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| 0765342405
| 9780765342409
| B001RKZUHK
| 4.32
| 173,938
| Oct 01, 1999
| May 19, 2002
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it was amazing
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This book made me wish I could forget that I had ever read Ender’s Game. Not because it was necessarily a better book – though it is longer – but becau This book made me wish I could forget that I had ever read Ender’s Game. Not because it was necessarily a better book – though it is longer – but because the two books offer different views of the same events from two distinctly different perspectives. Ender Wiggin is brilliant and empathetic, a boy torn apart by his own doubts and fears and driven to greatness by a government that sees him simply as a means to an end. It is only his ability to understand and come to love those around him that gets him through his trials, endure his isolation, and which ultimately allows him to put together the team that defeats the Buggers. Ender seems to be more human than human, and not in that ironic Blade Runner sort of way, but in a way which makes us want to see him succeed and do well. Bean, on the other hand, is about as different from Ender as it’s possible to get. He’s introduced in Ender’s Game as a foil, a character designed to show us how far Ender had come in the short time that he had been in Battle School. When we meet Bean, Ender is using the same techniques of isolation and constructive abuse that were used on him, making us wonder if Ender will turn out to be just a copy of the adults who were tormenting him. We learn that Bean, like Ender, is brilliant, but he is also strong-willed and ambitious and takes well to the atmosphere of Battle School. In the end, Bean shows himself to be a vital part of the team that Ender assembles to save the Buggers and cement humanity’s place in the cosmos. Ender’s story is all about empathy and self-understanding and his desire to be the person he wants to be, rather than the person humanity needs him to be. He has to give up some of his essential humanity in order to save the world. Bean’s story comes from the opposite direction. More brilliant than Ender, Bean learns to find his humanity. He has to learn to see people as people, rather than a means to an end or a puzzle to solve. The hard lessons that he learned on the streets of Rotterdam as a small child were vital in preparing him to become a commander, but they have to be put aside if he’s to become a human. Bean’s story is much bigger in scope than Ender’s, which gives the book as a whole more depth than Ender’s Game. We start out in Rotterdam, which has become a center of poverty and violence among rival gangs of street children. Bean, tiny and starving, manages to prove his worth to one of these gangs by suggesting strategies by which they can get more food and more respect. He gains the attention of Sister Carlotta, a nun who is working for both God and the International Fleet, and she is the first to see his full potential as a student in Battle School. But in the course of trying to understand Bean, she learns that his origin is one of horror, and that his future is even worse. As a character, I liked Bean more than I liked Ender, possibly because on a scale of Complete Misanthrope to Bodhisattva, Bean and I are pretty close to the complete misanthrope end of the spectrum. To be fair, though, Bean has a lot more reasons to feel that way, and he’s a lot worse than I am. As we meet him, Bean views people as means to an end or as problems to be solved. He doesn’t reform the street gang culture of Rotterdam because it’s the right thing to do – he does it because he needs to eat. When he does experience attachment or fondness for others, he doesn’t know how to deal with it, and turns it into just another problem to be solved. That hyper-analytical way of looking at the world makes Bean a much more aware character than Ender as well. While Ender spends most of his book wrapped inside his own head, Bean is constantly testing the world, analyzing it and trying to figure out what’s really going on. So while Ender was exploring the computer fantasy game, Bean was crawling through air ducts in the Battle School. While Ender was researching the battles of the past, Bean was learning how to spy on his teachers. In the end, just as Ender is learning to put aside his humanity for the common good, Bean discovers a deep well of compassion that he never knew he had. Ender becomes more isolated, and Bean becomes more connected to others. The two characters come at each other from different directions and view the world in vastly different ways, giving us a kind of parallax view of the same events, to use Card’s preferred terminology. Most interestingly, many of the revelations that were revealed to Ender in his book were discovered by Bean in this one, which creates a whole different reading experience. And that’s why I wish I could delete my memory of having read Ender’s Game,, or at least put it away for a while. Reading this book, I constantly compare what’s happening to Bean with what happened to Ender, looking for those scenes that are shared between the books and others that we only get to see once. Whether it’s the early days of Battle School or Ender’s fight with Bonzo Madrid or the climactic end, there are enough similarities and differences to make each book worth reading. But at the same time, I want to read each one for the first time, without knowing what’s going to happen next. I want to share Bean’s ability to see plans unspool before him without already knowing what those plans are. And then I want to read Ender’s Game the way I read Ender’s Shadow and have those wonderful moments of revelation as new light is shed on topics that were only briefly mentioned before – like Locke and Demosthenes, or the true fate of Mazer Rackham. Card has done a difficult job very well in this book, and I can’t imagine it was easy at all. As he noted in his forward, a dozen years passed between the first book and this one, and a person changes in that much time. He learned new things and gained new perspectives, and that naturally had a great influence on how he chose to write this story. And then there’s the enormous popularity of his other Ender books. Between Game and Shadow, he wrote Speaker for the Dead in 1986, Xenocide in 1991, and Children of the Mind in 1996. That means he had a much more solid understanding of his world by the time he got around to Ender’s Shadow in 1999, and a much larger fan base as well. Writers will always say that they write for the story, not for the fans, but every writer wants in their heart of hearts to have people love what they write. Revisiting your most famous work and exploring a popular character brings great risks with it. Fortunately, I think Card succeeded with this book. It both compliments and contrasts with Ender’s Game, offering enough new information and new viewpoints to merit a second novel, while being faithful to the story that fans had come to love over a decade and a half. What’s more, it feels like the work of a more experienced writer. The scale is larger, the characters have more depth, and he takes more chances with the story than he did with Ender’s Game. All in all, if you were a fan of the first, you’ll like this one. If you haven’t read either, you really should. And if you start with this one, let me know how it goes. ---------------------------- “Ender was what Bean only wished to be — the kind of person on whom you could put all your hopes, who could carry all your fears, and he would not let you down, would not betray you. I want to be the kind of boy you are, thought Bean. But I don’t want to go through what you’ve been through to get there.” ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Feb 2012
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Mar 27, 2012
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Paperback
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| 0812550757
| 9780812550757
| 0812550757
| 4.10
| 259,192
| Mar 1986
| Aug 15, 1994
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it was amazing
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In his introduction to the book, Card says that the main reason he wrote his most famous book - Ender's Game - was so that he would one day be able to
In his introduction to the book, Card says that the main reason he wrote his most famous book - Ender's Game - was so that he would one day be able to write this. I think this is something that probably happens a lot to authors. They get a Big Idea in their head, something with great depth and complexity and meaning, and quickly discover that they don't actually know what they're writing about yet. There's too much to say, there's too much that even the author doesn't know yet, and to go forward from that state of ignorance will result in what is, ultimately, an inferior narrative. Andrew Wiggin, the Speaker for the Dead, comes to the human colony Lusitania in order to speak the death of a local man, Marcão. While given the same reverence and privileges as priests, Speakers are not the same. Their job is to learn about the dead, to understand who they were and who they wanted to be, and then tell the truth as plainly and as clearly as possible. They do not give eulogies, where they try to paint the dead in as good a light as possible. They reveal who this person was, and in the process try to help those left behind understand them. It's a calling that requires an insightful mind, great empathy for others, and the ability to tell the truth despite how hard that truth may be to hear. As a Speaker for the Dead, Andrew Wiggin is very good at his job. It was he who was the first Speaker, who wrote a text that is as revered as the Bible - The Hive Queen and the Hegemon - in order to understand how humankind could kill the only other intelligent species it had ever encountered. The book reveals who the Buggers were and why they attacked humanity. It tells how their understanding of what it means to be intelligent led to a century of warfare and, ultimately, their own destruction. The book also reveals humanity, the dreams and fears that it faced when it met the Buggers. And it tries to understand why humans were so afraid that they took one of their own - a little boy named Ender - and turned him into the greatest monster in human history. The Xenocide. The one who destroyed an entire alien race. This book changed the way humankind saw the universe, and themselves. With the Buggers gone, but their technology still available, humans expanded out to a hundred worlds. Though their starships could only go just under the speed of light, the ansible provided instant communication between the stars. It formed a communications network that held the Starways Congress together and allowed humanity to become a multi-system species. Ender - Andrew - is ultimately responsible for all of this, and is therefore the linchpin of this entire universe. In order to write this book, to understand the culture and the history and the politics that would be necessary to write Speaker for the Dead, Card first had to understand who Ender was. So, with the blessing of his publishers, he was able to turn Ender's Game into a full-length novel. Once that was done, he was able to turn back to this book and craft it into what it has become. The colony of Lusitania is a small place, a group of Catholic settlers who live in a small and insular town. They have all the troubles that any new world would have, except for two that make it truly unique. The first is the descolada, a virus that nearly destroyed the colony and, thousands of years before, life on the planet. This illness literally unzips and recombines your DNA, ravaging your body utterly. If not for the dying work of the colony's two great xenobiologists, everyone would have died. As it turned out, Gusto and Cida were the last to die, leaving their sad, strange daughter Novinha behind. Even that wouldn't be enough to make Lusitania a truly remarkable place. No, for that, we must introduce the Piggies - the third intelligent life form known to exist in the universe. They're small, look like little pig-men, and are indisputably intelligent. They learn quickly, even despite the law forbidding xenologists from influencing their development, and present humanity with an important chance: the last time we encountered an alien intelligence, we obliterated it. Let's not do that again. This becomes harder, however, when the Piggies kill two of the xenologists in what appear to be a horrifyingly painful method. Now it looks like humanity may have to revert to type again, and that there truly is no way that humans can share the same space with other intelligences. Into all this steps Ender. His years of lightspeed travel have kept him young while three thousand years have passed, and he has wandered from world to world to speak for the dead. Now he is on Lusitania to speak for Marcão, an investigation that will lead him to uncover secrets kept for decades, and to once again change the way humans understand their universe. There's really so much to say about this book that it's hard to decide what to leave out and what to keep in. For one thing, Card is trying to write a very different kind of science fiction story. In his introduction, he says that a lot of fiction is adolescent in nature, science fiction especially. It's about adventure, about people seeing a way out of their conventional lives and going off alone. It's about being freed from responsibility and living a fast and crazy life. When that loneliness of adventure finally becomes too much, the hero settles down, but that's usually the last chapter of the book, if ever. Card wanted to go the opposite way, to take a lonely adventurer and show him trying desperately to become responsible, to become a member of a community. In class, where I'm teaching Ender's Game, we've identified isolation as being one of the overriding themes of the novel. Ender is constantly taken away from those he loves or held apart from others. In the end, he becomes a solo wanderer. Even more than that, he is made into a monster, a name on par with Lucifer itself. He is virtually thrown out of humanity, and it is only because no one knows who he really is that he can travel unmolested. So we're seeing Ender in that stage where the loneliness and the wandering have become an unbearable burden to him, and all he wants is a place to belong. But as a Speaker, as a man speaking a death that could completely upend the lives of everyone in the colony, he has his work cut out for him. There is also the element of redemption. In his years of travel, Ender has carried a very special package with him - the cocoon of the last Bugger hive queen. In exchange for her story, he promised that he would find a home for her, a place for her to rebuild her vast family. And on Lusitania, there is that chance. But first he has to save the Piggies, to prevent them from suffering the fate of the Buggers at the hand of a fearful and suspicious Humanity. If Ender can do this, perhaps he can make up for the horror that he unknowingly perpetrated. There's a lot going on in this book, to say the least. It's a great book, better in many ways than Ender's Game. It is more complex and adult and difficult, with moments of true emotion, a well-built socio-political system befitting a species that spans hundreds of worlds, and addressing the needs for changes in culture, politics and even language that would arise from the need to define relationships between worlds and between species. Fundamentally, though, this book is about what the Speaker for the Dead does best - understanding. It's about how we deal with The Other, even when that Other is completely alien to us. Humans and Buggers, Humans and Piggies - hell, Humans and Humans, we have a hard time understanding people who are not like us. We find it very difficult to look at the world from their point of view and to see the world through their eyes. Understanding what they love and fear, what they value and honor, or what they abhor - and more importantly, understanding what they see in you and how they understand you - is the best and surest road to making peace with those who are different from yourself. And that's a lesson that is valuable for all of us. --------------------------------------------- "No human being, when you understand his desires, is worthless. No one's life is nothing. Even the most evil of men and women, if you understand their hearts, had some generous act that redeems them, at least a little, from their sins." - Ender Wiggin, Speaker for the Dead ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Jul 20, 2011
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Jul 23, 2011
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Paperback
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| 0452295467
| 9780452295469
| 0452295467
| 3.97
| 5,673
| Jul 17, 2008
| Jun 24, 2009
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it was amazing
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Imagine, for a moment, one of our early human ancestors. A first-generation Homo sapiens, exploring his world with an amazing brain that would be the
Imagine, for a moment, one of our early human ancestors. A first-generation Homo sapiens, exploring his world with an amazing brain that would be the envy of the animal kingdom. If they understood envy. He, and his children, and their children and grandchildren will spread across the Earth as hunter-gatherers, the first beings (so far as we know) who can look at the world and attempt to pass on what it knows and learns. Their threats were simple: survive or don't. Find food or starve. Hunt or be hunted. And those fantastic brains did such a bang-up job that their descendants are still walking around, thousands of generations later. Now, take that Paleolithic man - swift of foot, sharp of eye, strong of hand - and drop him in the middle of modern-day Times Square. And, as his minder, give him a bored, easily distracted teenager - one who knows the world, but can't be bothered to do the work to make decisions. Congratulations. According to Daniel Gardner, we have just constructed a fine metaphor for how the human brain works. Part of it is very old, able to make decisions in an instant based on the slimmest of clues. The other is newer, more rational and savvy, able to put together reasoned, logical arguments, but doesn't have the sheer speed and force that is prehistoric partner has. And as much as we want it to be true that the rational, modern part of our mind is in charge,the sad fact is that out inner caveman has far more influence over us than we care to admit. Gardner begins the book with an interesting story about the most terrifying thing to happen in the last decade - the attacks of September 11th in the United States. By the time the towers fell, people around the world were watching, and anyone who didn't see it live would surely see it soon enough as it was replayed over and over again. It was truly terrifying to watch, unlike anything Americans had seen before in their country, and it scared the ever-loving hell out of people. Many people, as a result, chose to forgo air travel in favor of driving. Now, as Superman famously told Lois Lane, flying is statistically the safest way to travel. In fact, the most dangerous part of any trip that involves flying is usually the drive to the airport. But, in those days and months after the attacks, people were scared to fly. So they drove instead. And, according to a five year study of traffic fatalities in the U. S. after 9/11 by German psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer, 1,595 people died on the roads who otherwise would not have. They were afraid, and that's understandable. But they were afraid of the wrong thing. So they died. Gardner sets out in this book to figure out why it is that people in the healthiest, safest, most prosperous nations on Earth - in the healthiest, safest, most prosperous era of human history - live in a state of near-constant fear. A lot of it, as the intro implies, comes down to the fact that our brains, which evolved over millions of years to be very good at judging risks that might be found on the savannah, are simply not prepared to do the same in a modern technological world. Our brains can't tell the difference between risk in fiction and reality, between something that happened to us and something we saw on the news. When it comes to risk, our brains play it very safe, which is great out in nature. Is that shadow in the bushes a tiger? Maybe, maybe not, but either way it's probably a good idea to get the hell away from it. We can't say the same thing of that guy sitting on the bus who looks like maybe he might be a Muslim. We also tend to assume that if we've heard of something recently, then it must be more common. Again if you're out in nature and you saw a bear yesterday, there's a decent chance that the bear is still around today and you might want to be wary of that. But what if you see constant news coverage of a high-profile child abduction? It's on every show, being talked about on every blog - does that mean that the chance of your child being abducted has increased? Of course not, but your brain doesn't see it that way. Your brain thinks that your child will be taken from you the moment you look away, and all the reasoning in the world won't change its mind. One more thing: we don't get numbers. The news tells us that the rate of certain risks is up by 10%, but they don't tell us what the original figure was. We hear about millions of starving children in Africa, but don't do anything unless we get a personal story of one. We don't understand probability at all, we can't deal with randomness, and this lack of innate numeracy (compounded by an educational culture that makes it hard to teach kids to become numerate) costs us billions. Or more, as the recent economic Clusterthing has shown, when you have people who are good with numbers deliberately exploiting this flaw in order to profit. We think that correlation equals causation. We believe stories over facts. We think we don't have biases that we clearly possess. We assign high risk to things we don't like and low risk to things we do, regardless of how risky they actually are. And on top of all that, we know how to exploit others' fears in order to gain money and power for ourselves. It's easy to do, and it works like a charm. Reading this book won't make you into a magically unflappable person, mainly because all of this stuff is pretty well hard-wired in our brains. Even Gardner, who should have known better, tells a story about hunting through the slums of Lagos in the middle of the night to retrieve a photo of his children from the wallet that had been stolen from him. He had plenty more, but at that moment, his brain was convinced that losing the photo meant losing his children. Irrational, yes, and it nearly got him killed, but that's just one example of what a powerful force this primitive brain is. The good news, though, is that you can strengthen the newer, more recent brain - the lazy teenager from the initial example. By knowing how you make mistakes, how you can be fooled into fearing things that you don't need to fear, you can better understand your own reactions to events and make better decisions. You can educate yourself about the things that are actually dangerous, and stop losing sleep over the things that are not a threat. Being afraid is not your fault - it's an ingrained biological feature. Staying afraid, on the other hand, is something over which you have control. With enough will power, even you can overcome great fear. Sorry. Nerd moment there. Are there terrorists who want to destroy the United States? Sure. But they won't, because doing so is indescribably harder than certain politicians would have you believe. Are there creepy child molesters who want to abduct and defile your children? Yup. But the chances of that actually happening are so low that the odds of any specific child becoming such a victim are nil. Are there angry teens who want to come to their school and kill everyone they see? Of course. But when you look at the incidence of school shooting compared to how many kids go to school every day, you can see that the odds of your children being caught in a school shooting are slim to none. In fact, there are many parts of the country where your children are probably safer in school than out of it. There are real risks in our modern world, but they're not spectacular and they're not viscerally terrifying. A car accident, a heart attack, a diabetic death - these things don't make the news. Imagine a 9/11-style attack happening every three days, 3,000 dead each time. It would be an outrage, a national disgrace, and people would be scared to their bones. But it would take just about 233 attacks to equal the number of deaths in 2001 that occurred from cardiovascular disease in the United States. The nearly nonexistent chance of being killed by terrorists is enough to get people to submit to any number of indignities and intrusions on their persons and liberties when they travel, but the very real risk of death from a heart attack isn't enough to get people to go take a walk once in a while or stop eating junk food. So enjoy that delicious moment of irony the next time you go through the TSA molest-a-thon and get a seriously overweight screener taking liberties with your person. The fact is that we have it damn good compared to our ancestors. We live longer, we live better, even in parts of the world that are still developing, and it looks like the future will progress that way. But we still insist on needing to be afraid, even as we have less and less to actually fear. So put down the newspaper, turn off the 24-hour news, and take some time to figure out what is actually a threat. Give that bored teenager something to do with his time and let the caveman go back to his cave. -------------------------------------------------- "Anyone who has spent time in a Victorian cemetery knows that gratitude, not fear, should be the defining feeling of our age. And yet it is fear that defines us. We worry. We cringe. It seems the less we have to fear, the more we fear." - Daniel Gardner, The Science of Fear ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Jul 13, 2011
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Jul 17, 2011
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Paperback
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| 0765326353
| 9780765326355
| 0765326353
| 4.66
| 527,952
| Aug 31, 2010
| Aug 31, 2010
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it was amazing
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There are times when I hate having grown up to be a fantasy fan. Most of the time it’s when I pick up a book that seems promising – maybe because it’s
There are times when I hate having grown up to be a fantasy fan. Most of the time it’s when I pick up a book that seems promising – maybe because it’s from a familiar author, or because you heard from a friend of a friend that it was good – but it turns out to be disappointing. Stock characters, old and tired plotlines, and a world that’s basically Tolkien with some greasepaint and false noses added on. Given the number of people who write fantasy, the odds of coming across a truly interesting world with compelling characters and a story that has some surprises is difficult indeed. Fortunately, it looks like Sanderson has managed to pull it off. The world of Roshar is a strange and tempestuous place. The seasons come and go in unpredictable ways, sometimes bringing with them great highstorms that are so powerful that even the plants of this world have evolved ways to hide from them. It is a world filled with spirits, ubiquitous beings called spren, which pop up for almost any reason. There are the spren of nature – windspren, firespren, rotspren, riverspren and the like. There are spren that seem attracted to humans, like alespren, gloryspren, anticipationspren and logicspren. No one really knows what they are or why they exist, but they are everywhere in this world. The greatest kingdom in Roshar is that of Alethkar, which is barely a nation at all. A loosely bound alliance of ten high princes, the people of Alethkar are a hostile, ambitious, violent folk whose first and greatest love is battle and winning. Since the assassination of their king by the savage Parshendi, they have been involved in a seemingly endless siege of revenge on the great Shattered Plains. The greatest warriors of Alethkar – or any nation – are those who wield the amazing shardblades. Swords that seem to condense out of mist, the shardblades can cut through anything, though if they cut through a person their effects are a little more subtle. A warrior armed with a shardblade, wearing shardplate armor, can use the incredible power of stormlight to achieve feats that no normal man could survive. Bound within glowing gemstones and restored by the howling winds of the highstorms, stormlight is Roshar’s greatest treasure. Within this world we follow an ensemble cast which, while adhering to certain fantasy archetypes, still is made interesting and worth watching. Dalinar, the brother to the dead Alethi king, is searching for a way to hold together the weak nation that his brother formed. He has been learning of the old ways, the teachings of the vanished and reviled Knights Radiant, in the hopes that they can help hold his people together. On the other end of Alethi society is Kaladin. Once a promising young surgeon, Kaladin joined the army in hopes of being able to fight on the Shattered Plains. He made it there, but not as a soldier – as a member of a bridge crew, one of the most expendable resources in the entire war. He became the lowest of the low, forced to find a reason to stay alive. In a city far from the fighting, young Shallan Davar has fought to become the ward of the great heretic scholar Jasnah Kholin. While she has ostensibly come to learn from the woman, her true purpose is to steal Jasnah’s soulcaster, a device which, if used properly, can turn something into something else – stone into smoke, glass into blood, a man into fire. With this, Shallan hopes to revive her family’s flagging fortunes after the death of her father. What she discovers with Jasnah, of course, is far, far more. Then there’s Szeth-son-son-Vallano, truthless of Shinovar. Poor, poor Szeth. From a race of people known for their peaceful and easygoing natures, Szeth is the most powerful assassin the world has seen. He can harness the stormlight to manipulate gravity, making him able to do the impossible while he uses his shardblade to cut down anyone in his way. In truth, though, Szeth wishes only one thing – to find someone who is good enough to kill him, and end his tormented life. As you may have guessed, it’s a complicated tale, and Sanderson doesn’t hold to this whole “Give the reader time to get used to it” style of writing. If you’re not paying attention from the beginning, you are likely to be very, very lost within the first chapter or so. But once everything settles down, the story turns into a fast-paced, multi-leveled adventure that takes place in a world that is imaginative and fascinating. The characters are enthralling, too, with many levels and – most importantly – flaws. While Kaladin is a brilliant organizer and leader, he has to fight continually against the despair of realizing what his life has come to. The easy thing would be to allow himself to die, but he knows he can’t let himself do that. Dalinar, plagued by visions of what might be Roshar’s ancient past, is fighting centuries of Alethi martial tradition by trying to bring the high princes together and end the war, rather than allowing it to go on. He’s pulled between the love of his nephew, the king, and his frustration that the king won’t be strong enough to do what needs doing. Shallan, who left her home with a clear purpose, is finding that nothing was what she thought it would be. Jasnah isn’t an evil woman, despite being a heretic, and her plan to steal the soulcaster becomes less and less certain the more she learns. All of these characters are at the front edge of thousands of years of history, much of it shrouded in uncertainty – legendary Knights Radiant who fought Voidbringers before giving up their duty and turning against mankind. What actually happened is unknown, and perhaps won’t ever be known. But the effects of those events echo to the present day, causing problems which our characters will eventually have to deal with. Perhaps the greatest compliment I can give to Sanderson is that when I finished the book, I immediately went back to the first page and started reading again. There are very few books that have inspired me thus, but this one did – especially after the cascading Big Reveals at the end, which explain a lot, and cast a new light on a whole lot more. What’s more, I found myself wishing that I had access to an animation studio while I read the action scenes. Fights can be hard to do in written form – there’s a tendency to either describe too much or too little, and very often the reader gets slowed down trying to visualize what’s happening in the story. Sanderson is very, very good at writing action, something I first noticed in Towers of Midnight. Even when Szeth is hopping from floor to ceiling to wall, flinging people around like toys, the action was very clear in my mind’s eye, and it’s something I would love to see animated, if not done in live action. And yes, to get back to why I hate being a fantasy reader sometimes, it is the first book in a series, which means I’m likely to be following it for quite some time. There’s nothing truly wrong with that – there are plenty of series that I've followed in my day – but I never look forward to the waiting game that you have to play as the author works on the next book. To be fair, though, Sanderson is busy right now finishing up my favorite series, The Wheel of Time, so I think I can give him a little latitude. In any case, if you’re looking for a dense, fun new series to read, definitely pick this up. I plan on getting into some of his other books, mainly in order to have something to do while I wait for the next one of these. -------------------------------------- “The purpose of a storyteller is not to tell you how to think, but to give you questions to think upon. Too often, we forget that.” - Hoid, The Way of Kings ...more |
Notes are private!
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Mar 20, 2011
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Mar 29, 2011
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Hardcover
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| 1607060760
| 9781607060765
| 4.44
| 70,168
| May 19, 2009
| May 19, 2009
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it was amazing
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Zombies are boring. There. I said it. And I'm not ashamed. They are, though. Zombies have no real motivation, they have no goals other than to kill all Zombies are boring. There. I said it. And I'm not ashamed. They are, though. Zombies have no real motivation, they have no goals other than to kill all humans. They are mindless, a kind of twisted force of nature whose great terror lies in their sheer numbers and their unstoppability. As a concept, zombies are interesting, and as a symbol or a metaphor there's a lot you can do with them, but the zombies themselves are kind of dull. They lurch about, slowly decaying, looking for people to devour. No one ever made a best-selling book or a hit movie with a zombie protagonist. [1] Think about it: every zombie story rests on the same basic plot. The dead have risen and a small band of living survivors tries to find safety in a world that is actively trying to kill them. That's it. Sure, the details may vary - fast zombies or slow ones, a cure or no cure, they eat brains or they'll eat anything, trapped in a mall or a farmhouse - but the foundation of the story is the same, and woe betide the writer who strays too far from the formula. Writing a zombie story means agreeing to adhere to a set of predetermined set of rules, which allow only a little room for straying. So what is it that makes zombie stories so popular? Why do people love books like this one, or Pride and Prejudice and Zombies or World War Z? Why do movies like Shaun of the Dead and Night of the Living Dead and even Resident Evil get people so excited? It certainly isn't because of the zombies, although it is always fun to see the special effects improve. We read and watch zombie stories because we love the survivors, and it is they who make or break a zombie story. The more closely we can identify or sympathize with a survivor, the more interesting and horrifying the story becomes for us. They are a great demonstration of the variety in the human condition, and illuminate new and interesting aspects of humanity every time. In this case, we are given Rick Grimes as our protagonist, a police officer from a small town in Kentucky who gets shot on duty and wakes up a month later in the hospital to find the world has been given over to the dead. As he looks for his wife and son, Rick finds himself leading a band of survivors in their search for a place of safety away from both the dead who wish to devour them and the living who wish to kill them. What makes this a really fun - and terrifying - read is that Kirkman carefully paces the plot so that we never really get much time to rest. A pattern quickly starts to emerge in the story, with Rick and his people finding safety, a kind of equilibrium between running for their lives and resting, only to have that equilibrium disrupted. Each time the interval gets longer and longer, both in terms of page count and story-time, but each time you know what's coming. The hardest moments are the most peaceful ones, when they have found a refuge from the horrors of the world because you know it isn't going to last, and you know that when the balance is finally undone, it's going to be worse than before. Kirkman uses this pattern and this expectation to his advantage, creating a tight and tense narrative. He also provides us with a look at some of the ethical problems that arise from a world where the dead outnumber the living. In nearly every zombie story ever written, the living immediately start killing the zombies, but is that the right choice to make? We don't know all the facts. We don't know what caused this outbreak, whether it can be cured, or even whether the people affected might just get better. We just start taking head shots in ignorance, but might it not be worth it to try and learn something about these "monsters?" [2] There's also the question of how to organize a post-outbreak society. What kind of person or people should run the survivors' societies? Is this an opportunity to remake civilization, or should the old ways be adhered to? How much leeway to we have in restarting the world, and what will that look like in the end? The characters in this story have to deal with how to define a family when one's partner or parents or children could die at any time. They have a chance to redefine what is lawful and illegal, to toy with the notions of what is right and wrong, and to re-evaluate the role religion plays in their lives. It's a chance to rebuild the world from scratch, and the characters in this story test those limits in interesting and sometimes unsettling ways. And that's assuming that the living will actually survive and thrive in a zombified world. This is a world where death is always only moments away. It is only a matter of time before the living survivors join the ranks of the undead, and the awareness of that fact is the classic existential puzzle with a little extra twist to it: how do you live when you know that you will die, and especially when you know the horror that your death will entail? One of the more heartbreaking moments is when one character gets killed, and Rick has to break the news to his young son, Carl. When he asks his son if he is upset, Carl replies, "No. People die, dad. It happens all the time. I'll miss [him]... but I knew he was going to die eventually. Everyone will. Everyone." That is an observation that, frankly, no child should ever have to make. The characters in this story make hard choices and sometimes do terrible things in the name of survival. But, with very few exceptions, there are few characters that we cannot truly come to understand and identify with. Their decisions and their reactions make them richer, more interesting, which is what truly makes for a fascinating and engaging story. The zombies are really incidental to all that. As this is a comic series, I would be remiss if I didn't mention the art, which is overall quite good. There were a few times when I had trouble telling some characters apart, but the high rate of attrition generally took care of that problem. The detail in the artwork is very impressive, though I can imagine there were more than a few times that Charlie Adlard cursed Robert Kirkman for setting a large part of the series in a locale with a prominent chain-link fence that couldn't easily be ignored. As this is a horror comic, the art is sometimes horrifying, very graphic and quite satisfying without being gratuitous. Well, mostly without being gratuitous.... It's a really excellent book, though I do have one caveat if you're planning to buy the compendium edition: get a reinforced reading harness, or rest the book on a solid piece of furniture with a low center of gravity. This is one of the densest books I've ever read, packing nearly five pounds of book into less physical volume [3] than the last hardcover installment of The Dark Tower, a fairly hefty book. I think the ink may contain uranium or something. So, take measures to prevent back injury and hernias when you read this and you'll be just fine. Many thanks to my brother Michael for knowing I would enjoy this, and I look forward to watching the AMC television adaptation. ------------------------------------- "But honestly... I just don't know what anyone's thinking. To me, that's scarier than any half-rotten ghoul trying to eat my flesh." - Rick Grimes, The Walking Dead ------------------------------------- [1] Cue angry email pointing me towards exactly that book or movie in 3... 2... 1... [2] Short answer: no. [3] It comes out to 1.147 grams per cubic centimeter, which isn't nearly as dense as it feels when it's making the straps of your bag dig into your shoulder.... ...more |
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Dec 18, 2010
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Dec 18, 2010
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Paperback
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| 0812550706
| 9780812550702
| 0812550706
| 4.31
| 1,398,322
| Jan 15, 1985
| Sep 30, 2004
|
it was amazing
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A little while after I started teaching literature, I thought about what kinds of books I'd like to do with students in the years to come. The texts I
A little while after I started teaching literature, I thought about what kinds of books I'd like to do with students in the years to come. The texts I did this year - Fahrenheit 451, Things Fall Apart and a collection of Edgar Allan Poe stories - are all well and good, but probably not what I would have chosen to teach. I wanted something that would speak to the students, that would engage with their lives, and which ideally was some good classic science fiction. So I went over to Ask Metafilter and asked them what science fiction they would recommend teaching to high school students studying English as a foreign language. Just about everyone mentioned Ender's Game, and with good reason. It's a good story, for one, and it addresses a lot of the issues that young people have to deal with that are often left out of the literature they have to read for English class. The adults in the book are like the adults in the students' lives - slightly removed, seemingly omniscient, and not necessarily acting in their best interests, at least not as they see it. It deals with issues of bullying and isolation, of fitting in and standing out and accepting your place in the grander scheme of things. It's about critical thinking and moral reflection, all wrapped up in the unending carnival that is youth. Ender Wiggin is, as our book begins, six years old, and he may be the last, best hope for humanity. Ender comes from a strange place. In a near-totalitarian America, families are allowed to have only two children, in order to keep the population static. If a good reason exists, however, they might be allowed to have a third. That third is destined from the beginning to have a hard life, no matter what happens, especially if that third has been bred for a very specific reason. Ender Wiggin is a Third. His parents had two children already - their son, Peter, and daughter, Valentine. Peter is a brilliant young sociopath, and Valentine is an equally brilliant pacifist. In ordinary times, either of them could have been an historical figure, but these were far from ordinary times. Earth is at war with an insectile alien race it has nicknamed the Formics (nicknamed "Buggers"), and has survived two invasions. Everyone knows there will be a third, and if they can't fight it off then humanity will be scythed clean off the planet. The International Fleet needs a commander, one who has enough empathy to understand the enemy, but who also has the killer instinct to be able to wipe them out. Where Peter is too hard and Valentine is too soft, Ender Wiggin could be the one they're looking for. Young and frightened, Ender is taken off-planet to Battle School, where he and hundreds of other youths will take part in battle games to train them in how best to one day defeat the Buggers. While Ender knows that he's been chosen, he doesn't know why, and his experiences in the school lead him to wonder if being a Chosen One is really worth it. In game after game, Ender manages to prove his worth to the International Fleet by defying their expectations of what a battle commander should do. He is pushed to his limits and beyond by the International Fleet, whose motives and methods remain a mystery to him until he has accomplished their goal - one which he never even knew he was aiming for. It's a fun book, and a very quick read, and it's one of those "I should have read this when I was a teenager" books. While I was never put in a position where my action could very possibly save the existence of all humanity, I - like every other teenager ever - had doubts about my place in the world. I saw the conflict between what I wanted for myself and what the adults in my life wanted for me. I was given responsibility that I didn't want, and had to make a choice about whether or not I would live up to it. In other words, while the scale of Ender's problems are much bigger than that of the average young person's, they are essentially the same. I am fortunate in that Ender's Game can work to explode a pervasive and not entirely accurate belief held by all teenagers everywhere, from the dawn of time until now: the belief that there is no one else in the world who understands what they are going through. The big question then becomes, How do I teach this? What can I do to not only get my students to read it but to also understand its relationship to their own lives? However I manage to do it, that will hopefully reveal to them the whole point behind reading for pleasure: that you can look at a book or a story and say, "Yes - life is like this." Not all of it, but you can find that moment, that point of any story that can connect what it is saying to your own life, and thereby learn something from it. There are also a whole host of other issues that can be brought up with this novel, not the least of which is the systematic indoctrination of young people by their educational system. Perhaps a bit self-defeating, but the anti-authoritarian in me would be vastly entertained if I could somehow encourage these kids to look suspiciously upon the very foundation of the system in which they were currently residing. There is also the greater issues of how a society teaches its children, and the limited value of truth. We tell kids that "honesty is the best policy," but this book blows that axiom away. If they had told Ender the truth about what he was doing and why, he would have refused, and Earth would likely have been wiped out. In the same way, how do we - adults, and especially teachers - lie to young people in order to achieve a greater goal? What value, then, do these lies have, and are they worth telling? We can explore redemption and atonement through Ender's attempt to make up for the things he has done. Even more interestingly, we can look at Card's prediction of how the internet would shape political discourse and how citizens can easily be manipulated. Peter and Valentine put on electronic personae through which they gain immense power despite their youth, using their own innate genius to spark debate on the topics that will achieve their own goals. Outside the text, too, there is an excellent opportunity to discuss the relationship between a work and its author. While Ender's Game is a brilliant story that is so well-written that it is recommended reading by both Quakers and the U.S. Marine Corps, its author holds some rather despicable views that don't seem to mesh with the message he has put into his book. I speak here of Card's public denouncement of gay marriage, including accepting a position on the board of directors of the National Organization for Marriage. This group has made many attempts to block the spread of queer civil rights in the U.S., and it disturbs me that an author whose work I respect is spearheading the effort. What, then, is my responsibility as a reader? Should I never read his work again, lest it be seen as a show of support for his politics? Can I even read him fairly from now on, or will I always be looking for that anti-gay undercurrent, perhaps where there is none? Or should I simply ignore the author and enjoy the work? There are a great many authors and artists who are in the same position as Card, and it is a worthwhile discussion to have. There are so many topics to mine from this book that I had to stop myself from time to time and remember to enjoy it, rather than make mental lesson plans. In any case, if you haven't read Ender's Game, I recommend that you do. If you have a young person in your life, see to it that he or she has a chance to read it as well. If you're really lucky, it'll foster a lifelong love of reading. If not, at least they might walk away with the understanding that their problems are pretty universal, and that, on the whole, things could be a whole lot worse. They could be Ender Wiggin. ------------------------------------------------------------- "It was just him and me. He fought with honor. If it weren't for his honor, he and the others would have beaten me together. They might have killed me, then. His sense of honor saved my life. I didn't fight with honor... I fought to win." - Ender Wiggin, Ender's Game" ------------------------------------------------------------- ...more |
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Oct 20, 2010
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Nov 22, 2010
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Mass Market Paperback
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| 0879751983
| 9780879751982
| 0879751983
| 4.02
| 3,998
| 1982
| Jan 01, 1982
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it was amazing
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Now hold still while I read your aura. Yes, my spirit guide is telling me something, that you are experiencing some kind of pain or discomfort in your
Now hold still while I read your aura. Yes, my spirit guide is telling me something, that you are experiencing some kind of pain or discomfort in your back, or perhaps your shoulders. And this is typical of someone born under your star sign, you know? Of course you do - your type is very insightful, even if you do sometimes let little things escape your notice from time to time. Here - I have a medicine that will help you, a special homeopathic formula that I mixed myself. It's proof against all aches and pains. Yes, I have a spoon somewhere around - no, not that one, that one's bent. I could tell you that I got the recipe from visiting aliens, but you would never believe me. Perhaps it was Atlanteans.... Ah, there is one other thing.... My spirit guide tells me that there is another spirit who would talk to you - someone you miss very much. I'm getting the letter P, or maybe G.... Does that mean something to you? Ah, good, good. My abilities have increased a hundredfold since I started transcendental meditation, and I credit the Master with my improved skills. Well, our time is almost up. I have to go charge my dowsing rod with the crystals that were given to me by my young daughters. They say that the fairies gave them to them, and who am I to say otherwise? But I will say this before we part - the numbers of your name, crossed against your biorhythms, tell me that you must not enter into any dealings of a financial nature this week. You can leave your check on the table by the door. There is one truth that I have learned in my days, and that there is no idea so ridiculous, so implausible, so poorly-defined, that someone, somewhere won't fall for it. Whether it's psychic surgeons, aura readers, tellers of the future or viewers of past lives, UFO hunters, witch doctors, table-tippers, spoon-benders, mind-readers or water-dowsers, if you can figure out some simple slight of hand, the odds are good that you can convince someone you have supernatural powers. A few blurry photographs and some enthusiasm, and you can have aliens on our shores. Some clever guesses and a keen knowledge of human nature, and you'll never have to work a day in your life. If you're like me, it's enough to make you want to disavow humankind and just go live somewhere off in the woods. Thankfully, James Randi is not like me. A longtime magician and skeptic, James Randi has been one of the driving forces of modern skepticism. Since his 1972 debunking of spoon-bender Uri Geller, he has been an authority on people who claim to have supernatural abilities. He has traveled the world in search of these people, revealing the methods by which they knowingly or unknowingly deceive people who want so desperately to believe. This book, written in 1982 and well in need of an updated and revised edition, documents many of Randi's investigations in painstaking and unrelenting detail. He tells us first of the hoax perpetrated by two young English girls, one which was good enough to capture not just a credulous nation of newspaper readers, but a man regarded as one of the greatest minds of his time - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. In 1917, Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths released several photographs which showed them surrounded by gossamer-winged fairies. The public went wild for their story. Experts were called in to examine the photographs, and they all pronounced them genuine. The girls were interviewed, their cameras and equipment checked out, and no evidence of trickery could be found. In any case, believers said, two young girls would have no incentive to lie to the entire nation like this, would they? Well, they did. Perhaps it wasn't their intention to deceive the world, but that's how it turned out. As of Randi's writing, they hadn't admitted it outright, but a year after publication, they did. What started as simple fun with a camera and some paper cut-outs escalated into something uncontrollable by two young girls, and a legend was born. Elsie and Frances may have been innocents overtaken by events, but there are far more people who are fully conscious of their deceptions. A Holy Man who promises everything up to and including the ability to fly if you just follow his word and his special meditation technique. Researchers so intent on discovering psychic powers that they disregard even the most basic of experimental controls. People who manufacture fake artifacts to support their belief in ancient alien astronauts. There are those who take money from the unwitting and those who don't, some who treat the ability they believe they have with humility and those who don't. The weird, the arrogant and the dangerous - Randi's seen 'em all. And every time another one pops up, he knows what to look for. Belief is a weird thing. Under careful examination, every claim that Randi has seen has fallen apart. He has listened to them carefully and asked a very simple question that seems to elude so many others: How else could this effect be achieved? As a lifetime magician (though he prefers the term "conjurer"), Randi is an expert at getting you to think you see something that really isn't there, and he brings this expertise to bear when he investigates claims of the paranormal. What's more, he has a very good grasp of experimental procedure and how to test for a specific effect, and he is ruthless in making sure they are adhered to. But - and this is important - Randi is fair. If you come up to him and say, "Randi, I can see auras which tell me who the all gay people are," he won't just laugh in your face and say that you're crazy. He'll listen to your story, how your power works and how you use it, and then propose a simple test to see if it really exists. The test is to be double-blind, so when the target people come in and check the "gay" or "straight" box, that information is kept from both the aura-reader and the person administering the test. What's more, the psychic has to agree in advance on the conditions of the test, signing a promise (rarely kept) to accept the results. Tests are usually done multiple times, just to give the subject a chance. When the results come in as negative - as they always have thus far - Randi doesn't gloat. He doesn't laugh and say "I told you so." In fact, in one chapter he mentions that he feels bad sometimes, telling people who honestly believe they have a unique gift that, in fact, they don't. I suspect that Randi really wants supernatural powers to exist. I think he wants to meet someone who can move objects with her mind, talk to the dead or find water just by concentrating hard. Why else, then, would he have his Million-Dollar Challenge? What is described in Flim-Flam as a $10,000 reward for proof of supernatural abilities has grown significantly. Not because Randi is richer, but because he feels that his money is absolutely safe. Yet I think he would be happy to be able to give it away one day. This book should be required reading for everyone who has encountered what they believe to be the paranormal. It is detailed, it is harsh and it is unequivocal in its assertion that if you see someone doing something that logic demands cannot be done, chances are excellent that it's a trick rather than super-powers. Unfortunately, the True Believers will invariably be unaffected, and that is something else that Randi takes great pains to show. No matter how often someone was shown to be a liar, a fake or a fraud, there were always supporters ready to make excuses. The psychics themselves are also very good at inventing reasons why their powers cannot be tested - the wrong kind of weather, interference from the cameras that are recording the tests, or just bad energy from the skeptics in the room. All the logic and science in the world won't convince those who don't want to be convinced. As much fun as it is to read about The Amazing Randi rushing about the globe to put hoaxers in their places, it's also a little depressing. It was written in 1982, on the heels of Randi's book The Truth About Uri Geller, which exposed the spoon-bending psychic as a fraud, so you would think the one-two punch of these books would be enough to put paid to ridiculous beliefs in ideas that were demonstrably false. Well, you'd be wrong. Newspapers still run horoscopes every day, you can get a biorhythm app for your iPhone, psychics and mediums still rake in tons of cash, and there still innumerable people who put their faith, money and lives in the hands of psychic healers - only to lose all three. But Randi is undaunted. He started the James Randi Educational Foundation to support critical thinking and skepticism, he's still active in the skeptical community, and he's still accepting applications from people who want his million dollars. He may have hoped that this book would be a nail in the coffin of psuedoscience and woo, but even though that didn't pan out, he never gave up. One by one, case by case, the Amazing Randi has stared down the wild-eyed stare of unreason, and he has never blinked. For that, I will always be grateful. ...more |
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Sep 09, 2010
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Sep 10, 2010
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Paperback
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| 0340829788
| 9780340829783
| 4.26
| 204,053
| Nov 04, 1997
| Oct 2003
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it was amazing
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So. Now that we've put three books behind us, and sit at the pivot of the series, it is time that we settle down and have ourselves a little palaver a
So. Now that we've put three books behind us, and sit at the pivot of the series, it is time that we settle down and have ourselves a little palaver about Roland, the Gunslinger. We know little about this man, the protagonist of our epic series. We know he's a hard man, the kind of man who can cross deserts, brave oceans, and kill entire towns if need be. We know he's a dedicated man, who will follow his quarry wherever they may flee to. We know he is single-minded, the kind of person who would allow an eleven year-old boy to fall to his death if that meant getting another foot closer to his precious Dark Tower. He is a hard man, Roland Deschain is. He is the Gunslinger. But who is he really? Who was he before he started on this mad quest for something that may or may not exist? How did he get set on this path that could determine the fate of worlds, this quest that led to the deaths of everyone he ever loved? Who is he? Well settle down, boys and girls, because this is where we get to find out. In between destroying a sentient monorail at a rigged game of riddles and facing off against the darkest Dark Man there is in a mock-up of the Palace of the Emerald City, Roland tells his ka-tet the tale that shaped him and set him on his path. It is a tale that begins with his entry into manhood - a trial by violence where he bested his teacher, Cort, in a duel to the pain, and ends with Roland's soul nearly destroyed. Roland and his companions, Alain and Cuthbert, have been sent by their fathers to the most out-of-the-way place they know - a small village called Hambry in the Barony of Meijis. Their alleged purpose is to count things, more as a punishment than a mission. They seem to be three boys who got into trouble, and who now must pay by spending their summer doing menial work. They don't want any trouble, and they hope that no one will give them any. That's the story, anyway. In reality, they're looking for evidence of the workings of John Farson, also known as The Good Man, who is leading a popular revolution against the established order in Roland's home country, In-World. Hambry has an oil field, the work of the Great Old Ones, which is known to locals simply as "Citgo" Should Farson get enough oil - and the means to refine it - he will be able to revive ancient war machines and bring death to all of In-World. With Roland, Alain and Cuthbert as spies for the Affiliation, the Gunslingers in Gilead hope that they can stall, if not stop, Farson's rebellion. That would have been great if only Roland Deschain hadn't met Susan Delgado, the daughter of a deceased horse-breeder and soon to be the promised girl of the mayor of Hambry. As soon as they meet, their destiny is clear: it is true love. No more able to stand against their fate than a tree in a whirlwind, Roland and Susan do as all young lovers have done, and risk discovery and death in the process. In every corner there are those who would stand against them: Susan's spinster aunt, Cordelia, who hopes to make some money selling her niece off to the mayor; the Big Coffin Hunters, three mercenaries who work for Farson and who mean to see every last drop of oil gets in his hands; and Rhea of the Cöos, a horrible witch who possesses a crystal orb that lets her see all the malicious things that people do. Against these arrayed forces, Roland and his friends must not only foil the plans of John Farson, but also escape Meijis with their lives. With the first, they are successful. With the second, not so much. Dark Tower fans that I have talked to generally agree that this is the best book of the seven, for many reasons. First, we get to see Roland before he became all tall, gritty and scary. We see him as a callow youth, a boy of fourteen who is in way over his head, tackling responsibilities that would be better handled by a grown man. They're on the losing side of a terrible war as it is, as they're up against the combined cunning and guile of some very bad people. In many cases it is luck as much as skill that leads them to their eventual victory. What's more, we get to see Roland in love, and this is really where King shines in this book. He says in the afterward that he was dreading writing this book, mainly because he knew that he would have to portray teenage love - first love - in a realistic fashion, which can be hard to do when you're several decades removed from being a teenager. All the madness that comes with teen love - the longing, the furtive trysts, the absolute certainty in what you are doing and that no one can stop you. The way that the person you're in love with is all you can think about, and the only thing you want is to be with them again, if only for a moment. The way you freely and willingly lose your mind for love. It's something which, thankfully, we grow out of as adults. Frankly, if I ever felt like that again, I'd probably throw myself under a train. King has done a fantastic job with the relationship between Susan and Roland - it's as realistic as he can make it, without being mawkish and overly romantic. We are never allowed to forget that, like so many doomed lovers before them, they are risking everything with their love - their mission, their friends, and their lives - and we know that even the slightest misstep can mean disaster. Mixed with the other, more adventure-driven elements of the plot, it's incredibly tense, and it's handled very well. The romance aside, there are some wonderful characters in this book, and as is the case with so many Stephen King novels, the best ones are the bad ones. Susan's aunt Cordelia is a bundle of jealous paranoia, and you can feel her mainspring winding up every time she shows up on the page. Eldred Jonas is a laid-back killer, an old man who has buried countless young men, and means to bury Roland and his friends. And Rhea is just palpably foul. You can almost smell her when she shows up, which is a great accomplishment - and you can't wait to see her again. As an aside, Marvel Comics has been doing comic book stories of Roland's youth, and the first one re-tells this tale. It's called The Gunslinger Born, and while it's not bad, there is a certain emptiness to it. It's not easy to compress hundreds of pages of character and plot development into a seven-issue comic series. I don't know how it would read to someone who hasn't read this book, but to me it looked like it was missing a whole hell of a lot.... As I said, this book is the pivot on which the series turns, and it is essential to understanding Roland. We have to know who he was and how he became who he is. While there are still questions to be answered, and stories to be told, the big story is out. Now he and his ka-tet can continue in their quest for the tower, confident that they know a little more about this man who yanked them from their worlds into his. For us, the character and his world become richer, more full of meaning. Things that we might not have thought about in the first few books become more meaningful, and we can better appreciate the history of his dying world. Most importantly, we can begin to understand why it is so important that he find the Dark Tower, and we pray that he knows what to do when he gets there. ...more |
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Aug 12, 2010
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Aug 13, 2010
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Paperback
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| 0451210859
| 9780451210852
| 0451210859
| 4.23
| 268,461
| May 1987
| Aug 05, 2003
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it was amazing
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I have a soft spot in my heart for world-crossing stories. Perhaps it's the remnant of the same childhood fantasy that everyone has - you know the one
I have a soft spot in my heart for world-crossing stories. Perhaps it's the remnant of the same childhood fantasy that everyone has - you know the one, "My family is not my family, my hometown is not my hometown - I'm really a lost prince of a strange magical kingdom and one day my true identity will be revealed and I'll be able to go do something more fun than this...." Escapist fiction of this sort usually does really well, mostly because so many of us are unsatisfied with the way our lives are going right now. Harry Potter blew everyone away for the same reason that, say, Star Wars did - they spoke to that desire that we all have for a destiny, a reason for being in this benighted universe other than to consume, procreate, and die. It's a very powerful dream, that dream that we can lead a life better than the one we're living now, and it's one that very few of us get to realize. So we turn to fiction to realize that dream for us. Of course, nothing comes without a price. In hopping from world to world, you may have to resist the temptations of a Snow Queen or fight off the forces of Xur and the Ko-Dan Armada. You may discover that your father is the greatest force for evil in the universe, or that you've been born into a genetic cohort that scares the hell out of everyone. Crossing from one world to another - whether literally or figuratively - always comes with a price. For Eddie Dean, Detta Walker, and Odetta Holmes, that price could very well be their lives. When last we left the Gunslinger, Roland was sitting by a vast and gray sea at the end of the world. He had already sacrificed young Jake Chambers for his quest, and had been shown a vision of the universe that would have blasted the mind of a lesser man. Without any other direction, Roland continues on his journey - but not without some difficulty. Wounded and ill, Roland has to go through three strange doors and draw out new companions to replace the ones he lost so long ago. If he is successful, he will draw out a new ka-tet - a group bound by the forces of destiny - that will stand with him on the way to the Dark Tower. If he fails, he will face total obliteration, to say nothing of being devoured alive by huge mutant lobsters. Through door number one, Roland meets The Prisoner - young Eddie Dean, a junkie who has to bring a couple of pounds of cocaine through customs at JFK airport in New York. If he can do that, then the men holding his beloved big brother will let them both go, well-paid and well-loaded with the drugs that they so desperately want. Eddie can't do it without Roland's help, however - help that turns out to make the whole endeavor much more complicated and lethal than it might have been before. Through door number two, Roland must bring the Lady of Shadows, a woman who is two minds in one body. One of these minds is Odetta Holmes, an upper-class African-American woman (though in her era of the early sixties she would probably prefer to be called a Negro) who has thrown her efforts and her fortune behind the growing civil rights movement. She is cultured and civilized, a little bit snobbish and prudish, but far, far better than her alter ego, Detta Walker. Detta is the dark half, the evil twin who relishes in her misdeeds and embodies the worst qualities that can be found in a person. She likes to hurt people, to break things - partly out of the sheer enjoyment of hurting and breaking, but also out of a cruel sense of revenge for the ills the world has done to her. For the brick that was dropped on her head when she was a child, for the train that robbed her of her legs when she was an adult. Of all the people Roland has met so far, Detta Walker is the one who poses the most danger to him and his quest. Only by bringing the two women together can he have any chance of making it to the Tower. Through door number three, Roland must meet death - but not for him - in the form of The Pusher. The aptly-named Jack Mort has a hobby - anonymous murder. Planning and executing the suffering of others is what brings joy to his heart and a stain to his jeans, and he has intersected with Roland's quest even before Roland reached the beach. He was the one who pushed Odetta Holmes under a subway train. He was the one who pushed Jack Chambers in front of a speeding Cadillac. Now, Roland has control of this man's body and will use it to get what he needs from our world so that he can carry on in his. A little poetic justice along the way is just icing on the cake. If Roland succeeds, he and his new group will push on to find the Dark Tower and do... whatever it is that Roland needs to do there. If he fails, they will all die, and the hopes of Roland's world will die with them. Like I said, I enjoy tales of crossing worlds, and so this book felt good to me. I liked seeing not only how Roland dealt with the unfamiliar reality of New York in three different decades, but how the stories of Eddie, Odetta/Detta and Jack intersected with each other. At one point in his section, Jack thinks, "Who was to say he had not sculpted the cosmos today, or might not at some future time? God, no wonder he creamed his jeans!" Crude though it may be, Jack is more right than he knows - a few simple pushes altered the destinies of not only the people he pushed, but those of entire worlds. So if you think small actions can't have big consequences, well, look to Jack Mort. Actually, his section of the book was my favorite. While Roland vs. Eddie was an action-packed shoot-em-up, and Roland vs. Detta was a hostage drama, Roland vs. Jack was almost a dark comedy. Taking over Jack's body and keeping the man's mind at metaphorical gunpoint, Roland carves a swath of confusion through New York City. The mental disconnect people have between Jack Mort's appearance as a well-off CPA and his behavior as a seasoned gunslinger is enough for some moments of gold. By the end of the book, we're not much closer to the Dark Tower than we were at the beginning, but we are very nearly ready to get started on the journey. Not quite there yet, but Roland now has people he can count on when things turn bad. And they will turn bad, you can set your watch and warrant on it. ...more |
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| 0886777631
| 9780886777630
| B00217NM78
| 3.93
| 27,960
| Dec 05, 1996
| 1998
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it was amazing
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Let me just start by saying this: the first time I finished this series, I immediately went back and started reading it again. I can't think of any ot
Let me just start by saying this: the first time I finished this series, I immediately went back and started reading it again. I can't think of any other series that I've done that with. This is one of Tad Williams' "economy-sized manuscripts," similar to his fantasy classic Memory, Sorrow and Thorn. Similar in size and scope, anyway - four giant tomes chock full of all things awesome. It's a series of grand scope, amazing scale and great imagination, well worthy of your time. It's a complex, interweaving of tales, full of vibrant characters, implacable enemies, and important questions about destiny, identity, consciousness and the very nature of reality itself. Seriously, top-shelf stuff here, people. It begins in a near-future world, and it begins with the children. Renie Sulaweyo, a teacher in South Africa, has a brother in the hospital. He, like many other children around the world, has gone into an inexplicable coma, the causes of which defy medical science. The only clue she has is that the outbreaks of these comas coincide with the availability of access to the Net - a virtual reality internet that is what Second Life dreams of becoming. Here, depending on your equipment, you can live in a virtual world that is more vibrant and exciting than anything the real world can offer. And you can do it in full sense-surround 3D. Renie's brother, Stephen, engaged in the usual mischief that any kid with access to his own virtual universe might do, and finally got caught. Something shut him down, and Renie was determined to find out what did it. With the assistance of her student, a Bushman named !Xabbu, Renie uncovers an amazing virtual world, something that puts the best virtual reality to shame. It is the Otherland, a playground for the obscenely wealthy. And it may hold the secret to what has afflicted her brother. That's the short version, and since Renie is the one we're introduced to first, it would be easy to think of her as the protagonist of the story. That would be highly inaccurate, though. There's a lot of other storylines going on in there as well. There's young Orlando Gardiner, who compensates for a crippling illness by being the baddest barbarian on the net. His best friend, Sam Fredericks, has stood by him for many years in an online game that makes World of Warcraft look like pen and paper D&D. They and others are lured into a deadly quest by a vision of a great golden city, more realistic and magical than they ever thought they could find. Out in the real world, there's little Christabel Sorenson, upon whose earnest desire to help the funny-looking Mister Sellars the entire future of the Otherland rests. There's the aptly-named Dread, an assassin extraordinare whose strange "twist" gives him an edge in all things electronic. And, of course, there is Paul Jonas, a man trapped in an imaginary world, whose escape threatens the greatest dreams of the richest men the world has ever known. All of this, as the series title suggests, centers on the Otherland project, a virtual reality of monumental proportions. It's a digital world that is more real than the real world is, a world of computer-created, but very deadly, dangers. The slightest misstep could spell disaster and death - die in the Otherland and you die in real life. And just FYI, Otherland predates The Matrix by three years and, kung-fu aside, is a much better story. So if you're thinking, "Man, this is just a Matrix rip-off, you're very, very wrong. It's a daunting series to begin. After all, it's four books, each one clocking in around 800 to 900 pages. There are at least fifteen major characters, and the Otherland itself shows us seven different "worlds" in this book alone. There's a lot to take in, and on top of all that, there's a whole world happening outside the story - each chapter is preceded with a small news blurb that tells us about things that are going on in the world. Cops rounding up homeless kids in lethal "snipe hunts," homicidal artists, legislative representation for the industrial sector of America - this world is both familiar and alien at the same time. The good news is that it is a lot of fun to read. The pacing is very good, so you never get too bored watching any one character for a while. What's more, Williams pays homage to some of the greatest fantasy and science fiction the English-speaking world has to offer. At one point, even the characters admit that they seem to be caught up in a very familiar story. So my advice is to just dive right into it. Once you get going, things clip along at a good pace and you'll find yourself on page 943 in no time flat. The really fun part is re-discovering things in this series. There are some things I remember very clearly, but other little details that pop up and make me think, "Oh yeah, I forgot all about that." I enjoy seeing Williams' prescience - after all, he wrote this just as the internet was really becoming popular, and a good ten years before things like online gaming and social media took over our lives. His vision of an immersive, VR world may have seemed a little wild and out there back in the mid-nineties, but not anymore. So, make a sandwich and find a comfortable place to sit. This'll take a while, but I guarantee - it'll be worth it. ...more |
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Jul 08, 2010
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Jul 11, 2010
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| 1579128149
| 9781579128142
| 1579128149
| 4.43
| 5,259
| Oct 01, 2009
| Oct 01, 2009
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it was amazing
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When I was a kid, my father had the entire Time/Life science series. For you young whippersnappers, Time/Life books were educational series that cover
When I was a kid, my father had the entire Time/Life science series. For you young whippersnappers, Time/Life books were educational series that covered all kinds of topics - history, science, literature, you name it. The idea was that you sign up and they send you books, once a month, until the series was finished or you decided you no longer wanted to receive it. The Science series focused on, of course, science, with books devoted to every facet of physics, medicine, chemistry, biology.... It was a fantastic compendium of human knowledge in those pre-internet days, and I just loved it. I learned about how traveling at lightspeed squashes things by reading a story about spies chasing each other on the Lightspeed Express. I learned about how different drugs affect the mind and body. I learned about how important the wheel was, what water could do, and how the food we eat determines almost everything about our lives. My favorite volume of all of them was titled Matter, and it was about all the stuff there is. At the center of it was a pictorial representation of all the elements known to science in 1968. Everything from Hydrogen to Uranium and beyond. I could pore over those pages for hours, amazed by the idea that these things were all there was, made up everything around me. Learning that just six of them (Oxygen, Carbon, Hydrogen, Nitrogen, Calcium and Phosphorus) made up most of, well, me was just mind-bending. I don't know where that book is now - probably in a box at my mother's house - but the effect that it had on me has lasted ever since my childhood. In fact, as I was researching this review, I found the place that sells coins stamped from elemental metals and got completely distracted by the struggle to not buy any of them. So that's how Time/Life made me into a science nerd. Nevertheless, I was thrilled when I saw this book, and had to snap it up as soon as I could. It cost a whole lot less than a 1/10 troy ounce Rhodium coin Theodore Gray is an element hunter - something I didn't even know existed when I was a kid. He has made a hobby of trying to collect samples of every element that is is possible to (legally) own, and he's even built a special table to hold them all. A periodic table, as it were, which won him the IgNobel Prize in Chemistry in 2002. He and Nick Mann went through the collection to make outstanding, high-quality photographs and compile them into a fantastic book about "everything you can drop on your foot." It starts, of course, with a basic rundown of what an element is - a substance made of only one type of atom - and what the Periodic Table is - an organization of the elements by their common properties. There's also a page explaining the physics behind the shape of the table, what an "electron filling order" is, and why the atomic emission spectrum is so important. Fortunately for us non-professionals, he does this is a way that is amusing and understandable. Gray knows that his audience isn't professional chemists or grad students - it's people like me. People who are fans of science, but who, for one reason or another, never got into the real nitty-gritty of it. All of this means that it's a book you can enjoy even if you remember nothing from high school chemistry other than "BIFF=WANG." [1:] The book starts, of course, at hydrogen, the element that makes the sun burn ("Even at night," alleges the author, but I'll believe that when I see it) and ends with Ununoctium, which will no doubt get a proper name once those crazy kids in the high-energy physics lab get around to assembling it. It includes the spectre of the modern age, Uranium, and its evil twin Plutonium. There's Carbon, without which none of us would be here, and Arsenic, which does a fine job of seeing to it that we cease to be. There's Iron, which we use in abundance, and Dysprosium, which has almost no uses that you've ever heard of. Cesium tells us what time it is, and Krypton, which used to tell us how long things were (before we figured out the speed of light.) Strontium and Calcium, Sodium and Americium, Gold, Silver, Copper and Lead - every element is in here, waiting for you. They're accompanied by wonderful photographs that illustrate the applications of each element, as well as diagrams showing its emission spectrum, crystal structure, and other information that you may or may not be interested in. Regardless of how much you know about chemistry, you should find this to be a fascinating and enjoyable book. Moreover, if you have kids and you want them to be exposed to science in a way that engages their fascination and imagination, then this is the book for you. Just be ready to raise a science nerd, and if they ask for an elemental coin for their birthday, remember - Lead isn't just for toys anymore! [1:] Thanks, Mr. Hiza! ...more |
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Jun 26, 2010
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Jul 02, 2010
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Hardcover
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| 0345321383
| 9780345321381
| 0345321383
| 4.27
| 10,471
| Apr 01, 1984
| Apr 12, 1985
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it was amazing
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It's not often that you read a book and it immediately jumps up into your "Best Books Ever" list. Usually it takes some time and reflection, careful t
It's not often that you read a book and it immediately jumps up into your "Best Books Ever" list. Usually it takes some time and reflection, careful thought about the book's characters, themes and message. Perhaps a re-read would be in order, and then, after some consideration, you might say, "Yeah. I think this is a really, really good book that I want everyone else to read." I think I hit that somewhere around page 182. This is, as the cover tells us, a novel of "An ancient China that never was." It's set in the long-ago, indeterminate past (of which China has so very much), and starts off in a small village with an unusual history. The village of Ku-Fu, the story goes, was home to a section of the Great Wall, commissioned by the Emperor of China many centuries ago. This would not in itself be notable, except that it was built 122 miles south of the rest of the wall, thus serving no real purpose whatsoever. The general in charge was, he maintains, given the orders by the Emperor of Heaven himself, a story which held no sway with the more earthly Emperor who was ready to execute him. A more believable story was produced - that a great dragon had rested itself on that part of the wall, thus moving it, and it shouldn't be tampered with. And so the village of Ku-Fu became home to what was known as The Dragon's Pillow, a place that would one day loom large in the history of not only the village, but all of China. It is a peaceful village with the usual colorful characters that you get in such a place, such as the terrible partners Pawnbroker Fang and Ma the Grub, two greedy and unscrupulous men who hold the economic life of the village in their hands. When their misdeeds go too far, resulting in the horrible poisoning of many of the village's children, the story's narrator, Number Ten Ox (whose given name is Lu Yu, but he would not want to be confused with the famous author of The Classic of Tea) is tasked to bring a wise man from the city to diagnose the problem and find a solution. Out of the many wise men, Ox finds Li Kao, a cynical, world-weary curmudgeon with, as he so often tells us, a slight flaw in his character. Together, Ox and Li Kao must travel the length and breadth of China to find the Great Root - a ginseng root that was kept by the mythical Princess of Birds, and whose healing properties are all that stand between the children of Ku-Fu and certain death. Along the way, they must travel terrible labyrinths, fight unimaginable monsters, battle against an immortal evil, bring peace to restless ghosts and solve the greatest mystery in the history of China - what happened to the Princess of Birds, beloved of the Star Shepherd, Prince of Heaven. There is just so much to recommend this book, I don't even know where to start. For one, it's a lot of fun to read. The person who recommended it to me did so on the reasonable assumption that, since I like Terry Pratchett so much, I would probably like this book as well. And that was a very good assumption - there is a certain similarity between the two. Hughart uses humor very deftly, keeping the characters alive and interesting through even the most dangerous of times. Where Pratchett's humor often feels like literary slapstick, however, Hughart's is a bit more subtle. The characters are funny, yes, but the book was not written to make you laugh. It was written so that the reader would have a good time reading a story well-told. And what a story it was. It begins with a fairly straightforward quest - a search for the Great Ginseng Root to cure the children of Ku-Fu - and turns into something so much larger than that. As the evil Duke of Ch'in says, they're on the right quest, but for all the wrong reasons, a cryptic statement that takes a while to make sense. The scope of the story gets bigger and bigger as it goes on, and you realize that the pieces for this quest were put into place hundreds, if not thousands of years before the story actually started. The history of China is on display here, if somewhat distorted for the purposes of entertainment. Hughart spent time living in the Far East and gained a healthy respect for its long and often unbelievable history and culture. The book includes elements of China's history of inventiveness and ingenuity, as well as cultural myths that extend beyond its borders. The characters themselves are wonderful, too. Number Ten Ox is an earnest, strong, well-meaning young man who has one goal in mind- save the children of his village. Li Kao is a devious old man who tends to use his wisdom and quick thinking for more nefarious purposes - thus the slight flaw in his character. There are a lot of notable minor characters as well, including Pawnbroker Fang and Ma the Grub, who somehow manage to turn up all through the story, always being chased by the people they've cheated. The Duke of Ch'in is a terrifying figure, Henpecked Ho is comically dark, and Miser Shen starts off utterly unlikable, but if there's one character in the story that forces you to put down the book for a few minutes and gather your thoughts, it is he. It's a moving tale of hope and perseverance and the power of myth. It's a story about the need for humanity to temper desire and what happens when we let our lives be governed by fear and greed. It's about love and justice, revenge and history. It's a book that almost immediately earned my respect and admiration, and that's pretty hard to do. So go get it. Block out some time when you can sit and fall into the story and really get absorbed in it, because let me promise you - it will be well worth it. ...more |
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Jun 12, 2010
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Jun 26, 2010
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Mass Market Paperback
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| 1596914521
| 9781596914520
| 1596914521
| 4.05
| 19,753
| Sep 29, 2009
| Oct 05, 2009
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it was amazing
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I have a question for you. It's a simple-sounding question, but hard to answer, so I really want you to put a good amount of thought into it before yo
I have a question for you. It's a simple-sounding question, but hard to answer, so I really want you to put a good amount of thought into it before you do. Okay? Yes, I'm still in Teacher-mode, but that's not important right now. My question is this: What is truth? It's one of those unanswerable questions that has bugged us ever since we started being able to ask unanswerable questions. Along with "Why is there evil in the world?" and "Do we have free will or are our lives pre-determined from the beginning?" or "What's the deal with that Justin Bieber kid? I mean really?" this question is one that people either ignore or obsess over. Didn't think I could do a pop-culture reference like that, did you? Shows how much you know.... This graphic novel is about one man's pursuit of this question, and the ways in which it nearly destroyed his life. The man was Bertrand Russell, and we follow his life from his childhood to late adulthood as he searches for an unshakable foundation to mathematics and logic, and thus an absolute truth that he could rely on. As a child, Russell lived with the question of why things are the way they are, and got no good answers from his domineering grandmother. It wasn't until his introduction to geometry and the wonder of mathematical proofs that he could finally say there was something about which he could be absolutely sure in the universe. Mathematics, he thought, would be the answer to everything. Pure, unsullied and utterly, utterly reliable. But there was a flaw in math - the Axioms. Mathematics in the 19th century was a direct descendant of Euclid's work, and rested on a series of axioms in order to function. An axiom, then, is something that is assumed to be true so that you can go on to prove other things. For example, if you have a line, and a point not on that line, there can be only one line drawn through that point that is parallel to the first. Why is this true? Well... it just is. If you have to prove that, then you have to prove a thousand other things first, and you never end up being able to prove the thing you were trying to prove in the first place. It was like, he thought, the cosmological model of the world on the back of a turtle. Which stood on another turtle. Which stood on another, and another - turtles, all the way down. That didn't satisfy young Russell, and he went off in search of the floor upon which the last turtle stood, as it were - new mathematics that would be able to define the foundations of math, and thereby give a concrete understanding of the universe. Along the way, his desire to apply the certainty of math to human thought and interaction led him to the discipline of logic, a strange chimera of mathematics and philosophy. By becoming a logician, he thought he might finally be able to pin down some absolute truths about not only abstract math but human nature itself. Of course, he failed. Spectacularly. Broken marriages, broken friendships, ill health - his obsession with an absolute truth to the universe nearly destroyed everything he had. Fortunately for him, Russell pulled back from the abyss before it could swallow him whole, and became one of the early 20th century's greatest philosophers in the process. His failure to find an ultimate foundation for logic and math was not entirely without fruit - thanks to work by Russell and others, these disciplines were pushed forward in ways that made our modern lives possible. New ways of understanding the universe, from the unfathomable depths of infinity to the simplicity of 1+1=2, everything was open to examination in those days. Because of men like Bertrand Russell, humanity advanced in great leaps and bounds. In the end, it's a compelling book. I read and re-read it, convinced each time that there was something else I had missed. I was very often right. Doxiadis and Papadimitriou have put together a compelling tale of a man often overlooked by the general public, and they did so in a medium that's close to my heart - the graphic novel. The art, done by Alecos Papadatos and Annie Di Donna, is wonderful. It has a simplicity that belies the complexity of its topic, and shows an excellent sense of storytelling. Hats off to the two of them, without a doubt. This book, it should be noted, is not a primer on logic. If you're looking to know how logic works, or you want to know a bit more about higher mathematics and how to do them, then you'd best look for another book. As the authors tell us right in the beginning, this book is a story, a great tragedy that owes its inspiration to the ancient productions of the Greeks. It's the story of a man who pitted himself against the universe and lost, but who did so in such a way that he - and the world - came out better for it. The book ends with a scene from The Oresteia, a classic Greek drama about another man who found himself in a no-win situation with no absolutes to rest upon. Much like Orestes, when faced with two choices that could lead to his destruction, the only way forward for Russell was to compromise and to move forward. By doing so, he not only became a happier man, but became involved with humanity again, as a philosopher, a teacher, and an anti-war activist. In the end, this book is about the compromises we all have to make as human beings. The world may be a logical place, but we are not. There is a limit to our logical understanding of ourselves, and sooner or later we have to accept that and deal with people as people, rather than as problems to be solved and equations to be balanced. Bertrand Russell's quest, as interpreted by this novel, is an example of how far we can push the need to know exactly that's at the bottom of it all. The fact that the foundations of our world appear to be unprovable and unknowable is, ultimately, unimportant. What is important is that we are here, now, and we need to make sense of our own lives. ...more |
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Jun 10, 2010
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Jun 26, 2010
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Paperback
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| 1400066603
| 9781400066605
| 1400066603
| 3.79
| 617
| May 05, 2009
| May 05, 2009
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it was amazing
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I, for obvious reasons, have a great affection for the English Language. It's a rich and exciting tongue, with a history as tangled and strange as the
I, for obvious reasons, have a great affection for the English Language. It's a rich and exciting tongue, with a history as tangled and strange as they come. Over the last millennium or so, the language has gone through so many shifts and changes that people spend entire lifetimes trying to figure it out. Once they do, more often than not, they find that what once was true about their beloved mother tongue just doesn't hold up today. So there's a choice to be made by lovers of language: deal with the ever-fluctuating nature of English, adapt yourself to its changes and go on with your life, or do your damnedest to hold back the tide of error that is slowly overtaking your beloved tongue. For reasons that should be obvious, the former type of person is far less likely to write books. Their laid back, laissez faire attitude towards the world is less inclined to make them mad enough to sit down at a computer and pound out thousands of words on the state of the language today. The latter type of person - and I do occasionally count myself among them - are far more likely to sit up late at night and write scathing tracts about the utter and complete degeneration of today's language - about split infinitives and buzzwords and the ungodly Frenchification of English. If you listen to the sticklers, you might be forgiven for thinking that the very fabric of the English Language is in a state of decay, rotten and putrescent, and ready to fall apart any moment. Patricia O'Connor and Stewart Kellerman are here to give you some perspective, something in which language sticklers are usually lacking, and perhaps lessen the incandescent rage that overtakes you when you hear people use "infer" to mean "imply," or "unique" to mean "special," or say, "I could care less," even though you know it's supposed to be "I couldn't care less," because I mean my GOD, even a CHILD, even a half-trained, concussed MONKEY could see how that phrase works, what's so hard about a simple word, you MORONS, you gibbering pack of.... ****We are experiencing technical difficulties at the moment. Please stand by. We apologize for the inconvenience.**** And we're back. Sorry about that. This book is about errors in English, and not only the legitimate ones. It's also about how some of those errors aren't really errors, or how they used to be, but now they aren't. O'Connor and Kellerman are looking to give us a historical sense of how the language has evolved and changed over the centuries, and let us know that the rules of language can't be set by prim and stuffy grammarians from two hundred years ago. Those Grammarians, for example, are often called The Latinists, and a great many of them come from the 18th century. In those days, Latin was held up as being some kind of "perfect tongue," and there was a certain fetish for making English play under Latin rules. The authors wryly note that this would make "about as much sense as having the Chicago Cubs play by the same rules as the Green Bay Packers." For those of you who are rusty on your linguistic history, Latin split off into what are called the Romance Languages, which includes Spanish, French and Italian. English, on the other hand, has its roots in the Germanic side of the great language tree, and so is more similar to German, Dutch and Frisian. The vast number of Latin-based words we have are, technically, imports, as English is merely a cousin to Latin, not its descendant. But no, there were Those who wanted us to be more Latin-like, and so they imposed rules on English that made no sense whatsoever. Such as the Split Infinitive Rule (i.e. not putting a word between to and a verb - to boldly go would be considered an utter abomination to these people.) In Latin (and Spanish, and French, and Italian), the infinitive form of a verb is a single word - it is literally impossible to split. English, however, has two-word infinitives, and plenty of room to joyfully put in modifiers. Another good example is using the word "none" as a plural - "None of the ninjas are dead." The old grammarians would insist that the sentence be, "None of the ninjas is dead," because "none" is a compressed form of "not one." Even the venerable Stephen Fry can be caught pushing this one, in a rather hilarious outtake video from his wonderful quiz show QI. Fact is, people have been using "none" as a plural for centuries, and it was accepted language back then. The current fracas about it rose up in 1795 when a guy named Lindley Murray suggested that while "none" can be used as either a singular or plural, it is really best used as a singular. Which English sticklers all took as, "It really must be used as a singular." A hundred years later, and it's become an ironclad "RULE," with no more foundation than one grammarian's half-hearted opinion. There's also a great section on bad etymology - these are the stories about word origins that everybody knows, but which are most certainly wrong. For example, the origin of the word "Jeep" is usually attributed to a reading-aloud of "G.P.," meaning "general purpose," an appellation allegedly applied to these indestructible vehicles. Nope, sorry - it comes from Popeye comics. Or think about the Xmas season - whoops! I mean, Christmas season. Use "Xmas" today and you'll get lambasted for taking the Christ out of Christmas. The abbreviated word is now looked upon as a Secular Humanist Plot to ruin Christmas for all the good god-fearing folks. Nope - the letter X has been representing Christ for more than a thousand years, and comes from the Greek letter X (chi), which is the first letter of Χριστός, which means, yes - Christ. The venerable Oxford English Dictionary can trace "Xmas" as far back as 1551, in fact. One part of the book that really got my attention (other than Chapter 5 - the one on swearing) was the chapter on words that have fallen out of favor due to hyper-sensitive political correctness. Remember when Some People (they know who they are) started spelling the word for a female human as "womyn," so as to remove it from the male-dominating "man"? Well, as it turns out, back in the good old Anglo-Saxon days, "man" referred to a person, regardless of their sex. Over time, distinctions began to emerge, giving us waepman for males (lit. "weapon-person") and wifman for a married female. Change happens over time, and wifman became woman. Guys lost half their word and just ended up with "man." Poor us. The authors also touch on more charged language as well. For example, they recount the tale of a white city official who used the word "niggardly," meaning "stingy" or "tight with money" in a conversation about expenses. This caused a massive media storm because the word "niggardly" sounds really close to "nigger," a word that white people have to be really, really careful about using. For good reason, of course, but the fact is that "niggardly" and "nigger" are completely unrelated. The former goes back to old Scandinavian and the word "nygge," which meant a miser. The latter is a corruption of the Latin niger, meaning "black," which is turn gave us the Spanish and Portuguese "negro." Long story short (too late), that city official used the right word in the right context, but it wasn't a word that we let people use anymore. It's a a Fallen Word, joining other words and phrases such as "Call a spade a spade," "Rule of thumb," and "shyster." All of them have innocent origins, but have been inextricably linked with some of our worse human prejudices and practices. I could go on. The point is that this book is a great pleasure to read, and will give you a fresh new perspective on the English language. It's non-academic, so you have nothing to worry about there, well-organized and just plain entertaining. More importantly, while it may not be able to prevent you grinding your teeth when you see "Ten Items or Less" at the local supermarket, you may be less inclined to try and strangle the manager. Maybe. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Jun 07, 2010
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Jun 12, 2010
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Hardcover
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| 0307346609
| 9780307346605
| 0307346609
| 4.02
| 535,215
| Sep 12, 2006
| Sep 12, 2006
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it was amazing
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So where were you when the zombies came? I remember where I was. I remember vividly. It was the third lesson of the day - still one more to go before l So where were you when the zombies came? I remember where I was. I remember vividly. It was the third lesson of the day - still one more to go before lunch - and one of my regular students was due for her weekly lesson. She came in each week like clockwork, and while her English never got a whole lot better, she seemed to enjoy herself. Actually improving her English was secondary to having a nice chat, I think, and we could always count on her to liven things up. Not this day, though. For one thing, except for me, none of the teachers showed up. Normally that would be a problem, but a lot of students weren't in either. It was just a few of us and one staff member. We had heard of some new sickness going around, but we work for a company that doesn't accept sickness as an excuse for missing work. After all, I'd seen students come in with a cold that would have kept me at home, and Mrs. Kuroda was just that kind of person. Come hell or high water, I knew she'd be there. And she was. No sooner did she get in the door than she collapsed. Her skin was pale and waxy and she had a bandage on her hand. It had little yellow flowers on it, I'll always remember that. Like she'd made it out of a dress or curtains or something. I don't know why that sticks in my memory, but it does. The staff, Naoko, called 119 for an ambulance, and one of the other students, Shyunsuke, who was studying medicine at Kyodai, tried to see what was wrong with her. He laid her on her back, felt for a pulse, and got all panicky. "Shinda," he said over and over. She was dead. Now I don't know if you've ever had anyone die in your workplace, but it's weird. We didn't know what the protocol for this kind of thing was. There were only six of us in the building, and none of us were really experts in dealing with sudden and unexpected death. Aki, a high school girl, started crying. Naoko kept redialing 119, but no one was answering. I was about to suggest moving her into another room when suddenly the most horrible sound came from the body on the floor. It was somewhere between a moan and a gurgle, like someone drowning in syrup. We all looked at Mrs. Kuroda. She was moving. Slowly, jerkily, she was moving, getting her feet back under her and moaning the whole time. Naoko started to go to her, to see if she was okay, and I remember yelling, "Don't!" At the time I didn't really know why I yelled that. I know now. My years on the internet had pretty much prepared me for it, but I wasn't nearly ready for the way the Mrs. Kuroda grabbed Naoko and took a huge bite out of her throat. Blood flew everywhere, and I think everyone was screaming. Mrs. Kuroda dropped Naoko and started making her way towards us, her armis reaching for us and that low, wet growl coming from her throat. I knew what she was then. I grabbed a chair from a lesson room and started shoving her back, like some kind of lion tamer. I yelled for the other students to get out, but they weren't moving. Aki was crying harder, Shyunsuke was busy vomiting, and the other two had hidden somewhere in the building. "Everybody out!" I yelled again, and gave Mrs. Kuroda a shove away from the front door. Then I swung it at her, aiming for the head, of course. It connected, and she went down. I ran back, grabbed Shyunsuke and Aki by the arms and yelled "Everybody out!" again. I had barely enough time to shepherd them to the door than Naoko started to twitch. And Mrs. Kuroda was already trying to stand up. We ran. Didn't even care where we ran to - just away. The streets were quiet, but once I knew what I was looking for, it seemed like the zombies were everywhere. I've never run like that in my life, you know. Always used to joke that I would run when I was chased. So there you go. We broke into a sports equipment shed at Otani University and each took one of those aluminum baseball bats. Then we headed for the Botanical Gardens. I still don't know why we chose there, especially after what happened to Aki. A large, sprawling garden with lots of twisting paths and forests? Can't imagine what we thought we'd accomplish. I just knew that we couldn't barricade ourselves in a building - that never works, right? I got the zombie that took Aki, and Shyunsuke was the one who made sure that Aki wouldn't wake up again. Then we headed for the Great Lawn, on the theory that we'd be able to see any zombie coming from a few hundred meters. Bad move. It would have been a fine idea if there were more of us and if we were all armed with shotguns and chainsaws. All we had, though, were the two of us and some dinged-up aluminum bats. Against half a hundred zombies that all wanted to take a good look at the tasty humans who had so kindly put themselves on display. Shyunsuke and I were back to back, and I could hear him saying something over and over again in Japanese. I didn't know what he was saying, but I reckoned it was a prayer of some kind. I was doing some praying myself as those things got nearer. I could see the dull shine of their eyes and hear their feet shuffle across the dead grass and wished for the first time in my life that I had a gun. Not for them. We were saved, improbably enough, by an SDF helicopter. It was doing flybys around the city and saw the zombies moving towards us. Some of the soldiers started taking head shots while others lifted us up into the copter to safety. Shyunsuke pretty much broke down as soon as we were safe, and I'm not ashamed to say that I did too. That was the last I saw of the zombies. The rest of the story you already know - Japan was evacuated until the zombie threat was cleared. I wasn't allowed to go back to Osaka, so I could only pray that The Boyfriend made it out alive while I waited in the refugee camp in Pusan. When I did make it back, after the war, I found that everything on this side of the river had burned to the ground. At that point, I prayed that he'd died in the fire. Anything other than becoming one of them. It's been a long while since "victory" was declared over the zombies, inasmuch as they care. People in Japan don't like to talk about it, though. You get the feeling that we all did things and saw things that we'd rather forget, and if any nation is good at selective amnesia, it's the Japanese. So I was really glad when this book came out. It made me feel... less alone. Brooks went around the world, interviewing people who had experienced the Zombie War - including a couple of guys up in Kyoto, even. He listened to their stories, kind of like Studs Terkel, and wrote down what they had seen and done. He talked to everyone - soldiers, sailors, housewives, government officials - everyone who would talk to him. What he made of it is maybe not a comprehensive account of the war, but a broad look at all the things that people went through during those horrible years. A soldier who went through the Decimation in the Russian army; another who witnessed the Iran-Pakistan "war"; that asshole who made "Phalanx," which so many people thought would save their lives, Brooks talked to them all. He showed how the Great Panic killed so many people, and how the Redeker Plan and all its emulators saved so many more, as heartless and cruel as it was. He looked at the army and how they had to figure out how to fight an enemy that doesn't need to eat or sleep, and which recruits new members as it kills them. We still don't know where the zombies came from or why they rose up. And I don't think it really matters. As this book shows, there was so much death and pain, with so much heroism and glory, that the question of where the zombies came from is really immaterial. It opened my eyes, I'll say that much. From the refugee camp, we got very little news at all about the world. Just that the war was continuing. We heard about the civil war in China, and whatever it was that happened to North Korea - everyone heard about that. But the rest, I didn't know. Not until now. Brooks' book is exactly what it claims to be. It's an oral history, the collected stories of dozens of people who survived the war, and it's something that our descendants will need to read carefully. For those of us who survived the war, the pain may still be close. So if you're not sure if you're ready for this kind of book, give it time. But do read it. We must never forget what happened to the world when the Zombies came. In many ways, the living dead showed us just how important it was to be alive. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Mar 02, 2010
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Mar 05, 2010
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Hardcover
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| 0765302306
| 9780765302304
| 0765302306
| 4.43
| 164,727
| Nov 07, 2009
| Oct 27, 2009
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really liked it
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**spoiler alert** Imagine you have a favorite band, and for one reason or another - accident, death, Yoko Ono - they break up. There will be no more m
**spoiler alert** Imagine you have a favorite band, and for one reason or another - accident, death, Yoko Ono - they break up. There will be no more music from them. But it is decided that, regardless of what fate wants for the band, their music is too well-loved and too important to be allowed to stop. So a new band is formed, and they spend years poring over the original music. They get every recording, every bootleg, every interview about how and why these musical giants did what they did. They collect the original instruments and reproduce how the songs were recorded. They do everything in their power to understand that music as best they can. And then they start to make new music. When you hear it, you can tell that it's not the original group - maybe there's a lyrical choice that the old band wouldn't have used, or perhaps a certain favoring of chords that's different - but if you sit back and relax, and let yourself just enjoy the music, you can almost believe that it's your favorite band, come back together to make new and wonderful music again. That's kind of what it was like to read this book. In his introduction, Sanderson says that he's not trying to replace Robert Jordan - he's not going to try and copy Jordan's style or techniques. "Instead, I've adapted my style to be appropriate to the Wheel of Time. My main goal was to stay true to the souls of the characters." This is certainly evident as you read the book - there are techniques that Sanderson uses that Jordan never did - especially in terms of narrative style, dialogue and thematic unity. Sanderson is a generation younger than Robert Jordan, and this difference in age is reflected in the style of the book. While he certainly does his best to make it look as much like its predecessors as possible, for Sanderson to simply try to ape Jordan's style would have been a disaster. The narration seems to have a lot more rhetorical commentary than in previous books - the introductory paragraphs of chapter one are a good example, where the narration itself is commenting on the fallen state of Tar Valon, asking "Where was the White Tower, the law?" This technique of the narrative asking questions of the characters is peppered throughout the book. The narration seems a little tighter, more concise than Jordan's style, which was long criticized for being somewhat superfluous in its verbosity. Again, this is probably a reflection of the generational difference between writers - Jordan probably grew up reading Tolkien, and Sanderson grew up reading Jordan. Each generation seeks to take the good from the previous one, while simultaneously trying to improve upon it. So by and large, the storytelling itself feels more contemporary than other books. This is also true for the dialogue. There are more rapid-fire exchanges than usual, a sure sign of a younger author, and most of the time this works very well - he actually uses it in a few places to drop significant revaluations about characters, so it seems he's aware of what the quick back-and-forth can do. Each character has retained his or her original voice - with the possible exception of Mat Cauthon. It became pretty clear as I read this book that Mat must be Sanderson's favorite character, because he gets all the best lines. One thing that Jordan never did (and I don't think he really cared to try) was make me laugh. On the other hand, nearly every chapter with Mat in it elicited at the very least an audible chuckle if not an outright laugh. Of all the characters in the book, Mat's dialogue has become the most unique and, at the same time, the most contemporary, including, but not limited to, verbing a noun: [Verin:] reached into a pocket of her dress, pulling out several pieces of paper. One was the picture of Mat. "You didn't ask where I got this."Now for some readers, I have no doubt that this will be an intolerable change in a character's voice. They're going to go into paroxysms of rage that their favorite character has been turned into a Buffy guest star. And that's a valid criticism, I suppose. I loved the change. Mat has always been the most rogueish of the characters, dicing and drinking and flirting, and you would expect that kind of person to be of a sharper form of wit. Sanderson's decided to let Mat meet that potential, and I applaud him for it. By and large, though, the characters mostly sound like themselves. In some cases, more so, if that makes any sense. Rand, for example, is a lot more thoughtful than we've seen him before. For a long time, Rand was really a difficult character to get into. We were not often presented with those moments of sympathy that allow you to imagine yourself in that character's skin, and perhaps that was a conscious choice of Jordan's. Sanderson's done a good job at letting us see what being the Dragon Reborn has done to Rand since he left Emond's Field, and the path to disaster that he's on. Rand has decided to become hard, as hard as he has to be so that he can live until the Last Battle, and we finally get a good look at why he thinks this is necessary. What's more, we fear for him - there was one moment near the end of the book where, reading what Rand was about to do, I found myself saying, out loud, "No. No! Nonononono!" You'll know it when you see it. One other aspect of the work that Sanderson has focused on is thematic unity. Different characters experience similar situations that serve to reflect a certain theme of the work. Egwene's trials, refusing to submit to the will of Elaida, are reflected in Aviendha's increasingly ridiculous "punishments" by the Wise Ones, and bolstered by the appearance of Shemerin, an Aes Sedai who was, against all tradition, demoted to Accepted. They all serve to support the theme that you are who you say you are, and once you submit to another's opinion of you, you lose. Egwene already knows it, Aviendha has to learn it, and Shemerin learned it too late. The difference between being hard and being strong is another theme, this time balanced between Rand and Egwene. Rand, who has to unify the world under him before he fights the Dark One, has chosen to become hard. Not just steel-hard or rock-hard, but cuendillar-hard (a substance from the Age of Legends that is unbreakable by any known means). It is only by crushing his emotions, severing himself from others, and by doing whatever has to be done - up to and including mass murder - that he believes he can prepare for the inevitable confrontation. Egwene, on the other hand, has to unify the White Tower before it's too late. To do so, she must endure immense physical and emotional punishment at the hands of the very people she's trying to save. She knows she's right, of course, and the refusal of others to take her seriously would make it easy for her to just give up on the White Tower Aes Sedai. Leave them to their inevitable doom and build a new society of Aes Sedai loyal to her. But she doesn't do that. She endures the pain, she controls her anger and her impulses, and constantly reminds herself why she is doing what she's doing. In the end, this makes Egwene stronger, whereas Rand nearly shatters. Overall, I was very happy with this book. Like many Wheel of Time fans, Jordan's death worried me greatly. I worried that the whole story would just never be finished, that Rand would never find peace, the Tower would never be united, that Perrin would never have a quiet place just to be himself or that Mat would never be able to live a life with the responsibilities that he chooses. When Sanderson was announced as the author who would finish the series, I worried again, having never read his work. Would he be able to handle the task of finishing this series? Would he be able to pull together all the plot threads that were flying around and bring us to the conclusion that Jordan had known from the start? Would I, in other words, be utterly heartbroken? I am very happy to say that I'm not worried anymore. Sanderson has done an excellent job with this book, and I look forward to the final two. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jan 12, 2010
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Jan 14, 2010
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Jan 15, 2010
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Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 1563897504
| 9781563897504
| 1563897504
| 4.02
| 18,520
| 1985
| Dec 01, 2000
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it was amazing
|
This, ladies and gentlemen, is one of the works that has affected me deeply. More importantly, it is something that has caused considerable harm to my
This, ladies and gentlemen, is one of the works that has affected me deeply. More importantly, it is something that has caused considerable harm to my wallet and bank account, as I have been collecting comic books for almost twenty-five years now, and it's all because of Crisis. I can still remember going to the drugstore after church one Sunday and seeing the cover to Crisis #9 - a classic George Perez group shot of some of the most terrible villains ever seen in the DC Universe. You name the baddie, I guarantee he or she was in there somewhere. I was hooked. Of course, coming into a 12-part series in issue 9 meant that I was really lost as to what was going on, but some effort and visits to comics shops eventually got me up to speed. Unfortunately, once I understood Crisis, I realized that there was much more that I didn't understand. You can't really understand this story without understanding something of the DC Comics Universe. In the late 1950s, they published a story called "Flash of Two Worlds" (Flash #123), in which the Flash, Barry Allen, managed to, using his prodigious super-speed, vibrate through some dimensional barrier or other, and meet the Flash, Jay Garrick, that he had read about as a child in - you guessed it - comic books. The explanation for this was simple - the guy who wrote Flash comics in Barry Allen's childhood had, somehow, "tuned in" to this Alternate Earth, watching Jay Garrick's adventures and, thinking they were fiction, wrote them up as comic books which, in turn, inspired Barry Allen as a child. So when Barry was struck by lightning and chemicals, gaining super speed, he called himself The Flash, in homage to his childhood hero. Anyway, in "Flash of Two Worlds," Barry Allen finds out that the Flash he had read about actually existed, only on another Earth in another universe that vibrated at a different frequency from ours. Personally, I think this is a really cool idea, and my personal goal in life is to drink enough coffee in one sitting to accomplish the same thing myself. Confused yet? Well, it did help if you were an avid comics reader for 25 years before Crisis came out. But to condense the whole thing, here you go: In the Beginning, there was One. A Universe that grew and shaped and changed. Life was created, rose from the dust, and began to think. On the planet of Oa, located in the center of the universe, life grew with great swiftness, advancing at incredible speed. The beings of Oa embraced science and research. One Oan, a man by the name of Krona, sought to know the origin of the Universe they inhabited. Despite the warnings of his colleagues, he created a device that would allow him to do so. The result was a complete rupture of time and space, for the beginning of things must never be witnessed. So.... In the Beginning, there were Many. Universe upon universe, each moving at its own speed and vibration, separated by a shadow's thickness, but each unknown to the other. That was the idea, anyway. The whole "multiple universe" thing, after Gardner Fox wrote his "Flash of Two Worlds" story, became one of the best plot devices the comics writers at DC ever had. Finally they could have silver age and golden age heroes meet and work together. At first, there was only Earth-1 (silver age) and Earth-2 (golden age), which was odd, because the golden age heroes of Earth-2 were older. But I guess since Barry Allen (the silver age Flash, remember) was the one who broke the barrier, he gets precedence. Anyway, like I said - at first there were two Earths. That number grew swiftly, both for plot and copyright reasons. For example: At a certain point, DC was working on the rights to own characters from Charlton Comics (The Blue Beetle, Captain Atom, etc), and they inhabited Earth-4. Then they went to obtain characters from Fawcett (the whole Shazam line), who went onto Earth-S. As if the Hungry Beast That Was DC wasn't finished, they put characters from Quality Comics (Uncle Sam, Phantom Lady, The Ray, etc), onto Earth-X. Hang in there, I'll get to the story eventually.... There was also Earth-3, where the doppelgangers of our favorite heroes were villains, and the only hero on the planet was Luthor. Then came Earth-D, Earth-Prime, Earth-Omega and, eventually, Earth-Sigma. Suffice to say, by 1985, there was a huge mess.... Older readers had no problem following the continuity, but newcomers were baffled, and writers were no doubt also befuddling themselves. The decision was made to clean the whole thing up, make one Earth, one timeline, and one continuity. No more parallel Earths, no more vibrating through dimensional barriers. Sounds simple, doesn't it? Well, it took twelve issues and the appearance of almost every hero and villain ever seen in DC Comics' fifty year history to pull it off. The research took over three years, with one guy tasked with studying every comic DC had printed since 1935 (my thought when I heard that: "What an awesome job!"). It also required the cooperation of dozens of writers and artists across all of DC's titles, and a company-wide effort to make the Crisis a truly universal event. Our story opens with the end of the world. Or the end of a world, more to the point. A vast white cloud encroaches upon the earth, vaporizing everything in its path, without pause or remorse. Panicking, people try to flee, but to no avail. Into this horror appears a man with dark eyes and a tortured face, who watches the world die, helpless and weeping, and vanishes again as the universe becomes nothing more than a mist of free-floating electrons. Not a bad way to start a book, eh? The man is Pariah, and he is condemned to appear wherever great tragedy strikes, unable to help, unable to die, only able to watch. He is there when the Crime Syndicate of Earth-3 put aside their evil to try and stop the wave of energy that devours their planet. Again, Pariah appears, and again the world is destroyed, but not before the planet's only super-hero, Luthor, rockets his son through the dimensions, in the hope of freeing him from his world's destruction. Sound familiar? I thought so.... If you think you're going to know what's going on this quickly, you're wrong. A mysterious figure sends his associate, a woman named Harbinger, who can split herself among many forms, to gather heroes from Earths that have not been destroyed and bring them to a satellite that hovers in orbit. While she searches them out, one of her is corrupted by a shadowy evil that tracks her through the ice of Atlantis. She gathers them, heroes, villains and otherwise, to the satellite, where we first meet a character that had been hovering around various DC titles for a few months, always in the shadows - The Monitor. The Monitor informs them that there is great evil abroad, that universes are perishing at an astonishing rate, and are doing so at the hand of his adversary. Waves of anti-matter are consuming the universes, and with each one gone, the Monitor's power decreases. He has a task for these heroes, spread out over millennia of Earth's history. This is the first attempt to save the worlds.... The basic rundown of the story is that there is an anti-matter universe out there, created when Krona performed his experiment, controlled by the mirror version of The Monitor. This "Anti-Monitor" wants nothing more than to see his brother dead, and to see the positive Universes brought under his control. He's a good, old-fashioned Evil Overlord, I must say.... So as each universe is destroyed by the great sweeping cloud of death, he grows ever stronger. It has been pointed out to me that some people out there get all anal over this concept, thereby calling the whole damn plot into question. So, a bit of elementary physics. The above scenario cannot happen. When matter and antimatter collide, there is a huge burst of energy as the two forms of matter vaporize each other. Nothing is left - in "reality physics," both the Monitor and the Anti-Monitor would be playing at a zero-sum game. Given that these people are willing to accept, however, the existence of thousands of metahumans who can perform feats that also fly in the face of real physics, I think their arguments about the properties of antimatter are so much hot air. As a very wise man once said, "Blow." Anyway, the Anti-Monitor's release is tied with Pariah's fate as well. Determined to do as Krona did, Pariah set up a chamber, of matter and anti-matter, so that he may see the beginning of all things. The result was the beginning of the end, and his world was the first consumed by the anti-matter wave. The Monitor, observing this, imbued him with his curse, using him as a "tracker" to see which universe might be the next to die. So we have an unstoppable force tearing through the Multiverse, and it is up to The Monitor and Our Heroes to stop him. But the Monitor dies, and the worlds keep dying.... Of course you know that, in the end, the good guys win. But as with any good story, it is the telling of the tale, not the tale's end, that is important. Wolfman and Perez did some very daring things with this story, not only in rearranging the whole order of the DC Universe, but also in killing off some pretty heavy hitters. The best cover in the series, so good that they came out with a statue based on it, was the cover of issue number seven: The Death of Supergirl. The other major character to be killed off was Barry Allen, The Flash, who inadvertently started this whole mess a long time ago. But he died well, and, as Marv Woflman says in the forward to the collected edition of Crisis, there was a way left to bring him back if they needed to. Indeed, Barry Allen's presence has not yet vanished. The current Flash, Wally West, has long held Barry to be the high ideal which he must match, but at the same time leave behind. In one version of the Legion of Super-Heroes books, the character of Xs, another super-speedster, is Barry Allen's granddaughter, and the character of Impulse/Kid Flash, is Barry Allen's nephew. So the Flash lives on, in his way. In fact, he's recently been resurrected in DC continuity - though how long that will last is anyone's guess. On the other hand, no one remembers Supergirl. By the end of the Crisis, she had been wiped from existence, and was seen only once more, in a Christmas issue several years later, reminding the character of Deadman about what it means to work without reward. While several new Supergirls have appeared since then, unlike Barry Allen the pre-Crisis Supergirl is lost to history. As you can probably guess, I really like this story. It has an immense cast of characters, without becoming unwieldy or dispersed. The storytelling, with its multi-universal scope, nevertheless allows you to feel for individuals, with their triumphs and tragedies. Ultimately we see that even the mightiest of mortals is, at heart, human. There is foreshadowing galore, mysteries abound, the plot twists and turns, and you get glimpses of what is yet to come - the hand in the swirling pool of stars, the image of the Flash appearing before Batman and vanishing with words of doom, the Green Lantern's ring sputtering and failing.... It all intertwines together so very nicely and really satisfies my inner comics geek. The Absolute Edition was aimed at people exactly like me. Someone who would say, "I've read this story a dozen times, I could probably recite it... but I need it to be bigger. Like, big enough to club a man to death with." So yeah, they had me from the word go on this one, and as soon as the opportunity arose to buy it, I did so without hesitation. It really is very pretty - it's been recolored and everything, AND it comes with a companion book about how the series came to be. Fascinating reading. The big question, of course is this - after nearly twenty-five years and at least two other universe-wide reboots (Zero Hour and Infinite Crisis) that have changed the changes made by Crisis, why is this story still worth reading? Well, for one thing, the writing is solid - you can follow the story without having to buy a couple dozen other titles, and there are dramatic moments that have hung in my memory for years. In addition, there's the art. George Perez has been one of my favorite artists for years. His attention to detail and his ability to draw dozens of characters to a page while keeping each of them dynamic, interesting and individual is, in my opinion, nothing short of superhuman. If I could choose to draw like anyone, it would be George Perez, and I will never get tired of looking at his artwork. More importantly, however, this book is about the heroic ideal. On many scales, from the small-scale of characters like Hawk and Dove or the Losers, all the way up to the big guns of Superman, the Flash and Supergirl, the idea of what it means to be a good person is presented over and over again: you do good not because it's easy, not because it will benefit yourself. You do good because it is what you must do, even when you know it could lead to tragic consequences for yourself. My model of heroism was formed in these books, and the model set by these characters has guided my moral choices ever since. Where other people take their moral guidance from Jesus or Marcus Aurelius or Oprah, I take mine from Barry Allen and Kara Zor-el and from so many others who put their lives and their interests aside for the greater good. Can't ask for much more than that. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
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not set
|
Jun 13, 2009
|
Jun 13, 2009
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Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 9780670019977
| 0670019976
| 4.04
| 5,225
| Oct 16, 2008
| Oct 16, 2008
|
it was amazing
|
I've always found the end of the world fascinating. So many cultures have put together their own ideas of how the world will end, from the Norse Ragna
I've always found the end of the world fascinating. So many cultures have put together their own ideas of how the world will end, from the Norse Ragnarök to the Christian apocalypse to the Hindu cycle of creation and destruction. We live in a world that was, for a long time, unpredictable to us and on many occasions seemed to be outwardly hostile. Our ancestors faced floods and earthquakes and disease, with no idea of where these things came from, why they happened or how to stop them. And so they made myths and stories to explain the dangerous world in which they lived. From that, they extrapolated - if the world is this dangerous now, how dangerous could it be if it really tried? And so came our myths of a world that not only succeeds in hurting us, but in wiping us out altogether. Even in the modern age we have our myths. Books, television, and movies all use the end of the world (or end of a world) to tell stories - usually about the resilience of mankind and our ability to pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and rebuild human society, hopefully for the better. As good as this is for fiction, there are two problems when we try to apply these myths and stories to the real world: the world will end, one way or another, and no amount of heroics, cleverness or pluck will save us. Not in the long term, anyway. Science has accomplished what religion and fiction could not - it has seen the future and can make fairly accurate prophecies about how this world, and our civilization upon it, will die. Renowned astronomer Phil Plait is your prophet for this trip into all the ways the world will end.... In this book, Plait looks at nine possibilities for the end of the world as we know it. In order, they are: Death by Impact Death from the Sun Death by Supernova Death by Gamma Ray Burst Death by Black Hole Death by Aliens Death of the Sun Death by Galactic Collision Death of the Universe In each chapter, Plait outlines the ways in which that specific event could injure or kill us, with as much science as he can comfortably put in. He explains, for example, why we can't just send Bruce Willis up to hit an incoming meteor with a nuke (it probably won't work) and why any black holes produced by the LHC won't do us any harm. He looks at how a supernova happens, what it is about a black hole that turns it into one of the deadliest weapons in the universe, and tries - very, very hard - to make the reader understand exactly how long "forever" is. (Hint: it's a lot longer than you think. Longer than that, even. Nope, keep going....) Each chapter outlines the processes by which we could experience the destruction of our civilization or, in a few cases, the planet itself. He looks at the scientific foundations of these events, explaining in detail what it is about the sun, for example, that makes it a cauldron of chaos and torment, or why we really, really don't want to get even a smallish black hole anywhere near the planet. And I have to say, of all the unlikely ways we could be toasted, gamma ray bursts are my favorite - a deadly beam of energy from thousands of light-years away, cooking the planet all the way down through the crust and utterly devastating the planet's ecosystem so as to kill off anyone who was lucky enough to be on the other side of the world. I mean, wow. And there'd be no warning, either. By the time we knew what was happening, it'd be too late. So that chapter (with a line paying homage to Douglas Adams, even) is just mind-boggling. Probably my favorite chapter, though, is the one about supernovas, mainly because his careful, step-by-step description of exactly how a supernova occurs made me think, "What I wouldn't give to see that in person," disregarding the fact that a) the best parts would happen way too fast for me to observe and b) it would vaporize me. Still, it's a beautiful and terrifying chain reaction, which Plait describes in fantastic detail. The other chapter that evoked the same reaction was the one on the end of the universe. Despite timelines for which the word "vast" is terribly inadequate, Plait tells us what science knows about how the universe will end - the ever-increasing expansion of spacetime, the eventual death of the stars, evaporation of galaxies, the reign of the black holes and the slow, careful deaths which even they face. It all ends in darkness, all matter gone into a few stubborn subatomic particles and the eventual collapse of the very fabric of space and time. And as bleak and miserable is the future looks, I still thought, "I really want to see that." So if I can figure out how to live one googol years (that'd be a one with one hundred zeros after it [1:]) and not have my very atoms decay into nothingness, then I'll be able to... um... be really, really bored, probably. Since after that, there's absolutely - literally - nothing to do. Until the universe experiences vacuum collapse, or a brane collision, possibly hitting the reset button on the cosmos and we get to do it all over again.... Most of what's in the book isn't new to me, but that's probably because I grew up reading Cosmos, and I follow countless science TV shows, podcasts and blogs (including Plait's own Bad Astronomy blog, which is well worth keeping up with, as well as his regular appearances on SETI's podcast, Are We Alone? and occasional guest appearances on The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe - both of which make for excellent listening). For people new to astronomy, though, this will be a rather dense learning experience - and reading it will be time well spent. In addition to its user-friendly style, I really like the way it's arranged - from small-scale (relatively) to large, with "Things that are absolutely certain to happen" at the beginning and end, and with "things that probably won't happen" in the middle. And my favorite aspect of this book is that each chapter begins with a short vignette describing that particular end of the world, from the perspective of someone watching it happen. It's not something you often see in books of this nature, and I'm really glad that Plait decided to put it in there. It makes it a little less academic and abstract and more real. For all its death and destruction, the book isn't really a downer. For one thing, while things like asteroid impacts and the death of the sun are inevitable, they don't have to be fatal, and Plait describes a few ways in which - in theory - we (or our distant, distant descendants) might be able to avert or at least mitigate these catastrophes. It's not easy, of course, but saving the world never is. It's mainly a marvel at the forces that surround us in the universe. It's easy to forget, looking up at the sky from our brief, limited scale, that the universe isn't just some pretty lights drifting about in empty blackness. Things are exploding and dying, burning and freezing, moving quickly and slowly - the cosmos is replete with activity and danger. Most of the universe isn't just uninhabitable, it's actively hostile to life as we know it. And yet, without the black holes, the supernovas and the galactic collisions, without massive meteor impacts and breakaway comets, solar flares and deadly radiation - without all that, life probably wouldn't exist at all. So read this book, and take a moment to appreciate how lucky we are to be here at all, all things considered.... [1:] 10 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
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not set
|
Jun 12, 2009
|
Jun 12, 2009
|
Hardcover
| |||||||||||||||
| 0140345809
| 9780140345803
| 0140345809
| 3.83
| 5,171
| 1974
| Apr 01, 1991
|
it was amazing
|
Young adult fiction must be a really tough genre to wrap your head around, for a writer. You have a story that you want to tell, and you have to tell
Young adult fiction must be a really tough genre to wrap your head around, for a writer. You have a story that you want to tell, and you have to tell it in such a way that it is simple enough for your target audience to read, yet engaging enough to keep them reading. The themes have to be familiar enough for them to understand and relate to, yet unusual enough to be interesting for them. Go too far in the wrong direction and you have a failure. So how does a YA writer do it, balancing all those issues, while still writing a good book? Damned if I know. I've never managed to write a decent book for adults, much less young ones. Fortunately, there are plenty of talented writers who can write for young people, and one of those is William Sleator. A YA writer who specializes in science fiction, Sleator has written his fair share of strange, fantastic and sometimes disturbing books. Of all the ones I've read, this book is probably the one that creeped me out the most. The setup for this story is simple. Five sixteen year-old orphans - two boys, three girls - are put into a giant room, with no visible walls, ceiling or floor. The only structures in this room are stairs and landings. Nothing else except for a small machine with flashing lights and odd sounds that dispenses food. That's it. The five characters are very different and very interesting. First we have Peter, a scared boy, uncertain of his surroundings in the best of times, and utterly overwhelmed by being dropped into this bizarre place. He's afraid of everything and everybody, and finds solace only his the strange trances he drops into, in which he is with an old orphanage roommate, Jasper, feeling safe and protected. As an interesting aside, it wasn't until I was much older that I figured out Peter's sexuality. It wasn't that thinly veiled, either. I really don't handle subtlety well, I think.... Lola is not a showgirl. Sorry, had to put that in. Lola is a tough, street-smart girl who has no tolerance for stupidity or cruelty. She's had to learn a lot in her time, and doesn't look to others to decide what she should or should not do. Blossom is a fat little girl who is the first to figure out how to use the food dispenser (in a rage at it, she sticks out her tongue, and out pops a food pellet - but more on this later). She is cunning and devious, much sharper than people would give her credit for being. If anyone is truly dangerous in this crowd, it is her. Abagail is a mousy girl, pretty in her own way, but with very little in the way of self-confidence. She tends to latch on to other people and question her own thoughts and actions. She does have compassion, however, though not the means to make her compassion a reality. Finally, Oliver is the other boy of the group, and he is all that Peter is not. He is strong and confident and good-looking. For a while, Peter thinks that Oliver is his old friend, Jasper, and subsequently Peter is devoted to Oliver. A certain power stucture evolves when it is discovered that of all the people, only Oliver can bring Peter out of his trances. Oliver has power, and he is not afraid to use it. These five kids are trapped in this house of stairs. None of them know why they're there, they only know that they are. They soon discover that the food-dispensing machine will only give them food under certain conditions. In the beginning , they are forced to repeat a series of actions and movements, that evolve into a kind of dance, hoping to get food from the machine. From there it gets only worse. They soon discover that the dance isn't enough. The infighting that comes naturally becomes essential to their survival, for only when they are cruel or greedy will the machine start flashing its lights and entice them to dance. The question then becomes whether or not the kids will do as the machine wishes, and how long they can hold out against it. Or if they will. This book is disturbing to say the least. It levels some pretty harsh accusations about human nature, not just regarding the kids in the house of stairs, but also regarding the people who put them there. The kids are there for a reason, and not a good one. The whole setup (which is thoroughly, if somewhat clunkily, explained at the end) is about conditioning, and changing people's personality through stimuli and reinforcement to make them behave as desired. Because it demonstrates people, young people in particular, behaving in a manner that displays the truth of their nature, this book has often been compared to Lord of the Flies, and rightly so. In its way, it's even more disturbing than Lord of the Flies - at least the kids in that book had been left to their own devices, as terrible as they were. In this book, the horrors that these five teens go through are part of a deliberate state-sanctioned experiment in human conditioning - a kind of horrible, Pavlovian Breakfast Club. Such is the nature of that experiment that the two children who resisted the conditioning were actually regarded as failures. Upon reflection, the people pulling the strings are far more frightening and disturbing than these poor, manipulated children. If nothing else, the lesson to be learned from this story is simple - be a human being. There are some things that are too important to sacrifice for something as simple and petty as food and acceptance. We must never allow ourselves to be beasts. We have to be human. This has relevance today, when we are debating the ethics of torture - is it a necessary evil that we must tolerate if our society is to survive, or is it an offense against our humanity? If we allow ourselves to be fooled into thinking that an evil act is somehow the right thing to do, then we have lost a very important part of ourselves. Of course, it's also about science, but the message here is less dire - we must not allow science to lose its humanity. In this book, a strange future with a monolithic state government, science is entirely utilitarian, with no moral qualms about putting minors through psychological torture. The good news is that, at least as of this writing, science errs on the side of ethics. Modern science certainly has its moral gray areas, but the majority of scientists out there would never consent to run an experiment such as this. I hope. The last line in the book is one of the more frightening ones in literature, right up there with the last line in 1984. It's a blunt reminder of everything that has happened in the book, and a pointed summation of everything that Sleator has been trying to say - that humans have a base nature, that we can be manipulated, and we will, given the right circumstances, allow others to shape who we are. His message to his readers - teenagers like the ones in this book - is to refuse to submit to such control. Good advice for them, and for us. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
Apr 24, 2009
|
Apr 25, 2009
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0765352389
| 9780765352385
| 0765352389
| 4.01
| 788
| Apr 30, 1981
| Oct 01, 2005
|
it was amazing
|
It's always dangerous to revisit a book that you loved when you were a kid. Everyone knows that. Some books are really just geared towards a certain a
It's always dangerous to revisit a book that you loved when you were a kid. Everyone knows that. Some books are really just geared towards a certain age, a certain time in your life where that book can step in and say, "Here - someone knows what you're thinking about." And those books are amazing. You read them and your life changes. Maybe only in small ways, maybe in ways you don't even realize until later, but it does. Then you come back to it ten or twenty years later and think, "I remember this book. I loved this book. I think I'll read it again." So you do, and it's a disappointment. Not because the book isn't as good as you thought it was but rather because you aren't the person you were when you first read it. There's nothing wrong with that - it's just life. When I ordered this off Amazon, I did so with a certain amount of trepidation. This book occupies a very special place in my heart. I read it over and over again when I was a kid. It instilled a love of time travel that I keep to this day. I even adopted the name Tycho as a pseudonym for various parts of my own mind all the way through high school and beyond. I knew that re-reading it would put that entire past at risk of becoming foolish or stupid or childish, and I wasn't sure my ever-vulnerable pride wanted to take that. Fortunately, I discovered that the book was as good as I recalled it being. Shorter than I remember, of course, but still quite good. The story is deceptively simple - Tycho Tithonus, the youngest of four siblings - the other three being very talented and thoroughly unpleasant - finds a small, silver, egg-like object while digging up a new vegetable garden. As innocuous as is seems, that object is about to change everything. It is, in fact, a time machine. It's not very difficult - it has a series of dials on one end, which you turn to set the time you want to go to. Press the other end and it's done. And Tycho does what anyone would do when presented with such an amazing device: go back and re-work an unpleasant event in his past. And if by doing so he could maybe teach his nasty siblings to appreciate him more, well, so be it. Of course, the ramifications of this act don't become clear until it's much too late. But the past doesn't really hold that much allure for young Tycho. It's over and done with, and was never very pleasant to begin with. So he decides to go to the future, to see what has become of himself and his family. A quick twenty-year jump to April 23,2001 shows him what's in store for himself. A desperate, unhappy, bitter man, fronting for a lunar entertainment industry and reduced to begging sponsors for money. Disappointed and upset, Tycho comes back. Later, he visits the future again - same day - only to find it has changed completely. He's no longer a sad, shapeless man but a tough, ruthless one, a man who uses his ability to travel through time to make money and ruin his family. Terrified, Tycho returns to his own time. But his curiosity can't be stopped. He needs to see a future where everything works out right. Unfortunately, every time he goes there it's worse and worse. His future self becomes a monster and a murderer, a willing agent to bring beings of higher power onto this planet. This is one of the things I've always liked about Sleator - his mind turns around corners. Everyone and his uncle can write about a time traveler going to the past and changing the present, but who writes about someone changing the future by messing about in the present? Not many, I'll tell you that. Each time Tycho comes back from the future, the knowledge he has gained causes him to say something or do something that alters the course of his future in a new and terrible way. And seeing how much worse it gets just forces him to make even more terrible decisions, until you have the final, terrible paradox of an old Tycho trying to chase down and kill his younger self over the course of millennia. Which does bring up the problem of paradox, unavoidable in any time travel book, known in fiction as "massive, gaping plot holes." For example - if Tycho time-travels twenty years into the future to see his older self, there shouldn't be any older self there for him to meet. It's impossible - as far as the rest of the world was concerned, Tycho vanished on April 23, 1981 and re-appeared twenty years later. Everyone else lived through that time, but he simply side-stepped it. Instead of finding a letter from his older self to his mother in their future house, he should have found perhaps a black-framed picture of 11 year-old Tycho with a note to the effect that they should have loved him more. The only way I can think of to resolve this problem is to assume that Tycho was absolutely and incontrovertibly determined to return to his own time after each future visit, thus ensuring that he would eventually live out those twenty years. Fortunately, Sleator handles these paradoxes in a very simple and straightforward manner. During one of Tycho's experimental first trips into the future, he meets his teenage self, who shows him how the dials work on the egg: "But," Tycho said. "But if you're me... I mean, if we're the same person, how can we both be here at the same time?"There you go. That bit there is the author saying, "Yes, I know there are paradoxes involved, but that's not the point of the book." That pretty much sweeps aside all those little picky details, like older Tycho trying to kill his younger self, or the fact that, by the end of the book, the entire story didn't, technically, happen. "Shut up and concentrate." He handles the alterations resulting from time travel very neatly as well. Rather than beat us over the head with "Things have CHANGED!" he just inserts a simple descriptive line in there. If you're reading carefully, you'll notice that Ludwig's hair has gone from proto-emo long to a nice crew cut. Even Tycho doesn't notice, which is interesting. When presented with the results of a change in time, he has a moment of jamais vu - the feeling of something familiar as totally new - and then the story moves on. The effects multiply and resonate, and even Tycho isn't aware of how much he's changed. Going back to the plot hole problem for a moment, there is the small issue of the egg's origin and purpose. We know it was planted on Earth by aliens, something like 150 million years ago. It seems they did so with the intention that it one day be found and used in order to prepare the way for their arrival and dominance of Earth - this is what can be gleaned by the ravings of older Tycho. But why would an alien race which has time travel sorted out need such a roundabout way of conquering the world? Why drop it into some Jurassic mud and leave it at the whims of plate tectonics? Why not just show up at Tycho's house one day and drop it on his bedside table? This is never adequately explained in the book, probably because it's not what the book's about. But it nagged me when I was a kid, and it still does now. All plot holes and paradoxes aside, it's a really good book, and if you have a kid, I recommend it. It's the kind of story that you really can pick apart and look from many angles. In one sense, it's a story about destiny. Tycho and his siblings are all named after extraordinary famous people - Ludwig Beethoven,Tamara Karsavina, Leonardo DaVinci, and Tycho Brahe - in the hopes that they would grow up to emulate them. Tycho's siblings fall into line very easily, adopting the roles that they'd been given from birth. Tycho doesn't - he's interested in a little bit of everything, and isn't entire sure what he wants to do with his life. I knew that feeling when I was eleven years old. Hell, I know that feeling now. And of course it's about the futility of letting your future control your life. The future isn't fixed. It's an organic, growing thing that you can't begin to control, and the tiniest change in the present could become a radical change in the future. Sure, it's good to have goals and plans, but to try and wield unbending control over who you're going to be is foolish at best. And that brings me to the nagging question that occurred to me right around chapter 9, the first time Tycho sees his adult self and is terribly disappointed in him. Reading this again as an adult, I found myself wondering that if eleven year-old me suddenly appeared, what would he think? Would he be impressed at the path my life had taken? Would he be disappointed by my physical appearance? Would he be surprised at the relationship I have with my siblings? Would be be shocked that I have a boyfriend? What would his judgment be on his future? Following right on the heels of that, of course, was the more important question of, "Who cares what eleven year-old me thinks of my life?" Not to disparage the eleven year-olds out there, but you don't know nearly as much as you think you do, and becoming a teenager isn't going to confer any more wisdom. Tycho doesn't know the twenty years of history and context that led to him becoming a miserable bastard. Perhaps if he had learned a little, he might have made better decisions when he returned to his own time. And if eleven year-old me gave me any lip about what I'd become, I'd send him back to his own time with a whole host of new neuroses to deal with. Anyway, my point is this: The Green Futures of Tycho is a damn fine book. It's a good time travel adventure, and it's a good allegory for the existential angst we all go through when we consider the future. While such feelings might be new and raw to a child of Tycho's age, and old and familiar to us adults, it's still something that we need to deal with. And perhaps that best way to do it is to simply appreciate what we have now. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
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not set
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Apr 21, 2009
|
Apr 21, 2009
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Mass Market Paperback
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|
my rating |
|
|
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|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
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| 4.32
|
it was amazing
|
Feb 2012
|
Mar 27, 2012
|
|||||
|
| 4.10
|
it was amazing
|
Jul 20, 2011
|
Jul 23, 2011
|
|||||
|
| 3.97
|
it was amazing
|
Jul 13, 2011
|
Jul 17, 2011
|
|||||
|
| 4.66
|
it was amazing
|
Mar 20, 2011
|
Mar 29, 2011
|
|||||
|
| 4.44
|
it was amazing
|
Dec 18, 2010
|
Dec 18, 2010
|
|||||
|
| 4.31
|
it was amazing
|
Oct 20, 2010
|
Nov 22, 2010
|
|||||
|
| 4.02
|
it was amazing
|
Sep 09, 2010
|
Sep 10, 2010
|
|||||
|
| 4.26
|
it was amazing
|
Aug 12, 2010
|
Aug 13, 2010
|
|||||
|
| 4.23
|
it was amazing
|
Jul 27, 2010
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Aug 08, 2010
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|||||
|
| 3.93
|
it was amazing
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Jul 08, 2010
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Jul 11, 2010
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|||||
|
| 4.43
|
it was amazing
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Jun 26, 2010
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Jul 02, 2010
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|||||
|
| 4.27
|
it was amazing
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Jun 12, 2010
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Jun 26, 2010
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|||||
|
| 4.05
|
it was amazing
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Jun 10, 2010
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Jun 26, 2010
|
|||||
|
| 3.79
|
it was amazing
|
Jun 07, 2010
|
Jun 12, 2010
|
|||||
|
| 4.02
|
it was amazing
|
Mar 02, 2010
|
Mar 05, 2010
|
|||||
|
| 4.43
|
really liked it
|
Jan 14, 2010
|
Jan 15, 2010
|
|||||
|
| 4.02
|
it was amazing
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Jun 13, 2009
|
Jun 13, 2009
|
|||||
|
| 4.04
|
it was amazing
|
Jun 12, 2009
|
Jun 12, 2009
|
|||||
|
| 3.83
|
it was amazing
|
Apr 24, 2009
|
Apr 25, 2009
|
|||||
|
| 4.01
|
it was amazing
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Apr 21, 2009
|
Apr 21, 2009
|
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