heaphy, chief investigator of the U.S. Congress’s January 6 Select Committee; on exclusive access to the United States Capitol Historical Society’s oral history project on the insurrection; and on her personal contacts on the Hill, Nora Neus reconstructs what it was actually like in and around the Capitol during those 24 hours. Her narrators include high-profile politicians and maintenance workers, Capitol Hill residents and White House photographers, police officers who defended the building and insurrectionists who have since disavowed their actions.

Police officers recall the insurrectionists screaming at them and calling them traitors. Staffers remember “walking over pools of blood” as they ran for their lives. A young Asian-American staffer recalls locking herself in a room just feet from the rioters, mentally preparing to be raped. A mostly Black janitorial staff began cleaning the blood of insurrectionists off the marble floor on the Capitol before the building was even officially secured.

January 6 was a well-planned attack coordinated largely right out in the open, the threat of which lawmakers and government officials underestimated in part because it was coming from white people. Neus will examine the underlying racial implications of not only the attack itself, but also in the planning and coordination of the response.

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My Review: A deeply, deeply disturbing book about a searing and fateful moment in US history. No one wants to think about it this way but I'll say it openly: J6 was the Fort Sumter of the white supremacist rebellion. It's approaching a new inflection point with midterms threatening to expose the lies that undergirded felonious yam's 2024 election. We can expect more violence, and with a better prepared kakistocracy in place.

You're a citizen. If you're not, you still have a stake in what happens in the country that holds the planet's future habitability in it silos and missiles. Inform youself so you will know what to pressure your government officials to oppose, prevent if possible, and agitate for serious effort to neutralize.

It was, and is, possible for angry white men to plan and execute a coup attempt and get away with it because unexamined privilege, unacknowledged dominance, is finally being challenged. At this moment, the allies at the top are fumbling issues important to the aptly-named "base" so there is a window of opportunity we can not afford to bungle our handling of.

I encourage you, since you were not there on the grounds of the United States Capitol building on the sixth of January in 2021, to read these first-hand accounts from those who were. Calling this event a riot is inaccurate, diminishing both the intent of the perpetrators and the severity of the impact of their actions. Read about the planning...took place in the open, remember...the execution of this failed Putsch, the actions of the traitors. The awful things done, the horrifying behavior.

Now realize the sitting president, in his last Constitutionally sanctioned term, has issued many pardons for these men.

Do not assume the midterm elections will proceed as usual. Sound the alarm in your community for poll-watchers to be defended...and defended against. Do not sit it out because you're tired, because you don't think "They" would dare to do that.

Did you imagine "They" would dare stage a coup attempt? Because "They" did.

Openly. Without consequences.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

THE CONSPIRACISTS: Women, Extremism, and the Lure of Belonging
NOELLE COOK
Broadleaf Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$28.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: How do ordinary women become extremists?

Leafing through photos from the January 6 insurrection, extremist researcher Noelle Cook was struck by how many women looked like her: middle-aged white women in puffy coats. Women were not on the fringes of the extreme right, she realized. They were radicalizing each other, and the pandemic was changing them. So who were the women of J6? And why did some of them believe in shape-shifting reptilians and the health benefits of colloidal silver?

This is the world scholars call conspirituality, in which New Age religion, online wellness culture, and extremism blend and become laced with antisemitic and racist theories. With acute attention to the emotional lives of women and research on conspiracism, Cook introduces us to Tammy, who believed storming the Capitol would help take down a global cabal of pedophiles. We also meet Yvonne, convinced she is a starseed destined to lead others into the fifth dimension. We visit a trade show where vendors hawk everything from quantum healing devices to government cover-ups, and trace the movement's roots to a nineteenth-century mystical philosophy.

With arresting detail, The Conspiracists draws us into the lives of conspiratorial women to explore how and why women are becoming radicalized. Women are crafting entire worlds, Cook argues, and we ignore these worlds at our own peril. As misinformation spreads and extremism intensifies, The Conspiracists does not seek to excuse women's conspiracism but rather to understand it. Otherwise, we have no hope of countering its force.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: I am quite openly an atheist. In a world where how you pray and to whom can get you murdered, that is not the safe option.

One of the most powerful repulsive forces in my eyes against all religions, everywhere and of every stripe, is that this book's subjects are not unique to any one tradition...apart from the socially acceptable psychotic break that is labeled religion.

That statement will offend many. I've had a psychotic break recently, a reaction known to occur to people who take Levaquin (albeit very, very few of them, lucky me) as I did for pneumonia, so I speak from my own experience: If inanimate/invisible things are speaking to you, are counseling you about Reality, are imbued with consciousness or intelligence or both, you are experiencing a psychotic break...not a divine visitation or revelatory vision.

I'd treat the women profiled in these pages with the care and concern I received during my own psychotic break, gently attempting to lead them back to consensus reality. It's not always effective but it's worth trying. In profiling these women, Author Cook is not demeaning them, not saying (as I have) they are experiencing a mental-health crisis, not presenting value judgments outright...again, like I have done. She traces the women's sense of being abandoned, unconsidered, as they travel further and further into what most of us see as conspiracy-theory aberrations. It is a truth we as a society do not want to face head-on that huge swaths of our population are in the grips of this factually supported idea of themselves as abandoned, hard done by. In the face of that existential crisis what else is there to do but reach for some explanation, some reason? They already know there is no justification or excuse for their situation. There must be a "why," because there always is.

It's facing up to the vile, selfish cause of the nightmarish cruelty enacted on them that makes conspiracy theories so appealing and so successful. As these ordinary women's descent (as I see it) into aberrant thinking and acceptance of "alternative facts" demonstrates, the need to have a "why" is the most powerful inducement of conspiracies and delusions...of all sorts, in all times.

The absence of trust in what I see as trustworthy authority structures, eg science, has been carefully cultivated for more than a generation. (You can look up the research on your own.) It's led many people into a more general mistrust of what was once mainstream information economies that we relied on to build our consensus about the polity we live in. That vacuum, as the women profiled demonstrate in their adherence to beliefs not demonstrably truthful, is filled by the Othered communities they've chosen to fill the void. In those Othered communities there is stability, there is fellowship, there is belonging and validation the unempathetic outsiders do not offer.

I certainly don't offer empathy and understanding to people who believe they're messiahs, or that there are lizard people secretly controlling the world. Scorn and contumely by the dumpsterload, yes; understanding and empathy, not a smidgin. Hence my need to engage with this book: being Right is being part of the problem that's led to these fractures developing during the time of immense societal stress we're experiencing. In a quest not to unknowingly respond to others' delusional thinking, as I see it, with behaviors that will only worsen the problem I've identified, I seek my usual trusted source of advice: Experts who share my vision of the world more than they don't.

January 6th looms. It is a midterm election year, and there is widespread opposition to the current regime. A foreign war has been launched.

The omens do not portend a smooth course ahead. Conspiracists, you aunties, cousins, and grandmas, are likely going to support a radical alteration of the country's governance...despite the signs pointing to that course leading to repression and violence and immiseration. Beliefs that "They" are the ones who will suffer and be punished for "Their" misdeeds, that this horror will lead into a glorious Golden Age of Truth and Rewards for those who believed, are going to be dashed...are being dashed by the entire Epstein files debacle. Marjorie Taylor Greene, with whom I share nothing except the Constitutionally-guaranteed right to trial by a jury of my peers, has admitted she was wrong to hold her conspiracist beliefs.

It's a process we cannot hasten and widen in scope without understanding its roots. That was the point of Author Cook writing this book. Stand ready to escort the conspiracists back into consensus reality by learning how and why they left it.

BEWARE..."BE AWARE"...OF SOCIAL MEDIA'S EFFECTS ON YOU & OTHERS: THE TWITTERING MACHINE, leftist thinker's assessment & ESCAPING THE RABBIT HOLE, what to do about it,

ESCAPING THE RABBIT HOLE: How to Debunk Conspiracy Theories Using Facts, Logic, and Respect
MICK WEST
Skyhorse Publishing
$18.99 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: The Earth is flat, the World Trade Center collapse was a controlled demolition, planes are spraying poison to control the weather, and actors faked the Sandy Hook massacre….

All these claims are bunk: falsehoods, mistakes, and in some cases, outright lies. But many people passionately believe one or more of these conspiracy theories. They consume countless books and videos, join like-minded online communities, try to convert those around them, and even, on occasion, alienate their own friends and family. Why is this, and how can you help people, especially those closest to you, break free from the downward spiral of conspiracy thinking?

In Escaping the Rabbit Hole, author Mick West shares over a decade’s worth of knowledge and experience investigating and debunking false conspiracy theories through his forum, MetaBunk.org, and sets forth a practical guide to helping friends and loved ones recognize these theories for what they really are.

Perhaps counter-intuitively, the most successful approaches to helping individuals escape a rabbit hole aren’t comprised of simply explaining why they are wrong; rather, West’s tried-and-tested approach emphasizes clear communication based on mutual respect, honesty, openness, and patience.

West puts his debunking techniques and best practices to the test with four of the most popular false conspiracy theories today (Chemtrails, 9/11 Controlled Demolition, False Flags, and Flat Earth) — providing road maps to help you to understand your friend and help them escape the rabbit hole. These are accompanied by real-life case studies of individuals who, with help, were able to break free from conspiracism.

With sections on:

the wide spectrum of conspiracy theories

avoiding the “shill” label

psychological factors and other complications

(and concluding with) a look at the future of debunking

Mick West has put forth a conclusive, well-researched, practical reference on why people fall down the conspiracy theory rabbit hole and how you can help them escape.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Okay, I thought as I read The Twittering Machine, I've got the stakes clear in my head and I know where I fall in relation to the problem of social media's misuses by conspiracists. Now what?

The reason I love social media, in a nutshell, is: This book's existence would never have made it to my attention without social media, specifically bookish social media eg, LibraryThing, Goodreads, and Edelweiss+. I am clear enough on the issues created that I saw immediately how useful this book's message and techniques would be to me. This leads me to a confession: I am very much in need of help figuring out how to speak to conspiracists respectfully, or even just politely. My contempt and derision for and of them is part of what entrenches their adherence to these beliefs. How better to express one's rejection of being rejected than to double down?

Help me Obi-Mick West, you're my only hope, I thought as I began this read. My prayers were answered with a "sure, no sweat there, Grasshopper." (Have I used enough ancient-history media references to make my age obvious? I got more if you want 'em.) Author West is clearly in the business of debunking for a considerable span (see his amazing site Metabunk.org). He's lauded by the publishers of Skeptic and Skeptical Inquirer magazines, as well as producers of The David Pakman Show, The Skeptic Zone, and even The Joe Rogan Experience. He is, in short, in command of his material.

It’s also tempting to simply label conspiracy theories as either "mainstream" or "fringe." Journalist Paul Musgrave referenced this dichotomy when he wrote in the Washington Post: Less than two months into the administration, the danger is no longer that Trump will make conspiracy thinking mainstream. That has already come to pass. Musgrave obviously does not mean that shape-shifting lizard overlords have become mainstream. Nor does he mean that Flat Earth, Chemtrails, or even 9/ 11 Truth are mainstream. What he’s really talking about is a fairly small shift in a dividing line on the conspiracy spectrum. Most fringe conspiracy theories remain fringe, most mainstream theories remain mainstream. But, Musgrave argues, there’s been a shift that’s allowed the bottom part of the fringe to enter into the mainstream.

Finding someone else's words to make your central argument for you requires deep involvement in and command of the landscape you're describing. And describing the landscape is the first part of the task of teaching others what you know. An equally urgent need is to show the potential future debunkers what the stakes are, simply, directly, and convincingly:

These false conspiracy theories are a problem. They hurt individuals by affecting their life choices, in terms of money, health, and social interactions. They hurt society by distracting from the very real problems of corruption and decreasing citizens’ genuine participation in democracy.

–and–

Helping a friend break free from the spiral of conspiracism is not easy and it will take time. No matter how politely you do it you are still challenging some fundamental aspects of their identity. They will push back, and they may fight you. But it is an immensely valuable thing that you are doing for them. Freeing their minds from the burden of conspiracy theories and letting them see and participate in the world more as it really is. Do not give up. The stories in this book prove that people do get out with help.

What he does in the text that follows is provide simple and easily absorbed ways to get your embroiled friend or loved one to engage with you on their chosen "alternative facts" so you can get past the initial resistance that is inevitable. Anyone who seeks out alternative facts is already feeling lost, or powerless, or just fed up. The rabbit holes they fall down are coping mechanisms and become, like any group identification, part of their identity and sense of self and purpose in the world.

This is something literally all of us seek. Some choose religious affiliations to build social networks through; others politics; still others identity issues. All of us, without exception, build identities. It is here that Author West does something I very badly needed done: He states that conspiracists aren't stupid, as a rule, but simply lack a wide array of "relevant information sources." It can be fatal to anyone's objective thinking to limit the sources of information one consults...it reduces the opportunities to compare and contrast the sources' sources, so to speak. Do I trust Fox News? Not to tell me the truth; but I still engage with it, in a limited fashion, to learn what will be floating past my deck chair as the great liner United States sinks.

Where I got to after reading this book was someplace I really wanted to get: Accepting that, while I am sure there are conspiracies out there in the world, there are no reasons to accept conspiracies as the one true explanation for the events of the day. I think that belief, here reinforced, is the solid rock to stand on when speaking to people who aren't moored in consensus reality. It's a lot harder for me personally to engage with the people involved deeply in some of the conspiracy theories politely. That being a personal issue, rooted in my own mishegas, I didn't expect Author West's book to help me address it as much as it did.

Most people can escape the rabbit hole of conspiracy thinking because most people who get stuck down there are ordinary people like you and me. They are not, as a rule, any more or less crazy than the general population. People don't get sucked into conspiracy theories because they are mentally ill or deficient, they get sucked in because they watched some videos at a point in their lives when those videos resonated. They stay down there because they lack exposure to other information sources. They lack relevant facts, they lack context, and they lack perspectives on, and other ways of thinking about, the issues. These are all resources you can bring to them. The most effective way to bring that information to your friend is with honesty and with respect. Mocking and harsh criticism do not work because people push back when they feel threatened. Even if you feel their position is ludicrous, respectful disagreement works better than derision.

Simple. Actionable. Applicable to me, on a personal level. Maybe it can give you the support you need in resisting the encroachment of this dangerously misguided thinking deeper into the Body Politic of a threatened democracy.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

THE TWITTERING MACHINE
RICHARD SEYMOUR
Verso Books
$26.95 hardcover, available in the US and Canada only now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A brilliant probe into the political and psychological effects of our changing relationship with social media

Former social media executives tell us that the system is an addiction-machine. We are users, waiting for our next hit as we like, comment and share. We write to the machine as individuals, but it responds by aggregating our fantasies, desires and frailties into data, and returning them to us as a commodity experience.

The Twittering Machine is an unflinching view into the calamities of digital life: the circus of online trolling, flourishing alt-right subcultures, pervasive corporate surveillance, and the virtual data mines of Facebook and Google where we spend considerable portions of our free time. In this polemical tour de force, Richard Seymour shows how the digital world is changing the ways we speak, write, and think.

Through journalism, psychoanalytic reflection and insights from users, developers, security experts and others, Seymour probes the human side of the machine, asking what we’re getting out of it, and what we’re getting into. Social media held out the promise that we could make our own history–to what extent did we choose the nightmare that it has become?

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My Review: The author, a trenchant leftist social and political analyst, refers in his choice of title for this book to artist Paul Klee's watercolor painting, "Twittering Machine," from 1922:

Art critics have deeply divided opinions and interpretations of this small MoMA-owned piece of paper infused with artistic imagination, ink, watercolor paint, and gouache. Biomechanical pastoral, oppressive and unnerving enslavement of nature to the machine, triumphant use of machine for nature's purposes...it's not clear to anyone (except the Nazis who labeled it "degenerate art") what we should make of this cool-blue musically evocative strangeness.

In many ways, Author Seymour couldn't have chosen a better image to hang his leftist social analysis of social media on. The facts of modern social life are such that we're enmeshed in the internet to a greater degree than even when he was working on this book, or even when the publisher brought it out in September 2020...the middle of the crisis times of COVID-19's ongoing plague. I literally can not interact with the bureaucracies that control my life without internet access. My assisted-living facility has always provided wi-fi access and a bank of desktop computers...recently they've upgraded our wi-fi to better serve an increasingly online population of elders. This is the best time to think about the issues surrounding social media's impact on the societal world we all, regardless of age or level of active participation, live in.

If the social industry is an addiction machine, the addictive behaviour it is closest to is gambling: a rigged lottery. Every gambler trusts in a few abstract symbols—the dots on a dice, numerals, suits, red or black, the graphemes on a fruit machine—to tell them who they are. In most cases, the answer is brutal and swift: you are a loser and you are going home with nothing. The true gambler takes a perverse joy in anteing up, putting their whole being at stake. On social media, you scratch out a few words, a few symbols, and press ‘send’, rolling the dice. The internet will tell you who you are, and what your destiny is through arithmetic ‘likes’, ‘shares’ and ‘comments’.

It is this weird truth that dictates our modern media landscape. It is a symptom and a cause, simultaneously. Gamblers don't gamble because gambling is available, they gamble because they must. Addicts aren't getting high, in whatever way they do so, because the means to do it exist; they do it because they must.

The Twittering Machine may be a horror story, but it is one that involves all of us as users. We are part of the machine, and we find our satisfactions in it, however destructive they may be. And this horror story is only possible in a society that is busily producing horrors. We are only up for addiction to mood-altering devices because our emotions seem to need managing, if not bludgeoning by relentless stimulus. We are only happy to drop into the dead-zone trance because of whatever is disappointing in the world of the living. Twitter toxicity is only endurable because it seems less worse than the alternatives. "No addiction," as Francis Spufford has written, "is ever explained by examining the drug. The drug didn’t cause the need. A tour of a brewery won’t explain why somebody became an alcoholic."

What this book does, and does well, is present the case that the social media landscape, while it requires social media to exist, doesn't exist in a vacuum but in an economic system that needs growth of use and therefore numbers of users to make its owners as powerful as they desire to be. The platforms offer us a digital space that enables connection and rewards separation from all but those we most want to be like.

Yet, we are not Skinner's rats. Even Skinner's rats were not Skinner's rats: the patterns of addictive behavior displayed by rats in the Skinner Box were only displayed by rats in isolation, outside of their normal sociable habitat. For human beings, addictions have subjective meanings, as does depression. Marcus Gilroy-Ware's study of social media suggests that what we encounter in our feeds is hedonic stimulation, various moods and sources of arousal—from outrage porn to food porn to porn—which enable us to manage our emotions. In addition that, however, it's also true that we can become attached to the miseries of online life, a state of perpetual outrage and antagonism.

What I enjoyed about this read was the sense that, in detaching his analysis from blaming Social Media™ and attaching it to the capitalist profit-motive driven mindset, he validated my sense that it's all, au fond, about greed...theirs for money and power, ours for meaning and purpose. The result is, as Elon Musk tweeted after his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter was completed last week, a situation in which a capitalist says that Twitter "...cannot become a free-for-all hellscape." I quibble with "become" in that sentence:

...if we get hooked on a machine that purports to tell us, among other things, how other people see us—or a version of ourselves, a delegated online image—that suggests something has already gone wrong in our relationships with others. The global rise in depression—currently the world's most widespread illness, having risen some 18 per cent since 2005—is worsened for many people by the social industry. There is a particularly strong correlation between depression and the use of Instagram among young people. But social industry platforms didn't invent depression; they exploited it. And to loosen their grip, one would have to explore what has gone wrong elsewhere.

How this Brave New Twitter will cope with the simultaneous free-speech absolutism of Musk, the capitalist need to growgrowgrow, and the social need to reduce harm to the people who make up the ailing Body Politic will be a fascinating collision to watch. Armor yourselves against the smaller pieces of social-fabric shrapnel with the wise words of a man of principle, intellectual clarity, and a powerful communication style.

I'll leave the last words to Author Seymour at his most openly anti-capitalist (thereby closest to my heart):

The internet's history also shows us that when we rely on the private sector and its hallowed bromide of 'innovation,' quite often that will result in technical innovations that are designed for manipulation, surveillance and exploitation.

The tax-evading, offshore wealth-hoarding, data-monopolizing, privacy-invading silicon giants benefit from the internet's 'free market' mythology, but the brief flourishing of Minitel shows is that other ways, other worlds, other platforms, are possible. The question is, given that there's no way to reverse history, how can we actualize these possibilities? What sort of power do we have? As users, it turns out, very little. We are not voters on the platforms; we are not even customers. We are the unpaid products of raw material. We could, if we were organized, withdraw our labor power, commit social media suicide: but then what other platforms do we have access to with anything like the same reach?

RABBITS, truly trippy and not for everyone...but if it's for you, you'll eat it up with a spoon

RABBITS
TERRY MILES
Del Rey Books
$17.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Conspiracies abound in this surreal and yet all-too-real technothriller in which a deadly underground alternate reality game might just be altering reality itself, set in the same world as the popular Rabbits podcast.

It's an average work day. You've been wrapped up in a task, and you check the clock when you come up for air—4:44 pm. You go to check your email, and 44 unread messages have built up. With a shock, you realize it is April 4th—4/4. And when you get in your car to drive home, your odometer reads 44,444. Coincidence? Or have you just seen the edge of a rabbit hole?

Rabbits is a mysterious alternate reality game so vast it uses our global reality as its canvas. Since the game first started in 1959, ten iterations have appeared and nine winners have been declared. Their identities are unknown. So is their reward, which is whispered to be NSA or CIA recruitment, vast wealth, immortality, or perhaps even the key to unlocking the secrets of the universe itself. But the deeper you get, the more deadly the game becomes. Players have died in the past—and the body count is rising.

And now the eleventh round is about to begin. Enter K—a Rabbits obsessive who has been trying to find a way into the game for years. That path opens when K is approached by billionaire Alan Scarpio, the alleged winner of the sixth iteration. Scarpio says that something has gone wrong with the game and that K needs to fix it before Eleven starts or the whole world will pay the price.

Five days later, Scarpio is declared missing. Two weeks after that, K blows the deadline and Eleven begins. And suddenly, the fate of the entire universe is at stake.

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My Review: There is no possible way to explain the effect of this book to someone who's never dropped acid, consumed ayahuasca, or been down the psilocybin road. If you know, you know; if you don't, quite a lot of what is happening here is simply...weirdness. Which, to be fair, it is; but it is so much more than merely ornamentally weird.

If you're the one who read Ready Player One and thought, "hey, that could be me!" then you're prime meat for the story's more esoteric references. And you'll probably like it even more if you loved The Matrix but less so the sequels. I'm betting that, if you've read The Trial and/or Kafka on the Shore more than once, you'll read this book with relish.

But, crucially, absent a strong desire to seek out and complete patterns in the world, and in your head, the main pleasure of the book will slightly elude you. K (hi, Franz!) who narrates the book to us, isn't gendered. K's girlfriend Chloe is not inclined, under the circumstances of the book, to compliment K on diagnostic body parts. When talking through the extreme weirdness of life inside the rabbit hole of a planet-wide conspiracy with the stakes being your very life, suchlike stuff ain't no big. But in fact, there are little indicators that K is more than a gendered presence, is in fact a Jungian archetype, several in turn by my count. But that's a discovery for the reader to make. I will say this: I liked the hunt for those tells, too.

What worked best for me in the read was that very sense of patterns hanging from the trees, drifting in the air, making explicit shadows on the sidewalk as you're coddiwompling among the words. I enjoy the sensation of being led and misdirected to get to a story that won't take a final shape. I don't know Seattle, I took a serious aversion to it during my 1990s foray there, so a lot of the subtext from the locale was simply lost on me. (Greenness and verdant growth are menacing in two places on Earth: The Pacific Northwest and Ireland.)

There's something very soothing about conspiracy theories. One is assured of being Right: no evidence will ever penetrate the bunker mentality. There's a Reason for the random shit that happens: THEY want it to! And, if it's too random to fit into the pattern, THEY lost a round (which is scary and satisfying) or the computer introduced a new variable. Standing on the edge, looking down, and seeing Something is the only way most people can keep going. (I myownself see nothing, and absolutely vibrate with eagerness to lose myself in it.)

So on so many levels, this isn't a book aimed at me...I'm too old, too cynical, and too disinclined to believe there's a Purpose...but it's told in that densely imagined and deeply felt way that draws me in every time. That there are trappings I could do without, well, that's because they're there for others to enjoy. That there is no rush in Author Miles's unfolding of the story is a net good thing. He could've told the whole megillah in 200pp and had room for the publisher's entire catalog of SF/F titles. But the point of the story would've been violated.

Go on a journey. Listen to the people around you. I don't mean keep your ears open, I mean *listen* as the words come towards you. It takes a lot of practice to get good at listening, but this book is both a good place to practice and a rewarding discovery when you practice the skill here. I expect a lot of readers didn't fare well with the book because it simply doesn't follow ordinary trails to get between the start and the finish. If you're a Neal Stephenson reader, if Cryptonomicon and Reamde delighted you, here's another scratcher for that itch. You're not likely to be disappointed, either, Murakami readers. And best of all, you can get a paperback to take to the beach for Labor Day!