Walking on the Moon

This is a biography of Thomas Noguchi who was a flamboyant LA Coroner during some exciting times in Los Angeles and the country. He performed the autopsies on Marylin Monroe and Robert F. Kennedy and was involved with numerous other high profile cases up to John Belushi. And he was loud about it. He clearly enjoyed the personal publicity and sought it out. Just his public life role in those famous cases is interesting history.

His story also has a more tragic arc. After years of running the Coroner’s office, he is ultimately publicly removed from that role for mismanagement. Probably with reason.

He is also a Japanese-American in charge of a large department in the second-largest city in the USA when few non-white people had access to those roles. More than that he was publicly driving investigations of national figures. His investigation of Kennedy’s murder still teaches forensic pathologist lessons today. Seeing a Japanese-American describing the details of a presidential assassination was unheard of at the time.

Anne Soon Choi tells a story of this brilliant but inconsistent individual well. It’s obviously tricky to do. There are aspects of his life that show excellence. There’s the thirst for attention. And there are failures of ability as well. All of that is in the environment of racial and city politics of turbulent times. Choi covers it all well with the eye of a historian.

I can’t say this is the sort of beautifully written biography that rises to literary greatness. It is messy in places, and sometimes repeats information. But I think the messiness reflects the subject well. This is a person who was not one thing, or even consistent across time. He’s not a literary character and it’s rendering him as one would minimize the person he was.

Strongly recommended.

More Murderbot. The LA public library had this listed as following Network Effect when it actually is set before that novel. It was still good Murderbot fun, but I was hoping to see more of the post-Network Effect worlds.

Still recommended.

This is a fun book. I often read SF that’s speaking to bigger ideas and trying to change minds. In Bounce House Matt Dinniman is telling a ripping yarn first. For that to work for me, there has to be enough going on thematically that I care about why that yarn is in the realm of SF. I don’t mind if that leads to tropes, but I do care why we’re in the future.

Dinniman does a nice job with that. He wants to talk about gamer culture, imperialism, immigrants, personhood and a bunch of other ideas that fall nicely into SF. That is a lot to talk about while also setting up a space opera with stakes. In the end Bounce House doesn’t poke at any of those ideas deeply, but they’re creating believable stakes.

The shallow approach works because he gives us a winning cast of characters in a world that’s real enough as long as the pace is high. The pace is high, the stakes are clear, and the whole thing rips along with me in the seat.

Strongly Recommended.