All reviews copyright 1984-2012 Evelyn C. Leeper.
SUICIDE EXCEPTED by Cyril Hare:
I found SUICIDE EXCEPTED (1954) by Cyril Hare way too obvious--I knew who the guilty party was a quarter of the way through, with confirming clues showing up every few chapters after that as well. I don't think it's just because reading a lot of mysteries makes them easier--others are still just as surprising as before.
To order Suicide Excepted from amazon.com, click here.
Origins of Ancient Civilizations by Professor Kenneth Harl:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 05/14/2010]
"Origins of Ancient Civilizations" by Professor Kenneth Harl is another course from The Teaching Company. Having just finished "Human Prehistory and the First Civilizations", this seemed like a good next choice. And Harl has turned out to be a bit more engaging than Prof. Brian M. Fagan, and certainly a faster talker. One gets the impression that one is getting considerably more than thirty minutes' worth in a half hour.
Of course, as usual, I can find things with which to disagree. In the second lecture, Fagan is discussing literacy and tries to define what constitutes a fully-formed written language (as opposed to, say, a minimal set of pictograms or a bunch of knotted strings). But he falls into a circular reasoning trap when he says that a fully-formed written language is one that can convey everything that the spoken language does. He doesn't seem to recognize that even our written language does not meet this requirement: it does not convey emotion, or tone, or various other content. And I am not sure that other current languages would meet this. Alphabetic languages probably would, but would a pictographic language such as Chinese? (For that matter, I'm not sure that Hebrew without the vowels would even meet the requirement.)
Harl also talks about agglutinative versus inflected languages (in the context of ancient Sumerian), which will sound familiar to people who have read Neal Stephenson's SNOWCRASH.
LAND OF THE DEAD by Thomas Harlan:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 12/25/2009]
I started LAND OF THE DEAD by Thomas Harlan (ISBN-13 978-0-765-31204-4, ISBN-10 0-765-31204-2), set in a world in which the Japanese reached the Aztecs before the Spanish did. However, it had two strikes against it. First, it is the third in the "Time of the Sixth Sun" series. And second, it begins with three pages explaining the measurements and Mexica ship names, and a long table of equivalences between military ranks of the Mexica, Nisei, fleet, and army/navy ranks. An attempt to read it decided it--the first few pages seemed to assume a knowledge of what had come before that I did not have. The series may be good, but one apparently has to start with the first book.
To order Land of the Dead from amazon.com, click here.
WORLDSHAKER by Richard Harland:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 04/01/2011]
WORLDSHAKER by Richard Harland (ISBN 978-1-4169-9552-4) is a steampunk alternate history, heavy on the steampunk and light on the alternate history. The turning point is (points are?) the Napoleonic Wars, which in this world do not end in 1814, but drag on and on, leading to increased technology such as two-mile-long juggernauts that have become the equivalent of generation ships, with a social structure apparently inspired by H. G. Wells. The likelihood of this alternate history is negligible (which, I suppose, is true of most steampunk). If you like this sort of thing, then this is the sort of thing you will like.
To order Worldshaker from amazon.com, click here.
"The Rose" by Charles L. Harness:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 07/02/2004]
"The Rose" by Charles L. Harness is about a confrontation between science and art, but frankly it struck me as a lot of mumbo-jumbo.
FATHERLAND by Robert Harris:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 12/05/2008]
Our two discussion groups meet jointly in November because the science fiction group usually meets on the fourth Thursday of the month. So we try to pick a science fiction book that has appeal to non-science fiction fans as well. In previous years we have chosen THE EYRE AFFAIR by Jasper Fforde, BRING THE JUBILEE by Ward Moore, THE WOMAN AND THE APE by Peter Hoeg, KING AND JOKER by Peter Dickinson; this year we chose FATHERLAND by Robert Harris. One thing you may notice about this list is that all except the Hoeg are alternate histories. This ties in with my panel at this year's Philcon, "Are Alternate Histories Really Science Fiction?" It seems to be true that one reaction people have to the books we have chosen is "Is this really science fiction?" After all, there are no rockets, robots, or rivets.
The answer to "Are alternate histories really science fiction?" seems to be yes, though the explanation varies. Take your pick of:
Regarding FATHERLAND, reading it led people to do further research on the "White Rose" student anti-Nazi movement and Sophie Scholl (about whom there was a biopic last year), and to a discussion of Nazi architecture, both that which was built and that which was merely in the planning stages. (In FATHERLAND, these plans have come to fruition.) We had a brief digression about the Berlin Wall, and I was startled to realize that there was one group member who not only did not remember the Wall going up--she hadn't been born yet when the Wall came down! (The first item on the Beloit College "Mindset List for the Class of 2100" is "What Berlin Wall?" it also notes that for "most of the ... members of the Class of 2011, ... Alvin Ailey, Andrei Sakharov, Huey Newton, Emperor Hirohito, Ted Bundy, Abbie Hoffman, and Don the Beachcomber have always been dead."
A few additional items from that list:
9. Nelson Mandela has always been free and a force in
South Africa.
10. Pete Rose has never played baseball.
16. Women have always been police chiefs in major cities.
18. The NBA season has always gone on and on and on and on.
34. They were introduced to Jack Nicholson as "The Joker."
42. Women's studies majors have always been offered on campus.
64. Chavez has nothing to do with iceberg lettuce and
everything to do with oil.
66. The World Wide Web has always been an online tool.
68. Burma has always been Myanmar.
69. Dilbert has always been ridiculing cubicle culture.
I will dispute #4, though ("They never 'rolled down' a car window.") since I got a new rental car last month that had windows that rolled down.
And I will cite #17: "They were born the year Harvard Law Review editor Barack Obama announced he might run for office some day."
To order Fatherland from amazon.com, click here.
"Stars & Stripes" trilogy by Harry Harrison:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 02/07/2003]
I finished Harry Harrison's "Stars & Stripes" trilogy (STARS & STRIPES FOREVER, STARS & STRIPES IN PERIL, and STARS & STRIPES TRIUMPHANT). The premise is that an actual event at the start of the American Civil War triggered a genuine rift with England, who then sided with the Confederacy, although their attempts to aid the Confederacy backfired. I have two complaints about the trilogy. One, the whole progression of events seems a bit simplistic, and rather biased in its politics. And two, if one were to remove the parts that served to remind readers of events in previous volumes, and to tighten up the writing, this could easily be one book instead of a trilogy for which readers had to wait two years and pay three times as much for the whole thing. This may be a sad side effect of all of Harry Turtledove's alternate history series--publishers and authors now feel that all alternate histories should be series.
To order Stars & Stripes Forever from amazon.com, click here.
To order Stars & Stripes in Peril from amazon.com, click here.
To order Stars & Stripes Truiumphant from amazon.com, click here.
THE YEAR 2000 edited by Harry Harrison (Ace, ISBN 0-441-00406-7, 1997, 326pp, hardback): edited by Harry Harrison (Berkley, ISBN 0-425-02117-3, 1970, 254pp, paperback):
In 1970, Harry Harrison had thirteen authors write stories set thiry years in the future, in the year 2000. Well, having arrived there, I thought this might be a good time to see how close or far these stories are from reality.
The beginning of the first story, Fritz Leiber's "America the Beautiful," gives you a feel for what these stories are like: "I am returning to England. I am shorthanding this, July 5, 2000, aboard the Dallas-London rocket as it arches silently out of the diffused violet daylight of the stratosphere into the eternally star-spangled purple night of the ionosphere." The story itself deals with both the rising tensions between America and "the Communist League," and the generally self-satisfied feeling that Americans have with themselves. If the former has turned out to be false, there is still some truth in the latter.
The second story ("Prometheus Rebound" by Daniel F. Galouye) reads like something out of the 1930s, making me wonder what he was thinking the year 2000 would be like.
Before there was Mike Resnick, there was Chad Oliver, and before there was "Kirinyaga" there was "Far from This Earth," Oliver's story of progress, if progress it be, in Kenya. It's surprising, in fact, that this was not one of the inspirations for Resnick's series, but it wasn't.
Naomi Mitchison's "After the Accident" is a rather straight-forward genetic engineering story. And "Utopian" by Mack Reynolds reads like one of those stilted Utopian stories from decades ago, right down to people saying things like "If we were still using the somewhat inefficient calendar of your period, this would be approximately the year 2000."
Like Reynolds's story, "Sea Change" by A. Bertram Chandler deals with someone who has "time-traveled" (via deep sleep) from 1970 to 2000. And similarly, Chandler also has a theme of "the old best are sometimes the best," though in a different sense than Reynolds.
Robert Silverberg is one of the two authors who thought the race issue would be critical over the next thirty years. Though his racially separated society of "Black Is Beautiful" did not arise, his story does raise issues that are relevant today, not least of which is when does autonomy become just segregation under a different name. (The paperback edition has an unfortunate typo at the beginning, with "1933" instead of "1983.")
The other story of race relations is "American Dead" by Harry Harrison, and it paints an even gloomier view of the conflict between black and white. What is of interest is that neither Silverberg nor Harrison has any other racial influences in his story. Missing are the Asians and the Hispanics who certainly have an impact in the racial politics of the United States in the year 2000.
"The Lawgiver" by Keith Laumer is still very topical today with its theme of "right-to-life" issues, though a bit heavy-handed, I thought.
Though in real life J. J. Coupling was involved in communications technology (under his real name, John R. Pierce, he was an executive director in Bell Labs when he wrote his story), "To Be a Man" is more about bioengineering. However, it has some very "modern" ideas, in particular more of the concepts that Greg Egan is using these days. (I was particularly reminded of Egan's "Reasons to be Cheerful.")
One note: of the thirteen authors, only Aldiss, Coupling, Harrison, Masson, and Silverberg are still alive to see how it really turned out. And the used bookstore where Mark or I bought this went out of business a few years ago as well, after being in existence more than a hundred years.
To order The Year 2000 from amazon.com, click here.
HAUNTED GROUND by Erin Hart:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 01/11/2008]
HAUNTED GROUND by Erin Hart (ISBN-13 978-0-743-27210-0, ISBN-10 0-743-27210-2) was chosen by the newly formed afternoon book discussion group at my library. This is a mystery novel involving a skull found in an Irish peat bog, a missing woman and his child, and the murder of the sister of one of the main characters. I have to admit that I had some problems keeping the characters straight because I had no feel for how to pronounce most of the Irish names, and that appears to be how I remember names. (Strangely, I remember books visually, seeing the cover as part of my re-collection.) Anyway, I found this book disconcerting--there was something about it that made me think of it as a science fiction book (which it is not), but the writing style seemed wrong for that. The end was a bit too convenient, and overall I was underwhelmed. Your mileage may vary. [-ecl]
To order Haunted Ground from amazon.com, click here.
THE BLACK SPHINX by Matt Hart:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 02/23/2007]
THE BLACK SPHINX by Matt Hart (ISBN-10 0-552-55421-9, ISBN-13 978-0-552-55421-3) is a young adult novel from Britain. The premise is some sort of alternate history, where London is a small village, and Wolveston is the big metropolis. Except for that, there is little alternate history aspect, and it is more a straight fantasy novel with Dickensian influences. (I guess I was hoping for a world in which the Egyptian dynasties and religion survived.) However, as a fantasy it is pretty good. The cover illustration, by David Richards, is reminiscent of Edward Gorey. (The back cover, however, is rather hideous, as someone apparently decided to maximize the number of fonts used; I think there were fifteen, but it was hard to tell.) And to give the young readers something to do besides just read the book, each page has a couple of words from the Black Sphinx's curse, done as a substitution code with heiroglyphs for letters. I did not bother to decode 294 pages of these, but someone might.
To order The Black Sphinx from amazon.com, click here.
PLAINSONG by Kent Haruf:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 05/30/2008]
Our book discussion group read PLAINSONG by Kent Haruf (ISBN-13 978-0-375-70585-4, ISBN-10 0-375-70585-6). It was better than a lot of the current fiction chosen for discussion groups in that the people all seem like the sort of people you might meet in the supermarket--there are no serial killers, wacko fundamentalists, etc. But the one element I am going to comment on is the lack of quotation marks. From what I read about this, this may be a new trend among fiction writers: leaving out the quotation marks altogether and having the paragraph structure and internal clues let the reader know who is talking. Many reviewers liked this, saying it gave the book an immediacy and a feeling of involvement for the reader. Others found it distracting and confusing. I am in the latter camp. It was not always confusing, but as someone who grew up reading books with quotation marks, I did find it distracting. It is perhaps less of a gimmick than writing an entire book without the letter "e", but it still seems a gimmick.
To order Plainsong from amazon.com, click here.
SHERLOCK HOLMES AND THE DISAPPEARING PRINCE AND OTHER STORIES by Edmund Hastie:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 04/03/2009]
Another collection in the F. A. Thorpe "Large Print Linford Mystery Library" series that my library had was SHERLOCK HOLMES AND THE DISAPPEARING PRINCE AND OTHER STORIES by Edmund Hastie (ISBN-13 978-1-84782-110-2, ISBN-10 1-84782-110-3). These were "original" pastiches, in the sense that they were not based on cases referred to by Doyle. The title story is about the disappearance of the Crown Prince of Japan from Oxbridge (that marvelous merging of Oxford and Cambridge, used by writers to avoid insulting either one or the other), and is reasonably well-written. The other stories are actually fairly weak and poorly written--not too surprising when you realize that the author was fourteen years old when he wrote them. (I suppose what is surprising is that the first one is as good as it is.) I'm not even sure why it was published, as it just lowers the overall quality of the line.
To order Sherlock Holmes and the Disappearing Prince from amazon.com, click here.
MOUNTAINS OF THE PHARAOHS by Zahi Hawass:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 02/08/2008]
I listened to MOUNTAINS OF THE PHARAOHS by Zahi Hawass (read by Simon Vance) (ISBN-13 978-0-385-50305-1, ISBN-10 0-385-50305-9; audiobook ISBN-13 978-1-400-13280-5, ISBN-10 1-400-13280-0) on a recent trip. Many parts merely reinforced the adage that a picture is worth a thousand words--listening to the reader describing the layout of a tomb complex, complete with measurements (and given in both metric and English units to boot!) was less than edifying.
Hawass stresses that the pyramids were built by the ancient Egyptians, not by aliens or Atlanteans. He talks about this emphatically in the introduction. A few chapters later, he refers to the builders, and says "the men who built the pyramids- -and they were men..." and I found myself wondering for a minute why he was emphasizing that women did not build the pyramids. And then I realized that by "men" he meant "humans", not "males". Hawass also emphasized his belief that the pyramids were not built by slaves, but by volunteer labor. He tries to give the impression of freely given labor, but his description ultimately sounds more like corvee (labor in lieu of taxes) than true volunteers.
To order Mountains of the Pharaohs from amazon.com, click here.
WHY YOU SHOULD READ KAFKA BEFORE YOU WASTE YOUR LIFE by James Hawes:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 09/18/2009]
WHY YOU SHOULD READ KAFKA BEFORE YOU WASTE YOUR LIFE (British title: EXCAVATING KAFKA) by James Hawes (ISBN-13 978-0-312-37651-2, ISBN-10 0-312-37651-0) could have been interesting, as Hawes sets out to demolish all the things we think we know about Kafka. It starts out in a promising way, including a (possibly) unintentional joke. When Hawes is talking about the fame of Kafka and how it extends even to those who have not read Kafka, he says, "The brooding face of Kafka has become the icon of that K.-myth and his name, typographically irresistible to anyone from west of the Rhine ... has entered the languages of the world in the term kafkaesque, used wherever guiltless people are trapped in some nightmarish bureaucratic catch-22." [page 5] Everyone understands that sentence--even those who have never read Joseph Heller!
But then he drifts into a world of his own making, where he is so against that idea that there might be any truth in the "Tide of History" theory that he writes:
"So when a recent biographer of Kafka (Nicholas Murray) writes with a straight face of 'the long-standing debate about whether Kafka foresaw the fate of the Jews in Nazi Europe,' I throw his book across the room. '*Foresaw?*' Sorry, what is he trying to say? That history is prewritten? That it is all out there already, just sitting and waiting? This is no *debate*, this is plain and simple tripe that belongs in 'Star Trek' or 'Dr. Who'." [page 89]
He does get one thing right: "Star Trek" and "Dr. Who" have been fairly loyal to the notion that a time traveler cannot change history, so in that sense "history is prewritten." (Hawes wrote before the latest "Star Trek" movie.)
But the argument that just because history is not absolutely predetermined, nothing can be foreseen is clearly poppycock. I can foresee the sun will rise tomorrow. Japan could foresee when they attacked Pearl Harbor that they would end up in a war with the United States. The generals in World War I should have foreseen the results of attempting mass charges against machine gun emplacements. We all think that we can foresee the results of Candidate A being elected rather than Candidate B, or vice versa. We may be mistaken in some aspects, but if we did not think we could foresee the results, voting would be a completely meaningless action.
But Hawes makes even more radical claims. He writes of the anti- Semitism in Prague: "In fact, in 1910 Prague, what we now see as anti-Semitism was really anti-*Germanism*. ... the Jews of Prague were attacked not because they were Jews as such, not because of *what they were*, but because of the *political/linguistic choice they had made*." [page 101-102] This seems to suggest that what had been anti-Semitism for the last couple of thousand years suddenly changed into anti-Germanism for twenty-five years, and then changed back. And for the short period, the anti-Semitism was apparently really the Jews' fault.
Ptui.
Hawes spends a full chapter of the book discussing Kafka's pornography collection--with illustrations. While I understand the need to discuss this in a serious analysis of Kafka's works, Hawes is writing something less academic and more "commercial", and it looks like pure opportunism.
Hawes discusses Kafka's two notes to Max Brod directing that his papers be burned, and then says, "There's no doubt at all that Kafka didn't mean a word of it. ... There really no doubt: when Kafka instructed Brod to destroy his work, he didn't for one moment expect it to happen." First of all, this is proof by intimidation: Hawes gives no evidence, just declares his conclusion is obvious. And secondly, what is his conclusion? Why, that Kafka *foresaw* what would happen!
To order Why You Should Read Kafka Before You Waste Your Life from amazon.com, click here.
THE SLAYING OF THE SHREW by Simon Hawke:
Among the most unlikely literary detectives might be Will Shakespeare, in Simon Hawke's series. The second one, THE SLAYING OF THE SHREW, has nothing to add to either detection or Shakespeare and seems to be designed mostly to cash in on Shakespeare's recent burst of popularity. (And even being a fan of Shakespeare didn't help me here.)
To order The Slaying of the Shrew from amazon.com, click here.
ECONOMICS WITHOUT ILLUSIONS: DEBUNKING THE MYTHS OF MODERN CAPITALISM by Joseph Heath:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 05/04/2012]
In the introduction to ECONOMICS WITHOUT ILLUSIONS: DEBUNKING THE MYTHS OF MODERN CAPITALISM by Joseph Heath (ISBN 978-0-307-59057- 2), Heath says that not only is he not an economist, he has essentially had no formal training in the subject. Therefore, in order to accept much of what he says, one has to assume that he is capable of self-instruction and able to recognize his limitations.
Alas, he manages to ruin his credibility on the very first page. He is trying to explain why the film BLADE RUNNER was such a shock when it came out, and "how deeply it revolutionized science fiction as a genre." It is because, he says, "it was the first time anyone had ever suggested that there might be *advertising* in the future--or worse, that there might be *even more of it* in the future than in the present." I would not buy that, even if they threw in a Feckle freezer. If you know what a Feckle freezer is, you can see where this is going; if not, I will tell you that a Feckle freezer is the product that they are testing advertising for in Frederik Pohl's "The Tunnel Under the World" (1955). Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth wrote an even earlier "advertising in science fiction" story, the novel THE SPACE MERCHANTS (1952).
Now, Heath may be referring to only science fiction *films*, but if so, he should say so. And even there, he is wrong. Daniel F. Galouye's 1954 novel SIMULACRON-3 was made into a German mini- series in 1973, and is another example of advertising in science fiction. (If I were being snippy, I might say that the fact that he was in high school when BLADE RUNNER came out might explain why he does not know anything about earlier science fiction.)
Another earlier science fiction film that showed advertising was GORGO (1960). But that took place in its own present, not the future. That is one reason why there were not a lot of films about future advertising--most of the science fiction films before the 1970s seemed to be about the present rather than the future: monsters in present-day cities, inventions in present-day labs, nuclear war in the present-day world, etc. It made the sets so much cheaper.
Which I suppose brings us back to economics, which is what the book is actually about. If the only mistake had to do with science fiction, it could be overlooked. But Heath also makes a claim about queuing theory that is not only wrong, but widely known to be wrong. He describes a standard situation (such as in a grocery store) where there are several cashiers and many people who want service. Heath claims that the best solution is not some elaborate organized cashier assignment run by the store, but rather just letting the customers choose which queue they want to get on, based on which seem to be shorter or faster-moving.
Now, anyone who has done any shopping knows that you can pick what looks like a short, fast queue, only to discover that the first person has a fistful of coupons which won't scan properly, the second person ends up in a long discussion about whether the tuna should have rung up with a sale price, and the third person really has two orders that need to be rung up separately.
Queuing theory says that the most efficient method is the "single- queue, multiple-server". Banks, post offices, and lots of other places use this. But there is a problem in grocery stores: it is not just people standing in line, it is people with carts. The military commissaries I went to as a child used the SQMS system, but it resulted in a long queue snaking up and down the aisles. As you walked through the store (only four long aisles, so the path was really well-defined) , when you discovered the end of the queue you just got on it and did the rest of your shopping as you moved along the way. At the front, an airman would direct the person at the front of the queue to the next free cashier. This worked very well in a military context, but I can see it might run into a problem in a much larger, less "directed", and certainly less controlled supermarket. However, Heath does not point this out, but merely asserts that having customers choose their queues is the best system.
Many of Heath's claims are interesting and thought-provoking, but this sloppiness makes them untrustworthy as well. Maybe that is the ultimate lesson--never trust anyone on any statement about the economy.
To order Economics Without Illusions from amazon.com, click here.
GUILTY ABROAD
by Peter J. Heck:
THE MYSTERIOUS STRANGLER by Peter J. Heck:
I'm not sure where Peter J. Heck got the idea for having Mark Twain be a detective, but it seems to work. The fourth and fifth books, GUILTY ABROAD and THE MYSTERIOUS STRANGLER, continue the premise, and Heck seems to portray Clemens reasonably accurately without resorting to filling the book with caricatures and familiar quotes. These are among the most enjoyable mysteries I've read (though being a big Mark Twain fan probably affects my judgment).
To order Guilty Abroad from amazon.com, click here.
To order The Mysterious Strangler from amazon.com, click here.
TOM'S LAWYER by Peter J. Heck:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 11/07/2003]
Peter J. Heck has been writing a mystery series with Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) as the detective. The sixth and latest is TOM'S LAWYER (yes, they all have this sort of clever title). As with many of this sort of thing, the initial appeal of the premise wears off after a few volumes and one is left to judge the books solely as mysteries. Unfortunately, as mysteries they are (in my opinion) merely passable. If you're interested in Twain, I'd recommend you read one or two (the first, which introduces the narrator, was DEATH ON THE MISSISSIPPI).
To order Tom's Lawyer from amazon.com, click here.
TENNIS SHOES AMONG THE NEPHITES by Chris Heimerdinger (Covenant Books, ISBN 1-55503-131-5, 1989, 229pp, trade paperback):
This is a book whose target audience is teenage Mormon boys. I, on the other hand, am a middle-aged Jewish woman. So why am I reviewing this?
Well, perhaps the main reason is to remind people that there is more to science fiction than what they find in their local mall store, or even in their local superstore. Here is a book that in its eleventh printing, has spawned a whole series, and that I can almost guarantee that practically no one reading this has heard of.
Although teenager Jim finds his classmate Garth a bit of a nerd, he is fascinated by Garth's discoveries in a nearby cave. So he and Garth and his younger sister Jennifer go exploring, fall into a whirlpool, and wake up in the Meso-America of the Nephites and the Lamanites. (The Nephites and the Lamanites are tribes from two thousand years ago described in the Book of Mormon.) So what you have is a group of teenagers who find themselves in another time and have to use their knowledge of history to get by.
Of course, the history is Mormon history, so this is more like finding oneself back in Joseph's Egypt than at Plymouth Rock. And while it must be meaningful and educational to someone who knows at least the basic story, it's a bit baffling to someone who doesn't. (I suppose that one might claim that it should teach it to someone who doesn't know it already, but it didn't have that effect on me, partly because with Jim and Garth back there, things are at least slightly changed from the "real" history.)
Am I recommending this? Not really. Unless you live in an area with a large Mormon population, your local bookstore won't have this. While I assume that you can order it directly from Covenant (no, I don't have the address or phone number, but I'm sure directory assistance can help you), it's not clear that it's worthwhile for most people. On the other hand, if you want to look at some of the "edges" of the fantasy field, you might find this interesting.
To order Tennis Shoes among the Nephites from amazon.com, click here.
A MOVEABLE FEAST
by Ernest Hemingway:
HEMINGWAY FOR BEGINNERS
by Errol Selkirk:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 09/08/2006]
A MOVEABLE FEAST by Ernest Hemingway (ISBN 0-02-051960-5) is Hemingway's reminiscence of Paris in the 1920s. However, as Errol Selkirk noted in HEMINGWAY FOR BEGINNERS (ISBN 0-863-16128-6), it was not written until shortly before his death in 1961, and indeed the final editing was after his death. (The book was finally published in 1964.) So a lot of the memories are colored by intervening events: fallings-out with friends, literary successes or failures, and so on. Still, it does give a picture of what Paris was like in that era, and unlike George Orwell in DOWN AND OUT IN PARIS AND LONDON, Hemingway was not stuck in a restaurant kitchen washing dishes, but was hob-nobbing with the literary lights of that time. (HEMINGWAY FOR BEGINNERS gives a good summary of his life, but the artwork in it does not do as much to amplify the contents as the artwork in the books in the "Introducing" series.)
To order A Moveable Feast from amazon.com, click here.
To order Hemingway for Beginners from amazon.com, click here.
THE SUN ALSO RISES by Ernest Hemingway:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 02/06/2004]
One book suggested for reading groups was Ernest Hemingway's THE SUN ALSO RISES. It is a classic. I did not like it. Simple declarative sentences are fine, but they get boring after a while. One longs for a dependent clause, but one doesn't find one. All the people are obnoxious. The narrator was injured in the war, but Hemingway cannot say how. Who cares?
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 04/23/2004]
A few weeks ago, I was rather critical of Ernest Hemingway's THE SUN ALSO RISES (ISBN 0-684-80071-3). Last week we had the discussion meeting, and all six other attendees agreed with me--a unanimous thumbs-down vote. (In case anyone wants to see this as gender-based, the group was three men and four women.) I think I can safely say we won't be doing more Hemingway soon. (Our next books include Joseph Conrad's LORD JIM, Graham Greene's THE END OF THE AFFAIR, Betty Smith's A TREE GROWS IN BROOKLYN, John Steinbeck's SWEET THURSDAY, Kate Chopin's THE AWAKENING, Paulo Coelho's THE ALCHEMIST, Jasper Fforde's THE EYRE AFFAIR, and Franz Kafka's THE TRIAL.)
To order The Sun Also Rises from amazon.com, click here.
JANE AUSTEN'S GUIDE TO DATING by Lauren Henderson:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 02/17/2006]
In JANE AUSTEN'S GUIDE TO DATING (ISBN 1-4013-0117-7), Lauren Henderson seems to have been inspired by THE JANE AUSTEN BOOK CLUB. In that novel, the author draws parallels between the plots and lessons in Austen's novels and the lives of the members of a book group reading those works. In JANE AUSTEN'S GUIDE TO DATING Henderson tries to write a dating guide based on Austen's plots and lessons. I should offer the following disclaimer--my dating experience is 1) extremely limited and 2) extremely outdated, having occurred almost forty years ago. (That's about 20% of the way back to when Austen wrote, if you care.) At any rate, Henderson puts forth such rules as "If You Like Someone, Make It Clear That You Do", and "Don't Fall for Superficial Qualities", and "Be Witty If You Can, but Not Cynical, Indiscreet, or Cruel". Pretty bland suggestions, I would say. Obviously this book is not aimed at me; if I had any doubts, the choices in the quiz to determine which Jane Austen character I am frequently were all wrong. For example, one question is "Your favorite movie star is;" and the choices are:
a. Anyone dark, French and sexily brooding b. George Clooney c. Colin Farrell d. Matthew McConaughey e. Viggo Mortensoen f. Harrison Ford
Whether by "favorite" they mean the actor I think the best, or the one I think the most attractive, this list doesn't do it for me. As far as I can tell, the book is gimmicky and is probably not going to solve anyone's dating problems, but if someone more knowledgeable about dating wants to dispute this, feel free.
To order Jane Austen's Guide to Dating from amazon.com, click here.
THE HISTORIES by Herodotus (translated by Aubrey de Selincourt, introduction by A. R. Burn):
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 06/22/2007]
THE HISTORIES by Herodotus (translated by Aubrey de Selincourt, introduction by A. R. Burn) (ISBN-10 0-140-44908-6, ISBN-13 978-0-140-44908-2) is not reportage. Most of it is not first-person writing, and even when it is, at times Herodotus is either making it up or is extremely gullible. He does not claim to have seen the gold-digging ants, for example, but does present it as fact. He claims to have seen an inscription on the side of the Great Pyramid recording the amount spent on radishes, onions, and leeks for the workers. But he adds that "the interpreter who read me the inscription said the sum was 1600 talents of silver." So obviously he did not know from first-hand knowledge what the inscription said, and was almost definitely lied to by the interpreter (who may not have had any idea what the inscription said either).
Burn points out that Herodotus is willing to report beliefs even when he does not believe them himself. For example, "The third theory [of what causes the Nile to rise each year) is much the most plausible, but at the same time furthest from the truth; according to this, the water of the Nile comes from melting snow, but as it flows from Libya through Ethiopia into Egypt, that is, from a very hot into a cooler climate, how could it possibly originate in snow? Obviously, this view is as worthless as the other two." And talking of Phoenicians who circumnavigated Africa, Herodotus writes, "These men made a statement which I do not myself believe, though others may, to the effect that as they sailed on a westerly course round the southern end of [Africa], they had the sun on their right--to the northward of them." Well, Herodotus may not have believed these statements, but they are both, in fact, true.
[Note: the ISBN numbers given are for a newer edition, with the introduction by someone other than Burn.]
To order The Histories from amazon.com, click here.
OLD-NEW LAND (ALTNEULAND) by Theodor Herzl:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 07/30/2010]
OLD-NEW LAND (ALTNEULAND) by Theodor Herzl (translated by Lotta Levensohn) (ISBN-10 0-910129-61-4) is a typical utopian novel of the sort that was popular towards the end of the 19th century. The utopian society is being set up in Palestine by Jews, but that is really peripheral to the utopian aspects. The only relevance that the Jewishness of the project has is that the founders use the anti-Semitism of Europe to encourage Jews to emigrate and Christians to support them in doing so. In retrospect, this seems very bizarre--sort of like using the racism of the mid-20th Century American South to get all the blacks to emigrate to Africa.
And this is a fairly apt parallel, because one of the projects this utopia is working on is an anti-malarial drug so that the blacks in America can be encouraged to emigrate back to Africa--but even that only as a side effect of "opening up of Africa." One scientist says, "The white colonist goes under in Africa. That country can be opened up to civilization only after malaria has been subdued. Only then will enormous areas become available for the surplus populations of Europe." While it is true that at the time Herzl wrote this book, there was a strong "Back-to-Africa" movement, it was not intended as a side effect of bringing millions of white colonists there. Now this reads as the worst sort of condescension and paternalism. Herzl also vastly underestimates the difficulties caused by the influx of millions of Jews into Palestine, and their project to acquire all the land. (Then again, all utopian novels seem to gloss over the areas that people think would cause the most problems.)
Some things never change, though: "The [younger generation] were really only a kind of superior proletariat, victims of a viewpoint that had dominated middle-class Jews twenty or thirty years before: the sons must not be what the fathers had been. They were to be freed from the hardships of trade and commerce. And so the younger generation entered the 'liberal' professions en masse. The result was an unfortunate surplus of trained men who could find no work, but were at the same time spoiled for a modest way of life."
My edition of this book is also annotated with comparisons to the actual situation in Palestine at the time of the translation. However, since the translation was made in 1941, the comments are somewhat out-of-date.
To order Old-New Land (Alteneuland) from amazon.com, click here.