Books

Malcolm Reynolds’ Hero Moment

In Books, Fandom on 31 May 2010 with 3 comments

Ever since receiving my early copy of Firefly: Still Flying (I have a photograph in it), I’ve been overbearingly strident that (p)reviewer after (p)reviewer has been getting one of the new Firefly stories wrong.

The degree to which I have not seen others reading the story in the same way leads me to need to explain myself. (It should be noted, however, that I’ve not been engaged in some exhaustive search for all discussion of the story.) This is the point at which, if you haven’t yet seen the book and read “Take the Sky”, the story penned by Jose Molina at the end, you close this window and don’t come back until you have.

There’s no way for me to get into this without venturing headlong into spoiler territory, and you really do owe yourself the pleasure of reading the stories (Molina’s in particular) unspoiled. Read no further, and click no links.

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Current Reads At Year’s End

In Books on 23 December 2009 with Comments Off

Generosity: An Enhancement
by Richard Powers

When Chicagoan Russell Stone finds himself teaching a Creative Nonfiction class, he encounters a young Algerian woman with a disturbingly luminous presence. Thassadit Amzwar’s blissful exuberance both entrances and puzzles the melancholic Russell. How can this refugee from perpetual terror be so happy? Won’t someone so open and alive come to serious harm? Wondering how to protect her, Russell researches her war-torn country and skims through popular happiness manuals. Might her condition be hyperthymia? Hypomania? Russell’s amateur inquiries lead him to college counselor Candace Weld, who also falls under Thassa’s spell. Dubbed Miss Generosity by her classmates, Thassa’s joyful personality comes to the attention of the notorious geneticist and advocate for genomic enhancement, Thomas Kurton, whose research leads him to announce the genotype for happiness.

The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power
by Jeff Sharlet

The Family is about the other half of American fundamentalist power — not its angry masses, but its sophisticated elites. Sharlet follows the story back to Abraham Vereide, an immigrant preacher who in 1935 organized a small group of businessmen sympathetic to European fascism, fusing the far right with his own polite but authoritarian faith. From that core, Vereide built an international network of fundamentalists who spoke the language of establishment power, a family that thrives to this day. In public, they host Prayer Breakfasts; in private, they preach a gospel of biblical capitalism, military might, and American empire. Citing Hitler, Lenin, and Mao as leadership models, the Family’s current leader, Doug Coe, declares, We work with power where we can, build new power where we can’t.

The Umbrella Academy: Dallas
by Gerard Way and Gabriel Ba

The team is despondent following the near apocalypse created by one of their own and the death of their beloved mentor Pogo. So it’s a great time for another catastrophic event to rouse the team into action. Trouble is, each member of the team is distracted by some very real problems of their own. The White Violin is bedridden due to an unfortunate blow to the head. Rumor has lost her voice — the source of her power. Spaceboy has eaten himself into a near-catatonic state, while Number Five dives into some shady dealings at the dog track and The Kraken starts looking at his littlest brother as the key to unraveling a mysterious series of massacres… all leading to a blood-drenched face-off with maniacal assassins, and a plot to kill JFK.

The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation
by Drew Westen

The Political Brain is a groundbreaking investigation into the role of emotion in determining the political life of the nation. For two decades Drew Westen, professor of psychology and psychiatry at Emory University, has explored a theory of the mind that differs substantially from the more “dispassionate” notions held by most cognitive psychologists, political scientists, and economists—and Democratic campaign strategists. The idea of the mind as a cool calculator that makes decisions by weighing the evidence bears no relation to how the brain actually works. When political candidates assume voters dispassionately make decisions based on “the issues,” they lose. That’s why only one Democrat has been re-elected to the presidency since Franklin Roosevelt—and only one Republican has failed in that quest.

The Strange And Dangerous Offspring

In Books, Politics, Secularism on 9 December 2009 with Comments Off

The Family (Powells)
by Jeff Sharlet

Is fundamentalism too limited a word for such utopian dreams? Lately some scholars prefer maximalism, a term meant to convey the movement’s ambition to conform every aspect of society to God. In contemporary America — from the Cold War to the Iraq War, the period of the current incarnation’s ascendancy — that means a culture remade in the image of a Jesus strong but tender, a warrior who hates the carnage he must cause, a man-god ordinary men will follow as he conquers the world in order to conform it to his angry love. These are the days of the sword, literally — wealthy members of the movement gift one another with real blades crafted to battle standards, a fad inspired by a Christian best seller called Wild at Heart: Discovering the Secret of Man’s Soul. As jargon, then, maximalism isn’t bad, but I think fundamentalism still strikes closest to the movement’s desire for a story that never changes, a story to redeem all that seems random, a rock upon which history can rise.

I offer these explanations not as excuses for the consequences of American fundamentalism, an expansionist ideology of control better suited to empire than democracy, but to point to the defining tension of a creed that is both fearful and proud even as it proclaims itself joyous and humble. It is a martyr’s faith in the hands of the powerful, its cross planted in the blood-soaked soil of manifest destiny. It is the strange and dangerous offspring of two intensely fertile sets of stories, “America” and “Christianity”.

End of excerpt.

Is The Man Alive?

In Books on 14 November 2009 with Comments Off

Generosity: An Enhancement (Powells)
by Richard Powers

Has he ever fallen in love with a fictional character? I might as well ask: Is the man alive? He’s just a few genes away from those famous rhesus monkeys, clinging to their terry-cloth mothers as if life depended on it. The trait has all kinds of value: the ability to get warm from the mere symbol of smoke.

End of excerpt.

The American Credo Of Tolerance

In Books, Nonsense on 7 November 2009 with Comments Off

The Age of American Unreason (Powells)
by Susan Jacoby

But junk science also has a politicized meaning, diametrically opposed to what genuine scientists mean by the phrase. It has been appropriated by right-wing politicians and journalists to describe any scientific consensus that contradicts their political, economic, or cultural agenda. …

… The right-wing distortion and politicization of junk science is nothing more than a branch of a more pervasive phenomenon best described as junk thought. The defining characteristics of junk though, which manifests itself in the humanities and social sciences as well as the physical sciences, are anti-rationalism and contempt for countervailing facts and expert opinion. …

… Moreover, the much lionized centrists, sometimes known as moderates, are in no way immune to the overwhelming pull of belief systems that treat evidence as a tiresome stumbling block to deeper, instinctive “ways of knowing.” … The real power of junk thought lies in its status as a centrist phenomenon, fueled by the American credo of tolerance that places all opinions on an equal footing and makes little effort to separate fact from opinion.

End of excerpt.