Friday Review, 7/9/10

Three books this week. I swear I used to be able to read more books in a week. Of course, when I was taking classes, I often had to read two or three texts over the course of a week, but those were gutted and skimmed, mostly. Still.

Holly Black - White Cat

Oh, I love the premise of this book - our world, but magic works within a limited scope. "Curse Workers" have to touch you with their bare hands, and different "workers" can achieve different effects, from minor changes in luck up to transformation. Black put a lot of thought into how that would affect society, and a little thought into how it would have affected history. As such, everyone wears gloves always - at one point, the protagonist is looking through some porn, and the shocking thing is not the nudity, per se, but the lack of gloves. "Workers" are both elites and second class citizens - there's a political movement to force them to register, and a political movement opposed to it. "Workers" are often a key element of weddings (where luck would be nice to have) and christenings, for instance. In terms of history, Black includes a few notes about how previous societies dealt with the whole concept of magic - I would have liked more of that. At any rate, A+ for world building.

This book is also a caper novel - the hero is a con artist in a family of con artists, and he runs cons to get what he wants. Delicious, I love this particular genre, and Black describes some very nice cons, and includes some very good descriptions of legerdemain - she doesn't leave her audience in the dark about what's going on in the con scenes, either. That's a tactic which works very well on screen, but comes across as irritating in a novel, I find. So, A+ for capers, too.

The book is fairly twisty, but the twists are telegraphed well in advance. B+ for twists.

I didn't like some of the character building, especially the hero. Some of his motivations are messed up for obvious reasons within the context of the novel, but others are just messed up. Some of his reactions are off, too. He discovers some major secrets about himself, but seems to take them in stride far too easily - I didn't buy the shock. C+ for the protagonist.

I will happily read a second book in this world, because I really want to see what Black does with the background material. I want more history, and I want a deeper appreciation of the social environment. I'm not sure I'm keen on reading a lot more about this set of characters, however.

Albert Castel - The Presidency of Andrew Johnson


Johnson was a fascinating president. Castel wrote this political biography during the 1970s, and it comes at the end of a series of scholarly works dealing with Johnson, many of which were highly critical of Johnson and especially his approach to Reconstruction. Castel is mildly sympathetic towards Johnson - he doesn't deny Johnson's many flaws, but presents the man in a sympathetic light.

I learned some details about Johnson and the period in question, but nothing hugely enlightening.  While I still feel that the 14th Amendment was well conceived, I think that some of the strategies used to get the Amendment ratified were questionable. That is, I applaud the ends of the Republican Congress in the late 1860s, but deplore their means. Castel is mildly cynical about the Radical Republicans - seeing that they had a great deal to gain from the policies of Reconstruction in the form they championed - but agrees that at least some of their motivation was ideological rather than pragmatic.

As a scholarly work, this book was quite accessible, I would recommend it to a general audience. Castel is informative, and his knowledge of Johnson and Reconstruction is exhaustive. He includes detailed end notes, and abundant (but not to the point of being distracting) quotations. The final chapter is an excellent historiography, up through the 1970s, detailing the odd trajectory that Johnson's story has taken since the 1870s.

Jim Hines - The Mermaid's Madness


I really liked this novel. This is the second of the "Princess" novels. Hines is documenting the story of what happened to fairy tale princesses after their "happily ever after". His protagonists are Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, and Cinderella. Sleeping Beauty woke to find that everyone she knew and loved was dead, and that a rival neighbor had taken over the kingdom, and forced her re-awakening so that the last possible restraint upon them could be removed. Her fairy given gifts translate nicely into martial arts - grace in dancing = grace in fighting, for instance. Snow White was raised by a powerful witch, and makes use of said witch's training in her use of mirror magic - she is a powerful self-taught sorceress. And Cinderella has the magical protection of her mother (later revised into a Fairy God Mother, but originally, Cinderella was protected by her mother, who inhabited a tree in Cinder's backyard.), currently embodied in a magical glass sword.

This novel opens with the princesses travelling to provide a token tribute to local mermaids - or undines, as they prefer to be called - only to discover that the political situation has changed rather significantly over the winter. The adventure which follows involves twists, back stabbing, treachery, magic, fencing, and a great deal of other fantastic stuff.

What I like: Hines has thought out his characters very well. They have entirely realistic motivations, even given their fantastic origins. He has done excellent world building as well, considering the implications of mermaids - how do they work? What motivates them? - etc. The book is a quick read, but has some depth for all that. This is a well thought out and well written book.

What I didn't like: Very little. I did find the inclusion of Christianity to be a little odd - it threw me out of the world briefly, and really, given the world building, doesn't make a lot of sense. Oh well - it was a minor point, and not nearly enough to prevent me from recommending this book quite highly.

Library Activism

Special Bonus Post!

As you may be aware, I'm a big fan of libraries. As you may also be aware, in the US libraries as institutions are currently under considerable fiscal pressure as short-sighted state governments who see libraries as bloated budget lines which can be cut to balance state budgets. Fiscal policy is an entirely different issue, and I might address it at a later date, should a book on the subject come across my path. In the meantime, I offer this link.

Libraries are fantastic. Funding libraries is good fiscal sense, good social sense, good political sense, and just plain good sense. Slashing funding for libraries is not a good idea, and will ultimately result in bigger problems further down the road.

Library Post 7/6/10

I may have been mistaken, but I'm pretty sure the library was closed yesterday for the 4th (because it was closed anyway on Sunday) and so we didn't go. We went in late today, just before closing, and I grabbed these two:

Jim Hines - The Mermaid's Madness

The sequel to The Stepsister Scheme, Mermaid continues the story of the Princesses - Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, and Snow White. The premise is simple - these are the stories of the ladies after their fairy tales are over. It's fairy tales meets Charlie's Angels, basically. Hines has assigned logical abilities to each of the princesses, based on their pre-existing stories, and they solve crimes. The first book was quite good, so I'm looking forward to this one.

Neil A. Wynn - The African American Experience during World War II


This is more or less research for me - it fits into what I'm writing about for my dissertation, and it fits into my syllabus for next semester. The stories of African Americans in the US Army from the Revolution onwards are fascinating in their own right, and WWII is really where the men and women in the segregated units were finally able to prove their citizenship. The modern Civil Rights Movement can be directly linked to WWII (although, really, by WWII, the movement was quite established). This looks like a pretty good introduction to the material - Wynn has included some of the primary documents in the book, and the footnotes seem to be fairly comprehensive. If my books were not already ordered for next semester, I might consider putting  this in instead of the book I've already got - it will certainly be added to the supplemental reading list. And that's from flipping through it; hopefully it lives up to my expectations.

I'm going to be out of town next week. I should have access to the internet, but I won't be going to the library next Monday. I will probably do a supplemental trip on Thursday or Friday to pick up some paperbacks, so look for a continuation of my beach reading series!

Friday Review, 7/2/10

Robert Harris - Imperium


The subtitle of the book is "A Novel of Ancient Rome", and that seems pretty accurate. This novel is a fictionalized description of Cicero's rise to the position of Consul in Rome. Its a political/legal novel, in that politicians in Rome were also lawyers. The novel appears to be well researched - I can't really say, since Ancient Rome is entirely outside of my area of study, but there's a lot of detail. Arguably too much detail - I found myself having trouble keeping track of basic character points.

The book was published in 2006, and contains a lot of digs at the political process in the US now - the constant campaigning for office, the "issues" candidate, the compromises that politicians make. There was a strong sense of "plus ca change," which made the whole book a little more relevant, perhaps. At any rate, in answer to the question of "Are We Rome?", Harris seems clearly to believe yes.

In terms of format, Harris has combined what amount to two novellas into a single work. The first covers Cicero's rise to notoriety through his successful prosecution of a corrupt governor of Sicily. The second opens with his successful defense of a corrupt governor of Gaul, which cements his position as a patriotic Roman, and charts his rise through the power structures to become Consul, one of the two men who rule Rome. Either of the parts of the book would probably have stood alone - the second one would have needed a re-introductory chapter, perhaps - but they worked well together.

Over all, the novel lacked action. I'm not sure where action could have been added - it was a novel about politics, after all - but there was a lot of talking and not a lot of doing, and on the whole it felt a little flat.

Things I liked - complex characters, a good sense of research, winking references to current events. Things I disliked - the lack of a map - a map would have gone a LONG way to improving this book for me, the lack of a cheat sheet on Roman politics, the lack of a dramatis personae, and the lack of a full author's note explaining the background - I think these are not too much to expect from a historical novel. The short author's note states that the matter of the novel could certainly have happened, and much of it did happen, and the stuff that didn't happen can't be proved not to have happened. Harris used Cicero's speeches as his primary source. There is a sequel, I might pick it up.

Steve Barnes and Tananarive Due From Cape Town, With Love


This is the third novel in a series which I've been following with some interest. Based on a character that Blair Underwood created, Tennyson Hardwick, these are mystery novels with a strong male black protagonist (as you might expect, given the people involved in the project.) The goal, beyond telling good stories (at which these novels succeed, by the way), is to tell good stories about strong black characters, to fill a niche currently open in the hopes of attracting young black writers to write novels, and to write screen plays, and ultimately to create a vehicle for strong black actors and actresses that appeals to an American audience. Tennyson Hardwick is a strong character engaged in solving mysteries. He is virile, he is entirely masculine, and he's good at what he does - in short, he's a fairly typical detective type character. Audiences would not blink an eye if he were described as white, but he happens to be black. That is key, of course - these are more than niche marketed books, they are designed to appeal to non-black readers in the way that novels with white protagonists appeal to non-white readers. I think they succeed in that task as well.

This novel opens in South Africa (Cape Town, as the title indicates) and focuses on the adoption of a South African orphan by an American film actress, and the subsequent kidnapping of said adopted orphan. The plot involves international espionage, criminals, some violence, and lots of sex. Relatively standard fare for the genre, although the sex is a little steamier than most detective fiction. (Actually, a lot steamier. It's closer to porn than romance novel, without, I think, becoming porn. Still, decidedly R rated, possibly NC 17.)

On the whole, the book is deeper than much of the rest of the genre, touching on issues like race, national security (and the lengths to which one should be willing to allow the government to go to defend it), adoption, international adoption, the problem of fame, and a slew of other things. None of the issues rise to the level of beating the reader over the head - that would be bad story telling - but it would be hard to dismiss this book as trashy. The characters are strong, the writing is good, the stories are good, and the ending is not as predictable as one might expect.

Library Day, 6/28/10 (posted 6/29/10)

Late trip to the library yesterday netted two books:

Laurie R. King - A Monstrous Regiment of Women


This is the second of King's books about Mary Russell, a young woman who becomes the protege of Sherlock Holmes. Our library does not seem to have the first book, The Bee Keeper's Apprentice. Anyway, I'm intrigued, my wife and I are watching old episodes of Sherlock Holmes, so I thought I'd take a look.

Naomi Cahn and June Carbone - Red Families v. Blue Families: Legal Polarization and the Creation of Culture


This caused a stir when it came out a month or so ago - Cahn and Carbone are basically arguing that in the US "Blue" or Democratic states tend to have better family values than "Red" or Republican states, despite the fervent rhetoric of the Republicans. Essentially, Cahn and Carbone argue that easy access to divorces and birth control produce stronger families than restrictions on said.

Friday Review, 6/25/10 edited 6/26/10

I did not review these books on the 25th, I am reviewing them now.

Nicholas Thomson - The Hawk and the Dove: Paul Nitze, George Kennan, and the History of the Cold War 

George Kennan and Paul Nitze were, at the end of World War II, uniquely positioned to have a profound influence upon the foreign policy of the United States, and thus, the entire world. As the war ended, Kennan was the ambassador to Moscow, and, upon the request of the Secretary of State, sent a long telegram (known as the Long Telegram) to Washington, detailing how he felt that the Soviets should be handled after the war. He described his policy as containment, and this became the center of US foreign policy for the next 50 years. Although Kennan contended for many of those 50 years that his initial ideas were being twisted to serve a particular view point, the skeleton of his ideas was clearly visible throughout the period.

Nitze, as part of the Strategic Bombing Survey (investigating the effects of strategic bombing on Germany, and later Japan - that is, bombing of targets which were not immediately connected to the military - factories, etc) was one of the first US observers to investigate Hiroshima and Nagasaki, post atomic bombing.  He became a chief proponent of the arms race, arguing that atomic bombs could not be wished away, and so must be used to promote peace. Effectively, Nitze argued that we needed to build enough atomic, and later nuclear, bombs that we could effectively negotiate the process of stopping arms build-ups and start destroying the stockpiles. That sounds somewhat illogical, but Nitze made it work - during the 1980s he was a key negotiator for the US in arms control talks with the Soviets.

Throughout the Cold War, Kennan and Nitze were involved, singly or together, in every major foreign policy event that the United States experienced, from the Greek Civil War and the Korean War through the Cuban Missile Crisis and Vietnam and finally to Detante and the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union. They were often in disagreement about the position of the United States - in particular, Kennan was deeply opposed to the development of nuclear weapons, while Nitze saw them as a vital part of the US arsenal - but they worked together almost as often.  Because of their significance and positions, a dual biography like this covers the history of the Cold War quite nicely.  This was a fascinating book, providing a broad and tolerably deep history of the period.

There are some problems with it, however.  First, Thomson is the grandson of Nitze. This means that he had access to a wide array of Nitze's private papers and the recollections of Nitze's family and friends.  His access to Kennan's primary sources is still clearly extensive, but comes from a different entry point. Thomson struggles to remain objective, but it is clear that he sympathizes with Nitze in several locations. Second, Thomson is a journalist writing history. He does a good job with the history, but is clearly not a historian. He accepts the arguments of his primary sources without the skeptical view which a historian might offer.  Finally, and this is almost certainly not Thomson's fault, the book's footnotes are not marked in the text. The book is relatively well cited (certainly for a work of popular history - as a scholarly work, the notes are a little thin), but Thomson provides little depth in the notes, and, as stated, there are no note markers in the text, only notes in the rear of the book. As I say, this is probably not a decision that Thomson was able to make - many publishers want to keep footnotes to a minimum, and authors are usually not in a position to argue. As a historian, however, I would like to have seen a slightly more scholarly approach to the materials.

Kasey Michaels - Maggie Needs an Alibi 
Boy does she ever! This is one from the Beach Reading list, fluffy, irksome in some places, happy in others.
Maggie is Maggie Kelly, an author who writes historical detective fiction/romance.  Her principle character is a Regency dandy, Alexandre Blake, the Viscount St. Just. As the book opens, Maggie is completing the fifth book featuring St. Just, when St. Just and his loyal companion, Sterling Balder, appear in her apartment. Later, her publisher (and ex-boyfriend) dies under mysterious (and unrelated) circumstances. St. Just helps Maggie solve the crime and send the criminal off to prison.

I wasn't expecting a lot of depth from this book, and I wasn't surprised. Michaels has some interesting characters who sparkle, and some witty dialogue, as well as some interesting points of view on writing romances in todays publishing market. However, the mystery takes a very long time to begin (especially given that the victim was revealed on the back of the book), and the murderer's motivation was such that the reader could never have figured out the correct answer. In a mystery novel, at least as far as I am concerned, this is a flaw.

A friend has offered the second book, and I will happily accept it.  The teaser chapter at the end of this book was amusing, and it's entirely possible that the unsatisfying twist is a symptom of new characters - some serial mystery novelists settle down later in the series; providing logical murderers who can be caught by rational readers.

Trudi Canavan - The Novice
This is the second of the Dark Magician Trilogy. The trilogy has potential, and I like some of the things that Canavan does here, but there were some other things that I didn't like quite as much. What I liked - Canavan's handling of homosexuality in a fantasy setting - very nicely done. World building - still strong, and we see more of the world in this novel than the first. I especially liked that Canavan avoided the common pitfall of having things which are "just like this Earth analogue" - ie, there are beasts of burden, Canavan names them, but does not describe them as being "just like oxen" - indeed, she doesn't really describe them at all, and so the reader may see them as horses, mules, oxen, or anything else, really. I also really like Canavan's characters, and that will almost certainly be enough to have me read Book Three.

The thing I didn't like - Canavan is describing life in a school for magicians, and the formula is pretty obvious - our protagonist is different from her classmates, and so she gets picked on. She cannot confront her tormentor directly, and feels that she should not complain, and so endures and endures until she finally can't take it anymore. The book ends with a climactic battle between our hero and the mini-villain. If Book Three begins with them becoming close friends as a result, I'm not sure if I'll be able to care about the characters enough.

That makes it sound like Canavan is a bad author, and she isn't at all. Her characters really are lovely, and they come up with creative ways out of their problems. It was just that a great deal of the action in the book felt predictable, such that it dragged on the otherwise well written material.

belated library post for 06/21/10

I did not actually make it to the library on Monday except to drop off books, so this is only a slightly belated post from yesterday.

Only one book yesterday:

Yasmin Khan - Enlightening the World: The Creation of the Statue of Liberty 
This looks very interesting. I really don't have anything else to add, I haven't even really had a chance to look at it.