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The Color of Politics (February Reading)
Mar. 5th, 2008 07:57 pmThree nonfiction, one reread (fiction). Victory to the nonfiction resolution.
Warrior Poet: A Biography of Audre Lorde (Alexis De Veaux): Nonfiction. Academic biography of a unique "black, lesbian, feminist, mother, poet warrior". Footnotes abound.
( I love footnotes. )
This was long and dense, and I'm mostly disappointed that it pretty much skips life between 1986 and her death in 1992. Why?
Mirabile (Janet Kagan): Reread. Light, sweet and funny, with wacky SF biology and a grumbly old woman protagonist. Consistent worldbuilding across a series of short stories, tessellated into a novel with thin framing device grout. Strongly rec'd for charm.
I am in fierce denial that Kagan passed away on 1 March 2008, several weeks after this latest reread. I can't mourn the woman, having never met her, but it makes me sad that I'll never be able to say, "hey, I read your fiction, and it's cool." Kagan wrote exactly three books that I know of, and though they are cute and fluffy bordering on cotton candy overdose, you will have to pry those crumbling paperbacks from my hands against my most strident protests. I think that's a good eulogy for an author.
Greek Fire, Poison Arrows and Scorpion Bombs: Biological and Chemical Warfare in the Ancient World (Adrienne Mayor): Nonfiction, like the title says. Great idea, lousy execution. Mayor clumps her cites at the end of paragraphs or ideas. If you want to draw a line between "Arabic sources report[ing] great stocks of naptha were stored in Byzantine churches" during the Crusades and 2003 BS about Saddam Hussein sticking WMDs in Iraqi mosques, you have to work a lot harder than bare-faced assertions: I want to see a breakdown of the religious and political implications. Did political authorities or priests stick this naptha in churches? (see p137, HC) Was it even there, or were 11th - 13th century Arabs as gullible as contemporary Americans? Also, Richard Preston's thriller nonfiction fails as a good source to cite (p141 and elsewhere). This is a cute idea, but Mayor didn't pull together the primary sources to make this really amazing and cool. Mayor failed to go deep enough when drawing lines from the ancient to the contemporary; take the Archimedes mirror scheme compared to modern experiments with mircowave or heat devices. (For bonus points, note the criticism of same, p218 - 219. What does criticism of contemporary shenanigans have to do with ancient biological or chemical weapons?)
Some moments stood out: vinegar and fire; naptha as a concept, elepants scaring the dalights out of the uninitiated. Single best sentence in the book:
Conclusion: this needed to be 50 pages shorter or 200 pages longer, in smaller print.
The Conscience of a Liberal (Paul Krugman): Nonfiction. Presents hypothesis that New Deal legislation flattened America's economic profile - the poor got less poor, the rich got less rich - that this was a good thing, and that the rich or super-rich have been in bed with a number of other unhappy splinter groups trying to undo this so they can be really really rich like the Good Old Days (19th C).
( Brief suspension of the PG-13 rule for cursing and politics. Cut for length and tangents. )
There's some things Krugman does that are worth noting. He pulls together an argument that streches across nearly 80 years of American politics, and makes it sound reasonable. He left me with a lot of people and incidents to look up (what I forget is that the '95 federal shutdown could have affected me), which means he was engaging my intellect. However, this is also a weakness: he makes sweeping statements I would like to see followed up in greater detail. ("Veterans of the Environmental Protection Agency have told me that the Nixon years were a golden age." Could you support this statement with names, budget figures, Superfund rulings, please? p159) The fact I'm this het up about it says that Krugman is doing something interesting with ideas, though I'm annoyed he's written an idea book instead of an idea book underpinned with fact after fact after fact.
Warrior Poet: A Biography of Audre Lorde (Alexis De Veaux): Nonfiction. Academic biography of a unique "black, lesbian, feminist, mother, poet warrior". Footnotes abound.
( I love footnotes. )
This was long and dense, and I'm mostly disappointed that it pretty much skips life between 1986 and her death in 1992. Why?
Mirabile (Janet Kagan): Reread. Light, sweet and funny, with wacky SF biology and a grumbly old woman protagonist. Consistent worldbuilding across a series of short stories, tessellated into a novel with thin framing device grout. Strongly rec'd for charm.
I am in fierce denial that Kagan passed away on 1 March 2008, several weeks after this latest reread. I can't mourn the woman, having never met her, but it makes me sad that I'll never be able to say, "hey, I read your fiction, and it's cool." Kagan wrote exactly three books that I know of, and though they are cute and fluffy bordering on cotton candy overdose, you will have to pry those crumbling paperbacks from my hands against my most strident protests. I think that's a good eulogy for an author.
Greek Fire, Poison Arrows and Scorpion Bombs: Biological and Chemical Warfare in the Ancient World (Adrienne Mayor): Nonfiction, like the title says. Great idea, lousy execution. Mayor clumps her cites at the end of paragraphs or ideas. If you want to draw a line between "Arabic sources report[ing] great stocks of naptha were stored in Byzantine churches" during the Crusades and 2003 BS about Saddam Hussein sticking WMDs in Iraqi mosques, you have to work a lot harder than bare-faced assertions: I want to see a breakdown of the religious and political implications. Did political authorities or priests stick this naptha in churches? (see p137, HC) Was it even there, or were 11th - 13th century Arabs as gullible as contemporary Americans? Also, Richard Preston's thriller nonfiction fails as a good source to cite (p141 and elsewhere). This is a cute idea, but Mayor didn't pull together the primary sources to make this really amazing and cool. Mayor failed to go deep enough when drawing lines from the ancient to the contemporary; take the Archimedes mirror scheme compared to modern experiments with mircowave or heat devices. (For bonus points, note the criticism of same, p218 - 219. What does criticism of contemporary shenanigans have to do with ancient biological or chemical weapons?)
Some moments stood out: vinegar and fire; naptha as a concept, elepants scaring the dalights out of the uninitiated. Single best sentence in the book:
The most famous example occurred in Britain in 55 BC, when the Britannis' chariot-horses fled at the sight of Julius Caesar's monstrous war elephant covered in iron scales and clanging bells emerging from a river with a tower of archers balanced on its back(p199).
Conclusion: this needed to be 50 pages shorter or 200 pages longer, in smaller print.
The Conscience of a Liberal (Paul Krugman): Nonfiction. Presents hypothesis that New Deal legislation flattened America's economic profile - the poor got less poor, the rich got less rich - that this was a good thing, and that the rich or super-rich have been in bed with a number of other unhappy splinter groups trying to undo this so they can be really really rich like the Good Old Days (19th C).
( Brief suspension of the PG-13 rule for cursing and politics. Cut for length and tangents. )
There's some things Krugman does that are worth noting. He pulls together an argument that streches across nearly 80 years of American politics, and makes it sound reasonable. He left me with a lot of people and incidents to look up (what I forget is that the '95 federal shutdown could have affected me), which means he was engaging my intellect. However, this is also a weakness: he makes sweeping statements I would like to see followed up in greater detail. ("Veterans of the Environmental Protection Agency have told me that the Nixon years were a golden age." Could you support this statement with names, budget figures, Superfund rulings, please? p159) The fact I'm this het up about it says that Krugman is doing something interesting with ideas, though I'm annoyed he's written an idea book instead of an idea book underpinned with fact after fact after fact.
