Yes, it’s Banned Books Week again - time to mourn, and to celebrate. It’s especially poignant that this year, Banned Books Week coincides with the date of the Vice Presidential Debate for Campaign 2008, one of whose participants, as almost her first act in elected office, tried to ban books in her city library.
The upside to Banned Books Week, as Nicole Belle points out in her lovely post linked above, is that it is as much a time to fight back against ignorance, intolerance, and the enemies of freedom of thought as it is to beware their perpetual campaign of oppression. We have seen in too many ways in recent years the dangers of complacency and an unfounded confidence in progressive values. It is important to remind and re-energize ourselves about the alternatives that constantly stalk us in politics, social policy, and our private lives. And looking on the upside, one of the delicious satisfactions of this year’s remembrance will be the chance to see the party of book-banning and the religious war on tolerance get their ass righteously handed to them at the polls, at long last. That’s going to be worth celebrating.
Until then, the usual suspects:
The most frequently challenged books of 2007
The following books were the most frequently challenged in 2007:
The ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom received a total of 420 challenges last year. A challenge is defined as a formal, written complaint, filed with a library or school requesting that materials be removed because of content or appropriateness. According to Judith F. Krug, director of the Office for Intellectual Freedom, the number of challenges reflects only incidents reported, and for each reported, four or five remain unreported.
The “10 Most Challenged Books of 2007” reflect a range of themes, and consist of the following titles:
1) “And Tango Makes Three,” by Justin Richardson/Peter Parnell
[NB: A factually correct non-fiction book about a baby penguin parented by two male penguins. What is it with right-wingers and the penguins?]
Reasons: Anti-Ethnic, Sexism, Homosexuality, Anti-Family, Religious Viewpoint, Unsuited to Age Group
2) “The Chocolate War,” by Robert Cormier
Reasons: Sexually Explicit, Offensive Language, Violence
3) “Olive’s Ocean,” by Kevin Henkes
Reasons: Sexually Explicit and Offensive Language
4) “The Golden Compass,” by Philip Pullman
Reasons: Religious Viewpoint
5) “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” by Mark Twain
Reasons: Racism
6) “The Color Purple,” by Alice Walker
Reasons: Homosexuality, Sexually Explicit, Offensive Language
7) “TTYL,” by Lauren Myracle
Reasons: Sexually Explicit, Offensive Language, Unsuited to Age Group
8) “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” by Maya Angelou
Reasons: Sexually Explicit
9) “It’s Perfectly Normal,” by Robie Harris
Reasons: Sex Education, Sexually Explicit
10) “The Perks of Being A Wallflower,” by Stephen Chbosky
Reasons: Homosexuality, Sexually Explicit, Offensive Language, Unsuited to Age Group
September 29th, 2008
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General, Politics, Church & State, School, Religion, Culture, Privacy, Education, Media, Books, Evidence of Harm, News & Current Events |
3 comments
Some clown named Andrew Klavan has an essay at the conservative New York City Journal chock full of his insights into family, media, and culture. Predictably, in telling us what’s wrong with all the above, he mostly just tells us what’s wrong with Andrew Klavan.
June 6th, 2008
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General, Politics, Culture, Media, Books, News & Current Events |
4 comments
I mentioned in last week’s random book blogging that TOR was giving away free books. Blogassm tracked down some more information about why TOR wanted people to give them them their email addresses:
Tor Books, a major science fiction and fantasy publisher, announced recently that it would offer free weekly ebooks of its print titles if you sign up for its email newsletter. But this is just part of a larger online expansion that will include social networking and the publication of original short fiction and nonfiction, sources familiar with the project told me.
Two sources who spoke to me on condition of anonymity said that it’s intended to be a “go-to site, a central community” for science fiction and fantasy fans. A few authors have already been approached to submit original short fiction to be published online. Tor is paying upwards of 25 cents per word for these stories and right now is only dealing with solicited authors.
According to one of the sources, this website will act in part as a form of branding and promotion for Tor book titles, “with an eye towards leveraging traffic into advertising revenues, down the road.” The project is being largely organized by Patrick Nielson Hayden, a senior editor at Tor.
So far the details of this site have remained a secret, hence why the sources spoke on condition of anonymity.
In an email on Friday, Nielsen Hayden confirmed many of these facts.
February 19th, 2008
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General, Books |
one comment
Via Making Light is this odd, nerdy little story about an amnesiac trapped in a phone both buried in concrete.
John Scalzi is auctioning off a pre-publication copy of is next book, Zoe’s Tale, to support the Disabled American Veterans Charitable Service Trust. I am not a big fan of military sci-fi, but the man did win a Campbell and he apparently sells like a million or so of ech book he writes, so he probably has at least some small measure of talent. You can find the auction itself here and Scalzi’s post on the matter here. You can give to the Disabled American Veterans Charitable Service Trust directly here.
A look at the Clinton Rules via an index.
Does anyone know how many books are actually sold?
The Nation has an interesting look at two books that ask how the Russian Revolution, which was born from actions taken by local worker and soldier’s councils that were as democratic than anything at the time in the West, ended up in one of the worst dictatorships the world has ever known.
February 17th, 2008
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General, Books |
no comments
This won’t make much sense unless you he been reading this, but it is a lot of fun if you have. And if you aren’t reading Fred’s Left Behind series, you are missing out.
Tor is giving away free ebooks in exchange for your email address.
Steven Brust has written a Firefly novel and is giving it away for free. This is not acceptable. I want my next Vlad novel and he cannot write that if he is writing Firefly novels.
It is free book week in genre-land. Neil Gaiman, in celebration of his blog’s seventh birthday, is giving away one of is books away as an ebook. Which one will be determined by fan voting.
In less happy news, Caitlan Kiernan is ill and and in serious financial trouble as a result. You can help here if you are a fan or just a nice person.
Dave Sim? Still bug-nuts crazy. He’s kinda like the Platonic Form “Misogynist” at this point.
February 10th, 2008
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General, Books |
4 comments
You’re The Things They Carried!
by Tim O’Brien
Harsh and bitter, you tell it like it is. This usually comes in short,
dramatic spurts of spilling your guts in various ways. You carry a heavy load, and this
has weighed you down with all the horrors that humanity has to offer. Having seen and
done a great deal that you aren’t proud of, you have no choice but to walk forward,
trudging slowly through ongoing mud. In the next life, you will come back as a water
buffalo.
Take the Book Quiz
at the Blue Pyramid.
Now, I love this book, but I am not really that dark and cynical, am I? Plus, the idea of being a water buffalo doesn’t appeal that much to me.
Link via Lance Mannion, who got a worse book
February 5th, 2008
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General, Bloggin, Books |
7 comments
The World Without Us by Alan Weisman is a remarkable book. Ostensibly, it is about what would happen if human being were removed from the planet in some sudden and total apocalypse (imagine, Weisman suggests, that the believers in the Rapture or in alien kidnappers are right). And that tale is fascinating. Weisman has done an enormous amount of research, talking to everyone from New York City subway engineers to insect experts to world renowned chemists. He weaves that research into haunting and amusing tales of decay and destruction. He takes the reader through the gradual destruction of their homes and the more spectacular destruction of New York City. He chronicles the attempts of large game, nearly extinct now, to re-colonize the suddenly human-less Earth and t sad fate of cockroaches who have followed humans too far north. The vignettes are well told, even moving on occasion, but they are not the point of the book; the research they are based upon is.
Weisman spends most of the book taking us through the research that lead to each chapter’s tale of a person-less world and that research is the real point of his book. Weisman isn’t really interested in the end of the human world, he is interested in preventing that end. The chapter on which African large animals can survive the end of humans is actually about the effect human settlement patterns are having on African wildlife. The chapter on what would and would not decay quickly without human care is actually about the enormous waste that modern industrial society produces. The chapter on how plastics will affect marine life and bacterial evolution is actually about how humans have rushed headlong into changes, the impact of which they don’t come close to understanding. Because the book touches every continent and almost every aspect of modern industrial civilization, Weisman is able to cover almost every aspect of environmental degradation, including those that receive almost no media attention despite their importance. Because the research is weaved into a mystery — what would happen if humans disappear — the tone of the book never approaches stridency or fear-mongering. Instead, it is matter of fact and curious and brings the reader along to its conclusions gently, even subtly.
Weisman’s conclusion is the only area of the book that falters. His proposed solution may be logically compelling, but it is not practical in anything like a reasonable timeframe using anything like reasonable methods. There is no doubt that Weisman suspects as such and so the reader is left with the nagging, depressing suspicion that Weisman doesn’t have any other alternatives to offer. But that is a minor flaw in an otherwise extraordinary book. Weisman has written an environmental call to arms that is literary, engaging, curious, and serious without being strident. The World Without Us is perhaps the best environmental book of the last several years and I strongly recommend it.
January 14th, 2008
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General, Reviews, Books |
3 comments
Cass Sunstein is back, this time with a new book claiming that the Internet is bad for democracy because it allows like minded people to hang out with other like minded people, and thus they all become partisan zombies and thats bad, because, umm, because people aren’t supposed to have strong positions on things? The meta-argument kinda loses me there, as you can probably tell. I haven’t read the book so I cannot speak to its in depth argument, but Mr. Sunstein is blogging at TMP Cafe this week and his first post is not a particularly impressive one.
Here is the core of his post:
As the experiment was designed, the groups consisted of predominantly liberal or conservative members—with the liberal groups coming from Boulder, and the conservative groups from Colorado Springs. (The groups were not mixed together.) It is widely known that Boulder tends to be liberal and that Colorado Springs tends to be conservative. The groups were screened to ensure that their members conformed to these stereotypes. (For example, if people in Boulder liked Vice President Cheney, they were cordially excused from the experiment.) People were asked to state their opinions anonymously both before and after a period of group discussion, and also to try to reach a public verdict before the final anonymous statement. What was the effect of discussion?
The results were simple. In almost every group, members ended up with more extreme positions after they spoke with one another. Discussion made civil unions more popular among liberals; discussion made civil unions less popular among conservatives. Liberals favored an international treaty to control global warming before discussion; they favored it more strongly after discussion. Conservatives were neutral on that treaty before discussion; they strongly opposed it after discussion. Mildly favorable toward affirmative action before discussion, liberals became strongly favorable toward affirmative action after discussion. Firmly negative about affirmative action before discussion, conservatives became even more negative abou affirmative action after discussion.
A couple of things here. Even assuming that the degree of the effect was as intense as Sunstein implies, this is a poorly designed experiment, or, from Sunstein’s description of it, this is a poorly designed experiment. He doesn’t link to it or give us enough details to track down where it was published, so I cannot be one hundred percent certain. but there is no mention of what happens after the groups are shuffled and the rations are more 50-50. In other words, Sunstein assumes that the effect he describes is permanent without actually offering any evidence that it so. If your contention that the Internet makes partisanship worse, shouldn’t and one of your supporting arguments is that groups in isolation become more partisan and have less internal differences, shouldn’t you design an experiment that actually attempts to answer that question? Unless you assume that the groups always remain in isolation, the first thing you have to do is to determine whether or not that affect is lasting and to what degree it persists. This experiment as described does not do that.
And groups do not remain in isolation. People go to work, they go to Church, they go to movies and ball games and professional conferences. It is literally impossible for me to not be aware of the conservative view of the world, both because of the prevalence of conservative viewpoints in the mainstream media and because of the fact that I live a normal human life that brings into contact with other people all the time. Some of those people are conservatives, and some of those people talk about conservative issues. It’s probably easier for conservatives, but even they would have a hard time going through life without exposure to liberals.
The second problem assumes that increased partisanship on the issues in questions is a bad thing. First, any argument that assumes “extremism” is a label that can be applied to civil unions is suspect in and of itself. Civil unions are the compromise position between the current level of discrimination and full equality before the law. So in Sunstein’s experiment, the liberals became more strongly in favor of the compromise position. Describing that as an increase in extremism is ridiculous on its face. (UPDATE: Ted points out that this is not entirely accurate. It implies that Sunstein is labeling civil unions explicitly as extremism, when the text doesn’t really support that; I misread the way he was using the word. He still seems to be implying that civil unions are the opposite of the current inequality, but he isn’t really stating it explicitly, so I could be mis-reading his intention.) But its part and parcel of the problem with the underlying assumption. Sometimes, the compromise solution is not a viable one. Global warming, another area where “extremism” increased according to Sunstein is a good example. Either global warming is a large problem that has to be dealt with quickly and forthrightly or its an overblown ghost story that doesn’t justify the material investment required to prevent its worst effects from occurring. Neither side is much served by a split the middle, compromise is always good attitude. Half measures may be better then nothing form the global warming perspective, for example, but they won’t solve the problem and at the end of the day you still have to work to convince people to take the real steps required to prevent the worst form occurring. At best, compromise buys a little more time for such convincing — the kind of convincing that went on in Sunstein’s experiement — to continue. Affirmative action is less an all or nothing position than global warming, but it, too, can be argued that the compromise position is useless for both sides in the argument: a little affirmative action is either an unnecessary violation of rights or a useless tool that does not achieve the very real and needed societal changes.
It seems odd to argue that an increase in partisanship is bad without examining the actual merits of the questions involved; i.e. is one side already supporting a compromise position, as in the case of civil unions, or if a compromise position could have more than a minimal effect on the problem as in the case of global warming and affirmative action and is thus a rational choice for the players involved or not. Sunstein’s experiment assumes that any two positions are equally extreme, that the group dynamic demonstrated is persistent, and that compromise is always the rational position. All three of the assumptions are dubious and the fact that they form the underpinning of his experiment leaves his grander thesis, to the degree that he is going to support it based on this example, on very shaky ground.
November 12th, 2007
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Politics, Culture, Education, Books |
5 comments
J.K. Rowling has a wonderful gift for pushing the religious wingnuts’ “insane gibber” button, seemingly without trying. Her Harry Potter series consistently ranks among the books most frequently targeted for banning by the winger legions, and now she’s got them in a sex panic over what must be the most sex-free coming-of-age stories on record. I like her more and more.
October 21st, 2007
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General, Politics, Church & State, Religion, Culture, Privacy, Media, Books, Evidence of Harm, News & Current Events |
21 comments
I don’t have any profound comments about her place in literature or her works. I just know that they were very good and brought me a great deal of pleasure in my childhood. We should all do so well.
Via Scalzi.
September 7th, 2007
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Writing, Culture, Books |
one comment
Hilarious comment from Roxanne of Rox Populi:
The Fountainhead, in Brief
Anakin Skywalker goes to architecture school.
That’s great, but somehow I’m not quite sure it fits.
Maybe . . . “‘Dr. Evil’ goes to architecture school”? “Dick Cheney goes to architecture school?”
And how would you summarize Atlas Shrugged?
“Grover Norquist goes to urban planning school”?
What do you think?
August 22nd, 2007
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General, Politics, Economics, Culture, Books, Humor |
18 comments
So I’ve been slowly reading The Areas Of My Expertise by John Hodgman (you know him as the PC from the Mac commercials, or as the “resident expert” on The Daily Show). The book is hit-or-miss, and to be quite honest, it’s a whole lot more “miss” than “hit.” However, the section on the 51 states (long story) is quite good, and this bit, on New Hampshire, made me laugh out loud (especially the state motto):
New Hampshire
Nickname: The State Liquor Store State
Motto: “Live Free of Motorcycle Helmets and Seat Belts or Die.”
Notes: For centuries, a giant, craggy profile of a man could be seen in the cliffs of Cannon Mountain. Beloved and occasionally worshiped by the citizens of New Hampshire, he was dubbed “The Old Man of the Mountain,” and his profile still appears on the reverse of the New Hampshire state quarter. Sadly, in May of 2003, scientists determined that “The Old Man of the Mountain” was not in fact a giant man, but just rocks. The citizens of New Hampshire were so enraged by this betrayal that they tore the face off the mountain with picks. Remaining tourist attractions include: Olde Portsmouthe Towne, Libertarians, and tax-free wine and spirits. However, due to the state’s famous civic frugality, visitors are asked to provide their own roads.
He also dubs Missouri “The Demonstrate Your God-Damned Thesis State,” and gives Georgia’s nickname as “Where Every Street Is Named Peachtree,” which is funny if you’ve ever been there.
March 15th, 2007
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Satire, Books, Humor |
4 comments
When I was a kid, my parents had a simple system for paying bills. They had a cheap, plastic bill holder — a hunk of puke colored plastic with fins of various sizes rising from it’s base. Bills to be paid went on the left half of the holder, already paid ones went on the right, waiting for stamps. The bills themselves could be anything — actual bills from a real company, notes written on scraps of paper to remind my parents to donate to the charity of the day, even bank statements to serve as a reminder to move money form checking to savings, or vice versa. It worked very well for my parents and they still use it — having replaced the ugly bill holder with slots in their elegant computer desk — to this day. It is also a system that is very hard to replicate in a computer.
Computers and human beings do not think the same way. For a human, concepts like “next Tuesday” and “a meeting every other week, on Thursdays” and “this piece of paper is both a piece of mail and a reminder to put a check in the mail on the 13th” are both easy to remember and easy to understand. The same is not true for a computer. Computers store data differently than the human brain and making certain associations is not as easy for programing languages as it is for human beings. This fact, that the human brain isn’t really a biological computer, is the cause of almost all frustration people have with software. We expect our tools to “think” in the same fashion we do, and they don’t. Dreaming in Code, by Scott Rosenberg, is is the story the failure of programmers and engineers to bridge the gap between they way we think and what our tools can do, using the Chandler project as an example.
I want Chandler, but I will probably never see it. As described in the book, the Chandler group wanted to a create a personal information manager that would store and manipulate data in a fashion much more similar to how we hold information in our brains. In traditional programs, data is separated into categories or “silos”. Email is one kind of data, and so goes in one spot. An appointment on a calender is another kind of data and so goes in another. But as we already discussed, humans don’t operate like that. That email form my boss is also a change in schedule. That status report is also a reminder that the widget problem needs to be solved before we can decide on a release schedule. That calendar appointment is also a mile high stack of paperwork I have to get done before the meeting with the security audit. In small doses, this is easy for me to remember. It is progressively harder to do the more I have to remember, which is why we use programs to help us remember in the first place. But due to the discrete nature of computer data, building in those kinds of relationships among disparate kinds of data is not easy to do. Eventually,you pay a price in performance, in data size and robustness, and in user experience. Rosenberg details how the Chandler team encountered and dealt with — or failed to deal with — those problems. He also, at appropriate points, ties in the decisions that the Chandler team made or fell into to past discussions and fads about the best way to create software.
This is an area where the book really shines. Making software is still hard to do. Its rare for a large project to come in on time, under budget, and with the original feature set. This has been true since the invention of large scale software projects, right after the Second World War, and millions of tress and billions of electrons have given their lives in the search for why this is so. Rosenberg ties the Chandler team’s current problems to discussion of programming efficiency and software engineering from the past, using their problems to bring to life the consequences of popular theories and methodologies of software creation. None of these methodologies or theories has been anything resembling a large scale success. There are many reasons for this, from the iinabality to accurately and objectively measure programmer performance (this is a rant of a separate post, but if you are trying to measure programmer efficiency by some measure like lines of codes or number of bugs reported or fixed, then you are setting yourself up for a colossal failure) to the difficulty in brining new people onto a software project. Rosenberg uses the individual experiences of the Chandler people to illuminate a given set of theories, weaving their personal frustrations and triumphs as a touchstone to a more academic discussion of the history and qualities of software engineering methodologies. It is a very effective tactic, the difference between telling you that Picasso could paint and showing you a print.
This is not just a book for programmers. Anyone who designs, writes code, or manages programmers will be well served by reading the book, of course. Rosenberg has written a kind of meta case study. Not only does Rosenberg highlight what went wrong and right (and much more went wrong than went right), he also highlights what those failures mean for various software engineering theories and methodologies. It is an illuminating look at the topic. But this is also a tail for everyone else. More and more of our lives our intimately tied to software. Everything from how we get our entertainment to how we do our work to how our cars’ safety systems function is dependent upon software. The soul of Rosenberg’s book is the struggles of the Chandler team members to take what happens in their heads and turn it into a software. Understanding that struggle is one of the best ways to come to terms with the failures, compromises, and limitations of the software that runs your life.
January 29th, 2007
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Reviews, Economics, Writing, Science, Books, Technology |
3 comments
The blogosphere lost another good blogger today — Michael Berube is hanging it up. Berube is one of two blogging professors (Jeff Cooper was the other) of whom I ever thought, “it would be fun to take a class from him”. I am going to miss reading him. I guess now I have to buy his book ….
January 8th, 2007
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Bloggin, Culture, Books |
no comments
On Easter Sunday, 1873, white men — mostly former Confederate soldiers and sympathizers, surrounded the courthouse where a group of black men where holed up. The black men represented the legal government of the county, the white men represented the absolute refusal of whites in Louisiana to treat blacks as anything even resembling human beings. The white men attacked the out gunned blacks and beat them back into the court house, where they used a captured black to set fire to the building. The black men were allowed to burn to death. Most of the captives were executed the next day.
In 1921, the town of Colfax put up a monument to the battle. It read:
In Loving
Remembrance
Erected
To the Memory
Of the Heroes
…
Who Fell in the Coulfax
Riots Fighting For
White Supremacy
April 13, 873
I left the names of the three whites who died in the massacre. After reading this book, you would too. It is the tale of how the civil war was finally lost, at least in Mississippi and Louisiana. In essence, Whites in the South refused to treat freed slaves as anything other than, well, slaves. They expected their former chattel to behave as if the chains still existed, and when Blacks attempted to claim for themselves the rights all people are entitled to, Whites killed them. They killed them without provocation, without reason, without mercy. They killed for the explicit reason of making sure that Blacks could not vote, could not participate as the equals of Jim Crow was not a system of laws; it was the pale reflection of the violent will of the White South. Former Confederate soldiers and the cream of Southern society banned together ot impose its will upon the
Nicholas Lemann tells this story through the history of Adlebert Ames, former war hero and eventually Senator and Governor of Mississippi, and tells it well. His research is impeccable; events are told with the backing of a wealth of period source documents. His prose is sparse and clear and the more powerful for it. And Lemann never flinches from the true horror of the period. This is an infuriating book. If your blood doesn’t boil over the depredations described in this history, then there is something wrong with you. Leman does a good job not only of cataloging what happened but also what it meant to the people involved. The horror of the time is abundantly clear. If the book has a flaw, it is that it does not always do a good job of making clear how much the events in Mississippi mirrored those in other parts of the South. The book leaves the reader with the impression that Mississippi was representative of the Reconstruction South, but it doesn’t always prove the contention.
The impression, though, is reinforced by history. In the end, the murders and terrorists won all over the South — the North was too tired of war and too racist itself to beat back the Klan and other White Supremacy organizations like the White Lines. Despite the struggle of people like Ames and others from the North — the “carpetbaggers” so reviled in Southern mythology — the North was unwilling to force the surrender at Appomattox to mean both Union and Freedom. In the end, the noble Lost Cause, the heritage that I am told over and over again I should respect, degenerated into barbarism, murder, terrorism, and the explicit goal of making sure that no Black would ever live a life of anything other than complete and abject subservience to Whites. That fact and the mythology that grew up to excuse that fact dominated American politics until at least the 1980s. You can see the outline of almost every piece of racial politics in this country in Reconstruction Mississippi, especially in the refusal of Whites to accept that Blacks were full human beings and in the easy recourse to violence by Whites in service of that bigotry.
Lemann has written a depressingly comprehensive history of how the Civil War was lost to the forces of racism and hate in Mississippi. If you want to understand the Reconstruction — and thus the last hundred and forty years of American history — you should read this book.
January 8th, 2007
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Reviews, Books |
5 comments
1491 is a re-examination of what life was like in the Americas before the permanent arrival of Europeans. It is based on the most recent scientific work and is written by someone who knows how to explain even the most complicated scientific process in a clear and enlightening fashion. And I didn’t enjoy it anywhere as much as I think I should have.
The story itself is fascinating. The Americas before the arrival of Europeans turn out to have been much more populated than is generally understood. Places that we traditionally think of as largely empty — the Amazon and the interior of North America, for example — where actually the home of large, complex, city-building cultures. Those cultures were destroyed ahead of European history by the diseases that the first European explorers and their animals brought with them. The final numbers are in dispute, (a dispute covered very fairly by the author) but up to 95% of the original population of the Americas could have been killed by diseases and the resultant societal collapse. What is not in doubt that is that entire cultures disappeared after their first contact with European explorers. Further, the coastal Native Americans in North America more than held their own against European incursions for the first few decades of contact. It was only after diseases had shattered those nations that the conquest of North America could begin in earnest.
The portions of the book that focus on the lost cultures and the history of interaction between European invaders and Native Americans are the best portions of the book. The discussions of the science, as I mentioned, are nearly as interesting. Unfortunately, the book spends too much time dealing with the personalities behind the science. I am sure that most of the people profiled are nice, smart, and love kittens. But they are not one tenth as fascinating as the cultures they re-discovered, and time spent on them is time that could have been spent giving more detail about the fascinating and doomed cultures of the Americas.
It is th examination of those cultures — in many case, cultures that no school textbook has ever introduced you too — that make this book worth buying. For all its fault’s, 1491 does a marvelous job of conveying a sense of the lost cultures and a sense of the magnitude of that loss. And entire world, with cultures that were sometime much more enlightened (and some times not; 1491 is no hagiography of Native Americans), was destroyed in a handful of decades by greed, religious bigotry, and a terrible quirk of biology. 1491 is a good first attempt to explain what was lost and how it was destroyed.
January 2nd, 2007
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Reviews, Books |
10 comments
I have never been that impressed with Michael Crichton. Some of his work has been quite clever, most is lowbrow pulp nonsense (surprising only because he used science in interesting ways in a few of his books), and when he gets into territory he doesn’t understand he’s as clicheic and naive as the worst of them. He’s done a Christopher Hitchens in the last few years, making a sudden swerve to the right and cranking out talking-points propaganda disguised as plots - which came in for much-deserved lambasting from both literary and political/scientific critics. But that wasn’t bad enough: having discovered he can’t take the heat, he’s descended to the most scurrilous attacks on his critics.
When one commentator gave him a bad review for his recent garbled thriller on (the lack of) global warming, he wrote a one-scene character into his next book using that commentator’s name as the character name (changed from “Mike” to “Mick”), and describing him as a homosexual child rapist with a small penis.
The March [review] article that Mr. [Michael] Crowley referred to concluded: “And now, like a mighty t-rex that has escaped from Jurassic Park, Crichton stomps across the public policy landscape, finally claiming the influence that he has always sought. In this sense, he himself is like an experiment gone wrong — a creation of the publishing industry and Hollywood who has unexpectedly mutated into a menacing figure haunting think tanks, policy forums, hearing rooms and even the Oval Office.” . . .
The character that Mr. Crowley says he believes is modeled on him mostly appears on two pages in Mr. Crichton’s [just-released] 431-page novel.
On Page 227 Mr. Crichton writes: “Alex Burnet was in the middle of the most difficult trial of her career, a rape case involving the sexual assault of a two-year-old boy in Malibu. The defendant, thirty-year-old Mick Crowley, was a Washington-based political columnist who was visiting his sister-in-law when he experienced an overwhelming urge to have anal sex with her young son, still in diapers.”
Mick Crowley is described as a “wealthy, spoiled Yale graduate” with a small penis that nonetheless “caused significant tears to the toddler’s rectum.”
Mr. Crowley writes that Mr. Crichton’s Mick Crowley not only has a similar name but is also a graduate of Yale and a Washington political journalist. Mr. Crowley contends that Mr. Crichton has tried to escape public censure for his literary attack by hiding behind what has become known as “the small penis rule.”
The rule, Mr. Crowley writes, is described in a 1998 article in The New York Times in which the libel lawyer Leon Friedman said it is a trick used by authors who have defamed someone to discourage lawsuits. “No male is going to come forward and say, ‘That character with a very small penis — that’s me!’ ” Mr. Friedman explained.
Very classy, Crichton. Moving Republican science policy forward by leaps and bounds.
December 14th, 2006
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General, Reviews, Culture, Science, Media, Books, Technology, News & Current Events |
2 comments
This came from the Skeptics Society, and could be quite interesting. Reprinted in its entirety:
NEWLY published by the Skeptics Society…
The Bible Against Itself is a witty and well-informed work of revisionist Bible scholarship, a courageous exercise in the deconstruction of Holy Writ and a healthy corrective to anyone who still thinks of the Bible as the revealed word of God.
— Jonathan Kirsch, author of The Harlot by the Side of the Road
and A History of the End of the World
Before the Bible was the Bible it was a lot of little books written by many writers with many different viewpoints.
If you open up the Bible and read it straight through, you will notice two things that should not be true if it had been written as a coherent whole and with a single purpose. First, the Bible is quite repetitious; second, the Bible frequently seems to contradict itself. Readers have often ignored these contradictions, and apologists have long tried to reconcile them. Randel Helms chooses a third course — to understand the contradictions by looking at the cultural and historical factors that produced them.
December 13th, 2006
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Religion, Books, Read Your Bible |
12 comments
The latest form Orson Scott Card is getting quite a bit of well deserved mockery from the liberal blogosphere and quite a bit of understandable praise form the right. The book, a story about a leftist Army taking over New York City and precipitating a civil war, is badly written right wing wish fulfillment. In appears to contain every lazy stereotype and fantasy the more deranged on the right harbor about their neighbors on the left. The fact that Instapundit loves it is telling. Brad and Roy have the best takes, as usual, but I have seen more than a few references to the rumor that Card didn’t write his best novel, Ender’s Game. I don’t buy it: Card has always had streak of militarism and “kill em all and let God sort em out” in his writing, even in Ender’s Game.
The best argument for Card not having written Ender’s Game is just how much better it is than almost anything Card has written since. In fact, Card’s technical writing ability seems to have steadily declined. Just take this awful, awful passage from his new book:
You look pissed off,” said Malich.
“Yeah,” said Cole. “The terrorists are crazy and scary, but what really pisses me off is knowing that this will make a whole bunch of European intellectuals very happy.”
“They won’t be so happy when they see where it leads. They’ve already forgotten Sarajevo and the killing fields of Flanders.”
“I bet they’re already ‘advising’ Americans that this is where our military ‘aggression’ inevitably leads, so we should take this as a sign that we need to change our policies and retreat from the world.”
“And maybe we will,” said Malich. “A lot of Americans would love to slam the doors shut and let the rest of the world go hang.”
“And if we did,” said Cole, “who would save Europe then? How long before they find out that negotiations only work if the other guy is scared of the consequences of not negotiating? Everybody hates America till they need us to liberate them.”
“You’re forgetting that nobody cares what Europeans think except a handful of American intellectuals who are every bit as anti-American as the French,” said Malich.
This is representative: chapter two is nothing more than an extended Mary Sue sequence where Card’s alter ego really sticks it to all those liberal, American hating hoity-toity professors. The whole thing almost makes me pity Card. Almost. There is nothing remotely that bad in Ender’s Game. But I don’t take that as evidence for the contention that Card didn’t write Ender’s Game In fact, the sample chapters actually work to tie Empire back to his first work.
Put aside for the moment the stale dialogue, the horrible clichés, and the fantasy about Europeans and “anti-American” liberals. This conversation happens literally a few minutes after a terrorist attack kills most members of the Executive — including the President and the Vice President — and a few moments after the two men involved in this had decided that the Army, and perhaps they themselves, were going to be framed for the attack. And yet what really makes them mad is the fact that European intellectuals will think that this proves they are right about the value of military might in the world. Real people don’t act like this. Real people would be worried about their country, about the possibility of more attacks, about the safety of their friends and family, about the possibility that they were going to be framed for the greatest terrorist attack in the country’s history, about what they should be doing right now to help put things back together again. But Card hasn’t written real people; he has written talking point spewing robots. And Empire is not a real story, it is a polemic to the joys of Might:
“Nothing,” said Reuben immediately. “They respect us now because we have a dangerous military. They adopt our culture because we’re rich. If we were poor and unarmed, they’d peel off American culture like a snake shedding its skin.”
“Yes!” said Torrent. The other students registered as much surprise as Reuben felt, though Reuben did not let it show. Torrent agreed with the soldier?
Remember that — there is nothing good or valuable in American ideals or culture. They only thing that keeps America from being ignored is the power of her military. Might is right, Might is good, Might is all. It is a similar message to at least one of the themes that runs through Ender’s Game.
As a brief synopsis of the relevant portions of Ender’s Game:(and apologies for the lack of quotes — I don’t have the text in front of me) Ender is a child the military raises to be the ultimate strategists and battlefield commander and thus lead the Earth to victory over its alien enemies. Ender accomplishes this by committing genocide on the aliens, genocide that the military has maneuvered him into committing. Before that, however, the military manipulates Ender’s life so that he needlessly kills two boys (though Ender doesn’t know they are dead until long after the fact) and that he is abused and oppressed by others in order to impress upon him the fact that only overwhelming violence is the answer. When Ender is given his first student command, Ender treats his best subordinate in the same fashion in order to get similar results. At no point is any of this played as even morally ambiguous: the torture of Ender is justified, as are the deaths, as is Ender’s own torment of his subordinate as Good and Right and Necessary. Ender is explicitly forgiven his actions several time sin the text — even the genocide, even the murder of one boy where he clearly went farther than was required to take himself out of danger — in part because he was manipulated, but in part because overwhelming, destructive violence is a necessary part of human and human/alien relations. Even the men who manipulated Ender into genocide and murder are exonerated both by the text and the courts of Earth. Might is right, Might is good, even if Might is not yet all. There are other themes in the book, and the question of genocide is dealt with with more complexity than it might seem from this summary, but the
A common thread runs through Ender’s Game and Empire, then, even if it is much more developed in Empire. And that last is the primary difference: Ender’s Game is a story; Empire is not. Ender’s Game tries to be a good story; that is, it tries to build realistic characters and have them react realistically to the situations they find themselves in. It attempts to mirror how real humans behave because it is, like all good stories, interested in telling us something about people. Empire does not have real characters because it is not interested in telling us a story. It is interested in making a political point and it will make that point, realism,. believability, character be damned. The difference between Empire and Ender’s Game are not the result of different authors. They are the results of differences in authorial intent.
Okay, so this is OSC’s entry into neo-con porn, a badly written book that amounts to nothing more than material for the 101st Keyboarders to wank off to. Why spend so much time on it, aside from the unintentionally hilarious prose? Because I believe the distance between Ender’s Game and Empire illustrates one of Dave Neiwart’s points: extremism can be mainstreamed.
In the late eighties, Orson Card was a writer with authoritarian leanings who wrote decent stories. Then came sixteen years of Rush Limbaugh and his ilk’s demonization of the left wing. That demonization only increased after 9/11, turning in some cases to explicitly eliminiationist rhetoric; Dave’s site has the details. And at the end of the time, Orson Card has morphed into full blown right wing lunatic who writes a political polemic flecked with spittle and pours bile on leftists of all stripes. Now, a person’s growth is never as simple as A caused B, and obviously I am not privy to what goes on in Card’s head. But the similarities are so striking as to be compelling. Leftists, in the world of Limbaugh and Coulter and Malkin, are vile things: anti-Military, closed-minded, smug, superior, elitist, anti-American, violent, incapable of reasoned though, practically traitors. Leftists, in Empire, are vile things: anti-Military, closed-minded, smug, superior, elitist, anti-American, violent, incapable of reasoned though, actually traitors. America, in the world of Limbaugh and Coulter and Malkin, is always right (even when it acts as an Empire it’s not really acting as an Empire) and its correct course of action is always to show the world who is boss. America, in Empire, is always right (even when it acts as an Empire it’s not really acting as an Empire) and its correct course of action is always to show the world who is boss.
In just five short chapters, Empire contains almost every vicious strawmen that people like Limbaugh have constructed to represent the Left in their minds and the minds of their followers. Ender’s Game had none that I can think of, and was only tentatively authoritarian. It is possible, of course, that Card came to his conclusions about liberals years after that Limbaugh and his imitators built strawmen that look precisely like those conclusions. But forgive me if I think that the road from Ender’s Game to Empire went through the cesspool that is the world of Limbaugh and Coulter and Malkin.
November 30th, 2006
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Politics, Writing, Culture, Terrorism, Books |
36 comments
I was nervous when I started reading this book. As smart as Bill Scher is, the promo material that came with my review copy read as if this was going to be another stupid framing book. Whatever the academic merits of the “framing” concept, in practice, political books dealing with “re-framing” are almost exclusively about magical thinking. If only the left would use different frames, the thinking seems to go, then opposition will be left flummoxed and impotent, everyone will just fall in line and their will be universal health care, a sane foreign policy, civil rights, and ponies for all. This, fortunately, is not one of those books. Wait, Don’t Move to Canada does have some discussion about language and the use of terminology, but those sections are not ends in and of themselves: they serve the higher goals of the book. Bill Scher has written a book, to be blunt, about the importance of picking fights.
Picking a fight is the overriding theme of the book, even if it is never explicitly stated. But at every turn — from foreign policy, the environmentalism, to gay rights, to health care, to economics — Scher demonstrates that not picking fights, that trying to finesse difficult positions, does far more harm than it does good. He shows why it is important to pick those fights, even if we start out losing. Yes, there is discussion of language and terminology, but only in terms of how to effectively argue the points we need to argue. Scher doesn’t fall into the trap of believing that using the right term will suddenly shift people’s opinions. He, unlike too much of the framing crowd, doesn’t pretend that life long opinions will magically shift if liberals just recite the correct incantations. Scher is trying to teach people how to make effective arguments and even how to lose arguments in a manner that advances our goal. He isn’t framing issues, he is fighting to convince people that liberalism is the correct position.
But the tactical aspect of the book is of secondary importance. The real strength of the book is its central notion: that liberalism must be vocally defended if the Democrats are to have any long term success. In a world of supposedly non-ideological “netroots” and magical thinking hidden behind “frames”, it is refreshing to see a political book that celebrates the importance of ideas and the importance of defending and advancing those ideas. Wait! Don’t Move to Canada! might be disguised as a book on political tactics, but it is really a full throated defense of liberalism and the importance of liberal ideals to the country.
Political power is meaningless without ideology. Scher recognizes this, and his book both lays out a strong argument for liberalism as well as ways for you to help make that argument more effectively. The fact that it is written in a clear, punchy style and is often funny is a bonus. If you are a liberal who wants to make a difference, Wait! Don’t Move to Canada! will certainly help you do so.
October 9th, 2006
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Reviews, Books |
one comment
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