Month: October 2009

Small Gods is, what the 13th Discworld book by Terry Pratchett? Like Pyramids, it’s more of a stand alone book, with only few of the characters appearing in subsequent or previous books. It tells the story of Om, a god who decides to manifest himself physically on the Disk and is surprised to find himself trapped in the form of a lowly tortise due to a lack of followers. There are supposedly people who worship him, but everyone is sort of going along with the rote parts of the religion without really believing in it. And also, there’s the matter of the high priest Vorbis, who compels them all to continue out of fear more than faith.

The sole exception to all this is a somewhat dim-witted Novice named Brutha, who is apparently the last person who genuinely believes in Om and who thus is the only one who can hear the highly frustrated god-cum-tortise when he shows up at the monestary. Brutha is also gifted with a perfect memory, so when Vorbis enlists his help in a holy war on a neighboring country disguised as diplomacy, Om goes along because he has no other choice and has to fight for his own right to exist as a god.

Like with a lot of the other Discworld books, there’s some great social satire going on here. The obvious targtets are organized religion and zealots, but Pratchett also enjoys poking fun at the philosophers who serve as a stand in for secular science and who aren’t much better than the institutionalized religion they oppose. It’s basically more of Pratchett taking modern themes to their extreme and using his fantastical setting to present them in an absurd light. Any attempt, for example, to tell this kind of story using the context of Christianity and Christ’s coming back as a bleating lamb instead of a tortise would have been seen as sensational and not nearly as widely applicable to other religions or institutions. Pratchett manages to make it both funny and thoughtful without that.

This biographical graphic novel by artist/writer Art Speigelman is essentially a story about the Jewish Holocaust, but with the curious twist that Speigelman draws all the characters as different kinds of animals according (loosely) to their race. Jews are mice, Germans are cats, Poles are pigs, and Americans for some reason are dogs. So right off the bat (so to speak; there are no bats in the story) the book kind of captures your attention, even if the author never really goes far with the idea as a literary device.

Instead, the value of the book is with the story, which flips between modern day scenes where Speigelman visits his elderly father Vladek in order to interview him about the Holocaust, and flashbacks showing what Vladek describes. Almost as much time in the latter is given to describe the buildup of the travesties so that we get to see the gradual decline of Vladek’s wealthy Polish Jewish family and its ensnarement in the Nazi machine.

Interestingly, I actually got more enjoyment out of the parts of the book showing the interactions between modern Vladek and his aspiring biographer of a son, which included lots of little dramas, challenges, and caricatures. It was neat to see how the elderly Vladek honestly wasn’t that likable a fellow –he’s miserly, manipulative, controlling, and unfair to his son– and how that contrasted with the heroic, loyal, loving, and resourceful Vladek from the flashback scenes. The interesting (some might say “artistic”) thing is that even though these discrepancies exist, you can still see how it’s the same character and how the hardships of the earlier times acted to define the man we see in his elder years, both for good and bad. Art Speigelman himself also makes for an interesting character study, as he’s not without his own issues.

About the only major complaint I have about the book is that the way Speigelman draws the characters doesn’t allow him to do much to differentiate between them much. There were many scenes where I lost track of who was who because the panels just showed a bunch of identical looking animals. But otherwise the book’s stark black and white art style works given the bleak subject matter.

Sometimes it’s hard to recommend a Holocaust book –it’s not the most cheerful of subjects and yet has been extensively covered in other works. But Maus works pretty well for how it blends modern and past characters as well as its inclusion of a wider time frame. Check it out.

The full title of this book is The Brain that Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science and in it author Norman Doidage examines the concept of “brain plasticity.” Essentially this has to do with the ability of the human brain (and the mouse brain and the chimp brain, for that matter) to change in response to trauma, disease, or some graduate student with a bone saw and a fist full of electrodes.

One of the early examples in the book deals with a woman who suffered damage to the part of her brain that deals with balance, leaving her with the sensation of perpetual free fall any time she rose to anything above a completely horizontal position. But by controlling a machine with a sensor attached to her tongue of all things, she was able to remap her brain so that a different part took over the balancing gig and she could once again stand up and walk a straight line.

Like other good science writings, The Brain that Changes Itself is filled with personal stories like this one, and they cover some pretty varied ground. One part of the book deals with blind people who learn to “see” by having a computer translate images into physical pressure on different parts of their otherwise vestigial eyeballs. Another looks at what effect (besides the obvious one) hard core pornography has on the brain. Yet really graphic and cringe-inducing section deals with sado masochism and its origins in the dark side of neuroplasticity. And my favorite section dealt with a group chimps, some scientists that were deliberately causing them brain damage, the birth of PETA, and the protracted destruction of a gifted neuroscientist’s career. It’s all pretty compelling and really, really interesting since it’s tied directly into lessons on how the brain works.

My only complaint about the book is that Doidage goes off in some pretty weird directions, such as his condemnation of porn –not that I disagree with the condemnation, it’s just that his arguments come from a pretty odd direction. And about three quarters of the way through he switches gears a bit into a staunch defendant of Sigmund Freud and psychoanalysis in general. This wouldn’t be so bad (it’s still educational), except that the case study he employs in this section laughably ticks off every item on the list of psychoanalysis cliches –emotionally distant man whom the psychoanalyst asks to “tell me about your mother” and who uncovers buried memories until he’s curled up in the fetal position on the couch and bawling like a child. It was just a wee bit over the top.

Still, those parts aside I liked this book. It’s brain science made fun and interesting.

On the Road by Jack Kerouac is often cites as one of the best English language novels ever, but my experience with it suggests that to get that level of appreciation out of it you really need to have lived through the beatnick era to which it’s supposed to be a touchstone. I found it horribly grueling.

The book ostensibly tells the story of insouciant traveller Sal Paradise (essentially a stand-in for Kerouac), who criss-crosses North America in the late 1940s. Along the way he meets and travels with a lot of different characters, most notably the hyperactive and womanizing Dean Moriarty. Sal and his companions are just half a step up from being vagabonds as they rely on a combination of cars, hitchiking, odd jobs, and panhandling to make their way west from New York. Zany things happen and it’s all very slice of life for a very unorthodox life.

The novel is largely plotless, and I guess it’s best appreciated as a series of interconnected vignettes about American life during the period. We get to see a lot of different people of the type that at the time of publication probably weren’t discussed much in American literature or culture at large. It’s all very flavorful and in a way reminded me of Steinbeck’s Tortilla Flat –just a bunch of guys who loaf around, drink, and convince themselves that loafing and drinking are the most noble of pursuits.

This is fine and all, but it just didn’t work for me. Ironically I grew restless and bored with all the shenanigans and all the traveling around and the endless parade of characters that don’t seem to matter at all in any kind of narrative or personal sense. It’s colorful, but sprawling and formless. I guess that’s largely the point of the book, but that doesn’t mean that I’m going to love it.