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%.

The Moral Landscape

In this book Sam Harris presents a fascinating, interesting, and pretty appealing view of morality while managing to come off as pretty much unlikable.  He takes what is an appealing premise but he spends so much time arguing why he is better than other people and resolving imaginary arguments (in a condescending way) that his message gets lost under the frustration even people who agree with him feel.

The basic premise of the book is that morality is not under the purview of religion like it is often discussed.  He feels that morality can be decided by science.  There are various states of being that are empirically better than others and once we admit that, we can move towards those states.  He feels that there is a moral landscape with various hills and valleys and humanity's goal is to one day make it onto one of those peaks.

This is a fascinating argument.  I have always found it hard to believe that "Thou shalt not murder" is carved into every hydrogen atom in the universe however, if you look at morality from the perspective of human well being it allows for there to be moral truths without there being moral laws created by some higher power or universal constants.

However, this theory is intertwined with some incredibly acidic discourses on religion including what borders on a personal take down of the director of the National Institute of Health at the time the book was written. He then uses that segue into how hard it is for him and his "new atheist" friends. In the edition of the book that I read there is an afterword where he responds to a bunch of criticisms of the book.  This would be acceptable and perhaps even an educational look into his ideas if it weren't for a bunch of comments at the beginning where he basically complains about famous people giving his book bad reviews without reading it.
I think that the primary thing that I will take away from this book is his original idea and the long debate that it sparked about whether one can believe in objective morals in this sense without believing in objective aesthetics as well.

Overall, I would give this book an 81%.

Star Wars: Crucible

This book marks the end of an era.  This is almost certainly the furthest ahead in the timeline Star Wars publishing will go before Episode VII comes out.  As someone who is pretty invested in the Star Wars Expanded Universe, the concept of Episode VII destroying all of the canon that I have come to love (warts and all) worries me.

Before Episode VII was announced, this book was intended to be a passing of the torch novel.  Luke, Han, and Leia (and Lando!) would fight one last big fight and then at least move a little into the background.  However, when Episode VII was announced Troy Denning actually rewrote the end of the novel so that it was less blatant who the characters were passing the torch to.

Denning obviously felt that he needed more than just the characters advanced age to retire them.  I won't spoil which, if any, of the characters survive the book but basically every single character takes a beating.  Jedi healing trances are pushed almost beyond belief and while there is not that high of a body count, there is a very high injury count.

The book is almost a direct sequel to the last Fate of the Jedi book and it starts in a galaxy that is sort of in a unique position in Star Wars.  There are many Sith throughout, the Jedi are not a part of the government at all, and there are multiple other independent states but still only one big government.  It is a shame that this political situation is (probably) about to get plowed under by the new movie.

There have been some complaints that the villains of this book do not make for a fitting last hurrah for the big three, and maybe that is true.  However, considering all that they have faced, it would be hard to do something so galaxy shatteringly intense that hasn't already been done.  However, these antagonists are different than the vast majority of previous antagonists and that makes them interesting.

Overall, I would give this book a 87%.

The Boat

This book is the original novel the famous movie Das Boot is based upon.  If you have not seen the movie, as I have not, it is the story of German U-boat crew and their adventures in the Atlantic and Mediterranean.  While that description makes it sound like a lighthearted romp, it is anything but.  The entire crew and the boat get pushed to their breaking points and beyond.

The author of the book actually served on a U-boat and he says that while the novel is fictional it is very closely based on real events. The author felt so strongly about this that he complained bitterly when the movie further dramatized the events to make it more exciting.

The book provides some interesting statistics as well.  Out of the 40,000 men who manned u-boats and terrorized the shipping lanes, 30,000 of them never returned.  That is a truly awful ratio.  Another troubling thing that most people do not think about  is how young everyone was.  The book implies that most people serving on submarines were under 20 years old.  However, after reading the book that is somewhat understandable because anyone suffering even the slightest bit from age would probably not be able to hold up under the constant pressure (literal and otherwise).

While I know a fair bit about World War II, most of my knowledge is confined to the land battles.  I did not know that U-boats were vastly different than modern submarines, which spend most of their time underwater.  U-boats spent most of their time on the surface, only going underwater to attack or to avoid being spotted.

I think the thing that I will remember most about this book is that it managed to portray German soldiers in World War II not as Nazis, not as men just following orders, but as tired boys just trying to do their jobs and make it home.   The sufferings of the crew, like not being able to sleep because they are battered by a massive storm for days on end, are really brought to life by the author and descriptions like the green rings around the Chief Engineer's eyes from sleep loss are enough to make one cringe.

Overall, I would give this book an 89%.

The Prince and the Pauper

I have never read any Mark Twain other than those mandated by my middle school curriculum until this one. This is another one of the many books I have inherited from my grandmother.  I decided to read it because this version has the subtitle "A Tale for Young People of All Ages" and I really liked that.

The story is sort of a classic tale of two people switching positions, in this case the aforementioned prince and pauper.  Interestingly, unlike a lot of these stories, the two main characters have no contact with each other for the majority of the story.  Also, considering the age of this tale, it probably inspired a lot of the more modern renditions of the switching story.

This book does portray a pretty grim picture of the differences between the upper and lower classes in England in those days.  Also, it shows some issues with medicine at the time and how willing people were to accept the "prince's" drastic change in behavior and knowledge levels.

What was the most interesting part of the book to me was that there were various endnotes that explained various historical implications of the events of the novel including how he felt the events of the young prince's childhood in this story affected his actual reign as king.  They also talk about various laws and historical facts that influenced his decisions about various plot points in the book.

I think that the thing I will remember about this book is the harshness of the laws presented here.  It is easy to think of things like the Salem Witch Trials as a isolated historical incident but it was really just a harsher and more extreme version of the norm at that time.  The fact that people were actually routinely flogged and burned at the stake, even for relatively minor issues, is a troubling part of our world's history.

This copy was originally published in 1944 (I think, check out this website for the interesting history of this particular printing run http://www.twainquotes.com/UniformEds/UniformEdsCh35.html).  Another interesting thing about this version, is that, because it was published during WWII, it has a small picture in the bottom inside of the back of the dust jacket.  I thought that this was pretty interesting as I had never seen anything like it before.

Overall, I would give this book a 86%.