The Body Electric

Star Trek Cold Equations, Book Three: The Body Electric
© 2013 David Mack
352 pages

Bad news. There's a planet-sized machine with a companion black hole ominously named "Abaddon" using artificial wormholes to suck entire star systems into its maw.  Worse news: the machine is a Borg-like collective of artificial intelligence systems with a serious attitude problem regarding organic lifeforms. To wit, it wants us all dead, and when it collides itself with the supermassive black hole at the heart of the Milky Way, dead we shall be. It's up to Captain Jean-Luc Picard to somehow find a way to save the galaxy, with a little help from his once-dead-now-resurrected-android-friend, Data.  The Body Electric concludes David Mack's Cold Equations series, which started out as a political spy-thriller but ends in a bittersweet triumph for the now-returned Data.

Although the third and final piece of a trilogy,  The Body Electric leaves behind what I thought to be the primary story of the Cold Equations trilogy, the latest chapter in the Cold War in Space series of books. Instead, the 'other' story in the two previous novels,  the return of Data,  rises to dominance, with the positronic commander taking a starring role in the Enterprise's  efforts to stop the Machine's subspace-shattering kaboom.  Wesley Crusher's rare fans will be gratified at his role in the story; it is he who learns of the threat, but he's powerless to combat it..The Body Electric is easily more on the side of 'soft' science fiction, being more about its characters - - Data and the ever lively T'Ryessa Chen, for instance --  than science, but many of the characters put the spotlight on the future of artificial intelligence, being as they are droids. There's even a little philosophy of the soul throne in as the AIs debate the merits of joining or fighting The Machine, which is a larger, meaner version of V'Ger from The Motion Picture.  Although the-Enterprise-saves-the-galaxy plots border on ludicrous after so many movies, David Mack executes it well, especially in building tension.  Readers will find it most interesting for the continuing evolution of Data, who has grown quite beyond his old limitations.

This week at the library: astronauts, cities, and very serious business

Dear readers:

On last Sunday I raided my university library and got lost on a hike (sometimes the fork less traveled by takes you to an 18-hole golf course where you wander lost for hours until emerging in a subdivision), but came home with my usual bag of books. This month's takings:

• The Long Loneliness, the autobiography of Dorothy Day
• The Call of the Mall: The Geography of Shopping, Paco Underhill.
• The Fatal Conceit, F.A. Hayek
• I'll Take My Stand:  The South and the Agrarian Tradition, various authors
• Deke! , Deke Slayton   The story of the original Mercury Seven astronaut who had to wait until the very last flight of Apollo to see space.
• The Economy of Cities, Jane Jacobs. A follow-up to her utterly brilliant The Death and Life of Great American Cities, which I've read twice yet somehow never reviewed.. This is actually the wrong book: I intended to get Cities and the Wealth of Nations. 
• We Seven,  a joint memoir by the Mercury Seven. (There's really no such thing as too many astronaut memoirs, is there?) Published in 1962, it only covers the beginning of the Mercury program.
• Not Quite White: White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness,  Matt Wray.  

I recently finished The Metropolitan Revolution, a look at city-led political change, and am currently taken up with I'll Take my Stand.  I'd expected the 'southern symposium' to be ponderous, but it's been easy enough going so far. I'm two-thirds through, and taking breaks from it with the final book in a Star Trek trilogy I last read from in July.  This month's collection as a whole is on the dense side, but next month should bring lighter fare. Since it's April I'll be doing a series of works relating to England. I haven't settled on any books yet, but Sharpe's Waterloo may well be among them, with at least one history work.

Happy reading to you on this first week of spring!

...which will bring freezing temperatures later this week. 

The Simple Living Guide

The Simple Living Guide: A Sourcebook for Less Stressful, More Joyful Living
© 1997 Janet Luhrs
444 pages

Life distracts easily and passes by without being noticed. The Simple Living Guide is written as an antidote, one which both prompts people to think more deeply about their lives -- how the ordinary can take on meaning --  and which provides resources for living an engaged life. After an initial section on inner simplicity, separate sections concern personal finance, food,  health and exercise,  homes, travel, gardening, entertainment,  and so on, with a special section near the end devoted to clearing out clutter. Though distinct, the chapters link together. Each section is laced with real-life examples and book summaries drawn far and wide, and ends with a larger testimonial and list of resources.  The only fly in the ointment, and it is a truly minuscule fly, is the book's datedness: written in 1997, it reminds readers that cell phones are useful, but unnecessary given the widespread availability of phone booths. Ah, but time marches on. The majority of her advice rings as true today as it would been back in those halcyon days, but  a work written this century would have included the revolutionary impact of ubiquitous wireless connections and 'smart' electronics;  her multitude of pages on cheap car-renting strategies is practically moot considering car-sharing services. Luhrs' sections on inner simplicity and personal finance are exceptional, however.

The Call of the Mall

Call of the Mall: the Geography of Shopping
© 2005 Paco Underbill
240 pages

Paco Underhill wants to take a little walk with you through the local mall, to see it with his eyes- the eyes of  a "retail anthropologist" and marketing strategist who scrutinizes malls as the environments they were built to be: shopping arenas.  Born amid the automobile-guided infrastructure buildout of the 1950s, shopping malls have been the crown jewel of American consumerism, dedicated spaces of recreational consumption of goods.  The walk, which begins in the parking lot and travels through the cavernous mall's innards, going even down the twisty hallways into the hidden bathrooms, takes reader on a guided tour of the territory, where even toilets don't escape scrutiny. The Call of the Mall is a little business history, a little social musing, and a little advertising/marketing examination.  Written more for consumers than business students, it's an entertaining account that offers most another perspective on shopping malls.

Although Underbill spends most of his working life walking around malls, his feelings regarding them are mixed. He seems to enjoy them -- the long stretches of flat marble or tile, air-conditioned walks down channels filled with eye-catching displays and even more eye-catching people --  but his job requires being both appreciative and critical. Throughout the mall tour, Underhill's perspective reveals that for all their flashiness, malls do a lot things badly.  Music stores, for instance, have gone downhill since records gave way to CDs, because record sleeves could be used as eye-catching displays. CD covers are as useful for displays seen at a distance as postage stamps.  Underhill is also surprised that no store has ever considered using the mall restrooms as a display area for its own equipment (but considering how much volume mall toilets get, would any retailer want to chance his toilet being associated with badly-maintained restrooms?).  There are greater problems, too, unavoidable consequences of the malls' status as artifacts of suburbia.  Malls are in fact very artificial environments, little island awash in a sea of pavements. A lot of their foot traffic is from teenagers who are there because they have nothing else to do;  suburban teens have no place outside of home and school to go to.  Underhill makes the point repeatedly that malls are limited by their environment.

In revealing what malls don't do well, Underhill also points out their strengths, and explains to readers, uniitated shoppers, why they might work the way they do.  He points out, for instance, that the spaces near entrances and exits are consigned as low rent.  One would think otherwise considering they receive greater traffic than the interior of the mall, but Underhill comments that as people are entering a store, they need space to adjust, to adapt to their new environment. As they are making the transition, their mind ignores the first few stores they pass. He also elaborates on some of the strategies that the real estate giants who own the malls employ when deciding who rents what space;  different stores have different markets, and there are dynamics to be taken into consideration. A low-end and a high-end jewelry store side by side can enhance one another's business.  Underhill goes into several stores to scrutinize their specific practices; he comments on the high-end jewelry store's physical additions, for instance, how they use a black brick facade to minimize window space, sending a clear message of exclusivity to hoi-polloi outside who can't afford $80,000 necklaces.

Shopping malls are a mixed bag, an experiment  in retailing that may change as time passes, or may fail entirely. Demographics are changing, writes Underbill, as is technology; online stores are giving brick-and-mortar (or in suburban cases, plywood and concrete)  an increasingly hard time,  and this work was penned ten years ago, before Amazon Prime and similar services.  The Call of the Mall will probably frustrate marketing students looking for a catalog of tricks of the trade, because while Underbill offers general suggestions and reveals a few practices,  he's not going to give away the farm considering he makes a living as a consultant helping businesses  organize their physical space. For the ordinary person on the street -- or in the aisles -- The Call of the Mall is an entertaining look into the workings of places we might spend a lot of our time in.

Sycamore Row

Sycamore Row
© 2013 John Grisham
464 pages

 I have been less than impressed with John Grisham’s books in recent years; The Racketeer made me suspect Grisham or his publishers were merely milking the success of his name.  Sycamore Row, however, is a return to the Grisham of yore; set in his fictional Clanton, Mississippi, the site of many of his better novels.  A direct sequel to his first novel, and building off many others, Sycamore Row is good work, a legal thriller and a story of restoration and forgiveness.

Sycamore Row picks up only two years after the climax of A Time to Kill, in which Jake Brigance defended a black father who meted out shotgun justice to two white hooligans who beat and raped his young daughter. No one expected Brigance to triumph, not in a town like Clanton where racial tensions ran deep. But he did,  and the storied reputation he earned as  a progressive lawyer of integrity earned him the job that begins in Sycamore Road. On a fine Sunday morning, a local businessman, Seth Hubbard, is found hanging from a tree on his property; the next day, Brigance receives a letter from the man appointing him the executor of his will, a handwritten document that cuts out the man's family and leaves his enormous fortune to...the maid.  The black maid.  Once again Jake is thrown into a controversial trial that some want badly to turn into a good ol' race war. Jake  has no interest in that kind of legal battle;  the Hailey trial saw his house and dog perish in flames set by the Ku Klux Klan.

Although the premise sounds a bit much like The Testament -- where another rich old man left a handwritten will that disinherited his family and dumped the fortune on someone who no one had ever heard of, namely a missionary in South America --  the legal battle turns into a historical mystery that comes into light only late in the novel. The legal question of whether Hubbard was sane enough to produce a legally valid will is resolved not by trial arguments, but by historical fact as the characters struggle to discover what Seth Hubbard knew. The characters include not only Jake, but other Clanton favorites like Harry Rex Vonner, a cranky if wise divorce lawyer, and Lucien Wilbanks, who is the last of a noble clan of gentry, a disbarred southern scion with a taste for sour mash and a proud member of the NAACP -- just to rile folks up.  Sycamore Row's  enmeshment with the other Clanton novels will make this work especially attractive for Grisham readers, especially those like myself who've been disappointed by works like The Associate and The Racketeer.   The presiding judge is Reuben V. Atlee, whose own will will cause a stir in  The Summons which it neglects to mention $3 million sitting around in boxes in his basement. Even Willie Traynor, who owned the newspaper whose story was told in The Last Juror, makes a few steady appearances.

For those not enamored of the greater Clanton story, Sycamore Row is still superior to many Grisham works because it's not idle entertainment.  Grisham develops a theme of forgiveness throughout, and the final resolution is magnificent. There's no preachiness, no lectures from the main characters nor wisdom dispersed from a town savant; forgiveness and restoration are written into the character's very actions.  I was spellbound, and hope Grisham returns to Clanton again.

The Redneck Manifesto

The Redneck Manifesto: How Hicks, Hillbillies, and White Trash Became Amerca's Scapegoats
© 1998 Jim Goad
272 pages

Rednecks of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your bills.   Jim Goad's The Redneck Manifesto is a raucous mixture of southern pride and Marx-esque social criticism which examines the plight of working whites. Although few would take seriously the concept of white plight,  in Goad's eyes 'privilege whites' constitute a minority of American whites;  most are working-class slobs like himself who have been treated as miserably throughout American history as any minority,  even slaves.  His aim is to expose anti-prole bigotry, by shock therapy if need be, and demonstrate that America's big problems are rooted in class, not ethnic tension.

His history might echo A People's History if Howard Zinn had focused on working whites and were give nto telling the reader to "f*** off".  It is a history rooted in class conflict: since time immemorial, a wealthy few have kept most of the power in their hands, and America is no different. Though our national legend involves Pilgrims seeking liberty, in the fact of the matter is that most whites who immigrated came against their wills; they were the poor pushed off the fields, scraped off the streets, and shanghaied across the Atlantic to toil as indentured servants.  Volunteering or conscripting in the Revolution, they died to help create a Constitution which had no place for them, and the centuries of progress that followed brought only more of the same. The Civil War destroyed the economy of the south, but did little to displace the power-elite; industrialism proved even more lethal than the killing fields of Europe's Great War, at least for Americans,  as thousands died every year from factory and mining accidents. The rest of the century was no better;  homes were blown apart as companies tried to crack open the Appalachian mountains like a walnut, with no mind given to the people who lived there, and free trade agreements saw the disappearance of jobs which remained.  To add insult to injury, institutions that persecuted blacks, like slavery and Jim Crow laws, were somehow blamed on the impoverished working class, despite it being just as disenfranchised by local elites. (Documents like the 1901 Alabama Constitution remain equal-opportunity oppressors of the working poor.)  While the 20th century saw various populations gain media shielding and political protection, the white working class remained a common horse to beat on,  a pleasure shared by both formerly-marginalized minorities and the elite.

Against all this, Goad doesn't call for sensitivity; no self-respecting working man would whine. What he does want is for everyone to leave rednecks the hell alone. Making fun of his kin on TV is one thing; everybody likes their scapegoats. What he has his sights on is excessive tax burdens; let the government be paid for by people who receive the services, or the propertied --  and the United States' foreign policy, which typically involves sending the sons and daughters of the poor to fight  to fulfill the elite's ambitions.  War is the harvester of the home, and nothing else.  In addition to calling for an end to death and taxes, Goad celebrates the culture of the white working family,  with chapters given over to "Playing Hard" and  even to "Praying Hard", despite Goad's firm belief that religion and politics are both full of it.

The Redneck Manifesto may have a serious intent, but it's hard to take the delivery as such. Goad is deliberately and enthusiastically vulgar, employing racial slurs throughout to goad the reader, hopefully forcing them to see 'redneck' and 'hillbilly' as pejoratives on the level as  kike, Chink, and yea, even the dreaded "N-word".  That's artistic license,  but his seemingly schizophrenic style --  alternating between informal if serious analysis and seemingly insane ranting,  throwing in nicknames for personalities and employing colloquial spelling randomly  --  can easily throw a reader off. It's surely deliberate; Goad's whole purpose in writing the  book is defy conventional attitudes.

The Redneck Manifesto is a fascinating if problematic book; it's not a perspective I'm used to hearing. Class is a taboo topic now, relegated only to Marxists -- and few working men would give Marx's conflict theory of society a moment's consideration after a half-century of being assured by the TV that in America we're all one big happy middle-class family.  Good luck, too, finding the self-described Marxist who would go anywhere near ethnic consciousness if they are white. As a product of the white working class with a sympathy for Marxist social critique, I had a ball reading this -- even while wading through the eccentric treatment of the English tongue. It's funny, cringingly inappropriate, and yet thoughtful at the same time; a tirade with a point. There's tremendous value in looking at an often ignored segment of the impoverished population, but considering the abuse Goad hurls out, readers other than southerners looking for a sympathetic voice -- of which Goad's is surely one -- might put it down early.

Daily Life in Anglo-Saxon England

Daily Life in Anglo-Saxon England
© 2008 Sally Crawford
224 pages

            Who were the Anglo-Saxons? For a people conquered in 1066, their culture seems strangely dominant;  the land the Normans conquered remains England, not Greater Normandy, and Norman French is only an influence on the more native English, never having displaced the old language.   Daily Life in Anglo-Saxon England examines the earthy details of the Anglo-Saxons’ lives; the construction of their homes, the styles of dress, the culture they practiced at home and in community with one another. Separate chapters address both the material, like tools and towns, and cultural (religion and governance).  While some sections are based on physical artifacts, other evidence is documentary, taken from older histories like Bede’s, or inferred from miscellaneous documents.  The assertion that the Anglo-Saxons valued family care is drawn both from the presence of an adult skeleton who was born missing an arm and various descriptions of personalities in histories and graves as doting kinsmen and the like.   The book has a somewhat slow start (save for readers who are utterly fascinated by the difference between sunken-earth homes and free-standing  houses as archaeological sites), but on the whole is quite engaging.  The main point of the author’s writing is to rescue the Saxons from the perception that they were filthy peasants, knuckle-dragging their way around mud huts until the arrival of Christianity and the Norman French.  Her survey of their social life certainly illustrates how rich a life their culture possessed, and how sympathetic they can be even to modern readers.