Book Review: Rules for Radicals

I picked up this book because it's supposed to have strongly influenced our current President and a potential future candidate (Hillary Clinton). Writing as a GenXer with little to no interest in '60s activists, I had no previous experience with the author, his activities, or his writings, so this review will focus entirely on the text of Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals. If you're interested in politics--left, right, or other--I believe you'll find this brief read (196 pages) worthwhile.


I'm not 100% certain what I expected from this book, but the way folks on conservative talk radio use Rules for Radicals or "Alinsky" as shorthand for this or that political vice of the President, one would assume that this was the political version of The Anarchist Cookbook--all fire and brimstone and down with The Man. This would be incorrect.

Background
Let's start with the subtitle: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals [italics mine]. This book was written in 1971, after much of the wildness of the 1960s had already happened--and in many ways this book is a reaction against the chaotic and at times violent activities of that decade. Alinsky saw dramatic, screaming activism as counterproductive to effecting actual, lasting change. As an activist and professor, Alinsky is at turns lecturing and speaking from experience. He's taking the tone of an elder statesman saying, "Look, kids: you can yell and scream all you want, but if you actually want to change the world, you need to play a different game." His primary lesson is, surprisingly (to me), to work with people and the system as you find it.

To introduce his topic, Alinsky starts by explaining his purpose for writing the book: to teach serious activists how to make lasting political changes without alienating a large section of the population, which he believed was the general reaction to much of what the hippies did. He is out to win hearts and minds, and he believes that that can only happen by working with people as they are and the political system as it is. He is trying to explain how to obtain greater political access for the Have Nots in a world comprising three main groups:

• The Haves
• The Have-Nots
• The Have a Little, Want Mores

Alinsky also provides definitions of specific concepts, such as power, self-interest, compromise, ego, and conflict. He lays out these terms in realistic, non-threatening, and terms so the willing reader/activist understands how they operate within the U.S. system of government. His analysis is not so different from what you hear about America today: unnecessary war, government overreach, corruption, and minorities being kept under thumb by an oligarchical majority.

Community Organizers and Ego
One thing that caught my attention in this section was this description of a "community organizer," which is a favorite epithet of my friends on the right to describe the President:

"The ego of the organizer is stronger and more monumental than the ego of the leader. The leader is driven by the desire for power, while the organizer is driven by the desire to create. The organizer is in a true sense reaching for the highest level for which man can reach--to create, to be a 'great creator,' to play God."

However, he bookends this statement with the following two warnings:

"Nothing antagonizes people and alienates them from a would-be organizer more than the revealing flashes of arrogance, vanity, impatience, and contempt of a personal egotism."

"An infection of egotism would make it impossible to respect the dignity of individuals, to understand people, or to strive to develop the other elements that make up the ideal organizer."

Taking Action
Gradually, Alinsky moves from a theoretical discussion to more concrete, action-oriented content. He states that the first step in community organization is disorganizing the status quo. This is followed by organizing something new to replace it. One observation he had, which a conflict-averse person might have a problem with, is that there is no such thing as a "non-controversial" issue. If there is an issue, there will be conflict, and that must be managed through politics. If there is an issue but only one opinion on it, that amounts to tyranny.

Another Alinsky point: no one can negotiate without the power to compel negotiation. A protest against an entire nationwide corporation, for example, would be impractical for a local group; however, a protest at a single branch could have more impact.

So what does Alinsky mean by "take action" or protest? Perhaps one of the most important "rules" Alinsky writes about community organizing is that organizers must take people as they are--and that not all of them are going to join a group just because of the rightness of the cause, but for personal, self-interested reasons that are only partially connected to the overall "cause." Another favorite Alinsky ploy is to get one segment of the "Haves" to fight with another segment, resulting
in a win for the Have-Nots simply because the second segment of "Haves" did not want the aggravation of facing a protest themselves.

In the end, Alinsky's tactics are devious and at times cynical, but they were often effective because he understood the American political system. A recent example of effective activism in the Alinsky vein was the combination of pressures put on the L.A. Clippers following the racist comments of its owner. In that case, NBA players wore their jerseys inside-out and several teams threatened to boycott Clippers playoff games. The combination of bad publicity, threatened boycotts, and sponsorship losses (as well as the NBA-level ban) hit Donald Sterling where it hurt--his assets--and got him to sell his team. While more a case of Haves vs. Haves, the massive pressure put on Sterling was a loud message that his behavior would not be tolerated. Still, it was a campaign of which Alinsky would have approved. In the end, winning political battles come down to using the available, appropriate means to get your way. It might not always be pretty, but American politics very much wears the stamp of Alinsky's Rules for Radicals.

Book Review: Equal

The genre known as dystopia--negative utopia--consists of a story where some awful part of human behavior has taken hold as the ruling philosophy of society, or when some good part of our natures has been taken to some awful extreme. Such is the case of Equal, a book brought to my attention by its author, W. J. Costello.



 

The high concept of this novel is one where a future America has become much poorer, grubbier, and unhappier because society is now ruled by the notion of radical equality. In this dystopian future, people are regulated in their careers--five years per career, with everyone doing the same tasks in the same age range, up through age 50. Those individuals with gifts aesthetic, physical, or mental are kept in place by ear-mounted machines called Equalizers, which operate on the brain or the body to keep people from exceeding their peers.

In the midst of this dynamic, we have a sheriff who is put in charge of chasing a "runner," someone who's trying to escape from the society. Instead of catching this runner, a woman, he falls in love with her and thus has to do some thinking and make some choices about the society he lives in. The sheriff (I'm sorry, I can't recall the title now) has a nemesis, a fellow sheriff who's an utter sadist who somehow hasn't been apprehended himself.

There are a lot of elements here that could be the basis for a cracking good yarn: you've got the love interest, you've got a chase, you've got a dystopian society that gives the author an opportunity to comment on society today and where certain behaviors could lead. But, but, but. I had a difficult time with this book. I commend the author for completing a full, novel-length story and for making a more action-oriented version of Ayn Rand's Anthem. However, this work would have benefitted from some judicious editing on multiple levels, especially in the narrative style.



Leaving new-author mistakes aside, my biggest challenge I had with the world the author posits was the discrepancy between the level of technology the people use on a daily basis--blacksmiths and fireplaces and swords--and the level of sophistication needed to produce the "Equalizer," which can do anything from dumbing down the intelligent to making the attractive less appealing. Someone has to ensure that those tools work and keep working, which implies a high level of education that the society's organization would prevent.

If the author decided to write a sequel (full disclosure: W. J. Costello sent me a free electronic copy of the book), I would recommend that more attention be given to filling in some of the blanks on how such a society is formed, what the landscape and technologies look like, and how people interact. There are undoubtedly excesses to be founded in our current society, just as there are in the author's dystopia. The trick, as always, is conveying the true impacts of those excesses on societies and individual souls.

Book Review: Soyuz: A Universal Spacecraft

I've been reading quite a bit lately, but not everything I've read requires a review. This book was, if only to teach American space aficionados about the parts of the space business we haven't heard much about. The Soyuz spacecraft in its various forms has served Russia and the Soviet Union since 1960. Its design, developed in secret away from Western eyes, is distinctive and has not varied much since that time. The original vehicle launched Yuri Gagarin to a single orbit in 1961, at the height of the Cold War. The latest version, the Soyuz TMA, now supports the International Space Station, a joint U.S.-Russian space system, and can stay in space for over six months. This is a story--or set of stories--that's worth reading.

The basic Soyuz spacecraft is a three-part vehicle, with a bulb-like Orbital Module (OM) at the front end that currently serves to store instruments and provide a docking mechanism to link up with other spacecraft; a descent module (DM), where a crew of two or three sits during launch and reentry and controls the spacecraft; and the Propulsion Module (PM), which is a skirt at the bottom that houses the engines. This three-part structure is covered by an aerodynamic payload shroud at launch, and the vehicle continues to be sent into orbit aboard increasingly advanced versions of the original R-7 ballistic missile that launched the first Sputnik.


These vehicles faced several challenges that American spacecraft did not: they had to land on land in the Soviet Union (the USSR not being fond of letting outside eyes look at their strategic hardware). The territory is large and forbidding, often mountainous and cold. Like Apollo capsules, the Soyuz DM has a heat shield to protect it from the heat of reentry before deploying a parachute. However, instead of splashing down onto the relatively soft surface of the ocean, the DM drops its heat shield just before "dust down" and a set of solid rocket motors slows the capsule just enough to make for a "soft" landing. Of course the DM doesn't stop there. With its rounded shape, Soyuz looks like an upside-down acorn, and has a tendency to roll or bounce upon landing. Some missions set fire to the grass; some scare villagers; some land on snowy hillsides; one actually splashed down into a frozen lake and had to be towed by helicopter to shore. The seats have serious shock absorbers to cushion the crew from the impact, which is fortunate because the braking rockets don't always work. Upon landing, the crews sometimes have to wait for hours before rescue arrives. A pistol is considered standard equipment, if only to deter hostile bears. Can you imagine this sort of thing if an Apollo capsule had to touch down in the wilds of Colorado or Florida?

Which brings me to the next point: mishaps. The Soviet and Russian space programs do not have the same level of quality control and reliability as U.S. electronics. Automated docking systems often failed, as did Soyuz electronics, radars, or engines...but they kept flying. The really eye-opening parts of this book are the stories of the challenges, mishaps, and tragedies that the Western World didn't learn about until the Soviet Union collapsed. The story that had my hair standing on end concerned the reentry of Soyuz 5. Having just completed a test of docking with another Soyuz spacecraft in orbit, Soyuz 5 then started reentry procedures, but the propulsion module did not separate from the descent module. The DM was coming down head-first, and the hatch started to smolder and buckle inward before the reentry heat knocked the propulsion module loose. The video I liked to tells the rest, but it's definitely worth reading. What's even more astounding is that the single cosmonaut aboard was able to walk away (in a typical minus-40-degree Russian winter) to find help.

The USSR had the mixed advantage of state secrecy for much of its existence and a controlled press, which prevented the domestic media from either questioning the government or the non-Soviet world from learning of problems. The closed nature of life behind the Iron Curtain ensured that the cosmonauts received no help from the outside world, even if they wanted it. And even as the USSR was collapsing and the Russian Federation was struggling to be born, the Russians considered it a national priority to keep the space program going.

Personally, I find the Soyuz a bit lacking in aesthetic beauty: its three-part shape makes it look vaguely antlike, and they are not terribly comfortable--the current model is only 2.2 meters across, and the astronauts are crammed in three-wide in a metal ball that would be a serious challenge to anyone suffering from claustrophobia. But it works. The Russians continue to refine the vehicle and build more of them, much more cheaply than we Americans do. They are durable and reflect lessons learned over 50 years of spaceflight. Rather than build a completely new vehicle to meet new needs (the Buran "shuttleski" being the single exception), the Russians have continued to refine their single vehicle to meet differing needs over time.

The book itself is unevenly written. Broken up by vehicle class type, there are parts that overlap because the Russians would continue to fly older classes of spacecraft while testing the new version. Because of these incremental changes--roughly four generations over 50+ years--it is difficult to follow all the nomenclature. Soyuz vehicles have production numbers, vehicle numbers, and mission names/numbers that are likely to change depending on how they're used. For example, a vehicle might be a class T (Transport), but then also have one mission name if it's testing a particular piece of hardware or a maneuver, and then a different name for the consumption of the non-Soviet world. Missions that didn't achieve their objectives, for example, often were named "Cosmos" rather than "Soyuz."

There are also missing pieces in the book that I would have liked to learn about in more detail. For instance, what was going on with launch vehicle development in parallel with Soyuz improvements? What was the Russian lunar program like--the N-1, the lander (if any)? How did the various Soyuz configurations compare to each other in appearance and performance? Obviously the book would have benefitted from a lot more illustrations or photographs, even of the Salyut and Mir space stations, but it seems that even when the book was written (2003), some of the old secrecy remained.

There are definitely lessons Americans can and do learn from the Russian space program through the International Space Station partnership. Let's just hope we don't have another Cold War to fight.

Book Reviews: Various Summer Reading

I've been on a roll with reading this summer. It's variety of a sort. Some of these books you might like, some might make you ask, "Why the heck is he reading that?" To which I answer, "Because I wish to." Onward!

The High Crusade by Poul Anderson

Imagine what might happen if an alien star empire decided to visit Earth in 1345 for the purposes of evaluating our homeworld for conquest. Imagine what might happen if their ship landed near a town of crusading Englishmen. Well, you need not imagine further: Poul Anderson has done it for you. This is a fun adventure, but not as deep-thinking or thought-provoking as some Anderson books I've read. My biggest mental block about this book is the notion that medieval humans would have to couth or sense to counter alien hardware, but Anderson makes the case plausibly enough to make the story fun, if not entirely believable.

Ice by Anna Kavan

I probably shouldn't review this book since I did not finish it. But then again, perhaps that feeling of dismay deserves to be shared. I encountered this title because it was included in Brian Aldiss's gargantuan book of science fiction criticism, The Trillion Year Spree (which is worth reading, by the way). The problem with Ice? Several. Leave aside the dystopian future it depicts. SF is full of plenty of those, and some are quite good. The style, however, is vaguely stream-of-consciousness--lots of rambling, and random depictions of events which the viewpoint narrator sometimes experiences, sometimes imagines. The reader faces the ultimate "unreliable narrator," made worse somehow by knowing that the late author was a drug addict who succumbed to heroin soon after writing this book. It's a frightening look into the mind of a drug addict, then, but I cannot say it's particularly good fiction, as the meandering "events" and blahblahblah prose do not encourage the reader to pay much attention to either. I'm sorry I waited so long to purchase this--I read Trillion Year Spree sometime in the '80s--my expectations were too high and the quality of the writing too low.




The Player of Games and Consider Phlebas by Iain M. Banks

These books are not listed in the order they were written but in the order I read them. I'd heard that Mr. Banks had passed on recently and a friend or two had recommended his works. This would not be the first time I started reading an author this way (I didn't start reading Robert A. Heinlein until his passing), but one day I need to learn to enjoy living SF authors. Be that as it may, I'm glad I read these books in the order that I did, or I might not have read both books. So what are we looking at here?

Banks has created a high-tech future called "The Culture," in which human beings have created a wide variety of technological marvels, from ringworlds to city-sized starships to genetically advanced people who have glands that can secrete any type of mood or mental state imaginable. It's not quite a "singularity" type future, but it is very advanced, on the level of space opera with an Arthur C. Clarke realism. The Player of Games follows the adventure of a man named Gurgeh, a professional player of strategy games. The best in his line of work, Gurgeh gets an offer he can't refuse--a strategy game where the stakes are life-and-death, political success or triumph. The intricacies of this world come across nicely in the story, and Gurgeh, while flawed, is a sympathetic character.

Consider Phlebas was the first book in the Culture series, and it was not nearly as enjoyable. It is written from the point of view of a genetically advanced warrior who is at odds with the Culture civilization and lives more or less like a Han Solo/Malcolm Reynolds sort of amoral space pirate--without the likeability. Again we find large vehicles, massive manufactured worlds, and high-tech weaponry. However, the lead character, Horza, is hostile to the Culture (a traitor, in fact), and tries to stay outside of its territory, so we only get a hint of how it operates. There is conflict, success, and failure in this book, but the tone is rather downbeat. I'm hoping to get into other Culture novels to better appreciate what Banks has created. These books are not short, though--each well over 500 pages. Don't editors edit anymore?

Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury

This is one of the few Bradbury books I haven't read. I picked it up because my mother, since retiring, has been taking a lot of short courses at her local community college, and one of them was on this book. It's rare that she and I will read the same author willingly, so I thought it would give us an opportunity to talk about something different. The book itself is Bradbury's rose-colored-glasses view of his boyhood in northern Illinois (Waukegan, renamed Green Town) in the late 1920s. It forced me to really think about how I have written and thought about my childhood in Lombard, Illinois, because I have not been nearly as warm and fuzzy toward the place. Bradbury describes a life almost Tom Sawyer-like in its simple pleasures and festive innocence: the joys of new sneakers, visiting carnivals, exploring the neighborhood, listening to family talk on broad front porches. And yes, I suppose I experienced some of that while growing up in Lombard. Life certainly was simpler then (1970s-80s) if not necessarily better. The book itself is a series of vignettes rather than a full novel in the pure sense. It's soft, poetical, and magical, like most of Bradbury's work. It's a nice place to visit, but it reads like fantasy for me because, as I said, I had a much different experience.

The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett

I knew this book primarily through the movie, which brought together many of the same actors who starred in Casablanca, including Humphrey Bogart, Peter Lorre, and Sidney Greenstreet. The film is delightful, and sparks with much of the same energetic dialogue. The problem with seeing the movie first, which is usually something I do not do, is that there aren't a lot of surprises once you start the reading experience. The screen writers did a commendable job converting most of the book to the screen, eliminating only a few sidesteps or characters who would have taken too long to explain. Hammett's prose is heavy on dialogue, and therefore much of what you read on the page you also hear in the film. I actually preferred The Thin Man, which is a lot more humorous and entertaining tale about a high society husband-and-wife team who solve a murder. But if you haven't seen or read The Maltese Falcon, you're in for a treat: a street-smart private investigator is dragged into an increasingly complex set of characters and circumstances surrounding the aforementioned Falcon. To elaborate would be to spoil the fun.

The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler

Unlike The Maltese Falcon, I have not seen The Big Sleep or any other Raymond Chandler-book-based movie. Imagine my surprise (or, perhaps not) that Chandler's tough-guy detective Phillip Marlowe is also portrayed by Humphrey Bogart. In this story, we've got a hard-bitten detective in 1930s Los Angeles who's hired to sort out a blackmail problem for a rich family and faces a lot of harsh bad guys and twisted behavior along the way. Marlowe appears to be a model for Mickey Spillane's tough guy, Mike Hammer. Given Chandler's description of the character, I had the 1980s Mike Hammer, Stacy Keach, in my mind when I imagined Marlowe. Anyhow, Chandler's got a different way of going about things than Dashiell Hammett. Where Hammett advances his stories primarily through dialogue, Chandler throws in a lot more narrator asides. It's easier to "see" Chandler's world, which he lavishes with details of climate, clothing, architecture, and character descriptions. I'm tempted to pick up more Philip Marlowe books because there's a certain elegance and style to the prose--and the characters. You can imagine Marlowe, who's a bit more cultured than Mike Hammer, getting hired by a millionaire. Mickey Spillane's tough-guy stance carries over to his prose, almost as if the author is trying too hard. Chandler created a fun book here, and I look forward to catching up on others--and maybe, eventually, the movies.




...And yes, I found time for some nonfiction, too...

The Influence Game by Stephanie Vance

I got this book because I'm finding that it helps to know a bit about the lobbying business (welcome the world of the government contractor). The subtitle of this book is 50 Insider Tactics from the Washington, D.C., Lobbying World that Will Get You to Yes. The idea behind the book is that while the tips are derived from the lobbying world, the logic of them could apply to anyone or any situation. I might differ with that assessment a bit, but you can find politics everywhere, so an understanding of how American politics works can give you some insight into the American business culture. As a set of tactics for actual lobbying, though, I found this book very helpful and directly applicable to the knowledge I needed to acquire. A tip of the fedora to my friend The Deastroyer for this recommendation!

The Civil War by Geoffrey Ward, Ric Burns, and Ken Burns

 A couple weeks ago, I visited Lookout Mountain, Tennessee, a 2,000-foot ridge that overlooks Chattanooga. It was one of several battlegrounds that were decisive in capturing the city during the Civil War. While I was there, I wandered the gift shop and found this book, which is the basis/companion text for the PBS miniseries that was made several years ago. It occurred to me awhile back that my knowledge of Civil War history is a little scanty, as I was more interested in World War II as a boy. Now, living in the South, I suppose some familiarity with the War is unavoidable, especially when I came to realize how close some of the battlefields were to places I live or visit on a regular basis (a Union army set up camp on the south side of Huntsville, in the general area where the hospital district is now).  

The Civil War provides a high-level narrative of the conflict and manages to capture, if only in brief sketches, the viewpoints of the Yankees and Confederates. I found the book worth reading, and interesting enough to consider renting or buying the miniseries. The book also provided me some insight into how and why the war was fought so savagely for so long. There are other things I might want to read along these lines to get a better, more detailed perspective (I also read the memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant a few months back). I guess, as much as Americans might like to think otherwise, much of our history derives from this single conflict, and its lessons must be learned and understood, however painful the questions it makes us ask.



I think that's all for now. If any of these reviewlets intrigued you enough to make a purchase, please click on one of the links posted here--I get some (not a lot of) credit from Amazon.com if you make the purchase through my site.

Keep your brain busy!

Book Review: Escapement

Full Disclosure: Ciara Knight is a friend from a previous career life. When a friend tells me she's writing a steampunk series and is looking for feedback, it seems rather difficult to do. I guess I'll find out with this review won't I? And by the way, I did not receive a free copy--as a writer's courtesy, I paid full fare for the download--it's a good practice and keeps you a tad more honest.

What we have here is a steampunk romance. Actually, let me add another layer to that. What we have is a steampunk superhero romance. Ciara is trying something very ambitious here, and where it will go is anybody's guess--except hers.

I'll get my confessions/negative feedback out of the way first so I can get on to the fun stuff (though, like any author, she'll probably zoom in on the constructive criticism). My primary confession is that it took me a while to finish this book. I don't consider this a reflection on Ciara so much as my taste in books. I am not a romance reader, nor a particular fan of the steampunk subgenre, though I am a fan of The Peshawar Lancers, to name one. Romances thrive on emotional and sexual tension--of which this story has plenty--but that's not the sort of fiction I read for fun. That has probably colored this review more than it should, but then I am not Ciara's target market.




I had some difficulty "visualizing" this world in my head. The steampunk aesthetic, because it is so specific, requires a bit more attention to the reader's "eye." What are people wearing? What does the technology look like? What sort of vehicles do they use? How are interior spaces decorated--is it actually Victorian, or technology from our own time repurposed as such? Where are the characters in relationship to each other? Escapement has places where this is done well and other places where I would have preferred the extra one- to two-sentence scenic detour to help me situate myself. There are some interesting pieces of technology in this book that would bear a moment's consideration. Consider my favorites, the steampunk-flavored Borg  implants that Escapement's ruling class wear: eyepieces, heart replacements, leg replacements, primitive circuit boards. What color are they? How are they powered?

One last issue I have is understanding how old this civilization is. One learns over the course of this first (of several) stories that the primary villain, an implant-laden queen, played a key role in forming this society, which exists sometime after the "great war" of 2185. At times it seems that the war happened long ago, and others like it occurred during the childhood of the protagonist, Princess Semara. Are we dealing with a post-nuclear war world? We get hints, but not (yet enough) to fill in all the pieces. There are giant creatures in certain parts of this ruined America called "sermechtapedes," which were either mutated or fabricated into existence. How? When? We have references to the prewar world--cultural or political artifacts I won't spoil for you--but again it was difficult to situate myself in place and time.

*

So I've been poking at my friend pretty hard with the iron fist here. Time to apply the velvet glove. Ciara's got an ambitious story going on here with a lot of things going on at once: a romance, a political drama of sorts, and a culture war, with machine people (called Kantians) on one side, supernatural rebels (called Neumarians) with X-Men types of powers on the other, and a variety of plain old humans in the middle struggling to live their lives as slaves or victims or escapees.

Ciara actually introduced this story through a prequel novella titled Weighted, which tells the story from the perspective of Raeth, a Neumarian who has been captured and tortured by the machine people. Escapement continues the story from Semara's point of view.




In Weighted, we learn that the machine people have made it their mission in life to kill the Neumarians, which they view as "parasites." In Weighted, a younger Princess Semara must face a choice about what to do when it's her turn to kill a Neumarian. Escapement shows 16(?)-year-old Semara living with the consequences of that choice. Without giving away too much, suffice to say that Semara has been having second thoughts about the things she's been forced to do and decides to take action to escape that life. This puts her into the company of the hated Neumarians and on an inevitable collision course with her mother, the queen.

What I like with this story is how Ciara manages to advance the personal relationships between Semara and the other characters around her. She grows as a person and the friendships around her deepen as the narrative goes forward. That is not an easy thing to convey or do well. Another thing I like is that her Neumarian characters' "powers" have limitations or costs. They are not infinite, they require specific resources, and they take a toll on the user or others when used. Lastly, the story keeps moving through continually new conflicts or challenges. There might be too many challenges, perhaps--the reader and the characters barely have an opportunity to catch their breath before the next  big thing hits. The narrator's voice never eases up: there is always something new to worry about. Is that a function of Ciara's style or this genre or this character? I don't know, but there were a couple of times I wanted to give the narrator a hug and ask her to relax, if only for a moment. :-)

So while I have my misgivings about this type of story, I am tempted to keep reading, if only to see where Ciara takes her characters. I give her a lot of credit: she wanted very badly to write fiction when we were working together, and she's gone out and done it. And she's taking risks to grow and improve her craft. I wish I were that passionate about story telling, though I favor nonfiction. Regardless, I believe that if you are of a mind to read a steampunk-themed romance, then Escapement and the rest of the Neumarian Chronicles will probably work for you. Give it a try.

Book Review: Blogging the Moon

I've had the pleasure of listening to Paul Spudis talk about his future vision for the moon several times, most recently at Marshall Space Flight Center, and this book--a collection of entries from his Air & Space Magazine blog--provides fleshed-out versions of arguments he makes in his standard stump speech. The short version of Spudis's take on the human future in space is simply to build capabilities for living and working in space, starting with the Moon as a base. Spudis makes the case that the Moon is the best place to start human expansion into the solar system because it's close, it's (scientifically) interesting, and it's useful. That's the short version. The longer version, addressed in various ways in this book, covers a variety of issues related to this cause, and it ranks with The Case for Mars, Mining the Sky, and The High Frontier as one of the major "visions" to be found in the space advocacy community.

As I noted in my earlier blog, there are several things I like about Spudis's vision for space development:

• He keeps his development program affordable by keeping the process incremental, using a combination of robotic and human activities to get the various jobs done.
• He concentrates on building technological capabilities and infrastructure that, while tested on the Moon, might be used at other destinations, such as asteroids or Mars.
• He focuses on a target that we know how to reach and that has become a lot more interesting in the last 40 years (more on that momentarily)
• He doesn't depend on hype or that overused word, "inspiration" to get the general public to support space--as he points out more than once, the general public really doesn't care about space unless there's something dramatic going on, and even then it's a 50/50 coin toss on whether they support what we're doing up there.
• He ties his program to realistic policy concerns that are ongoing, not flavor-of-the-year: national security, science, and economic development--and the Moon can support all three.

What was curious to me was how much the blog entries in this book felt like "deja vu all over again." Writing at the height of the debate over and subsequent cancellation of the Constellation Program, Spudis's blogs covered a particularly painful time in my life, as I faced several personal stresses resulting from the fact that my professional life was in a bit of doubt. Aside from reading about events and arguments that I'd forgotten--purposely or otherwise--what was curious to me was how many of the issues, discussions, and arguments Spudis addressed about Constellation have reared their ugly heads today as I support the Space Launch System. Does our space program have a mission? Is a heavy-lift launch vehicle necessary to accomplish said mission? Where are we going to go next? The arguments haven't changed, and neither has some of the "attitude" involved. What makes today different from 2009-2010 is that we know that Constellation ended--so what now?

Spudis's answers to the the first three questions are no, not necessarily, and, not surprisingly, the Moon. He is not shy about his dislike of the dismantling of the Vision for Space Exploration, which he differentiates from the Constellation Program. He saw the VSE as a strategic direction, designed to establish a permanent human presence in space, while he sees Constellation as a vehicle program that didn't necessarily follow the intent of the Vision. It might not make some NASA strategists happy--like Robert Zubrin, he's not shy about criticizing the government space agency--but it is well worth reading as an informed opinion on the topic of space.

This book is more timely now, perhaps, than the original entries that were published in them because they were written as several lunar missions were just beginning to collect new information about that battered sphere in our sky, including Chandrayaan, Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS), and others. The data that has come in from these missions--some of which is summarized in the video presentation included in the DVD at the back of the book--have made a solid case for water ice on the Moon. And water, as Spudis points out, is just about the most useful substance humans could find there, as it can be used for air, water itself, insulation material for habitats, and most importantly, rocket fuel. Spudis seems torn somewhere between frustrated in these entries, as he considers the current state of affairs unlikely to produce the vision he lays out, which is a permanent human presence throughout the solar system. Still, one never knows what will come next, or how the current program might be used to advance Spudis's vision.

If there is one disadvantage to the blog format of this book as opposed to the other big space-vision books I mentioned earlier, it is that the vision is not organized systematically. Often reacting to the events of the day, Spudis does not have the opportunity in a weekly blog to lay out a step-by-step argument for his vision. Still, his vision is there, and he makes his primary points again and again over the course of several years. If you want a more complete description of his approach to space development, you can always check out his website. I'd heard one person call Spudis a "one-trick pony," which is hardly fair, as his architecture is hardly simple. I might call his work principled or consistent, and he consistently concerned about our nation's future in space, as we all should be.

Book Review: Architecture for Astronauts: An Activity-based Approach

I was came to this book in a roundabout way, but I was really glad that I did: Architecture for Astronauts provides a high-quality, user-friendly overview of habitats designed for long-term human occupation in space. If you note the price, you'll see that the book is not inexpensive, but the author, Sandra Häuplik-Meusburger (hereafter SHM), has gone to great lengths to make the content accessible and visually appealing.



Beginning with an overview of the spacecraft--Apollo, the Salyut series, Skylab, Mir, Shuttle, and the International Space Station (ISS)--the author explains why some spacecraft were covered, but not others. For instance, while the Mercury, Gemini, and Soyuz spacecraft all had long missions, they were not included because they were more or less made for transportation, not habitation. Another nice feature of the front matter is that it provides infographics depicting how mission time and habitat space are allocated. In the case of describing the interior space, SHM depicts the spacecraft architecturally and logically. For instance, there's a nice table on pages 92-93 showing where astronaut activities are performed within the common area(s) of a spacecraft--work, sleep, hygiene, eating, and leisure--and which are performed in a detached area. For instance, an extravehicular activity (EVA) is depicted as being "outside the circle," while eating, hygiene, and leisure occur within a common area or areas.

The color-coding is also useful, as it ties to the colored edging tabs for each primary section (sleep, work, etc.). Along with color-coding activities in space, SHM provides some handy tables, such as the one above, which list the attributes of individual spacecraft vertically to allow the reader to get an overview of that system as well as horizontal comparisons by attribute. Also, each major section includes a set of lessons learned (called "Design Directions") for future spacecraft designs. Lastly, each topic is covered in a series of two-page spreads so you don't have to flip back and forth. In short, a lot of work went into making this book visually appealing, accessible, and useful.

I would consider this to be a good introductory textbook providing a historical overview of human-rated space systems for the space architecture practitioner. If you're looking for a good look into human factors in space, I would recommend this book as a starting point, then shift over to Out of This World: The New Field of Space Architecture, which concentrates more on the structures than the astronauts and Patricia Santy's Choosing the Right Stuff, which delves into the evaluation and selection of astronauts (and which I still need to read!).





For someone like me, who's an enthusiast, the book provides just about the right level of detail. If you want to know more, each chapter provides an extensive list of sources, including interviews conducted with nine astronauts across the entire range of systems (though I was mildly surprised that there were no women included among the interviewees).

I mentioned that I came to this book in a roundabout way, so I'll explain that briefly. The author of this text coauthored a paper with an American I met at the Global Space Exploration Conference. That paper concentrated on one area covered in Architecture for Astronauts: the inclusion of plants as a way to improve the quality of life for astronauts on long-duration space missions. I liked the paper, became friends with the coauthor, then acquainted with the author via Facebook.

What I got most out of this book is how downright unusual and unnatural human travel through space is. I've been on the machinery end of NASA for six years, and I tend to forget about the people actually doing the work. It's not just a matter of making machines that can survive launch, orbit, and landing in space environments, you have to make those machines capable of keeping humans alive, safe, healthy, and sane for days, weeks, or months at a time. It's not just a matter of cramped quarters or zero gravity, but radiation, loud noises, isolation from friends and family, and overwork that can creep up on the astronaut and make him or her a little stressed. And after reading the section on "Hygiene," I've never been so grateful for Earth gravity and regularly functioning toilets. At any rate, we're still a long way from Star Trek and "normal" life in space.

If Architecture for Astronauts has one flaw, it is that the two-page-per topic format prevents the reader from getting too far in depth with any one subject, which made me want to know more about how all this stuff fits together. In that case, I suppose, this book is a resounding success!

Book Review: Space Politics and Policy: An Evolutionary Perspective

I'm about ten years late reading this book, but it was still well worth reading. Space Politics and Policy is an excellent text for the motivated reader to "get smart" on space policy. It is not cheap, even used (I got my slightly marked-up copy on Amazon.com for $40); it's still over $100 new as of this writing, but even given the price constraints and age of the book, it is worth reading because most or all of the issues it addresses are still relevant today, just in more advanced form.



As a space advocate for the last 15 years and a NASA contractor for the last six, I thought I understood (more or less) how space activities "happened," at least from the NASA perspective. However, this text enlightened me quite a bit on how policy is executed in the space business and how politics generally shape those policies. In a series of essays covering everything from commercial activities to international relations to military and intelligence space issues, this book addresses the broad waterfront of activities and gives the reader some good insights into "how the game is played."

For example, it might or might not come as a surprise to the interested space fan that space policy is not designed to rapidly advance our nation's progress into the final frontier. Congress and the President do not sign on to high-priced space programs because they have a burning passion to settle the solar system. Unless a crisis hits, as it did in the '50s and '60s with the launch of Sputnik or the flight of Yuri Gagarin, Congress doesn't like to make drastic changes to space policy; instead they follow a policy approach known as incrementalism, which basically means, "We'll take what we did last year and maybe throw a few more dollars at it." Otherwise, it takes a crisis mentality for the political class to take an issue seriously enough to make dramatic changes (consider Washington's reactions to the Great Depression or World War II compared to business-as-usual).

Next--and this should not surprise space advocates at all--space policy is inevitably tied to defense, economic, scientific, or even intelligence-gathering policy--because the same rocket that can send an astronaut to the Space Station or the Moon also can send a nuclear warhead somewhere on Earth or launch a spy satellite into orbit. So, again, space is not voted for on its own merits (exploration, technological development, settling the solar system) but to advance some other, more Earthly concern. Which means that space advocates cannot ignore Earthbound issues. There was a time, of course, where space was more or less outside the usual run of national political affairs, but that time was between May 25, 1961 and July 20, 1969. Aside from that "golden age" of space policy, where human beings heading for the moon constituted a critical national issue, space has become a rather routine and minor part of government expenditures, like farm subsidies or the Coast Guard. Attention to space can be gauged by how much money is spent on it: from a peak of five percent of the federal budget in 1966, NASA now constitutes 0.44% of the total.

One of the big lessons of this book, aside from understanding how incrementalism works in space policy, is that the U.S. space business has several different power centers or "voting blocs." These would include: the Executive Branch (and its appointees within NASA), the Legislative Branch, the civil service bureaucracy within the individual NASA centers, the Department of Defense, the intelligence-gathering community, the private sector, and interested advocates. Conceivably, you could now split the "private sector" bloc into traditional aerospace companies like Lockheed-Martin and Boeing and the "NewSpace" sector, comprising companies like SpaceX and Bigelow Aerospace. While the former organizations generally adhere to the system as it has existed, the latter companies are trying to transform U.S. space policy to be more freewheeling and less dependent upon government dollars. Perhaps the section of the book most germane to my day job is the altogether too brief discussion on where government works best vs. where the commercial sector does best. To wit: governments can best absorb large, dangerous, or complicated projects that have little to no immediate payoff, such as infrastructure (space stations, space ports), basic research into scientific principles or new technologies, and exploration of frontiers; the private sector works best when it is marketing proven products and services to a mass market.

Regardless of how many groups you divide things into, the book makes clear that for any policy to be implemented, it must meet the needs or advance the goals of several of them. Given that the system is set up to advance things slowly, any would-be world changers need to understand the behaviors and needs of the various stakeholders in your policy and how they might respond. If you push for a policy that only benefits one group, the others will fight back against the change.

I also appreciated the book's chapter on international space policy, which came in handy as I was attending the Global Space Exploration Conference this past month. While space exploration is undoubtedly a mechanism for advancing technology in a nation, not every nation in the world advances at the same pace--and there times when the U.S. does not want other nations getting ahead of it technologically. This is why we end up with Europe as a junior partner on some programs (human spaceflight), a fully-fledged equal or lead on others (science missions), and a competitor on others (commercial satellite launches). This is also a reason why export control laws are so challenging. You might decry such attitudes as dangerously short-sighted or parochial, or you might regard them as cautiously prudent. In any case, with many more spacefaring nations in the mix than ever before, it is no wonder that international space activities have become so difficult to sort out and execute. The fact that we got the International Space Station built at all is something of a minor miracle in diplomatic and technical circles.

The bottom line is that if you are interested in space policy, how it works, and how you might make things (a little) better, Space Politics and Policy is well worth reading. As national and commercial activities in space become ever more advanced and complex, it is well worth considering that the policy environment will become equally as complex. It's not as simple as the President getting up and giving a speech anymore. The calculus of policy is as difficult as rocket science, with the added challenge of new variables being added every now and then. Something to think about the next time you wish we were doing more in space.

Book Review: Going Interstellar

It's a tough market for trying to "sell space" right now. Budgets are tight for space agencies worldwide, and there's no telling how long it will take for some of our more ambitious missions to the moon, Mars, or an asteroid to come to pass. So it might seem a little outlandish to be talking about missions out of the solar system--to other stars, no less!--but that is the exact point of Going Interstellar, a new anthology of articles and short stories about interstellar travel using current technologies.



The editors (Les Johnson and Jack McDevitt) and writers of this book have decided to throw caution to the wind, daring to talk about how human missions beyond our solar system might unfold. The technical articles in the book are brisk and light on equations or technobabble. In addition to Johnson, who's written extensively about solar sails and other high-tech propulsion systems, Dr. Greg Matloff has added articles on fusion and antimatter starships. They make it clear that the systems needed to span the incredible distances between stars are all technologically feasible, and none of them require "warp drive" or violations of known physics. Of course it should be pointed out that "feasible" is a long way from "doable right now." For instance, the ability to generate every Star Trek fan's favorite, antimatter, would take years. The energy output would be akin to half the world's total current production and would require special facilities out near Mercury's orbit. Hydrogen fusion, another favorite of science fiction writers, is also elusive, but we're at least working on it. "The rest," as physicists might say, "is just engineering."

The stories in this book are quite engaging. In fact, I finished this book over the course of three days. With stories by Ben Bova, Jack McDevitt, Louise Marley, Michael Bishop, Sarah A. Hoyt, and Mike Resnick, Going Interstellar looks at adventures beyond the solar system from a variety of unique perspectives, including an aging astrophysicist, a technologist in an interstellar feudal society, an artificial intelligence program, a teenager, and the next Dalai Lama. Interstellar travel is a bit like other frontiers for writers where there is little known about the place or the experience of getting there. It allows them to impose their own dreams and obsessions on a blank slate, much like Sir Thomas More place his Utopia in America. Intelligent machines? A reborn Tibetan culture? Why not?

What I liked about this book, beyond the brisk pace of the writing by multiple authors, was its willingness to touch on something that sometimes is sorely lacking: technological optimism without "magic." As I noted above, there is no faster-than-light-speed travel, no instantaneous travel between stars. This is a look at what really ambitious human spaceflight could look like using tools and machines accessible to us today, and the stories are informed by emotion, imagination, and technical know-how. In short, it's everything you'd like hard science fiction to be, and it's a pleasure to read.

Book Review: Fallen Astronauts

Every once in awhile I read a book that covers aspects of the space program that I hadn't known before. Such is the case with Fallen Astronauts, a book cowritten by Colin Burgess, Bert Vis, and a Facebook space friend of mine, Kate Doolan. The subtitle of this book, Heroes Who Died Reaching for the Moon, conveys the topic well: this is a series of stories about American (and Russian) astronauts who died during the race to the moon but never made it there.



Primarily this is the story of Americans who died prior to Apollo's eventual triumphs. Their names are mostly unknown outside of the space community--Gus Grissom, Ed White, Roger Chaffee, Ted Freeman, C.C. Williams, Charlie Bassett, Elliot See, and Ed Givens--but most of them can be read on the Astronaut Memorial wall at Kennedy Space Center.

A few patterns begin to emerge in reading these men's biographies: white males born 1925-1935, interested in engineering or aviation from an early age, driven to attend one of the nation's military academies (West Point or Annapolis), very smart, very patriotic. Like most of America's astronauts, they were and are among the best of our best--intelligent, physically fit (Ed White tried out for America's Olympic team), and possessed of the maturity, professionalism, and fearlessness required to fly into space when our nation's space program was still new and highly dangerous. Space exploration is still highly dangerous and subject to accidents (the last seven astronaut names added to the memorial wall were added in 2003), and our astronauts continue to be the same types of overachievers as the men portrayed in this book.

The Soviet space program, much more secretive, still had its share of best-and-brightest space heroes, also drawn from their air forces. A single chapter of this brief book (254 pages of text) discusses cosmonauts who died on the other side of the Cold War space race. Even after the fall of the USSR, Russia remains protective and quiet about the failures of their program, and some secrets might never be known. However, the courage of their astronauts was no less than ours, and like ours they faced the very real possibility of death in space--as some of them did. Some of their names, at least those that were known to the West in 1971, were included on a plaque mission commander Dave Scott left on the moon during Apollo 15.

A few things struck me about this book, in addition to the striking biographies of the astronauts. First, given that the book was written by three non-Americans (two Australians and a Dutchman), I was surprised by the great seriousness, sympathy, and respect the authors showed toward their subject. This approach was gratifying, as it could have gone very easily into maudlin sentimentalism (they come close) or outraged anger (the closest they come is making a plea for Ed Givens to be included on the Astronaut Wall). For the most part, though, they give us just the facts. Also, the authors did their homework, seeking out sources beyond the typical technical briefings or NASA press releases, going so far as to solicit letters from family members and peers of the astronauts to get a sense of the astronauts as men. The letters are quite affecting. Lastly, the quality of the writing is simply excellent.

If I have any criticism of the book--and it's a minor one--it is that when you read the individual chapters, you can tell they were clearly written by separate authors as there is some repeated content in each of them that could have been eliminated. Because of that, the book reads like a series of separate essays rather than a unified work. However, the authors all manage to write in a similar style and convey the same general themes and sentiments.

And what are those sentiments?

A few days ago, as part of my day job, I was asked to review a speech astronomer Neil DeGrasse Tyson gave at the National Space Symposium. He was talking about the philosophy of our nation's space program, and he compared it to the sort of exploration cave men first did: "Not all of us leave the cave. Not everyone wants to, and that's okay. Not everyone who leaves the cave comes back. But we erect statues to those who do because they are heroes." Amen.

Book Review: The Shield of Time

Poul Anderson's books are always a treat for me, and The Shield of Time was no exception. A novel-length set of three related stories about Anderson's Time Patrol, Shield covers the further adventures of Manse Everard, a "time cop" responsible for maintaining Earth's history in such a way that it is kept intact for the Danellians, super-beings from Earth's distant future. 

The Time Patrol stories are a thinking person's action stories, combining occasional hand-to-hand combat scenes with time travel puzzles. The stories are puzzles because often what happens is that the Patrol learns of some sort of anomaly in the timeline--say, one of their team members discovers a group of people in a place and time they aren't "supposed" to be according to the Danellians' prescribed history. The way Everard and his fellow agents solve their problems is by learning and applying lessons in cultural history and mores.

In the case of The Shield of Time, the Patrol encounters a series of anomalies that cause everything "uptime" of the 12th century to disappear. Agents who arrive in the altered future find a world vastly changed from their own--changed buildings, languages and dialects altered, politics and societies shifted, and so forth. Everard, an American Midwesterner recruited by the Patrol in 1954, is an "Unattached" Agent, allowed to work in multiple historical places and times. He and an American woman recruited out of 1987 Southern California lead the effort to restore the normal flow of time. This requires some detective work to understand how history went "wrong," as well as several back-and-forth missions and a bit of derring-do, which move along briskly.

The appeals of Anderson's writing are his ways with describing working technology, his lively portrayals of lifeways in various places and times, and his attitudes of people living a life of free thought and adventurous action. I myself would not qualify for Anderson's "patrol," lacking military experience or a love for the outdoors. Of course the Patrol has technologies that allow its agents to survive some of the dangers of ancient times, including food-borne illnesses and sexual-transmitted diseases, as well as memory-imprinting of languages and maps of ancient cities. In such ways, people from the future can move through history with some reasonable authority or realism.

The Shield of Time's three novellas are not the best of the Time Patrol stories--I highly recommend the set of stories collected as The Time Patrol--but both books are entertaining.

And since I'm here, if you're interested in buying any of the books I've reviewed (do a search for "book review"), please click on one of the boxes and purchase them from Amazon. Theoretically, I'd get a piece of the action. Just an ask, not a demand. Trust me, I don't depend on these reviews to pay my grocery bills...but the purchases are appreciated.

Book Review: After America: Get Ready for Armageddon

I've done my level best to avoid watching the Republican presidential debates, mostly because it's more than one year until the election, and because I don't believe my life as an American should be so politicized that I need to pay attention to an election more than a year away. But I do still read the news, and I do listen to the radio. And yes, I listen to talk radio. That includes Rush Limbaugh and his occaional stand-ins when he takes a day off. One of them--perhaps the smartest and most entertaining of the lot--is Mark Steyn. Steyn has written a couple of books now, and I've read America Alone and now, After America. While Steyn has a distinctive edge to him, he is undoubtedly a keen observer of the American scene, and his opinions are not mere boosterism or hype (as opposed to, say, Sean Hannity or Glenn Beck).

So what does Mr. Steyn have to say, in his snarky and urbane sort of way? After 349 pages of often-painful reading, there's no way around it: he believes this nation is in terrible trouble. This book reads rather like a conservative's jeremiad for the United States. A jeremiad, for those of you unfamiliar with the term, is taken after the prophet Jeremiah, whose book in the Bible is a long recitation of the sins of the nation of Israel and what evils will befall them unless they mend their sinful ways. Well, Israel did not reform, and all that Jeremiah foretold came to pass, which was a bit of a painful "I told you so." Which might explain why jeremiads are not particularly popular.

And this was a hard read. Steyn goes after everything from political correctness to government overspending to our nation's cultural rot, and then projects forward to the implications of our current actions. The implications are not pretty, nor will some folks who hold with our current culture or set of behavior accept them, but they are reasonable. I was about 35 pages into this book, and Steyn had me convinced that we were screwed, and I thought, "My God, what more could he find to say?" The answer was: quite a lot.

He makes comparisons between present-day America and ancient Athens, Rome, Jerusalem, and more recent Imperial Britain, showing how a failure in one place/time/nation could be repeated here. One thing he does do, however, is remind his readers of the virtues that were to be found in each of those civilizations. For instance, the more socially sensitive of our time might deride the British Empire as some sort of heartless, racist enterprise, but overlook the efforts it made to spread Western notions of law, justice, and equality under the law around the world, or how it was the primary force behind eliminating slavery and piracy around the world. Steyn also notes how America, at its height of influence in 1950, held most of the financial and military cards in the world, and yet held no interest in acquiring territory or becoming some sort of dominating hegemon--we were trying to strengthen our allies so they could stand up for themselves.

That said, for the most part, Steyn's book is terribly depressing to read. I doubt I will do so again, unless it is to focus on its epilogue, "The Hope of Audacity" (a deliberate flip of President Obama's book title, The Audacity of Hope), which offers the only chunks of optimism in an otherwise pessimistic book. I suppose, as with Jeremiah, Steyn's point is to scare his readers into realizing the seriousness of their situation and to act on the fear of what might be in order to stop it. Perhaps Steyn succeeds too well. The picture of the future he paints is not a pretty one, and seems all but inevitable if you accept his premises. If we're facing existential problems in this nation, what, then, can one person do? I'm not certain that a call to reinvigorate America's founding principles is sufficient to overcome all the problems Steyn lays before us. However, the alternative is to do nothing, and I think the Tea Party and (yes, I'll say it) the "Occupy" movements are signs that America is not willing to give up it essential nature without a fight.

You might read Steyn's book and get depressed. You might read it and get righteously angry. You might read it and think that the man is a damned fool. However, I am convinced that if you do read it, you will come away from it wanting to take action. And if enough individuals read it and do take action, however chaotic or contradictory, I think that would satisfy the author.

This I Believe

This essay is my response to This I Believe, a print compilation of a radio series started by Edward R. Murrow in the 1950s and revived by National Public Radio. The series challenges people—of high stature or none—to speak for three minutes on the philosophy that guides their lives. The series includes statements by folks like Robert A. Heinlein, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Jackie Robinson as well as more modern voices like Newt Gingrich, John McCain, and Colin Powell. The essays range from profound to smile-provoking (how can you not like a statement that begins “You cannot have enough barbeque”?).  I don’t believe anyone’s life will be changed by these essays, but they might at least inspire some thought in readers about what philosophy they use to get through the day. Here’s mine.

***

Try to Be a Good Man

If I’ve had anything drilled into my head by my family, it’s the notion of being a good man. They probably never used those words, but they meant that behind every lecture, every piece of advice (solicited or otherwise), and every gift they ever gave me.

As an adult child of divorce now in my 40s, I lived most of my life without Dad in the house. This is not a rebuke to my parents; I am simply stating a fact. What that meant to a child of the “latch-key” generation was that I was the man of the house. It also meant, when it came to figuring out who and how to be, I was pretty much on my own. So like anyone given an assignment with few parameters and lots of room for error, I winged it. I noted what sort of behaviors were admired by other family members and tried to internalize those models.

I’ve had to learn, usually through screwing up, how to do not just the right thing, but the good thing, or the right thing done well. How should I put this? It is not a matter of just doing your job right or wrong. When I was in grad school for technical writing, we read excerpts of technical manuals from Nazi machines designed specifically to kill large numbers of people. One could do that job “right” but still be flat-out wrong. So being a good man also means having knowledge of good and evil, having a conscience. These I absorbed from church, but also from my experiences of living in and observing the world.

I’ve been called an idealist and a perfectionist by peers and managers and people who have worked for me. That doesn’t quite explain who I am. The goal for me hasn’t been to be perfect. I’ve had the recognition early on, and every day since then, that I will always be imperfect. So my goal has always been, “Get better!”

It means not just knowing the right thing to say, but when to say it.

It means not just knowing the right thing to do, but doing it.

It means doing the right things in ways that are unobtrusive, humble, and polite. I do good for the good of my soul, not because I’m interested in looking better than someone else.

I do not always get these things right, and I lecture myself when I know I could have done better. But every day is a new opportunity to try again. Trying to be a good man filters into everything else you do, so it’s a good place to begin. It’s where I began to think like an adult. And sometimes, even if you don’t hit the mark, others appreciate the effort.

Book Review: The Stranger

I became aware of Albert Camus through Jerry Pournelle, who had one of his characters read Camus' The Plague as a demonstration of what duty meant. And that was a truly excellent, soulful book.



On the heels of that book, I'd purchased the only other Camus book I could find on the shelves, The Stranger.



I'd started the book years ago, gotten stuck, and left it on the shelf for all that time. I decided to soldier on and read the whole thing this time. Fortunately, the book wasn't too long--122 pages or so--but that might be the only virtue I could find in it.

I am probably suffering from a couple of disconnects with this book. For one, it's a translation from the French, and translations always suffer in some way. Perhaps I was missing the author's intent simply because expressions or subtleties of humor or emotion get lost on the way from France to America. Another disconnect was Camus' philosophy, which is one of existentialism, which as I understand it is one where there is no God and no ultimate point to human existence, leaving the individual to make up his or her own purpose. I figured I could handle that: I've had moments like that in my past as well. Plus, I'd liked The Plague. What was there to fear?

It turns out there was nothing to "fear" from this book. It didn't challenge any of my beliefs in any serious way, nor did it convey its own beliefs very well. The problem stems from the protagonist of the book, the narrator who is identified only as Mersault. The man is a disconnected cypher, lacking much in the way of inner or outer life or sentiment. The book opens when the man is informed that his mother has died in a nursing home of some sort, and his reaction is utterly devoid of emotion. Mersault is at least aware that his reactions baffle others, who try to be considerate of his feelings, where he doesn't have any feelings worth considering.

A chapter or two is spent going through the funeral arrangementments for his mother (which is where I got "stuck" reading last time). The reader is left not to care about them, if only because one finds it hard to care much about the narrator or his method of describing them. Following the funeral, Mersault returns home and describes a number of his neighbors or coworkers, and again his interactions are detached, distant. While the narrator/author makes some mild efforts to describe others in amusing or absurd terms, nothing he said captured my attention or imagination for any great stretch. One neighbor has a love-hate relationship with his ugly dog. Mersault starts to have an affair with a lady in his office (he is a minor clerk in Algiers). Another neighbor fights with his girlfriend and finally convinces Mersault to write a letter on his behalf to get her goat and lure her into a situation where the neighbor (Raymond) can have one last opportunity to really hurt her. It is this situation with Raymond that ultimately leads Mersault getting into a fight with the brother of Raymond's former girlfriend--an Arab--and then murdering him. The first half of the book closes with Mersault going to prison to await trial. The second half of the book is a travelogue of sorts through Mersault's continuing disconnected thoughts while in prison and then while on trial.

I kept waiting for something to happen, some insight to open up for me, some emotion to grab me, some moment to happen where I felt sympathy for Mersault, some point to come out of all this, and it just never happened. Perhaps I lack the sophistication to understand French sensibilities, or I missed the "absurdity" the back cover blurb assured me was there, or perhaps I'm just too stupid to understand the existentialist point Camus was trying to make. Whatever the situation, I just didn't get or particularly like this book. Which is a shame, because I did like the first one I read by this author.

The best author of European absurdism I've ever read is Kafka, whose works I still have yet to complete, though I have those on the shelf as well. That's approximately the tone Camus sets in this book, but the absurdity of Kafka is more obvious, more exaggerated. Perhaps I'll take him on next. Perhaps I need someone to explain The Stranger to me. Camus' work did not do that for me, which is frustrating and disappointing for a man whose works won him the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Book Review: Doc

One of my favorite writers, hands down, is Mary Doria Russell, who is, like me, a native of Lombard, Illinois. The first book of hers I read, The Sparrow, was a work of science fiction and was startling in its characterization and sheer literary brilliance. What startled me most, I suppose, was that the book moved me, something that doesn't happen very often, as I am a very detached reader. Her subsequent books, Children of God, A Thread of Grace, and Dreamers of the Day, were each a treat as well. Russell's latest work, a biographical novel about John Henry Holliday, better known as the dentist who fought alongside Wyatt Earp and his brothers at the O.K. Corral in Tombstone, Arizona. As with other books by Ms. Russell, I breezed through this book in a couple of sittings. The reason for this rapid read was not that I was speed-reading but simply because she's that good and the story is that absorbing.




I suppose most people of my generation know of Doc Holliday and the Earps through the 1990s movies Tombstone and Wyatt Earp. The two actors who portrayed Holliday in these films were Dennis Quaid and Val Kilmer, both of whom took the time to get the Georgia aristocrat's accent right. I'm more familiar with Kilmer's interpretation of the man, as Tombstone is just a more entertaining movie. Kilmer portrays Holliday as a thrill-seeking, cynical, drunken gunslinger and criminal. The most memorable lines among many Kilmer utters as Holliday are "I'm your huckleberry" and "I have not yet begun to defile myself." Quaid's portrayal is hazier to me (It's really hard to watch a Kevin Costner film, let alone one that lasts for three hours), but he does different things with the role, portraying Holliday as more of a fallen aristocrat than an out-and-out bad man. Quaid is more of a professional card sharp. One of his first lines is "Make sure you take good care of your teeth, son." Holliday was, after all, a doctor of dental surgery.
The gunfight at the O.K. Corral and the events leading up to it have been portrayed in several other films (including one starring Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas). Ms. Russell does not portray this fight, except by flash-forward or foreshadowing. Doc concerns Holliday's early life over a couple of chapters before focusing primarily upon his time in Dodge City, Kansas.

I like what Russell does here. By covering a generally unknown part of Holliday's life, we get a different look at the character. This is actually a happier time for him, as he comes to a place where he can practice his professional craft and had yet to become notorious as a participant in an infamous gunfight. His consumption--tuberculosis, as it is known now--was less painful, at least for most of the book, which occurs in 1878. What Russell gives the reader is the story of, yes, a fallen Georgia aristocrat, but one more known for his quick tongue than his quick draw. He was educated well for the time, knowing French, Latin, and Greek. He played piano with proficiency and had a Southern gentleman's touchiness about matters of honor and propriety. He is portrayed as a man of great insight and sensitivity, which could have been born from any number of reasons. But one thing Russell makes clear is that the man was not a cold-blooded killer.

And yet despite all this, he became caught up in the wild, roustabout life of a Western cattle town, dealing faro, living with a prostitute, and carrying a gun in a town where carrying guns was illegal.

Russell’s marvelous at characterization because she depicts the good and bad in people in all their complexity. Sometimes she does not even bother trying to explain how both can exist in the same person. But what she does with almost every character upon which she turns her literary attention is something that is marvelous: she grants each one their own moment of hope or grace. That is what touched me about her first book, The Sparrow. Whatever bad things had happened to him, no matter his understandings or errors, he was privileged to have a moment of hope about his existence. Holliday, too, has such a moment, and it is wonderful to behold. Again, for reasons that elude me, Doc had the ability to move me. Impressive.

And here’s the part that always impresses me about Ms. Russell’s writing: the ease with which the reader can absorb it from the page. I engaged in a little correspondence after reading one of her books expressing my appreciation and thanks. That sort of smooth, effortless-to-the-reader experience isn’t too complicated to figure out: “You just need 50 or so drafts,” she wrote, or words to that effect. That is craftsmanship of a high order. And the narrative voice for Doc is unique as well. As with many of her stories, she writes in a variant of third-person-unlimited narrative voice, in that she does not depict events strictly from Holliday’s point of view, but sometimes from a generalized collective voice of the people of the time. Take this passage describing winter in Kansas:

“The first sign of what you were in for? Just a shift in the wind. Right before Christmas, usually. Huge clouds the color of spent charcoal would pile up on the far horizon. Suddenly the temperature would drop like a rock, and the first blizzard of the season would roar across the plains and hit you like a damn train. Men would get caught outdoors—fixing a fence, maybe—no coat, just wearing what seemed sensible that morning when the sun was shining and it looked to be another pretty day. Happened so fast, you didn’t hardly know what to think.

That’s how it was the year John Riney took over a farm from a Dutch fella, out north of Dodge.”

I also like Russell’s proficient way of characterization through dialogue. As with the narration above, so too with her dialogue: she gets across the intent and flow of a character’s voice without resorting to bad attempts at “dialect.” What she will do occasionally is give the reader a flavor for how someone speaks. She also has a natural ear for the spoken word, even when she writes soliloquies, like this one that she puts into the mouth of Wyatt Earp:

“There can’t be one law for rich Texans and another law for broke Texans, and another law for Negroes, and another one for Chinamen, and squaws, and Irishmen, and whores, and another one for everybody else. I can’t parse it that way, Dog! I am not that smart! There’s got to be one law for everybody, or I can’t do this job.”

I made the mistake several years ago (during my brief correspondence with Ms. Russell) of questioning her affection for one of her characters--specifically, T. E. Lawrence, "Lawrence of Arabia," whom I saw, and still see, as an instigator of many of the West's problems in the Middle East. Not one of my more diplomatic moments, perhaps, but that takes away nothing from her mercury-quick writing or her believable and even likeable portrayal of the man. Live and learn.

I think what Russell did for me with this book was make these legendary figures of the American West more human, more real. And not just more real, but likeable, each with their own capacity for attaining some sort of peace, or grace, this side of the grave. You can get a sense of the author’s religious convictions (whatever they might be) in these moments, and Russell’s work abounds with them.

Read her work. Any of her work. You won’t be disappointed.