BEHIND THE BEAUTIFUL FOREVERS, a damning indictment of class privilege

BEHIND THE BEAUTIFUL FOREVERS: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity
KATHERINE BOO
Random House
$27.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: four horrfied, repulsed, politically appalled stars of five

The Publisher Says: From Pulitzer Prize-winner Katherine Boo, a landmark work of narrative nonfiction that tells the dramatic and sometimes heartbreaking story of families striving toward a better life in one of the twenty-first century’s great, unequal cities.

In this brilliantly written, fast-paced book, based on three years of uncompromising reporting, a bewildering age of global change and inequality is made human.

Annawadi is a makeshift settlement in the shadow of luxury hotels near the Mumbai airport, and as India starts to prosper, Annawadians are electric with hope. Abdul, a reflective and enterprising Muslim teenager, sees “a fortune beyond counting“ in the recyclable garbage that richer people throw away. Asha, a woman of formidable wit and deep scars from a childhood in rural poverty, has identified an alternate route to the middle class: political corruption. With a little luck, her sensitive, beautiful daughter — Annawadi's "most-everything girl" — will soon become its first female college graduate. And even the poorest Annawadians, like Kalu, a fifteen-year-old scrap-metal thief, believe themselves inching closer to the good lives and good times they call “the full enjoy.”

But then Abdul the garbage sorter is falsely accused in a shocking tragedy; terror and a global recession rock the city; and suppressed tensions over religion, caste, sex, power and economic envy turn brutal. As the tenderest individual hopes intersect with the greatest global truths, the true contours of a competitive age are revealed. And so, too, are the imaginations and courage of the people of Annawadi.

With intelligence, humor, and deep insight into what connects human beings to one another in an era of tumultuous change, Behind the Beautiful Forevers carries the reader headlong into one of the twenty-first century’s hidden worlds, and into the lives of people impossible to forget.

My Review: I'll keep this short since the synopsis above is so long. Boo set out to tell the story of the cost that average Indians are paying for the rapid rise through the capitalist ranks that their country has embarked on. She chose as her lens the small tragedy (in the cosmic scheme of things) of a death (and subsequent court case) in Mumbai's slum called Annawadi.

Really and truly, this is all one needs to know; names, places, details aren't going to make this any easier to pre-process. One is best advised to enter into this book with little information about the events chronicled. It simply cannot be fathomed by those of us with thirty dollars to spend on a book, with access to a free public library, with an education sufficient to read the text, with lives so easy that we possess time to pass, as opposed to needs to meet, what this story will reveal. I will not steal Boo's thunder with a fuller report.

I hate this woman's writing. It feels so chilly and so removed from the subject that I can't believe how much praise this aspect of the text has received. It's the kind of gawdawful New Journalism crapola...get in the middle of the story, get all the juice and dirt, and then spew it back at a faux-objective remove...that I associate with Norman Mailer's terrible Executioner's Song, of unlamented memory.

The story is this generation's 12 Million Black Voices. It deserves so much more than it got from its author. It is, quite simply, necessary reading for free marketeers and libertarians and their misguided, often foolishly optimistic, ilk.

THIS IS WHAT REALLY HAPPENS IN YOUR TERRIBLE, UNFORGIVING, “COMMUNITY STANDARDS” WORLD. Read it. Recognize yourselves in the unseen overclass. Your tax-o-phobic refusal to recognize your duty to your fellow human beings leads directly to this world, its injustices and cruelties, its inhumane and indifferent treatment of the innocent-of-any-crime hoi polloi.

If you don't feel deep and humiliating PERSONAL shame after reading Boo's awful story, I fear you are a sociopath.

THE TRANSPARENT SOCIETY, David Brin's prescient warning about today's reality: NO PRIVACY

THE TRANSPARENT SOCIETY
DAVID BRIN
Basic Books
$11.99 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: �In New York and Baltimore, police cameras scan public areas twenty-four hours a day.
�Huge commercial databases track you finances and sell that information to anyone willing to pay.
�Host sites on the World Wide Web record every page you view, and "smart” toll roads know where you drive.

Every day, new technology nibbles at our privacy.Does that make you nervous? David Brin is worried, but not just about privacy. He fears that society will overreact to these technologies by restricting the flow of information, frantically enforcing a reign of secrecy. Such measures, he warns, won’t really preserve our privacy. Governments, the wealthy, criminals, and the techno-elite will still find ways to watch us.

But we’ll have fewer ways to watch them. We’ll lose the key to a free society: accountability. The Transparent Society is a call for "reciprocal transparency.” If police cameras watch us, shouldn’t we be able to watch police stations? If credit bureaus sell our data, shouldn't we know who buys it? Rather than cling to an illusion of anonymity-a historical anomaly, given our origins in close-knit villages-we should focus on guarding the most important forms of privacy and preserving mutual accountability. The biggest threat to our freedom, Brin warns, is that surveillance technology will be used by too few people, not by too many.

A society of glass houses may seem too fragile. Fearing technology-aided crime, governments seek to restrict online anonymity; fearing technology-aided tyranny, citizens call for encrypting all data. Brin shows how, contrary to both approaches, windows offer us much better protection than walls; after all, the strongest deterrent against snooping has always been the fear of being spotted. Furthermore, Brin argues, Western culture now encourages eccentricity-we’re programmed to rebel! That gives our society a natural protection against error and wrong-doing, like a body’s immune system.

But "social T-cells” need openness to spot trouble and get the word out. The Transparent Society is full of such provocative and far-reaching analysis.The inescapable rush of technology is forcing us to make new choices about how we want to live. This daring book reminds us that an open society is more robust and flexible than one where secrecy reigns. In an era of gnat-sized cameras, universal databases, and clothes-penetrating radar, it will be more vital than ever for us to be able to watch the watchers.

With reciprocal transparency we can detect dangers early and expose wrong-doers. We can gauge the credibility of pundits and politicians. We can share technological advances and news. But all of these benefits depend on the free, two-way flow of information.

My Review: In his blog, Contrary Brin, the author posted a wonderful article called A Transparency Tsunami!, treating the latest advance in malefactor detection--and not coincidentally, social control. It's face recognition technology, using public database images and traffic cameras and surveillance videos from all imaginable public places to build a file of your very own physog. For, of course, your comfort and convenience. After all, you're safer when Big Brother knows where you are, who you're with, what you're getting up to. Right? And, since *you* aren't doing anything wrong, nothing criminal, what's the problem?

Tell that to the cops who come haul you to court for feeding the meter. Tell that to the IRS agent who demands to know where the money for that bracelet you bought at the mall came from when you're behind on your taxes. (And best hope your wife doesn't overhear.) Look (!), they already know what kind of porn you watch via your ISP and even how long it takes you to...get there...since no one watches past the, uh, crisis point. You want them to know you chiseled a Girl Scout out of an extra box of Thin Mints, too?

Brin's point, in this book and in that blog post, is that they know it and they ain't gonna un-know it. He wants our surveillance state, so heartily endorsed by the best Republican president we've had since 1956 by the name of Obama via his reauthorization of the USA-PATRIOT Act, to be looked BACK at: Sousveillance, the only practical protection against surveillance:

The article in the New York Times spirals downward into a list of begged-for impossibilities, never once considering the real issue…which is not how to blind elites (a utopian notion never achieved by any society in history and impossible today, as cameras proliferate faster than Moore's Law.) Rather, the solution is to limit what authorities can do to us with such systems. And to accomplish that, we need only get into the habit of looking back. Of embracing the tech waves and ensuring that no cop, no public official, goes un-recognized, unwatched.

What could be more obvious? To work with tech trends instead of (futilely) against them? But the well-meaning activists, though properly worried, never stretch their minds in a new direction. The only direction that can work.

Contrary Brin 26 September 2013, "Face Recognition Has Arrived...Smile!"
What Brin advocates is NOT LYING STILL, not shutting up or shutting down or shutting out reality, but engaging in the business of being a citizen and calling the Powers That Be to task by doin' unto them others what them others is doin' to you.

I expect that has a familiar ring to it. It's always been good advice. It's never been more crucial to follow.

WALKING YOUR OCTOPUS, the adventures of Otto, a domesticated cephalopod and his human Victoria

WALKING YOUR OCTOPUS: A Guidebook to the Domesticated Cephalopod
BRIAN KESINGER
Baby Tattoo Books
$29.95 hardcover, available now, so what are you waiting for?!

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A beautifully produced and richly illustrated book that showcases the day-to-day adventures of independent girl-about-town Victoria Prismall and her pet land octopus Otto. Thirty panoramic, full-page illustrations humorously chronicle the duo's home and social activities that include (among other things) bathing, biking, dating, cooking, playing croquet, and pumpkin carving. Accompanying text explains the "do"s and "don't"s of living with a large land octopus. The book's art is extremely detailed, and each illustration tells its own visual story. The Victorian era characters and period-influenced design elements combine to create a wonderful, collectible art-object for those who still value the classic elegance of ink-on-paper. The hardcover binding is plussed with two-layer embossing and spot varnish, and the interior is printed on extra heavy paper. An exquisite volume for lovers of books, art and pets.

My Review: I can't remember snickering, chortling, giggling, or smirking this much in a very long time. The absurdity of the premise is matched only by the beauty of the object.



"The adventurous spirit of the octopus is infectious. After spending time with them, you will find yourself attempting many activities that might have heretofore been out of range of one's more mundane lifestyle." This fronts a page showing Victoria, our intrepid octopus-adopter, attempting (with limited success) to ice-skate, supported by the smiling, multi-skated Otto the rescued octopus.



Inspired, divine steampunky-bizarro silliness. If the pictures don't make you smile, I'd tell you to unpucker and drink a G&T and then look again. If they still don't make you smile, apply for a sense of humor graft.

THE BABY KILLERS, late and much-lamented Jay Lake's bizarro/steampunk novella

THE BABY KILLERS
JAY LAKE
PS Publishing
Out of print, Amazon Marketplace sellers start at $50

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: "Within our tale, gentle reader, you will see writ before you a palimpsest of low living and high misdemeanor, and the curious redresses that are visited as a result thereof . . ."

In The Baby Killers, Jay Lake restages mankind's Fall from Grace as an alternate-history steampunk fable. Written in a style of rambunctious Victoriana-that-never-was, this novella is set in Philadelphia in 1907, when that city serves as the seat of the British Dominion of the Americas, and as a Pandora's Box of sin and vice. The Governor-General has a taste for violating innocents, while the good Dr. Scholes uses them to fashion his mechanized agents of Justice. The Gollinoster, a feminine incarnation of angry retribution, wanders beneath the city streets - and an undying creature of ancient destruction is rushing to meet her. Villains and heroes (categories that overlap significantly) battle in a story of debauchery, degradation, radical experimentation, mad metaphysics . . . and a farting Frenchman.

Both popular culture and actual history are mined here to create a tale in which the use of idealized technology meets our darkest desires . . . and the result is positively electric.

My Review: Never let it be said or implied or even thought that Jay Lake is anything other than adventurous. This is an exuberant trip into a sick, weird vision of a sick, weird culture.

Much like our own.

Don't believe me?

{She} stood sobbing in front of her house. She, who had not cried since age ten when her brother took her virginity in the upstairs maid's room. ... There had probably been six people in the house when {the girl} exploded into flames. Two were girls from her list, valuable members of her stock book.

If this doesn't remind you of the response of the owners to the Bangladeshi clothing-factory collapse, and the BP America president's response to the Deepwater Horizon disaster, you're not paying attention.

The Baby Killer of the title isn't what you think it is. Well, it sort-of is; but not really because it's so much worse than what you think it is: Dr. Scholes uses the living brains of babies to power his retribution machines, his Robocops of steam, which of course means the babies qua babies are dead, though their "lives" are continuing and are augmented by Countess Lovelace's punchtape difference engines.

Drone-using teenaged soldiers, anyone?

So that's the book's level of success. It's a dark and bitter look at the endless and boundless vileness of humanity, and it's a cautionary tale told too late about the price extracted from us all for the sin of hubris, and it's darkly funny as well as starkly moral. It's compact, at 68pp, and so it's impossible to overdose on the grims. It's got a farting Frenchman as its Angel of Justice. It's, well, it's surreal and it's weird and I can think of no good reason for you not to buy and read it.

So go already. Amazon doesn't run on air.

SCHOOL BOARD, prescient debut political satire from 2014

SCHOOL BOARD
MIKE FREEDMAN
Broken Levee Books
$14.99 Kindle, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Houston, Texas, 1999. Enter Tucker "Catfish" Davis, a high school senior with high-flying political ambitions as the self-proclaimed heir to populist Louisiana Governors Huey and Earl Long. Armed with idealism and a fedora, he embarks on a quixotic campaign to get elected to the local school board in an effort to help the "little people" of Houston.

In the wild days that follow, Catfish's long-shot bid gains traction through guerilla campaigning against a questionable tax deal supported by his opponent, a powerful executive at an Enron-esque energy company. With the help of his classmates, an indicted Louisiana governor, a gay journalist with nascent mayoral ambitions and an ex-Green Beret trained to wage unconventional warfare, Catfish makes it a race Houston will never forget.

Based on an actual 1999 news story, School Board is an entertaining but satirical debut novel that revels in the diversity, madness and absurdities of the Bayou City.

I RECEIVED AN ARC FROM THE PUBLISHER. THANK YOU.

My Review: First, read this:

"I'm not wearing this."
"You are if you want to win tonight's debate," the political consultant said, holding up the picture of Walker in full polo regalia in the Chronicle that Tucker's campaign had planted in the morning edition. "Less polo playing, more goat roping."
"We live in Memorial, the richest area of town."
The political consultant showed a poll from The Pony Express with Walker trailing by twelve percent.
"That's Tucker's paper," Walker said. "What legitimate poll has a margin of error of eleven percent?"

This is a sassy, Swiftian satire of turn-of-the-century Houston, Texas, and its far-too-rich, far-too-crazy political culture. The place that gave rise to both the Bushes that infested the White House. The culture that's given rise to many, many a ridiculous fad...moving their baseball team to the American League! building freeways not trams! nary a zoning law to be found!...is skilfully flensed by a native son who saw this plot play out in real life.

What makes books like this fun to read is the sense of absurdity and the fun they allow you to have laughing at, as well as with, the protagonist. The thing that keeps me reading in political satires is that sense of being outside the action looking at them make the stupid mistake or misread the room, a lot like y'all who watch The Office and Arrested Development do.

What didn't work for me, this time, was the sense that I, the one laughing at other people, wasn't laughing as hard or with as much contempt as the author was. He seems to have a really serious dislike for these characters. It's not like that's unheard of, of course, but it doesn't make me feel comfortable...I need to sense the author pulling his punches or I start sympathizing with the targets not the actors.

I won't shove it at you...but I won't say avoid it, either. In today's political climate, maybe this is just the thing for working through your emotional breakdown as the spectacle of Clinton versus Trump (!!) unfolds.

A CLOCKWORK ORANGE did NOT age well and Anthony Burgess knew it

CLOCKWORK ORANGE
ANTHONY BURGESS
W.W. Norton
$15.95 trade paperback, available now

Rating: 1* of five

The Publisher Says: A vicious fifteen-year-old "droog" is the central character of this 1963 classic, whose stark terror was captured in Stanley Kubrick's magnificent film of the same title.

In Anthony Burgess's nightmare vision of the future, where criminals take over after dark, the story is told by the central character, Alex, who talks in a brutal invented slang that brilliantly renders his and his friends' social pathology. A Clockwork Orange is a frightening fable about good and evil, and the meaning of human freedom. When the state undertakes to reform Alex—to "redeem" him—the novel asks, "At what cost?"

This edition includes the controversial last chapter not published in the first edition and Burgess's introduction "A Clockwork Orange Resucked."

My Review: I found the slang, "Nadsat," stupid and tricksy. I found the "ultraviolence" almost risibly dated, since I've seen my nephews playing video games more violent than this. I found the prevalence of rape so voyeuristically deployed, so gratuitously hamfistedly bludgeoningly prevalent, that in the end it evoked only a snort of derision from me.

That, in the end, is my problem with the book. Leaving aside the roll-my-eyes-so-far-I-can-see-my-brain nonsense with words, and the novella becomes a pursey-lipped Great Aunt Prudence-shocker, a piece made to play on the fears of right-wing conservative religious nuts and libertarian dupes of the twin perils of Moral Degeneracy and Government Intervention.

I'll give the last words to Burgess, whose response to the book I found on Wikipedia:

In 1985, Burgess published Flame into Being: The Life and Work of D. H. Lawrence, and while discussing Lady Chatterley's Lover in this biography, Burgess compared that novel's notoriety with A Clockwork Orange: "We all suffer from the popular desire to make the known notorious. The book I am best known for, or only known for, is a novel I am prepared to repudiate: written a quarter of a century ago, a jeu d'esprit knocked off for money in three weeks, it became known as the raw material for a film which seemed to glorify sex and violence. The film made it easy for readers of the book to misunderstand what it was about, and the misunderstanding will pursue me until I die. I should not have written the book because of this danger of misinterpretation, and the same may be said of Lawrence and Lady Chatterley's Lover." Burgess also dismissed A Clockwork Orange as "too didactic to be artistic." (emphasis added)

THE LADY ASTRONAUT OF MARS, Mary Robinette Kowal's Hugo-winning novelette

THE LADY ASTRONAUT OF MARS
MARY ROBINETTE KOWAL
Tor.com
Free online read, or 99¢ on Kindle

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Thirty years ago, Elma York led the expedition that paved the way to life on Mars. For years she's been longing to go back up there, to once more explore the stars. But there are few opportunities for an aging astronaut, even the famous Lady Astronaut of Mars. When her chance finally comes, it may be too late. Elma must decide whether to stay with her sickening husband in what will surely be the final years of his life, or to have her final adventure and plunge deeper into the well of space.

My Review: No wonder this story won the 2014 Hugo Award for Best Novelette. Kowal, comme d'habitude, presents her Lady Astronaut with a life-choice that will reverberate down the ages no matter how she decides it; and makes it clear that this is not the first time Elma has faced such life-choices, but is at last old enough to really *get* what she's deciding.

It's a theme in my reading here lately. This is the same vein worked by Blake Crouch in his exciting and engrossing novel DARK MATTER. It's an evergreen in all manner of fiction from Jack Finney's romantic obsession novel TIME AFTER TIME to the entire genre of alternate (sic) history worked famously by Harry Turtledove and Eric Flint. It speaks to something deep inside us, a common core of regrets seething or simmering in each human breast. It's impossible to exist in the material world without creating this core, and I'm beginning to think that it's the source of our human condition: malaise, misery, morbidity. We're all weighed down to one life of the infinity of possibilities by the gravity of our regrets.

Elma and Nathaniel have lived a happy life. They're married many years, they're still in love with each other, but they're childless and they're aging (she more gracefully than he) on Mars. Their work in the space program, here turbocharged by a celestial accident much discussed in modern space science: asteroid impact, made the Martian colony possible when politics made it imperative.

As she levels up in her life experience, Elma isn't clear on the correctness of her decisions already made which gives her pause in facing this latest one. Her husband's life is ending, both inevitably and painfully. Her misery is deftly portrayed, without melodrama or self-pity. When her life-changing decision arrives, she's sure of her course. Nathaniel, however, has other ideas. He does, out of love, a self-sacrificing thing to enable his beloved Elma to do the only job she's ever had, the only one she loves. The no-correct-way ending feels so deeply true and right that it brought me to tears. I identify with Nathaniel and Elma, probably because I'm about Elma's age, and because my life circumstances are, like theirs, constrained by decisions made long ago.

Like them, I don't regret my decisions so much as question them. Stories like this enable me to go through my own life's process again. So far, I don't regret much that I did and didn't decide to do; but the ones I regret, I regret completely, forcefully. Which tells me that I did life right: I'm still not obsessed with trivialities!