BillP's Book\Miniature\Wargame Blog

The book was very interesting, fairly well written and I enjoyed it immensely, in fact I think I read it in two sittings over about 36 hours. It was one of those books you lose sleep over by deciding to read it instead of going to bed at a reasonable hour.

That being said, I’m afraid the book doesn’t really rebut Ehrenriech for a number of reasons. Shepard started off checking into a homeless shelter, Crisis Ministries, that provided living quarters, two meals a day, and a range of counseling and employment services that greatly facilitated his progress. Such comprehensive and effective homeless services are, I am afraid, the exception rather than the rule. In fact, one wonders how “randomly” Charleston was selected for this experiment.

Secondly, throughout his journey, Shepard successfully rode the ragged edge of disaster; breaking a toe at his moving job, dealing with a bout of food borne illness, having a physical altercation with his room-mate, any one of which could have, if it came out slightly differently, put an end to his experiment. He was often one step away from disaster, It was fortunate that he managed to navigate all these successfully, it is doubtful if anyone could have, or since his experiment ended early, whether he could have continued to do so.

Finally, Adam had intended for the experiment to run for a full year, but after 10 months he ended it early to go back to NC to tend to a sick father, This raises the question of what he would have done if it hadn’t been an experiment? What if instead of being able to abandon his working class life to deal with a sick Dad, he actually had a working class life with a sick Dad?

So, in the final analysis, it was a very interesting well-written book, by a very determined and intelligent young man, which kind of inherently refuted its own premise.

64 for the year

First was Lock In by John Scalzi. This is very entertaining and thought provoking police procedural set in a near future America where a flu like disease has swept though the world leaving tens of thousands of people “locked in”, that is totally conscious, but unable to speak or move. Government response to the disease resulted in investment in technology which has reached the point where the locked in people can have neural interfaces implanted into their brains allowing them to control and live vicariously through android robots called “threeps” (from C3PO of Star Wars) or through people called “integrators” who equipped with neural nets and trained to allow locked in folks to live through them. A locked in person reports for their first day of work, via threep, as an FBI agent and is sent to deal with the apparent murder of one of these integrators, and the plot takes off. The book is excellent. First it’s a great exploration of an interesting social construct of dealing with the locked in syndrome. Second it’s a pretty good police procedural. Finally, unlike a lot of science fiction, the characters are pretty well thought out. I recommend it highly.

I also finished two more Scalzi’s, this time from his Old Man’s War series; The Human Division and The End of All Things. These two are the fifth and six installments of the series and take up pretty much were the last one left off. In this case the Colonial Union is dealing with the fallout from the Earth discovering that the CU has been exploiting them as the Conclave’s efforts to destroy the CU and a bunch of other issues. If you liked the first four volumes you’ll need to read these two. If you haven’t read Old Man’s War , you need to read that first or you’ll be clueless.

Hard Tack and Coffee by John D. Billings is an excellent book by an artilleryman in the Army of the Potomac which really does tell you pretty much everything you ever wanted to know about what it was like to be a soldier in the U.S. Army during the civil war. One note, this is more of a generalized “what it was like” book than a set of memoirs of Billings’ personal experiences. I recommend it very highly.

Underwood, Scotch and Wry by Brian D. Meeks is an interesting self-published Amazon ebook about a washed up novelist with writer’s block who is now a tenured English professor who hates computers, but enjoys scotch, sleeping with grad students, and not teaching. When a dean, in an effort to get rid of him, assigns him to teach a course on social media, his grad assistants step in and teach an old dog new tricks.

Underwood Scotch and Cry is the sequel, where the professor, having overcome his writer’s block has moved to NYC and is once more a novelist. In this case, he makes an ill-considered bet with another writer, and to win the bet is mentored on the ins and outs of the self-publishing industry by a hugely successful writer of self-published romances.

The two books are, as I say interesting. The protagonist is not a very likeable character, snarky and chauvinist throughout, and the premise for both books is a bit far-fetched, but they are short and cheap and the second one does have a fair amount of information about self-publishing. I’ll probably read the (inevitable) sequels.

63 for the year