{"@attributes":{"version":"2.0"},"channel":{"title":"Song of a Traveller: the courtesan's salon","link":"https:\/\/thewronghands.livejournal.com\/","description":"Song of a Traveller: the courtesan's salon - LiveJournal.com","lastBuildDate":"Wed, 25 Jan 2017 07:59:00 GMT","generator":"LiveJournal \/ LiveJournal.com","copyright":"NOINDEX","image":{"url":"https:\/\/l-userpic.livejournal.com\/126910415\/709131","title":"Song of a Traveller: the courtesan's salon","link":"https:\/\/thewronghands.livejournal.com\/","width":"100","height":"100"},"item":[{"guid":"https:\/\/thewronghands.livejournal.com\/1548379.html","pubDate":"Wed, 25 Jan 2017 07:59:00 GMT","title":"[Book Reviews] Chinese cryptography and ungrateful children","author":"thewronghands","link":"https:\/\/thewronghands.livejournal.com\/1548379.html","description":"Translated from Chinese, Mai Jia's \"Decoded\"<\/a> is a pretty good novel from an author who doesn't know a whole lot about cryptography. [rueful grin] That's okay. It's in that class of \"just treat this as cryptofantasy and not so much how it actually works\"... if you read it as a kinda lyrical novel about anything else, it's pretty good. I appreciated the historical context of starting several generations back in the protagonist's family and discussing geniuses in the context of their families and culture. Some of the other reviews complained that the book was a disjointed read, particularly towards the end. I didn't think so... either that, or I'm reading REALLY different books than the rest of these reviewers, heh. (Or people are only used to American literature that lays everything out for you super clearly and holds your hand, rather than leaving anything about mood or characterization for the reader to infer.) So, the appendix at the end is a little disjointed, but don't let that put you off the whole book. Said appendix is six pages out of 300, and it's not even that hard to get through. If you've read Pascal, you'll be fine. I particularly appreciated the setting -- I learned a little bit about Chinese storytelling through reading this. I was also interested in the themes of passing the educational torch from teacher to student, and how those relationships supported or interfered with each person's work. Good researchers can become good teachers, but sometimes leave their research behind to do so. (Maybe that happens in academia everywhere, heh.) That in-the-world\/back-from-the-world tension that allows the brain to grapple with heavy ideological loads is something I can relate to. I'm not sure that framing Rong Jinzhen as autistic was particularly accurate in characterization -- we see so much more of his actions than of his internal world or way of thinking. I'd be interested to see what my friends on the spectrum thought; I don't read a lot of books with autistic heroes that aren't American or British. So, a well written fictional novel that has only a loose association with how any of the parts I know about actually work, heh. Three and a half familial shifts of fortune out of five.
<\/a>
I just love Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, and whoever titles her collections in English is a genius. \"There Once Lived A Mother Who Loved Her Children, Until They Moved Back In: Three Novellas About Family\"<\/a> is super grim and blackly hilarious. Even the introduction casually smacks you with some truly awful happenings that actually happened. And yet, people soldier on anyways. If you want to see why her work was banned in Russia, this is the collection for you. It requires a morbid sense of humor and the ability to see horror and familial affection in the same sets of actions; her characters coexist with themselves in a complexity not often seen. For people who do trigger warnings, trigger warnings for everything. Domestic violence, rape, murder, graft, poisoning, graft, violence, ruining good chocolate, and that's just one novella of the three. Literary-minded first responders will probably like it. Most other people probably will not. Five family relationships more challenging than anything I've got out of five and the best-worst of this batch.
<\/a>
Daniel Abraham is currently getting a fair bit of attention for his \"Expanse\" series which has been made into a show, but I ended up reading his \"The Dagger and the Coin\" fantasy series instead. (I might go back and read his space series later.) Starting with \"The Dragon's Path\"<\/a> and proceeding through four more books, \"The Dagger and the Coin\" is substantially a long fantasy series about moving off the gold standard. Only a New Mexican would write this! [grin] (I exaggerate for humor, but not much. That is a major plot arc.) I enjoyed the read, though he does get pretty grim after a while. I'd read more of his work. But I doubt I'll ever go back and reread these books again... they kinda fit my \"airplane book\" criteria there in that they didn't teach me anything, make me think, or give me any new ideas. I did love Marcus Wester as a character, he and I totally could have been friends, and his interplay with his stalwart lieutenant and their long-practiced laconic exchanges were the highlight of the characters for me. (Particularly good: the \"this magic sword will kill you fast or slow\"\/\"yeah, they all do that\" scene.) Enough unpredictability to be interesting without undermining your notion of who the characters are. Three and a half sleeping dragons lying out of five.
<\/a>
\"This Is Your Brain on Parasites: How Tiny Creatures Manipulate Our Behavior and Shape Society\"<\/a> is not a good book to read when you're about to deal with a large amount of feline bodily excretions. (I had *just* read the toxoplasmosis chapter. Seriously!) I had high hopes for this book, and it did reference a bunch of interesting research, but I wanted the book to be less sensationalistically written and more scientifically rigorous. It was like reading a serious book on science authored by someone who mostly writes clickbait. Everything was BIG and AMAZING and TECHNICOLOR and... can't we just have a parasitic ant fungus or some creepy parasites that change the fear reactions of mice? That's interesting enough in and of itself, we don't need to have a thematic guitar riff for how super weird that is and every time, heh. So, five stars for interesting science, one black hole for aggravating delivery, we'll call it three secret protozoans out of five overall. Worth it, but auggh.
<\/a>
Eavan Boland continues to write poetry I like... her \"A Woman Without A Country\"<\/a> is thoughtful, topical, understated and lyrical, with a good grasp of history and how one walks across it without always being defined by it. I particularly appreciated her view of her ancestors' interaction with the complexity of Irish history, and how individual choices can make one's life about something else even as the background doesn't change. Four generations out of five.<\/a>

This entry was originally posted at http:\/\/ivy.dreamwidth.org\/1568921.html<\/a> and has \"comment comments there. Please feel free to comment on either site; comments rock.","comments":"https:\/\/thewronghands.livejournal.com\/1548379.html?view=comments#comments","category":["sci-fi","poetry","book reviews","china","russian literature","fantasy","science"]},{"guid":"https:\/\/thewronghands.livejournal.com\/1536542.html","pubDate":"Tue, 06 Dec 2016 06:35:31 GMT","title":"[Sociology] \"If we fuck up, we fuck up....?\" \"AGGRESSIVELY!\"","author":"thewronghands","link":"https:\/\/thewronghands.livejournal.com\/1536542.html","description":"Hello, Seattle! Tonight I finally made it down to Krav Maga Seattle<\/a> to determine if they were a reasonable place to refer my friends who have inquired about self defense. Indeed, they are. Krav has a specific philosophy -- basically, harder, faster, more, fight fight fight never stop fighting. (See subject line.) They are all-around aggressive -- they will push you to not just take the trial class, but to sign up. Not just to sign up, but to go several times a week. Not just to go, but to get in the best physical shape of your life, which they will be more than happy to assist you with. So if your goal is basically \"Become A Martial Artist As Fast As Possible\" and you are willing to work hard at it, I can now recommend Krav Maga Seattle. They ran me around for an hour and they had maybe thirty people in their class, all running and yelling and fighting at drill-sergeant volume (part of their training is, they want their stuff to work when you are tired and winded and stressed out), and no one got injured. No one even seemed unhappy. Good job, Krav Maga Seattle! There were a reasonable number of women there, maybe 30%. The class is mostly but not entirely younger folks, twenties to forties. So, in short, if your self-defense level of desired investment is \"I want to take a class once and then be done\", go to a Rory Miller weekend seminar the next time he's in your area. If you are able-bodied and willing to go train regularly, consider Krav. If you are not able-bodied, talk to me about your body and your intentions -- I can recommend other things. If you are considering a firearm, talk to me\/see previous post on that topic to figure out if that's going to match your lifestyle and threat model.

Krav and I have some philosophical differences -- I think the instructor could benefit from a seminar on the legal aspects of self defense. (You cannot keep kicking someone once they're down if you can't justify it as being in active fear for your life. If they're down and pointing a gun at you, that looks a lot different than if they're unarmed and you just KO'd them, and now you're still kicking. In that second one, you go to jail too. To broad-brush it, you want it to be crystal clear to everyone who the aggressor was, and that you exited the fight as soon as you could safely do so. To fine-brush it, go take a Rory Miller seminar.) Our verbal de-escalations are different. I'm less aggressive before it's a fight and after it's a fight. But for empty-hand or generic weapon, if you are serious and willing to work hard, they're pretty good.

It turns out that one of the instructors there is a New Orleans expat, and was one of Mayhem's favorite instructors at his Krav school down there. Ha! Small martial arts world. I got home and debriefed Mayhem on my evening.

Raven: \"...so I spent an hour hitting things, as you can see.\" [proudly displays bruised knuckles, aka I should have brought hand wraps] \"Mostly in the right places!\"
Mayhem: \"Do you feel better now?\"
Raven: \"...wow, I really do. Ahahaha. I didn't even think about it, but yeah.\"
Mayhem: \"I've met you.\"

Endorphins are love. (I'm fine, I'm just running triage on a bunch of other peoples' problems at the moment and boy there are a lot of them. Beating up an innocent kick bag really reset my Pollyanna meter, though. :) Eeyore --> Rosie the Riveter! We can do it!) I don't know why weightlifting works, yoga works, martial arts works, but running makes me hate everything... but I'll take the good parts of that and, er, run with 'em.

Your martial arts questions can go here, if you have them! There are many experienced martial artists reading, so you can get lots of perspectives, too, not just mine.

This entry was originally posted at http:\/\/ivy.dreamwidth.org\/580462.html<\/a> and has \"comment comments there. Please feel free to comment on either site; comments rock.","comments":"https:\/\/thewronghands.livejournal.com\/1536542.html?view=comments#comments","category":["fianna","sociology","new orleans","seattle","fitness","martial arts"]},{"guid":"https:\/\/thewronghands.livejournal.com\/1534756.html","pubDate":"Thu, 01 Dec 2016 03:03:13 GMT","title":"[Book Reviews] \"Everfair\" and \"Swimming to Antarctica\"","author":"thewronghands","link":"https:\/\/thewronghands.livejournal.com\/1534756.html","description":"Two books I read recently that I really liked:

I love well-done alternate histories, ones imaginative enough to engage my speculative brain about how things might have gone and yet grounded enough in the actual history and personages of the time to read as believable to me. The best ones have me going and reading a bunch of actual history afterwards to figure out what really happened, and where the author departed from the known narrative. Science fiction and speculative fiction in general is an exploration of what might be; alternate history is a good vehicle for this. Accordingly, Nisi Shawl's \"Everfair\"<\/a> kind of reminds me of Steven Barnes's \"Lion's Blood\"<\/a> and its sequel. (Aside: augggh, I cannot believe I missed Shawl talking about \"Everfair\" with Ted Chiang last month<\/a>. I would have LOVED to go to that; Chiang is also one of my favorite sci-fi authors (and wrote the short story that the \"Arrival\" movie is based off of), and they're both Seattle locals. Augggggh!) \"Everfair\" is steampunk, and I normally hate steampunk... I just can't get into stories about how totally awesome it was to be a colonialist English person, nor do I have the remotest desire to dress up and pretend to be one. Familial and political grrrr, heh. \"Everfair\" is not that story. It looks at Belgium's colonization of the Congo from the perspective of the Africans, where the alt in the alt-history is that the Africans had access to Age of Steam technology earlier than they did. There's a lot more to explore in that premise, though I feel like I would benefit more if I'd started with a better understanding of the actual historical period. (If anyone has recommendations for books I should read about that, I'm keeping my ear to the ground. I know I have one on my wishlist\/library list already.) This is more an alternate history of diplomacy and engines than it is one of firearm development and troop movements -- there's that story in there too, but it's mostly broad-brushed.

I appreciated the multiple sympathetic characters in the story, several of whom I would have happily read a freestanding novel about. I liked that many of them were flawed people who made mistakes, chose unwisely, and regretted that they couldn't always have had enough foresight or understanding to do better. I liked Daisy's respected stature as a poet even as I cringed through her stepping all over her partner's feelings. That kind of thing happens, and it's rarely depicted so believably -- people want either one shining teachable moment after which everything is fine forever, or for the stomping character to be the villainiest villain who ever vil'd, after which they are rightly derided by all characters of sense. I appreciated the realism of a character who in some ways is perceptive and insightful totally botching it on a different front, and the exploration of the cultural blinders\/personal lack of understanding that led her to do it. I also appreciated the nod to Liberia in Thomas's arc, and the characters' struggles with how to get their enterprises respected when dealing with alliance countries which were rather less than sympathetic. (That happened over and over and over again in history as countries attempted to settle themselves into a pecking order. Even countries on the short end of that unthinkingly can turn around and do the same thing to their own would-be allies, and I thought that was a nice bit of storycraft on Shawl's part. There are several arcs where there's a lot more story to be written in the world, so on the good side, many jumping-off points. It leaves the reader wanting to know a lot more about what happened. I hope the author continues to write in the world... I want to know how Everfair continued after the major events in the denouement, whether or not they had diplomatic relations with Macao, what official languages they did end up choosing, and how Lisette thinks of herself citizenry-wise at the end of it all. Four atrocities avoided out of five.<\/a>

I also really enjoyed Lynne Cox's \"Swimming to Antarctica: Tales of a Long Distance Swimmer\"<\/a>. Cox is a phenomenal athlete and a compelling writer. Even though her experiences swimming sound like they'd be utterly miserable to people who don't have her determination, love of the sport, and acclimatization to cold water, she brings a kind of immersive joy to writing about that it was like for her that the reader can catch. Vivid prose, daunting challenges, plenty of adventure -- I recommended the book to two people while I was still on the last chapter. I also appreciated her handling of the physiology of her sport, and how people treated her for not looking like their idea of a phenomenal athletic prodigy. The other open-water long distance swimmers I know are similar... body fat helps you there, both with buoyancy and with insulation. (I remember being alarmed and distressed when I went from the positive buoyancy I'd had all my life to being negatively buoyant. Swimming is a lot scarier when you don't float by default any more!) She handles the unkind comments of people who don't have a tenth her swimming ability with class and grace.

I also particularly appreciated her interest in science and her contributions to studies of cold-water immersion and the physiology of that sport. The studies that she participated in now have their conclusions taught in wilderness medicine courses; her work there has been helping save lives for twenty years now. She's unusually gifted in her ability to endure and excel in extreme temperatures, but the data on what that looks like still helps people who aren't so fortunate in the genetic lottery. Anatomy and physiology nerds may appreciate reading the book for that alone! Four and a half freezing dunkings out of five.<\/a>

This entry was originally posted at http:\/\/ivy.dreamwidth.org\/578772.html<\/a> and has \"comment comments there. Please feel free to comment on either site; comments rock.","comments":"https:\/\/thewronghands.livejournal.com\/1534756.html?view=comments#comments","category":["africa","book reviews","history","sci-fi","sociology","biography","physical feminism","fitness"]},{"guid":"https:\/\/thewronghands.livejournal.com\/1532938.html","pubDate":"Sat, 26 Nov 2016 00:40:51 GMT","title":"[Book Reviews] Interstellar drama","author":"thewronghands","link":"https:\/\/thewronghands.livejournal.com\/1532938.html","description":"Shortly after I finished 2010's Pulitzer Prize winner for nonfiction, \"The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and its Dangerous Legacy\"<\/a>, I had the pleasure of discussing it with a Russian friend of mine. I remember the Cold War from childhood, but much of it came during a point in my own development where my understanding was more incomplete than it is now -- I encountered the news coverage of the players at the time, I read Zbigniew Brzezinski in order to try to make more sense of the forces at play, but I had not yet reached the point in my intellectual development where I realized that you had to read more than one book on a topic to understand it, heh. Hoffman's \"Dead Hand\" goes a long way towards rectifying the incompleteness of my childhood understanding, with many details about the Russian programs and political movers that were highly secret at the time, as well as the handling and devolvement of arms and chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons as what was the Soviet Union deunionized. At the time, I don't think I appreciated what an extraordinary figure Gorbachev was, or how much he differed politically from the rest of the Soviet establishment. It's a strange thing to read a book about weapons of mass destruction and come out with a renewed faith in humanity, but there were so many many ways that could have gone appallingly wrong with far greater loss of life. Hoffman is a compelling guide to these interwoven storylines about the progression of the weapons programs, and leaves the reader better informed and with better questions about where we stand now. Five moments of gratitude for being alive out of five.
<\/a>
After putting off reading Nnedi Okorafor's \"Who Fears Death\" for months and then loving it, I had a much shorter wait before diving into \"Lagoon\"<\/a>. This was almost a one-sitting read for me, with a lively and well-realized setting, several compelling characters, and an unpredictable narrative that sweeps you up in the progression of events and carries you along to its rollicking conclusion. No surprise that the marine biologist was my favorite character, but Okorafor's deft weaving of several concurrent narrative threads will likely appeal to readers who enjoy stories where the exercise of perspective is part of the story. While understanding the aliens who have arrived is the stated center of the churn, I found that my developing understanding of the human characters and their backgrounds was more interesting. Four marine witches, the worst kind, out of five.
<\/a>
I wanted to like Karen Lord's \"The Galaxy Game\"<\/a> more than I did, but the story just never quite cohered for me. Despite being an NPR book of the year, I felt like I never got as much detail as I wanted about any of the characters. I liked her worldbuilding and the different cultures she populated her galaxy with, I liked Wallrunning as a mixed practice-of-human-social-coherence and gravity-defying sport, but I wish I could have seen a couple Wallrunning matches rather than having the characters around the excitement but never giving the reader a close look at it. I appreciated the cultural differences between the psi-possessing cultures and the ones that lack that, and that we had a character who came from one of them but wasn't able to interact in that way... but I feel like a deeper story could have been told about how that went for him. There was a fantastic buffet of things to explore from the author's imagination, and I feel like we got the top half-inch of all of it and that's it. I want to know more about the mindships, and the intersection of Wallrunning with pilots! I want to know how people from non-psi cultures find their interactions with them! So I simultaneously award many points to the book for making me care so much, and also feel frustrated at the lack of deeper resolution on any of it, heh. Three galaxies awaiting exploration of five.
<\/a>
Much like the authors' previous \"Difficult Conversations\", I found \"Thanks for the Feedback: The Science and Art of Receiving Feedback Well\"<\/a> a worthwhile and valuable read. Like pretty much everybody, I struggle when hearing feedback that I didn't expect or don't like. The single most useful thing about this book was the up-front comment that 90% of how a conversation goes depends on the person receiving the feedback, not the person giving it, but we focus a lot of our conflict resolution skills on being the person giving it. Oh! The systematic look about the different reasons that people feel feedback is wrong or unfair or unwelcome was useful -- I can see a number of past conflicts that fell into the categories delineated by the authors, though of course it's much easier to see when other people are doing those things than it is to catch yourself when you're doing it, heh. But I've had a number of difficult conversations in my life recently, so I've had a chance to try to apply the techniques suggested here to my understanding and analysis of those situations. It is helpful, not least because just having something that reminds you to stop and consider the other person's point of view from multiple angles helps in generating a more thoughtful and productive response. It's not always going to go well, you can't control the other person's side of the conversation, all you can do is try to provide a space for them to feel heard and consider what they have to say. Still, that's often better than we do otherwise. I appreciated the toolkit with which to consider the options available. Four attempts to hear it from their perspective out of five.<\/a>

This entry was originally posted at http:\/\/ivy.dreamwidth.org\/576856.html<\/a> and has \"comment comments there. Please feel free to comment on either site; comments rock.","comments":"https:\/\/thewronghands.livejournal.com\/1532938.html?view=comments#comments","category":["africa","politics","mythology","book reviews","fantasy","russia","space","sci-fi","sociology","science"]},{"guid":"https:\/\/thewronghands.livejournal.com\/1529469.html","pubDate":"Sat, 12 Nov 2016 06:51:31 GMT","title":"[Politics] Surveillance self defense","author":"thewronghands","link":"https:\/\/thewronghands.livejournal.com\/1529469.html","description":"Hello, Internet! Several of my friends have installed Signal<\/a> (hi!) and thanked me for the recommendation. I thought I'd link again. Also, those of you tending to your digital footprints may appreciate the EFF's Surveillance Self Defense project<\/a>. They have tutorials customized to LGBTQ youths<\/a>, Mac users<\/a>, activists and protesters<\/a>, journalism students\/new journalists<\/a>, professional journalists<\/a>, and plenty more. Also consider their Privacy Badger browser extension<\/a>. They also have rainbow unicorns<\/a>. [grin] Go forth and encrypt!

For developers: you can make everyone's lives better by improving user privacy and transparency in the code you write. It matters! Thanks -- we appreciate your efforts.

For sysadmins: don't build systems that are used to do creepy things. I have for the length of my career refused jobs on ethical grounds and it's not as terrifying of a conversation with your management as you'd think. It's easier for some folks than others, I'm not going to starve because I fired a potential client or anything, and I've been fortunate to have management that respects my \"oh HELL no\". Just putting it out there that sometimes it is possible to nope on out of contributing to the problem.

I am totally considering buying a bunch of copies of Little Brother and donating them to school libraries, or starting a book group somewhere for people who wouldn't normally know that book exists. Cory lets you download and read it for free<\/a>, which is great, and I want to give him money for his work because that book is great and I would have loved it as a kid. (Tl;dr, if you want your kid to turn out like me, give them that book, heh. Since it wasn't written when I was a kid, I had to settle for being given Animal Farm at an impressionable young age because \"it's about animals!\". Ahahaha.)

[deliberately public for linkability if you know other people that would find this helpful]

This entry was originally posted at http:\/\/ivy.dreamwidth.org\/573422.html<\/a> and has \"comment comments there. Please feel free to comment on either site; comments rock.","comments":"https:\/\/thewronghands.livejournal.com\/1529469.html?view=comments#comments","category":["civil liberties","politics","book reviews","reading","security","privacy"]},{"guid":"https:\/\/thewronghands.livejournal.com\/1512668.html","pubDate":"Thu, 18 Aug 2016 08:57:53 GMT","title":"[Book Reviews] \"Ghost Rider: Travels on the Healing Road\"","author":"thewronghands","link":"https:\/\/thewronghands.livejournal.com\/1512668.html","description":"The most internally complicated book I have read in some time, Neil Peart's \"Ghost Rider: Travels on the Healing Road\"<\/a> had been multiply recommended to me by gentlemen of my acquaintance who love Rush. It's a journey-saga of a musician whose only daughter was killed in a car accident just shortly before his wife was diagnosed with and then died of cancer. This was world-shattering to Peart, and this book is his story of what he did next, how one even makes a beginning at recovering from a loss that staggering. Fearing stagnation and a slipping away into sorrow and hermitude made permanent, Peart gets on his motorcycle and tries to keep moving. From Quebec to Alaska to Belize, back and forth across much of North America and nearly all of the West, he rides and writes about it. He reads voraciously; I have a tremendous list of book recommendations just from having read this book. He seeks out the wilderness, small towns, and challenging roads. He rails at the sky, at people who are alive when the ones he loved have died, he complains about tourists and Americans and broken motorcycle parts. His dog, being taken care of back in Canada, dies. His best friend, meant to make it out to travel with him, gets arrested for smuggling pot across the US\/Canada border and is sentenced to years in jail. Much of the latter 2\/3rds of the book is drawn from his letters to his incarcerated friend. He judges his life to have become a bad country song. He keeps moving.

For a book with a lot of motion in it, it's a very slow pace... grief is. He talks about his process of hoping someday to heal as \"one step forward, one step back\". Peart reminds me tremendously of one of my exes (several of them, really, but one most of all), with whom I discussed the book and who I don't think would actually like reading it despite the moments of profound similarity -- I think he liked my Cliff Notes and Interesting Jumping-Off Points For Discussion summary better than he would have actually liked reading it. If you like charmingly grumpy people, you may well like Peart, but he doesn't spare us the ugly parts of his psyche during this worst time in his life... he likes America but not Americans, he has some pretty ugly things to say about the people he sees in Vegas in particular, and his attempt at fake-British jive talk is cringingly horrifyingly racist sounding to an American ear. (I think he was trying to make fun of racism there? Badly? But it didn't work.) I've run into that before with non-American friends; different expectations around what is offensive and what you don't say can run a conversation aground with a quickness.

I'd been told this was worth reading for years, and I agree that it is, but I'm glad I read it when I did. I was much more impressed with the overlap of small towns in Canada Peart discusses with small towns in Canada I have recently been to... until I realized that there's basically one major highway through the area and few towns, so it's not very surprising that we both would have stopped at the only towns along the only highway there. [rueful grin] Most of his travels are in the West -- he goes through Alaska, both Vancouvers, Seattle, along the Columbia, through Mendonoma, to Moab, through Albuquerque and several national parks. (My sense that he discovered all these places after I'd been there because I read his book about it now is hilariously misplaced; all of this happened before I'd even seen my current city of residence, heh.) He hides his identity and tries hard not to have any \"hey, aren't you...\" conversations with his well-meaning fans. He discusses the fracturing of his sense of self, the dissociation with \"that other guy\" who played the drums and cared about music. He gets flirted with and gets on his motorcycle and runs away as fast as he can, speculating on how awful it is that an Air of Tragedy is apparently romantic catnip when all he wants is to ride around alone, write letters to his friend, and be in the wilderness. He quotes a whole lot of song lyrics, most of which he wrote. That would be the apotheosis of goth cliches if his tragedy were not real and profound, and if he weren't a blazing literary genius. As it is, he gets away with it.

One of the places I felt the most sympathy for him was towards the end of the book, where roughly a year after the second of his tragedies he has some interest in dating again... and the sister of his wife, who had been one of the closest people to him in bereavement, can't forgive him for having those feelings. He says in the epilogue, as gracefully as possible, that they are no longer close because of it. That's a peculiar horror, that in starting to heal and move on with your life, that the also-bereaved find that unbearable, and you lose them too. Gah. Country songs indeed.

Despite the fact that I loved this book, I'm probably going to recommend it to almost no one... between his open dislike of most Americans (occasionally extended to most of humanity regardless of nationality or buffet-line clustering habits), that facepalm facepalm British jive talk passage, and its slow pacing and oxbow-meandering, it's a book that is likely to only speak to a subset of folks. GoodReads is representative -- a lot of the reviews can be basically summed up as \"OMG what an arrogant jerk!\" or \"this book doesn't go anywhere, it's a lot of incoherent letters to his friend in jail\". But for people disposed to sympathy, it's a profoundly moving book. Four duck-shaped rocks out of five.<\/a>

This entry was originally posted at http:\/\/ivy.dreamwidth.org\/556457.html<\/a> and has \"comment comments there. Please feel free to comment on either site; comments rock.","comments":"https:\/\/thewronghands.livejournal.com\/1512668.html?view=comments#comments","category":["mexico","book reviews","albuquerque","motorcycles","seattle","travel","psychology","canada"]},{"guid":"https:\/\/thewronghands.livejournal.com\/1509978.html","pubDate":"Wed, 03 Aug 2016 08:10:20 GMT","title":"[Book Reviews] Security and Mount Everest","author":"thewronghands","link":"https:\/\/thewronghands.livejournal.com\/1509978.html","description":"Hello, Seattle! Somewhat recently I read \"High Crimes: The Fate of Everest in an Age of Greed\"<\/a>, which came recommended to me. Indeed, it was a good recommendation. It's rather the opposite of the more common triumphal feel-good read that is the staple of books about mountaineering, and doesn't quite fit in to the other common trope of the genre, books about that terrible tragedy that happened to those other people and what should have been done differently to prevent it. Instead, \"High Crimes\" is basically about Everest and human evil. Some of it's financial, people labeling refilled oxygen bottles as original ones for sale and then shrugging and going \"huh, funny\" when they fail climbers and the climbers have to descend. Some of it's governmental, permit fees and seizure and exploitation of Tibet and political destabilization causing a great uptick in bribes required and shakedowns shook down. And some of it's anarchic, figuring out what you do when your necessary-for-life supplies are stolen in your absence at an altitude where there is no real potential for law enforcement. Or what you do when one of your trip members gets violent. There's a well known incident of one repeat Everest summiter punching his wife, the woman with the most Everest summits ever, in the head at 21,000 feet and knocking her out. At that altitude, that's a life threat. This book is the main reason that incident is well known. He then stalked around the camp threatening everyone else, and the other climbers slept (or failed to) holding their ice axes or a knife, afraid he was going to attack them too. We have guides misrepresenting their experience, abandoning their only clients, and summiting themselves. There's a lot of deception -- one particularly shameless fellow who did not summit stole the camera from a successful summiter whom he thought was dying and then left him there to die. He then claimed that that was him in the photos on the summit. (Under 94839208392 layers of clothing and goggles, it's not immediately obvious that it was not.) He was rather taken aback when the guy he'd left to die didn't, made it down, and then started asking some pretty uncomfortable questions as to why this fellow stole his camera rather than trying to save his life.

Life-saving up there is economically disincentivized. Most of the climbers on the mountain are not in physical condition to assist in a rescue attempt -- a lot of Everest climbers aren't mountaineers so much as they are people who want to get up this one mountain once. So they don't have the serious conditioning + fortunate genes combination to be able to take care of themselves at altitude much of the time, much less help anyone else. Everyone up there is pretty far down on Maslow and not always thinking very clearly. It's a recipe for conflict... weaker climbers don't mean to prey on the resources of the stronger and more well-equipped parties, but they do it anyway. Or they die. Everyone thinks big and dreams hard and sees themselves on the summit. That's not always how it works out, particularly for the poorly prepared. For most people, if you're near death and you \"find\" a tent and food, you don't care if it's not yours. The human animal wants to survive. It's totally eating that food and taking that tent and burning that fuel. Given that there are relatively few places suitable for pitching tents, their locations are well known, and it's not like you can really carry heavy locks up there or make a tent door lock that would survive a knife slit on the leeward side, it's a tough security problem. You have to leave your supplies unattended in high camps, you can't be at all of them all the time, and a lot of stuff apparently goes walking in the night. No one saw anything. No one will admit to it.

Lots of points to the book for being thought-provoking, particularly about the monetizing and Maslow-security aspects of the situation. It's rare that I find a book on mountaineering day-job relevant, but this one was. Four bland lies out of five.

This entry was originally posted at http:\/\/ivy.dreamwidth.org\/553740.html<\/a> and has \"comment comments there. Please feel free to comment on either site; comments rock.","comments":"https:\/\/thewronghands.livejournal.com\/1509978.html?view=comments#comments","category":["ethics","hiking","climbing","book reviews","doom","crime","security","travel"]},{"guid":"https:\/\/thewronghands.livejournal.com\/1506702.html","pubDate":"Mon, 11 Jul 2016 19:00:49 GMT","title":"[Book Reviews] Active books from a sedentary woman","author":"thewronghands","link":"https:\/\/thewronghands.livejournal.com\/1506702.html","description":"When I can't go anywhere, this is what you get. Plus side: I finally cracked the cover on the Landmark Edition \"Arrian\". (I bogged down shamefully in the \"Hellenika\" last November and have not yet resumed it, but maybe reading about Alexander the Great will fire my enthusiasm for Greek campaigning.)

Books About Exercising:<\/u><\/b>
I think everyone but me that I know who has read Haruki Murakami's \"What I Talk About When I Talk About Running\"<\/a> is a member of some secret cult of niceness and peace that I lack the endorphin entry ticket to. [grin] An easy, gentle, meditative read, I cannot decide whether Murakami just has a much nicer time running than I do, or if I'm just a gripier person, heh. I appreciate his way of presenting the everyday and how he's taken the same lessons of perseverance from running and applied them to novel writing. I've also found that the essential skillset of not giving up when things get hard is important and carries over. I admire his ability to find joy in it. (I still do not find joy in it.) Three inabilities to relate out of five -- I feel bad doing that to a Murakami book, but man. Bafflement.
<\/a>
I did very much like Bryon Powell's \"Relentless Forward Progress: A Guide to Running Ultramarathons\"<\/a>, which I read to see if I could figure out how to optimize my training for the marathon. (I figured if I followed his 50k program, then I ought to be more than capable of running all of a marathon, right?) Fortunately\/unfortunately, I repeated week 5, uh, 17 times before I realized that I was not going to progress past that point at my current fitness level. So, bright side, it did tell me where I am stuck. I probably do need to up my base mileage... I just need to figure out how to have less wear and tear on my body while running high-mileage weeks. (I already do either trail or treadmill, no concrete or asphalt unless it's a race, fish oil for the joints, healthy diet, and I've tried lots of different kinds of shoe.) The book was pretty helpful in affirming that I'm doing a lot of things right, and I appreciated its informal anecdotal style. There were parts that were terribly funny if you've had similar experiences. I may try this program again in the fall -- I have two full marathons scheduled then, so I have something to train for. Four and a half aspirations out of five.
<\/a>
Going old-school, Heinrich Harrer's \"The White Spider: The Classic Account of the Ascent of the Eiger\"<\/a> is grandly heroic, generously forgiving of the mountaineers who made unsuccessful attempts, and celebratory of the strengths of everyone who gave it a good try. This historical account of ascents of the Eiger's North Face is as inspiring as it is thorough. Fans of modern mountaineering literature may be surprised and pleased by the absence (and indeed, quashing) of the jockeying for honors -- it is Harrer's position that there's plenty of honor to go around in making earnest attempts at a challenging goal. The historical perspective allows the reader to learn successful and unsuccessful strategies for climbing the Face as the mountaineers and climbers of the era did, as well as providing a useful window into history -- the various strains of national pride at play in Europe after World War II are mentioned herein in the smoothing over. More than thirty years of stories and anecdotes, as well as data about the development of climbing technology, the ascendance of crampons, and the progress of steel-cable search and rescue techniques make this well worth reading. Four calculated ascents out of five.
<\/a>
A more modern take on the same mountain, at least in part, Jon Krakauer's \"Eiger Dreams: Ventures Among Men and Mountains\"<\/a> is a series of short, delicious essays (including the titular and hilarious essay about the Eiger) that had me laughing out loud with recognition -- I've certainly turned around on enough shorter mountains to recognize the feelings of relief, regret, joy, and failure that come with the experience. I never was a 23 year old guy, so \"The Devil's Thumb\" left me going \"what were you THINKING\", but his canyoneering and Alaska pilot essays were the most educational of the volume for me. Greatly enjoyable as always; four and a half variably advised attempts out of five.
<\/a>
Despite the fact that the name is nearly longer than the book, Andy Selter's \"Glacier Travel and Crevasse Rescue: Reading Glaciers, Team Travel, Crevasse Rescue Techniques, Routefinding, Expedition Skills\"<\/a> was excellent. Helpfully clear and direct, this book provides a fair amount of insight into the basics of what one should be considering before venturing into crevasse country. People already familiar with avalanches will have a leg up on understanding the forces at work in snow and ice compaction, fracturing, and behavior, as will students of mountain weather patterns. As a hiker beginning to consider mountaineering proper, though, this was the introduction I was looking for, and I can use the knowledge from it to help me find instruction in travel techniques and appropriate gear. Thanks! Five ice axes out of five.
<\/a>
Stephen Madden's \"Embrace the Suck: A Crossfit Memoir\"<\/a> was not really all that interesting... it's a pretty predictable journey-book from someone who discovers that waking up in the morning to exercise stupidly hard sucks, but eventually is rewarding, but that sticking with it long term is hard and requires a lot of self-discipline, heh. Also diets are hard, sometimes work if you stick with them, but sticking with them is super challenging if you want to eat in restaurants or with other people. So, I was hoping it'd be funnier than it was, but it wasn't. Two and a half burpees out of five.
<\/a>
Read the same week as \"Embrace the Suck\" (which did after all have the better title), T.J. Murphy's \"Inside the Box: The Culture, Science, and Sweat of the CrossFit Revolution\"<\/a> was the better of the two. Useful and interesting insights to some of the CrossFit personalities whose videos I've watched or whose books I've read. Also an easy fun read... it'd make a good airplane book. (Memoirs are great for that.) I would have liked a little more information, if it's available, on why CrossFit worked around the author's injuries when they sounded pretty bad... seems like he's got other books out specifically on running that might address that to some degree. My favorite part was the case study in chapter 7, but the firebreathers explanation was also pretty worthwhile. Three and a half Frans out of five.<\/a>

This entry was originally posted at http:\/\/ivy.dreamwidth.org\/550585.html<\/a> and has \"comment comments there. Please feel free to comment on either site; comments rock.","comments":"https:\/\/thewronghands.livejournal.com\/1506702.html?view=comments#comments","category":["running","climbing","military history","book reviews","fitness","classics","adventure"]},{"guid":"https:\/\/thewronghands.livejournal.com\/1495649.html","pubDate":"Mon, 16 May 2016 17:14:37 GMT","title":"[Book Reviews] Two for science","author":"thewronghands","link":"https:\/\/thewronghands.livejournal.com\/1495649.html","description":"I have read two fabulous books about science recently, one about Cascadian geology, forestry, and public policy, the other about how and where science was advancing during Europe's Dark Ages. I enthusiastically recommend both of these. Steve Olsen's \"Eruption: The Untold Story of Mount St. Helens\"<\/a> wasn't the book that I expected it to be, but a valuable book to read nonetheless. Far more history of forestry and logging in the Northwest than I thought I was in for, and that's pretty depressing if you're an environmentalist, but it's essential to understanding the history of the region, why it looks the way it does now, and how most of the people who were in danger of being in range of the 1980 blast were Weyerhaueser employees and loggers. (It really was lucky that it happened on a weekend and not during the week, or far more people would have been killed.) So it's a doubly tough read -- clearcutting tales and then people dying horribly in the wake of a volcanic explosion since the people managing the emergency didn't guess correctly enough what kind of a blast might result and which areas might be affected. Excellent for people who do disaster planning and recovery, also excellent (if more brief by far) for people who do disaster response. I appreciated all the new information!

The things I was particularly interested in: I knew that the scientist who was famously killed on the ridge<\/a> while taking observations of the mountain was also the first guy on scene a month and change before the blast. He made savvy observations<\/a> about how it could explode (there were more, that's a short clip) and how bad it could be, even mentioning the possibility of a lateral blast, which few other scientists were considering. So if he knew how bad it could be, why was Johnston there? Part of it seemed to be that he was willing to take risks for science, going up to the forming lava dome by helicopter to run out and take gas samples even shortly before the blast. Part of it was that this was an unprecedented event, having not previously been observed by modern scientists. And part of it was that he took someone else's shift -- the other scientist had a graduate student in town and wanted to take the student to breakfast. He'd be back by lunch. Mount St. Helens blew at about 8:30 AM. Johnston was never found; they named the observatory and ridge where he died after him.

A highly relevant detail that I hadn't seen mentioned before: Mount Baker sent up a plume five years before, in 1975<\/a>. The state government's response was to close off a lot of the area, which angered seasonal tourism business in the region. (Mount Baker's still<\/a> at it<\/a>.) But the plume at Baker never turned into harmonic tremors<\/a>, and St. Helens did. Still, when the state government wanted to close off St. Helens, they met a lot of local resistance. \"You did this five years ago. Lots of people went out of business. Nothing happened. Screw you, I pay my taxes, you're not doing this to me.\" In addition, the governor at the time<\/a> was kind of baffling, praising an 84 year old guy who refused to evacuate from the emergency zone she declared, saying that we needed more of his kind of common sense in the state. When the mountain blew and he was killed, she then said \"well, we told people to leave, it's their own fault if they stayed\". Pick one! But the declaration of the zones was only partially based on the geologists' opinion on where the blast could reach... some of the boundaries were set on where the roads were delimiting the boundaries between Weyerhaueser's land. As the largest employer and economic engine in the state at the time, state politicians were reluctant to tell Weyerhaueser that they couldn't send their own employees onto their own land, so they didn't. Eek. Good thing it was a weekend. Four and a half daunting lava cones out of five.<\/a>

British-Iraqi physicist Jim al-Khalili's \"The House of Wisdom: How Arabic Science Saved Ancient Knowledge and Gave Us the Renaissance\"<\/a> was also excellent, describing the massive translation effort of known texts from Greek and Roman scientists into Arabic during the Abb\u0101sid Caliphate and the subsequent pursuit of and development of chemistry, astronomy, medicine, and mathematics by Arabic-literate peoples (al-Khalili characterizes the science being done by its common language of communication, which at that time was Arabic rather than Latin or English -- the scientists he highlights were Muslim, Jewish, Christian, and a few pagans, but they wrote in Arabic as their lingua, um, franca.) His discussion of the overlap between alchemy and chemistry as the science of chemistry developed was particularly interesting to me, as many people throw out actual science being done by scientists who also worked on alchemy that we now know to be flawed. I appreciated his setting the record straight on how many scientists known to the Western canon and Arabic-literate people alike held beliefs that we now know to be incorrect, but that this does not negate their contributions that we now know to be correct. It can be challenging to look at historical figures further back in the development of knowledge and see them with the understanding of their time, and not just with judgement far clearer in retrospect than it could possibly have been at the time.

It was also interesting to see the genesis of state-funded big science projects in the caliphate, verifying Ptolemy's astronomical observations and then extending the realm of the observed to perform new calculations. If you are a fan of librarians, you'll be cheering for the House of Wisdom, the Companions of the Verified Tables (nerdiest science posse name ever!), and the Arabic Egyptologist publishing hieroglyph-to-Arabic translation dictionaries in the ninth century. Kind of disturbing to think of all the scientific insight and knowledge that one misses by not speaking or reading the language of the discoverers; one can see why the translation phase of the texts of the time preceded the scientific and intellectual flowering. I'm grateful to all the Arabic texts that eventually got translated into English -- we have a lot of the Greek and Roman texts via this route, much like the medieval Irish monks -- but how much more might we know if we had done better and more thorough translation into English ourselves? Kinda also want to go find books on the history of Indian science and the history of Chinese science -- I know a lot of good work was done there too! The sections on the development of zero, decimals, and decimal fractions show some of this interaction of scholarship, both in the places where an idea was successfully communicated to other cultures and in the places where it had to be rediscovered in different places at different times, since it hadn't managed to make it out into the general global knowledge of scientists, insofar as such a thing existed (which was not very far). Clearly, we need a better babelfish. Scientists? Also interesting on the multicultural science-doing front, al-Khalili draws some parallels between the decline of Arabic intellectual centers and governments which exiled or persecuted their Jewish residents, particularly in Andalusian Spain. But his final theory on what caused the decline of those Arabic-literate cultural centers, which I wish he'd given more than a few pages to, was neither the encroachment of religious conservativism, the sacking of Baghdad by the Mongols, nor European colonialism. Instead, he credits the lack of adoption of the printing press, due to the difficulty of setting correct grammatical Arabic in movable type. I would have really liked to hear more about that theory, but alas, the book is short. Four rational inquiries with measurable values out of five.<\/a>

This entry was originally posted at http:\/\/ivy.dreamwidth.org\/539598.html<\/a> and has \"comment comments there. Please feel free to comment on either site; comments rock.","comments":"https:\/\/thewronghands.livejournal.com\/1495649.html?view=comments#comments","category":["politics","book reviews","history","translation","doom","economics","geology","save the everything","ecology","math","astronomy","seattle","science"]},{"guid":"https:\/\/thewronghands.livejournal.com\/1485363.html","pubDate":"Thu, 31 Mar 2016 08:48:44 GMT","title":"[Book Reviews] Notable, for good or ill","author":"thewronghands","link":"https:\/\/thewronghands.livejournal.com\/1485363.html","description":"Since I have so many books on my to-review list, this iteration is books that I felt particularly strongly about, or that I felt had some outstanding characteristic. [grin] You have been warned.

I bought Au\u00f0ur Ava \u00d3lafsd\u00f3ttir's \"Butterflies in November\"<\/a> in my local indie store off the \"Staff Picks\" shelf without reading any reviews. I came home, and the first sentence of the first review on Goodreads was \"this book is like being forced to watch amelie on a loop while bjork makes you snort pixie stix.\"<\/a> I began to wonder if I had made a terrible mistake. Fortunately or unfortunately, the book was not as whimsical as I was then expecting... the protagonist has some improbable experiences, but it never utterly transcends the possible. This is a book of unremarked-upon remarkable coincidences that everyone appears to take for granted, surprising acceptance of the world's internal weirdness by the characters, and a sense of inevitability about the whole thing that I found a little disturbing. (Despite knowing that it was not a grimdark book, I kept waiting for something far worse to happen, heh.) It's a basically happy book, black comedy or not. Character-driven more than plot driven... when it ended, I kept reading into the recipe section because that didn't have the feeling of an ending that I'd have expected despite there having been resolution of some of the plot threads. Like this review, it just kind of ends. (Three out of five torrid road trip affairs with someone you've known for two seconds.)
<\/a>
Max Gladstone's \"Three Parts Dead\"<\/a> was marvelous! Gladstone has built a complex world which slowly unfolds itself to the reader, so deftly that as I was a third of the way through or so I was worried that the joy of discovery would turn out to be unfounded. I needn't have worried -- the world is indeed rich, detailed, and internally consistent. His characters are pleasantly imperfect, determined and ambitious, decisive and strategizing, and it's all the fun of political machinations on a smaller scale. I liked both major protagonists; they were sympathetically drawn and their motivations understandable. The interweaving of religion with major changes in the world was particularly well drawn, and the differing reactions of the characters to the revelations of the second half of the book gave it verisimilitude rather than a pat \"well of course\" feeling. It came to me well reviewed<\/a> and my faith in the reviewer was entirely justified by the book. [grin] I will definitely be reading the rest of this series; what a lovely find! Five doughty necromantic lawyers out of five, and the pick of this batch.
<\/a>
I wanted to like the five-author commentary extravaganza \"Musashi's Dokkodo (The Way of Walking Alone): Half Crazy, Half Genius -- Finding Modern Meaning in the Sword Saint's Last Words\"<\/a> much more than I did, but the authors kinda lost me right from the beginning. In the introduction, they went from \"Musashi might have displayed some pathological tendencies\" to \"let's use a dictionary definition to diagnose mental health conditions of historical figures\" to \"so he was 100% most definitely a psychopath\". It's not impossible that they had a worthwhile line of inquiry there, but their conclusions were not supported sufficiently by their argument, and certainly not to the degree of assurance with which they argued them. (That reminded me of high school debate club, or most political stumping, where the object is to sway the audience with rhetoric more than to present a fact-based analysis.) Musashi wrote only 21 precepts (short sentences) in the entire book, so I felt it was misleading to have his name on the cover as the primary author in giant font... this was much more opining and commentary about Musashi than Musashi's own actual content. They should have given larger font billing to the primary editor, and then listed the five authors in smaller font on the cover. As for the main text, two of the five authors had viewpoints that I thought were interesting and valuable, a third was kinda hit or miss for me, and two of the five were missing the point consistently. The whole \"modern meaning\" of the book is, unfortunately, often without reference to the context the book came out of. (Shout-outs to the monk and the warrior for getting that part right, though!) So statements like \"I wish Musashi had used this word instead of that word\" for shades of meaning were infuriating when the source text is itself a work in translation and the translation is differently rendered by different authors. (Again, some of the authors totally got that! But some others didn't.) Basically, I wanted a lot more scholarly rigor than there was, and instead it ended up feeling more like sitting around with your friends opining on a series of writing prompts. It's fun to do, but it's less fun to read. Rory Miller liked it, but I didn't -- two brief snippets of actual Musashi out of five.
<\/a>
Another NPR-review-sourced read, I found all promised the complexity and discussions of the nuanced psychological difficulties of colonialism in Seth Dickinson's \"The Traitor Baru Cormorant\"<\/a>. I also found it much more ultimately depressing than the reviewer did, though... the plot moves on, but the ruins that empire has made in its wake are still there, and nothing is going to change that. Baru is a thoroughly well-realized protagonist, deep, subtle, and believable. I liked her, and that made it more difficult to read about the devil-and-deep-blue-sea choices she found herself confronting. Stylistically, the book shares a feature that I don't like about some mystery novels -- in an effort to show you how clever the protagonist is, she comes to conclusions that the reader is unlikely to have come to. When writing a really smart protagonist, I'm far more impressed if they can do that with information that the reader had access to but wasn't able to assemble in the same way. Here, you don't really have a chance to measure yourself against Baru because she just knows things about her world that haven't been mentioned yet to you. That's minorly disappointing. Still, overall the book is well-crafted if not a feel-good novel. Three and a half wheels-within-wheels accountants out of five.
<\/a>
I put off reading Cixin Liu's Hugo-award-winning \"The Three-Body Problem\"<\/a> far longer than I should have, believing that it would be more difficult than it was. There's some technical heft to it, but I read enough science and math that I was engaged rather than trudging. Surprising characters, enjoyable problem-solving revelations in-game -- I should have seen the nature of the system long before the character figures it out, but it was such a satisfying conclusion! That was probably my favorite part of the novel; it put me in mind of Buckminster Fuller's quote about the beauty of correct solutions. The novel's setting against the Cultural Revolution was unfamiliar enough to keep me pleasurably doing research and learning things in order to better understand it, a process that I also enjoy. I appreciated both the author's note and the translator's note at the end showing their hands in how they brought the book to us and made it comprehensible to people coming from a different history and context; transparent metadata in translation is helpful to the reader too. Four and a half realignments of the rules you thought you knew out of five.
<\/a>
<\/a>catvalente<\/b><\/a><\/span> is back! \"Radiance\"<\/a> was everything I loved about her work, and probably my favorite thing she's written since \"Palimpsest\". Her famously lush prose, full of weird analogies and Classical references, still reads like poetry. It's a book dense with allegorical weight, meta-meta-meta-self-referential in its commentary on what it is to always be before the lens as a storyteller, a truth-teller, a documentarian, a playwright, a director, an actor. A liar. A subject. A detective. It's a book of snappy dialogue and slow dances with the subconscious. I had a difficult time with the horrorlike aspects of the back half of the book, and was decidedly relieved when it went back to a noir flavor instead. (Aliens are fine. \"Aliens\" are not fine.) I am impatiently waiting for one of my film nerd friends to read it so they can tell me what I missed about the finer points of film-making, but there was plenty there for the plainly literary-minded, so even if you're not a film buff you can completely go away satisfied. Four and a half episodes of lunacy out of five.
<\/a>
Why, why, WHY do I keep trying to read books marketed as lesbian literature? I always hope that it will be good and\/or speak to my experience, and I have yet to find any that I like. (As a lady-preferring bisexual, this is super annoying. These should be my people! But they keep telling the same damn story, and it's depressing and boring all in one. Patricia Highsmith's \"The Price of Salt\/Carol\"<\/a> is that same damn story. None of the characters made much emotional sense to me... they were either distanced and detached, not very self-aware, or prone to baffling caprice. Someday I will read a lesbian story that isn't a coming-out story, one where the ladies can have their romance without a major tragedy befalling either of them and the story is about anything other than how wonderful-awful it is to be a lesbian. I wished this book were far less depressing than it was... reading about how social persecution sure can rip your nascent relationship apart is pretty realistic, but not very enjoyable. Ugh. Two and a half moments of the destruction of happiness out of five; if anyone knows a good lesbian story where nobody is coming out, leaving a terrible relationship with a man for True Love with a woman, or being persecuted\/having her life destroyed, do let me know.
<\/a>
Edwin Black's \"IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America's Most Powerful Corporation\"<\/a> is an incredibly well documented, intensively footnoted condemnation of IBM's rise as a multinational conglomerate right before World War II, and the cascading effects of their prioritization of profits. Chilling to reflect on what \"don't ask, don't tell\" can get you in the use of technology... I'm sure many of the IBM worker bees of the era were unaware of the human cost being paid by the victims of the Holocaust for their delivered efficiency, but many of the IBM employees were not only involved, not only complicit, but responsible for architecting the decisions and solutions that the Reich implemented. There can be no effective denial of that, despite the company's also-deliberate attempts to obscure its actions for the historical record. This is an important read for students of history and politics, but more so, it's an important read for people working in technological and engineering fields today. Being a good company employee isn't always the right thing to do. Hats off to the author and his research team for producing such a powerful, disturbing book; five long looks at the ethics of doing business with evil out of five.
<\/a>
Hari Kunzru's \"Transmission\"<\/a> is an absolutely brilliant first half of a book in search of a coherent ending. I howled my way through the first few chapters, having been to those meetings and talked to those people. I sent excerpts to my friends -- I particularly loved the opening of \"Guy Swift: The Mission\". Everyone's been cornered by that guy at parties. Unfortunately, the cleverness can't sustain itself past the point where the plot begins to resolve. Once our protagonist takes his decisive action that's meant to fix everything, the tight writing of the first half unravels and everyone just kind of meanders off into \"well, I guess that happened, and on with our separate and unrelated lives from here on out\". New characters are Chekhov's-rifle introduced at the very end and then nothing is done with them. People just vanish from the plot with a shrug. I had such hopes, but they were only half realized... three buzzword saturated romps through the void out of five.<\/a>

This entry was originally posted at http:\/\/ivy.dreamwidth.org\/529404.html<\/a> and has \"comment comments there. Please feel free to comment on either site; comments rock.","comments":"https:\/\/thewronghands.livejournal.com\/1485363.html?view=comments#comments","category":["law","ethics","musashi","politics","civil liberties already","physics","fantasy","war","china","literature","swords","work","hacking","book reviews","history","sci-fi","movies","iceland","martial arts","hackers","philosophy"]},{"guid":"https:\/\/thewronghands.livejournal.com\/1480182.html","pubDate":"Wed, 02 Mar 2016 21:04:27 GMT","title":"[Book Reviews] [Sociology] More on \"out there\"","author":"thewronghands","link":"https:\/\/thewronghands.livejournal.com\/1480182.html","description":"I recently finished Frozen Ed Furtaw's \"Tales From Out There: The Barkley Marathons, The World's Toughest Trail Race\"<\/a>, and near the end there was a description of a sleep-deprived ultrarunner who had an experience that I howled my way through... I suspect that many folks who have similarly pushed their limits and experienced that state of \"something is just not right here\" will find this as awful\/hilarious\/familiar as I did. Take it away, Frozen Ed, talking about New Hampshire runner Andrew Thompson tackling the fifth and last loop of the Barkley Marathons in 2005.

\"His exertion and lack of sleep for over 50 hours now were beginning to take their toll. By the time he got to the area of Son of a Bitch Ditch and the coal ponds, about a mile before the Garden Spot, he had pretty much lost his ability to make forward progress. As Andrew expressed it later, he experienced \"a profound loss of purpose\". Several days later he wrote and emailed a lengthy report on what he then experienced... Andrew's is one of the most astounding and gripping stories I have ever read about the Barkley. It is best read in Andrew's own words:

\"I crossed the ditch and looked for the ponds. Nothing. Just more trail. Back and forth I went, screaming like a lunatic in an evil nightmare. WHERE THE HELL ARE THE PONDS? The little trail that climbs the tailings, 'piled high to the outside' -- where are they? I traversed this short stretch perhaps 5 or 6 times, back and forth. Even after finding the ponds, I returned to the ditch in disbelief of the distance between. WHERE IS MIKE DOBIES' HOUSE? WHO THE FUCK MOVED MIKE DOBIES' HOUSE?! I was now losing my mind in the full definition of the phrase. The Barkley would be forgotten for minutes on end although the premise lingered. I HAD to get to the Garden Spot for... why? Was there someone there?<\/i><\/b> [snip] I looked at my watch -- 12:30. Four hours, 21 minutes for Bird Mountain and the North Boundary Trail. This was the last time that I looked at my watch. It was the last time that time contained any sort of significance. It was my last forward step toward the yellow gate, and the Barkley 100 finish.

I sat beside Book 2 for several hours. I never collected my page. I didn't know there was a page to collect. Loop 5 became a final exam that I could just make up later... I was just there, looking around. If my mother had walked up to me at that point, I would have looked at her like she was a falling leaf. After some time I walked down to the gap so I could hitch a ride with one of those cars, but they were all gone. (This is a profound concept. See, on a topo, it looks as if one could see the gap from the Garden Spot, and in the memory it seems so as well. But one could no more see into the gap from that position as they could see into the campfires back at Big Cove. BUT I COULD.) So I stood in a shin-deep puddle for about an hour -- squishing the mud in and out of my shoes. No cars.... When it cooled off, I had a long sleeve shirt. When I got hungry, I had food. When it got dark, I had a light. Wow, isn't it strange that I have all this perfect stuff just when I need it? Whenever I needed something else, PRESTO!, right in my pack. Strange!

I rounded a bend and BAM! -- Big Cove Branch. Oh, shi.... It all came flooding back in waves of sickening heartache. The Barkley. Dude, you just pissed away the Barkley 100.\"<\/i><\/b><\/a>

He gets back to the campsite all right. But wow, that is one of the best accounts I have ever read of what it's like to be inside of one of those fugues of altered mental status. I've seen a lot of them, both from the side of being a first responder\/Search and Rescue, and from the side of being someone with endocrine issues who goes on adventures. Obviously, no one ever *wants* to end up there, swearing at invisible house movers and pond relocators, forgetting what you're doing entirely. But if you go out looking for your limits, eventually you are gonna find some. And the first thing to go is your awareness that you're in that place. In my personal experience, \"everything sucks\" comes well before that, but \"everything sucks\" is a long slippery slope -- some of that is just, like, \"you're running and this is just how you feel when you're running\", but sometimes it is altered mental status and you can't always tell when you've clicked over from the normal \"everything sucks\" into problematic whoa-town. When you're doing okay and someone else mentally isn't, that's usually increasingly obvious. When you yourself are not doing okay, it's not always obvious at all. The world sucks! It's conspiring against you! WHO MOVED THE PONDS? Fuck this race anyway... ooh look a squirrel. Heh. A lot of Ellis Amdur's de-escalation stuff can be useful when dealing with someone like this, but it's harder to apply when it's you. (I am reflecting again on my \"not right\" experience of Sunday. At least I always knew where I was and what I was doing!)

What about the rest of y'all? Had any experiences like that, either as the person in it or the person who found them later? Doesn't running sound extra fun now? [grin] I did enjoy the book, though.

This entry was originally posted at http:\/\/ivy.dreamwidth.org\/523807.html<\/a> and has \"comment comments there. Please feel free to comment on either site; comments rock.","comments":"https:\/\/thewronghands.livejournal.com\/1480182.html?view=comments#comments","category":["the south","running","fianna","book reviews","wilderness medicine","no shit there i was","save the everything","sociology","emergency medicine"]},{"guid":"https:\/\/thewronghands.livejournal.com\/1473831.html","pubDate":"Fri, 29 Jan 2016 08:26:42 GMT","title":"[Book Reviews] Books at least partially about North America","author":"thewronghands","link":"https:\/\/thewronghands.livejournal.com\/1473831.html","description":"I'm glad that some of the oral traditions and stories about ravens from the Canadian First Nations are being preserved... \"Tulugaq: An Oral History of Ravens\"<\/a> is a paired collection of collected tales and photography of the raven in situ. Sometimes thought-provoking, sometimes entertaining (I lost it at \"Yukon turkeys\"), it makes me contemplate a visit which I will undoubtedly chicken out of (raven out of?) because sixty below is not a temperature I wish to experience. Still, it was nice to live vicariously. Three and a half capering corvids out of five.
<\/a>
\"Native Peoples of the Olympic Peninsula: Who We Are\"<\/a> is a really helpful and well thought out introduction to our neighbors here in Washington. I've spent some time with friends out at the Quileute reservation and wanted to learn more about the peninsular peoples and their history. This book, put out by a cooperative effort between tribal councils, leaders, and elders, is a helpful primer to people looking to learn. It includes maps of each tribe's lands and historical presence, commentary on language and orthography, introductions to common cultural practices and arts, and some usually pretty depressing history regarding treaties, resettlement, and how the reservations came to take their modern form. It's positive in focus when it is possible to be, discussing the skills and accomplishments of tribal members despite the weight of colonialist history, but it doesn't shy away from the ugly things that happened either. It just doesn't let those events define the lives of the peoples that it's celebrating. Much appreciated! Four greater understandings out of five.
<\/a>
A gift from <\/a>miss_adventure<\/b><\/a><\/a>
The best book I've read yet this year! (Granted, it's early, but I loved it.) \"Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language Among the Western Apache\"<\/a> had been on my radar for a couple years, ever since I started visiting the Southwest regularly. I've been to Navajo Country, but I knew relatively little about the western Apache before reading this book. When the book club at Ada's named this as one of their picks for this year, I was delighted to have the excuse to read it. To my pleasure and surprise, many of the world reference points the author has were things I knew about from Irish culture, so while there was a great deal of listening and learning to do, I had more of a frame of reference than I had expected, going in. The book is comprised of four essays, each both illustrating and then expounding upon the use of places as referents to well known lore among the western Apache, describing how that rootedness in landscape maps to lessons in tribal behavior and values, and showing how those references are used in context to guide and instruct living people. The author talks a good deal about how neglected the use of place and geographic referents are in ethnographic studies; I would love to see if thinking about place is similarly a touchstone to history, morality, and ancestry for other tribes. Slender but thought-provoking; most readers will go away talking less and listening more. Five cultural lessons of place out of five, and my pick of this batch.
<\/a>
\"Tales from Rugosa Coven\"<\/a> is a much homier fantasy than most of what you read -- character-driven rather than plot-driven, and the interaction with the supernatural is almost gentle at times. It's a little weird, but it's more \"magical realism\" weird than \"epic fireball-throwing magic battles\" weird. I very much liked the coven members dealing with the things normal people do throughout their lives, the interweaving of their religious celebrations in the everyday, the centering of problems that most folks can relate to... divorce, a partner with addiction issues, struggling with the stigma of mental health challenges, personality conflicts with people that you work with. I was disappointed in how some of the plot points resolved (I really felt for Ria!), but that's true to life for you. At least the author wrote skilfully enough that I didn't see it coming a thousand miles away, but also didn't feel that it was a complete \"where did that come from\" kind of solution. I did like the perspective shifts between different viewpoint characters, the way they each saw the world through their own filter, and how that colored their interactions with each other. Multi-PoV lets you understand the big picture much better! Three and a half normal people out of five.
<\/a>
I admit, I bought \"God's Middle Finger: Into the Lawless Heart of the Sierra Madre\"<\/a> completely for the title -- how could one not? Compelling reading, if a bit sensational, but why on earth did the protagonist stick around as long as he did? After the second time he thought he might die, I was kinda thinking \"not too bright, are you?\", and by the time he was doing cocaine with Mexican cops I was pretty sure that he wasn't good at this self-preservation thing. So it's a bit on the lurid side, but I was pleased to see that Grant depicts the people he meets *as* people, and not as characters in the Story Of Crazy Things He Did. (Not always a given with adventure travel books!) I learned a good deal of history about Mexican geography, economy, and history of interactions with the US, and that was valuable to me. I discovered a new Mexican author whose work I picked up based on him being quoted here several times. I found out that the author or editor of the much-beloved \"Born to Run\" must have done a LOT of editing of that story, since the Tarahumara are substantially present in the narrative here but their culture is presented in a much more complex fashion than it was in \"Born to Run\". So, a worthwhile read, but I'm still pretty astonished that the author didn't get killed by locals displeased with him blithely wandering into their territory. The ending is pretty hilariously abrupt, as indeed, he realizes that he has been stupid and That Is It, End Of Book Now, No Kind Of Reflective Conclusion, Just The End. Three and a half instances of poor judgment out of five.
<\/a>
Classic of Southern literature or not, I purely hated \"The Moviegoer\"<\/a>. The author can write beautifully, but the protagonist is loathsome, unapologetic, and that works out great for him. On the very first page, it's \"the Negro cottages\". On the tenth, it's \"too many homosexuals in the French Quarter\". Around page 80, it's how he feels as if he is Jewish because he goes to the movies alone, and clearly, if a man sees a Jew he feels such and so. (Because... there are no Jewish men?) He rhapsodizes about the bodies of his secretaries and women on the street without feeling more than the shallowest of lusts for them, which doesn't prevent him from trying to wheedle them into bed with false proclamations of love. When they start to have feelings back, he just gets a new secretary. He is neurotic and isolated and financially successful, I don't think he gives a serious thought in the entire book to the feelings of anyone else except his cousin whom he wants to marry, and I cannot scrape up sympathy for his struggles because they are entirely of his own making while he externalizes the costs of them like a cousinfucker. A skillfully written character study of a complete jerk, I went digging through the copyright page to see what year it was written, because I couldn't believe it had beaten out \"Catch-22\" for the National Book Award. Zero self-absorbed prats out of five; seriously, ugh.
<\/a>
In a word, infuriating. (Apparently this is my batch to get mad about books about New Orleans!) \"Zeitoun\"<\/a> is a warm and vivid portrayal of family life in pre-Katrina New Orleans, the story of a Syrian immigrant who came to New Orleans, built a business, and fell in love. His heroic actions in helping save his neighbors in the aftermath of the storm are well framed, and I appreciated the constant threads of connection between Zeitoun and Kathy. (In many ways, this book is more the story of their relationship than anything else.) But the sudden left turn of his causeless arrest and subsequent week in jail, remarkably free of anything resembling due process, is horrifying. I've read a lot of books about events surrounding hurricane response that were depressing or frustrating, but I think this one is in the top five for straight-up civil liberties outrage. I'm glad it won all the awards that it did; four and a half cries for justice of five.
<\/a>
A couple months ago, Mae recommended the Welcome to Night Vale podcast<\/a> to me -- she loves them. I'm still very slowly working my way through them... it turns out that I have far less time than I thought where I'm using my hands but not my mind. (You'd think athletics would be good for this, but no. Running, I need the music to keep me going. Everything else, I need to think about what I'm doing. So far, podcasts are a good match for house cleaning and, um, house cleaning.) When I heard that there was a Night Vale book<\/a>, I was enthused about that -- I'd listened to enough of the podcast to have a sense of the world already, but I read way way faster than I listen. Indeed, I knocked out the book in a week. Weird and sly, the book is a worthy addition to the podcast. I'm delighted that I listened to several of the podcast episodes before reading the book, since that gave me the singular experience of hearing the whole thing in my head in Cecil's voice. The book does contain plot spoilers for the podcast, depending on how far you've gotten, but that wasn't problematic for me -- it's just the evolution of interactions between characters, rather than \"well now I'm not going to bother to listen to anything in the middle\". Subtle bits of truth run side by side with tales of the ridiculous and unlikely, making for excellent satire that manages to continually surprise the reader. (I think the author's taken similes with a twist to an art form.) Sympathetic characters with uncomfortably familiar personality traits engage in madcap behaviours that seem to make sense to them in the world they find themselves in. In between fits of laughing and moments of recognition, the reader tries to keep up with the world's dreamlike logic. Mostly, I succeeded. Four KING CITYs out of five.
<\/a>

This entry was originally posted at http:\/\/ivy.dreamwidth.org\/517748.html<\/a> and has \"comment comments there. Please feel free to comment on either site; comments rock.","comments":"https:\/\/thewronghands.livejournal.com\/1473831.html?view=comments#comments","category":["mexico","the south","hiking","fiction","new orleans","corvids","literature","racism","linguistics","running","book reviews","history","ravens","native americans","seattle","pagan","canada"]},{"guid":"https:\/\/thewronghands.livejournal.com\/1473287.html","pubDate":"Wed, 27 Jan 2016 19:29:42 GMT","title":"[Book Reviews] Books at least partially about Europe","author":"thewronghands","link":"https:\/\/thewronghands.livejournal.com\/1473287.html","description":"Hello, Internet! Madly behind on book reviews again. This time I'm splitting by literary geography. Next up, North America.

A holiday present from my dad, David Hoffman's \"The Billion Dollar Spy: A True Story of Cold War Espionage and Betrayal\"<\/a> was a pretty readable recounting of America's running of Adolf Tolkachev in Moscow under the noses of the KGB. Tolkachev was an engineer with substantial access to documents describing the future direction of development of Russian aviation systems, and he was a walk-up volunteer to American intelligence at a time when operations in Moscow were effectively shut down. Hoffman does a good job of describing the psychological modeling concerns of the agents handling the Tolkachev case, the outcomes they tried to guide him towards, and the different tensions from within the various American governmental departments. It's full of tension and by the end, you get the sense that the spy is squeezing himself to do as much damage as possible before time runs out for him one way or another. Three and a half determined \"I'll show you all!\"s out of five.
<\/a>
Maire Brennan's \"A Natural History of Dragons\"<\/a> Our narrator is charming, and I think that's half the delight of this book. It belongs to the genre of \"set in a vaguely Victorian era, but less awful\" -- readers familiar with the historical era on which it is based may keep twitching, waiting for the narrator's gender to hold her back more than it does. Still, I prefer that -- reading a book about how a bright young scientist is totally crushed by her sexist repressive society wouldn't have been nearly as fun. I enjoyed her growing understanding of the natural world around her, and in particular her development of a social consciousness and understanding of how she wasn't doing particularly well in relating to her local allies. The spoiler at the end of the book was disheartening, though I'm still going on to read future volumes to see how our heroine fares. Three and a half dawning awarenesses that one might have behaved poorly out of five.
<\/a>
One of the creepiest books I read this year, \"In The Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin\"<\/a> is a compelling story about a disturbing time in history. The American ambassador to Hitler's Germany has a difficult job -- he's not well respected by his political peers at home, his family is unconventional, his passion lies elsewhere, and his philosophy is a poor fit for the situation he finds himself in. He's a quietly understated heroic figure for much of the book, but as one watches the rising tide of authoritarian fanaticism, cultural restructuring to support an autocratic militaristic state, and the cheering-on that's done by much of a scared populace, it seems so frustrating that there's little he could do to prevent Hitler's ascension to power. I felt particularly strongly for the Jews in exile, holding mock trials as their most effective form of diplomatic protest when they could see what was coming and it didn't stop it. Augh. Chilling reflections on some of the current trends in American politics; those who do not know history, etc. etc. Four and a half worries about historical trends out of five.
<\/a>
Much like \"In the Garden of Beasts\", Erik Larson's \"Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania\"<\/a> is as much an atmospheric piece of history as it is a story of a looming disaster and the mechanics which allowed it to come to pass. Excellent fleshed-out detail of the passengers on board the Lusitania, the captain's mind, character, and modes of decision-making, and the known and coincidental events which converged into the well-known disaster. I particularly appreciated his well-placed sourcing of historical facts, and gentle nudges towards where an interested reader might go to learn more about each particular aspect. It was emergent through the story who was likely to survive, as we have far more accounts from the survivors than we do of the people who died, but that can't really be helped. Four senses that something has gone terribly wrong out of five.
<\/a>
\"The Man Who Knew Infinity: A Life of the Genius Ramanujan\"<\/a> was a loan from <\/a>moodyduck<\/b><\/a><\/span> and an excellent recommmendation on her part. A wonderful look at the surfacing and work of one of the twentieth century's most brilliant mathematical minds; I'm astonished that I had never heard of him before being lent this book. I appreciated the author's sensitive handling of everyone's \"oh how unlikely!\" reaction to Ramanujan's origins, and the difficulty of living in a new country that he experienced in his years working in England. I came to this book for the math, but I was pleased to read a story of intellectual recognition and cooperation across cultural and communication barriers. Reading about the deprivations of the Great War and their effect on Ramanujan's health was painful to read -- what a loss of a person and a mind! But what a spectacular body of work he left anyway! I could have wished for a little more math in the book, but I'm sure there are math texts for that, heh. Four and a half unusual notations out of five, and my favorite of this batch.
<\/a>
Man, nothing kills your childhood crush on a character like reading about him when you're nearly forty and he's seven years old. Despite that, Katherine Kurtz's \"The King's Deryni\"<\/a> was an introspection-producing return to Gwynedd after many years away. It's full of backstory about characters that you hopefully already know and love... if you don't, this is going to be a dense and difficult way to make their acquaintance. The book is deep on court protocol and less so on characterization. Alaric has a childhood just angsty enough to explain his justifiable concern for daggers in his back later on, and many of the villains of later trilogies surface here briefly, but relatively little screen time is given to their development and motives. (For the first time, this book made me wonder if perpetually rebelling Meara kinda had a point or not.) Lovers of magical or feudal ritual will find a lot to like; there's plenty of that here. Three and a half pomp and circumstances out of five.
<\/a>
I expected to learn a good deal about Italian art from \"The Venus Fixers: The Remarkable Story of the Allied Soldiers Who Saved Italy's Art During World War II\"<\/a>, but I was delighted by how much I learned about Italian history and geography in passing. Thorough in its coverage of Tuscan and Florentine art history and rehabilitation, some of the particular tidbits of interest in the work show up merely in passing. (Coverage of how the homosexuality of some of the corps members was pointedly Not Discussed was particularly interesting; I hadn't given a lot of thought to their personal lives, but of course that would have been a property of the era. As if war wasn't difficult enough!) Reading this book inspired an interest in visiting Italy, though I think I'd have a lot more reading to do before I went. From the Nazis to the Borgias, architecture to archaeology, there's a lot to be learned in a short and chaotic time. I have already loaned it to an art-loving friend, two minutes after I finished. Three and a half salvaged masterpieces out of five.
<\/a>
It's difficult to assign a number of stars rating to 500 pages of mythical brain spaghetti, so reviewing \"Celtic Queen Maeve and Addiction: An Archetypal Perspective\"<\/a> is necessarily nonlinear, heh. I'm not terribly familiar with Jungian analysis, so I was kind of picking up the relevant parts of what it means to be a therapist in that context as I went. I am pretty familiar with Maeve and the various legends surrounding her, and I appreciated the many places where the author prods my understanding of the mythology by looking at it from an unexpected angle. So, I came for the Celts and stayed for the addiction therapy advice. If only I remembered my dreams, I'd be interested to see whether the book's contents percolated through, heh. But I learned a good bit about the Jungian engagement with the founder of the 12 step program, and how the program approaches addiction from a religious perspective, and that was valuable. Marching giant ants next to your tiny holy boat out of five.<\/a>

This entry was originally posted at http:\/\/ivy.dreamwidth.org\/517155.html<\/a> and has \"comment comments there. Please feel free to comment on either site; comments rock.","comments":"https:\/\/thewronghands.livejournal.com\/1473287.html?view=comments#comments","category":["germany","fantasy","celtic paganism","fiction","war","spies","ireland","europe","boats","book reviews","history","art","france","math","philosophy","psychology"]},{"guid":"https:\/\/thewronghands.livejournal.com\/1464527.html","pubDate":"Sat, 28 Nov 2015 09:44:06 GMT","title":"[Book Reviews] Nonfiction post: heroic, depressing, depressing, depressing, bicycles!","author":"thewronghands","link":"https:\/\/thewronghands.livejournal.com\/1464527.html","description":"First, a little book tourism: I have new travel ambitions. Portugal<\/a>. Buenos Aires<\/a>. And Los Angeles<\/a>. I've been talking with my friends about where we've gone to ebooks and where we haven't, the loss of the social aspect of reading (I hate it when I go to the Silent Reading Party and I can't tell what anyone else is reading because they have an ereader, how can I possibly beam at them over their choice of book if I don't know what it is? Other friends of mine are horrified at my librarical nosiness.), loaning and sharing books across formats, and indie bookstores in the age of Amazon. I flirted with the idea of trying to exclusively shop at indie bookstores for physical books, but I know the instant I say I'm doing that I will find myself marooned in an airport with only a broken ereader and the in-flight seat insert from Southwest to read, and I'll crack and buy something pulpy from a Hudson News, heh.

I purely loved Tom Reiss's \"The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo\"<\/a>. The historical perspective on where much of the swashbuckle in Alexandre Dumas's swashbuckling tales came from captivates the reader. I've been reading a lot of New Orleans history recently, and this fit right in with that, providing the French and Parisian side of the treatment of people of color during the tumultuous era of the French Revolution and on into the Napoleonic wars. The meteoric rise and frustrating fall of General Dumas makes for the kind of tale you'd expect in an opera, all the more riveting for having really happened. Its influence on French literature was a surprise to me, and I'm glad the tale was finally shared. Thorough research (I particularly liked the coverage of the editing of the French memorials to their hero and what that said about French politics of the time), wonderful subject, history for adults about a beloved childhood antihero. Now I'm going to go back and read \"The Count of Monte Cristo\"; I wonder if there's an interlinear French ebook. Five heartstopping heroes out of five, and right out of the gate my favorite of this batch.
<\/a>
\"The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less\"<\/a> contains many helpful nuggets of insight. It references studies that allow us to guide our own behaviour in ways that are likely to increase our happiness. It's also deeply creepy -- not the author's fault, but the implications of the studies fly in the face of a lot of American free-choice culture, and that's a hard pill to swallow. I already do a good number of the things the author suggests -- in most realms, I'm a satisficer (someone who optimizes for \"good enough\", however you define that) more than a maximizer (must be certain to have the absolute very best thing, and to know that it *is* the best one), and apparently I'm much happier thereby. (I understand a perpetual maximizer friend of mine way better as a result of having read this! That seems so incredibly stressful!) I've definitely used similar techniques to simplify my life, but the idea that we ought to have a more guided, structured, and authoritarian society for our own happiness is pretty chilling. It's kind of a social-structure conservative book that way, intentionally or not. But the author's correct that one can end up with cognitive fatigue from trying to make the best choice possible about everything all of the time, particularly when one isn't an expert in that thing. Learning about every available option is resource-intensive and high-labor, and doing that for every field is effectively a denial of service attack to memory and cope. My takeaway there was more \"hm, so options should be presented when possible with a few curated ones that experts in the field would recommend, and then a roll-your-own style version if that doesn't suffice\". But there, implementation devils are in the details. Lots of good stuff to chew on, but oh man I want to argue with it even while doing most of the things it says are good already. Three and a half arguments in my head with the author out of five, heh.
<\/a>
A gift from my Dad, \"Louisiana Rambles: Exploring America's Cajun and Creole Heartland\"<\/a> has given me scads of ideas for places in Louisiana to explore beyond New Orleans. Initially I was a little unthrilled that the author was himself not from the area, but on reflection I think it's a differently valuable book to have travel tips from someone discovering everything for the first time. A local would know more about each site, but a fellow tourist is likely to be more like the intended audience. The author's love for his adopted state shines through, though, and he's got a funny and disarming way of describing his outings that engages the reader and makes them want to ride along. Only downside: after reading his pages of mouthwatering description, you'll probably end up hungry. If you're going to Louisiana, there are far worse problems to have. Three and a half riverboat roars out of five.
<\/a>
\"Hurricane Katrina: The Mississippi Story\"<\/a> is a thorough discussion of the Mississippi Gulf Coast counties and the aftereffects of Hurricane Katrina on them, and therefore a fairly depressing read. It speaks well of the spirit of the people determined to get through such a natural disaster, and it's well worth reading for anyone interested in disaster recovery or emergency management. However, it's not really up for debate that FEMA did a terrible job in managing the response or allocating the funds for recovery afterwards, and watching that slowly and frustratingly play out in the lives of the citizens of the coast is super frustrating. The author did a great job in interviewing people who lived through the experience, and in citing the stats and studies available, so I think he had excellent access to data and wrote a much-needed book that will be historically useful in our review of past recovery efforts and adaptations of future policy. Still, read this and then go cuddle a puppy or something -- it's a really rough go of it when it's your hometown they're discussing and you know every broken stick of it. Four \"heck of a job, Brownie\"s out of five.
<\/a>
It just keeps sounding more and more cheerful, doesn't it? [rueful grin] Now y'all see why it's been so long since I posted book reviews. I have easily ten more super depressing sounding books in my stack, too. (Dad sent me a big box of history, and he mostly reads history about terrible things that have happened. I have to alternate it with happy books about magic ponies and people who help others to get through it.) The cover of \"The Hitler Kiss\"<\/a> is terrible for reading in public, too... the \"A Memoir of the Czech Resistance\" is in tiny font, and not present at all on the spine, so if you're a super pale person reading this book in public people think you're into Nazi slashfic and avoid sitting next to you on the train. :\/ *This* is the case for ebooks; I nearly put a \"I AM READING ABOUT THE GOOD SIDE\" post-it on the spine. I picked this up because I liked the compiler's previous book, \"Intimate Enemies\" about the Baroness de Pontalba and her contributions to New Orleans architecture. \"The Hitler Kiss\" is a very different book, a transcribed and cleaned up first person account of an older man's memories of his youthful engagement with the Czech Resistance. The authorial voice is thin in places... the compiler had to piece it together from a series of interviews, so it doesn't have an even flow. Nevertheless, the occasional rambling lends it veracity, and I learned quite a bit about what happened in Czechoslovakia during World War II. No one reads a book that's basically \"Nazis vs. Red Army, fight!\" expecting a good time, but it was still difficult in places to read about the optimism of the Czechs who thought that the Russians were going to save them rather than occupy them. The author's relationship with his parents, and in particular with his famous father, is centered in the story. Other than reading about what was and wasn't successful in the author's vast experience of Anne-Frank-like methods of hiding people from the Gestapo, the father-son story was my favorite part of this book. It's not a happy story, but it's an important one, and I particularly appreciated the closure brought by the \"what happened after\" in the history of the Czech people and the author's life individually at the end. Three and a half \"oh no, I'm so sorry!\"s out of five.
<\/a>
\"American Sniper: The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in U.S. Military History\"<\/a> is difficult to read if you don't agree with the author's unapologetic pride in his war record. I read it as a gift from my Navy-affiliated dad, but Dad and I are not always in agreement on foreign policy. The introduction gives you a fair sampling of what the second half of the book is about. I had problems right away with chronically referring to Iraqis as \"savages\", but the author doesn't. My ethical world is pretty shades-of-grey, he describes his as black and white. He's inarguably a total badass who loves his country and did his best in its service, but my political disagreements with the people who sent him there overwhelm that; it's kinda like 'wow, you were super effective at great risk to yourself at doing that thing I don't think we should have been doing at all, and you're pretty proud of how many people you killed'. We're just not going to agree. Three difficulties out of five.
<\/a>
I pre-ordered \"Urban Cycling: How to Get to Work, Save Money, and Use Your Bike for City Living\"<\/a> after meeting the author at one of Seattle's women bicyclist \"Critical Lass\" rides; I was impressed with her knowledge, friendliness, and intentions to make urban bicycling accessible to all kinds of people, and I wanted to support that. Her ethos really shines through in the book, and I'm very glad I ordered it. It's the book I wish I had had when I started being primarily bike-centric rather than car-centric in Seattle. If you're a super experienced urban rider you may find it a bit basic, but even with two years of year-round experience under my belt I still learned a lot and found many useful references to Google later. The section on repairs was particularly nice to have all spelled out, but I was surprised that my second favorite part were the profiles of different riders in different cities around the US. I've just begun to contemplate taking my bike with me when I travel, so it was neat to see how folks handle their different regional weather and terrain challenges, and gave me ideas for how I might do the same. Four and a half cheerful little bells out of five.<\/a>

This entry was originally posted at http:\/\/ivy.dreamwidth.org\/508297.html<\/a> and has \"comment comments there. Please feel free to comment on either site; comments rock.","comments":"https:\/\/thewronghands.livejournal.com\/1464527.html?view=comments#comments","category":["foreign policy","the south","history","engineering","war","biking","france","emergency response","disaster preparedness","sociology","reading","seattle","science","travel"]},{"guid":"https:\/\/thewronghands.livejournal.com\/1464059.html","pubDate":"Fri, 27 Nov 2015 08:06:53 GMT","title":"[Book Reviews] Fiction post: starships and unlikely friendships","author":"thewronghands","link":"https:\/\/thewronghands.livejournal.com\/1464059.html","description":"Mae is a Zelazny fan, and has been slowly exposing me to non-Amber works. I read \"A Night in the Lonesome October\"<\/a> slowly over the course of the month of October at her recommendation. It's written in diary format, one entry a day, so it lends itself to that method of reading, and that really informed my experience of the book. You can tell that you've gotten sucked in to the narrative when you get a short day's entry and are so frustrated because nothing much happened and you want to know more! Heh. While I'm not a horror fan, I've read enough of the genre to get at least most of the references. (I think. Unknown unknowns!) I did appreciate the slow building of the plot, the carefully dropped revelations, and the way that the metastructure of the book echoed the internal plot developments of the great game. That's deft craftsmanship there. Scruff was a personable canine narrator, and his crosswise friendships made for a nice note of suspense without ever getting grimdark. I'd read this book to my niece around Halloween next year; four and a half carefully laid plots out of five.
<\/a>
After October, she next lent me \"Lord of Light\"<\/a>, an entirely different flavor of great fun. The space overlay of the mythical story wasn't too heavy-handed; it still retained the rogueish flavor of our scoundrel-saint protagonist rather than a deep delve into how the science of the world worked. I can't even imagine how much research Zelazny had to do on Hinduism and Buddhism both to write it; I have a nontrivial background there and I still did a lot of Googling. The tone of a lot of his Buddha lectures was pretty good; Zen-ish without being overly preachy, and it served the character's purposes well while also being true to the Sam he'd drawn. Four liars and role hoppers out of five; the novel deserves the Hugo it won.
<\/a>
Exactly the opposite tone rules in \"The Martian\"<\/a>... this is 85% a deep delve into the science of how the world works. I thought it great fun... I am one of those people who wished all of Apollo 13 was the engineering scene, and it delivers on that. I'm not space enthusiast enough to comment on the veracity of the Mars mission planning behind it, but I enjoyed reading and Googling to figure out some of the systems that were new to me. Watney is astonishingly upbeat for someone in his fictitious position; I think his morbid sense of humor was my favorite part of the book. There are some moments where I wish things were a little less sexist (choice of imprecations, etc.), but I wish that about the actual world a good bit, so it was disappointing but not enough to wreck the squee for me. I saw the movie before I read the book and wish I'd done it the other way around; I appreciated the better ending of the novel and it seemed less suspension-of-disbelief stretching. Four cheerful brushes with death out of five.
<\/a>
I found \"Stung\"<\/a> through Book View Cafe and had it on my to-eyeball list for months before I actually picked it up. It's a mystery whose main joy is that of its detective-protagonist, an unlikely television psychic. The grandmotherly mystery-solver isn't a new figure for the genre, but \"Stung\" defies expectations there, pairing determined grandmother Darnda with her slightly rebellious granddaughter-apprentice. The generational dynamics in here really worked for me, and I appreciated that Darnda's ethical positions seemed mature and well thought out, but she was still willing to consider and revise them as she found herself in new situations that demanded that she make hard choices. Strong characterization, gentle wisdom, unfortunately believable dysfunctional family interactions, and several older-and-wiser characters whose voices I appreciated... Annabelle was particularly excellent. Four and a half wandering bees out of five; I will look for more from this author.
<\/a>
Also on my to-read list for quite some time before I got around to reading it was Francesca Forrest's \"Pen Pal\"<\/a>. Magical demirealism at its finest, this story is a delight to the animistically inclined. Having grown up on the Gulf Coast, I have a particular wistfulness towards Mermaid's Hands... I would have loved for there to be such a place near my coast. (So much more magical than what we did have! But I still appreciated the nod to local traditions that were there.) As a child, I too tried the message-in-a-bottle thing, and I did get a reply, but with less spectacular results. But I think my favorite thing about this story was the connection between both protagonists. It's a story about the dawning of political consciousness and the nuances that can come about through people who just wanted to live their lives having to learn more about how the larger world sees them and wants to interact with them, but though those threads are there, the aspect of the story that presented itself most to me was about how our desire for connection can be transformative. Five outflung hopes out of five, and my favorite of this batch.
<\/a>
First in Jim Butcher's new fantasy series, \"The Aeronaut's Windlass\"<\/a> is not as good as the Dresden Files but is far, far better than his Codex Alera series. It has the potential to become as good as the Dresden Files, though... give his characters some time to develop and have transformative experiences, heh. His new fantasy world is well crafted and has lots of details which can be built on in future volumes. There's no shortage of action, the sky battle scenes are grippingly described if you're an Age of Sail person (despite my initial skepticism about steampunkish sky ships, the three-dimensional dogfighting sold it for me), and there are several characters I liked well enough to root for. I'm impatient for more of the series to come out now, heh. Three and a half solid captains with honor out of five.<\/a>

This entry was originally posted at http:\/\/ivy.dreamwidth.org\/507691.html<\/a> and has \"comment comments there. Please feel free to comment on either site; comments rock.","comments":"https:\/\/thewronghands.livejournal.com\/1464059.html?view=comments#comments","category":["the south","mysteries","book reviews","hinduism","doom","fantasy","fiction","writing","space","sci-fi","religion","buddhism","reading","science"]},{"guid":"https:\/\/thewronghands.livejournal.com\/1453582.html","pubDate":"Wed, 30 Sep 2015 18:29:04 GMT","title":"[Book Reviews] Three nonfiction, one fiction","author":"thewronghands","link":"https:\/\/thewronghands.livejournal.com\/1453582.html","description":"Books (that I felt like reviewing) of September!

<\/a>miss_adventure<\/b><\/a><\/a>
I delighted in the inimitable Dr. Barry Cunliffe's \"The Extraordinary Voyage of Pytheas the Greek\"<\/a>, though. In chronicling the times and setting of Pytheas's journey, there's lots of context even for Classical scholars of the worldview and knowledge of the Greeks of Pytheas's time. Prior to reading this book, I'd forgotten that the Mediterranean coast of what is now France was then Greek colony cities, for example... Pytheas starts from his Greek hometown of Massalia, now Marseille. Cunliffe doesn't stop there, though -- the meat of the book is discussing a similar framing for the cultures Pytheas would most probably have met along the way (probably over the neck of the Iberian peninsula to Brittany, then Britain, Iceland, and Denmark by sea), and the contributions those intersections of experience and knowledge made to our early understandings of geography and natural history. While it's less than refreshing to have examples of academic backbiting going back thousands of years, I found the search for the unknown sources of known import products (tin and amber) to be absorbing. Dr. Cunliffe does a good job of explaining the likely divergent possibilities for travel routes between points on Pytheas's journey, and is clear about what is speculation and what has evidence on its side. An excellent read about a fascinating explorer of his time; five bold voyages out of five.
<\/a>
The only fiction book of this set, Gail Tsukiyama's \"The Samurai's Garden\"<\/a> is a gentle read with slow character development. Tsukiyama does an excellent job of carefully suggesting the maturing of kindness between a Chinese artist recovering his health, the caretaker of his father's vacation home, and a woman whose beauty of spirit brings them all together. This is a book about the surprising fulfillment found in cultivation, not through the \"hard work brings rewards\" ethos as it's usually framed, but \"helping others makes you happier and wiser\". Set against the distant tides of a faraway war that affects all the protagonists, the book uses that as a foil to suggest a different way of interaction than man's inhumanity to man. Given all the difficulties in the world, it was nice to read a book about people whose countries were at war with each other getting along and not treating each other as the enemy. Four and a half slowly deepening understandings of five.
<\/a>
My favorite of this set, \"Ireland, a Bicycle, and a Tin Whistle\"<\/a> is full of sheerest delight and wicked wit. I chortled my way through this Irish-Canadian's bicycle circumnavigation of Ireland, from the John Denver-loving motorcycle gangs of Carrick-a-Rede to the miserable weather of the west coast to the 1\/4 of the trip merely labeled \"alcoholic haze\" with no further details given. The political\/cultural commentary is in places a product of its time, but captures the larger historic patterns that cycle around and play out. The more you know about traditional Irish music, the funnier this book is; I will absolutely be recommending it to several of my relatives. Bicycle fans won't find a whole lot about bicycling in here... while there are plenty of references to the perilousness of cycling along Irish roads while giant tour buses roar merrily by, and some, er, choice phrasing describing some of the hill climbs. But if there's a hobby the book is skewed towards, it's music. A sample:

Then they came in -- three lads, hard as nails, arms tattooed with UVF, GOD AND ULSTER, and MOTHER, fingers with LOVE and HATE, faces scarred with Saturday night fights. As they sat down with their half 'uns and their wee nips, one of them turned to me and said in a slow, staccato monotone, \"Play us something we can all sing along to.\" It was one of the most menacing requests I had ever heard.<\/i><\/b> [snip] I moved quickly into a finger-style instrumental version of \"God Bless the Child\" which I'd cribbed from a record a few months earlier; it was technically difficult, but had a gentle jazz-blues feel guaranteed to soothe the soul of a psycho-killer -- or so I thought. Halfway through the second verse, one of them stood up. He did not look soothed. He walked over and curled his fingers -- H - A - T - E -- over the fretboard, deadening the strings. He leant over me, looked me in the eye, and said very softly and very slowly: \"You've shown us that you can play the fuckin' guitar, Davy. Now play a John Denver song.\"<\/i><\/b>

Reader, I was on the floor. From the alleged Belfast bullshit of \"every year at midnight we ride our motorcycles over the bridge at Carrick-a-Rede\" to the undocumented backwards rotation of part of his trip (allegedly he's going counterclockwise around Ireland, but he starts one chapter at the Giant's Causeway and bicycles backwards around the route that Mayhem and I hiked, ending up back at Dunseverick and Ballintoy... that's clockwise, and he never mentions it, heh), this book is a gem. Five meanderings out of five, and my favorite of this batch.<\/a>

This entry was originally posted at http:\/\/ivy.dreamwidth.org\/497580.html<\/a> and has \"comment comments there. Please feel free to comment on either site; comments rock.","comments":"https:\/\/thewronghands.livejournal.com\/1453582.html?view=comments#comments","category":["music","book reviews","history","fiction","ireland","biking","japan","france","motorcycles","china","iceland","philosophy","classics","travel"]},{"guid":"https:\/\/thewronghands.livejournal.com\/1447838.html","pubDate":"Thu, 03 Sep 2015 22:10:32 GMT","title":"[Book Reviews] [Sociology] Ignorance of background stories, China, Japan, and fiction","author":"thewronghands","link":"https:\/\/thewronghands.livejournal.com\/1447838.html","description":"Hello, Internet! After <\/a>tithenai<\/b><\/a><\/span>'s glowing review<\/a> some months back, I put Ken Liu's \"The Grace of Kings\"<\/a> on my to-read list. I recently finished, and said on Goodreads:

This was a good book that came so close to being a great book. Truly excellent world-building, well realized characters who develop and change, compelling moral dilemmas with clear paths only sometimes available. I loved the first 40% of the book unconditionally, and there was still much to love in the following 60% -- thoughtful, robust female characters, political machinations, two supporting characters who almost separately Rosencrantz and Guildenstern the entire thing. Since this is the first installation of a series, I'm still holding out some hope for a more satisfying arc further down the line.

The thing I didn't like: there's a turn in the development arc of one character where they take a path that I think they're smarter than. It's a big, epic, tragic-heroic flaw, but the character's development up until that point seemed to indicate more insight and maturity than that, so it was a disappointing \"and now doom happens, for a preventable and foolish reason\" development. History's full of that, sure, but it didn't seem consistent with my read of that character.

Four stars, and hope for the future. I'll try the author's Hugo-winning translation next!<\/i><\/b>

Welp... it turns out that apparently it's based on history and that guy really did do that thing<\/a>. Hahaha, whoops.

\"In The Grace of Kings, Ken Liu\u2019s telling a version of the fall of the Qin dynasty, and the Chu-Han contention, in an alt-Hawaii-ish setting with gods and zeppelins and it\u2019s totally great. But more to the point (for this essay, anyway), he\u2019s using storytelling tricks which remind me a great deal of Ming Dynasty classics like Romance of the Three Kingdoms, and it\u2019s these techniques as much as (or even more than!) the setting that make the book feel so fun and deep at once.\"<\/i><\/b>

But not being already familiar with the Chu-Han contention, I thought it a disappointing gap in characterization only so dispiriting because the rest of the book is so great. Ahahahafacepalmhideunderthetable. Stranger than fiction. But one of the reasons I liked \"The Grace of Kings\" so much was that it spoke to a narrative I didn't already know and hadn't seen already done to death. Hooray, larger world. (I would love to see what those of you who know more about Chinese history and classical literature than I do think of it.) The author also has a collection of book-relevant links<\/a> on his blog, including another perspective on foundational stories<\/a>. Worth checking out!

In the course of finding out the above, and discussing it with <\/a>ilcylic<\/b><\/a><\/span>, I said:

Raven: Oh man. He has a free short story up and it's brutal<\/a>. Unit 731.
<\/a>ilcylic<\/b><\/a><\/span>: Whee.
Raven: Yeah. It's brilliant, though, even if its conceit is very unlikely. Fantastic depth of characterization and multiple perspectives. In case you feel like reading really thoughtful sci-fi about war crimes and justice, heh. (And what is history, and who controls it.)
<\/a>ilcylic<\/b><\/a><\/span>: Well, the opening is interesting.
Raven: It's worth it all the way through, but man. Oof.
<\/a>ilcylic<\/b><\/a><\/span>: Indeed. I can't imagine sight-seeing such a thing. Even for historical purposes.
Raven: Yeah. I think they'd need, like, shock historians.

So I kinda want to go read the relevant source material for \"The Grace of Kings\" and then go back and see how that changes my perspective on the work. I might have to amend my review appropriately, though I think there's value in the reactions of both the unfamiliar and the educated reader, so I'll probably leave the original text and then just add to it. Besides, by the time I get around to that, the second book might be out, heh. In the meantime, on to \"Three Body Problem\"!

This entry was originally posted at http:\/\/ivy.dreamwidth.org\/492014.html<\/a> and has \"comment comments there. Please feel free to comment on either site; comments rock.","comments":"https:\/\/thewronghands.livejournal.com\/1447838.html?view=comments#comments","category":["book reviews","history","fantasy","war","japan","sociology","china","plotting"]},{"guid":"https:\/\/thewronghands.livejournal.com\/1445632.html","pubDate":"Mon, 24 Aug 2015 17:14:20 GMT","title":"[Book Reviews] \"Intimate Enemies: The Two Worlds of Baroness de Pontalba\"","author":"thewronghands","link":"https:\/\/thewronghands.livejournal.com\/1445632.html","description":"Hello, Internet! I have recently been thoroughly delighted by one of my finds from the Garden District Book Shop, \"Intimate Enemies: The Two Worlds of Baroness de Pontalba\"<\/a>. This book was *magnificent*. The author's site<\/a> does a pretty good job of summarizing it, as well as giving you a guide to her authorial style. Up-front disclaimers: the events depicted in the book are horrible in parts -- attempted murder, children that died in infancy (they don't get a lot of coverage, but pretty much any factual book about that time period that focuses on family life and law is going to have some... the titular Baroness has five children in her marriage, three of whom make it), widespread societal sexism and denial of a woman's right to self-determination, theft of fortunes. But the book's treatment of some of those difficult topics is one of its great strengths -- the author brings to life the contrasts between the assumptions of most nineteenth-century mindsets versus our own modern assumptions, and that allows the reader to broaden their experience of the book. She's also helpful in pointing out how things that horrify us would have been \"meh\" to most people of the time and vice versa (privacy! it worked differently!), due to those worldview deltas. I particularly liked her explanation of the family-centric asset managements vs. individual control of money in the French courts. (Like, law court, not waiting-on-the-king Empire court, though it was often the nobility of the Emperor's court who went to the law court to argue about money and property.)

Dr. Vella provides a thorough background of New Orleans further back than I had read in detail, which finally made clear to me the intersections and cultural tensions between the French New Orleans government to the Spanish-Creole government back to France and then finally Louisiana Purchased into America. Aha! One side of the heroine's family (her family by blood) were Spanish nobility, the other (her family by marriage) French nobility, and she goes back and forth in the book between New Orleans and France, investing heavily in real estate and inheriting property in both. It's the best book I've read on the changing economics of the aristocracies of the time, and how that shaped the city. Literally -- the heroine's New Orleans holdings included the buildings around what is now Jackson Square. She was the architect. It's a deep look at property rights, the rights of women, the differences in marital law between France and Louisiana, urban planning, charitable giving, and a complicated love-hate relationship that defied both families in turn and inspired an opera. I'm loving it. I'm seeking out everything else the author has written -- apparently she's got a book on George Washington Carver coming out this year<\/a> that I'm totally going to read. I love her authorial voice -- she gives you what's known of the facts, and describes how she got this data, but she doesn't hesitate to pass judgment when that's appropriate, and her sly wit is *hilarious*. Five soaring transatlantic iron arches out of five.

This entry was originally posted at http:\/\/ivy.dreamwidth.org\/489826.html<\/a> and has \"comment comments there. Please feel free to comment on either site; comments rock.","comments":"https:\/\/thewronghands.livejournal.com\/1445632.html?view=comments#comments","category":["europe","book reviews","new orleans","history","feminism","architecture"]},{"guid":"https:\/\/thewronghands.livejournal.com\/1425304.html","pubDate":"Wed, 20 May 2015 00:21:23 GMT","title":"[Book Reviews] Things that were not as they seemed","author":"thewronghands","link":"https:\/\/thewronghands.livejournal.com\/1425304.html","description":"It's not often you get to read a biography by a person who found the subject's body, but \"The Last Man on the Mountain: The Death of an American Adventurer on K2\"<\/a> is exactly that. While more than a little morbid, it does give the author particular insight into the life of her subject, early American mountaineer Dudley Wolfe. This highly sympathetic portrayal is an easy read, challenging much of the previous collected statements about the American 1939 K2 expedition and how things fell apart there. I was surprised at how much it had in common with stories of Himalayan expeditions gone south fifty years later; the problems discussed were more medical and teamwork issues than equipment failure or poor luck with the weather. While the effects of high altitude are what they are (and were little known at the time, as expeditioners were expected to \"power through\" altitude sickness and frostbite), the teamwork and leadership failures of the expedition are really stark, leading to the deaths of four members, including Dudley Wolfe. Sobering. Four failures of leadership out of five.
<\/a>
I loved Chitra Bannerjee Divakaruni's \"The Palace of Illusions\"<\/a>! I'd previously enjoyed her \"Mistress of Spices\", and this lyrical dive into mythological retellings was even better. Divakaruni does a brilliant job of writing flawed but sympathetic characters who leap off the page; her Panchaali is determined if not always wise, impassioned and searching for understanding in a way that's easy to relate to. Modern readers will probably empathize with her chafing at the restricted boundaries of her world, and with her later defiant choices to have a life more to her liking in the ways she found open to her. Krishna was one of my favorite other characters, but he's hard not to love. I also felt a lot of sympathy for Bheem the kind-hearted. Excellent worldbuilding, including relevant concepts from the source mythos without \"as you know, Dave\" overexplaining to the reader, and an ending that felt mostly satisfying while still being properly a little irritating. Recommended to fans of Greek theater, epic fantasy, alternate history, Indian literature, and lush prose. Five fire-born heroines out of five, and the pick of this batch.
<\/a>
Conversely, I really *wanted* to like Lynn Coady's \"Hellgoing\"<\/a>. Having read a previous short story of hers, I had high hopes for this volume, particularly since it was so award-winning. Unfortunately, I hated it. It's a series of small dioramas of despairing people who don't understand the world or each other, with no resolution. Coady has some marvelous turns of phrase, but the outstanding trait of her characterization is that everyone is hopeless, unsympathetic, petty, and lost. They move, but they don't end up anywhere. That's just not a world I want to read about. Two Godot-waiters out of five.
<\/a>
I was initially really intrigued by Baron-Cohen's The Science of Evil: On Empathy and the Origins of Cruelty\"<\/a> (it was last month's selection for my cognitive science book club), and I've read a bunch of neurology, but sadly this one really fell short of my hopes for it. I've read the studies that it references tying borderline to early childhood abuse, but I think he's just wrong in his attempts to construct a similar narrative for psychopathy. (I'm not a professional neuroscientist, but my layperson's reading of the literature doesn't seem to support his construction there.) And his overarching thesis just kind of fell apart at that point for me. I'm not sure you're going to get a deep treatment of the autism spectrum as sort of a couple chapters side note in a book on empathy, but I felt he really didn't do justice to the connection he was attempting to make there. I do agree that there's interesting findings in how ordinary people bring themselves to dehumanize others and be terrible, and that genetics and environment both have roles, but that's such a set of bland statements that nearly everyone is going to agree with that. Zimbardo's \"The Lucifer Effect\" was more thorough, if more disturbing. Two big skims out of five.
<\/a>
\"Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade\"<\/a> was a difficult read at times, but I'm glad I read it. (Isn't that one definition of a classic?) The book ties together a whole lot of history, starting in 1909 and ending in 1993. Steward's life spans growing up in rural America in the twenties to the Parisian literary scene of the thirties, his mentorship by Gertrude Stein and his friendship with Alice B. Toklas, the changing sense of what it was to be a gay man as America entered McCarthyism and conflated homosexuality with Communism, his extraordinarily systematic cataloguing of every sexual encounter in his long life, the great insight that that provided the Kinsey Institute, his drift and then severance from his teaching career into his tattooing career, and his interactions with many people who formed the basis of alternate communities still around today. International Mr. Leather. The Janus Society. The Hell's Angels during their most notorious era. Gay policemen organizations in San Francisco. The author must have done a monumental amount of work to recover the source files from Steward's estate, and to tell his story accurately, and my hat is certainly off to him for that epic job well done. There's a lot of history that I learned or added to my knowledge of by reading this book, and for that I'd recommend it to most people. But some of the sections about Steward's demiconsensual masochism are likely to be challenging for readers who don't share that wiring, so I wouldn't recommend it to my conservative relatives who would be horrified by those sections. Overall, it's a solid contribution to histories of the twentieth century and the experience of gay men of the time; four difficult questions out of five.<\/a>

This entry was originally posted at http:\/\/ivy.dreamwidth.org\/469669.html<\/a> and has \"comment comments there. Please feel free to comment on either site; comments rock.","comments":"https:\/\/thewronghands.livejournal.com\/1425304.html?view=comments#comments","category":["hiking","mythology","book reviews","history","neurology","save the everything","india","science","psychology","canada"]},{"guid":"https:\/\/thewronghands.livejournal.com\/1416017.html","pubDate":"Thu, 02 Apr 2015 17:25:36 GMT","title":"[Book Reviews] Books that may or may not be in sets","author":"thewronghands","link":"https:\/\/thewronghands.livejournal.com\/1416017.html","description":"\"Sleights of Mind: What the Neuroscience of Magic Reveals about Our Everyday Deceptions\"<\/a> really did live up to its description -- despite being familiar with the majority of the studies it references, I hadn't thought to apply their lessons to sleight of hand the way that the authors did. That's got some creepy implications for society and our susceptibility to fraudsters looking to either be better pickpockets, better confidence men, or better fake supernatural phenomena pushers. I remember some of the cited phenomena from the press during my childhood, and I think it does a service to people who don't want to be taken in by offering the option to understand our own minds better and how some of these things work. The authors do an excellent job of tagging the spoiler content so that people who don't want to be told how the magic tricks work can avoid them being ruined, and while I don't know why anyone who felt that way would read a book essentially about the mechanisms there, still I think it's a kindness to their audience. Innovative application of extant studies to an unexamined area of applied neuroscience; five eye-catching hand gestures out of five.
<\/a>
I've enjoyed most of Brandon Sanderson's work, but I have to admit that \"Steelheart\"<\/a> and its sequel \"Firefight\"<\/a> just didn't do it for me. The world was interesting at first, and I'm a softie for the superhero genre, and I even kinda liked our goofy, bad-simile hero, as Marty Stu for teenage boys as he is. But the inner struggles of the Epics trying to be good just seemed contrived and creepy to me... I didn't like the conceit that power inevitably corrupts. And when the Big Reveal came, I was aggravated enough by what it was to not really be that vested in the world any more. It's a pity; I thought the story had potential and I just didn't like where he took it. Two and a half flying fireballs out of five.
<\/a>
I enjoyed Older's work on \"Long Hidden\"<\/a>, so when I saw that he'd written a novel, I had to give that a shot too. \"Half-Resurrection Blues\"<\/a> boldly starts with a quotation from one of my all-time favorite books, \"Borderlands\/La Frontera\"<\/a>. Ghosts aren't my favorite fantasy topic, but Older's alt-Brooklyn makes it worth reading a ghost story. He's got a very strong sense of place, so New Yorkers will probably find this a particular delight. His cast of characters is vivid, diverse, and occasionally hilarious, with a protagonist who reliably cracked me up with sympathy. I can't talk about the ending without being spoilery, but I am pleased that he didn't take the convenient reconciliation way out. (Also, more Dr. Tijou!) His prose is a hardboiled kind of lyrical; I will read further books in this series as they come out. Four spirits of place out of five.
<\/a>
Another Powell's acquisition, Malinda Lo's \"Ash\"<\/a> is a new casting of Cinderella, now with more slightly-Celtic-flavored magic -- it's an easy read if you'd like some escapism. Lo is skilled at creating atmosphere by leaving a lot of negative space in some of her storylines... much of the way that the mood of a piece or a turn of the plot is created by her is due to the things you thought might happen but didn't. She deftly shapes your expectations and then subverts them, but never in a way that the reader feels betrayed. Just... surprised. (And many of the surprises are happy ones rather than \"rocks fall, everyone dies\", so if you're looking for a non-depressing read, this book is pretty safe in the end.) Her depiction of GLBT themes is similar, quietly cheerful in their unremarkableness. Most of the relationships or hoped-for relationships we see in the book are het, but when they're not, no one remarks on that or cares. I appreciate books where that's not even a big deal... the plot is being driven by family, greed, and otherworldly magic, and they all have other things to think about. Would totally give to my niece when she's old enough to read it. Three and a half storybook stories out of five.
<\/a>
Take this review currently with a grain of salt, because I have read \"Washington Scrambles: Selected Nontechnical Ascents\"<\/a> but I haven't tried any of the scrambles yet, so I can't report on helpfulness\/accuracy. [grin] I'll revise my opinion after this year's hiking season for that part (or sooner if something horrible happens and I just have to say \"THOSE TRAIL INSTRUCTIONS ARE OLD AND WRONG AND LEAD INTO A CREVASSE\" or something, heh). It's a second edition, though, and the Mountaineers, so I very much doubt that. I picked this book up because I went to Skye last summer, fell in love with it, and next time I go back I totally want to go scrambling on the Cuillens. I figure that should not be one's first outing, and I'd rather practice somewhere that I'm familiar with the terrain and weather. Hence, Washington Scrambles. The introduction contained one of the more helpful pointers... I've done a fair bit of hiking, and technically I've done some scrambling, but it was always basically clear where I should be going and there was never any danger that I would become lost. I've never done full on harness-and-rope-and-ice-axe technical ascent mountaineering. Scrambling seemed to bridge the gap between those two skills, and I had previously been unable to find anything that actually spelled out what skills were required in order to be able to go scrambling on harder routes than I'd done. While the introduction here was necessarily sparse (it's a guide book to routes, not a how-to book), at least it pointed me in a helpful direction. As for the routes themselves, I appreciated the split ratings between difficulty and skill level required... I'm up for long hard 20 mile hikes, but I'd like to ramp up slowly on terrain requiring lots of technical skills, and the way that the book breaks out the routes makes it possible to make choices that will do that. Hooray! The directions to starting points seem pretty clear, though once I've picked my first one I'm going to sit down with topo maps and GPS and double check everything. There's a good variety of length, skill level, and geographic regions. So, tentatively four routes out of five, and an after-action IOU.
<\/a>
An excellent account of the Expedition Denali mountaineers, \"The Adventure Gap: Changing the Face of the Outdoors\"<\/a> tackles the challenge of representation and role models for youths of color as much as it discusses the climb. The author just barely didn't make the mountaineering crew (due to finding out that he needed two hip replacements), but he was in good enough shape to tag along as chronologer and historian. I was cheering throughout for the team and for NOLS, who helped put it all together. I knew about the expedition before it was launched through NOLS Alumni fundraising, and had heard that they'd had to turn back due to weather just short of the summit, but before reading this book I hadn't realized it was so, well, electrifying, pun kinda intended. (That shows the effects of stepping up to lead when it's REALLY necessary. Wow.) Five lightning strikes out of five, and one of the two best of this batch.
<\/a>
\"Partner\"<\/a> is the continuation of a romance series that I actually liked, since it doesn't seem to have the frustrating gender dynamics that normally make me hate romance. Werewolf Marines! (I am still vastly entertained by that conceit.) Echo and DJ are both characters that I liked as people and wanted to root for. I was impressed that the author continued to be able to surprise me, from where Charlie's arc went to my strategically forgetting about Cole for most of the end of the book. (That was particularly funny.) I was also taken by surprise to hear Guadalupe referred to as a werewolf Marine... I had internally expected that to be only the series heroes, but DJ's right, she totally is too. Hah! My bad. So it has plenty of action (both in and out of bed), enough to satisfy most people who like reading military fantasy or sci-fi, a pretty diverse cast, and a story that will appeal to paranormal romance fans. My only real complaint is the cover (which isn't really the author's fault)... Echo has a good shooting stance, which is in character, but DJ doesn't. Leaning back like that away from the gun isn't something I've ever seen a Marine do. This is the other best book of this batch. Five songs that actually exist out of five; music fans may enjoy looking up DJ's selections, as a kind of Easter egg.<\/a>

This entry was originally posted at http:\/\/ivy.dreamwidth.org\/460343.html<\/a> and has \"comment comments there. Please feel free to comment on either site; comments rock.","comments":"https:\/\/thewronghands.livejournal.com\/1416017.html?view=comments#comments","category":["music","hiking","climbing","fairy tales","book reviews","neurology","fantasy","superheroes","biogeek","nyc","seattle","science"]},{"guid":"https:\/\/thewronghands.livejournal.com\/1414828.html","pubDate":"Sat, 28 Mar 2015 21:28:54 GMT","title":"[Book Reviews] \"Soirbheas\/Fair Wind\"","author":"thewronghands","link":"https:\/\/thewronghands.livejournal.com\/1414828.html","description":"Hello, Internet! I have just finished savoring the first book of a new-to-me delightful poet, Meg Bateman. (Yes, still the book of poetry that I bought when Mayhem was changing our tire on Harris.) Her \"Soirbheas\/Fair Wind\"<\/a>is a marvelous eye, a song of aging and loss, gentleness and discovery as old things pass away, having touched the world as they moved through it. It acknowledges the passing of an old lifestyle while not declaring that everything is doomed forever now, it allows itself to mourn without gathering a future bleakness. She follows it up with poems on love and on friendship that keep a similar overwash; there's often change and loss in there, but it doesn't remove the closeness. Her intimacies are often in negative space, and the facing-page translation seems to help with that. (My Gh\u00e0idlig is minimal at best, and comes from what Gaeilge I have. For Romance language readers, imagine that you speak tourist Spanish and you're trying to read poetry in Italian. About like that. You... know what some of the words mean! You have some idea of how it's meant to sound when read out loud! But you're missing nuance and texture and sometimes correct grammar. Better than nothing, but you're keenly aware of what you don't see in the original. Still, the only way to get better is to keep on.) So my sense of usage there might be due to my deficiencies as a reader, rather than something she intended as a poet... but I don't think she'd grudge me it. I will definitely be hunting up her subsequent \"Transparencies\"<\/a> the next time I want to immersively treat myself. In the meantime, here's her final poem of the collection, so you can see what I mean.

Envoi

Chunnaic mi eadar-theangachadh de dh\u00e0n leam
ann an duanaire de bh\u00e0rdachd ghaoil \u00e0 Alba
agus bu ne\u00f2nach leam gun robh an c\u00e0irdeas
nach do mhair agamsa ach tr\u00ec seachdainean
(ged a luidir an t-uisge-sti\u00f9ir mi fad bhliadhnachan)
an sin an ainm a'ghaoil a mhaireas.

Bu ne\u00f2naiche buileach na h-\u00ecomhaighean --
cuid a ghineadh ann an \u00f2rain Gh\u00e0idhlig eile,
cuid a tharraing saighead a' chomhardaidh a-nuas --
is iad nan seasamh gu borb sa Bheurla,
gun iomradh fi\u00f9 's gum b' i a' Gh\u00e0idhlig
a' bhean-ghl\u00f9ine dhaibh no am bogha.

Bitheadh an t\u00e0charan ag imeachd --
tha a chaolan dh\u00f2mhsa air sgaoileadh;
ma labhras e ri feadhainn mu ch\u00e0irdeas s\u00ecorraidh
gach beannachd leotha 's guma fada be\u00f2 an gaol ac',
nach ionann f\u00ecrinn na beatha is f\u00ecrinn na b\u00e0rdachd.<\/i><\/b><\/a>

*******

Envoi

I saw one of my poems translated
in a book of love poems from Scotland,
and it felt strange that an affair
that only lasted three weeks
(but in whose wake I floundered long after)
was there in the name of eternal commitment.

It was stranger yet to see the images --
some born of other Gaelic songs,
some brought down by the arrow of rhyme --
standing naked and incongruous in English.
with no mention that Gaelic
was either the midwife or the bow.

But let the changeling make its way --
its umbilical cord with me is cut;
if it speaks to some of enduring love
may theirs be the blessing of love that lasts,
but let this particular revelation be mine
that reality and poetic truth are not the same.<\/i><\/b><\/a>

This entry was originally posted at http:\/\/ivy.dreamwidth.org\/459086.html<\/a> and has \"comment comments there. Please feel free to comment on either site; comments rock.","comments":"https:\/\/thewronghands.livejournal.com\/1414828.html?view=comments#comments","category":["poetry","skye","book reviews","scotland","gaeilge","translation","love"]},{"guid":"https:\/\/thewronghands.livejournal.com\/1403764.html","pubDate":"Tue, 10 Feb 2015 14:54:09 GMT","title":"[Book Reviews] Books not in sets","author":"thewronghands","link":"https:\/\/thewronghands.livejournal.com\/1403764.html","description":"From the holiday season, \"Deep: Freediving, Renegade Science, and What the Ocean Tells Us about Ourselves\"<\/a> (a <\/a>girl_on_a_stick<\/b><\/a><\/span> recommendation) was an intriguing dive, pun sorta intended, into the gonzo DIY worlds of freediving and deep-water scientific research. Of those, the freediving part was the more foreign to me, and also the more interesting. Tons of my friends enjoy scuba, and given my not-well-controlled asthma, that's not in the cards for me. I used to love swimming as a kid, though, and felt sad to miss out on their underwater adventures. Reading about the breathing exercises that freedivers use did make me wonder if those would be helpful to me in swimming. I don't think I'm setting my sights on any 200 foot dives or anything, but maybe I could get to 20 feet. [grin] There were places where I had some doubts about the author's summations or abbreviations of the science (he is an author and not a scientist), but for the basically scientifically literate I think it's pretty easy to pick out where to raise an eyebrow. I also appreciated his drawing attention to the underfunded nature of a lot of our ocean sciences, and the awesome things that we have found there. Three and a half wetsuits out of five, and a curious intent to learn more about freediving.
<\/a>
I had intended to read a bunch of books about the history of Africa all together to have a solid historical context for reading \"Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela\"<\/a>, but when both my father and <\/a>project_mayhem_<\/b><\/a><\/span>'s sister bought me \"Long Walk to Freedom\" for a holiday present, well, the time had come. So now I'm doing it the other way around -- first the central autobiography, then all the background knowledge. It's an interesting test of meta-vision, in a way... for a work so long, some stuff is just going to have to be left out. Trying to read into the empty spaces gives you a peculiar kind of insight (though it's debatable whether that's into Mandela or into his editors, heh). So I certainly learned a lot about the history of South Africa, and post-colonialist African politics in general, but the book is as much or more about how you define yourself as a moral person while engaged in a difficult struggle that is going to continually test your principles. It ties in well to many of the military history, African history, and insurgency\/counterinsurgency books that I've read, but it's more a book about strategy than it is about tactics. I particularly appreciated Mandela's grace in difficult circumstances... his appreciation for his second wife's support for his political struggle and her stalwart presence through his years in prison, while also acknowledging but not condoning the actions of her bodyguards<\/a> that caused so much difficulty, anger, and trouble. His story isn't about that series of events in particular (there are about eight hojillion similar events in that era of history, which is a big part of why reading about it is difficult and unpopular), and he tries to take the high road when discussing most peoples' atrocities, but ugh. I would get divorced over that too. (Not that he explicitly says that that was why, he takes more of a \"people grow apart and choose different paths\" tack, but I can't even imagine how awful to have a loving partner who supports you for years in prison, with whom you have several children, and then they go do that.)

There are a lot of similarities both to books that I've read about the American civil rights struggle and to a lot of the histories about the IRA. I appreciated his difficulty in struggling with how to balance his lack of wanting to be a Communist or to have his movement taken over by Communists with the ugly reality that that was where most of his available allies among the white population of South Africa at the time were. You can't choose who is willing to be on your side or partners in your struggle for freedom, and there's a strange bedfellows tension in how much you're going to accept help and from whom. Set against the larger geopolitical stage of the era, that's particularly fraught... it was important to him to succeed in having a \"for all South Africans regardless of race\" movement and background, but what do you do when many of the people willing to help you come with a lot of baggage? (I am reminded of \"The Terrorist's Dilemma\"<\/a> and how much I would not want to have that job. Ugh, having to ride herd on and be responsible for the actions of a lot of angry armed people who feel very hard done by and want to blow things up in response. Mandela definitely had those problems.) The book stops soon after his release from prison, which is a pity... I would have loved to hear more about Truth and Reconciliation and the peace-building process afterwards. I'll just have to note that for my follow-up reading. Four and a half thoughtful pragmatists out of five.
<\/a>
\"The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics\"<\/a> was one of the best books I read this year. I rowed my way through college and this brought back all my love of the sport, as well as being a cluebat of empathy towards people who grew up during the Great Depression. While the book was substantially about one rower's life in particular (because the author had access to his family and their records), it was simultaneously a local-interest history work, an instructive tale about cooperation and determination, a kinda terrifying biography of someone tougher than I can imagine having to be, and a paean to a wonderful sport. I kept stopping and indignantly reading parts of it to Mayhem, who is not a rower. Highly recommended if you have any interest in Washington history, the early parts of the 20th century, or rowing; five ways to piss off Hitler out of five.
<\/a>
On a lighter note, I also enjoyed \"A Butler's Life: Scenes from the Other Side of the Silver Salver\"<\/a>. In another world, one in which I was better at cooking, I could totally see myself having this job. [grin] This is a collection of no-shit-there-I-was stories, told with dry understatement and considerable humor. I enjoyed watching Christopher go from stumbling into a beginning service job to remaking himself into an estate managing executive with style and efficiency... and humor. People who didn't intend to make their life in the career they ended up with (I suspect this is most of us!) may particularly find a lot to love here, as the glamorous setting and not-so-glamorous tasks combine to make a pretty fine series of opportunities for our hero. I don't think I would have had the patience to take the live-in jobs that he did, I need more time to myself than that, but one of the interesting parts is getting to speculate on what it would be like to have this be your life. Four and a half \"will that be all, sir?\"s out of five.
<\/a>
I fell in love with Sudhir Venkatesh's writing in \"Gang Leader For A Day\"<\/a>, but I just didn't love \"Floating City: A Rogue Sociologist Lost and Found in New York's Underground Economy\"<\/a> as much. It has many of the things that I enjoyed about \"Gang Leader\", including deeper ethnographic studies of particular people and how their stories change over years. I liked and agree with his assessment that New York is less geographically bound and more socially mobile than Chicago, particularly for black marketeers who can learn to move between social contexts. And I even sympathized with his tension between the \"be a scientist\" sentiments from his sociology department at Columbia\/his desire to do statistically significant studies with large numbers of participants and the deep-dive of seeing how things worked out over time. But oh boy, did I get sick of his personal angst suddenly centering itself in the story. I'm sympathetic to ethnographers having feelings about the subjects they study, and his horror at feeling like he had facilitated making people's lives worse by introducing Shine and Analise even though he didn't mean to. But, dude. Get over yourself! You were just there! It's not all about you! He acknowledges that the folks he's studying, working with, and befriending even yell at him about this, and yet still he's more present in the narrative there than I wish he had been. (I suspect that he was trying for \"researchers are human and flawed too, I'm not somehow setting myself up as better than the people I study\" but ended up with something more like \"I, too, am flawed and human! Behold, everyone, how the madam and the johns and the drug dealer all tell ME that I should get over MYSELF, and lo they were right\".) So even though I was interested in his work and I'll read his future books, I hope he can put the angst to bed some. Three weird hangups out of five.
<\/a>
\"Laws in Conflict\"<\/a> is another fine medieval mystery by Cora Harrison. I appreciated the way that she brought out the differences between Brehon Law, English law, and Roman law, and how they all interacted with each other in the period described. I know more than the average layperson about Brehon law and Gaelic western Irish culture, and I still learn something every time I read one of her mysteries. (And going to look up all the details afterwards is half the fun! Not required to read and enjoy the book, of course, but it's a fertile jumping-off point if you are this flavor of nerd.) Mara remains a stalwart and intelligent protagonist, and while the structure of the mysteries is often kinda formulaic (there is a really notable \"and then the protagonist SUSPECTS PEOPLE\" in the middle), it is more than made up for by the teamwork of her law scholars, the discussions about how one would uncover information at a lower level of technology, and the insights into how kinship-based societies respond to wrongdoing by their members. Great fun, four stealth O'Flaherties out of five.
<\/a>
I am giving up saying that I'm not a romance reader... it turns out that I (understandably!) don't like the gender-policing heteronormative scripts and heroes who are inexplicable broody emotionally stunted jerks, but fortunately, I have now read four non-mainstream romances where things aren't like that! So here's to good romance! \"Thief of Songs\"<\/a> is genre-busting in ways that I predictably loved... it's a book about art, where the spark of connection between the lovers is based in their shared creative dynamic and deep love of creating music. It's a book about the baggage of history, and how that can inform your view of yourself even when many people around you don't see it similarly. (I was super sympathetic to the hero on that one... I know what it's like to have a cultural identity that you're very attached to, and for most of the people around you to find your political views dismayingly bafflingly archaic. But without growing up in the political context you did, they'll find it harder to understand.) It's a poly romance -- one of our leads is already in a happy relationship as the story starts, and that is not threatened, undermined, or displaced by the arrival of the other lead. Hooray for a writer who can find her dramatic tension *somewhere else*. [grin] And it's a multigender book set in an interesting world with a lot of possibility for development. There are four genders in the book, and no systemic oppression of any of them, and relationships between people are encouraged regardless of your gender or the gender of the person or people you fall in love with. So there are a lot of different kinds of relationships shown, both deeply and in passing, and sometimes the most interesting things about them aren't the gender combinations of the partners. I appreciated that. I had a lot of fun with some of the worldbuilding features (asking my friends what their poem name would be, if they had to pick one), and winced sympathetically at the geographic unfairness of how magic works in the world there (it flows downhill, so highland people are magic-starved and lowland people are magic-rich, and that informs economic and military geopolitics a lot). I'd love to read more in this setting; five annual magic runs out of five.<\/a>

This entry was originally posted at http:\/\/ivy.dreamwidth.org\/448107.html<\/a> and has \"comment comments there. Please feel free to comment on either site; comments rock.","comments":"https:\/\/thewronghands.livejournal.com\/1403764.html?view=comments#comments","category":["politics","crime","ireland","military history","nyc","rowing","poly","music","mysteries","book reviews","history","economics","counterinsurgency","global economic theory","art","seattle","biography","science"]},{"guid":"https:\/\/thewronghands.livejournal.com\/1402697.html","pubDate":"Thu, 05 Feb 2015 08:58:33 GMT","title":"[Book Reviews] Books in sets","author":"thewronghands","link":"https:\/\/thewronghands.livejournal.com\/1402697.html","description":"I have been a fan of Steve Perry's for some time, and enjoyed his blog while he was coming up with the concept for his \"Cutter's Wars\" series, The Ramal Extraction<\/a>\/The Vastalimi Gambit<\/a>\/The Tejano Conflict<\/a>. The series has a lot of things I like... ensemble cast, interesting aliens (they're pretty much of the \"like humans mentally but with a different culture\" flavor of aliens, not the \"what the what what I don't even know how to think about that\" kind of aliens). The characters aren't super deeply developed, but they're all likable and fun, and the way they tease each other is the kind of camaraderie that I've seen in well-functioning teams. Perry is a martial artist and reliably writes fight scenes that are better than most action, though I'm sure I have made people watching me read laugh by making gestures in the air trying to figure out which throw that was from the description. There's some Chekov's rifle in it -- everyone on the team has a couple specialties, which often are just the thing to solve the fix them find themselves in, by golly. The other mercenary army has a member of a rare alien race? Us too, and ours is better! But I forgive a little convenience there for the sake of all different kinds of folks working together well on the side of good and for a common goal. They're sort of a cheerful trilogy of novels about an interstellar mercenary team, and I find that I prefer that to gritty grimdark doomness with explosions. It is mostly okay to care about the characters. That's nice. [grin] The last book in the series made me really wonder if the author just had a fondness for a specific historical era and wanted to put his team in there by, uh, mumbletymumble reasons, but again, 100% forgiven because it's so much fun. [grin] Four lighthearted explosions via saboteur out of five.
<\/a>
A recommendation of <\/a>tylik<\/b><\/a><\/span>'s, I have torn through the entire Jane Yellowrock series (start here with Skinwalker<\/a>, and there's like nine of them) in a matter of weeks. Despite the distracting occasional typos (it is not JOHN Lafitte National Park!), it's an interesting series set in places that I love, some of which are not commonly represented in fiction, or if they are, not in a positive way. Natchez, Mississippi is not most peoples' idea of a good setting for a vampire novel, but I was kinda thrilled by that. Most of the series is set in New Orleans, with occasional forays to Natchez or Asheville, NC. But it's nice to see an alt-universe South where most of the locals are sympathetically and positively depicted, not just \"New Orleans and then oh yeah those rednecks\". Our protagonist is a Cherokee skinwalker, genetically able to take the shape of most animals if she has some of their DNA to work up to it. She also shares her body and her consciousness with the soul of a mountain lion, and so you get a dual POV from the protagonists and a built-in source of dramatic tension. Jane and Beast often don't agree, but they work together pretty well. In the series: