All reviews copyright 1984-2012 Evelyn C. Leeper.
"Two Hearts" by Peter S. Beagle:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 05/19/2006]
"Two Hearts" by Peter S. Beagle (F&SF Oct/Nov 2005) is a well- written version of a rather basic "slaying the monster" sort of tale. It is good to see that Beagle is still writing, but it is hard to get too enthusiastic about this piece.
THE LAST UNICORN by Peter S. Beagle:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 09/23/2011]
The Middletown science-fiction-book-and-movie group chose THE LAST UNICORN by Peter S. Beagle (ISBN 978-0-451-45052-4) for its September meeting. The book is considered a classic (it was even chosen by Lin Carter for the Ballantine "Adult Fantasy Classics" line). I found it just so-so; what seems to be the big joke--the magician being named Schmendrick--is merely puerile, and nothing else really works for me either. Even so, it is better than the movie made in 1982 based on it, which is *terrible*. To start with, it is a musical, and the songs are painful to listen to. I also found the animation primitive, but that may not be a valid complaint since someone said it was animation in the anime tradition (or perhaps that it was proto-anime). At any rate, nothing about it worked for me except the talking skull, which I did like.
To order The Last Unicorn from amazon.com, click here.
THE RISE AND THE FALL OF THE BIBLE by Timothy Beal:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 04/01/2011]
THE RISE AND THE FALL OF THE BIBLE: THE UNEXPECTED HISTORY OF AN ACCIDENTAL BOOK by Timothy Beal (ISBN 978-0-15-101358-6) is not what one might expect. It is not a book written by an atheist, or a skeptic, but by a Professor of Religion at Case Western Reserve
University who is married to a minister. Yet it is not a defense of a literal interpretation of the Bible either.
For example, in writing about Kenneth N. Taylor's translation, THE WAY: THE LIVING BIBLE, Beal writes: "So for a time, THE WAY saved me, or at least distracted me, from the growing doubts about my childhood faith in the Bible. That is, it saved my iconic idea of the Bible from the disillusion that came from literally reading it. Indeed, this was the true innovation of THE WAY: it offered a reading experience of the Bible that didn't entail all the complexities and frustrations that came when I actually read the biblical text. It felt like what reading the Bible was supposed to feel like, even while it distracted me from the real ambiguities and uncertainties of the Biblical text itself."
And later he writes, "To a point, fundamentalist-leaning critics and I agree about what the Bible business is doing to the Bible. By reinventing it in an ever-widening variety of things and words, all marketed as the one and only Word of God, these publishers are devaluing the very thing they're selling."
Beal bases a lot of what he says on the premise that the Bible has become a cultural icon, but in doing so has lost its standing as a set of texts (not a single text, as Beal emphasizes) that serve to inspire religious faith and study. In support of this, Beal cites a poll that found that 78% of Americans believe that the Bible is the Word of God, 65% believe that it "answers all or most of the questions of life"--and 28% say they rarely or never read it. <> (The text is unclear on whether this is 28% of those responding positively to the other questions, or 28% of all responders. Personally, I am skeptical of any poll that indicates 72% of Americans often read the Bible. Would people lie about this? Well, the number of people who claim they attend church regularly is completely out of sync with actual church attendance figures.)
To order The Rise and the Fall of the Bible from amazon.com, click here.
A GREAT IDEA AT THE TIME: THE RISE, FALL, AND CURIOUS AFTERLIFE OF THE GREAT BOOKS by Alex Beam:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 09/11/2009]
A GREAT IDEA AT THE TIME: THE RISE, FALL, AND CURIOUS AFTERLIFE OF THE GREAT BOOKS by Alex Beam (ISBN-13 978-1-58648-487-3, ISBN-10 1-58648-487-7) is about the "Great Books of the Western World" set (hereafter referred to as GBWW) produced by Britannica from the early 1950s until recently. If the people who came up with the idea (and the selections) come out as less than ideal, so does Beam himself at times. On page 50, when he is reporting stories from an issue of "Life" magazine in 1935, he says that the one titled "Eleanor Roosevelt Spends a Night in the White House" is "doubtless some arcane 'in' joke." If indeed it is a joke, it is hardly arcane or "in"--Eleanor Roosevelt was known for her traveling on behalf of her husband and in general for good causes. On the topic at hand, frequently Beam admits to be unfamiliar with various works in the GBWW. (Beam admits this, though, and he is not writing about the content of the books so much as the creation and marketing of a canon.) And Beam is generally quite snarky about the people involved in the GBWW project--the book is as much, or more, about them and their foibles as it is about the GBWW.
The people involved were Mortimer Adler, Robert Hutchins, and William Benton. Beam does occasionally (uncharacteristically) go out of his way to give them the benefit of the doubt, as when he attempts to temper the "all-white" image of the GBWW authors by describing the committee as "[having] chosen seventy-four writers, all deceased and primarily Caucasian males (St. Augustine's ethnicity is always in doubt)." But when a *1990* marketing memo for the GBWW says, "We have also answered an objection of more recency--namely, where are the women? We *have* come a long way, baby, and thus we have Jane and George, as well as Willa Cather and Virginia Woolf in the 20th century," what can one say? Beam gives us the answer, "To which one can only say: Ouch."
It gets worse, with Adler making pronouncements such as "[blacks] didn't write any good books" and (responding to a charge of Eurocentrism), "If [Asians] came to the West, they better learn Western culture. If they want to stay Japanese, they should stay in Japan." (A better answer would have been that the set was specifically titled "Great Books of the Western World".)
Beam takes the set to task (as did others) for including outdated works of science. Yes, Galen was important in the history of science, but it is not clear that today's readers will get any benefit from reading him--in a mediocre translation to boot. And the use of Galen as a basic text in St. John's College's curriculum defies all reason. (There are several other authors equally outdated; I chose Galen just as an example.)
Beam also attacks the translations used for the works, and rightly so. (Over half of the selections were originally written in languages other than English, including a dozen in Greek and another dozen in Latin.) The committee might have claimed to choose the best "available" translation, but "available" meant "available free". (There was a definite rift between the committee and those academicians who felt that if people were going to read the GBWW, they should do it in the original languages anyway.)
*My* primary objection to the GBWW set is that while it is nice as "furniture", it is expensive without being worth the price. Because Adler wanted no intermediaries between the reader and the book, there were no introductory or explanatory materials other than a one-page biographical note, no footnotes to explain arcane references to foreign phrases, and so on. In an inexpensive Dover edition, one understands that this lack is a cost-saving measure. For a set selling for $250 in 1952, this excuse won't work.
In addition, by the time *I* discovered the GBWW, I already owned several of the books. The big explosion of cheap mass-market paperbacks started right around the time the GBWW came out. Oh, there were paperbacks before this, but one started to see more and more, and by the 1960s, all the GBWW worth reading by the general public were available cheaply. (The scientific works are a different story.) So the target market may have owned some of the works already.
Regarding the pages themselves, Beam complains that they are hard to read because they are double-column nine-point type. Judith C. Kinney (in a review on amazon.com) says, "Beam measures the type at nine points. My point gauge measured it at ten points. The type seems small because the lines have no leading ... [the space between the bottom of a letter with a descender ... and the top of a letter with an ascender ... in the next line]. Most of THE NEW YORKER is set in ten-point type with two points leading. The leading makes all the difference." in addition, some volumes did have single columns, or less "packed" pages, in particular the science works. This seems like sloppy research on Beam's part, and indeed, several reviewers say Beam's knowledge of Adler, Hutchins, and Benton are based mostly on a few secondary sources.
So the GBWW is an opportunity to buy these works in bad, un- annotated, hard-to-read, expensive editions, rather than better, cheaper versions that, admittedly, would not look as uniform on the shelf. (There is an irony here, I think, that people who supposedly want to get people to learn to think for themselves about these books are promoting uniformity and conformity.)
Beam may seem too harsh on the notion of providing an opportunity for the average person to read these (or other) GBWW, but one must remember that the cost of the set did not make it readily available to the economically disadvantaged. There are two aspects here: the set as a physical object, and the set as a list of works. That the set was available in a variety of bindings, ranging in price from $225 to $1175, indicates that the physical object was considered as important, if not more so, than the list.
(Consider Clifton Fadiman's "Lifetime Reading Plan" as an alternative approach. Fadiman gave you an annotated list, and assumed you knew where the libraries and bookstores were.)
To order A Great Idea at the Time from amazon.com, click here.
"Shoggoths in Bloom" by Elizabeth Bear:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 06/05/2009]
"Shoggoths in Bloom" by Elizabeth Bear: People who aren't riffing on Jane Austen seem to riff on H. P. Lovecraft. This did not quite capture Lovecraft's atmosphere (at least for me), and the whole racial issue seems tacked on. I don't know--maybe it has some meaning related to the story, but if so, I missed it. In a short story (or novelette) one must exercise an economy of themes and not try to cover too much ground, and this seemed to ignore that rule.
Tideline by Elizabeth Bear:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 06/27/2008]
I found "Tideline" by Elizabeth Bear (ASIMOV'S Jun) a fairly bland post-holocaust story about a post-war robot and a boy. Maybe it was supposed to be touching or something, but it did nothing for me.
BLOOD MUSIC by Greg Bear:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 03/09/2007]
Our science fiction group read BLOOD MUSIC by Greg Bear (ISBN-10 1-596-87106-7, ISBN-13 978-1-596-87106-9) this month. This was expanded from a shorter piece, and both won Hugos. Yet I found that the basic premise required too much of a suspension of disbelief on my part, even while enjoying parts of the book quite a bit. I suppose it is a sort of alternate history now, since a good-sized chunk of it takes place in the World Trade Center towers.
To order Blood Music from amazon.com, click here.
DINOSAUR SUMMER by Greg Bear (Warner Aspect, ISBN 0-446-52098-5, 1998, 325pp, hardback):
This is billed as an alternate history, and it is in the sense that its premise is that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's LOST WORLD was non-fiction, and dinosaurs did survive on a Venezuelan plateau. But it's not alternate history in the sense of looking at what changes there would be in society because of the change.
This is not so much a complaint as a warning. If you like alternate histories for that sociological aspect, you will be disappointed in Dinosaur Summer. It is more aimed at the person who enjoyed The Lost World and wants to read more about dinosaurs and the lost plateau. The story starts out in a dinosaur circus, but that seems mostly to allow Bear to introduce his human, reptilian, and avian characters before heading back to the plateau. Some of the latter two are real, others are fictitious, and you probably can't tell the players without a scorecard, which Bear provides in an afterword.
I was really looking forward to this book, but found it a disappointment. Perhaps I was looking for more change in society than the fact that King Kong flopped. As an adventure novel, it starts off very slowly, and doesn't offer the reader much to carry hold her interest. I suppose if you really like dinosaurs, they will carry the book, but I found Dinosaur Summer a disappointment.
To order Dinosaur Summer from amazon.com, click here.
AGATHA RAISIN AND THE QUICHE OF DEATH by M. C. Beaton:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 07/25/2008]
I really like the BBC radio adaptation (I cannot find the name of who did it) of AGATHA RAISIN AND THE QUICHE OF DEATH by M. C. Beaton (ISBN-13 978-0-312-93916-8, ISBN-10 0-312-93916-7), so I decided to read the book (and possibly the whole series of Agatha Raisin books). While the book was okay--and had I read it cold, I might even have said good--I discovered that the best parts of the radio adaptation were not in the book at all. The basic plot is there: London public relations executive Agatha Raisin retires to a cottage in the Cotswolds, where she tries to gain acceptance by entering the local quiche-baking content. Her quiche, however, is actually store-bought, and what is more, has poisoned the judge! But the adaptation has an acerbic wit that is missing from the book, where the characters are flatter and less appealing, even the ones who are supposed to like. The book is very popular--there are seventeen sequels--but not up to my expectations.
To order Agatha Raisin and the Quiche of Death from amazon.com, click here.
PRIDE AND PRESCIENCE (OR, A TRUTH UNIVERSALLY ACKNOWLEDGED) by Carrie Bebris:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 12/08/2006]
PRIDE AND PRESCIENCE (OR, A TRUTH UNIVERSALLY ACKNOWLEDGED) by Carrie Bebris (ISBN 0-765-35071-8) is what is called a "biblio- mystery". In specific, it is about Mr. and Mrs. Darcy solving a mystery that arises shortly after their marriage at the end of Jane Austen's PRIDE AND PREJUDICE. It has the same flaw that the recent film version of PRIDE AND PREJUDICE had (at least in the American cut)--it is far too explicit in its references to sex. Note that when I say this in reference to Jane Austen's work, what I mean is that they even acknowledge it at all. In that film, we see the Darcys in their nightclothes on their balcony. In this book, there are constant references to Elizabeth's hair getting mussed, or their being late for appointments, or whatever, with knowing innuendoes. Jane Austen would spin in her grave. I thought the mystery itself was also a bit un-Austen, with more of the paranormal that one expects in that clergyman's daughter's works (although there are some echoes of NORTHANGER ABBEY). Also, the characters did not always ring true, and I thought I detected a couple of anachronistic word choices (which, alas, I failed to note down). But there was a certain talent in the writing, and readers must have liked it--it has been followed by SUSPENSE AND SENSIBILITY (OR, FIRST IMPRESSIONS REVISITED), and NORTH BY NORTHANGER (OR, SHADES OF PEMBERLY).
To order Pride and Prescience from amazon.com, click here.
WAITING FOR GODOT by Samuel Beckett:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 01/31/2003]
We watched the Irish television production of Samuel Beckett's "Waiting for Godot." This is part of the series "Becket on Film", which will do all nineteen of Beckett's plays, and is running intermittently on PBS in the United States. I think that "Waiting for Godot" is a bi-model play--you will either love it or hate it. I loved it, maybe because it sounded so much like conversations that Mark and I have. :-) (I'm not sure which of us is which, though.) If you like Tom Stoppard (especially "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead"), you'll probably like this.
To order Waiting for Godot from amazon.com, click here.
"Imaginary Books in Speculative Fiction" by Robert Bee:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 09/05/2008]
For book-lovers, I have to recommend "Imaginary Books in Speculative Fiction" by Robert Bee ("New York Review of Science Fiction", June 2008). Jorge Luis Borges, Stanislaw Lem, and H. P. Lovecraft are the obvious authors to cover, but Bee covers many others as well.
THE WHOLE FIVE FEET: WHAT THE GREAT BOOKS TAUGHT ME ABOUT LIFE, DEATH, AND PRETTY MUCH EVERYTHING ELSE by Christopher R. Beha:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 09/02/2011]
THE WHOLE FIVE FEET: WHAT THE GREAT BOOKS TAUGHT ME ABOUT LIFE, DEATH, AND PRETTY MUCH EVERYTHING ELSE by Christopher R. Beha (ISBN 978-0-8021-4485-0) is about Beha's quest to read the "Harvard Classics" (a.k.a. the "Five-Foot Shelf") in a year. (Though he sometimes refers to these as the "Great Books", the Harvard Classics are distinct from the "Great Books of the Western World" produced by Britannica in the early 1950s.)
In an appendix, Beha talks about what he calls "A-Year-of-Riding- the-Unicycle" memoirs--memoirs of a year of doing some specified activity--of which I have read (and reviewed) several, including:
The "Great Books of the Western World" also have a book about them: A GREAT IDEA AT THE TIME: THE RISE, FALL, AND CURIOUS AFTERLIFE OF THE GREAT BOOKS by Alex Beam (978-1-58648-487-3), which I previously reviewed. But Beam writes entirely about the concept, development, and marketing of the "Great Books of the Western World" rather than about the contents of them (other than the point size used, and the translations).
The "Harvard Classics" seems a better choice for people who are looking to avoid overlap with their existing books, since it relies more on shorter works (letters, essays, and so on) and less on book-length works. The "Great Books" includes six novels, the "Harvard Classics" only one (DON QUIXOTE). To make up for this, there was later published a "Harvard Classics of Fiction" which comprises twenty volumes of long and short fiction. But more than just omitting novels, the "Harvard Classics" will have a volume that includes plays by half a dozen dramatists, or essays by three different authors, while the "Great Books" seems to try to cover fewer authors but with more from each. The "Harvard Classics" also includes a few non-Western works ("The Thousand and One Nights", "The Sayings of Confucius", Buddhist writings, "The Bhagavad-Gita", and chapters from the Koran), though these hardly constitute broad exposure to non-Western literature.
One major drawback to the "Harvard Classics" might be the cost--I just saw a set in a used bookstore for $2450.
As alternatives to either, there is Clifton Fadiman's "Lifetime Reading Plan". Fadiman gave you an annotated list, and assumed you knew where the libraries and bookstores were. For a much longer, but purely Western, curriculum, there is always Harold Bloom's THE WESTERN CANON.
To order The Whole Five Feet from amazon.com, click here.
MEN OF MATHEMATICS by Eric Temple Bell:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 07/01/2005]
Eric Temple Bell's MEN OF MATHEMATICS (ISBN 0-671-62818-6) was the book for our general discussion group this month. I believe that this is considered the classic work of mathematical biography, but its age--and at times lack of scholarship--is showing. For example, no one today would write, "It was the wrong time of the month and Napoleon was enjoying one of his womanish tantrums." [page 244] And Bell first insists that Georg Cantor was "of pure Jewish descent on both sides" [page 558], and later says, "The aggressive clannishness of Jews has often been remarked, sometimes as an argument against employing them in academic work, but it has not been no generally observed that there is no more vicious academic hatred than that of one Jew for another when they disagree on purely scientific matters or when one is jealous or afraid of another. Gentiles either laugh these hatreds off or go at them in an efficient, underhand way which often enables them to accomplish their spiteful ends under the guise of sincere friendship. When two intellectual Jews fall out they disagree all over, throw reserve to the dogs, and do everything in their power to cut one anothers' throats or stab one another in the back."!) [page 562] Amazing today, yet apparently in 1937 the publisher saw no problem with that claim.
[Georg Cantor is the mathematician who found proof that there are precisely as many integers as even integers or rational numbers, but there are actually a lot more real numbers. -mrl]
If you don't recall reading this, or can't find it in your copy, that's because current editions (since about 1965) have been bowdlerized to change this to "When two academic specialists disagree violently on purely scientific matters, they have a choice, if discretion seems the better part of valor, of laughing their hatreds off and not making a fuss about them, or of acting in any of the number of belligerant ways that other people resort to when confronted with situations of antagonism. One way is to go at the other in an efficient, underhand manner, which often enables one to gain his spiteful end under the guise of sincere friendship. Nothing of the sort here! When Cantor and Kronecker fell out, they disagreed all over, threw reserve to the dogs, and do everything but slit the other's throat." Note that whoever changed this removed all references to religion. You can even tell what was changed, because the font for that part of the paragraph that was replaced has noticeably thinner lines than the rest!
In fact, searching for other changes based on ink color turns up two more. On page 559, Bell had referred to Cantor's brother's becoming a German army officer, saying "what a career for a Jew!" This has been changed to "very few Jews ever did." And on page 560, the editor was unable to come up with something that would take up exactly the same (or slightly less) space as the original, and has the change sticking out into the margin! The original reads, "Cantor could not see that the old man [his father] was merely rationalizing his own greed for money." The changed text says, " Cantor could not see that the old man [his father] was merely rationalizing his own absurd ambition."
The whole question of Cantor's Jewishness has been a subject for
debate. For quite a while, it seemed as though Bell had made
this up. However, in footnote 3 on the web page
However, in any case, Bell agrees that Cantor's mother was born a
Roman Catholic, which would make Cantor non-Jewish by Jewish law.
One suspects Cantor is using the definitions of the Nuremberg
Laws instead. Bell's description of Galois's life is also
considerably off the mark--see
Still, Bell's off-hand remarks are sometimes quite *on* the mark.
On page 221, he says, "Shortly after his seventh birthday [1784]
Gauss entered his first school, a squalid relic of the Middle
Ages run by a vile brute . . . whose idea of teaching the hundred
or so boys in his charge was to thrash them into such a state of
terrified stupidity that they forgot their own names. More of
the good old days for which sentimental reactionaries long."
Bell's explanations of the mathematics is not as clear as other
have been. (Mark recommends William Dunham's JOURNEY THROUGH
GENIUS [ISBN 0-140-14739-X] as a better alternative.) I actually
skipped a lot of the mathematics while reading Bell (and we also
read only selected chapters); I was reading more for the external
forces on these mathematicians. (For example, Queen Christina
may have had many good qualities, but she basically killed
Rene Descartes by insisting he tutor her at five in the morning in
an unheated room.) This may still be the classic work, but if you
are going to read only one such work, it may not be the best
one.
[See my comments on the
modifications made to TEN LITTLE INDIANS for more on removing
ethnic slurs from older works of literature.
(
To order Men of Mathematics from amazon.com, click here.
LOOKING BACKWARD
by Edward Bellamy
(Signet, CT339, 1887 [1960], 222+xxii pp):
I have a special connection with this book, since Edward Bellamy was
born in Chicopee Falls, Massachusetts, which was incorporated into my
high school home town of Chicopee. (Chicopee's other claim to fame is
that it is the home of the friction match. It is not, as Mark
sometimes asserts, the home of the self-starting hamster.) And Bellamy
was the editor of the Massachusetts newspaper where my brother is
currently working as a sportswriter.
LOOKING BACKWARD is subtitled "2000-1887," which makes it especially
topical this year. As to its accuracy, or even plausibility . . .
well, we'll see.
Bellamy has a very optimistic view of people and their reaction to all
the rules of this new society. He claims, for example, that "the fact
that the stronger are selected for the leaders is in no way a
reflection on the weaker, but in the interest of the common weal." But
since Bellamy later has Dr. Leete admit, "A man able to duty, and
persistently refusing, is sentenced to solitary imprisonment on bread
and water until he consents," there is apparently some dissension in
this "perfect" society.
There are other imperfections as well, though I suspect Bellamy did not
even realize them. Dr. Leete says, "The great nations of Europe, as
well as Australia, Mexico, and parts of South America, are now
organized industrially like the United States. . . . An international
council regulates . . . their joint policy toward the more backward
races, which are gradually being educated up to civilized
institutions." And no one that Bellamy meets is anything but white, or
Christian. (One wonders if the fact that the narrator was found
entombed on a Friday and fully awoke on a Sunday has additional
meaning.) This easy racism probably went completely unnoticed in 1887;
it is more obvious now.
Throughout the book, there are all sorts of "predictions" which are
off. One obvious one is that people listen to live music by telephone,
but there are no recording devices. On a larger scale, everything
operates smoothly under a planned economy, and we've seen that that
doesn't work that way either. But the interesting part is how all this
is related.
Virginia Postrel's article in the "Wall Street Journal"
(http://interactive.wsj.com/millennium/articles/
SB944517208522468175.htm) sums it up in one sentence: "The future, in
fact, is made of surprise." Futurists, including Bellamy, "didn't
factor in the power of vanity, self-expression, chance, novelty, or
fun." In Bellamy's 2000, nothing is produced unless people have asked
for it, and guaranteed a certian level of consumption. But, as Postrel
notes, "no one fills out a request for rock music, Jacuzzis, or Vidal
Sassoon-style blunt haircuts." Bellamy's characters can choose between
listening to a waltz or organ music, but there are no Beatles, Philip
Glass, or Ice T, nor are the inhabitants of Bellamy's 2000 likely to
wait up one day and request them. (No one in 1900 was likely to
request Van Gogh or Stravinsky either.)
(I will note that Bellamy has his narrator write on December 26, 2000,
"Living as we do in the closing year of the twentieth century,"
indicating that *he* knew when centuries started and ended.)
The particular edition I read is no longer available, but this is
available in a bunch of editions, including a "Dover Thrift Edition"
and on-line at http://eserver.org/fiction/bellamy.
To order Looking Backward in a standard paperback edition from amazon.com, click here.
To order Looking Backward in a "thrift" paperback edition from amazon.com, click here.
IS THAT A FISH IN YOUR EAR?: TRANSLATION AND THE MEANING OF EVERYTHING
by David Bellos:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 01/20/2012]
IS THAT A FISH IN YOUR EAR?: TRANSLATION AND THE MEANING OF
EVERYTHING by David Bellos (ISBN 978-0-86547-857-2) covers a lot of
familiar ground. Bellos's contention is that it is wrong to say
that "poetry is what is lost in translation" or that "a translation
is no substitute for the original." His complaint about the latter
statement seems to be based on a literal meaning of the statement--
as he points out, a translation is *precisely* a substitute for the
original. But even he admits that what is usually meant is that a
translation is not as good as the original, so why does he spend so
much time quibbling over the literal meaning? This is particularly
ironic when he spends so much time explaining why literal word-for-
word translations are often the worst.
But Bellos also ventures into areas not usually discussed in books
about languages and translations. For example, Bellos spends more
time than most authors on the question of translating films. One
fascinating example of the problems of translation that he
discussed was the film THE GREAT ESCAPE. A key moment is when
someone trying to pass as German is tricked into speaking English
when a German officer speaks English to him. What they say is not
important--how they says it is what counts. So a subtitle would
have to say "The German is speaking English" and "The Scot responds
in English." But if you are *dubbing* the movie, you have a real
problem.
Bellos also discusses subtitling, citing accepted rules such as:
According to Bellos, the result is that films for foreign audiences
tend to have less dialogue and longer shots. As he says, "Ingmar
Bergman made two quite different kinds of films--jolly comedies
with lots of words for Swedish consumption, and tight-lipped, moody
dramas for the rest of the world."
Bellos does make an egregious mathematical error, though. He gives
the number of books translated between all pairs of seven different
languages (English, Chinese, Hindi, French, German, Arabic, and
Swedish) between 2000 and 2009. He notes that "nearly 80 percent
of all translations done in all directions between these seven
languages ... are translations from English. ... Translations from
English are all over the place; translations into English are as
rare as hen's teeth." What he does not give are the number of
books actually published in each language. To give an extreme
example, if the other six languages each have one hundred books
published each year, and English has ten thousand, it would not be
surprising that there would be far more translations from English
than into it. The total numbers are more even than that, I
suspect, but Bellos gives no information on them at all. (All his
numbers are based only on books that have been translated.)
Instead he makes reference to the number of people who speak the
various languages, hardly a meaningful figure in this context.
Coincidentally, the Johnson blog on language (named for Samuel
Johnson and written by the staff of "The Economist"), recently
dedicated an entry to "true untranslatability".
Johnson begins by summarizing: "Roman Jakobson, a linguist, is
credited with the notion that languages differ not so much in what
they can express as what they must express. The common trope that
language X has no word for Y is usually useless (it usually means
language X uses several words instead of one for Y). But languages
do differ significantly in what they force speakers to express."
The problem I have is that Johnson's examples also seem more in the
category of "needs more words to express" than "cannot be
expressed."
For example, Johnson cites the sentence "I am loved." In Spanish
and other Latinate languages, Johnson says, the speaker must
declare their sex: "You soy amado" or "Yo soy amada." (One comment
said that in written Spanish one is starting to see sentences like
this rendered as "Yo soy amad@" (unpronouncible, apparently).
However, "Me amada" (or "Me amadan") seems a perfectly viable
alternative: "He (or she) loves me" or "They love me". Lest you
argue that this is too different, this is a whole series of buttons
saying "I am loved" in various languages, and the Russian is "Menya
lyubyat"--"They love me."
Then Johnson says that the common Russian verb of motion "requires
you to express whether you're going by vehicle or foot, one-
direction or multidirectionally, and in the past tense, makes you
include an ending for your own gender. So 'I went' would, in one
Russian word (khodila, say), express 'I [a female] went [by foot]
[and I came back].'" Therefore, Johnson concludes, "I went" is
untranslatable into Russian.
I don't know Russian, but I would bet there is some way to express
"I went" without most of those specifics. (The gender of the
speaker may be the biggest obstacle.) "I was in this place and
then I wasn't", for example, seems to mean something very close to
"I went".
Someone in the comments gave the example of Chinese relationship
words--he can say "elder brother" or "younger brother", but not
just "brother". But can he say "male offspring of my parents"?
I will agree that some of the translations might be awkward, but
that is not quite the same as untranslatable, so in that I guess I
agree with Bellos.
To order Is That a Fish in Your Ear? from amazon.com, click here.
FOUNDATION'S FEAR
by Greg Benford:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 12/13/2002]
I read Greg Benford's FOUNDATION'S FEAR, the first of the
"Second Foundation Trilogy" (even though it precedes the first
"Foundation Trilogy"). The Foundation parts were okay, but the
"Voltaire/Joan of Arc" segments and the "pan" segment broke up the
flow completely and had (apparently) little to do with the main
story. I had heard that this was a problem with this volume, but
that the other two (FOUNDATION AND CHAOS by Greg Bear and
FOUNDATION'S TRIUMPH by David Brin) are much more focused. We'll
see.
To order Foundation's Fear from amazon.com, click here.
MICROCOSMS
edited by Gregory Benford:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 07/30/2004]
In his introduction to the original anthology MICROCOSMS (ISBN
0-7564-0171-2), Gregory Benford mentions such classics of the
sub-genre as Theodore Sturgeon's "Microcosmic God", Frederik Pohl's "The
Tunnel Under the World", and James Blish's "Surface Tension"--all
of which are must-reads. And the first story, Jack McDevitt's
"Act of God", has definite echoes of Moskowitz's story. It is
also one of the strongest stories. (This isn't a big surprise.
The conventional wisdom for na anthology is to put the strongest
story first, the second strongest last, and the rest in-between,
in general trying to separate pairs of stories that are too
similar.)
Geoffrey A. Landis's "Ouroboros" is computer-based, but unlike
some of the other computer-based stories here, is a true microcosm
(rather than just a virtual reality situation). While clever, it
was also a bit obvious, and also dependent on what may at first
appear to be proofreading problems.
Most of the stories in MICROCOSMS, however, seem more about
something other than what I would consider microcosms. Robert
J. Sawyer's "Kata Bindu" does seem to draw somewhat on "Surface
Tension"--but also perhaps on David Brin's "The Crystal Spheres".
Pamela Sargent's "Venus Flowers at Night" has a virtual reality
that someone in our world experiences, not a microcosm in the
sense I would use it. Russell Blackford's "The Name of the Beast
Was Number" suggests the idea of a microcosm, but never goes
anywhere with it. Robert Sheckley'a "A Spirit of Place" is a
limited society, but not a microcosm as I would use the word. Tom
Purdom's "Palace Resolution", George Zebrowski's "My First World',
Paul Levinson's "Critical View"--they're all something *like*
microcosms without actually being them. And Howard V. Hendrix's
"Once Out of Nature" isn't even science fiction so far as I can
tell.
Jamil Nasir's "Dream Walking" is somewhere on the border, and
related, I think, to H. L. Gold's "Mind Partner"--though not quite
as extreme. In fact, the whole idea of recursion seems to be
connected to macrocosms, even since Augustus de Morgan wrote,
"Great fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite 'em, And
little fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum, And the great
fleas themselves, in turn, have greater fleas to go on, While
these again have greater still, and greater still, and so on."
And in "The We Who Sing", Stephen Baxter seems to draw on Olaf
Stapledon in what I suppose could technically be called a
microcosm, although it could be considered a macrocosm just as
easily.
To order Microcosms from amazon.com, click here.
THE UNCOMMON READER
by Alan Bennett:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 04/04/2008]
THE UNCOMMON READER by Alan Bennett (ISBN-13 978-0-374-28096-3,
ISBN-10 0-374-28096-7) is a wonderful book. I love Bennett's
writing in general, and he is at the top of his form here. This
book postdates the film THE QUEEN, and seems to have taken some
inspiration from it, though it may be that those elements I
recognize are things the British already took for granted. The
Queen is the eponymous character, one day coming upon a
bookmobile outside one of the palace gates and feeling obliged to
check out a book. She soon discovers that she likes reading, and
finds her attitudes (toward everything) slowly changing. Bennett
also observes that her position affects her reading in odd ways.
For example, "`... she had handicaps as a reader of Jane Austen
that were peculiarly her own. The essence of Jane Austen lies in
minute social distinctions, distinctions which the Queen's unique
position made it difficult for her to grasp. There was such a
chasm between the monarch and even her grandest subject that the
social differences beyond that were somewhat telescoped. So the
social distinctions of which Jane Austen made so much seemed of
even less consequence to the Queen than they did to the ordinary
reader, thus making the novels much harder going." Highly
recommended for those who love reading, books, libraries, and
plain old good writing.
To order The Uncommon Reader from amazon.com, click here.
THE COMPANY MAN
by Robert Jackson Bennett:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 03/30/2012]
THE COMPANY MAN by Robert Jackson Bennett (ISBN 978-0-316-05470-6)
is basically steampunk, which means it can be seen as alternate
history, but not very effectively--alternate history requires more
actual history, while steampunk emphasizes the technology without
spending more time on politics, or sociology, or other aspects.
(Which is not to say that steampunk ignores the alternate history
aspects, but it does not focus on them.) So while Bennett does
have some geopolitical changes (without McNaughton, he writes, "the
German Crisis might never have been averted"), he does not spend a
lot of time on them, and in fact makes the error of referring to
"Pakistan" in the world of 1920 [page 216]. The name "Pakstan" was
coined by Choudhary Rahmat Ali in 1933 as an acronym of Punjab,
Afghania, Kashmir, Sindh and the suffix -stan from Balochistan.
The "i" was added later to ease pronunciation. (A variety of other
acronymic break-downs were created later to use all the letters.)
Its use by someone in 1920 is completely anachronistic.
THE COMPANY MAN is okay as a noir steampunk, but if you are looking
for alternate history, you will be disappointed.
To order The Company Man from amazon.com, click here.
WHY TRUTH MATTERS
by Ophelia Benson and Jeremy Stangroom:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 03/02/2007]
WHY TRUTH MATTERS by Ophelia Benson and Jeremy Stangroom (ISBN-10
0-8264-7608-2, ISBN-13 978-0-826-47608-1) has what they claim as
the answer on the back: "Truth matters because we are the only
species we know of that has the ability to find it out." This is
clarified inside as "we have the kind of brain that can
conceptualize reality as existing independent of us." But first
of all, whether we are the only species who can do this is
certainly arguable, and second, having said this on page 21, the
authors are left with the rest of the book to discuss the various
ways in which people marginalize truth (e.g., wishful thinking,
cultural relativism, etc.). It is all a bit unstructured, and
with a lot of mentions of modern philosophers, scientists, and
events that assume the reader is familiar with them. Continuum
Press seems to publish books on philosophy, but I would say they
are aimed more at the serious student of philosophy than at the
general public.
To order Why Truth Matters from amazon.com, click here.
TRENT'S LAST CASE
by E. C. Bentley:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 10/28/2005]
TRENT'S LAST CASE by E. C. Bentley (0-06-080440-8) is one of the
classics that Thompson discusses. Bentley was tired of the
"infallible detective", so his Trent is definitely not
infallible. And as part of my on-going cataloguing of anti-
Semitism in early twentieth century English mysteries, I'll cite
one sentence from this 1913 novel: "In Paris a well-known banker
walked quietly out of the Bourse and fell dead upon the broad
steps among the raving crowd of Jews, a phial crushed in his
hand."
To order Trent's Last Case from amazon.com, click here.
WHEN LIFE NEARLY DIED
by Michael J. Benton:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 05/07/2004]
Michael J. Benton's WHEN LIFE NEARLY DIED is a rather dry
discussion of mass extinctions in general and the Permian
extinction in particular. I could never figure out how the
information was arranged. Just when I had decided he was tracing
the history of our understanding of extinctions chronologically,
there would be a digression that threw off the continuity.
Intriguing stuff, but hard to read.
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 05/21/2004]
Two weeks ago, I wrote about Michael J. Benton's book about the
Permian mass extinction, WHEN LIFE NEARLY DIED. In the book, he
attributed the extinction to volcanic eruptions, but new evidence
may indicate that it was caused by an asteroid impact instead.
See http://tinyurl.com/2lvyc for more details. For an article
disputing the new evidence, see http://tinyurl.com/26my4.
To order When Life Nearly Died from amazon.com, click here.
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 12/07/2007]
Before seeing the film BEOWULF, I decided to re-read the poem
BEOWULF. I read the translation by Burton Raffel, because that
was one of the ones in the house, but I would recommend a more
recent translation: Seamus Heaney's is highly recommended
(ISBN-13 978-0-393-32097-8, ISBN-10 0-393-32097-0). Mark has
reviewed the film in the 11/23/07 issue of the MT VOID, but I
wanted to comment on the similarities and differences between the
two. At first, I was reasonably impressed with how the film
stuck to the poem. The arrival of the Geats was pretty much as
written, and the swimming competition included, even though it
was not critical to the main plot. It was, in fact, fairly
faithful up until the moment that Beowulf walks into the cave to
kill Grendel's mother. Well, except for adding a fair amount of
sex, and having Beowulf completely naked during the fight with
Grendel. The latter change resulted in a lot of austin-power-
izing, with strategically placed elbows, tankards, and so on.
And the original had no hint of Beowulf and Hrothgar's wife being
interested in each other. But from the point Beowulf enters the
cave, it all falls apart (from the point of view of
faithfulness). Grendel's mother did not look like Angelina
Jolie, and the various connections with Hrothgar, Beowulf, and
her were non-existent in the poem. And the dragon episode in the
poem was a completely separate episode that took place back in
Sweden, not in Denmark, and was completely independent of the
Grendel story.
Also, they changed the "attitude" of the story. In the original
poem, Beowulf and others are boastful, but this is considered a
good thing. Modesty was not prized in Beowulf's society. But in
the film, after Beowulf recounts the story of the swimming
competition, one of his warriors says to another something to the
effect that the last time Beowulf told the story, he had killed
three sea monsters, and this time he claimed nine--a very
unlikely thing for a fellow warrior to do in Beowulf's time.
The film--with its special effects--is entertaining, but I felt
that all the added love interests detracted from the epic nature
of the tale.
To order Beowulf from amazon.com, click here.
THE MANUAL OF DETECTION
by Jedediah Berry:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 12/11/2009]
THE MANUAL OF DETECTION by Jedediah Berry (ISBN-13
978-1-59420-211-7) is described as Borgesian, but is more
Kafka-esque in its portrayal of the Agency as the all-seeing,
never-sleeping watchdog of society. But there is also a heavy
layer of noir, the question of what is reality and what is dream,
and a use of carnivals--one carnival owner is named Caligari, and
there are similarities to Ray Bradbury's carnivals as well. If I
had to pick the strongest similarity, though, it would be to Alex
Proyer's film DARK CITY, even to the significance of the beach.
Berry's protagonist is a clerk in the Agency, and the case names he
has chosen for his files--the Oldest Murdered Man, the Three Deaths
of Colonel Baker, and the Man Who Stole November 12th--give the
reader a feel for the strangeness, while also evoking the
traditional detective story. (The name "The Three Deaths of
Colonel Baker" sounds like something from Arthur Conan Doyle, but
the explanation is more Agatha Christie.) And Berry's character
names are always notable, perhaps too much so. From the detective
Charles Unwin, to his predecessor Travis T. Sivart (a palindrome
*and* a pun), to his secretary Emily Doppel, to Hoffman and
Caligari and all the rest of them, Berry has tried to make his
characters' names meaningful, but there are times that he seems to
be pushing too hard. Still, the novel is captivating, and almost
hypnotic at times, and so I recommend it.
To order The Manual of Detection from amazon.com, click here.
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 01/05/2007]
I was reading a "New Yorker" article on Bible publishing
(<
http://www.newyorker.com/printables/fact/061218fa_fact1)
which said "ninety-one per cent of American households own at
least one Bible--the average household owns four." Well, we are
not an average household: we have eleven--or so. "Or so" because
I am not sure how to count partial Bibles. Does one copy of the
Tanakh (Old Testament) and one copy of the New Testament count as
one Bible or two? How do I count an abridged version? Does the
Apocrypha count?
Okay, since you are probably wondering, the various versions are
the King James Version, King James Version (Canongate, only some
books), New King James Version (Extreme Word Study Bible), New
International Version (travel edition), New International Version
(Study Bible), New English Bible (New Testament only), Douai (Old
Testament only, abridged), Jewish Translation Society (1917 and
1985 translations), U. S. Army Jewish Scriptures (abridged), and
the "Black Bible Chronicles". Also the Apocrypha (Modern
Library), and an interlinear New Testament.
"Extreme Word" edition of the Bible:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 12/07/2007]
A few weeks ago, in the 11/02/07 issue of the MT VOID, I talked
about how Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch explains the problems in
reading the Bible as literature. Among other problems, he says
that poetry is printed as prose, paragraphs and even sentences
are broken into short verses, and then we "pepper the result all
over with italics and numerals, print it in double columns, with
a marginal gutter on each side, each gutter pouring down an inky
flow of references and cross-references." Well, in pulling out
books to read along with this course, I ran across the "Extreme
Word" edition of the Bible, which attempts to address at least
some of these problems. It reduces the chapter numbers to a
light blue background design at the start of the chapter, and
verse numbers to very small, faintly printed numbers. While it
does have two columns, paragraphs look like paragraphs, and there
are even topic heading (e.g. "Jeroboam II Reigns in Israel").
The marginal gutters are a function of trying to get an enormous
book into a single volume (hence the tissue-thin paper in most
editions as well), but footnotes have taken the place of marginal
notes. The footnotes are no worse than a lot of non-fiction
books these days, and the sidebars are presented in the same way
that one finds in news magazines, etc. There are still some
random italics, though.
To order "Extreme Word" edition of the Bible from amazon.com, click here.
FANTASTIC FABLES
by Ambrose Bierce:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 06/17/2005]
Ambrose Bierce's FANTASTIC FABLES (ISBN 0-486-22225-X) is full of
cynical fables. A sample: "A Man Running for Office was
overtaken by Lightning. "'You see,' said the Lightning, as it
crept by him inch by inch, 'I can travel considerably faster than
you.' 'Yes,' the Man Running for Office replied, 'but think how
much longer I keep going.'"
There is also "Aesopus Emendatus", a collection of twists on
Aesop's fables, such as: "A fox, seeing some sour grapes hanging
within an inch of his nose, and being unwilling to admit that
there was anything he would not eat, solemnly declared that they
were out of his reach."
As noted, there is a very strong thread of cynicism in this
collection. It wouldn't surprise me to learn that Bierce ended
up so disillusioned with humanity that he went off to Mexico with
a death wish.
To order Fantastic Fables from amazon.com, click here.
WEAPONS OF CHOICE
by John Birmingham:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 02/11/2005]
Most of what I said about Charles Stross's THE FAMILY TRADE goes for John Brimingham's WEAPONS OF
CHOICE (ISBN 0-345-45712-9) as well. At least WEAPONS OF CHOICE
is in trade paperback rather than hardback, but it is book one of
a trilogy, so it's still $48 for the whole story. However, the
Stross has "Book One of The Merchant Princes" right on the front
in fairly large print; WEAPONS OF CHOICE has "The first novel in
a three-book epic, the Axis of Time trilogy" in much smaller
print on the back. The premise is that part of a multi-national
naval task force from 2021 gets transmitted back to 1942 Midway.
(Yes, it sounds a lot like THE PHILADELPHIA EXPERIMENT.) The
reaction of the 1942 military to the diverse make-up of their
2021 counterparts is worth investigating up to a point, but
Birmingham seems to want to deal with every possible permutation
of problem and reaction, and it becomes repetitive after a while.
In addition to the usual American "types", the multi-national
aspect lets Birmingham have Japanese, Asians, and Russians as
well. (I find it interesting that his 2021 military team has a
high-ranking lesbian, but apparently no gay male personnel. I
still haven't decided if 1942 personnel should have more problems
dealing with a black lesbian commander or a gay male sailor.)
One reason the story is/will be so long is that Birmingham is
spening at least a novel's worth of exposition on the inter-
personal relationships, at least another novel's worth of
exposition on the military strategy, and another large chunk on
the aspect of having the 2021 folks trying to 1) convince the
1942 folks that they really are from 2021, and 2) explain what
will happen in the war, all the secret details the 1942 people
don't know, etc. The problem is that my inter-weaving them, the
whole thing seems stretched thin.
To order Weapons of Choice from amazon.com, click here.
AT THE CITY LIMITS OF FATE
by Michael Bishop (Edgewood Press, ISBN 0-9629066-6-2, 1996, 328p):
Michael Bishop holds the somewhat ambiguous honor of having the
most Hugo nominations without a win of any author (nine). But
although three of his nominated short fiction pieces are in the
time span covered by this book, none of them are included here. On
the other hand, the book has a central theme of religion that,
while not completely absent from any of Bishop's work (no pun
intended), is better represented by the lesser-known works featured
here.
The book starts out aptly enough with "Beginnings," with two
thieves hanging on either side of Yeshua on Golgotha. It ends with
the modern-day trial of Judas Iscariot in "I, Iscariot" (a concept
echoed strangely in James Morrow's Blameless in Abaddon, where it
is God on trial instead).
In between, Bishop looks at a snake-handling cult in "Among the
Handlers," introduces Saint Augustine to a traveler who tells him
about the science and technology to come in "For Thus Do I Remember
Carthage," and combines God and the mass media in "God's Hour."
In addition to the theme of religion, Bishop also has a Japanese
undercurrent to his work, from a discussion of Japanese Zeros in
"000-00-0000" to Yukio Mishima in "At the City Limits of Fate" to
"Reading the Silks." Yet although certain theme recur, each story
is an individual. Unlike many authors, Bishop seems to produce
something fresh each time. Well, okay, two of his Hugo-nominated
works are sequels to other works--"The White Otters of Childhood"
and Brittle Innings--but they are sequels to two classics in the
field, and Bishop definitely gives each of them it a fresh
viewpoint. Bishop can write derivative works that are not
derivative, while most authors seem to write "new" works that are
derivative.
Bishop uses a variety of styles here, a variety of voices, and a
variety of techniques, and they all work. Again, I am reminded of
the two very different styles he maintained throughout Brittle
Innings. In any case, Bishop is living proof that in the battle of
form versus substance, they can both be winners. I highly
recommend this book (and indeed any of Bishop's work). Unless you
live near a science fiction specialty shop, you will probably have
to have it special-ordered. It's worth it.
(In case you're wondering, Bishop's nominated stories are "Death
and Designation Among the Asadi" [1973], "The White Otters of
Childhood" [1973], "Cathadonian Odyssey" [1974], "Rogue Tomato"
[1975], "The Samurai and the Willows" [1976], "The Quickening"
[1981], "A Gift from the Graylanders" [1985],
"Cri de Coeur" [1994], and Brittle Innings [1994]. Now wouldn't
that make a hell of a collection!]
To order At the City Limits of Fate from amazon.com, click here.
A CROSS OF CENTURIES
edited by Michael Bishop:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 10/12/2007]
A CROSS OF CENTURIES edited by Michael Bishop (ISBN-13
978-1-56025-926-8, ISBN-10 1-56025-926-4) is a collection of
stories, mostly reprints, dealing with Jesus in some form or
other. This is a collection that may appeal more to believers
(although too specific a belief may also be an obstacle). Worth
noting is that Bishop says in his introduction, "Finally, I want
to acknowledge contributor Barry Malzberg's insightful objection
to any and all theme anthologies: the loss of surprise and so of
pleasure attending readers' awareness that at some point, in some
way, the tale before them absolutely *must* deal with an aspect of
that theme." (But this did not stop Malzberg from allowing the
inclusion of his own story "Understanding Entropy"--nor is there
any reason why it should.)
To order A Cross of Centuries from amazon.com, click here.
EASY RIDERS, RAGING BULLS
by Peter Biskind:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 01/30/2004]
Peter Biskind's EASY RIDERS, RAGING BULLS was recommended as a
good summary of the 1970s in Hollywood. However, it seemed to
spend more time on all the scandal and gossip than I was
interested. Also Biskind has an annoying habit of referring to
people sometimes by their first names and sometimes by their last,
often in the same paragraph. This made it hard to keep track of
what was going on. ("Who the heck is this 'Bob' he's talking
about here?") (I found out later it was put together from a lot
of articles which Biskind wrote for "Premiere" magazine, which
would explain some of the inconsistencies in name references, as
well as the very jerky writing style, where one feels one is being
whipsawed around.)
To order Easy Riders, Raging Bulls from amazon.com, click here.
DEBT-FREE U
by Zac Bissonnette:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 04/20/2012]
DEBT-FREE U by Zac Bissonnette (ISBN 978-1-59184-298-9) is an
explanation of how you (or your child) can go to college without
ending up with massive loan debt or bankrupting your family. Many
of his suggestions seem reasonable, but I cannot say I agree with
all of them. (Disclaimer: I went to college from 1968 to 1972,
when in-state tuition at the University of Massachusetts was $100 a
semester, and the most expensive textbook was a forestry text for
$23. Coincidentally, Bissonnette is also going to the University
of Massachusetts.)
For example, Bissonnette talks about how to improve your chances
for merit scholarships and grants, which are outright gifts, not
loans. He explains the formulas used for various financial aid
applications--for example, why using your liquid assets to pay down
your mortgage might make more sense than holding onto the cash. He
feels that campus tours are (*at best*) a waste of time and money.
And so on. His basic message is that you should go to a school you
can afford (which may mean working part- or even full-time) rather
than take out a lot of loans that will take the rest of your life
to pay off.
His major contention is that going to college is more important
than going to any particular college, and he spends a lot of time
doing marginal cost and marginal return calculations on public
state colleges versus Ivy League colleges.
But Bissonnette makes a few claims that I do not think are true, or
certainly not universally true. For example, he claims that there
is no reason for students not to take their core requirements
(English, history, French, etc.) at a community college and then go
to a four-year (state) college for the courses in their major. But
another book I read recently, IN THE BASEMENT OF THE IVORY TOWER:
CONFESSIONS OF AN ACCIDENTAL ACADEMIC by Professor X, the author
describes his experiences as a teacher at a community college.
Bissonnette claims that while at four-year colleges, students are
likely to find themselves taught by graduate students, at community
colleges they will be taught by real professors. "Professor X"
(that's a pseudonym, not a real title) says that most of the
courses are taught by "adjuncts", or low-paid part-timers.
Bissonnette claims that the quality of learning at a community
college is equal to that at a four-year college. Professor X
describes composition classes where students are barely literate,
cannot write a real sentence, and are totally unprepared for any
sort of college-level work. I defy Bissonnette to get a college-
level education in a class like that.
He also seems to think that a full-time college student can work
full-time (or close to it) as well. For example, he claims that
the average college student spends 24 hours per week watching
television, 10.2 hours drinking, and 4.1 hours on video games. He
then says that these hours could be spent on a job. Well, yes, but
he does not take into account that this results in no "de-
compression" time--the student ends up running on high all day.
(He also does not figure out how much time will be required to get
to and from a job.) I do not disagree with the notion of working
to earn money for college, but I think suggesting that students can
carry a full course load (actually he recommends an *over-full*
load so you can graduate faster) *and* a full-time job is a way to
end up with more students dropping out.
And although Bissonnette keeps talking about how great an education
one can get at a public university, when he describes astronaut
Sally Ride as "the first woman in space", he does not help his
credibility.
To order Debt-Free U from amazon.com, click here.
"It's a *Good* Life"
by Jerome Bixby:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 07/16/2004]
The short stories nominated for the Retro Hugo for Short Story were all of high-quality, and all award-worthy,
but I would pick "It's a *Good* Life" by Jerome Bixby, and not
just because it was made into a "Twilight Zone" story. It is a
very effective horror piece on its own.
YEAR OF THE HANGMAN
by Gary Blackwood:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 11/22/2003]
Gary Blackwood's YEAR OF THE HANGMAN is a
very well-done alternate history about a failed American
Revolution. In fact, though it is a young adult book, it is
still one of the best alternate histories I've read this year,
in part because it deals with society and isn't just a sequence
of alternate battle maneuvers.
To order Year of the Hangman from amazon.com, click here.
THREE VICTORIAN DETECTIVE NOVELS
by Everett F. Bleiler:
Everett F. Bleiler's THREE VICTORIAN DETECTIVE NOVELS is a real
bargain, with three for the price of one: Andrew Forrester's "The
Unknown Weapon", Wilkie Collins's "My Lady's Money", and Israel
Zangwill's "The Big Bow Mystery". "The Unknown Weapon" (1864) is
probably the first modern detective story to have a female
detective. Unfortunately, the denouement seems too much like
pulling a rabbit out of a hat, although that may be a function of
the more modern policy of providing all the necessary clues to the
reader. "My Lady's Money" (1877) is a very early "drawing room"
mystery, and more satisfying. And "The Big Bow Mystery" (1891) is
the first real "locked room" mystery, and handles that aspect in a
very deft manner. I will point out that although "The Big Bow
Mystery" has its share of lower-class characters, it is not set in
the London-Jewish milieu that Zangwill is best known for.
To order Three Victorian Detective Novels from amazon.com, click here.
"A Case of Conscience"
by James Blish:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 07/02/2004]
My first choice for the Novella Retro Hugo is the novella "A Case of Conscience" by James
Blish, which forms the first part of the novel A CASE OF
CONSCIENCE. I will admit a predilection for theological science
fiction. I realize this seems to contradict my complaint about
Connie Willis's Christmas fantasies last week, but theological
discussion is not the same as religious content. And Blish leaves
his readers to draw their own conclusions, rather than dictating a
set explanation. Certainly the question of whether one can have a
completely moral society without religion (or more specifically,
at least in the story, without God) is still a topic of
discussion.
"Earthman, Come Home"
by James Blish:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 07/16/2004]
James Blish's novelette "Earthman, Come Home" suffered by
being a part of a larger cycle--it ended up as the last two
chapters of the last book of CITIES IN FLIGHT. Since I was not
familiar with what led up to it, I found it flat. (I still think,
though, that the scene in DARK CITY when the city is revealed is
the ultimate Blishian moment.)
CLASSIC HORROR WRITERS
by Harold Bloom:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 05/13/2005]
Harold Bloom's CLASSIC HORROR WRITERS (ISBN 0-7910-2201-3) has
chapters on Ambrose Bierce, Charles Brockden Brown, Henry James,
J. Sheridan LeFanu, "Monk" Lewis, Charles Robert Maturin, Edgar
Allan Poe, Ann Radcliffe, Mary Shelley, Robert Louis Stevenson,
Bram Stoker, and Horace Walpole. Each chapter has a brief
biography, "critical extracts", and a bibliography. The critics'
comments are obviously more meaningful if you are familiar with
the authors and their major works, so this is more for someone
who is already somewhat knowledgeable about 18th and 19th century
horror fiction than for someone looking for an introductory work.
To order Classic Horror Writers from amazon.com, click here.
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