Space Chronicles

My first experience with Neil deGrasse Tyson was watching him talk about his book, Death by Black Hole, on Jon Stewart's Daily Show.  I was enamored with the concept, rushed out, bought the book, and enjoyed it immensely.  A few years later, I happened to be watching the Daily Show and again saw Tyson.  This time he was promoting a new book, Space Chronicles.  I put that on my to-get list but as a collection of his former works didn't sound as interesting as his answering of space questions like Death by Black Hole.  When I finally got it, I was right, however the book still has some interesting points.

The primary problem with the book is that, since it is a collection of his other works, he makes the same points over and over again.  Even someone who supports the space program, as I do, found the repetitiveness of some of the points exceedingly wearying.  This book would probably have more enjoyable read over the span of several months rather than a week so that the repetition would be less obvious.

However, despite this problem, the articles are all quite interesting individually.  Tyson's ability to take complicated interstellar concepts and render them easy to understand by the layperson remains undiminished over the years making it an easy and yet educational read.  The book is also interspersed with tweets from him; some of which are funny, all of which are informative.

Some of the parts I found most interesting were when he talked about the political climate during the space race (and contrasting it with today's).  I was a big fan of space race history when I was younger, I knew all about von Braun and Aldrin and Shepard and all the rest, and reading about it as an adult was a fun return to nostalgia.

I think the thing that I will remember the longest from this book is something that Tyson only makes allusions to, however the allusions he made were enough to convince me to look it up myself.  It was the story of Robert Wilson and what he said when asked about how the particle accelerator that was planned in Batavia, Illinois would contribute to national defense.  He said "In that sense, this new knowledge has all to do with honor and country but it has nothing to do directly with defending our country except to help make it worth defending." (http://history.fnal.gov/testimony.html).  I love this sentiment.

Overall, I would give this book an 87%.

Joyland

Stephen King is one of those authors that I would read any of his books. They are, while not particularly dense, certainly entertaining. Joyland is no exception. While it was not a serious or science fiction-y as the last Stephen King book I read (11/22/63), it was still a fun, vacation style read.

The book takes place at an amusement park and, in traditional Stephen King fashion there is a certain amount of the supernatural. Though I thought that the supernatural bits were unnecessary and the story would have been better and perhaps even scarier without them.

I found the main character pretty likable with his mixed bag of failures and successes but really the most enjoyable part of the book was simply the setting. It is clear that the author put in a lot of time researching carnivals and amusement parks for the writing of this book. Just like 11/22/63, the research clearly shows in the attention to detail of the carnie lifestyle. Parts of the book don’t even feel like a Stephen King story; they could have been in some sort of carnival novel.

I think one of the main things that I will take away from this book is how adaptable a writer King is. He has put out a huge number of books but the last couple of his that I have read show a huge amount of effort and care put into them. The fact that one of the bestselling authors of all time does this shows how much he cares about writing as a craft.

Overall, I would give this story an 82%.

The Atrocity Exhibition

The Atrocity Exhibition initially attracted my attention because of its shape.  The copy I have is shaped like a thick magazine but with a more rigid cover.  What was something that looked like this doing in the science fiction section?  My curiosity piqued, I resolved to give it a try.

The book is setup like a collection of short stories.  Most of them follow around a single person whose name changes every story which implies some sort of breakdown or identity crisis.  The order of the stories does not seem to a matter a great deal, though perhaps you can feel the rationality fade from one story to the next. The edition that I have had some wonderfully bleak photographs that really helped set the mood.

Tacked onto the end are a few more stories that don't follow the same plot or characters (some of which are the "four additional stories" advertised on the cover).  One of them is on the appeal of Ronald Reagan in a... unique way.  An interesting one is "The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race" which is exactly what the title implies it is.  It assigns everyone involved roles and has many puns.  Three are excerpts from medical text books but edited so that the patient is a celebrity (Mae West, Queen Elizabeth, and Princess Margaret).  The last story in the collection is about World War III.

I think that this last story is by far the best in the book.  It is about how celebrities and the endless barrage of the 24 hour news can distract from what is actually important in the world.  The premise is that World War III has already happened but only one man of the general public actually remembers it because everyone else is so distracted by the unimportant things that the news inflates to its importance.  Of all the stories in the book, it is perhaps the most poignant despite being set in a cold war timeline where Reagan is on his third term.  The news has only become more about what kind of headlines will grab viewership rather than what is important.

The main plot of the book is almost entirely symbolism and allegory.  One could almost see it as a postwar, compressed Gravity's Rainbow.  However, in this, the allegory is more direct.  The characters literally call out names like Ralph Nader and others but since the book was written in the 60's I am sure that there a lot of references that were pertinent at the time that are now borderline unintelligible. I worry that 50 years from now some of my favorites will be equally difficult to comprehend.

Overall, I would give this book a 76%.