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1501175513
| 9781501175510
| 1501175513
| 3.87
| 63,147
| Sep 11, 2018
| Sep 11, 2018
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really liked it
| …the only thing we have to fear is fear itself - Franklin Delano Roosevelt Inaugural address – March 4, 1933 Real power is—I don’t even want to use the …the only thing we have to fear is fear itself - Franklin Delano Roosevelt Inaugural address – March 4, 1933 Real power is—I don’t even want to use the word—fear. - Presidential candidate Donald J. Trump in an interview with Bob Woodward and Robert Costa on March 31, 2016FDR was correct. The fear that gripped the nation in the Great Depression may have had a basis in reality, but acceding to that fear could have hindered any attempts to make the dire economic situation better. Would Roosevelt feel the same way today? Do we have nothing to fear but fear itself? Well, we do have a very concrete problem that generates a fair bit of concern, anxiety, nervousness, and yes, fear. The guy in the White House. The fear that Roosevelt addressed was a concern that the nation, under the weight of the latest in a series of economic collapses, might not be able to recover from it soon enough to matter, leaving the nation impoverished, riven with internal strife, and in danger from external enemies. The fears we contend with today include a widespread concern about a declining standard of living, a whipped-up concern about minorities, both foreign and domestic, distrust of those who worship differently, or not at all, confusion about increasing gender fluidity, and diversity. But there are specific fears that center on the guy in the Oval Office, both of the incoming and outgoing sorts. [image] Bob Woodward - image from the Washington Post As illustrated in the opening quote above, (which is the opening of the book as well, the Trump quote, that is) Donald Trump believes the application of fear in dealing with people and nations is the proper course. Threats, bullying, and intimidation are the favorite irons in his bag. In the application of this approach, it is distinctly possible that he might miscalculate to the point of sparking economic mayhem, or even war. But the other element of fear that should terrify us all is his fear for himself. Donald Trump has paid vast sums of money to see that his under-the-covers philanderings remain under cover. (“You’ve got to deny, deny, deny and push back on these women,” he said. “If you admit to anything and any culpability, then you’re dead.”) He is terrified that the world might see what an empty vessel he truly is. You may recall his conversation with the Mexican president in which Trump pleaded with El Presidente to give him some political cover so he would not have to face his supporters with the news that building the wall was really only a campaign scam. He is afraid that he will be shown to be a mobbed-up front-man, a tool for the Russian mafia, living large by laundering their ill-gotten rubles. He is terrified that he will be exposed as an asset of the Russian government, impacting American foreign and domestic policy in ways that advantage his Russian handler. Where those fears become kinetic is in how he attempts to protect himself. He has done his best to shred the two American institutions that might hold him accountable, the justice system and the fourth estate, waging war on truth itself. Trump has been griping about the media, well the media that is not Fox, Infowars, Clear Channel, Rush Limbaugh, or any of the far right-wing outlets that serve as a public relations propaganda support system for him, at least since his campaign. It has always seemed clear that the intent here is to erode the standing of news organizations that were likely to expose his many misdeeds. His attacks on judges handling suits against him, on the FBI, which was investigating his campaign’s potential ties to Russia, and on the Justice Department, which controls the FBI, and under which the Special Counsel was appointed, are all attempts to undermine the authority of agencies that are likely to bring his crimes to light and him to justice. If he can persuade the American people that the cops and judges are all corrupt he might get away with his particular responsibility for decades of money-laundering, at the very least, and quite likely a traitorous alliance with Putin, whether entered into willingly or via blackmail. Fending off investigators, public and journalistic, is an existential challenge for him, driven by his fear of exposure. The focus of Woodward’s book is on one particular form of fear, the concern the people who work for Donald Trump have that he might do serious damage to the United States, and even to the world, either in his handling of potentially fraught negotiations, domestic or international, (there is particular attention paid to dealings with South and North Korea that illustrates this very well) or in his need to preserve his freedom, and privilege, by destroying respected norms and institutions. He is Godzilla, and we are all Tokyo. [image] Another substantial element is the chaos that is the White House, where established lines of communication and authority are regularly crossed, where the staff are constantly on the edge, wondering when the next absurd and/or dangerous presidential action may require their intervention, to try talking him out of it, slow him down, or make the requisite paperwork vanish. A third theme that permeates is Trump’s flaws as a leader, his lack of intellectual curiosity, his adherence to preconceived notions regardless of research and advice that would lead a flexible human to a more informed opinion, (for example, accusing Iran of violating the treaty despite his own people telling him that they had not) his inability or unwillingness to take in more than a minimum amount of information on pretty much any subject, suggesting an attention deficit disorder. You have probably heard quite a few quotes from this book, as coverage of its contents has been widespread. Perhaps the most significant are in the prologue It was no less than an administrative coup d’état, an undermining of the will of the president of the United States and his constitutional authority. In addition to coordinating policy decisions and schedules and running the paperwork for the president, Porter told an associate, “A third of my job was trying to react to some of the really dangerous ideas that he had and try to give him reasons to believe that maybe they weren’t such good ideas.” …the United States in 2017 was tethered to the words and actions of an emotionally overwrought, mercurial and unpredictable leader. Members of his staff had joined to purposefully block some of what they believed were the president’s most dangerous impulses. It was a nervous breakdown of the executive power of the most powerful country in the world.As with Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury, Steve Bannon has clearly offered the author considerable information on the goings on inside the White House. It is also clear that there are many other insiders who have talked to Woodward. One must always wonder, of course, where reporting events accurately leaves off for these sources, and where reputation embellishment begins. Thankfully, Woodward has gone to great lengths to corroborate diverse accounts to arrive at an accurate picture. I would be inclined to take what is reported in this book as the best obtainable version of the truth. Here are some other details that are worth remembering. -----Reince Preibus, as head of the GOP, had invested heavily in analytics and big data, over $175 million, and was very effective in using the drill-down intel to target neighborhoods with battalions of volunteers in the 2016 election. The intel even allowed targeting of individuals. -----It was in 2015 that the NSA first found that Russia was looking at US voter rolls. -----After pussygate, while almost all of his advisors urged Trump to drop out of the presidential race, there were two who urged him to stay in, Bannon, which is no shock, and Melania, which is, given the general view that she wanted no part of a presidential run. -----Woodward also reports that, while Trump and Melania operate in pretty much separate spheres, there is genuine affection between the two. Color me skeptical. ----- It was interesting to learn how much influence and access Lindsay Graham had at the White House, which goes a long way to explaining how Graham could have pulled such a 180 on Trump. Graham had called Trump a “race-bating xenophobic bigot” in 2015, but in 2018, Graham said “He’s not, in my view, a racist by any stretch of the imagination.” It’s enough to give a guy whiplash. -----Fascinating to read about Trump’s lawyer John Dowd and his dealings with Trump and Robert Mueller. -----It was somewhat alarming learning of the sundry notions that were floated by presidential advisors re how to deal with North Korea’s acquisition of ICBM capability. -----And also alarming, although not at all surprising, to read of John Kelly’s avid hostility toward Dreamers. ----- His people manage Trump’s time so he gets home after the weekend news on CNN and MSNBC goes into softer mode at 9pm. Much of the book goes into specifics on the hirings and firings that keep the doors of the White House in need of constant oiling. Sometimes the idiocy is mind-boggling. Trump, early on, passed over John Bolton for a significant position because he did not like his moustache. Not that I have any particular fondness for Bolton, myself, but you do not base such decisions on the quality of someone’s facial hair. I mean he hired Ty Cobb, for god’s sake, or had him kidnapped from another century. Gripes – Woodward sticks by his public position that the Steele dossier was a “garbage document” and that Comey should not have presented any of it to the president. It is unclear on what Woodward bases this position, given the solidity of the investigator, and the ongoing verification of information reported in that document. You have probably heard/read this, but here are some of the lovely things said about Trump by his own appointees -----Cohn had witnessed this for over a year—denial when needed or useful or more convenient. He’s a “professional liar,” Cohn told an associate. -----He’s a fucking moron,” Tillerson said so everyone heard. ----- Trump had failed the President Lincoln test. He had not put a team of political rivals or competitors at the table, Priebus concluded. “He puts natural predators at the table,” Priebus said later. “Not just rivals—predators. -----The president’s unhinged,” Kelly said -----Trump normally wouldn’t listen long or very carefully to his national security adviser but it had gotten much worse, McMaster told Porter. “It’s like I can’t even get his attention.” -----Cohn realized that Trump had gone bankrupt six times and seemed not to mind. Bankruptcy was just another business strategy. Walk away, threaten to blow up the deal. Real power is fear… Applying this mind-set from his real estate days to governing and deciding to risk bankrupting the United States would be a different matter entirely. ----- In a small group meeting in his office one day, Kelly said of the president, “He’s an idiot. It’s pointless to try to convince him of anything. He’s gone off the rails. We’re in crazytown. “I don’t even know why any of us are here. This is the worst job I’ve ever had. -----McMaster said that he believed Mattis and Tillerson had concluded that the president and the White House were crazy. As a result, they sought to implement and even formulate policy on their own without interference or involvement from McMaster, let alone the president. ----- In the political back-and-forth, the evasions, the denials, the tweeting, the obscuring, crying “Fake News,” the indignation, Trump had one overriding problem that Dowd knew but could not bring himself to say to the president: “You’re a fucking liar.” The man really commands loyalty in his people. And then there are the insults, the abuse to which he subjected that staff, regardless of their level of loyalty to him. It is amazing anyone will even speak to the man. I will spare you those. It is obvious that there is a clear and present danger to all Americans from the man currently resident in the White House, a man who is not only unfit to hold this highest position in the nation, but a man whose dull intellect, exuberant venality, core-deep corruption, contempt for American values and laws, authoritarian inclinations, and unsurpassed greed have made him the worst president in the history of the nation. His rigidity and ignorance have caused even people who share the political values he espouses to engage in activities that are probably criminal in order to spare the nation the downsides of his ill-informed, and often darkly-intentioned decisions. Fear is not the only thing we have to fear. We have just cause to fear what Donald Trump might do with the gigantic instrument he has been charged with operating. While busying himself looting the national treasure for himself and his pals, while paring back sane restrictions on polluting industries, while dismantling much of the mechanism of government that produces and distributes factual information for the nation, while engaging in border practices that make us remember the 1930s and 1940s, he is also busy tearing down respected institutions, shredding political and moral norms, and making the USA the laughingstock of the world. So, President Roosevelt, it is most certainly NOT THE CASE that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. There are plenty of fear-generating people, nations and events on our planet that can justify our fears. But the one that supersedes all, for the moment, is Donald J. Trump. He is a danger to us all, and, as the investigations into his dark deeds progresses, he is only getting more paranoid and desperate. Be afraid. Be very afraid. We must especially beware of that small group of selfish men who would clip the wings of the American Eagle in order to feather their own nests. Review first posted – 9/21/18 Publication date – 9/11/18 =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the author’s personal, Twitter and FB pages September 5, 2018 - I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration - by Anonymous Interviews -----September 15, 2018 - New York Magazine - Bob Woodward on the ‘Best Obtainable Version of the Truth’ About Trump - by Olivia Nuzzi -----September 5, 2018 – CNN - 13 totally bananas moments from Donald Trump's phone call with Bob Woodward - by Chris Cillizza. – a fun piece ----- September 14, 2018 - The Guardian - Bob Woodward: 'Too many people are emotionally unhinged about Trump' - by David Smith ----- September 14, 2018 - KQED.org – Washington Week Washington Week episode: ‘Fear’ inside the Trump White House - with Robert Costa – Woodward’s final line in the interview - “He’s really disabled. He can’t tell the truth.” Items of Interest -----October 15, 2018 - A nice short video that puts the current danger into historical context - If You’re Not Scared About Fascism in the U.S., You Should Be -----February 22, 2019 - Atlantic Magazine - The Alarming Scope of the President's Emergency Powers - by Elizabeth Goitein - When push comes to prosecute or impeach, do you really expect Trump to accede to the rule of law? This alarming article points out the many tools available to Swamp Thing that might be misused to keep his crooked ass out of jail. Be afraid. Be very afraid. -----March 7, 2019 - NY Times - Nicholas Kristof offers an optimistic perspective on the unlikelihood of a Trump Reich - We Will Survive. Probably. -----March 14, 2019 - NY Times - Donald Trump’s Bikers Want to Kick Protester Ass - building a brownshirt militia - this is really bad -----But Lawrence O'Brien Lawrence O'Brien thinks it's just gas. Sure hope he's right. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Sep 12, 2018
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Sep 18, 2018
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Sep 18, 2018
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Hardcover
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0316399264
| 9780316399265
| 0316399264
| 3.85
| 9,393
| Sep 2018
| Sep 04, 2018
|
it was amazing
| I'm standing next to my table, everything neatly lined up, and I'm just hoping that my professors can see how much effort I've put into making my desi I'm standing next to my table, everything neatly lined up, and I'm just hoping that my professors can see how much effort I've put into making my designs practical and ergonomic and sustainable. And I'm starting to get really nervous, because for a long time, no one says anything. It's just completely silent. And then one of the professors starts to speak, and he says, "Your work gives me a feeling of joy."…I asked the professors, "How do things make us feel joy? How do tangible things make us feel intangible joy?” They hemmed and hawed and gestured a lot with their hands. "They just do," they said… So this got me thinking: Where does joy come from? I started asking everyone I knew, and even people I just met on the street, about the things that brought them joy. On the subway, in a café, on an airplane, it was, "Hi, nice to meet you. What brings you joy?" I felt like a detective. I was like, "When did you last see it? Who were you with? What color was it? Did anyone else see it?" I was the Nancy Drew of joy. - from the author’s TED talkJoyful is what she found out. [image] Ingrid Fetell Lee - image from her FB page The answers are directed at the immediate senses, and how external elements, form, color, shape, texture, scent, or sound can offer joyful sensate experience. Seeing it all laid out, it was clear that joy was not a mysterious, intuitive force; it emanated directly from the physical properties of the objects. Specifically, it was what designers called aesthetics—the attributes that define the way an object looks and feels—that gave rise to the feeling of joy.She notes commonality in the joyful things she found in the world, and breaks that down to ten subject areas she labels the Aesthetics of Joy; Energy, Abundance, Freedom, Harmony, Play, Surprise, Transcendence, Magic, Celebration, and Renewal, looking at how each can be applied to improving our lives. She offers diverse, interesting, and enlightening examples from the real world of how each has been approached. While her focus is on our living and working spaces, selecting how to shape and what to put on our walls, desks, coffee tables, and mantles, to create more enriched environments, she also looks a bit at where and how you might find joy in the outside world. [image] Jihan Zencirli has made an uplifting business out a familiar joyous object – reflecting points about the joy of celebration and the impact of large objects in our festivities If you are trying to engineer more joy into peoples’ lives, that is a form of psychological practice, whether board certified or not. (IFL does consult with several psychologists in trying to get a handle on joy.) But is this really so much different from any other artform that attempts to help us feel? Painting, writing/performing music, dance, writing poetry, fiction, and non-fiction, all seek to evoke a response. A body of research is emerging that demonstrates a clear link between our surroundings and our mental health. For example, studies show that workers with sunny desks are happier and more productive than their peers in dimly lit offices.She finds in the dominant modernist minimalism architecture and internal décor of contemporary life, the places we work, the buildings in which we live, the places where we learn, or secure needed services, a soul-sucking drain on our need for joy. She sees joy as a form of sustenance, no less than food, water, light, clothing, and shelter. We need at least some joy to keep going on. We all have an inclination to seek joy in our surroundings, yet we have been taught to ignore it. What might happen if we were to reawaken this instinct for finding joy?[image] Pierre Cardin’s iconic Bubble Palace designed By Antti Lovag – image from nine.com.au – the author writes on the impact on creativity of curvy shapes in one’s environment IFL offers some concrete examples of the impact of design on behavior. A non-profit took on the task of repainting schools, to make them more stimulating and inviting. The results were eye-opening, both in attendance and performance metrics. I suppose it is possible that the schools thus impacted might have been self-selected, and might have improved anyway. I did not dig deeply into the report, but it does at least seem like a wonderful idea, and ther results were encouraging. [image] Even aprons designed for professional use can make restaurant workers feel a bit better - Image from Hedley and Bennett I was talking about this book with a dear friend who was a chef, had owned and run a restaurant or three in her time, but is out of the business now. She said that one of the things that was very important to her was that the plates on which a meal was served complemented the food, drew the eye, made for a presentation that was about more than just aroma and flavor, but built anticipation. IFL is doing that here, on a much larger table. The repeating joy in my experience, outside of things interpersonal, is the visual stimulation of the natural world. During a period of several years, my wife and I managed to visit many National Parks, and each experience was most assuredly joyous, seeing so much rare and exquisite beauty in American landscapes. But those days ended and I had to find something else to fill that need. When I got out of work on Sunday morning, I took to driving to different NYC parks and shooting what I could of local visual delights. The combination of natural light and man-made elements was no less joyous and filling than seeing the Grand Canyon or Death Valley. My park tour days are also a fond memory now, but there is singular joy to be had spotting a late afternoon cumulo-nimbus in glowing white, while its neighbor clouds are in shadow. Or the god-light rays of a setting sun visible from the upstairs deck in the back of our house. No, the visions do not pay the bills, but they do provide significant moments of feeling at one with the world. One thing IFL looks at is how to incorporate into one’s personal and/or work spaces ways to reproduce such natural salves, ways to remind ourselves of things that are natural. Turns out there are many ways to fill that bill. [image] Are we going that high? - my shot from a joyous ride over the Willamette Valley in 2008 – (It is clickable, if you want a higher rez) IFL writes about the joy of transcendent feelings, and the correlation of upward movement with joy One of the joys of this book is trailing along with the author as she talks with experts on design across the planet. I added some (ok, many) links in EXTRA STUFF. You will really enjoy checking out the linked designers and their work.[image] Work by Eva Zeisel – image from the British Museum – reflecting the Renewal aesthetic, as Zeisel’s design shapes suggest nature and growth Here’s a bad idea for design. Yes, a newborn’s first cry is a source of joy. Replaying it over and over is something less than joyful. Small repeating elements can, however, evince joyful feelings, as in confetti, sprinkles, or glitter. But I suppose they can also become distracting and intrusive, not to mention no fun for the cleaning staff. [image] A “Reversible Destiny Loft” in Tokyo – The author tried it for a few days - Can enough physical stimulation in a living space reverse aging? One may wonder, does the aesthetic IFL espouses reflect anything more than her own personal preferences? There is certainly a danger that confirmation bias might play a role here. By offering thoughtful discussion, and the assistance of professional practitioners, she made me feel pretty comfortable with there being a minimum of such sample soiling here. There might be real issues with the values espoused and the degree to which one might take the recommended strategies. For example, IFL looks for examples of order as joyful. The notion is reminiscent of the broken-window theory that projected an increase in crime in places where unrepaired, publicly viewable damage was left untended. There was a basis for that and the policy was effective in the real world. But on a personal level, it is also possible that one man’s mess is another man’s nirvana. This is not hard science, with firm edges, but scientifically informed advice for directions that may lead you to a place you want to go. [image] Starburst lights at the Metropolitan Opera illuminate the Sparkle and Flare element of F-L’s Celebration aesthetic The Brain Candy Corner Here is a list of some notions from the book that provide food for thought, or, you know, brain candy. They are legion here -----The impact of variable rather than uniform light -----Preferred human landscape – both to live in and see in paintings on our walls – there appears to be one in particular that is favored almost universally -----Can a living space that is stimulating enough slow aging? -----Consider the diversity of our senses – thought you had five? Nah, many more. -----A sparse environment numbs our senses -----On minimalism as anti-sensory -----On the shifting baseline syndrome – what seems wild today is less wild that what seemed wild a generation ago -----On the relationship of joy to play -----Association between play and circles -----Yarn bombing -----Ways to see the unseen -----Fear of loss of personal interaction resulting from on-line life -----On the roots of Carnevale -----The appeal of balloons -----Seasonality brings the promise of joy, while a simple one-way time flow makes the future always uncertain -----On anticipation as an enhancement to joy [image] Yarn bombing in action – an element of the Surprise aesthetic – image from wiki – Bet this photo made you smile One aspect that kept me wondering was a question of definition. Where does joy leave off and pleasure begin? Amusement? Enjoyment? Where do fun and happiness fit into this spectrum? How is joy different? Need joy be a purely positive thing? Can one have fun doing something awful? Sure, if one is psychologically damaged. But can one take joy in dark doings? Did Charles Manson experience joy when he was killing people? Maybe fun is less substantive. Like having had a fun time at a party, the beach, or a baseball game. Fun is ephemeral. It tickles our senses and then abates. How is this different from pleasure? Can pleasure be an ephemeral experience too? Joy, somehow, seems richer. I do not defend this notion at all. Going on feelz here. Joyful does not really address all this, and I guess it does not really need to. It seems perfectly ok to accept the presenting notion that joy is an absolute good thing, and that we human sorts have a need for joy in our lives, in the same way that we need more readily defined physical inputs. Is joy a sustaining experience? Can it become ecstatic, transcendental even? I think it can, based on personal experience. I once said to my son that the joy I experience from the beauty of the world was like a religion for me. His response was, “why like?” The lines between the sundry joy-like feelings remain squishy for me. But then, IFL is a designer, not a researcher in psychology, and it would be wrong to hold her to a requirement that she explain everything that goes on in our tiny minds. In short, (yeah, I know, too late), Ingrid Fetell Lee has done an amazing job of explaining the impact of design on our lives, while offering a wide array of potential correctives. In doing so, she has accomplished that major victory of combining the imparting of information with delivering that intel in a manner that is engaging, entertaining, energetic and fun. Your brain may explode with all the possibilities on display in this book, but I expect I am not alone in reporting that Joyful is a thing of beauty, a classic of its kind, and will, I expect, be a joy forever. Wonders never cease, as long as we are willing to look for them. Review posted – September 7, 2018 Publication date – September 4, 2018 =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the author’s personal, Twitter, Instragram, and FB pages The author’s TED Talk, Where Joy Hides and How To Find It Some of the People (mostly designers) mentioned in the book (there are more, really) -----Ruth Lande Shuman - founder of the non-profit Publicolor, which offers a group of design-based programs aimed at helping high-risk students in their education. -----Ellen Bennett, while working as a line cook, decided to upgrade the aprons that kitchen staff wear, so designed a line of more interesting apparel and got her business started -----Shusaku Arakawa and Madeline Gins started The Reversible Destiny Foundation to design and promote “procedural architecture,” claiming that certain sorts of living spaces could reverse human aging. Color me skeptical, but their work is worth checking out. -----Dorothy Draper (no relation to Don) is noted in Joyful for her attention to texture, vibrancy, and richness of interior environment, particularly in the resort hotel The Greenbrier in West Virginia -----Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid, Russian emigres, devised a test to determine a universally favored painting. Turns out their “Most Wanted” project found its way into Darwinian Aesthetics -----British geographer Jay Appleton devised the “prospect-refuge theory” of human aesthetics. -----Landscape architect James Corner designed the High-Line park in Manhattan [image] -----Summer Rayne Oakes works in ecologically-minded design -----Piet Oudolf is a world renown expert in horticultural design -----George Van Tassel’s Integratron Dome has a mind-bowing origin story, and peculiar qualities that may be out of this world. Of all the links provided here, this one may be the most fun. You might also want to check this site, and this video and its sequel. [image] ----- The Quilts of Gees Bend -----Architect and designer Gaetano Pesce is the creator of bubble housing, what he calls habitologue. -----Leanne Prain, Yarn bomber extraordinaire -----Gavin Pretor-Pinney is the founder of The Cloud Appreciation Society -----Psych professors Dacher Keltner and Jonathan Haidt write about awe, a moral, spiritual, and aesthetic emotion -----Conceptual artist Olafur Eliasson delights in the inexplicable Music -----from Ludwig Van - Ode to Joy, via Lenny B -----Joy to the World - Three Dog Night -----You Bring Me Joy - Anita Baker -----Joy to the World - The MT Choir My editor was worn out from all the joy [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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Aug 24, 2018
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Sep 03, 2018
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Sep 02, 2018
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Hardcover
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0062319809
| 9780062319807
| 4.12
| 245,007
| Feb 27, 2018
| Feb 27, 2018
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it was amazing
| That summer I hunted the serial killer at night from my daughter’s playroom. For the most part I mimicked the bedtime routine of a normal person. Teet That summer I hunted the serial killer at night from my daughter’s playroom. For the most part I mimicked the bedtime routine of a normal person. Teeth brushed. Pajamas on. But after my husband and daughter fell asleep, I’d retreat to my makeshift workspace and boot up my laptop, that fifteen-inch-wide hatch of endless possibilities…I rarely moved but I leaped decades with a few keystrokes. Yearbooks. Marriage certificates. Mug shots. I scoured thousands of pages of 1970s-era police files. I pored over autopsy reports. That I should do this surrounded by a half-dozen stuffed animals and a set of miniature pink bongos didn’t strike me as unusual. I’d found my searching place, as private as a rat’s maze. Every obsession needs a room of its own. Mine was strewn with coloring paper on which I’d scribbled down California penal codes in crayon. - from the prologueI’ll Be Gone in the Dark is not just a tale of a decade-long crime spree, of a maddeningly elusive peeper, burglar, rapist, and murderer. It is not only a tale of obsession, as the author, and others with her particular inclination, bury themselves in the forensic, statistical, genetic, and geographical trail left by this relentless offender. It is a story as well of how some dedicated active and retired police, and private citizens worked hand in hand to try to track down a homicidal monster. It is also a story of the impact that monster had on the communities he terrorized and on how advances in technology over several decades shortened the distance between suspicion and apprehension. [image] Michelle McNamara hard at work - image from The Times - provided to them by Patton Oswalt McNamara had always wanted to be a writer, but she gained some focus on what to write as a teen. [Her] fascination with the grisly began when she was just 14, when a young woman named Kathleen Lombardo, whom McNamara knew from church, was murdered while jogging a block and a half away from McNamara’s home in Oak Park, Illinois. The man who slit Lombardo’s throat was never found. McNamara would be forever haunted by what she’d later describe as “the specter of that question mark where the killer’s face should be.” - From Vulture articleShe takes us along with her, introducing readers to three general groups of people, the victims, the professional investigators, and her small band of amateur sleuths. These are not deep profiles, but we are given enough about each to understand their roles in the ongoing drama, and their motivation. [image] Contra Costa County Sheriff’s Office sketches of a masked man who had fled a crime scene in 1979 and an artist’s impression of the killer – image from The Times The first crimes took place in the 1970s, the last known GSK crime was committed in 1986. He began with simple burglaries, dozens of them, enough to earn a tabloid name, The Ransacker, then moved on to rape. One of his victims was thirteen. The tabloids called him the East Area Rapist (EAR) and the Original Night Stalker (ONS), often merging the two to EAR-ONS. He was nearly caught after one couple resisted, so, to ensure not only compliance, but that there would be no witnesses, he moved on to homicide. His home invasions were well planned, professionally executed, and particularly cruel. It was not enough to rape women. He made many of the women tie up their husbands or boyfriends, and forced them to watch him commit the rape. He had a signature technique for monitoring whether the male victims moved. Movement, they were told, would get their partner killed. And sometimes he killed them anyway, both of them. During her research, McNamara coined the GSK tag for him, the Golden State Killer. [image] Attacks attributed to the GSK – image from the Sacramento County DA’s office by way of the NY Times McNamara takes us through not just the clues that accumulated over the years, but methodologies for looking into them. There is some very surprising information here on what happens to old police files. We follow along as new methods are added to tried and true shoe-leather investigation. There were two major technological breakthroughs over the four decades of the investigation. DNA fingerprinting was the first. And even once it was put into widespread use there were still problems with local police departments coordinating with other PDs. She walks us through how that changed. The other major item is what you are using right now, the internet. All the information in the world is useless without the ability to connect a fact here to a crime there. The internet, McNamara predicted, was what would eventually allow for the apprehension of the GSK. It is quite cheering when McNamara begins to connect with other cold-crime obsessives across the country, and they begin sharing theories, and sometimes actual evidence. It was an incredibly long investigation, and such projects come with some built-in risk. falling for a suspect is a lot like the first surge of blind love in a relationship. Focus narrows to a single face. The world and its practical sounds are a wan soundtrack to the powerful silent biopic you’re editing in your mind at all times. No amount of information on the object of your obsession is enough. You crave more. Always more. You note his taste in shoes and even drive by his house, courtesy of Google Maps. You engage in wild confirmation bias. You project. A middle-aged white man smiling and cutting a cake decorated with candles in a picture posted on Facebook isn’t celebrating his birthday, but holding a knife.As with the infamous Kitty Genovese incident in 1964, how people react not just to crime but to neighborhood security in general comes in for some scrutiny here. That’s what we all do. All of us. We make well-intentioned promises of protection we can’t always keep.People did react in some ways. Sacramento saw a spate of residents trimming trees and uprooting bushes to deny cover to the GSK, installing floodlighting, reinforcing doors, sleeping with hammers under pillows, and buying thousands of guns. Victim support groups formed, some of the victimized men joining neighborhood patrols. Community safety meetings were packed. There were some positive impacts from GSK’s dark deeds, though. The case had a profound impact not just on fear and public safety in California, but also on the way that rapes were investigated and how rape victims were treated, said Carol Daly, a detective in the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office at the time…Rape victims were seen and cared for faster, and pubic hair, scratches and other evidence were examined and preserved, she said. Rape kits were standardized. “Every victim went through the process,” she said. - From 4/25/18 – NY TIMES articleWhen my wife was reading this book, some time ago, she became a bit McNamara’s writing skills are considerable. She keeps the narrative moving, slickly evading the potential peril of death by excessive detail. She reports on some of the gore the GSK generated, but not too much, not nearly as much as she might have. She has an ability to clarify the forensics, while keeping us in touch with the terrors experienced by the victims, and the hopes and frustrations of the diverse posse on the GSK’s trail. Occasionally a particular passage or turn of phrase will make you sit back and sigh in appreciation, but the narrative chugs on and each particular gem is allowed to please, then recede into the rearview. The pair who took on the task of completing the book when McNamara died retrieved some fine samples from her notes. For example, He was a compulsive prowler and searcher. We, who hunt him, suffer from the same affliction. He peered through windows. I tap “return.” Return. Return. Click Mouse click, mouse click…The hunt is the adrenaline rush, not the catch. He’s the fake shark in Jaws, barely seen so doubly feared.McNamara died in her sleep, in April, 2016, at age 46, from a combination of drugs interacting with an undiagnosed medical condition that caused a blockage in her arteries. She had been stressed out from working on this book, putting in long hours and suffering anxiety and nightmares that kept her from sleeping. Her husband engaged researcher Paul Haynes and investigative journalist Billy Jensen to complete the book McNamara had worked on for so long, and with such dedication. A week after Michelle’s death, we gained access to her hard drive and began exploring her files on the Golden State Killer. All 3,500 of them. That was on top of dozens of notebooks, the legal pads, the scraps of paper, and thousands of digitized pages of police reports. And the thirty-seven boxes of files she had received from the Orange County prosecutor, which Michelle lovingly dubbed the Mother Lode.The GSK burglarized more than 120 homes, raped dozens of women, killed at least ten people, and at least one dog during the 1970s and 1980s. We do not know how many people he drove mad in their decades-long inability to find him, or how many lives were ruined as a result of his crimes. The good news is that in April 2018, only a few months after the publication of Michelle McNamara’s book, a 72-year-old man, Joseph James DeAngelo was arrested, based on DNA evidence. The Golden State Killer is finally in jail. He had not killed anyone in thirty years, as far as we know, but it is in the nature of such sprees to have a strong impact long after the events themselves. Meg Gardiner, who grew up in Santa Barbara, in one of DeAngelos target neighborhoods, tells of the experience of terror during the period of the killer’s mayhem. Yesterday my brother texted: “I have a different feeling driving around the neighborhood today. It was always in the back of my mind that he could still be living around here. In a weird way it feels safer.”So does Michelle McNamara’s work, her legacy, a major contribution to finally locking up a long-sought monster. HBO has bought the rights and plans to develop I’ll Be Gone in the Dark into a documentary mini-series. [image] Joseph James DeAngelo, 72 – believed to be the Golden State Killer – image from Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office Review first posted – June 15, 2018 Publication date – February 27, 2018 December 2018 - I'll Be Gone in the Dark wins the 2018 Goodreads Choice Award for non-fiction The HBO series of I’ll Be Gone in the Dark aired June 28, 2020 ==========In the summer of 2019 GR reduced the allowable review size by 25%, from 20,000 to 15,000 characters. In order to accommodate the text beyond that I have moved it to the comments section directly below. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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May 15, 2018
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Jun 12, 2018
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ebook
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0060921706
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| May 08, 2018
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it was amazing
| “…I want to ask you many things. I want to know who you are and how you came to be a slave; and to what part of Africa do you belong, and how you fare “…I want to ask you many things. I want to know who you are and how you came to be a slave; and to what part of Africa do you belong, and how you fared as a slave, and how you have managed as a free man?”…when he lifted his wet face again he murmured, Thankee Jesus! Somebody come ast about Cudjo! I want tellee somebody who I is, so maybe dey go to tell everybody whut Cudjo says, and how I come to Americky soil since de 1859 and never see my people no mo’. “Before she was a world-renowned novelist, Alabama-born and Florida-raised Zora Neale Hurston was an anthropologist, an ethnographer, a researcher into the history and folklore of black people in the American South, the Caribbean, and Honduras. She was a central figure in the Harlem Renaissance, producing works of fiction in addition to her anthropological work. [image] Cudjo at home – from History.com - (Credit: Erik Overbey Collection, The Doy Leale McCall Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of South Alabama) It was during this period that she first met the last known black man transported from Africa to America as a slave, Cudjoe Lewis. She interviewed Lewis, then in his 80s, in 1927, producing a 1928 article about his experiences, Cudjoe’s Own Story of the Last American Slaver. There were some issues with that report, including a serious charge of plagiarism. Hurston returned to Lewis in Africatown, Alabama, to interview him at length. It is these interviews that form the bulk of her book, Barracoon, plagiarism no longer being at issue. [image] Zora Neale Hurston - image from Smithsonian Her efforts to publish the book ran into some cultural headwind, publishers refused to proceed so long as her subject’s dialogue was presented in his idiomatic speech. Thurston refused to remove this central element of the story, and so the book languished. But the Zora Neale Trust did not give up, and a propitious series of events seemed to signal that the time was right Last fall, on the PBS genealogy series Finding Your Roots, the musician Questlove learned that he descends from people brought over on the Clotilda. Then an Alabama reporter named Ben Raines found a wreck that looked to be the scuttled ship; it wasn’t, but the story made national news….[while] Kossola’s relevance goes beyond any headlines, [there are also] noteworthy links there: one of Kossola’s sons is killed by law enforcement, and his story holds a message about recognizing humanity echoed by Black Lives Matter. - from Time Magazine articleThen there is the story itself. Hurston gets out of the way, acting mostly as Cudjoe’s stenographer and editor, reporting his words as he spoke them. It is a harrowing tale. A young village man in 1859, Kossula (his true name) was in training to learn military skills when his community was attacked by a neighboring tribe. His report of the attack is graphic, and gruesome. Many of those who survived the crushing assault were dragged away and sold to white slave traders. (Definitely not their choice, Kanye) We learn of his experiences while awaiting his transportation, his telling of the Middle Passage, arrival in America and his five years as a slave. He tells, as well, of the establishment of Africatown, after the Civil War ended the Peculiar Institution in the United States, and of the travails of his life after that, having and losing children, running up against the so-called legal system, but also surviving to tell his tale, and gaining respect as a storehouse of history and folklore. This is an upsetting read, rage battles grief as we learn of the hardships and unfairness of Kossula’s life. “Oh Lor’, I know it you call my name. Nobody don’t callee me Kossula, jus’ lak I in de Affica soil!”The book stands out for many reasons. Among them is that it is one of very few reports of slavery from the perspective of the slave. There are many documents available that recorded the transactions that involved human cargo, and many reports by slavers, but precious little has been heard from the cargo itself. It is also a significant document in teaching us about the establishment of Africatown, a village set up not by African Americans, but by Africans, Cudjoe and his fellow former slaves. The stories Cudjoe tells are often those he learned in his home culture. [image] 'The Brookes' Slave Ship Diagram – from the British Library Barracoon is a triumph of ethnography, bringing together not only a first-person report on experiences in African slave trading, but reporting on slavery from a subject of that atrocity. In addition Kossula adds his triumphant account of joining with other freed slaves to construct an Africa-like community in America, and offers as well old-world folklore in the stories he recalls from his first nineteen years. It is a moving tale for Hurston’s sensitive efforts to reach across the divide of time to encourage Kossula to relive some of the darkest moments any human can experience, sitting with him, calm, caring, and connecting. And finally, it is a truly remarkable tale Kossula tells. It will raise your blood pressure, horrify you, and encourage bursts of tears. You think you’ve had it tough? And for this man to have endured with such dignity and grace is a triumph all its own. [image] Commemorative Marker for Cudjo Lewis – Plateau Cemetery, Africatown, Mobile, AL - image from wiki The text of the story is short, but Kossula’s tale is epic. Editor Deborah G. Plant has added a wealth of supportive material, including parables and old-world stories Kossula told to his descendants and to residents of Africatown, a description of a children’s game played in his home town in Africa, and background material on Hurston, her professional issues with an earlier piece of work, and her involvement with the Harlem Renaissance, without touching much on Hurston’s unexpected political perspective on segregation. The information adds to our appreciation of the book. [image] Cudjo with great-grand-daughters twins Mary and Martha, born in 1923 - image from Doy Leale McCall Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of South Alabama The ethnographical research Hurston did bolstered a perspective on African culture that different was not inferior, that African culture had great value, regardless of those who believed only in Western superiority. Long before Jesse Jackson, such research proclaimed “I am somebody.” The research Hurston did in the USA, Caribbean and Central America certainly informed and strengthened the portraits she painted in her fiction writing. The history of slavery is a dark one, however much light has been shone on it in the last century and a half. This moving, upsetting telling of a life that endured it is a part of that history. That this 80-year-old nugget has been buried under the weight of time is a shame. But there is an upside. The pressure of all those years has created something glistening and wonderful for us today, a diamond of a vision into the past. Review posted – 5/25/18 Publication date -----5/8/2018 - hardcover -----1/7/20 - Trade paperback =============================EXTRA STUFF VIDEO -----A film shot by ZNH – Cudjoe appears in the opening scene ----- On the unveiling of a bust of Cudjoe in Africatown - WKRG in Mobile – it also ncludes an interview with Israel Lewis, one of Kossula’s descendants -----A contemporary profile of Africatown and the challenges it faces, particularly from hazardous industry nearby EXTRA READING -----Emma Langdon Roche’s 1914 book, Historic Sketches of the South, includes much on the Clotilde -----Wiki on Cudjoe - includes images from E.L. Roche -----Smithsonian Magazine – May 2, 2018 - Zora Neale Hurston’s ‘Barracoon’ Tells the Story of the Slave Trade’s Last Survivor - by Anna Diamond ----- History.com piece on ZNH’s work on Barracoon - The Last Slave Ship Survivor Gave an Interview in the 1930s. It just Surfaced by Becky Little – (the interviewing was actually done in the 1920s) -----Bitfal Entertainment - A pretty nice brief summary of Cudjoe’s experience, with many uncaptioned illustrations -----Time Magazine - Zora Neale Hurston’s Long-Unpublished Barracoon Finds Its Place After Decades of Delay - by Lily Rothman ----- On the slave ship Clotilda -----NY Times - May 26, 2019 - ‘Ship of Horror’: Discovery of the Last Slave Ship to America Brings New Hope to an Old Community - By Richard Fausset -----National Geographic - January, 2020 - America’s last slave ship stole them from home. It couldn’t steal their identities. - much more information about the Clotilda's criminal mission, and about the lives of the men and women it transported and their descendants -----Nw York Times - Last Known Slave Ship Is Remarkably Well Preserved, Researchers Say by Michael Levenson AUDIO -----NPR’s Lynn Neary talks with Amistad’s editorial director Tracy Sherrod, and Barracoon’s editor Deborah Plant - In Zora Neale Hurston’s ‘Barracoon’ Language is the Key to Understanding - Definitely listen to the entire interview. It is under four minutes. One wonderful benefit is to get a sample of the audio reading of the book, which sounds amazing. Tracy Sherrod is the editorial director of Amistad at Harper Collins, which is now publishing the book. She says Hurston tried to get it published back in the 1930s, but the manuscript was rejected. "They wanted to publish it," Sherrod says, "but they wanted Zora to change the language so it wasn't written in dialect and more in standard English. And she refused to do so."...more |
Notes are private!
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May 05, 2018
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May 18, 2018
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May 24, 2018
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Paperback
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0316556343
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| 4.23
| 1,126,108
| Apr 10, 2018
| Apr 10, 2018
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it was amazing
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Men, can’t live with ‘em, can’t turn ‘em all into swine. What do you mean turn them into swine? From her earliest application of her new found transf Men, can’t live with ‘em, can’t turn ‘em all into swine. What do you mean turn them into swine? From her earliest application of her new found transformative skills it is suggested that what Circe turns her unfortunate guests into has more to do with their innermost nature than Circe’s selection of a target form. (The strength of those flowers lay in their sap, which could transform any creature to its truest self.) Clearly her sty residents had an oinky predisposition. And I am sure that there are many who had started the transformation long before landing on her island. Whaddya call the large sty Circe filled with erstwhile men? A good start. Ok. You had to know this would be part of the deal for this review. So, now that I have gotten it out of my system, (it is out, right?) we can proceed. When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.It was a word that Barbara Bush might have had in mind when she described Geraldine Ferraro, her husband’s opponent for the Vice Presidency, in 1984. “"I can't say it, but it rhymes with 'rich,'" she said, later insisting that the word in question did not begin with a “b,” but a “w.” Sure, whatever. But in this case, I suppose both might apply. Circe is indeed the first witch in western literature. And many a sailing crew might have had unkind things to say about her. [image] Madeline Miller - image from The Times Our primary introduction to Circe (which we pronounce as Sir-Sea, and even Miller goes along with this, so people don’t throw things at her. But for how it might be pronounced in Greek, you know, the proper way, you might check out this link. Put that down, there will be no throwing of things in this review!) was that wondrous classic of Western literature, The Odyssey. Given how many times this and its companion volume, The Iliad, have been reworked through the ages, it is no surprise that there have been many variations on the stories they told. Circe’s story has seen its share of re-imaginings as well. But Miller tries to stick fairly close to the Homeric version. Be warned, though, some license was taken, and other sources inspired the work as well. But it is from Homer that we get the primary association we have with her name, the magical transmutation of men into pigs. [image] George Romney's 1782 portrait of Emma Hamilton as Circe - image from wikipedia We follow the life of our Ur-witch from birth to whatever. She did not start out with much by way of godly powers. Her mother, Perse, daughter of the sea-god Oceanos, was a nymph, and her father was Helios, the sun god. Despite the lofty position of Pop’s place in things, Circe was just a nymph, on the low end of the godly powers scale. This did not help in the family to which she had been born. Not one of her parents’ favorites, she was blessed with neither power nor beauty, had a very ungod-like human-level voice, and her sibs were not exactly the nicest. Kinda tough to keep up when daddy is the actual bloody sun. Years pass, and one day she comes across a mortal fisherman. He seems pretty nice, someone she can talk to. She’d like to take it to the next stage, so she lays low, listens in on family gatherings, and picks up intel on substances that might be used to effect powerful and advantageous changes. She asks her grandmother, Tethys, (very Lannisterish wife AND SISTER to Oceanos) to transform him into a god for her, but Granny throws her out, alarmed when her granddaughter mentions this pharmakos stuff she had been looking into. Left to her own devices she tries this out on her bf, making him into his truest self. It does not end the way she’d hoped. (Pearls before you-know-what.) Not the last bad experience she would have with a man. [image] Levy’s 1889 Circe - image from wikipedia Her relationships with men are actually not all bad. Daddy is singularly unfeeling, and can be pretty dim for such a bright bulb, and her brothers are far less than wonderful, but there is some good in her sibling connections as well. She has a warm interaction with a titan, Prometheus, which is a net positive. Later, she has an interesting relationship with Hermes, who is not to be trusted, but who offers some helpful guidance. And then there are the mortals, Daedalus (the master artist, the Michelangelo, the Leonardo da Vinci of his era), Jason, of Argonaut fame, Odysseus, who you may have heard of, and more. There were dark encounters as well, and thus the whole turning-men-into-pigs thing. [image] Brewer's 1892 Circe and Her Swine - image from Wikipedia Miller has had a passion for the classics since she was eight, when her mother read her the Iliad and began taking her to Egyptian and Greek exhibits at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. It made her a nerdy classmate but was a boon when she got to college and was able to find peers who shared her love of the ancient tales. It was this passion that led her to write her first novel, The Song of Achilles, a reimagining of Achilles relationship with his lover, Patroclus, a delight of a book, a Times bestseller, and winner of the Orange prize. It took her ten years to write her first novel, about seven for this one and the gestation period for number three remains to be seen. She is weighing whether to base it on Shakespeare’s The Tempest or Virgil’s Aeneid. If past is portent, it will be the latter, and should be ready by about 2025. [image] Ulysses and Circe, Angelica Kauffmann, 1786. - image from Miller’s site The central, driving force in the story is Circe becoming her fullest possible self. (I suppose one might say she made a silk purse from a sow’s ear. I wouldn’t, but some might.) This is the story of a woman finding her power and, as part of that, finding her voice. She starts out really unable to say what she thinks and by the end of the book, she’s able to live life on her terms and say what she thinks and what she feels. - from the Bookriot interviewMost gods are awful sorts, vain, selfish, greedy, careless of the harm they do to others. Circe actually has better inclinations. For instance, when Prometheus is being tortured by the titans for the crime of giving fire to humans, Circe alone is kind to him, bringing him nectar, and talking with him when no one else offers him anything but anger and scorn. She is curious about mortals, and asks him about them, going so far as to cut herself to experience a bit of humanity. [image] Carracci's c. 1590 Ulysses and Circe in the Farnese Palace - image from Wikipedia Livestock comes in for some attention outside the sty. Turns out Circe’s father has a thing for a well-turned fetlock, so maybe she comes by her affinity for animals of all sorts, albeit in a very different way, quite naturally. Her island is rich with diverse fauna, including some close companions most of us would flee. An early version of Doctor Doolittle? Scholars have debated whether Circe’s pet lions are supposed to be transformed men, or merely tamed beasts. In my novel, I chose to make them actual animals, because I wanted to honor Circe’s connection to Eastern and Anatolian goddesses like Cybele. Such goddesses also had power over fierce animals, and are known by the title Potnia Theron, Mistress of the Beasts.Not be confused with The Beastmaster [image] Circe and Odysseus. Allessandro Allori, 1560 - image from Miller’s site While she has her darker side (she does change her nymph love-rival Scylla into a beast of epic proportions, which gets her sent to her room, or in this case, island, and there is that pig thing again) she is also a welcoming hostess on her isle of exile, Aiaia. (Which sounds to me like the palindromic beginning of a lament, Aiaiaiaiaiaiaia, which might feel a bit more familiar with a minor transformation, to oy-oy-oy-oy-oy-oy-oy-oy). I mean, she runs a pretty nifty BnB, with free-roaming wild animals, of both the barnyard and terrifying sort, a steady flow of wayward nymphs sent there by desperate parents in hopes that Circe might transform them into less troublesome progeny, a table with a seemingly bottomless supply of food and drink. And she is more than willing to offer special services to world-class mortals, among others. I mean, after that little misunderstanding with Odysseus about his men, (Pigs? What pigs? What could you possibly mean? Oh, you mean those pigs. Oopsy. How careless of me.) she not only invites everyone to stay for a prolonged vacay, but shacks up with the peripatetic one, offers him instructions on reaching the underworld, suggests ways to get past Scylla and Charybdis, and probably packs bag lunches for him and his crew. She is not all bad. [image] Barker's 1889 Circe - image from Wikipedia Circe struggles with the mortals-vs-immortals tension. Her mortal voice makes her less frightening to the short-lived ones, allowing her to establish actual relationships with them that a more boombox-voice-level deity might not be able to manage. Of course, it is still quite limiting that even the youngest of her mortal love interests would wither and die while she remained the same age pretty much forever. Knowing that you will see any man you love die is a definite limiting factor. Yet, she manages. She certainly recognizes what a psycho crew the immortals are, even her immediate family, and respects that mortals who gain fame do so by the sweat of their brow or extreme cunning, (even if it is to dark purpose) not their questionable godly DNA. Reinforcing this is her front row seat to the real-housewives tension between the erstwhile global rulers, the Titans, and the relatively new champions of everything there is, the Olympians. I mean, perpetual torture, thunderbolts, ongoing seditious plots, the nurturing of monsters, wholesale slaughter of mortals? She knows a thing or two, because she’s seen a thing or two. My thoughts about [Circe as caregiver] really start with the gods, who in Greek myth are horrendous creatures. Selfish, totally invested only in their own desires, and unable to really care for anyone but themselves. Circe has this impulse from the beginning to care for other people. She has this initial encounter with Prometheus where she comes across another god who seems to understand that and also who triggers that impulse in her. I wanted to write about what it’s like when you to want to try to be a good person, but you have absolutely no models for that. How do you construct a moral view coming from a completely immoral family? - from Bookriot interview[image] Circe Offering the Cup to Odysseus – by John William Waterhouse – 1891 - image from Wikimedia Of course, there is a pretty straight line between the sort of MCP hogwash Circe had to endure in the wayback and recent events that have been getting so much attention of late “I wasn’t trying to write Circe’s story in a modern way… I was just trying to be true to her experience in the ancient world.”There are plenty of classical connections peppered throughout Circe’s tale. Jason and Medea (niece) pop by for a spell. She is summoned to assist in the birthing of the minotaur (nephew) to her seriously nasty sister. She is part of Scylla’s origin story, interacts with Prometheus (cousin), gives shit to Athena, even heads into the briny deep to take a meeting with a huge sea creature (no, not the Kraaken). Hangs with Penelope (her bf’s wife) and Telemachus (bf’s son), and spends a lot of time with Hermes. She definitely had a life, many even, particularly for someone who was ostracized to live on an island. For Circe, I would say the Odyssey was my primary touch-stone in the sense that that’s where I started building the character. I take character clues directly from Homer’s text, both large and small. I mentioned her mortal-like voice. The lions. The pigs. And then when I get to the Odysseus episode in the book, I follow Homer obviously very closely… - from the BookRiot interview[image] "Circea", #38 in Boccaccio's c. 1365 De Claris Mulieribus, a catalogue of famous women, from a 1474 edition - image from wikipedia In terms of sources, I used texts from all over the ancient world and a few from the more modern world as well. For Circe herself, I drew inspiration from Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Apollonius of Rhodes’ Argonautica, Vergil’s Aeneid, the lost epic Telegony (which survives only in summary) and myths of the Anatolian goddess Cybele. For other characters, I was inspired by the Iliad, of course, the tragedies (specifically the Oresteia, Medea and Philoctetes), Vergil’s Aeneid again, Tennyson’s Ulysses and Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida. Alert readers may note a few small pieces of Shakespeare’s Ulysses in my Odysseus! - from Refinery29 interview[image] Circe – by Lorenzo Garbieri - image From Maicar Greek Mythology Link Madeline Miller’s Circe is not a lovelorn, lonely heart desperate for connection in her isolation, but a multi-faceted character (not actually a human being, though), with inner seams of the dark and light sort, with family issues that might seem familiar in feel, if not in external content, with sins on her soul, but a desire to do good, and with a curiosity about the world. She may not have been the brightest light in the house of Helios, but she glowed with an inner strength, a capacity for mercy, an appreciation for genius, beauty and talent, and a fondness for pork. This is the epic story of a life lived to the fullest. Circe is an explorer, a lover, a destroyer, and can be a very angry goddess. This transformative figure is our doorway to a very accessible look at the Greek tales which lie at the root of so much of our culture. If you have a decent grounding in western mythology this will offer a delightful refresher. If you do not, it can offer a delightful introduction, and will no doubt spark a desire to root about for more. Madeline Miller may not have a wand with special powers, or transmogrifying potions at her command, but she demonstrates here a power to transform mere readers into fans. Circe is a fabulous read! You will go hog wild for it. Can you pass the hot dogs? That’s All Folks [image] The Sorceress Circe, oil painting by Dosso Dossi, c. 1530; in the Borghese Gallery, RomeSCALA/Art Resource, New York – image from Britannica Review first posted – 4/27/2018 Publication date – 4/10/2018 December 2018 - Circe wins the 2018 Goodreads Choice Award for favorite Fantasy novel of the year ==========In the summer of 2019 GR reduced the allowable review size by 25%, from 20,000 to 15,000 characters. And then in 2021 GR banned the inclusion of external links in comments. (I used to put the overage there) As a result of these two new restrictions, I have been forced to truncate the review available on Goodreads. To see the entirety, including EXTRA STUFF and all the links, please head on over to my site, Coot's Reviews. No size restrictions there. ...more |
Notes are private!
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Apr 11, 2018
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Apr 23, 2018
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Apr 22, 2018
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Hardcover
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0062490427
| 9780062490421
| 0062490427
| 4.20
| 33,877
| Apr 24, 2018
| Apr 24, 2018
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it was amazing
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[image] Image from the Smithsonian Wait, what? You’re [image] Image from the Smithsonian Wait, what? You’re kidding, right? Say it ain’t so. Well, there is some disagreement about this among paleontologists, but, according to Steve Brusatte, while they may not have matched up to Marc Bolan in a boa, and the feathers in question were maybe more like porcupine quills than the fluffy sort of plumage one might find on, say, an ostrich, those things poking out of the T. rex’s body were indeed feathers. And if you think the notion of a 40-foot, seven-ton eating machine, with ginormous, dagger-like, railroad-spike-size teeth bearing down on you, is scary, consider this. They travelled in packs. Sweet dreams! I have to confess that after reading this chapter, I did indeed have at least one dream that night that included multiple representatives of the T. Rex family. Not a wonderful image to induce one back to the land of Nod, after having bolted suddenly upright from REM sleep in fight-or-FLIGHT mode. [image] Hello, lunch - Image from The Real T-Rex BBC special – this one from the Mirror But I promise, not all the revelations in The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs will make you reach for some extra alcoholic or pharmaceutical sleep inducement. What we know about dinosaurs has continued to evolve, at an accelerating rate. Some revelations in the book are surprising and delightful, like the fact that new dinosaur species are being discovered at the rate of about one a week, and that this has been going on a while. There is a lot of catching up to be done since we mastered the basic few, Triceratops, T-Rex, Brontosaurus, Archaeopteryx, Stegasaurus, Dimetrodon, and the usual gang of idiots. Much bigger gang to keep track of these days. [I strongly urge you to check out Brusatte’s U of Edinburgh lecture, linked in EXTRA STUFF, for some very decisively feathered other members of the T. rex family. Fluffy indeed!] [image] Steve Brusatte - looking for Triassic vertebrate footprints in a quarry in Poland – image from palaeocast.com (Sorry, dear. I could have sworn I dropped the engagement ring right here!) Dinosaurs had a pretty long reign as kings/queens of the hill, but they had to begin sometime. Once upon a time all the land was one, linked from north to south, called Pangea. Monster monsoons raked much of the Earth, blistering heat, deserts, jungles, except of course at the poles, which were relatively balmy. This time, from about 300 to about 250 million years ago (mya) is called The Permian Period. Then, boys and girls, the earth split a seam. All that hot material that is constantly coursing through the earth found a way out and spewed forth. Not a good time to be an earthling. It is referred to as The Permian Extinction. 90% of all life was wiped out, by lava flows, fire, global warming, airborne particles blocking the sun, and thus a dramatic, if temporary end to photosynthesis, which killed off most plant life. And the ensuing acidification of water did seriously unpleasant things to aqueous life. But, after things settled down again, which took a while, a new class of critters came to dominate, dinosaurs. Yay! [image] From Pangea to now – image from LiveScience.com The Permian period was followed by the Triassic, from 250 to 200 mya, fifty million years of nature gone wild (I have that videotape in the attic, I think). Over the course of the Triassic, things on the land started to look like the world we know today. But the continents would have to drift for many millions of years yet before they would resemble our current landmass configuration. The first true dinos showed up around 230 to 240 mya. But they did not have the planet to themselves. There were reptiles, fish, birds, insects, even mammals, small ones, around at the time. [image] Metoposaurus, Kermit’s g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-grandma, was an amphibian the size of a Buick, with a coffee-table-sized head, and, unlike those little critters you had to work with in bio lab, these pups had hundreds of very sharp teeth. It hung out by water’s edge to capture anything straying too close. Mostly fish, but watch your ankles. There is interesting material in here about what came before the dinosaurs, (dinosauromorphs, yes, really) and where the line is drawn (arbitrarily) between dino and pre-dino. You, here, you, over there. Like Middle East borders. Brusatte walks us through the timeline of the dinos, from conditions being established at the end of the Permian, their arrival in the Triassic, to their sudden farewell at the end of the Cretaceous. Permian, Triassic, Jurassic, Cretaceous. Go ahead, repeat that a few times. It’s the sequence of periods Brusatte covers here. The first three come in at around 50 million years each, with the Cretaceous hanging on for about 80. The last three, taken together, comprise what is known as the Mesozoic Era, aka The Age of the Dinosaurs. (Which makes no sense to me. Shouldn’t it be The Era of the Dinosaurs? Or the Mesozoic Age? It’s so confusing.) He shows what changed geologically, and how the changes allowed this or that lifeform to arise. (often by wiping out the competition). He also takes us along with him to dig sites around the planet, Scotland, Portugal, Poland, The American Southwest, South America, China, and more, and introduces us to some of the foremost scientists in the field. The characters in Brusatte’s tale are not all of the ancient sort. He populates each chapter with modern specimens notable for their diversity and sometimes colorful plumage. While they may all be brilliant scientists, many could easily be classified as Anates Impar. It would not be a huge stretch to imagine them populating a nerdish Cantina scene. Here are Brusatte’s description of three of them. There are many more. You can spot Thomas Carr, now a professor at Wisconsin’s Carthage College, from a mile away. He has the fashion sense of a 1970s preacher and some of the mannerisms of Sheldon Cooper from The Big Bang Theory. Thomas always wears black velvet suits, usually with a black or dark red shirt underneath. He has long bushy sideburns and a mop of light hair. A silver skull ring adorns his hand. He’s easily consumed by things and has a long-running obsession with absinthe and the Doors. That and tyrannosaurs.Brusatte also shamelessly namedrops every A-list paleontologist he has encountered. Of course, it sounds like those encounters were substantial, so I guess it’s ok, but… I was reminded a bit of Bill Clinton’s memoir, in which it seemed that every person he mentioned had either changed his life or was a close personal friend. In a way, the book constitutes a this-is-your-life look at Brusatte’s paleontology career (boy meets bone?), with appearances by many of the people he had learned from or worked with. (they are legion) In addition to the studies mentioned in the book, he is the author of a widely taught textbook, Dinosaur Paleobiology. He is the paleo expert in residence on Walking with Dinosaurs (so much better than the sequel, Fleeing from Dinosaurs) on the BBC. One of the things that has allowed modern paleontologists to make and continue to make ground-breaking discoveries about Earth’s former tenants is the major advance in technology at their disposal. It’s a lot easier, for example, to see inside a fossilized skull to measure the size and shape of internal cavities with the help of a CT scanner than it was before they were available. [image] A new dinosaur, feathered, winged Zhenyuanlong from China - image from The Conversation You will learn some fascinating new information about dinos, some of it startling. This includes how sauropods managed those looooooong necks, why wild diversification happened when it did, why it took dinosaurs as long as it did to get large and take over. There is a fascinating bit on how some dinosaurs can pack an extra punch by getting air while they breathe in and out, surprising intel on how some of the critters you thought were dinosaurs aren’t, and directions on where you can look to see actual living dinosaurs today. He punctures some of the notions from the Jurassic Park movies. If trapped by a T-Rex, for instance, do not remain motionless. Rex has binocular vision and can see you perfectly well, whether you are sitting down in a port-o-san or hiding in or under a vehicle. Wave buh-bye. [image] If you do not know what this is from you need to get out more Speaking of un-fond farewells, Brusatte take us up to and through the biggest bang of them all, on Earth anyway, 66 mya. His description of the horror that marked the end of the dinosaurs is graphic, and disturbing. It was the worst day in the history of our planet. A few hours of unimaginable violence that undid more than 150 million years of evolution and set life on a new course. T. rex was there to see it.[image] Look, up in the sky. It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s…Oh, shit Artwork by Donald E. Davis Brusatte has written an eminently readable pop-science history of the dinosaurs, with accessible info on geology, biology, and the work of paleontologists, who are laboring tirelessly (and maybe obsessively) to find out the answers to questions that are as old as humanity’s awareness of the erstwhile inhabitants of our planet. This is one of those books that should be in every household. You do not need to be a scientist to get a lot out of it. The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs, bubbling with the enthusiasm of its author, will be an enjoyable and enlightening read for homo sapiens of all ages from pre-teen through fossil. Learning more about Earth’s illustrious, impressive, sometimes terrifying, and sometimes adorable former tenants never gets old. Really, who doesn’t love dinosaurs? Review posted – April 13, 2018 Publication date – April 24, 2018 December 2018 - Dinosaurs may no longer rule the earth, but The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs rules the 2018 Goodreads Choice Award for Science. Reached for comment, a spokesman for Mr. Brusatte offered the following response. =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the author’s personal and Twitter pages Episode 37 of Palaeocast features Steve talking about Therapods and Birds - December 1, 2014 – 44:00 A presentation by Brusatte, who is a wonderful speaker, on Tyrannosaur Discoveries, at the U of Edinburgh – Watch this, really. Great stuff. [image] In the above, Brusatte talks about feathered dinos, among other things. Meet Yutyrannus huali, (artist’s interpretation) a feathered tyrannosaur from China (but you can call him Fluffy) – image from The Conversation A fun article from the BBC - Legendary dinosaurs that we all imagine completely wrong - By Josh Gabbatiss - 3/21/16 NY Times – April 4, 2018 - Brusatte is keeping busy, publishing, with his team, a new study about the presence of dinos in Scotland, specifically in the Isle of Skye. In Footprints on Scotland’s Isle of Skye, Signs of a Dinosaur Playground - by Nicholas St. Fleur [image] This image of a sauropod print accompanied the above article – from the University of Edinburgh An interesting lecture (33 minutes) on how paleontologists research dinosaurian social behavior and what they have found - Social Behaviour in Dinosaurs - with David Hone Hone's delivery has a sing-song rhythm that can be a bit soporific, but the content is fascinating. Of particular interest is the basis for juvenile clustering. [image] This cluster of dinosaur egg fossils, on display at the Tianyu Museum, dates back 70 million years to the late Cretaceous era - shot by Stefen Chow - text and image from above article It reminds me of that scene in the first Alien film when they discover the nesting site [image] [image] [image] [image] ==========In the summer of 2019 GR reduced the allowable review size by 25%, from 20,000 to 15,000 characters. In order to accommodate the text beyond that I moved it to the comments section directly below. [image] But then in 2021, GR opted to ban the use of external links in Comments. [image] So I had to chop off bits here, which hurts. However, you can see the entire review, including the links deleted here, and the links in Comment #2 below, on my site Coot’s Reviews. Stop by and say Hi! ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Apr 10, 2018
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Apr 10, 2018
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Hardcover
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0345816773
| 9780345816771
| 0345816773
| 3.88
| 5,625
| Jan 30, 2018
| Jan 30, 2018
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it was amazing
| The end of the road was always just out of sight. Cracked asphalt deepened into night beyond the reach of our headlamps, the thin beams swallowed The end of the road was always just out of sight. Cracked asphalt deepened into night beyond the reach of our headlamps, the thin beams swallowed by the blackness that receded before us no matter how fast we biked. Light was a kind of pavement thrown down in front of our wheels, and the road went on and on. If you ever reach the end, I remember thinking, I’ll fly off the rim of the world. I pedaled harder.Some lights shine brighter. The sky is full of stars, all with their distinct glow, color, and twinkle. But there can be no denying that, as breathtaking as are all the lights we can see after sunset, some call your attention at least a bit more. There are some on which you fixate. Kate Harris is one of those. She burns radiantly with obvious intellectual brilliance, which combines with a broad knowledge of science and humanities, glows with an impressive poetic gift for descriptive language, and is possessed of an incredible store of determination. [image] Lands of Lost Borders is Kate Harris’s telling of a bike trip she took with her from-pre-teen-years bff Melissa Yule. Nothing much, really, just a leisurely jaunt across the Silk Road. Be home in time for dinner, dear. Ten months and ten thousand biking kilometers later, they were. Actually, the journey was broken up into two trips, (so, back in time for lunch?) and took over a year in total. This book focuses on the longer chunk of their ride. I wanted to bike the Silk Road as an extension of my thesis at Oxford: to study how borders make and break what is wild in the world, from mountain ranges to people’s minds, and how science, or more specifically wilderness conservation, might bridge those divides.There is drive and then there is DRIVE!!! Most of us have it in modest quantities, sometimes in spikes, sometimes it barely registers. Mine has been of the spike sort. Finding, on occasion, a target, something that fills or I thought would fill a need, I found the wherewithal to make it happen. One, when I was still a teen, was tracking down a young lass I had seen at a frat party. Another was finding a study abroad program when I was tending to a broken heart, and was looking to heal somewhere far away, a third was plotting a cross country trip in an old Postal truck with a small group of peers. Not exactly riding the Silk Road, but maybe a small taste of the joys to be had when what has been dreamt of crosses the border into reality. Of course, once across that frontier, the new land in which one finds oneself may or may not be what one had imagined. But getting from here to there, setting and accomplishing a goal is a glorious experience. One that I expect all of us have had, to one degree or another. And hopefully one that we all nurture and renew at least somewhat through the course of our lives. There are some people, however, who set their sights slightly higher, sometimes beyond the bell curve, outside the box, off the beaten path. [image] Happiness is a red Hilleberg tent pitched among snowy mountains - Image from Harris’s FB pix The higher we climbed onto the Tibetan Plateau, the better I could breathe. I felt a strange lightness in my legs, an elation of sorts. Each revolution of the pedals took me closer to the stars than I’d ever propelled myself, not that I could see them by day, when the sky was blue and changeless but for a late-morning drift of clouds. The shadows they cast dappled the slopes of mountains like the bottom of a clear stream, so that climbing the pass felt like swimming up towards the surface of something, a threshold or a change of state. Earth to sky, China to Tibet.Harris writes of her early upbringing, hanging with her brothers, moving several times, particularly enjoying remote places. It did not take long for her to set her sights beyond the horizon, well, beyond the planet, actually. She had decided as a teen that she wanted to go to Mars, under the impression that all of her home planet had already been pretty much explored. She gained some notice from the Mars Society after she sent a letter to dozens of world leaders urging them to support a manned (womaned?) mission to the Red Planet. She went on a few Outward Bound adventures, and translated her particular gift for grant writing into third-party funding for projects of various sorts across the world. Toss in an early passion for biology as well. [image] Melissa Yule and Kate Harris - image from Explore-mag.com Harris and Yule had been teaming up for sundry adventures since they were classmates as pre-teens. Science fair projects eventually gave way to other pursuits. They ran in the NYC marathon, on a whim, according to their bios in CyclingSilk.com. Who does that? These two, apparently. They also biked across the USA in 2005 and rode bikes across Tibet and Xinjiang in 2006. (the earlier piece of the Silk Road trip.) I guess they were just getting warmed up. In 2011, three Masters degrees between them later, Harris’s from Oxford and MIT, they combined their endurance-athlete inclinations, a permanent desire for adventure, and an interest in protecting imperiled landscapes and ways of life to try to ride the entire Silk Road, or at least as much as was possible, beyond what they had already ridden. Some borders are real, though, defended by people with guns, and require one to set off in an unplanned direction. So, there were interludes that had them on trucks, buses, trains, and planes. Longing on a large scale,” says novelist Don DeLillo, “is what makes history.” And longing on a smaller scale is what sends explorers into the unknown, where the first thing they do, typically, is draw a map.There are passages throughout the book on nature conservation, and the irrelevance of political borders to biological realities, but I got the feeling that this was far secondary to the ecstasy of adventuring. It seemed to me that Kate’s prodigious talent at writing grant applications, and no doubt Mel’s as well, had secured necessary funding (a $10K grant, plus considerable other support) for their odyssey, but reporting on conservation along the ride, while constituting the labor required to justify the grant, was something less than a passion. ( I was smitten with wildness, and only incidentally with science.) Of course, it could be that Harris and Yule’s reports back to their sponsors on the more scientific details of the pair’s extended field trip was the channel for most of that material. This book focuses on the adventure of exploration and, remaining true to the title, a consideration of borders, literal and figurative. [image] From Harris’s Facebook pages The more I learned about the South Caucasus, with its closed borders and warring enclaves, the more the place seemed like a playground game of capture-the-flag turned vicious, all in the dubious name of nationalism. And yet political fortunes, while sometimes solid as brick, are finally only as strong as shared belief.Harris provides spot-by-spot descriptions of the places through which they travel. She notes the sorts of things you would expect, the landscape, the architecture, the weather, the physical conditions of the area, the traffic, the colors and textures, the friendliness (or not) of the locals and the pair’s interactions with them. The history of the places they traverse comes in for a bit of a look. The origins of the word “Tibet,” for example, a consideration of whether Marco Polo actually traveled as far as he claimed, and disappointment that his motivation was solely mercantile and not exploratory. One source of inspiration was an intrepid female explorer from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Fanny Bullock Workman, a mountaineer and explorer also fond of the bicycle. this particular stretch of salt and wind, nearly uninhabited and widely dismissed as a wasteland, is one of the most contested territories in Asia. Tibetan by cultural heritage, Indian by treaty claim, and Chinese by possession, the Aksai Chin is caught in this territorial tug-of-war owing to its strategic location between nations. It all began when China furtively build a road across it in 1957, the very dirt track we were on, roping like a slow-burning fuse for more than 1,600 kilometres over the emptiness of the plateau. India only clued in to Highway 219’s existence half a decade later, and their discovery detonated a war over the borderland.[image] image from NatureNeedsHalf.org She fills us in on some of the logistical challenges involved, the hurdles to be jumped in getting the correct papers to cross from here to there, the difficulty of communicating when there is no common language, the struggle to find food, water and shelter, replacements for lost or broken pieces of this or that. One surprise was the absence of any reports of serious sexual predation, although she does report on the need to move quickly at times to evade potential unpleasantness. There are several reports of wonderful, warm experiences, as locals take the pair under their wings for a meal and a warm place to sleep. They are even joined for a time by a stray dog, and are swarmed by a herd of Tibetan antelope. Anyone can recognize wildness on the Tibetan Plateau; the challenge is perceiving it in a roadside picnic area in Azerbaijan.Harris’s telling is not just the travelogue of seeing this, then that, but includes ongoing philosophical meanderings, about her own experiences and the wider human variety, about not only the political borders with which people must contend, but personal edges, where they begin and end, or don’t. Her intellectual explorations are bolstered by a rich trove of quotes from literary classics, both prose and poetry, and from some of the authors you would expect, like Thoreau and Muir, Wallace, Darwin, and Carl Sagan. But finally, it is Harris’s gift for language that elevates this book to Himalayan heights. Combining intellectual heft with an inquiring mind is amazing enough, but to be able to communicate both the inner and outer journeys with such sensitivity and beauty is a rare accomplishment indeed. After being on an achievement bender most of my life, the prospect of withdrawal, of doing anything without external approval, or better yet acclamation, kept me obediently between the lines I couldn’t even recognize as lines. Isn’t that the final, most forceful triumph of borders? They make us accept as real and substantial what we can’t actually see?[image] image from NatureNeedsHalf.org I would not want you get through this review without at least a few roadblocks. I really wanted for each chapter to include a map of the travels contained therein. There is a map provide at the beginning, but chapter-by-chapter additions would have been most welcome. I would have liked a bit more science in the book, even if it added a fair number of pages to the total. A quibble. I wonder, though, if Harris was aware of the issues faced by Fanny Bullock Workman, who also wrote of her travels, having greater popular success with work that focused more on the travel than the scientific findings. Whether buttressed with dirt roads or red tape, barbed wire or bribes, the various walls of the world have one aspect in common: they all posture as righteous and necessary parts of the landscape.This is not your summer trip to Europe. You will not be familiar with most of the places these two riders visit. The larger entities, sure, country names, some mountain ranges, but most of the local place names will be unfamiliar. Part of the fun of reading this book is that it sends you off on a journey of discovery of your own, looking up this town, that river, or an unheard-of plain or valley. In this, the book very much succeeds in sparking a bit of the exploratory impulse in most readers. You may or may not want to schedule a trip to many of the places she notes, but you will definitely want to learn more about them. The true risks of travel are disappointment and transformation: the fear you’ll be the same person when you go home, and the fear you won’t. Then there’s the fear, particularly acute on roads in India, that you won’t make it home at all.[image] image from Explore Magazine – shot by Kate Harris It may be grueling, surprising, filled with up and downs, demoralizing, exhilarating, exciting, stunningly beautiful, and rich with landscape, exterior and interior. Lands of Lost Borders may not wear out your arms or legs, your back, or any other muscle group, (ok, maybe the muscles that control your eyes) but it will stimulate your mind, lift up your spirit, and stimulate your need to pedal through darkness into knowing. Lands of Lost Borders is a stunning literary memoir you will not soon forget. Exploration, more than anything, is like falling in love: the experience feels singular, unprecedented, and revolutionary, despite the fact that others have been there before. No one can fall in love for you, just as no one can bike the Silk Road or walk on the moon for you. The most powerful experiences aren’t amenable to maps. Review posted – April 6, 2018 Publication date – August 21, 2018 =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the author’s personal, Twitter and FB pages Melissa Yule’s Twitter page. Yule holds a Master’s degree in International Development from the University of Guelph. Her interests include community development and environmental science. Here is her profile on the CyclingSilk.com site. There is a lot of information available at Cycling Silk. I strongly advise you to check out the site. A brief (11:43) video of their trip In case you missed the link in the body of the review, it is worth checking out Fanny Bullock Workman, one of Harris’s heroes. The Golden Record – it was sent on the Voyager mission to let far-away civilizations know we are here. Harris talks about it a fair bit at one point in the book [image] What’s on it - image from Wiki The Harper Book Queen included a bit on this book in her TBR Tuesdays FB live broadcast from 8/21/18 - at 11:47 Interviews -----The Globe and Mail - In a tiny B.C. cabin, Kate Harris penned tales of travel along the Silk Road - by Marsha Lederman - 2/15/18 -----Explore Magazine - The Way of the Wolf: Lands of Lost Borders, With Author Kate Harris What was the hardest part of the journey?[image] The Harris Mansion - image from the Globe and Mail article 400 sq ft of paradise in Atlin, B.C. suits the author just fine. Not surprising that she is comfy in what most of us might consider roughing-it quarters. She is a descendant of William Clark, of Lewis and Clark fame. Sorry, I could not help it. There were just so many quotes from the book that I wanted to use. But it was not possible to fit them all in. So off we go to EXTRA EXTRA STUFF right below here in Comment #1 ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Mar 19, 2018
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Mar 29, 2018
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Mar 29, 2018
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Hardcover
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0525521194
| 9780525521198
| 0525521194
| 3.60
| 45,271
| May 08, 2018
| May 08, 2018
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it was amazing
| In 1945 our parents went away and left us in the care of two men who may have been criminals.When we are young we rely on the people who surround In 1945 our parents went away and left us in the care of two men who may have been criminals.When we are young we rely on the people who surround us to introduce us to the world, to explain the many elements of life that can be so confusing, overwhelming, or simply opaque to young eyes. Some of this knowledge can only come from first-hand experience, but it helps to have adults at hand, of a trustworthy sort, who can help us along the road of becoming. Nathaniel (aka Stitch) is fourteen. His sister, Rachel, (aka Wren) is sixteen when their parents depart for Singapore on mysterious government assignments after the war, leaving them in the care of the boarder they call “The Moth,” and a fluid cast of what can only be considered dodgy characters, reminiscent of Caravaggio from The English Patient, who was both a criminal and a spy. Questionable they may be, at first glance anyway, but they are a remarkably colorful lot. One of my favorites was one Norman Marshall, aka The Pimlico Darter, aka The Darter, a fellow with a taste for cheating at dog-race betting and transporting materials uncertain, nicely hidden in boxes, from one place to another under cover of night. All very hush-hush, and possibly criminal. There are plenty of other lively supporting characters who stroll, dash, or creep across the pages. The house felt more like a night zoo, with moles and jackdaws and shambling beasts who happened to be chess players, a gardener, a possible greyhound thief, a slow- moving opera singer.It is among these remarkable personalities that Nat and Rachel are introduced to the realities of a world that exists largely in shadows, the dim light redolent of wartime London, or warlight of the title. The first part of the story, Nat and Rachel’s adolescence, takes place in the immediate post-war period. The curtain between war and post-war being sometimes permeable, they are affected by events of a continuing shadow engagement, in which war-time battle driven by armored divisions, fleets of ships, and waves of aircraft was replaced by the dimly-lit conflict of combatants in street clothes, engaged in theatres where stealth and treachery defined the landscape. We passed industrial buildings, their lights muted, faint as stars, as if we were in a time capsule of the war years when blackouts and curfews had been in effect, when there was just warlight and only blind barges were allowed to move along this stretch of river.The focus is primarily on Nathaniel, with Rachel relegated to activities that are mostly reported rather seen first-hand. There is a strong element of coming of age here for Nat, whose experiences in the world of work, whether legal or not, and adventures with the opposite sex expose him to a broader vision of the world. With both parents away, he must look to the adults at hand for role models. It would help if he actually knew what they were really on about. [image] Michael Ondaatje - image from his FB pages Further on, we meet him in his late twenties, in a surprising profession, focused on learning the full truth of his mother’s involvement in the war, and with related tasks after. …There’s a photograph I have of my mother in which her features are barely revealed. I recognize her from just her stance, some gesture in her limbs, even though it was taken before I was born… I found it years later in the spare bedroom among the few remnants she had decided not to throw away. I have it with me still. This almost anonymous person, balanced awkwardly, holding on to her own safety. Already incognito.Nat’s search for the truth of his mother, Rose’s, life is, in a way, a stand-in for seeking the truth of his own. Telemachus wanting to learn of his mother’s odyssey. While the primary focus of the book is on Nathaniel, Rose comes in for the next-most attention. Her history is fascinating, and a delight to read. There are many echoes here of the author’s prior work. (I have read several, but not all of his earlier six novels) As he has done before, Ondaatje takes us into war from a place of later reflection through older, wiser eyes, which may remind readers of Anil recalling ethnic slaughter in Sri Lanka in Anil’s Ghost, or the many war scenes in The English Patient. You return to that earlier time armed with the present, and no matter how dark that world was, you do not leave it unlit. You take your adult self with you. It is not to be a reliving, but a rewitnessing.In our look-back, Rose and others engage in mortally perilous missions. Some do battle on the homefront as well, although no less dangerously. Scarring is another feature Ondaatje returns to. The English Patient was surely a high point in the literature of skin miseries. But the experience that scarring suggests shows up here as well. An immigrant with whom Nat works as a teen sports noticeable facial scarring. A co-worker of his mother has less than beautiful hands from his scaling interest. Another has abdominal marks that were clearly nearly mortal and Rose has a decent dose of skin-told-tales as well. He also sustains the motif of almost-darkness in looking back at this time, as well as in the characters’ initial experience of it. There are times these years later, as I write all this down, when I feel as if I do so by candlelight.The darkness extends to identification as well, given how many of the characters are known by their colorful noms du guerre rather than by what might appear on their birth certificates. There are bits of payload you will appreciate here, information about the real world that appears in the story, some information on greyhounds and dog-racing, and covert programs to cope with domestic security risks. You will get a feel for life in London during the aftermath of war, and also in The Saints, an area of England new to me. You will pick up a bit on the range of bird whistle signals that might be used by a secretive Thames-borne barge, and most surprisingly learn a bit about stegophily. (you have to click, at least, to learn that one.) Ondaatje mentions a program of post-war mopping up, called The Silent Correction. I do not know if it refers to something real or imagined. My googling yielded nothing informative, but it does seem like the sort of thing that would have existed. An abbey that is put to another purpose is a fun-fact. An interesting element is the acquisition of skills that might not be so readily acquired during peacetime. A bee-keeper, for example, has a questionable talent for anaesthetics gained during the Italian campaign. A veterinarian is a skilled lock-picker. Ondaatje plants seeds early in the tale that grow to mighty oaks by the end. There is a large twist, serving to remind how what has happened can define what is and direct what can be. We are foolish as teenagers. We say wrong things, do not know how to be modest, or less shy. We judge easily. But the only hope given us, although only in retrospect, is that we change. We learn, we evolve. What I am now was formed by whatever happened to me then, not by what I have achieved, but by how I got here. But who did I hurt to get here? Who guided me to something better? Or accepted the few small things I was competent at? Who taught me to laugh as I lied?...But above all, most of all, how much damage did I do?As in most good novels, there are Easter-egg clues to the novelist’s craft. a high perspective, as from a belfry or cloister roof, allows you to see over walls into usually hidden distances, as if into other lives and countries, to discover what might be occurring there, a lateral awareness allowed by height.This nicely reflects the author’s on-high ability to see past windows into the secrets of his/her characters’ lives. And another nugget. Who made me move from just an interest in “characters” to what they would do to others?And just in case you were not aware, Ondaatje’s writing is poetical, exquisite, and moving. There are many passages in Warlight that call you to return, mull, and savor. A writer who is not fond of linear narrative, he jumps about without much warning, but attentive readers should have little difficulty knowing when they are in the narrative. While considerable attention is paid to the business of international intrigue, that seems more to provide a palette against which the characters can be displayed. Warlight may be about the dim light of history, secrecy, mystery, and uncertainty, but it glows with the luminescence of a master story-teller at the peak of his power. Whether you read by the glow of a low-wattage bulb or under the blaze of the noonday sun, the sparkle will shine through. I found Nat’s story, as well as his mother’s, compelling. Nat’s yearning to cast light on his family’s secrets will lead you along, teach you a thing or two, tug on your emotions, and leave you dazzled. Ondaatje’s portrait of coming of age during dire times, and the perils and prices of desperate measures, will keep you turning pages, whatever the candle-power at your disposal. The challenge of making moral decisions under dangerous and murky conditions that is presented here should, nonetheless, leave you with a simple, unambiguous, choice. Warlight is such a brilliant piece of work that you might need shades. Review first posted – May 4, 2018 Publication – May 8, 2018 I received the book from the publisher's First To Read program in return for an honest review. I will post the dishonest review elsewhere. [image] [image] [image] [image] =============================EXTRA STUFF Michael Ondaatje on FB The Guardian - MO reading an essay he wrote while staying in Conrad’s boat in London Guardian Artangel books podcast: Michael Ondaatje June 4, 2007 – The New Yorker - The Aesthete: The novel and Michael Ondaatje by Louis Menand – a fascinating analysis of MO’s work - He is not telling stories; he is using the elements of storytelling to gesture in the direction of a constellation of moods, themes, and images. He is creating the literary equivalent of a Cornell box or a rock garden or a floral arrangement.July 18, 2018 - Warlight is long-listed for the 2018 Man Booker Award for Fiction ...more |
Notes are private!
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Mar 24, 2018
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Apr 05, 2018
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Mar 23, 2018
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1250158060
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| Jan 05, 2018
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it was amazing
| MUELLER IS COMING! MUELLER IS COMING!Michael Wolff has given us a drone’s (dragon’s?) eye view of the competing centers vying to be the power behind the throne, with some looking, in the longer term, at carving paths for their own succession to the highest position in the realm. There is a mad king who needs to be handled. Centers of power arise, morph, wage battles both silent and overt, succeed and fail, rise, die, and sometimes rise again. What we see in Michael Wolff’s Fire and The juicy bits of this book have been everywhere for the last few weeks. It is highly quotable, and the publisher, Holt, the author, their PR people, and the major news outlets have been flooding the zone. Whether on-line or in print, over airwaves on TV or radio, through cable, and probably via the deep-state-news (WDSN?) that beams directly into peoples’ minds, all media have been all agog with the many looks at this elephant to which they have been privy. With so much blanket coverage coming at you, one might be forgiven for wondering whether you first saw the item you just read in the book, or came across it somewhere else. It is a little bit unnerving. I will spare you the further confusion of adding all those bits here. I really have to put some in, though. I mean you know them already, right? How many synonyms can you find for idiot? Fire and Fury is the biggest book of the moment, the Wall Street Journal reporting that it had sold a million copies as of Monday, January 8, 2018, a day earlier than its scheduled release. Remains to be seen, of course, with a steady stream of books on Trump being published, how long this frenzy will persist. But the last time I was aware of people standing on line for hours to get a book, it included the words Harry and Potter. This book, in the words of our former vice president, is a big fucking deal. [image] Michael Wolff - image from Mediaite.com The bottom line of Fire and Fury is that it presents Donald Trump as unfit to serve as president, based not on the dark view and negative press of his opposition, but the been-there-OMG-did-you-see-that experience of his own staff and supporters. Almost all the professionals who were now set to join him were coming face to face with the fact that it appeared he knew nothing. There was simply no subject, other than perhaps building construction, that he had substantially mastered.Wolff uses named and unnamed sources. It seems clear that his primary go-to was one Steve Bannon, a weaver of webs, a bomb-thrower, a snake in the grass, a back-stabber, a manipulator, a white supremacist, a gifted media manipulator, and a pretty bright and articulate, if sartorially challenged guy. One might be tempted to dismiss Wolff’s book based on this reliance. Don’t. There are plenty of other sources feeding the narrative. The question is whether the image Wolff generates by making a composite of the incoming bits makes sense. Is it plausible? Is it correct? Having seen Wolff interviewed on multiple news and entertainment shows, and attending to the back-and-forths between him and knowledgeable news people, it seems eminently clear that he got it right. There are probably some details that err a bit here and there. Maybe this person was not at that meeting, or a date may be off. I expect that the only inaccuracies to be found here will be of that sort. Niggling, beside the point. And blown way out of proportion by those with an interest in distracting you from the core content of the book. That the president attempted to stop its publication should tell you something. What was, to many of the people who knew Trump well, much more confounding was that he had managed to win this election, and arrive at this ultimate accomplishment, wholly lacking what in some obvious sense must be the main requirement of the job, what neuroscientists would call executive function. He had somehow won the race for president, but his brain seemed incapable of performing what would be essential tasks in his new job. He had no ability to plan and organize and pay attention and switch focus; he had never been able to tailor his behavior to what the goals at hand reasonably required. On the most basic level, he simply could not link cause and effect.Michael Wolff is a veteran author and journalist, with seven prior books to his credit. He has been nominated for the National Magazine Award three times, and accused by people he has written about of fabricating. The absence of actual lawsuits against him suggests that complaints were less than firmly grounded. He is a serious writer and should be taken seriously. It is a bit mind-boggling the access he had to the actual White House, but he lays it out. He hung out in the WH, with a huge degree of access and was able to get input from the people working or passing through there, for months. Was the administration insane for allowing this? You betcha. But they did, another sign of their unpreparedness. Inauguration day offered a look at what was to come. Much of the sixteen-minute speech was part of Bannon’s daily joie de guerre patter—his take-back-the-country America-first, carnage-everywhere vision for the country. But it actually became darker and more forceful when filtered through Trump’s disappointment and delivered with his golf face. The administration purposely began on a tone of menace—a Bannon-driven message to the other side that the country was about to undergo profound change. Trump’s wounded feelings—his sense of being shunned and unloved on the very day he became president—helped send that message. When he came off the podium after delivering his address, he kept repeating, “Nobody will forget this speech.”As noted above, the geography through which Wolff’s tale travels is one of sundry kingdoms. I could not help but imagine the opening credits of Game of Thrones as we approach each power center, the models for each of the city-states animating, offering moving, 3-D representations of each kingdom’s imagery and motifs. The three (sadly, not seven) are the alt-right of Bannon and his allies (clearly White Walkers), the mainstream GOP crowd epitomized by Reince Preibus, and the family wing, considered by Bannon to be of a liberal-democratic bent, in the person of Jared Kushner and the president’s daughter, Ivanka Trump, aka Jarvanka. (Cersei and Jamie?). [image] Swamp Thing as Joffrey Baratheon- image from DesignCrowd.com, by way of Huff-Po The forward motion of the story is the events of Trump’s campaign, but mostly presidency up to October, 2017. I know, I know. One of the problems with political books is that they can often be outdated in fairly short order. The several months between October and the book’s publication is a lifetime in Trump years. It is impressive, given the daily churning of personnel and events in the DC universe (not the multiverse) these days that any book on Trumplandia still has relevance by the time ink on paper makes its way to readers. And yet, the issues raised here, the main issue, is momentous, and sticks. Wolff has offered a host of quotes from his sources, many named, that question Swamp Thing’s competence, not just to function as president, but to function as a human being. His own staff frequently mention the applicability of the 25th amendment (although in the real world that is a total fantasy) and the likelihood of impeachment. The sound of Robert Mueller’s approaching steps echoes throughout the work, clearly feeding Trump’s paranoia about being treated unfairly, and boosting his fear of being found out, labeled a squatter or deadbeat, and evicted. In most White Houses, policy and action flow down, with staff trying to implement what the president wants—or, at the very least, what the chief of staff says the president wants. In the Trump White House, policy making, from the very first instance of Bannon’s immigration EO, [executive order] flowed up. It was a process of suggesting, in throw-it-against-the-wall style, what the president might want, and hoping he might then think that he had thought of this himself (a result that was often helped along with the suggestion that he had in fact already had the thought).Wolff, with his title, and content, offers a wonderful Game of Thrones image. But there are plenty more that could easily apply. The Producers is one that he mentions, a particularly apt metaphor, given that it seemed clear to many of us, even during the campaign, that Trump, like Bialystock and Bloom, got into the presidential race for the money, and never really intended to win. This is confirmed in the book. Personally, I think Max Bialystock would have made a better president. Another scenario that Wolff mentions is the relationship of Thomas Cromwell to Henry VIII, wonderfully portrayed in the novel Wolf Hall (no relation), with Steve Bannon in the Cromwell role and you-know-who as the guy who made such a gigantic mess, because he simply had to have things his way. One could also consider House of Cards (the original), with all the plotting, back-stabbing, and hunger for power that made that series such fun to watch, although, after Bannon as Francis Urquart, the personnel parallels fade a bit. Alice in Wonderland gives us Trump as the single-minded Queen of Hearts. The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight might offer an image of ineptitude, if one ignores the fact that Trump has overseen the greatest looting by criminals of the national treasury in the nation’s history. For all his intellectual challenges Swamp Thing is a larger than life character with very little core, a made-for-Television president. [image] Swamp Thing and Bannon as Henry VIII and T. Cromwell - image from NY Magazine One of the things I most enjoyed was Wolff’s take on The Mooch. Anthony Scaramucci is the sort of Damon Runyon hanger-on one might expect to see in Guys and Dolls, or maybe a Batman flick, all puffery and attitude smeared over a core of ignorance, inflated by cartoonishly excessive self-confidence and corruption. From the description in Fire and Fury, it is not hard to imagine him in a too-wide pin-striped suit, shoulder-padded, sporting excessive pancake makeup, swinging a pocket watch from a chain, and laughing uncontrollably as he kicks some poor shmo that his minions are holding down for him, because he was a few dollars short on his protection payment. There are some things missing from the book, of course. There is not the sort of detailed biographical material better found in an actual biography. Forget seeing an autobiography. Anything Trump truly wrote would probably be close to an actual choose-your-own-adventure kid book, given his inability to remain focused for more than a few minutes. There is not a lot about serious international threats, with one exception. In a press conference at his Bedminster, NJ property: “His staff had not prepared him for this, but, in apparent relief that he could digress from the opioid discussion, as well as sudden satisfaction at the opportunity to address this nagging problem, he ventured out, in language that he’d repeated often in private—as he repeated everything often—to the precipice of an international crisis.Thus an increased concern about the danger of someone implementing the launch codes in a fit of pique or confusion. A fair bit of that intercontinental exchange of verbal ordnance occurred after the book was written, most notably the “My Button is bigger than your Button” lunacy. There is little discussion, although it gets a mention, of the potential implications of Trump’s autocratic leanings. The telling of the tale is much more about what has already happened as opposed to what might. It was during Trump’s early intelligence briefings, held soon after he captured the nomination, that alarm signals first went off among his new campaign staff: he seemed to lack the ability to take in third-party information. Or maybe he lacked the interest; whichever, he seemed almost phobic about having formal demands on his attention. He stonewalled every written page and balked at every explanation. “He’s a guy who really hated school,” said Bannon. “And he’s not going to start liking it now.”This is not a book about policy. It is portrait of a White House as a theater of political warfare, a candidate who never really wanted or expected to be president and a president who is not only completely out of his depth, but who shows not only no capacity, but no interest in learning to swim. Even the people who work for him see him as unintelligent, narcissistic, incurious, and lazy. They even suggest he is losing his grip on reality, presuming he ever had one. It is certainly entertaining, the bits about Trump’s TV addiction, how he manages to cover his bald pate, and his pettiness about not wanting the cleaning staff to pick up his clothes from the floor. I mean, really, is he ashamed of being seen as a slob? Eating burgers in bed in front of the TV will probably gain him more support than criticism. I mean, even I can get on board with that, and I do not have a kind view of the man. But the more serious element is his mental fitness, and the danger this presents to us all. [image] image from Wolff’s Twitter feed, citing the Hollywood Reporter There is zero chance that the Republican Party will allow their sitting president, however damaged or corrupt he is, to be removed from office under the 25th Amendment. The best chance for his leaving office is for him to suffer a serious physical health crisis, which might force him to resign. As an older, overweight, out of shape man, this is not far-fetched. Even with a Democratically controlled Congress in January 2019, there is no guarantee that the Senate would come up with the sixty-seven votes needed to convict. The significance of this is that until Donald John Trump is removed from the presidency, by impeachment, ill-health, death, or being voted out of office in 2020, we are all at risk. Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury is an air-raid siren warning us all of peril, real and potential. (Wolff Hell?) It is must-read material for every American. When the GOP stands in the way of investigations into the administration, they are supporting a president who is unable to function at the needed level, a president who is uninterested in the details of governance, a president who is not in control of himself, a president who places not only himself, but the nation, and the entire world at risk. You need to know what they are protecting. It doesn’t take a stable genius to know that you should be afraid, very afraid. As Dubyah said, “That’s some weird shit.” Published – January 9, 2018 Review Posted – January 12, 2018 ==========In the summer of 2019 GR reduced the allowable review size by 25%, from 20,000 to 15,000 characters. Then in Summer 2021 they decreed that external links would not longer be allowed in comments, where I used to put the review overage. So I have included the entirety of the review, including EXTRA STUFF, on my site, Coot’s Reviews. Stop by and say Hi! [image] [image] [image] [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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Jan 07, 2018
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Jan 11, 2018
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Jan 10, 2018
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Hardcover
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1250074312
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| 4.01
| 2,600
| Jan 23, 2018
| Jan 23, 2018
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it was amazing
| If among you, one of your brothers should become poor, in any of your towns within your land that the Lord your God is giving you, you shall not harde If among you, one of your brothers should become poor, in any of your towns within your land that the Lord your God is giving you, you shall not harden your heart or shut your hand against your poor brother, but you shall open your hand to him and lend him sufficient for his need, whatever it may be … For the poor you will always have with you in the land. Therefore I command you, ‘You shall open wide your hand to your brother, to the needy and to the poor, in your land.’ - (Deuteronomy 15:7-11) The law, it its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread. -- Anatole FranceThe poorhouse. These days, it’s common parlance for extreme financial misfortune. Someone who has had a particularly bad fiscal spell could be said to be heading to the poorhouse. These days, we do not have literal, brick and mortar poorhouses. Those were usually fetid places, ill-maintained, offering meager shelter and food to the detritus of society, the poor, ill, elderly, and disabled, often requiring labor in return. These days, we have something new. America’s poor and working-class people have long been subject to invasive surveillance, midnight raids, and punitive public policy that increase the stigma and hardship of poverty. During the nineteenth century, they were quarantined in county poorhouses. During the twentieth century they were investigated by caseworkers, treated like criminals on trial. Today we have forged a digital poorhouse from databases, matched algorithms and statistical risk models. It promises to eclipse the reach and repercussions of everything that came before.The most famous poorhouse resident in literature is one Oliver Twist. In the novel of that name, Dickens intended to highlight the inhumanity of the Poor Law Act of 1834. The world of poverty he described was, while literarily thrilling, a horrifying exposé of man’s cruelty to man. Poorhouses found a home in the USA as well. The first poorhouse in the city of my current residence was established in 1863. In my erstwhile lifelong home, New York, an 1824 law directed the counties of the state to erect poorhouses. Residents could be required to do whatever work the superintendent demanded. Any resistance resulted in being kicked out. Among other sources for the poorhouse population, children younger than 15 caught begging could be legally remanded there until the person in charge of the poorhouse let them out. There were certainly poorhouses in NY earlier than that. The first poorhouse in the USA was in Boston, in 1662. [image] Virginia Eubanks - from her Twitter page Virginia Eubanks has been involved with economic justice movements for over twenty years. She is an associate Prof of Poli Sci at the SUNY Albany campus. Her writing about tech in social justice has appeared in The American Prospect, The Nation, Harper’s and Wired. She is a founding member of the Our Data Bodies project, which looks at how the gathering and use of digital info by government impacts our rights. In Automating Inequality, Eubanks offers a bit of history on the poorhouse, noting, with particular relevance for the operation of today’s prisons, and other bits of outsourcing of government welfare responsibilities, that privately run poorhouses led to the residents being particularly exploited and deprived of necessities in order to increase profits for the owners, not that the publicly run ones were any great shakes. Her central notion is that the physical poorhouse of the past has been replaced in the 21st century by a modern version. For all their high-tech polish, our modern systems of poverty management—automated decision-making, data mining, and predictive analytics—retain a remarkable kinship with the poorhouses of the past. Our new digital tools spring from punitive, moralistic views of poverty and create a system of high-tech containment and investigation that I call the digital poorhouse. The digital poorhouse deters the poor from accessing public resources; polices their labor, spending, sexuality, and parenting; tries to predict their future behavior; and punishes and criminalizes those who do not comply with its dictates. In the process, it creates ever-finer moral distinctions between the “deserving” and “undeserving” poor, categorizations that rationalize our national failure to care for one another.She takes two approaches. First is tracking the history of how the poor have been treated, noting the Dickensian era preference for punishing the poor overtly, by shunting them into miserable institutions, if providing any aid at all, then a revolutionary approach called Scientific Charity, which employed caseworkers applying the methodology of police work in examining the merits of a person’s application for aid, As Mary Richmond wrote in Social Diagnosis, her 1917 textbook on casework procedures, “the reliability of the evidence on which [caseworkers] base their decisions should be no less rigidly scrutinized than is that of legal evidence by opposing counsel.” Scientific charity treated the poor as criminal defendants by default.the reversal of reliance on private charity with the New Deal, the paring back of benefits in the 1970s, beginning the use of computer technology to exclude applicants, and sundry mechanisms being used today. The second is to offer case studies, on-site looks at three locations. Homelessness is the focus in Los Angeles, the outsourcing of welfare systems in Indiana, and child custody issues at the Allegheny County Office of Children, Youth and Families (CYF) in Pittsburgh. In short, Eubanks offers a history of US public policy on poverty, along with the mechanisms employed in various eras to manage, and limit public outlays to address it, a look at the mechanisms now in use that serve to exclude applicants rather than enhance service, and an analysis of how those systems impact people today. She very successfully bridges the gap between theory and reality with her field studies. This is what’s going on. This is how it affects people. Instead of being shunted to three-dimensional concrete buildings, today’s poor are far too frequently denied public services, while the state, in addition, often erects barricades to the poor finding a way out of their situation by making it more difficult for them to get a job. Apparently biblical predictions were not considered adequate to the task, so we appear to be committed, as a society, to keeping the poor poor. We apparently prefer for them to remain that way. Hating the poor has been a national addiction since the invasion of North America by religious extremists. We are so addicted to hating on the poor that we have managed, with very few exceptions in our national history, to define poverty at such an insanely low level of income that the majority of poor people are denied even the dubious comfort of fitting the official definition. For example, the US Census Bureau defines its poverty threshold as $12,331 for a single person. So, if you are a single person, earning, say, $12,500 a year, you are not considered poor. Congratulations! And if you are over 65, that line drops to $11,367. I guess we seniors must eat less. Right, whatever. I am no stranger to such topics, and while the broad strokes of her Bruegelesque depiction of our welfare system might not be all that surprising, as with the painting, there is much to be appreciated by looking at the details. There were pieces of information in here that were surprising. Did you know that the CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps of the New Deal era) imposed a cap of 10% black recruits during the Depression, despite the dramatically higher unemployment rate they experienced? Or that half of us spend at least some portion of our lives in poverty? Eubanks offers many instances of Kafkaesque, sometimes deadly results of how people are treated by welfare systems. It is amazing to me that there have not been thousands of incidents of people so frustrated by this mean-spirited, cruel system that they go postal on social service agencies across the nation. Probably because they can’t afford the hardware. God knows it’s easy enough to buy. When you are poor you surrender your rights as a citizen, hell, as a human being. Innocent until proven guilty? Not once you apply for any sort of public assistance. The right to parent your own child? The right to confront your accusers? Not if a hostile neighbor calls in an anonymous false report accusing you of neglecting your kid. The right to choose your sexual partners? Not if the welfare agency deems that person inappropriate. The right to counsel? Nope. You are on your own, with the entire resources of the state aligned against you. Offer any resistance to or question the caseworkers who are assigned your case and you are denied benefits. It’s yes, Massa, no, Massa, or you are out on the street, and in many places you can be fined and/or put in jail for being homeless. While I am a senior citizen, retired, with only Social Security for my personal income, I am blessed with a spouse who remains employed full time. But I have had my share of interactions with the welfare and legal systems. When I was 18 years old, I had my own apartment. But after a significant industrial accident, (I was working at a large Postal Service facility in Manhattan) I was unable to work for a long time, several months of which was spent in hospitals. I was covered by worker’s comp, but it took so long for benefits to begin that I lost my apartment. Thanks, guys. At least I had a fallback, however unpleasant that may have seemed at the time. I have had just loads of fun dealing with unemployment, having endured that most American of experiences, the layoff, more than once. After one particularly frustrating interaction at an unemployment office, I ripped a large piece of hardware off the wall of the men’s bathroom. (Statute of limitations is passed for that one, right?) In another I was denied benefits, because I made a typo (press 1 to be insulted, press 2 to be denied, press 3 to be put on permanent hold) in an interactive system that would not allow human contact. While out of work for most of four years, and being held responsible for child support (while having joint custody) based on what I had earned in my highest earnings year ever, I had my driver’s license suspended by the state of New York, because I was unable, not unwilling, unable to pay the considerable monthly sum. Not a small thing, as many of the companies that hired people with my skill set were located in suburbia. Way to help. It took several years before the court accepted the fact (helped along by the reams of documentation I produced) that I had been unable to get work in systems, and had taken a shit-paying job as a security guard because it was the only thing I could get. The support arrears that accumulated during this period helped force me into dire financial straits. So, while I am decidedly middle-class by education and inclination, I have first-hand knowledge of how systems that at least purport to be helpful can do their best to make a bad situation worse, permanent even. I live in dread of the day when I have to face these systems again. (It will almost certainly come) And I am doing ok. The people Eubanks writes of are, mostly, not. Dealing with welfare agencies, with or without their associated, gun-toting uniformed sorts, or their legal enforcers, is horrifying enough. With the expansion of data collection, and monitoring, real and potential, with the widespread sharing of collected information (privacy rights? You’re kidding, right?) with a vast array of other government entities (and private entities too, where service provision or data collection is outsourced) as well as any law enforcement agency that asks for it, Big Brother has become more like the entire Manson Family. They are watching, and any mis-step, real or imagined, any spark of resistance, real or imagined, any error on your part, real or imagined, can get you cut off whatever public benefit you are on, thus increasing your poverty, reducing your life expectancy and increasing your risk of being incarcerated in what has become that contemporary replacement for the poorhouse of old, jail. There are even systems in place that look at projected behavior, that put one darkly in mind of the film (and story) Minority Report. Virginia Eubanks has written a piercing appraisal of how the new technology of the digital age has given the state unimaginable power over the lives of any who are forced into contact with it. The needs of the poor are not different from the needs of the middle class. But the latter, with the means to take care of those needs in the private market, can minimize contact with the beast that is the welfare/legal system. Once one comes into contact with that beast, a person is marked, indelibly, for decades or forever. What can be done? As is often the case, big problems do not lend themselves to simple fixes. Eubanks offers an array of actions that might be taken to help in the Dismantling of the Data Poorhouse. She has highlighted truths we should be aware of, and notes groups that should be targeted for a bit of consciousness raising. Mostly the proposed remedies sound sane, but unlikely, not a rare thing in books about sociopolitical ills. The strengths of this book are many. I was reminded very much of Barbara Ehrenreich’s perceptive writings on diverse important matters of public policy. Eubanks has dug deeply into the underlying realities of being poor in America and filled in a lot of the blanks. (BTW, it make a perfect companion to the excellent book White Trash), and should find a natural home in college and graduate school classes on poverty and public policy. People who are poor already know a lot of what is in here, although even the reader of meager means will still find fascinating information. The middle class, or wealthy reader will, hopefully, have their eyes opened (dare we say their consciousness raised?), finding serial unsuspected revelations in Automating Inequality. But the most significant group of readers who should read this are those who, like me, have lived at least a bit in both worlds, particularly those who, currently not a part of the public welfare/legal system, expect they never will be, and disparage those who are as lazy or morally suspect. poverty is not an island; it is a borderland. There’s quite a lot of movement in the economic fringes, especially across the fuzzy boundary between the poor and the working class. Those who live in the economic borderlands are pitted against one another by policy that squeezes every possible dime from the wallets of the working class at the same time that it cuts social programs for the poor and absolves the professional middle class and wealthy of their social obligations. - [see recent tax cuts for the 1%]As the powers in Washington, and in many of our states, seek to dim the lights of our shining city on a hill, it will be up to those who are not wealthy or connected, those who work for low wages, those who are jobless, those who earn, while knowing that a layoff could happen any day, those who can see through the porous barriers between the middle class, the working poor, and the distraught, to comprehend and act on the need to join forces in order to rekindle that flame. As Eubanks points out, and as you probably already know, in your heart of hearts …systems designed for the poor will eventually be used on everyone.It’s enough to enrage and/or depress Dickens. Review first posted – January 19, 2018 Publication date – January 16, 2018 ==========In the summer of 2019 GR reduced the allowable review size by 25%, from 20,000 to 15,000 characters. Then in Summer 2021 they decreed that external links would not longer be allowed in comments, where I used to put the review overage. So I have included the entirety of the review on my site, Coot’s Reviews. Stop by and say Hi! [image] [image] [image] [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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Jan 02, 2018
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Jan 15, 2018
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Jan 02, 2018
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Hardcover
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0062742019
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it was amazing
| I learned in school that blood has a memory. It carries information that makes you who you are. That’s how my brother and me ended up with so much I learned in school that blood has a memory. It carries information that makes you who you are. That’s how my brother and me ended up with so much in common, we both carried inside us the things our parents’ blood remembered. Sharing what’s in the blood, that’s as close as you can be to another person. …I spent as much time as I could in the woods. To look at me, you might of thought, But you are only seventeen, and a girl, you have got no business being off in the wild by yourself where a bear could maul you or a moose trample you. But the fact is, if they put me and anyone else in the wilderness and left us there, you just see which one of us come out a week later, unharmed and even thrivingIn the great north, snow and isolation can hide a world of secrets, but some will still bleed through. Being a badass has certain advantages, particularly when one spends so much time in the Alaskan woods. It’s maybe not always an advantage in places with fewer trees, like school. Tracy Sue Petricoff is seventeen. She can handle herself in the wild. But she is not yet able to handle the wild in herself. You might even see her as half-feral. Her latest attack on a classmate, however justified it might have been, has resulted in her being cast out of the more structured world of public education, and left her to the somewhat less restrictive environment of home. Of course, home has not been an entirely safe place for her either. [image] Jamey Bradbury - from her site Her mother had died when Tracy was fifteen, hit by a car while walking on the side of the road near their home. This left a huge gap in Tracy’s upbringing, as mom was the person who knew her best, who had taught her to recognize animal tracks, who had taught her to identify plants and their uses, and who truly understood her innermost self, an unspoken family legacy that is both a gift and a curse. Her father, Bill, a good man, a regular contender in the annual Iditarod, was rocked by his wife’s death, lost his focus, struggled to cope, but is trying his best to be mother and father to Tracy and her younger brother, Scott. This includes rules, but Tracy reacts to rules like a bear might to a trap. Her mother gave her one cardinal rule. Never make another person bleed. Sorry, Mom. Returning home from the woods one night a large man slams into her. In the ensuing tussle, she is tossed hard enough against a tree that she loses consciousness. On waking she finds there is blood on her knife, and a trail where the man had gone. Her memory of the event is fuzzy. Did she cut the man? Why had they crossed paths? She tries to put it out of her mind, but when neighbors report an intruder having stayed in their cabin, and her father comes to the aid of a bleeding man emerging from the woods, she wonders if this is the man she had encountered, and will he be coming back, for her. I felt the trail tugging at me, every acre of land behind the house yearning for me to roam its familiar hills and hollows. Any other evening, I might of stole away for a few more minutes, long enough to satisfy the craving in me.The Wild Inside is a riveting, genre-bending coming-of-age/thriller/mystery/horror novel with a dose of fantasy and a touch of romance. Tracy would like nothing more than to be left to her devices, hunting, setting traps, retrieving what she catches for food and fur and racing with her dogs. Her personal receiver is tuned to the call of the wild, as she feels a particular affinity with the animals of the forest, can perceive and interpret sounds, smells, and sights that most will overlook. She is as much a creature of the woods as she is a civilized human being. I was very much reminded of the character Turtle from My Absolute Darling, in her toughness and feel for the natural, not that other stuff. She is a woodland detective, as skilled as Sherlock Holmes at spotting clues, but with the nose of a hound and the night vision of an owl. And she is determined to unravel the mystery of her forest fracas. For reasons of her own, Tracy does not tell her father about her unfortunate encounter. (What a tangled web we weave) The secrets involved with that event lock her into a series of lies that make her life much more complicated than it needs to be, with tragic results. [image] Image is from the author’s site More complications ensue when dad hires a young drifter to help out. Bill trains dogs, has forty doghouses and a kennel on the property. That is a lot of shoveling, and other chores as well. As he takes on outside work in addition to bring in enough to provide for his family, Bill could sure use the help. How much do they really know about Jesse Goodwin, who seems to be particularly adept at gaining Bill’s trust? Can Jesse be trusted? There is something off about the new hired hand, an odd sort, whose CV does not always hold up to close, or even routine scrutiny. Trying to figure out the mystery of Jesse is part of the fun of the book. The tension of wondering if/when the mysterious man from the forest will return and wondering what he will want is another. The boogeyman just outside the frame is a device that works well to sustain the tension level. The Iditarod features large in this landscape, Dad having been a regular contestant, Tracy having competed in the Junior Iditarod, with her final Junior race and the full-on Mush-mania, for which she will be eligible for the first time, both on a near horizon. Tracy loves to race dogs as much as she loves to run, to hunt, and to breathe in the fullness of the woods. It provides motivation for some of her decision-making, both the good and bad sorts. Although she is basically a good person, she is no paragon. In fact, she can be a pretty self-involved teenager and if you count on her to always do the right thing, your totals will be off. There is a dramatic, dark twist near the end that some readers will find discomfiting. I thought it made sense under the circumstances, and how Tracy handles it is consistent with what we have seen of her up to then. It’s a pretty daring move by Bradbury to steer her tale in that direction. Whether you approve or not, it will definitely jangle your senses, and makes for an outside-the-box ending. There was one item in the story that jangled my senses a bit. I did not understand how Tracy thought she could get away with paying substantial entry fees for races without having a well-prepared explanation for how she got the money. A solution is found later but Tracy’s presumption seemed a bit much, even for a teenager. In another instance. I thought it a stretch that one character was far too ready to try talking with another who had already confessed to some pretty dire deeds. A more reasonable range of choices would seem to be either lock and load or stay the hell away. [image] Image is from the author’s site Bradbury’s love for the landscape comes through loud and clear (and, I expect, played a role in her decision to live in Anchorage for the last fifteen years, having been born and raised in Illinois) in her lyrical, beautiful writing. The cold, the woods, the severe beauty of the landscape all serve as a wonderful backdrop for and echo of the harsh challenges Tracy faces. Tracy Sue Petricoff’s physical DNA is known, but if I were checking her literary DNA markers, I would be looking for signs of Mowgli, John Clayton, and Katniss Everdeen. Jamey Bradbury’s freshman novel is a triumph, a coming of age tale set in the borderlands, interior and exterior, where the wild meets the world. Her struggle to understand and gain some control over the urges she experiences makes her relatable, even though our adjustments might not have been so daunting. It is riveting, tear-inducing, and jolts through such sudden turns that you will need to make sure your feet are firmly planted on your sled, and your team is exceptionally well-trained. You would hate to tumble and be left behind. This is one ride you will want to mush through to the end. Review first posted – January 26, 2018 Published – March 20, 2018 [image] [image] [image] [image] This complete review has been cross-posted on my site, Coot’s Reviews. Stop by and say Hi! Be sure to check Comment #1 below for an interview with JB. =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the author’s personal, Twitter, Instagram and FB pages Here is extra material that did not make it into the final version of the book A Dead Darling- from Bradbury’s site Bradbury works as a freelance writer. Here is a stack of her writings for the Anchorage Daily News The author reading an early excerpt from the book at a Gathering of the Tribes on May 15th 2011 Quiet Works, a collection of short stories, was submitted as Bradbury’s 2009 MFA thesis (continued in first comment below) ...more |
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Jan 02, 2018
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Kindle Edition
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0062679074
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| Oct 18, 2016
| Feb 13, 2018
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it was amazing
| I couldn’t help noticing that although I’d probably never had more time to myself, it was like time was shrinking around me. More and more often I I couldn’t help noticing that although I’d probably never had more time to myself, it was like time was shrinking around me. More and more often I glanced up from the computer and realized it was already eight or nine, and a few evenings after Ana told me her story, I went down to the pier to watch the sunset, only to discover that the streets were already dark.Time is a strange thing. We think of it as linear, this happened, then that, and after that something else. We measure it with instruments large and small, slice and dice it up into pieces from eons to ages, millennia to centuries, decades, years, months, weeks, days, hours, minutes, milliseconds, nanoseconds and god knows what else, and order our lives around it more often than not. But sometimes the personal experience of time, particularly where it intersects with memory, can soften the hard lines that separate this time from that. [image] The Persistence of Memory by Salvador Dali – from the Museum of Modern Art Ana Ivan, a mathematician and an artist, was raised in Ceausescu’s Romania, has lived in places as diverse as Morocco and Norway, and when we meet her, she is in her late twenties, planning an art exhibit in New York City. She believes she is cursed, convinced that anyone she loves is doomed. She thinks about time a lot. Her performance art installation attempts to address issues horological, even time travel. It entails living in total darkness for thirty days. She has many stories to tell, of her own life and of the lives of her parents. Our window into Ana’s world is a nameless narrator, a young man from Denmark, working in Brooklyn as an intern at an art festival. He is drawn in by Ana’s stories, to the point of obsession. I was reminded of another young narrator, drawn to a damaged Eastern European, Stingo, the young writer in Sophie’s Choice. I have a powerful olfactory memory of the day my youngest was born, the ammonia-cum-hormone smell of broken water piercing my usually insensitive nostrils, a puddle in the second-floor middle room of the house where we lived at the time. Recalling the smell brings the room back to me, vividly. Only problem is that we did not move into that house until 1996, and my daughter was born in 1993. I have no idea why my admittedly dodgy memory cells have built up this decidedly inaccurate structure, but they have, and its walls are solid. - WB [image] Mikkel Rosengaard - image from forfatterweb.dk There are several elements to Ana’s tales. One is her personal history, experiences at school, skills, weaknesses, fears, desires, loves, what one might expect. Another is her parents’ history. She undertakes an investigation into the circumstances surrounding the death of her mathematician father. We learn of her parents’ past, from young adulthood to the now of the story. One cannot tell a family tale of growing up Romanian without also describing what life was like under the brutal Ceausescu regime. There are plenty of examples of how struggling to have a life in that world was a Kafka-esque trial, even without other dramatic events interceding. A third is time. It is a consideration throughout the book, how time slips, rearranges, redefines, softens, and can reform in a hardened, if not necessarily accurate form. How malleable is time? And can one slip past its lines to jump from then to now without experiencing the intervening seconds, minutes, hours and days? Finally, there is the notion of stories as a powerful element in our consciousness. The narrator is so drawn in by Ana’s tales, so obsessed, that it seriously impacts his life. There are tragedies aplenty in this novel, one in particular that will both stun and sadden you. Ana’s stories serve to peel back the layers of her life. As when one rubs off the crunchy tunic and fine skin from an onion and has at the nested scales below, Ana’s revelations may affect your eyes. People cope with the challenges life presents, or fail to cope, in diverse ways. Maybe taking an expansive view of time is one solution, whether or not there is a mathematical basis for that perspective. Rosengaard has had a chance to write about temporal notions before. In an interview with Christopher Knowles and Robert Wilson that he did for Office Magazine, he looked at, among other things, the theatrical collaborators’ use of and conception of time. For some physicists, however, time is not a flow but a dimension much like a landscape. Just like Manhattan still exists while you and your consciousness are in Brooklyn, October 1976 still exists while your consciousness is in January 2017. According to this idea of the block universe, all moments exist simultaneously on the plane of time: your birth, your first kiss, last Saturday’s party and Sunday’s hangover too. All of it exists at once, and the sense that the present is somehow more real and alive than the past is just a trick of the consciousness, our limited minds trying to make sense of it all.Do not get the notion that this is a sci-fi novel. It is not. It is more the sort of consideration of universal issues one might see from sage international authors like Milan Kundera or Gabriel Garcia Marquez. On the downside, the notion of stories being a tool of change is taken a bit too far a time or two. Actual people do not talk the way that some characters (not Ana) do. Thirty-year-old Mikkel Rosengaard is a freelance writer living in Brooklyn. Like his narrator, he was born and raised in Denmark. He worked at The Ivan Gallery, in Bucharest. Makes one wonder what the impact was of his time there, and if this was the source for Ana’s family name. This is his first novel, and if this is what his rookie work looks like, I can’t wait to see what he will write as a veteran. Ana Ivan is enigmatic and vulnerable, magical and damaged, fascinating, yet sad. You will think about Ana long after you finish reading this novel. The Invention of Ana is not a long book, under three hundred pages in my ARE. It will not take so many hours to read that it will distort your sense of where or when you are. But, it is a fascinating, stimulating, entertaining read that will definitely be worth your time. Review first posted – January 5,2018 Publication dates ----------February 13, 2018 - hardcover ----------November 13, 2018 - trade paperback [image] [image] [image] [image] It was first published, in Danish, on January 16, 2016. The English language version was translated by Caroline Wright =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the author’s personal, Twitter and FB pages Other writing by the author ---- A couple of articles for the newsletter Hyperallergic -----Office Magazine - Christopher Knowles In case you have not seen it, or, I imagine for most, even heard of it, there is a remarkable recent (2017) film that looks at one's memories as definers of self, Marjorie Prime. The star, Lois Smith, had an outside shot as an oscar nomination. Didn't happen. It is thoughtful, fascinating, and moving. ...more |
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1250117771
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| Jan 30, 2018
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it was amazing
| What frightened me? Certainly the prediction by Bill Gates and his team that an epidemic like the 1918 influenza pandemic that killed 50 million p What frightened me? Certainly the prediction by Bill Gates and his team that an epidemic like the 1918 influenza pandemic that killed 50 million people could happen again today—and that in the first 200 days it could kill 33 million people. That’s almost as many people as AIDS has killed over four decades. Even scarier was the Bank of America/Merrill Lynch assessment that the threat of a global pandemic could claim more than 300 million lives and cost the global economy as much as US$3.5 trillion.There are many things to be concerned about in this world, justifiably. Terrorism, global warming, the undermining of democracy by dark forces. (The Patriots winning yet another Super Bowl) I know that we are, or certainly should be, concerned about the potential carnage that might be wrought by some lunatic (you know the one) doing something in a fit of pique over an insulting tweet, and sending considerable supplies of glowing ordnance rocketing about the planet. Millions would perish. Landscapes would be rendered uninhabitable for decades, if not centuries, if not forever. A worldwide engagement in such insanity would slaughter hundreds of millions. We have experienced large-scale human die-offs before, in wars, of course, but there are other sorts of global catastrophes (defined as events that could wipe out 10% of humanity) that could kill even more. The Spanish influenza pandemic of 1918 may have killed as much as 5% of the world population. Some outbreaks since then infected over a third of the world’s population (e.g., pandemic influenza), whereas others killed over half of people infected (e.g., Ebola or SARS). If a disease were to emerge that was as transmissible as the flu and as lethal as Ebola, the results could be catastrophic. Fortunately, this rarely transpires, but it is possible that it could, for example with the H5N1 influenza virus. - from the Global Catastrophic Risks reportThere may not be a lot we can do about deranged leaders, other than vote them out of office, where untampered voting is an option. But there is a lot we can do to take on the growing challenges of potential epidemics and pandemics. Preventing the emergence of a global deadly pandemic afflicting vast swaths of the world’s people can save as many lives, and maybe even more lives, than averting a nuclear war. This is the point of The End of Epidemics. [image] Jonathan Quick - Image from Scribe Publications Dr. Jonathan D. Quick, MD, MPH, a family physician, has been working in international health since the 1970s, was Director of Essential Drugs and Medicines Policy at the World Health Organization from 1993 to 2003. He is a fellow at Management Sciences for Health (MSH), a non-profit founded in 1971 to assist local communities in distressed nations establish health care delivery systems. He has authored over a hundred books, articles and book chapters, and is a long-term advisor to health care projects in Afghanistan and Kenya. He has gotten up close and personal with some of the worst threats to human health and decided to put together a plan of action after the West African Ebola epidemic killed over 11,000 people and orphaned more than 16,000 children. Once the world woke up to the crisis, there was a generous outpouring of assistance. As the response peaked, I was consumed by nagging questions: Where will we be four or five years from now? Will the world have gone back to sleep? What’s needed to protect the world from future outbreaks? To find the answers, I explored the lessons from epidemics over the last century – smallpox, AIDS, SARS, avian flu, swine flu, Ebola, Zika – and I drew on some of the best minds, experienced professionals and committed citizen activists in global health, infectious disease, and pandemic preparedness. - from the MSH site[image] Influenza victims at Fort Riley, Kan., during the 1918 epidemic - image from the Boston Globe He lays out a seven-step program for averting future epidemic crises, (lofty goals) then drills down into each of the seven to add flesh to the bones, specifics to the generalities. In doing so, he offers considerable historical perspective. This is what happened here at this point in time. This is what was done to address the medical problem. This is what was done to raise public awareness. This is what was done to use the fuel of that awareness to effect change in laws, resource allocation, and results. Here are his Seven sets of actions needed for preventing and coping with epidemics (1) Ensuring bold leadership at all levels (2) Building resilient health systems (3) Fortifying three lines of defense against disease (prevention, detection, and response) (4) Ensuring timely and accurate communications (5) Investing in smart, new innovation (6) Spending wisely to prevent disease before an epidemic strikes (7) Mobilizing citizen activism If your brain works at all like mine, your first instinct is to engage in a little recreational eye-rolling, accompanied by mutterings such as, “uh huh, and how do you define that?” Or, “Oh, really? And who gets to say what constitutes “timely and accurate”, “smart”, and “wisely?” All seven sound like lofty, and very ill-defined goals. But Quick addresses each of these goals using real-world experience and translates them into examples, offering actions that can be taken. I soon parked the snark and took in what was being offered. While there are plenty of short-sighted, self-serving jerks who will stop at nothing to interfere with making the world a better place (Even today, needle exchanges are banned in almost every state in the southern U.S., where the AIDS epidemic is now concentrated and HIV infection rates are ten times higher than in other parts of the country.), there are also a lot of knowledgeable, committed people, care providers, religious, political and business leaders, eager to identify and implement mechanisms for change, for improving access to health care, for developing new vaccinations and treatments, for organizing distribution networks where few or none now exist, for educating populations on the realities of transmissible disease exposure and for working with local communities to address today’s health challenges and defend against potential horrors. [image] The AIDS virus – image from Avert.org There is frightening intel in this book on the sources of new pathogens, from bush meat to factory farms, to unemployed bio-engineers. In addition, there is brain-candy material on how several of the all-star list of epidemic diseases got their start, and how they were brought from their birthplaces to the rest of the world. Fascinating, powerful stuff. One particular bit of important analysis here is on the secondary impact of epidemics. The damage is not just to those immediately afflicted, but to those around them and to entire economies. As with war, where common illness can take more lives than war injuries, epidemics sometimes take more lives from disruption of primary healthcare than from the epidemic itself. Because health workers are diverted to emergency response centers and health facilities are sometimes closed, epidemics can also disrupt routine public health care needs such as immunization, treatment of acute illness, and facility-based births.He looks not only at how we manage to put our hands over our ears and rattle out sound-blocking la-la-la-la-la-la noises, but takes it a step further to try to understand why we do that. He also reports on some remarkable success stories, including, over a long-term, the West coming to grips with the HIV crisis to the point where, while still a major life-threatening disease, it is now a manageable long-term condition and not an instant death-sentence. With concentrated and persistent effort progress can be made. Quick cites some other remarkable success stories in Africa that have received scant coverage in Western media. He gets specific on how much money would be needed to undertake the program he proposes, (chicken feed) and compares that with the cost of failing to do so. New diseases are cropping up at a faster rate than ever before. Since 1971, scientists have discovered at least 25 new pathogens for which we have no vaccine and no treatment. Where do new diseases come from? What is the impact of actions by people on the creation of new diseases? We face threats from bioterror. What would ISIS do with a designer virus? Bio-error presents another risk. I can certainly image a future president (Merkin Muffley?) getting on the phone to a foreign leader to fill him or her in on the oopsy release of an engineered bug, even if it had been intended only for testing and defense purposes. Well, how do you think I feel about it, Dmitri? Hopefully, a sufficient number of forward-looking world leaders will have already established protocols to make that call one that is intended to deliver information, and not induce a retaliatory doomsday panic. And what about unintended consequences from bio-engineered materials that go rogue? [image] The Ebola virus – image from Wikimedia If you are a public health policy junkie (it was my first career out of graduate school, and that monkey took up permanent residence on my back), this is mainlining material. The stakes could not be higher, the need for long-term-planning could not be clearer. We provide considerable funding for the military and charge them with the broad mission of keeping us safe from foreign threats. Given the potential for danger to the lives of citizens, doesn’t it make sense to direct resources toward preventing such losses where the potential for carnage is greatest? And don’t forget that many of the diseases that we fear here have their origins elsewhere, as air travel allows stowaway bugs to cross the globe in a matter of days. So, in our ever-smaller world, resources need to be directed to the sources over there of some of our exposure here at home. [image] H5N1 Influenza Virus – image from Wikimedia I have two gripes about the book. Quick calls his program The Power of 7. Sorry, but that sounds like a Sesame Street segment, or yet another group of Marvel superheroes, maybe a vitamin drink. I am sure there is a PR firm somewhere that would be happy to earn some pro-bono brownie points by coming up with something better. Second, and this is a more passing thing, early in the book the author tended to sound like one of those people whose focus is more on himself than his message. Even if the content of what he is saying is true, it’s just poor form. Sentences like I was hosting a videoconference for the global health nonprofit that I led… or it comforts me to know that I’m part of an organization that’s truly committed to saving lives. Thankfully this sort of thing vanishes pretty quickly, and focus on the message proceeds without further such asides. While I can definitely see this being of particular interest to readers who share my personal addiction, I could see it being used even more productively in colleges and graduate schools. It should be required reading in all MPH (Master of Public Health) programs and in any courses, graduate or undergraduate, that address global health issues. It should certainly find its way to every political leader in a position to impact public health legislation, and to all those charged with managing health care institutions, public and private. It wouldn’t hurt to slip a copy over the transom of every foundation that funds such things. Maybe the Gates Foundation, or a similar entity could see to such a global distribution. [image] SARS-associated coronavirus- image from ThingLink.com The End of Epidemics is reality-based, offers fully-informed analyses of existing and projected medical dangers, and presents a well-thought-out program for averting catastrophic loss of life across the planet. It is a significant distillation of current knowledge on how to go about ensuring that we actually have future generations, and for anyone involved in public policy it is a must-read. For the rest of us, it is a readable, worthwhile, informative look at a potentially imminent global danger. I hope the knowledge presented in this book and the optimism of its author, infects readers, and is passed on to many, many others. Published – 1/30/18 Review first posted - 2/2/18 Added bit on February 2022 reposting - The prescience of Quick’s concerns is impressive, even though his predictions were, in fact, conservative, and based on established science. Thankfully, COVID was not as lethal as Ebola or Marburg. It was, and remains, lethal enough. The importance of this book, looking back from 2022, cannot be overstated. I can only hope that it finds a readership among public health officials and legislators sitting on health-care-related committees. [image] [image] [image] [image] =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the author’s personal, Twitter and FB pages From This Week in Global Health - a fascinating interview with Dr. Quick A short video in which Quick talks about his End of Epidemics project ResearchGate offers a list of Quick’s writings, many of which can be downloaded in their entirety for free. From Science Alert, a short article on the ranking of potentially horrific events - New Report Officially Ranks All The Catastrophes That Could Wipe Us Out in 2016 The report cited by the above article is from the Global Priorities Project - Global Catastrophic Risks - 2016 Flue Near You is a crowd-sourcing system for early detection of you-know-what. It takes data from participants across the country, anonymously. Check it out. January 18, 2018 - NY Times - Flu Hospitalization Rates Are the Highest in Years. Here’s Why. - by Donald G. McNeil Jr in some places — including Southern California, Pennsylvania and central Texas — some hospitals have seen so many flu patients that they had to set up triage tents or turn other patients away. Local shortages of antiviral medications and flu vaccines have been reported, and the C.D.C. said patients may have to call several pharmacies to find shots or to fulfill prescriptions....more |
Notes are private!
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Dec 19, 2017
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Hardcover
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0062690981
| 9780062690982
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| 4.04
| 3,916
| Feb 06, 2018
| Dec 04, 2018
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it was amazing
| The guilt is collective, the responsibility shared. In a hundred years no one will even remember what happened here and certainly no one will care. The guilt is collective, the responsibility shared. In a hundred years no one will even remember what happened here and certainly no one will care. History is forgetting. Afterward we write the account, the account becomes truth, and we tell ourselves it has always been this way, that others were responsible, that there was nothing we could have done.Australia, 1885, drought-stricken central Queensland. The McBrides struggle to scratch a living from their parcel of land, raising bony cattle, and listening, always listening for the siren song of rain. Tommy (14) and Billy (16) are out hunting a bit too far afield, for something, anything, to add to the family menu when they see the local bigshot, John Sullivan, his assistant, and some native troopers engaged in a nefarious activity. The boys’ father had warned them about staying away from Sullivan’s land. But their witness sparks a tragic sequence of events that leads the boys on a life-altering quest for vengeance, led by none other than the untrustworthy Mr. Sullivan. Colonial Oz has a lot in common with the westward expansion of the United States. Not least among these similarities are a sere landscape, and thus challenges for any seeking to make a living from the land, and the inconvenient presence of prior inhabitants. As in the USA, the locals did not fare well once the invaders set their sights on their turf. The “dispersal” of the native people is a core element of Only Killers and Thieves. [image] Paul Howarth (and two close associates) - image from his FB page The chief baddie here is John Sullivan, the largest local landowner, a person with no limits to his avarice and no moral qualms to guide his actions. He has brought in a team of Native Mounted Police, led by the frightening but intriguing Inspector Edmund Noone. Cop? Bounty hunter? Horseman of the apocalypse? Whatever. You do not get in this man’s way. A crime is committed, evidence suggesting the perpetrator might be an erstwhile native employee of the McBrides. Sullivan and Noone lead a group of troopers and the two boys in pursuit. Australia is a vast place, fodder for the imagination, like ancient maps that filled in unexplored parts of the blue with “There be dragons here.” Father had a surveyor’s map showing their selection and the surrounding land, everything to the north, south, or east. The lines only went so far west then faded into nothingness; the interior blank.A place where one comes face to face with physical challenges, a venue in which hard moral choices must be made, and where character, one’s personal unknown interior, is both sculpted and revealed. The landscape is a character here. It has moods and expresses itself dramatically. A dark god perhaps rendering judgment on the acts of men with sand storms that can kill in diverse way. The land also serves as a powerful external manifestation of emotional turmoil. “Might have only dust in it,” Locke said. “We could ride right through.”Like Cormac McCarthy, Howarth intertwines scenes of extreme horror with writing that is rapturous. But all the imagery and content would be for nothing if we did not care about Tommy McBride. A decent young man put into indecent situations. You will love him and feel for the moral torment he endures as he works through his doubts in struggling mightily to find truth, and follow the righteous path. He is forced by dire events to grow up in a hurry. Four days ago the world had been one way, now it was twisted another way around. He couldn’t get his bearings. Didn’t know for certain where anyone stood. What he’d always taken as definite now felt flaky as the soil on the ground.As Tommy binds us to the story, it is Edmund Noone who captures our attention. He is an extremely dark presence, but shows moments of perception and humanity, seeing Tommy’s talents, and the failings of others. All heads turn when Noone crosses the page. He personifies the cold genocidal brutality of the west invading aboriginal Australia, carrying out the dispersal campaign through which natives were massacred, mirroring the annihilation of native peoples in the USA. This is the core point of the book. He presents his case to Tommy as stripped down truth, reminiscent of CCA Chairman Arthur Jensen reading the riot act to Howard Beale in the stunning film, Network, although with a more outback wardrobe, fewer words, and a lot less bombast. (I hear it delivered as slow burn, a la Clint Eastwood, through gritted teeth, rather than the Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God blast of the Network scene.) “Listen,” Noone said. “Listen to me now. I’m going to tell you what will happen if we were to let that man live. He will hate us. Not only you and I personally, but all white men. He will become like a tick on the back of a beautiful horse, biting and gnawing and burrowing into the very fabric of this country we are trying to build. He will hunt us, all of us, we will never be safe in our homes. Your families, should you have them, will not be safe. Your children, your grandchildren, will not be safe. Remember, he will breed also. He will produce a dozen heirs, all with his hatred in their blood.There are plenty of other works this book calls to mind. Lonesome Dove for the moral challenges and struggle with responsibility, Cormac McCarthy’s various works for their depiction of western violence and violation, and their richness of language, and The Son for its epic depiction of the savage displacement of one civilization by an invading other. It is a powerful and moving portrayal of a very dark period in Australian, in human history. I cannot say how much attention this period and these atrocities receive in the local history books, but if that telling is in short supply, I hope that this book will help revive the memory. It is a time that should never be forgotten, an era of criminality on which a future was constructed. That it is Paul Howarth’s first novel is amazing, encouraging us to look forward to many future triumphs from him. Only Killers and Thieves is the first great book of 2018. You must read this. Review – September 22, 2017 Published – February 6, 2018 =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the author’s Twitter and FB pages, although the FB page does not appear to have been updated since 2014. I expect there to be some on-line updating as publication date approaches. My review of the sequel to this novel, Dust off the Bones A local magazine is referenced both in the epigram and by one of the characters being a regular reader. If you get a hankering to see what The Queenslander looked like, issues from the way back have been digitized and can be seen here. An interesting wiki on the Australian Native Police A fascinating article from The Guardian by Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore on Horror in the outback: Jane Harper, Charlotte Wood and the landscape of fear You might also pick up a few words new to non-Australian eyes and ears. Bunyip, coolibah and bilby pop to mind. ...more |
Notes are private!
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Aug 17, 2017
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Sep 08, 2017
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Sep 09, 2017
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Paperback
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