Walking on the Moon

Agency takes place in the same continuity as The Peripheral, and it surprised me again. This time the surprise was how resilient the setting turned out to be.

Gibson has often turned his mind toward anthropomorphizing artificial and collective intelligences. He has a remarkable skill at making that dry idea engaging and entertaining. He makes robots human like no one else.

His artificial intelligence is the star of the show and he primarily uses the thriller plot of Agency to illuminate that intelligence’s emergence and maturity from multiple perspectives. One of the things that delights me about this is that he makes his human characters real and interesting enough that their perspectives are authentic and enhance his ideas about artificial life.

Beyond this extended character study, Gibson is an SF master who also cheerfully throws out other ideas to play with along the way. He’s also quite good at constructing the thriller that underlies all of this.

While I liked it quite a bit, I don’t think it’s his most profound work. It is very entertaining and very engaging – emotionally and intellectually – but he has been even deeper. That may say more about how I rate the quality of his other work.

Recommended.

Bill Bryson turns a beautiful phrase. He also organizes a great book and executes it quite brilliantly. He’s funny and informative and as a writer has few equals.

I particularly love his travel writing and his memoirs. They’re warm and funny and informative.

His science writing tends to leave me cold. I think I miss the personal connection of lived experience that he brings to his other writing. The Body isn’t for me.

Carmen Maria Machado has brought a remarkably powerful work into the world with In The Dream House. Any short summary would belie the honesty, power, and craft she employed. That said, it’s a memoir of her years as a victim in an abusive relationship.

Abuse is complicated, layered and yet invites simple judgement from us. Everyone has preconceptions about what it is and perhaps insight from being involved. Whether the reader believes that one brings it on oneself or that the abusers are possessed by overriding malice or many many other explanations, each person and relationship differs.

Machado tells her story in tiny, bite-sized chapters that slowly cohere into the narrative. They also cohere into an introduction to her remarkable mind. She has dissected her experience deeply from many angles. Each chapter is a facet of those thoughts, captured at different moments in time and reflecting aspects of the situation. That creates bounds around her experience that neither define or encapsulate it. Other people’s experience is never our own, and Machado doesn’t let us believe so. The corral she draws around the thing clarifies it remarkably.

She attacks the thing from so many perspectives. She is a scholar of the literature and the statistics. She is a queer woman living with her understanding of others’ assumptions and judgements. She has dug deeply into how those preconceptions have shaped her own ideas of her identity. She is a hurt child. She is a Star Trek fan. She is a literary scholar. She is a young, sociable college student. She is a writer. And so, so, much more. She is a human, and one I find remarkable.

I have to stress hat last facet – being a writer – because she is a remarkable one. Each of these facets is a gem in itself. The memories are evocative and poetic. The musings are clear while capturing the thoughts that led her to them. The scholarship is professional. And the whole thing intertwines in ways that make it all more of what each is.

A must.

To A God Unknown contains a simple narrative presented with all the complexity and style that literature can muster. I have not read a lot of Steinbeck, and I’m surprised how much of the human condition he can illuminate with his spare, direct prose.

Unknown lays out the characters and their lives without obvious artifice, but it’s pretty hard to miss the symbolic role they are to play. Everyone is iconic here, and the stakes are both trivial – a single family ranch in Central California – and monumental. The ranch is nothing to the world and everything to these people. The events are pedestrian in that any rancher can relate and lyrical in that no one can explain them. The characters play their literary roles in the drama without deviation while stinking of humanity.

The result is a powerful concoction. I didn’t wind up caring a lot about what happened to these characters, but I did come away with a lot of empathy for the people whose lives are at the whims of the ineffable.

Steinbeck also opens the door to think about how people think about and try to bargain with the ineffable. No conclusions, but lots to think about, if you are of that mind. And I certainly am.

Recommended.

The Lady From The Black Lagoon delivered a powerful blend of ingredients that come together to make a new, delightful tale. I was expecting a conventional biography of an underappreciated woman whose significant contributions to the movies were predictably underplayed by the various old boys networks. Lady delivers the goods here, with meticulous research of Milicent Patrick’s career. Casual fans of monster movies, like me, probably don’t know her name but almost certainly know the results of her brilliant creation: the creature design and costume from The Creature From The Black Lagoon. The confluence of studio politics, ego mania, and internalized patriarchy erased her indelible mark on the movies and a big part of Lady is an attempt to start redressing that.

Any figure who had been treated so harshly by the people in the industry she was such a big part of would be a worthy topic such a biography. That Milicent turns out to be a larger-than-life personality is an added delight. Mallory O’Meara brings her vividly to life.

But wait, it gets even better. O’Meara meshes Patrick’s story with her own story of building a new life in Los Angeles and researching the biography of Patrick. This plan is as brilliant as it is daring. It works because O’Meara composes and expresses her intertwined memoir with power, compassion, and clarity.

Her voice is a distinctive combination of confidence, honesty, and whimsy. She describes the process of learning the ad hoc methods of historical research as she works through Patrick’s story. She links that story with her own career in the same industry and how it mirrors her idol’s experiences. She also shares the ways that the experiences of writing the book prompted deep self-reflection and how it changed her.

O’Meara composes and expresses these competing threads of biography and memoir with moving panache. She is an excellent writer with a vivid voice.

A must.

The physics nerds that I know – and I know a couple – approach problems along similar distinctive pathways. They tend to try to break an obstacle down into fundamental principles, translate it into mathematics, and methodically explore the whole set of possibilities in those formulas. If your mind doesn’t work like that, it sounds like a deadly dull process.

Randall Monroe gleefully proves that idea wrong in How To.

The premise is that he approaches some simple, practical problems with a whimsically amplified version of the stereotypical physics nerd mindset. the result is an impish set of a completely impractical explorations of mathematical modeling. The trick is that he has so much fun laying out and working through these models that readers are sucked into the pleasures of analysis.

Again, that sounds much duller than it is. Anyone who is interested in math or science will find themselves quickly sucked in. I hope that people who don’t think they are will feel the pull as well.

Strongly recommended.

This is kind of an interesting beast in that it is an adaptation of two British TV episodes on a remake of a well regarded series, Civilization. Dame Beard’s focus is on how ancient art reflects humanity’s impressions of their bodies and their gods.

It does have the nature of a breezy overview that short episodic television often has. Within that framework, she makes several thought-provoking points. I also appreciated how she pointed out artistic movements and shifts that may correlate with philosophical shifts. I’m no expert on ancient art, but this has whetted my appetite to learn more.

Recommended.

I read 22 books in 2019. (Off-by-one error). Here are the books I strongly recommended:

• Second Founding
• How To Hide An Empire
• War Dances
• In Patagonia
• Operation: Mincemeat
• The Apocalypse Codex
• The Half Has Never Been Told
• The Library Book

I enjoy Eric Foner’s work both because he is interested in the US Reconstruction and because he writes lucidly and thoughtfully about it. The Reconstruction informs the current form and slant of American society at the same time that the content of the story we tell ourselves about it varies completely with who is telling it. This is an exploration of the time that citizens imbue the national government with new powers and new roles at the same time that people begin making the myths that will continue to inform the discussions about them. In Second Founding, Foner frames those struggles inside the bounds of the constitutional amendments that people enact and interpret.

People often interpret the past as being more unanimous than it was. In thinking about the reconstruction amendments – 13, 14, and 15 – I’d bet that most people imagine a pretty unified support for the general ideas that recognize formerly enslaved people as citizens. Foner does an excellent job drawing out the various competing positions and the compromises that create the amendments and their interpretation.

Depending on what one believes – and the Reconstruction narrative they know – current discussions about the ability of the federal government to override state laws to protect voting rights or civil rights can be completely opaque. The false uniformity makes current actions feel like unethical exploitation of established law. If one’s mythology includes the idea that the 14th amendment recognizes rights of citizens and declares that the federal government must act to protect them, the 20th century has a flavor of betrayal to it. If one’s mythology views that amendment as a mechanism to secure a lasting voting bloc that supports moneyed interests, the 20th century looks more like a replay of a domestic power grab that hade been beaten back at the end of the 19th. Founding strips such false consensus away and opens a door to talk.

The reality, as Foner explains, is that the amendments were the results of a compromises between at least the 247 congressmen who wrangled over them. Some were pretty clearly motivated by ideals; some were pretty clearly motivated by power politics. Some were motivated by the financial interests of patrons. Some were driven by what state legislatures were willing to approve – a process that includes how the amendments will tilt powers and representation of states in the future. Most balanced combinations of those motivations.

Many of the arguments the representatives and pundits published at that time took root as the basis of the mythology of the emerging post-Civil-War central government. There are few arguments about these amendments that don’t date from their creation.

Foner chronicles the arguments and resulting language that defines them. He also holds the various interpretations of the arguments’ expression and resulting clauses up and connects them. He has a definite bias, but presents more than enough information to understand the process.

He then goes one step further and explores how the Supreme Court interprets the amendments. It is oddly comforting to see that political appointments and hidebound jurists are nothing new. Foner argues compellingly that the justices of the day did interpret the law conservatively – and commercially. (And President Johnson’s influence was considerable as well.)

Overall this is a clear and informed exploration of these Amendments and the people and stories around them.

Strongly Recommended.

This is another joy from the work of Rund Abdelfatah and Ramtin Arablouei on the brilliant Throughline podcast that NPR supports. They credit Daniel Immerwahr’s How To Hide An Empire significantly in their Puerto Rico episode. I recommend that episode.

Empire itself is a strong history of the United States’ adventures acquiring and administering territory in the 19th century and the sea changes that WWII brings to that Empire. The two phases are fascinating in their own rights. The strange happenstances of expansion by a democratic yet slave-holding state before the war are fundamentally refined by changes in technology and geopolitics worked on and by the US. The US becomes a worldwide distributor of influence, goods, and arms and our foreign holdings reflect that in ways that surprised me.

The first half of Empire shows how the US’s Manifest Destiny mythology drives conquest and land acquisition, modulated – as always – by the internal struggles between Northern financial and manufacturing interests against Southern slave-driven interests. The expansion of the empire is also influenced by our best ideals. The geopolitics of the world also plays a role. Unlike European powers that were wresting land and resources from largely indigenous people, the US was largely wresting land from other colonizers. The interplay between the promises one makes to the colony and the improvements that appear when the uprising is over reveals a lot about human nature.

After World War II, the US needs foreign holdings less to pull in resources like rubber and guano (yes, guano) than to project influence and products. The underlying changes that drove those changes and what that means for the people in the colonies are fascinating. The trade-off between exerting influence based on democratic ideals and holding colonists in varying piecemeal states of rights and protections produces some remarkable verbal tap-dancing and outright doublethink.

One hopes this sort of history can make citizens think more deeply about how we act. Empire is a clear and accessible place to start.

Strongly recommended.