Month: March 2008

Note: This is book #13 of my 52 Books in 52 Weeks challenge for 2008.

I guess you could call this book by Alan Weisman a kind of “speculative nonfiction.” It revolves around a peculiar thought experiment: imagine that every human everywhere on the plant just winked out of existence. Maybe a supervirus wipes us out in a few days. Maybe powerful space aliens decided to relocate every last one of us to an intergalactic nature preserve for our own good. Or maybe Jesus comes back and shouts “OKAY, EVERYBODY OUT OF THE POOL! WE’RE GOING HOME!” Why and how we would vacate the planet don’t matter. What matters is what would happen to it after we left.

This is the strange hook upon which Weisman hangs a litany of topics: ecology, evolution, environmentalism, civic engineering, agriculture, paleontology, zoology, the plastics industry, the petroleum industry, nuclear bombs, and a lot more. In fact comparatively little time is spent discussing how familiar things (say your house or New York City) will rot, fall apart, deteriorate, and eventually get gobbled up by nature. This is surprising, since it’s exactly the kind of thing that the dust jacket and the few talk show interviews I saw Weisman do would suggest that you’d be reading about.

Instead, the author usually follows this pattern with each new section of the book:

1. Introduce a new subject (e.g., giant sloths, the ocean, coral reefs, Istanbul (not Constantinople), nuclear waste dumps)
2. Talk about what that subject (or whatever preceded it) was like in the distant past, before humans
3. Talk about how badly humans screwed it up (usually through over hunting, over farming, or over pollution)
4. Talk about what may happen to it over time if we were to just up and go away tomorrow

There are exceptions, but this pattern pretty much explains the majority of the book. It’s often interesting and educational, but I have to admit that I also just as often found it dry, dense, and boring. There’s only so much discussion about how an aggressive plant is going to eventually displace its cultivated neighbors once their human caretakers are gone, or how the gigantic ancestors of tree sloths used to lumber through North American forests before our own ancestors strolled up to them and clubbed them out of existence. Weisman seems to rarely employ any kind of pizazz or character when explaining these things, tending instead to keep it pretty academic. Sometimes you have a subject matter that’s peppy enough to stand on its own (like, say, the life span of nuclear waste or an island of garbage twice as big as Texas floating around in the Pacific), but for a lot of the other material, it needed a stronger and more engaging voice.

And it’s not like Weisman is worried about keeping things neutral –the whole book is unapologetically an environmentalist’s work, with the author’s views and anxieties showing through like sunlight through a plastic grocery bag. And that’s fine and dandy. I just wish he had, say, spruced up his discussion of spruce trees a bit. It was educational, but not as engaging as I hoped it would be.

Others who did the 52-in-52 thing this week:

• Jeremy reviews The Ghost Brigades by John Scalzi
• Heliologue reviews Eragon by Christopher Paolini and The Assault on Reason by Al Gore
• Natasha reviews Yellow Star by Jennifer Roy, Parvanas Journey by Debora Ellis, and Weedflower by Cynthia Kadohata
• Kevin reviews Into the Wild by John Krakauer and An Army at Dawn by Rick Atkinson

Note: This is book 12 of my 52 Books in 52 Weeks challenge for 2008.

I think I can pretty say that this book by Steven Johnson isn’t going to be for everybody. It tells the story of how several men tried to cope with and understand a massive outbreak of cholera in London during 1854. Yeah, riveting, right?

Actually, it was. In addition to talking about the disease itself (which basically causes death by diarrhea), the book follows the quest of a London doctor named John Snow as he propels the nascent science of epidemiology into its own. Snow went door to door in what was largely considered a doomed neighborhood, gathering information about who died, what their habits were, and most importantly how they got their water. He was working on a theory (one that turned out to be quite solidly supported) that cholera was transmitted via drinking water, and one public water pump in particular: the now infamous Broad Street pump that was befouled because a cholera victim’s septic tank was leaking into its water supply.

This was a time before the germ theory of disease was widely known or accepted, so Snow was more of an underdog and outsider than you might think. The prevailing wisdom of the time was the “miasma theory,” which held that “all smell is disease,” and that cholera and other maladies were literally carried on the wind in the form of smells and bad air. It was amazing how hard Snow and the other main protagonist of the tale, Reverend Henry Whitehead, had to fight against this theory, which was largely taken as fact despite its frequent lack of evidence. But the team’s tenacity and creativity won the day, resulting in the closure of the Broad Street pump, the avoidance of another cholera outbreak, and the iconic map of cholera deaths from which the book takes its name.

In addition to this central story, Johnson talks about related subjects, such as the London underclasses, the sociology and civic engineering of large cities, and the new London sewer systems. (The latter were particularly interesting, since they were built as a means of cleaning up the filth of the city, but they basically just ended up flushing it all into the Thames river and making waterborne diseases like cholera worse.) About the only complaint I have about the book is that it goes off the edge towards the end in what is basically a thinly veiled plug for Johnson’s Outside In project. But in general, the whole narrative proved to be both fascinating and educational. Plus I guess I just love this history of science when it’s presented in a context and with interesting characters.

Others doing the 52-in-52 this week:

• Jeremy reviews Old Man’s War by John Scalzi
• Heliologue reviews The Fugitive Game by Jonathan Littman and God is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens
• Natasha reviews Because of Win Dixie by Kate DiCamillo
• Kia reviews The Lucifer Effect by Philip Zimbardo

Note: This is book 11 of my 52 Books in 52 Weeks challenge for 2008.

As far as ZOMG TEH WORLD IS ENDING! books go, this one by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle was really pretty good. The idea is that about the time humans and chimps were striking out on their own separate branches on the evolutionary tree, some dark planet out past Pluto slingshots a comet towards us. A bunch of time passes, and then in the late 1970s the dark planet proves to be one hell of a shot because the comet (dubbed “The Hammer” by the increasingly nervous onlookers) pummels the ever living crap out of Earth.

As you can imagine, things go bad. Huge amounts of water are vaporized and turn into rain that continues for months and even years. This, along with mile high tsunamis obliterate just about everything on any coast and create seas where there used to be savannas and valleys. And remember charming old world Europe? It’s gone. Totally underwater. Most tectonic plates around the globe get a bad case of the shakes, resulting in massive earthquakes and volcanoes that annihilate whole regions. And because of all that water vapor, clouds, and rain, the planet’s temperature is sure to drop so that earth-scraping glaciers are due more quickly than you might guess.

And yet all that is just the backdrop of Lucifer’s Hammer. The book’s real story is about how a handful of people survive (or don’t survive) the apocalypse. What I really liked about the story is how it took a huge cast of characters and wove them all into the same overarching tale. Many of the characters had at least tenuous relationships before the comet hit, so it’s often not much of a stretch. You get to see them do exciting stuff like running from the aftermath of the comet (termed “hammerfall” by the survivors), trying to scrounge up enough food to survive the coming winter, dealing with their own internal struggles, fighting off rival groups of survivors and would-be warlords, and trying to rebuild society. The whole thing ends with their facing the dilemma of trying to take the safe course that will set the human race back by a millennium, or taking a riskier route that might preserve some of the fire of modern civilization. It’s a great ride and a heck of a page turner.

It’s also worth noting that one of my favorite things about this book is how it unflinchingly presents moral dilemmas that are almost impossible to contemplate when you live in a safe neighborhood with a fully stocked refrigerator and easy access to endless food, supplies, and luxuries. If you were part of a relatively small group of survivors that has just managed to find a safe place and gather enough food and medicine to let you survive the weather, how would you deal with an endless stream of other refugees that threaten to overrun you. What would you do if taking in someone’s children meant that you and everyone else in your group would eventually starve, but turning them away meant that they would die but your group might survive? That’s the kind of thing that these characters had to deal with in the name of survival. It’s harsh, but it’s fascinating.

So, if you’re looking for a good page turner with a little science and a little morality thrown in for good measure, I could easily recommend this one.

Others doing the 52-in-52 this week:

• Jeremy reviews Shuyler’s Monster
• Heliologue reviews Rant by Chuck Palahniuk.
• Natasha reviews Left to Tell: Discovering God Amidst the Rwandan Holocaust by Immaculee Ilibagiza, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas by John Boyne, Kira Kira by Cynthia Kadohata, The Tenth Circle by Jodi Picoult, and Cheap Psychological Tricks for Parents.
• Kia has just joined us and is up to 14+ books already!

Note: This is book 10 of my 52 Books in 52 Weeks challenge for 2008.

In preparation for doing this review of Stephen King’s latest, I did some poking around and read some other reviews on the ‘net and was surprised to find that a lot of people like it. I, despite being a King fanboy, didn’t care for it that much. It’s gotten to be that King barely writes what you can fairly call horror books anymore. That’s his prerogative, of course (roaring, scarcely imaginable success has its privileges), but between this, Blaze, Cell, Lisey’s Story, and The Colorado Kid it’s just not been the King I grew to love.

Look, it’s not that Duma Key is a bad novel. In fact, it’s pretty well written and refreshing in its setting. Instead of yet another everyman cum hero from a xenophobic town in rural Maine, Duma Key tells the story of a successful building contractor from Minnesota named Edgar Freemantle. Our hero is maimed in a work site accident, and when the resulting physical and mental damage wreck his marriage, he retires and moves to a small island in the keys of Florida to recuperate. Part of his therapy involves taking painting up again, and he turns out to be very good. Supernaturally good, in fact. The stuff he paints is very surreal, and the paintings seem to have sinister lives of their own that are tied to an old and evil somethingoranother on the island. It’s the kind of “artist/creator as a magician or god” ground that he’s covered in other works, like later Dark Tower books and the short story Word Processor of the Gods, but here it’s pretty fresh in its presentation.

And King does a good job of what King often does well: He builds character. Edgar Freemantle and the friends he makes Duma Key are interesting, nuanced, complex, and flawed. They’re good literary characters, in short, not Mary Janes or cliches. The thing is, though, that the book is ALL character development and setup, to the point where it languishes over those actions. We get to know a lot about Edgar Freemantle, but honestly, I thought I had ENOUGH after a couple hundred pages and was ready for the plot to develop. Instead, we get long scenes about beach walks, art shows, and father-daughter chats that are nicely done except that there are too many of them and they drag.

Then, literally in the last 100 pages of the 600 page book, King seems to remember that he’s got to do something that makes the book fit in the “Horror” section of the bookstore and drags out some extras from the first Pirates of the Carribian movie. Dead, squishy sailors walk in from the surf and oh yeah there’s some kinda monster in the woods that Edgar and his ka-tet (to use The Gunslinger’s term) have to figure out how to best. That part was cool, but it felt forced and like it was part of another book.

I know I’ll keep buying new King books as long as he makes them, but I think I’m gonna have to go back to some of the older stuff to remind me why he’s one of my favorites for a good old fashion page turner.

Others doing the 52-in-52 this week:

• Jeremy reviews The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
• Natasha also reviews The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini, plus Book of a Thousand Days by Shannon Hale, The Absolutely True DIary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie, and Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert
• Heliologue reviews The Lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot by Bart D. Ehrman