Pope Joan, by Donna Woolfolk Cross

April 09 2006 (04:47:00) ( 0 views )

I have a poor grasp of history. It was too much for my attention span when the overworked and underpaid employees of my high school were trying their best to educate me. So it's been a pleasure, and an eye-opening experience as well, to have read a few "historical novels." Neal Stephenson of course comes to mind, although I'm sure many will argue that his genre is more in the realm of historical fantasy I have definitely picked up more accurate history and curiosity about it from his novels than any other source I can recall today. (In youth, a short attention span. In my later years, a poor memory. Hmm.)

Pope Joan is the account of the possible but unconfirmed rise to the Vatican throne of a girl, Joan Anglicus, in the 9th century. Whether or not the story is true, it's a great story, and a great job of painting the picture of what life may have been like in Europe 1200 years ago.

Joan is Joan Anglicus, born to a Frankish priest and his wife, a Saxon captured by the Christian soldiers of the Emperor Karolus. Joan's mother Gudrun is never completely converted to Christianity (small wonder, that conversion by the sword could cause superficiality) and teaches her daughter about the Norse religion and mythology and Saxon language -- although this must be done strictly in secret, for if the canon -- her father, a relentless and cruel religious tyrant -- discovered it, there would be literal Hell to pay.

Joan's life is hard, and her status as a woman is that of a subhuman being. In spite of her circumstances, she is obviously very brilliant and cannot be kept from learning to read and write, and from studying what paltry crumbs of knowledge in the form of books that come her way. She does encounter some wise and kind men who help her to learn and grow intellectually.

When her brother is killed in a Viking massacre, Joan assumes his identity and begins her life as a monk, passing for a man for the rest of her life.

The story of how she goes from the monastery to Rome, and into the Vatican is a well-told tale of intrigue, perseverance, and the triumph of an indomitable spirit. It is humbling to imagine how people lived in 842 with misery and hardship, living only half our normal modern life-span. Disease, cruelty, poverty, and war made it very unusual for people to live long lives in this time.

Although the setting is so very far in the past, the message is clear: many great minds and potential great leaders have been discarded by our culture because of their gender. Women then were no more than property, like animals or slaves. To have been a gifted intelligent female in these years would have been a horrible curse -- indeed, there is no doubt that many such were burned at the stake as punishment for being witches.

Pope Joan is an uplifting tale, a painless history lesson, and a very good read. I would recommend it to anyone.

The Smoke Room, by Earl Emerson

March 30 2006 (06:27:00) ( 0 views )

Jason Gum is a young Seattle firefighter, the narrator of this novel. He begins: "Experts estimated the pig fell just over 11,000 feet before it plunged through Iola Pederson's roof." Now, that's how to get your audience's attention -- the first words on page one.

Earl Emerson has become a skillful writer of mystery and suspense. I've enjoyed reading his work, and I think I've missed few of his novels over the years. I especially enjoyed the Mac Fontana books. The last few of his novels have dealt with the environment he knows from personal experience: the city of Seattle and its Fire Department. Emerson is a lieutenant in that organization, so he knows what he's writing about. My paltry experience as a volunteer gives me enough basic firefighting knowledge to be able to nod my head at the accuracy of what he describes, including the powerful and not always pleasant personalities.

The Smoke Room is a novel about Gum's misadventures and involvement in the less-than-savory actions of two fellow firefighters. Gum's steamy involvement with an older woman that commences from the unlikely falling pig incident on page one causes -- through a series of circumstances -- him to be implicated in what could be the theft of a fortune in bearer bonds. Add to this complicated mess the fact that his mother is terminally ill, and Jason's life just starts falling apart, the way the first few tons of snow begin to slide in the beginning seconds of an avalanche.

Some of the characters are less than believable, sort of out-of-focus, and the story line seems unfinished, perhaps prepared with insufficient time, but I forgive the author on the strength of the many enjoyable hours he's given me.

This isn't Emerson's best work, but I found it well worth reading. At 308 pages it's a reasonable weekend read, or entertainment for a medium-sized airplane trip. It does become rather suspenseful toward the end -- at least in the sense that I truly wondered how Emerson would resolve such a tangled story in the few remaining pages.

If you haven't read any of Emerson's books, I would recommend several. He started out with the "Thomas Black" detective series, most of which are very good. Try Fat Tuesday or Yellow Dog Party, for instance. Of his most recent books, I thought Pyro was very good. But my weakest spot is for the "Mac Fontana" series. Black Hearts and Slow Dancing will serve as a suggestion, but you can't go wrong with any of them, in my opinion.

More information about Mr. Emerson, his books, and his personal appearances, may be seen at http://earlemerson.com/.

EL

A Short History of Nearly Everything, by Bill Bryson

March 07 2006 (05:38:00) ( 0 views )

I am not typically a reader of non-fiction. In fact, I think I could probably count all the non-fiction books I have really read on my fingers. (This doesn't include textbooks -- that's not reading in the sense I use it here. That's work.) I actually wonder if I'd need both hands.

But in this case, I read every word, every page. I looked at every picture. I read the introduction, looked through the notes, the illustration credits, and even scanned the index. This is a fascinating book.

I've never read anything else by Bill Bryson, and to flaunt my ignorance, I'd never heard of him. My brother-in-law Mike gave us this book for Christmas. And it's a handsome gift. It's a real doorstop of a book, with a hard cover and glossy paper, measuring 8 x 10 inches and 624 pages. It has 595 beautiful illustrations, including photographs, drawings and paintings. But nothing is as important as the fact that this book held my interest as tightly as any page-turner I've ever cracked. I'm just not used to that with non-fiction.

So what is the subject matter of A Short History of Nearly Everything? Well, nearly everything. It is divided into six sections. They are:

1. Lost in the Cosmos. This is nothing less than an exposition of current theory and knowledge of the formation, composition, size, and state of the Universe in which we live. Among many other things, Bryson discusses our Solar System, the discovery of Pluto, and theories about asteroids.


2. The Size of the Earth. Who knew that in 1735 "...people had lately become infected with a powerful desire to understand the Earth ..." to the extent that a party of "scientists and adventurers" from France travelled to Peru with the idea of triangulating distances in the Andes with the ultimate goal of calculating the size of the Earth?


3. A New Age Dawns. The age of Einstein, Planck, Hubble, Neils Bohr. A time when "a graduate student ... named Clair Patterson ... using ... lead isotope measurement to try to get a definitive age for the Earth ..." discovered that the soil, air, the very rocks he was testing were unbelievably contaminated with lead -- "two hundred times the levels...expected..." which discovery lead him to understand that this was the result of adding tetraethyl lead to gasoline. Patterson embarked on "a hellish campaign" to expose the truth about this monstrous health hazard. Bryson credits him directly with the introduction of the Clean Air Act of 1970, and "the removal from sale of all leaded petrol in the United States in 1986." This fascinating story is one of many woven into the fabric of this section.


4. Dangerous Planet. The nature of our globe -- what's inside, and what's on top. What's happening to our continents, what about volcanos? Did you know that Yellowstone Park is a volcano?


5. Life Itself. Cells, DNA, Darwin. What was the "KT impact?" Dinosaurs roamed the earth much longer than we have to date. What's our life expectancy as a species?


6. The Road to Us. The mysterious biped. Hominids, the Holocene era. Anthropology, archaeology. In Chapter 29 we read that "about a million and a half years ago some forgotten genius ... took one stone and used it to shape another... it was the world's first piece of advanced technology."

There is no way I can really do this book justice here. It is, after all, about "nearly everything." On the back of the dust jacket appear the usual testimonials from critics. They are all true in this case, but the one I want to excerpt comes from Tim Flannery, Times Literary Supplement:

"...schools would be better places if it were the core science reader on the curriculum."

A Short History of Nearly Everything is filled with stories of quirky scientists, and the often ironic fates they met. It seems almost a natural law of human history (and somewhere Bryson states it as such) that the wrong person will get credit for any major discovery.

The book is stuffed with material from which one may launch hours of heavy thinking and talking. Bryson quotes Ian Tattersall in Chapter 28, "The Mysterious Biped:" "'One of the hardest ideas for humans to accept ... is that we are not the culmination of anything. There is nothing inevitable about our being here." There is much about the origin of the human race -- what is known and what is not known. And there is little to make one confident that we are here for very long.

Bryson has accomplished what is, in my mind, a very unusual feat here. This book is not chatty or condescending, it is not oversimplified, nor is Bryson less than modest about its capacity to cover the ambitious scope he's undertaken. This is a starting place, but what an accomplishment.

The only other author I've encountered that writes this type of non-fiction is John McPhee, and Bryson cites his work more than once. McPhee has written such books as Basin and Range, which takes on the subject of plate tectonics, and Coming Into the Country, a book about Alaska that I read in the 70s (I think).

We live in a time when much money and work is expended on increasing our knowledge, yet how much of that knowledge ever touches most of us? Writers like Mr. Bryson give us the opportunity to have a look into the huge body of information that humanity has accumulated, and, having seen it, we know that we know very, very little about anything. In his own words, "We enjoy not only the privilege of existence, but also the singular ability to appreciate it and even ... to make it better."

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Whiteout, by Ken Follett

February 24 2006 (21:46:00) ( 0 views )

I've read Ken Follett's novels for many years, remembering back to The Eye of the Needle, and The Key to Rebecca as two of the best thrillers ever. His writing has been quite diverse since, including such unusual yet terrific books as Pillars of the Earth and On Wings of Eagles -- the latter being a nonfiction account of Ross Perot's efforts to rescue his employees from the Iranian revolutionaries in the days following the overthrow of the Shah.

Follett has a knack for the thriller, and for the original. Both are well displayed in this novel, which is a great weekend's entertainment or just about right for a long airplane trip.

I must mention that I'm not really happy with the bio-terrorism angle of the plot in this book. It seems that both Mr. Follet's and my government have made enough hay on that theme without his help. But having said that, the plot is very well done and the book provides plenty of suspense along with sufficient character development to keep us involved.

The principal character of the book is Toni Gallo, an ex-cop now working as head of security at a medical research laboratory in Scotland. The abovementioned terrorists plan to steal a deadly virus that is stored in the lab, and the attempt is carried out during an unexpected blizzard that chokes the roads and makes every movement a challenge.

The story of how Gallo handles this situation and the other characters in her life as well is well thought out and believable.

Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson

Going into this I have to admit that I am 100% hooked on Neal Stephenson. I think he's a bit younger than me and for that I'm thankful, for he may be around to write more books for a long time.

Snow Crash is far from his latest, but it's his latest for me. I've read a few of his others: Cryptonomicon, Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World. These are all excellent, as far as I am concerned. And so was Snow Crash, even if I may be so bold as to say that I can see the progress Mr. Stephenson has made since 1992 when he wrote this novel.

For a pretty good summary of Neal Stephenson's life and works so far, see Wikipedia.

As for Snow Crash, I'm glad to be an amateur critic. A professional wouldn't be able to take the time to read a 13-year-old book and then write about it in his column, he'd be too busy reading the latest stuff and forming opinions about it. But for me there are no such restrictions; as far as I know my readers are few (if any) and if they have come here to keep up on the latest trends in literature they are already sorely disappointed.

This was one of the most entertaining books I've ever read. Its vision of the near future (very near now, 13 years later) is provocative yet humorous enough to avoid extreme grimness.

Its protagonist, Hiro Protagonist (good heavens), is a hacker living in California in some undisclosed future year. He becomes aware that there is a very serious threat to both the "metaverse" and the real world from a virus called "Snow Crash," a reference to a blanked-out computer screen showing only what (in the old days of broadcast TV) used to be known as "snow."

In this whirlwind story he befriends a 15-year-old skateboard "Kourier" named YT, a street-wise young girl with an arsenal of high-tech weapons that she uses in pursuit of her profession -- which is basically delivering messages and packages by "pooning" vehicles and being towed at high speed through the maniacal jungle that California has become.

Other important characters include Uncle Enzo, head of the MAFIA; L. Bob Rife, televangelist and corporate emperor; Raven, an Aleut with a motorcycle, glass-tipped spears, and a nuclear warhead; Ky Nguyen, a bionically enhanced veteran of Vietnam; Da5id, friend and wealthy hacker who is injured by Snow Crash (it can crash both computers and programmers, as the latter have brains that have come to terms with digital language); and Juanita, Da5id's ex-wife, an object of Hiro's admiration and would-be affection, and religious mystic.

Did I use the word "whirlwind" already? Yes, I did. It was inevitable.

The story leads Hiro on a crazy chase, trying to run down and destroy L. Bob Rife and the evil virus that he's about to unleash on both the real and virtual worlds. Action takes place both in the "metaverse" (sort of a graphically-enhanced super-realistic Internet where people are represented by "Avatars," and interact with others according to how the metaverse code is written. NB: Hiro P. is one of the coders of the metaverse, an advantage not to be overlooked.) and in reality -- although the question is begged: which world is less real?

There is sword-fighting, love-making, motorcycle riding, and lots of heavy speculation about the significance of Sumerian myth and stories from the Old Testament as they might pertain to the present day. Hiro comes to the conclusion that the myth of Babel is really a story of salvation, when humans were freed from bondage to a type of machine language control that is never completely suppressed. It comes out at times in history as glossolalia, or speaking in tongues, as in the Pentecost, and Southern tent-revival meetings. Snow Crash is a virus written in this very old and powerful language, and it threatens to enslave the world, or at least California, to the whims of L. Bob Rife.

If you like computers and have ever thought about any of this stuff, read this book. If not, read it anyway. Stephenson is very habit-forming. His later stuff is nothing less than fascinating and I regret that I did not begin this project until I had read the abovementioned books. He is obviously very well-versed in all manner of history, and has given a lot of thought to the progress of humanity through the ages.

Thanks to William Lychack

My heartfelt thanks to Mr. William Lychack (author of The Wasp Eater, about which I wrote some inadequate words last year) for his very nice letter. He didn't even mention that I called him "John" in the title of that post. Please excuse the errors of the elderly, sir.

I am very gratified that what I wrote was pleasing to you, Mr. Lychack. Your book held me in its spell when I read it, and for that experience thanks are hard to express. When I find a book with characters that come alive in that way, that takes me into its atmosphere so completely and makes me care about what happens in its pages -- well, that is what I'm looking for when I read. The end of such a book always leaves me a little sad that I have to leave that paper world and search for another.

Furthermore I can't tell you how pleased I was that you actually read this little blog -- having been read by a "real writer" has gone irrevocably to my head and I shall be impossible to live with henceforth.

Please give us more, Mr. Lychack. And thank you, again.

EL

Therapy, by Jonathan Kellerman

The Alex Delaware series by Jonathan Kellerman has long been one of my favorites. Therapy, (2004) is a recent addition to the series.

Obviously I've missed one or two before this novel, as Alex Delaware is no longer with his lady of many adventures, Robin, the guitar-maker. Robin does appear briefly in the role of "ex," however, as does the bulldog, and the indispensable Milo Sturgis is still prominent in this story. Delaware's new lady, Allison Gwynn, is an interesting replacement. She is a teacher, a hospice volunteer, and a psychotherapist.

Alex Delaware is a child psychologist that over the years has formed a working relationship with the LAPD. Milo Sturgis is his good friend, and a homicide detective with the force. Together they become involved in the mysterious murder of two young people found in a parked car in the driveway of an uninhabited house.

The mystery is as good as any of the others that I remember. And so is the psychology. Another important character in this book is "Dr. Mary Lou Koppel," a psychotherapist who has a popular radio call-in show. Koppel once treated the young man who was found murdered in the car. The identity of the young woman found with him remains a mystery until much later in the book.

There's a tremendous amount of intrigue and plot-twisting in this thoroughly enjoyable book, and the resolution of "whodunit" is quite satisfying. Even more skillfully done, however, is the portrayal of all the characters. The relationship between Delaware and Sturgis is the foundation of all these stories, and here it is continued and well utilized. There are many psychologists involved, and a lot of "shop talk" that sounds very authentic to my ears. (I work in the mental health treatment industry, although I am not a therapist, I'm a computer geek.)

Delaware and Sturgis are involved in a complicated plot that takes us as far away as South Africa and Rwanda. They encounter some really surprising characters, and uncover very high-level corruption. I love stuff like this, and used to read Robert Ludlum just because of these type of plot twists. I finally gave up on Robert, though. He just wrote too much for me, I guess, and I couldn't keep up.

Jonathan Kellerman has never disappointed me in the past, and his record is perfect with this novel as far as I am concerned.

EL