The Book of Evidence is an odd book that happened to fall into my hands. The cover said it had won some award or other so I decided to give it a shot. It tells the story of a formerly rich playboy type falling towards poverty and then killing a woman for no particular reason. It’s a brooding kind of book, perhaps a bit reminiscent of Crime and Punishment but without the same power.
The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language is not quite a book for the amateur linguist, but the unschooled can still get a lot out of it. There were places where the author lost me with too many vocabulary words, but the history of the study of language evolution was very interesting and I learned a lot about the players in the field and the current level of understanding.
Of course the book doesn’t tell you what the first spoken word was. There’s no way to know, since verbal communication doesn’t leave fossils, unfortunately. But you get an idea of how language may have started with gestures and certain canned sounds that grew to more individualized sounds over many generations. You also get an appreciation for how complicated our language is and how much we take it for granted. When you think about it, it’s a miracle (not to mean that I attribute it to a supreme being of some sort).
Perhaps most interesting is how much I learned about evolution in general. I’ve heard all the arguments about evolution being a theory, not proven, and I’ve heard the counter-arguments that evolution is thoroughly accepted by all scientists as a principle, only there are some specifics to work out. Although I doubt the author intended this, the weight of the evidence bolstering the theory of language evolution, which is not generally accepted, showed how ponderous the evidence in favor of evolution in general is. Language evolution necessarily starts from evolution as a foundation.
As a bonus, I now know who Noam Chomsky is and will be able to appreciate the endless references to him.
I was never a Harry Potter maniac but I’ve read and enjoyed the whole series. One of them got me through my first week of quitting smoking (and I heartily endorse them for that purpose).
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows was a fitting finale for the series. She really tied the ends together and gave plenty of opportunities for joyful tears. I particularly liked Neville Longbottom’s contribution to the ultimate showdown. My only complaint is that I’d have appreciated a longer “wrap-up” because I was sorry to see the characters go and wanted to relish their happiness a little longer. I’d also have liked more Harry/Ginny interaction because what little there was was so nicely done, but perhaps that’s the secret to a good romance.
Vaccine: The Controversial Story of Medicine’s Greatest Lifesaver is a dense book. I was interested in the recent controversies over the possible link between vaccines and autism and the recommendation for HPV vaccination in girls as young as twelve. Unfortunately, the book only lightly touches on the latter.
I learned more than I meant to about the history of vaccines, their successes and failures. I hadn’t realized there were so many missteps or that the history of vaccine went so far back. Many people, regarding the HPV vaccine, have made the point that it’s too new and we don’t yet know what the end result will be. After reading this book, I think it’s a very valid point. Vaccines can be contaminated, can give the patient the disease they were intended to prevent, and can have unforeseen side effects or long term effects. Although modern medicine has learned a lot from past incidents, it seems wise to not be in the first wave of people being vaccinated.
On the other hand, the link between autism and vaccine just isn’t there. Most strikingly, there are different camps of the anti-vaccine crusade making completely different, and sometimes contradictory, accusations. Those who were betting on mercury are being disproven as mercury got eliminated in the US back in 2000 (and hasn’t been present in England for quite some time) without reducing autism levels. Of course there are other theories.
The book is generally written to a lay person’s level of understanding but occasionally takes a more technical turn. It was heavy at times but worth reading. One of the most important points the book makes, over and over, is that vaccination is more for the good of the community, which accrues a significantly lower risk, than for the good of the individual, who incurs a slightly higher risk.
Why do I like reading true stories about children with mental or emotional handicaps? I don’t know, but usually I do. Schuyler’s Monster: A Father’s Journey with His Wordless Daughter was somehwat of an exception. Frankly, I didn’t think much of Schuyler’s Father. Although his devotion to his daughter is touching and his writing style is highly readable, he’s kind of a jerk and that really comes across.
Schuyler’s handicap is an unusual brain disorder that leaves her mute though, in her case at least, high functioning in other ways. She seems like a pleasant social girl and I hope we’ll hear something from her own pen somewhere down the road. It’s too early to tell how well she’ll learn to communicate using alternate devices but there’s reason for hope. And it’s great her father advocates for her so strongly. One just wishes he was perhaps not such a jackass about it.
Billed on the cover and on Amazon as a mystery, Case Histories is both more and less. As a mystery, it’s transparent, but I doubt the author intended it to be a whodunnit. No, it’s more of a series of interrelated character sketches in a crime-based framework. The characters have all been scarred by past tragedies and are now coming together through a series of unlikely coincidences to heal some of those wounds.
In no way is this a realistic book, but it is an entertaining one. I enjoyed the characters but could have done with a little less plot (attempts on the detective’s life are my least-favorite crime-series cliche). The book wraps up a little too neatly at the end but since you’ve come to care for the characters, it’s nice to see them happily settled.
Transparent: Love, Family, and Living the T with Transgender Teenagers is the memoir of a lesbian who gets involved with transgendered teenagers, mostly male-to-female. This isn’t a subject I can claim to know anything about, but it’s an interesting one. I learned a lot about the challenges these kids face and you certainly do get a sense for how strongly some of them feel the disconnect between their physical and mental genders. It’s curious how some people feel like they’ve been born the wrong gender while other people simply feel non-stereotypical. For instance, I have many stereotypically male characteristics, habits, and interests, but I’ve never doubted my identity as a woman.
Cris is more patient with the kid she semi-adopts than I would be. Gender issues aside, these kids have a lot of other problems, so kudos to her and her partner for taking on such a troubled teen and sticking with her.
Blah blah blah. We know I don’t like Koontz anymore. What we don’t know is why I keep reading him. I guess I’m just so disappointed. I don’t think there’s ever been an author I liked so much whose later work turned me off so bad. I’m finding these newer novels nearly unreadable due to choppy paragraphs combined with pointless purple prose and characters we’re told about rather than learn about.
The Taking also suffers from the worst case of deus ex machina I’ve ever witnessed. The machina literally turns out to be deus. You’re reading along about 15 pages from the end thinking there must be four or five volumes to go and then bam! All better. Never mind. It might as well be Pam waking up with Bobby in the shower.
OK, I swear. No more new Koontz books ever. If I get in a Koontz mood I’ll re-read something from his glorious past.
Some purple prose snippets:
“The certainty of purpose that characterized her approach to life seemed, however, to be less firm than usual, turning soggy under the influence of the deluge, so quickly washed thin and bleached of its former intensity.”
“Like cloud-fluttered moonglow in a dream rich with psychosis, orange firelight rippled across the rain-soaked lawn, over the loathsome bulbous fungus that now seemed obscene in its slimy tumescence.”
I read Accidents in North American Mountaineering every year because it comes free as part of being an AAC member. As the years go on, there are fewer and fewer surprises. Truth is, accidents are caused by the obvious things (exceeding abilities, under-protecting) and mitigated by the obvious things (wearing a helmet, tying stopper knots). There are no new ways to die.
But every year something stands out, if not for novelty then for tragedy, or perhaps pure presentation. This year there were two such incidents for me. One was the death of a well-known climber at Wind Rivers, Wyoming caused by a tourist throwing a rock off the top of a formation. A seemingly random, horribly preventable, tragedy. I was particularly sensitive to this accident when it occurred because Steve was on his way out to the Wind Rivers the very next day. The climbing community was naturally very angry at the tourist, who ultimately wasn’t charged, but who among us has never thrown something off the top of something? It’s like skipping stones on a pond: a natural human impulse. I feel for both the tourist and the climber’s family. There were no winners here.
The other incident was more memorable for its retelling. Sometimes climbers send their own accident reports into ANAM and this was one of those. Told in the first person, they have a greater immediacy, and this particular incident was recounted without foreshadowing. When one of the climbers dies before the tale is done, the reader is as surprised as the narrator must have been at the time. This was a prime example of how small mistakes and bad luck can accumulate into an unexpectedly fatal epic. I expect we’ve all been there, except with a few fewer mistakes, or a bit less bad luck, and so we live and have a good story to tell and never know how close we came.
Read the reviews on Angels & Demons on Amazon and they all agree regardless of how many stars they assigned: It’s an exciting page turner with little redeeming value. This is not a book that makes you go “hmmmm” but it’s a book that makes you keep reading. Almost 500 pages and I think I read it in three days, so there you go.
As far as plausibility, it seemed no better or worse than The DaVinici Code. I’m not a religious person so I’m able to look at the religious details the same way I would if they were medical details. As long as I can follow the point, I’ll suspend disbelief with regard to the accuracy.
I did guess “whodunnit” almost immediately but Dan Brown got me mixed up enough to doubt myself. That’s really the leading characteristic of a good mystery writer. The solution has got to plausibly match the clues presented but can’t be obvious. One good way to do that is to arouse suspicion early and then divert it. Once the reader has considered and dismissed a suspect, the author is freer to play with his mind.