Walking on the Moon

As a long-time comics reader, it’s been strange to watch them become so prevalent in popular culture.  When I was a kid, something like Super Folks was a genuine anomaly – commenting on real life through comics in a way that indicated a love of that medium was never done.  Lately this has become a more common lens through which to get at the world.  Prepare To Die! is Paul Tobin’s entry.

Tobin has built a world of superheroes in the 90’s comics sense.  His heroes (and villians) sport colorful powers and celebrity stature backed with realistic characterization and real failings.  His hook is that when confronted with the cliched command “Prepare to die!”, Tobin’s hero, Steve Clarke,  negotiates a 2 week cease fire to do just that.

From there the history of the world and the protagonist unspool as we follow Steve through his bucket list.  Following Steve is fun and moving.  Superheroics is mostly teenage boy wish-fulfillment and yanking his protagonist into that world at that age lets Tobin riff on celebrity and the differences between childhood dreams and adult aspirations.  Steve’s reflections are resonant and believable while the suddenly ticking clock gives his introspection real stakes.  This is good stuff.

And then it all comes off the rails for me in the last chapter.  The tone and what I thought was the theme all change and the world finishes in a place that makes a lot of that soul searching seem moot.

That may be my limitation, of course.  And heaven knows that so many promising comic series come to an unsatisfying conclusion that it’s practically a genre trope. But, still, the ending really felt too arbitrary and at odds with the rest of the book for me.

The ending would not have disappointed me if the vast majority of the book wasn’t excellent.  Tobin has a knack for getting inside the head of young men and putting them on the page for all to see – good and bad.  He also puts together a propulsive adventure story and comics plot. There’s a lot to like here, but that final chapter just doesn’t work for me.

John Scalzi’s Redshirts is an affectionate look at the worst job in fiction – the doomed minor character. As soon as I start writing about the inner lives of minor characters, I wind up twisting myself around the axle of noticing that they’re fictional.  Saying a doomed character doesn’t know he’s doomed forces me to confront the fact that they’re a character – they have no inner life at all, but that’s true of  a main character, too, and  their inner lives are what fiction’s made of, and look there’s that axle again.  Fortunately for his readers John Scalzi doesn’t have these problems.

Scalzi deftly breathes life into minor characters running around the irrational and dangerous Star Trek universe (actually a knock-off of that universe).  He does a fine job both bringing those characters to life and showing us the world in which they live without changing the essential nature of either.  This is a fictional Sci-Fi universe that only makes sense as fantasy; these are not the heroes of that series. Creating interesting characters without breaking those rules is quite a trick.

It’s far from the only trick he pulls off.  As the characters begin to understand their world, they  figure out the tropes of the genre they find themselves in.  This allows plenty of room for commentary on the sorts of world serial fiction creates by looking out from that world.  It’s an interesting and fun perspective.

It’s fun because Scalzi knows these tropes intimately. He can smile with  genre conventions and inside jokes that grow from necessity. He also decries the lazy writing or the corner cutting that springs from a tight schedule, limited talent, or laziness. That distinction is important to him and,  he implicitly argues, should be to us as well.

It’s one thing to point out through meta-fictional games that genre characters are often written worse than they deserve.  The trick that makes Redshirts powerful is that without leaving this world that he constructed to expose all faults and inconsistency of bad wriing, he writes several moving, absorbing, meaningful arcs while sticking to those rules.  It’s one thing to point out hackwork; it’s quite another to show how to transcend genre in the same breath.

Even if you couldn’t care less about what this all says about writing and genre, Redshirts is a fun read. If you do care, it’s quite a lot more.

Strongly recommended.

Stephen Ambrose’s Undaunted Courage tells the story of the Lewis and Clark expedition with an emphasis on Meriwether Lewis and Thomas Jefferson.  Jefferson may seem out of place in that sentence.  He never travelled west of the Mississippi, but as Ambrose demonstrates, he did groom Lewis extensively and shaped the goals and principles of the expedition.

Lewis is a fascinating individual. Already a patriot, soldier, and woodsman, he eagerly takes up Jefferson’s training to become a enough of a jack of the trades of writer, botanist, and navigator to turn the expedition from a look around into a scientific endeavour.  Between the two men it is also clear that this is to be a political and business expedition as well.  Understanding and cultivating the trust of the natives, and determining the extent of the land Jefferson bought and how to exploit it take up at least as much time as looking at new plants.

A fair amount of time is spent understanding Lewis’s relationship with Clark, of course.  Their unique shared command of the expedition was key to its success and the two men fought the prevailing structures of society to make it work.  The Army expected one commander, but Lewis (their choice) made it clear to the men and the brass that he and Clark would be equals.  Ambrose illuminates this key relationship.

When exploring something that is as much a part of the American mythos as this expedition, it would be easy to gloss over the real men and real pressures inherent to it.  Ambrose does an excellent job of keeping the magnitude of the task in focus while pointing out places the expedition errs.  There’s no sugarcoating, either.  When Ambrose thinks Lewis has messed up, he is blunt about it.  This is a considerable merit.

As I sit down to write this, some weeks after completing Undaunted Courage, I remember that it did take a while to get through it.  But, I also realize that I remember much more of it than I would have expected.  This is a pretty good selling point for Ambrose’s writing.  I don’t remember any flashiness, but I do remember the narrative and interesting perspectives on a monumental undertaking in American history, undertaken by real humans.  Tough to do better than that.

Recommended.

Whenever I talk about a Neal Stephenson book, I generally have nice things to say.  REAMDE has all of his strengths as an author on display: a well thought-out near-future (or maybe divergent timeline) world, many thought-provoking elements in service of a good story, a set of interesting protagonists solving tricky problems, and a breakneck pace.  There is also the occasional bit of perfect description that causes you to see the commonplace from a new angle.

It’s a lot of fun to read, and one gets the impression that Stephenson is having fun writing it.  At one point, in the middle of a firefight, he steps back and introduces a new character – backstory and all – a detour of tens of pages.  He does this, I think, both for the joy of pulling such a thing off well, and to cheerfully heighten the tension of the conflict by drawing the reader’s attention away.

I can pick at this or poke at that, but basically REAMDE delivers the well-imagined thrills of a Cryptonomicon.  If you liked that, you’ll like REAMDE.

Strongly recommended.

When I reviewed Braniac, Ken Jennings first book, I said I would be on the lookout for more.  I skipped his trivia almanac, but I devoured Maphead with great delight. As with Brainiac, I have an  interest in the topic, even if I haven’t given in to it at Jennings’s level. 

Structurally, Maphead is very much like Brainaic: Ken Jennings goes out and immerses himself deeply into a geeky sub-culture in which he was previously only mostly immersed and tells us all about it.  In this case, his topic is maps and the passtimes around them without feeling like I went to class.

Maphead‘s a little like a 1990’s P.J. O’Rourke book where P.J. would tromp off to some troubled nation, drink with the locals, and boil it all down for his readers humorously.  Except Jennings travels are most interesting in the sense that he’s covering the conceptual landscape of his topic. And there’s much less drinking.  So perhaps not a great analogy, except for the key points that both are funny and I learn things from them without feeling like I went to class.

I think Maphead is best understood as a travel book where we’re traveling around the idea of maps.  In the tradition of great travel authors, Jennings succeeds both because he has picked representative stopping points in an interesting destination, and because he is informed and good company on the journey.

He finds interesting places that readers with less time to look around might miss.  Maps are awesome, and it’s not very surprising that the Library of Congress has a boffo collection; Paris has a big tower.  What one might not expect is that there are a set of folks who hold imaginary road rallies on maps with pen and paper, or the extent to which a game show winner/author might get sucked into GeoCaching, or that there’s a National Geography Bee.  All of these are enticing to different degrees, but The National Geography Bee sounds so bad-ass that it should clearly be widely televised instead of the World Cup.  Our man Jennings found the thing, and shows it to us in all its geeky, competitive, synthesis-of-facts-and-thinking glory.  I am now aggressively hostile to the National Spelling Bee (which isn’t Jennings fault; OK it is kinda) for taking away coverage from the National Geography Bee.

Anyway.

Finding all this stuff and describing it in a way that recognizes its essential nerdity while highlighting its fundamental attractions (beyond its essential nerdity) is a brilliant coup.  If a book called Maphead sounds like the smallest bit of fun to you, you should read this.  You will have much more than the smallest bit of fun.

Strongly Recommended.

Chicago history seems to be full of larger than life characters and ironic juxtapositions. This may be because the city is some kind of fantasy exemplar of corruption, hubris, and contradiction, or because the folks who chronicle the place can spin their tales that way.  Gary Krist’s City of Scoundrels: 12 Days of Disaster That Gave Birth To Modern Chicago enhances the city’s larger-than-life reputation, for better and worse.

The 12 days in question are in late July 1919 in which a simultaneous race-driven set of riots, political maneuvering, child kidnapping, and blimp crash(!) combine to form a significant crisis.  The driving forces are, unsurprisingly, the riots and the maneuvering.  The crash and the detective case add flavor to and flesh out the news cycle of late 1910’s Chicago.

While the additional color adds context and scope to the main proceedings, the last part of the subtitle never really coheres.  Krist gives us a clear and insightful view of the times, but never quite connects it to the larger arc of Chicago’s history.  Some of this is because larger arcs are inherently large, and few turning points are absolute.  These riots had ramifications beyond their time, but Chicago has too many other forces colliding on it for them to feel definitive.

While the subtitle somewhat oversells the book, what is there is an insightful and engaging telling of a key time in Chicago history.  I found it gripping without having any particular interest in Chicago.

Recommended.

Jenny Lawson’s memoir, Let’s Pretend This Never Happened has clear roots in her entertaining blog.  I don’t read it regularly, but I follow references to it and have enjoyed much of what I have read there.  I know Lawson can write manic, funny anecdotes with great style.  I was happy to find her range to be wider than that.

The book is episodic, and each episode has its pleasures: apt turns of phrase, zany escalations of absurdity, and honest moments of revelation. This is an interesting and engaging person who tells her own story well.  The reader comes away with a sense of having met a singular person.

If I have a criticism, it is that it still feels somewhat like episodes that were built into a larger narrative.  There are worse recipes for a memoir, but I’m interested to see what Lawson can build if she were to build a work from the ground up.  I’m interested, but  if she decides she would rather  continue putting out collections of this quality, I’ll stay pretty happy.

Recommended.

I really enjoyed James Loewen’s books about how we record and pass on history.  One of the points he made was how few books there are that chronicle the US war in the Philippines, so I decided that when one came up on my radar I’d be sure to have a look.  Enter Gregg Jones and Honor in the Dust, which discusses Roosevelt, that war, and US imperialism.

Jones does a nice job corralling his facts and following the chronology of the conflict.  He tracks the US’s grab for Cuba and the almost incidental grab for the Philippines in support of their revolutionaries.  It is a good place to start as it frames Roosevelt’s character and support for military intervention well against the times before getting into the dirty details of the Philippine War.

The details are pretty dirty, and not at all surprising to any 21st century observer.  US soldiers in a hostile and grueling environment are ordered to use extreme measures to put down insurrections lead by desperate guerrilla fighters.  Slaughter, torture, and betrayal abound, and when these actions come to light the high command denies everything.  Except that with more than 100 years of time and investigation there is much stronger consensus about the misdeeds committed and the origin of them. It makes for depressing reading, especially when it rings so much like foreshadowing.

Jones has his facts straight and writes clearly, but there is a lack of urgency to his narrative.  Events proceed inevitably but there is little tension.  Some of this may be due to a desire not to oversensationalize the events, which are quite appalling enough without embellishment.  Some of it may be that Theodore Roosevelt, the most larger-than-life of the players, disengages quite a bit from the war itself as he becomes president.  And perhaps some of the lack of tension is that we know that the public and military are going to largely forget about the lessons that the war teaches.  Whatever the reason, the narrative flags somewhat in the later part of the book.

This is important, gut-wrenching stuff to know about, but to an extent it feels like literary vegetables.  It is nutritious but does not go down easy.

Recommended.

In Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power, Rachel Maddow lays out the proposition that through the late 20th century the executive has slowly pulled the power to take America to war away from the people. She does an excellent job both laying down the research that led to that position and explaining how it fits together and why Americans should care.

I was careful to say that the executive had taken the power from the people, not from Congress, though that’s true as well.  One of Maddow’s key observations is that the 20th and 21st centuries have steadily compartmentalized the sacrifice involved in going to war.  Sacrifice motivates people to assess the benefits of warfare; blunting that pain removes an incentive to consider it.  It is a keen observation that she explains clearly and supports strongly.  By itself it illuminates a fair amount of policy.

She’s also clear and precise about the other, more commonly heard arguments about how the executive has drawn this power to itself with few setbacks.  There were some important ones, however, that indicate that the trend need not be inevitable.  After Vietnam, Congress did assert some amount of power and pull back some of the rights from the executive.  But Congress is directly responsive to the people in the best and worst senses of that.  When supporters and donors lose interest, congresspeople fight other battles.

That is all only a curiosity if she does not argue that Americans should care.  While you will not find a chapter in Drift called “Why You Should Care,” Maddow does a good job of underlining the problems without beating you over the head with them. The philosophical and practical issues both get some time in the spotlight, from who should bear the risk and cost of war to what it means to commit the power of the US military on the say-so of a few of the powerful.  These are important issues given appropriate weight.

Overall this is a timely, clear argument about the current state of our warmaking engine and a history of how it got to be that way.  It is well worth understanding and probably changing.

Strongly recommended.

Michael Brooks starts with a good theme in 13 Things That Don’t Make Sense, but his execution comes off the rails for me.  His idea is to pick 13 places that scientific consensus is weak or non-existent and highlight them as areas in which breakthroughs could come with new thinking.  This is a sound idea.  Things we don’t understand are spots where people are looking and new ideas are necessary, which is a recipe for shaking things up.

The problem is that the actual phenomena he highlights are hit or miss.  While there really is significant confusion if not downright incredulity around dark matter and dark energy, saying that there is less confusion about cold fusion and homeopathy is a big understatement. There is consensus that homeopathy is snake oil and that cold fusion is an over-hyped anomaly. The distinction is between what experts in the field make sense of and what the general public makes sense of.  There isn’t much chance of a scientific breakthrough coming from studying how Penn and Teller catch bullets in their teeth, even though most people don’t know how it works.

Brooks’s choices are not uniformly bad.  I did enjoy and learn from parts of 13 Things.  Overall, though, I found the mixing of real conundrums and simple misunderstanding to be very distracting.