Dec 30 2023

The Education of an Idealist by Samantha Power

Samantha Power was a writer before she went into public service. And even though she’s been America’s ambassador to the United Nations, and is now serving as the chief of the US Agency for International Development, it’s possible — maybe even probable — that she’s a better writer than anything else. Which means that even after I have read The Education of an Idealist, it’s difficult to pick up the book, look at the quotes I had flagged for writing this review, and put it down again in anything like a reasonable amount of time.

Here’s a case in point from early in the book where she’s talking about her time at Lakeside High School in suburban Atlanta, a few years after her mom had brought her and her younger brother to the United States from their native Ireland. (It’s also one of several locations that make me think that Power and I very likely have mutual acquaintances.) Court-mandated desegregation brought a fair number of Black students to Lakeside in the mid-1980s when Power was there. She reflects on what that meant in practice.

By the time I arrived at school in the morning, rolling out of bed around 7:30 a.m. and taking a quick ten-minute walk to school, most of my black peers had been up for several hours—first waiting for a neighborhood bus that would take them to a transit hub, then catching a second bus that brought them to Lakeside. I played on the school basketball team and ran cross-country and track. Due to afternoon practice, I started on homework “late”—after six p.m., when i would arrive home. The African-American students on my teams, however, had to wait around for an “activity bus” that did not even leave Lakeside until seven p.m., ensuring that they were rarely home and able to start studying until after nine p.m. Crazily, students who sought out extra help from a teacher or stayed after school to use the library weren’t even permitted to ride the activity bus and had to find their own way home…
To this day, when I hear people judge students on the basis of their test scores, I think of my sleep-deprived African-American classmates as we geared up to take English or math tests together. We may have been equal before God, but I had three more hours of sleep, vastly more time to prepare, and many more resources at my disposal than those who were part of the busing program. (p. 35)

It wasn’t just schools.

Mum and Eddie [Power’s stepfather] saw similar bigotry at Emory University, where they had taken up their jobs as nephrologists. When Eddie attempted to recruit a talented Haitian-American doctor who had graduated from Harvard Medical School, one of his colleagues expressed his opposition, telling Eddie, “Down here, they park cars.” (p. 36)

Power has taken a large and difficult issue — racial discrimination in American schools and workplaces, legacies of a past that is far from passed — and shown how it works in daily life, and implicitly challenged readers to think about how it may have played a role in their lives, what roles it is probably still playing. The whole book is like that. It’s engaging, it’s full of great and funny stories, but it’s also clear throughout that Power sees many ways in which the world could be better, and she’s dedicating her life to helping bring some of those ways to fruition.

The Education of an Idealist by Samantha Power

Power got a big career break when, after graduating from Yale in 1992 (another place we may well have mutuals), she went to work for Mort Abramowitz who was then president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She wanted to work for Foreign Policy, Carnegie’s prestigious journal, and was disappointed to wind up an intern in the president’s office. She feared a gopher role, not quite realizing that she would have a close-up view of the intersection between think tanks and policy in Washington.

Mort was the first person I came to know who had helped make foreign policy at such rarified levels, and over time he would drill into me a simple truth: governments can either do harm or do good. “What we do,” he would say, “depends on one thing: the people.” Institutions, big and small, were made up of people. People had values and people made choices. (p. 52)

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Dec 29 2023

The Hanging Tree by Ben Aaronovitch

Peter Grant, one of two official wizards of the London police force, owes his life to Lady Tyburn, one of the genius loci of the city’s numerous rivers. So when she wakes him with a pre-dawn phone call to say that one of her daughter’s friends has had an accident — the “fatal” is unstated but implied — and that she wants him to keep her daughter from being implicated in the investigation, he answers as he promised. “Yes ma’am, no ma’am, three bags full ma’am.” She adds that Nightingale, his supervisor in both policing and wizarding, is not to know. Peter replies that Tyburn has made herself crystal clear. And then calls Nightingale immediately.

The Hanging Tree by Ben Aaronovitch

“I rather think I’d have to have taken an interest in any case,” said Nightingale once I’d briefed him. “Still, I shall endeavour to adopt a façade of ignorance until such time as you need me.” He paused and then said: “And you will let me know when that moment arrives.” It was not a question.
“Yes sir,” I said, and hung up wondering why everyone felt the need to be so emphatic at this time of the morning. (p. 2)

Given Peter’s task of keeping someone unimplicated in a police investigation, he can’t exactly go digging through computerized records to find out what is already in the system about the incident, so he calls Detective Constable Guleed, who he knows is doing night shift for Homicide Assessment that week.
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Dec 28 2023

System Collapse by Martha Wells

System Collapse has a great ending, possibly the best yet in Martha Wells’ wonderfully engaging Murderbot series. I emphasize that because I was a little lost at the beginning of the short novel, though that was mostly my fault. The story in System Collapse picks up immediately after the end of Network Effect, which was the second Murderbot story that I read. In the intervening two years, I read four more novellas in the series, so the setup was not fresh in my mind and had been overlaid by other stories with the same characters. In that regard though, I partly mirrored the state that SecUnit — the more friendly and more common name for Murderbot — finds itself in at the novel’s beginning. Something redacted has happened to render some of SecUnit’s memories unreliable, something that has slowed its reactions, and muddled its thinking.

System Collapse by Martha Wells

SecUnit, a team of humans from Preservation, and the ship Perihelion — dubbed Asshole Research Transport, ART, by SecUnit — are all still on a planet that has proved hostile along unexpected vectors. They are still near a site of alien contamination that they narrowly escaped in Network Effect. They still want to evacuate a colony of humans who have been cut off from the larger starfaring civilization while all remain free of the contamination. And there is still a team from the Corporation Rim who also want to evacuate the colonists, but as a means of gaining indentured laborers. If they wind up killing SecUnit and company on the way to that KPI, that’s just business, right? Effective, efficient, but nothing personal. The colonists, for their part, have just encountered two groups presenting wildly different versions of the universe outside of the only world they have ever known. Should they trust either?

Then SecUnit and the humans it’s working with find out that there is potentially another settlement up near the massive engines that are terraforming the planet. Those interfere with scans, sensors and long-distance communications so thoroughly that the only way to find out for sure is to send a detachment to go and look. The group that may have settled there was a splinter and did not want to be in contact with the main colony, so they selected a location to keep themselves incommunicado. Ignoring them would leave them open to the planet’s alien contamination, which could then potentially spread beyond the planet. Not really an option, then, and most of System Collapse is about what happens when SecUnit and a small team go up to have a look-see.

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Dec 27 2023

Just SNOW Already! by Howard McWilliam

This book is an utter delight! Just SNOW Already! masterfully combines straightforward prose with the slyest, most charming illustrations to tell an entirely different, layered tale of anticipation and of (hopefully) not neglecting all the wonderful things already taking place while you’re waiting for something “better” to happen.

Our unnamed protagonist is a young boy who shares the big eyes and bangs of my own youngest child. He really, really wants it to snow, as there is nothing more fun, in his opinion. His sister is less enthused, but gets ready to go outside to play with the neighbor while our young hero waits more or less patiently inside for snow. He runs to the window every so often, looking hopefully up at the grey skies… and absolutely missing all the intriguing and delightful things actually unfolding on the street in front of his house.

While the words themselves are already pretty great, balancing the narrator’s dramatics against his family’s more measured responses, it’s the illustrations that really shoot this book into the stratosphere. The multiracial family is terrific representation, and the street scenes are full of rich, wordless story. I loved how the narrator’s sister was busy living life while her brother pined, tho the book also provided a very valuable lesson on other ways to cope with anticipation.

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Dec 26 2023

The Narrow Road Between Desires by Patrick Rothfuss

The last time there was a new book by Patrick Rothfuss to write about, The Frumious Consortium was a new project,and Laura reviewed The Slow Regard of Silent Things faster than the rest of the crew. She had strong ideas and took issue with common views coming out of fandom. She set the naysayers straight:

The Narrow Road Between Desires by Partick Rothfuss

This is not a book about doing; this is a book about knowing, about being aware of all the small things in your life and how important they are. When Auri takes the time to deeply contemplate exactly where an object should be placed and which direction it should be facing and how it should be touched, she is understanding that object, and through it, herself. In essence, how it should fit into the world, just as we all must fit into the world.

Laura found her ways to fit into the world, and now the rest of us have to find ways for the world to fit without her in it. I would love to know what she thought about The Narrow Road Between Desires, not least because it is another novella that’s skew to Rothfuss’ larger works, both in its characters and its time. The main character of The Narrow Road is Bast, a male fae who also appears in The Name of the Wind and The Wise Man’s Fear. His name was familiar, but that was about all because I’ve only read the other two books once each, and that about a decade ago. So the beginning of The Narrow Road felt like it was aimed at readers with much more recent experience with the world and the characters, or who were already deeply invested in the setting and hungry for anything fresh from Rothfuss. While I could admire the writing and the construction, I was not, initially, all that caught up in the story.

On the one hand, The Narrow Road is the story of a day in Bast’s life, from the time in the early morning when he tries to sneak out of the inn where he works and gets caught through midnight when all of the day’s plots have been wrapped up and he returns to the inn, only to be quizzed by the keeper on the day’s events. On the other hand, it’s not just any day; it’s midsummer, the longest day, when this fae strikes several bargains and keeps up his end of them, to various reactions from the humans with whom he has bargained.

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Dec 25 2023

Merry Christmas

Luke 2:1-14, Old English:

Soþlice on þam dagum wæs geworden gebod fram þam casere Augusto, þæt eall ymbehwyrft wære tomearcod. Þeos tomearcodnes wæs æryst geworden fram þam deman Syrige Cirino. And ealle hig eodon, and syndrige ferdon on hyra ceastre. Ða ferde Iosep fram Galilea of þære ceastre Nazareth on Iudeisce ceastre Dauides, seo is genemned Beþleem, for þam þe he wæs of Dauides huse and hirede; þæt he ferde mid Marian þe him beweddod wæs, and wæs geeacnod. Soþlice wæs geworden þa hi þar wæron, hire dagas wæron gefyllede þæt heo cende. And heo cende hyre frumcennedan sunu, and hine mid cildclaþum bewand, and hine on binne alede, for þam þe hig næfdon rum on cumena huse. And hyrdas wæron on þam ylcan rice waciende, and nihtwæccan healdende ofer heora heorda. Þa stod Drihtnes engel wiþ hig, and Godes beorhtnes him ymbe scean; and hi him mycelum ege adredon. And se engel him to cwæð, Nelle ge eow adrædan; soþlice nu ic eow bodie mycelne gefean, se bið eallum folce; for þam to dæg eow ys Hælend acenned, se is Drihten Crist, on Dauides ceastre. And þis tacen eow byð: Ge gemetað an cild hræglum bewunden, and on binne aled. And þa wæs færinga geworden mid þam engle mycelnes heofenlices werydes, God heriendra and þus cweþendra, Gode sy wuldor on heahnesse, and on eorðan sybb mannum godes willan.

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Dec 24 2023

That’s Dickens with a C and a K, the Well-Known English Author

Marley was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it: and Scrooge’s name was good upon ’Change, for anything he chose to put his hand to. Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail.

A Christmas Carol

Mind! I don’t mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a door-nail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the Country’s done for. You will therefore permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Marley was as dead as a door-nail.

Scrooge knew he was dead? Of course he did. How could it be otherwise? Scrooge and he were partners for I don’t know how many years. Scrooge was his sole executor, his sole administrator, his sole assign, his sole residuary legatee, his sole friend, and sole mourner. And even Scrooge was not so dreadfully cut up by the sad event, but that he was an excellent man of business on the very day of the funeral, and solemnised it with an undoubted bargain.

The mention of Marley’s funeral brings me back to the point I started from. There is no doubt that Marley was dead. This must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going to relate. If we were not perfectly convinced that Hamlet’s Father died before the play began, there would be nothing more remarkable in his taking a stroll at night, in an easterly wind, upon his own ramparts, than there would be in any other middle-aged gentleman rashly turning out after dark in a breezy spot—say Saint Paul’s Churchyard for instance—literally to astonish his son’s weak mind.

Scrooge never painted out Old Marley’s name. There it stood, years afterwards, above the warehouse door: Scrooge and Marley. The firm was known as Scrooge and Marley. Sometimes people new to the business called Scrooge Scrooge, and sometimes Marley, but he answered to both names. It was all the same to him.

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The rest.

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Why don’t you try W.H. Smith?

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Dec 22 2023

Long Chills And Case Dough by Brandon Sanderson

Given the way this year has been going, it seemed only fitting to (finally, belatedly) start my Year Of Sanderson with the last book released as part of his gargantuan Kickstarter. And let’s be honest, I likely won’t finish reading the other four books he sent out by the end of the calendar year. Fortunately, it’s pretty much always the Year Of Sanderson in my reading heart.

I also desperately needed a break from the psychological thrillers that have made up the vast majority of my work reading recently. This novelette was the perfect length to give me a tiny respite, especially since I stayed up late to devour Britney Spears’ memoir too last night — a full review of which will be forthcoming after Christmas. I did actually pause when I realized this story was also a mystery, tho, granted, in the hardboiled PI genre. But since my beloved Wax And Wayne series of this author’s is technically a Western, I figured I’d still be in for a transporting sci-fi treat.

And boy howdy was I.

Jack Derrins is a self-made anachronism. While the rest of the world is living firmly in the year 2151, Jack chooses to exist as if it’s still two hundred years earlier, running a private investigation agency and pining for the bad old days. His new secretary Alici is uninterested in his standing instructions for her to look pretty and stay helpless; truly it is a shock how he can never seem to keep an assistant for any significant length of time.

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Dec 21 2023

Mya McLure, The Brave Science Girl: The Toad Cave by Douglas Haddad & Jennifer Ball-Cordero

Mya McLure is a young environmentalist who knows that making an impact requires efforts both personal and political. While she leads her classmates in petitioning local government to stop cutting down trees, she also finds herself faced with a much less public dilemma, as a large number of toads come to her home in search of shelter.

Enlisting the help of her classroom teacher Miss Russell, Mya learns how to build a habitat for the toads in the woods near her house. But misadventure befalls the two as they’re setting up the little toad cave that Mya has built to her teacher’s instructions. Will Mya be able to use her quick wit to help get Miss Russell out of trouble?

This was a very cute picture book that revolves around how humans can build welcoming habitats for toads via easy-to-make toad caves. It even has instructions in the back, if you want to try crafting one at home. Jennifer Ball-Cordero’s illustrations are especially charming, featuring a multicultural cast and surprisingly adorable amphibians. I do feel that there may have been a little bit of miscommunication on one page, where Miss Russell is running towards a cave that is clearly very different from the habitat she and Mya are building, but the target audience of second graders might not even notice that at all.

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Dec 20 2023

Breakfast at Tiffany’s by Truman Capote

Holly Golightly knew how to make an impression. That’s the first impression that Truman Capote wants his readers to come away with. Years after Capote’s unnamed first-person narrator last saw Holly, he drops everything to go see a bar owner who called him out of the blue after not being in contact for quite a long time. Holly is their one point of connection. “I took a taxi in a downpour of October rain, and on my way I even thought she might be there, that I would see Holly again.” (p. 10) But no, all that Joe Bell has is a photograph from Africa, dated 1956 — Breakfast at Tiffany’s was first published in 1958 — of a wood carving that is the spitting image of Holly. Apparently she made an impression in Africa, too.

Breakfast at Tiffany's by Truman Capote

That encounter with an image of her likeness leads the narrator to recount the days during World War II when he was new in New York and lived upstairs from Holly in a Manhattan brownstone that had been subdivided into rooms and apartments. Here is how he first saw her, one night well after midnight, when she had awakened several residents by ringing the bell:

I went out into the hall and leaned over the banister, just enough to see without being seen. She was still on the stairs, now she reached the landing, and the ragbag colours of her boy’s hair, tawny streaks, strands of albino-blond and yellow, caught the hall light. It was a warm evening, nearly summer, and she wore a slim cool black dress, black sandals, a pearl choker. For all her chic thinness, she had an almost breakfast-cereal air of health, a soap and lemon cleanness, a rough pink darkening in the cheeks. Her mouth was large, her nose upturned. A pair of dark glasses blotted out her eyes. It was a face beyond childhood, yet this side of belonging to a woman. I thought her anywhere between sixteen and thirty; as it turned out, she was shy two months of her nineteenth birthday. (p. 17)

Quite a lot to see whilst leaning over a banister in the wee hours of the night. And so Capote begins establishing the fantasy of Holly Golightly, whose escapades form the bulk of the story. The narrator and essentially all of the other men in the novella are fascinated with her, and Capote seems to delight in piling on the improbabilities as the story goes on. She is attractive, smart but also willing to play dumb or at least distracted, energetic, impulsive. She’s also perfectly willing to lead men on, and they are more than happy to play the part in hope of winning her favor, or at least standing higher in her esteem than the other men who have gathered round.

The individual scenes and anecdotes are generally funny, and the momentum is unstoppable, though by the end I thought that Capote was seeing how much his audience would put up with. Quite a bit, as the movie adaptation and the book’s continued popularity show. The Brazilian diplomat, the exchange of partners, the child bride, the Hollywood brush with stardom, the adorable old Mafia guy, the assembly of colonels and captains all invited to the same party. And she’s not yet nineteen! Reader, don’t think about this too hard, just have another cocktail and enjoy the antics.

There are three more stories in the book, one about prostitutes in Haiti, one about an escape from a prison farm, and one a piece of Christmastime Southern Gothic. The last is the most touching, especially its ending; all three are very mid-twentieth century writerly tales.

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