Walking on the Moon

Cunning Plans is a collection of talks and notes for talks that Warren Ellis has given over the last few years. I suspect that the talks were a tad more lively when given and that the text here is a pale substitution.  The preparation and notes do give a look into the workings of a mind I find very interesting.  You will know pretty quickly if it will be interesting or not.  The book is a $1 kindle single, and it’s hard not to float the buck just to see what’s on Ellis’s mind.

Recommended.

Winston Groom’s The Aviators takes a look at some of the men who most changed the face and scope of aviation in the 20th Century.  The fact that he looks at only three people who found themselves at the center of international attention as often as they did says something about how rough and tumble aviation was, and perhaps still is.  The Aviators provides an overview of the aviation careers of Eddie Rickenbacher, Jimmy Doolitle, and Charles Lindbergh.  Again, it’s fascinating that so many qualifiers are needed in that sentence.  This is an overview – Richenbacher has more to say about himself than Groom can reasonably allot to him; on the other side, Lindbergh’s contributions to medical prosthetics and ecology are shoved out.

Without covering any of the men in detail there’s still plenty to say.  While I imagine one could produce a boring work about these three, they don’t make it easy.  Just hitting the high points:

Rickenbacher:

• Was the US Ace of Aces in WWI
• Ran Eastern Airlines profitably for decades
• Was nearly killed in an Eastern crash
• Crashed during WWII and spent 24 days on a life raft in the Pacific

Doolittle:

• Designed, built and flew the first instrument approaches
• Was at the center of nearly every controversial discussion about military aviation between the World Wars
• Personally led the famous one-way raid on Tokyo that both acted as a symbol of American resolve after Pearl Harbor and shifted Japanese defence posture in the Pacific make it possible for the US to restore their presence there.

Lindbergh:

• Became an international celebrity for being the first to fly from New York to Paris non-stop (and solo).
• Defended and promoted aviation causes for years between the the world wars
• Studied and improved the operation techniques of the P-38 Lightning in the Pacific, providing significant enough improvements to change the course of the war in the Pacific.  And flew combat missions as a civilian.

There’s no shortage of incident or impact, and Groom brings it all to life accurately and with some flair.  Overall it’s a great way to whet a reader’s appetite for deeper histories of the period.

Recommended

It is easy to tell that The Sculptor was created by Scott McCloud.  Even if you somehow failed to identify his clean, distinctive art style, the writing displays all his predilections in both content and style. I’m a pretty big fan of those predilections, so I enjoyed The Sculptor quite a bit.

Most of McCloud’s work comments on art and the struggle to create it, and this is the central theme of The Sculptor. McCloud centers his narrative on a gifted and driven sculptor who makes a nearly literal deal with the Devil to improve his chances of making his creative mark. This is the kind of character that McCloud does well.  Several of his Zot! villains are cut from this cloth as well as some of his heroes. McCloud’s own drive, coupled with his obsessive study and theorizing about art seem to make his driven artist archetypes particularly believable.  His sculptor is no different.

Within that setup, McCloud wears his heart on his sleeve.  His characters all make their wants and needs and hopes and dreams very clear to us as readers, and we’re invited to root for them unabashedly.  There’s not much wondering about anyone’s motives or purity of heart.  Even the central love story is carried out as much through declaration as through any innuendo.  Everyone is very direct; when he resorts to symbolism to drive a point home, it’s of the most direct sort.

In some hands, that could feel very simplistic. And Sculptor is simple in many ways, but McCloud’s winning sincerity makes the directness feel like clarity when it could feel like laziness.  The story is a bg sincere puppy, and such animals are tough to dislike.

It’s also surprising that McCloud can keep narrative tension without any real villains in the story.  Each character seems to represent a different attitude about making art in addition to having a personality and perspective.  While there are clearly differences in how much sympathy McCloud has in their perspectives, none is portrayed as being irretrievably wrong or without some merit. This reflects his inclusive bent toward other artists, but the occasional bad guy to hiss at does help focus attention.  Even his deal with the Devil is diluted into a deal with Death, who has the sculptor’s interests in mind to an extent; the real enemy is the rules of the deal rather than a malevolent supernatural force.

Overall there’s a lot to like about The Sculptor, but I can understand some people being more bored than inspired.

Recommended.

Will Bingley and Anthony Hope-Smith call their Gonzo graphic novel a graphic biography of Hunter S. Thompson, but I see it as more a supplement for other reading on Thompson.  They seem to assume that the reader knows who he is and why he is an important – or at least interesting – man in American letters.  I have long been a fan of Thompson, so I may well be the target audience.

To their credit, they illuminate Thompson from some unusual angles.  Their vision of Thompson is a more calculating and clear-eyed writer and journalist than most biographers.  It seems that Thompson did care about and groom his legacy, but I am not sure that he was thinking about the big picture of his legacy at the time he was writing his early works.  It definitely will prompt me to reread some of the other biographies with that in mind.

Graphically, I think the art matches the tone.  The lines are clean and dramatic with a clarity that mirrors Thompson’s clear eyes throughout.  There’s a certain amount of Darrick Robertson’s Spider Jerusalem in their Hunter Thompson, which is to be expected.  Jerusalem is partially a Thompson pastiche, but one gets the feeling that Robertson’s influence is also present.  The effects are strong, regardless of the sources.

Recommended for Thompson fans.

Phil Lapsley’s Exploding The Phone captures the phone phreaking culture with both solid journalism and with the sort of enthusiasm that brings a story to life. I have long known that phreaking was a foundation for the modern hacking and open source communities, but the scene never came alive for me.  Reading Exploding The Phone was like finding my parents’ high school year book for the first time and realizing that they went through the same things I did.  It was enlightening and warming.

The first few chapters are a little repetitive for my taste.  Lapsley follows several seminal phreakers introduction to the phone system, and those paths are different only in detail.  As a result, the chapters are somewhat repetitive.  I think that Lapsley is trying to give these fellows their due and to introduce the cast for the rest of the chapters, but I would have been happier with one detailed chapter and somehow getting just the differences.

Once the narrative begins to talk about the social scene that phreakers developed around conferencing and connecting to one another inside the phone network, the scene becomes recognizable as a forerunner of modern social networks. That’s the point at which it becomes rich enough to go from academic to exciting for me.

In addition to the social networking of the phreakers, Lapsley brings the stories of the phone company employees and law enforcement officers who collided with them.  These folks shared the phreaker mentality and skill set to different extents, just as such folks do today.  It makes the scene more full and believable.

Overall this is a great view of an legitimately exciting time that is the basis for much modern technology.  Jobs and Wozniak figure prominently, and the path from phreaks to hackers is remarkably clear.

Strongly recommended.

Denis Johnson’s The Laughing Monsters is an exciting, suspenseful, thriller set in Africa.  For me, and I suspect most readers, the plot is really a sideline, though. The mood Johnson sustains is much more powerful and interesting.

Johnson’s Africa is haunted.  It’s haunted by ancient ways of life ruptured by recent horrors.  It’s haunted by the West’s history of exploitation and recent headless terror over 9/11 and related unrest.  It’s haunted by Africa’s homegrown despots and their rapacious hungers.  It’s haunted by poverty, greed, and ambition. These restless spirits howl throughout the whole book.

Importantly, all these ghosts visit our protagonists directly. There are no moments where anyone announces that Imperialism brought about a plot element or haunting detail, but there’s never any doubt where those elements and details stem from, either. The ghosts are always personal; they touch our anti-hero adventurers as directly as a creepy uncle in a church basement. The unease and guilt swirl throughout the narrative.

It’s a spooky book front to back, and a good thriller to boot.

Strongly recommended.

Kevin Underhill writes Lowering The Bar, which is really all the credentials one needs as a funny lawyer. His Emergency Sasquatch Ordinance is one of those e-mails or gift shop books that collect strange, stupid, outdated laws.  Unlike the e-mails and the gift shop books, Sasquatch is well researched and properly referenced. It’s also funnier.

So Underhill has done an existentially strange thing.  He’s produced the best instance of a disposable piece of pop culture.  The result is an engaging piece of ephemera.  It’s well worth buying and reading it, even if you may do so in the bathroom.

Strongly Recommended.

I picked this up based on a review of a writer I like, and I got something I wasn’t expecting.  The blurb and the review both gave me the idea that Eric Kaplan was going to use the abstract question of how we relate to imaginary characters as a stepping stone into a general philosophical discussion. Does Santa Exist is more about how Kaplan has made peace with the questions than how society has.  The result is a philosophical memoir.  I admire the audacity but don’t share his positions.

He begins with a tour of the philosophy of logic and quickly zeros in on logic’s limitations in dealing with self-reference and contradictions.  Valid concerns, of course, and well expressed.  He moves on to other belief systems: Buddhism and other mystic systems.  It’s sort of an odd juxtaposition in terms of the overall shape of philosophy, but seems to trace his own metaphysical journey.  He alludes to formal Buddhist and Zen training a few times.  He clearly does not find what he calls the mystic approach compelling, either. From there he wends his way to Kabbalah.

I’ve encountered the Kabbalah system before, and I don’t find it an intuitive way to organize my thoughts on reality. If Alan Moore (and J. H. Williams III!) can’t sell me on a system of magical thinking, well, anyone else will have an uphill battle.

So, I’m happy Kaplan’s found a belief system that works for him, but if the point of Santa was recruiting others – and I think it is – he didn’t manage to get me.

The Epic Struggle of the Internet of Things is an essay by the estimable Bruce Sterling that promotes his perspective on pervasive computing, big data, the giant companies that promote these and the effect of it all on society.  It’s thought provoking and refreshing with plenty to turn over in the reader’s mind.  It’s also thick with snippets that went directly into my quote file.

Sterling is largely interested in current trends in public and private surveillance.  He starts by working backword to see their causes – tech drivers and economic ones – and forward to see their effects.  Many have pointed out the changing role of consumers in a system where so many “products” are free, but Sterling captures some of the driving forces particularly clearly. His perspective is both polemic and entertaining.

Not all of his essay is convincing, of course.  He’s thin on the economic forces that sustain his favorite big data companies, for example.  However, as a perspective changer and food for thought The Epic Struggle is invaluable.

Strongly recommended.

Douglas Adams warns against blowing up the Earth in chapter 1 because you’ll need it later.  This is good advice even if you’re writing an apocalyptic trilogy. MaddAdam is the last of Margaret Atwood’s apocalyptic trilogy that started in Oryx and Crake, and the trilogy had kind of run out of gas for me.

MaddAdam ties up loose ends from the earlier books, fills in some details of some characters pasts, and advances the post-apocalyptic plot.  The earlier episodes had more momentum and satirical bite.  One of the joys of those books was the fairly biting look at the modern society that Crake wanted to wash away.  Atwood would skillfully extrapolate that world from this with equal parts horror and humor that made for the best satire.  MaddAdam does not extend the satire much, and it is definitely missed.

The plot of MaddAdam fills in the gaps in a character’s history, but that history doesn’t add much to the world or the plot.  One of the strengths of After The Flood is that Atwood shows us the events of Oryx and Crake from a different conceptual part of the world.  The difference in the characters’ perspectives enrich the plot and add satirical targets.  MaddAdam’s flashbacks bring few new perspectives, though plot details get filled in.  I’m glad that Atwood knows these details that make her plot more sound and consistent, but I didn’t get very excited about learning the finer points.

Atwood is one of my favorite writers and technically the writing is spectacular.  Even though I was not very impressed by MaddAdam, it is full of beautiful phrases and brilliant literary constructions.

Overall, I recommend MaddAdam for completeists, but most readers won’t get much out of it that wasn’t in Oryx and Crake and After The Flood.