Book Review: Children of Time

Children of Time

Written by Adrian Tchaikovsky in 2015

Synopsis: Children of Time tells two stories on a collision course, each spanning thousands of years and beginning long after Earth civilization destroyed itself. One follows the last of humanity, who have deciphered enough of their predecessors’ technology to launch an aging starship and now drift in and out of cryostasis as they search for a new home. The other follows a derailed terraforming experiment on a distant planet and generation after generation of the sentient life and civilization that has developed there.

Review: Befitting the title, the way Tchaikovsky plays with time in this book is masterful. The main human character we follow is woken for a couple days at a time between centuries-long sleeps, and the author beautifully captures his growing emotional ache and vertigo as he loses external markers of time, and his strained relationship with a confidant who is kept awake longer and steadily grows older than him. Planet-side, where everyone is living normal-length lives, each part of the book picks up with a new generation. While individual characters thus only survive for a few chapters, the next part gives three new characters the same names, treating them as continuations of the same archetypes—the main characters are each generation’s leader, its sharpest scientist, and its most talented second-class citizen. These unique time-jumps were fun to follow, and switching between the two stories at pivotal moments meant I was constantly kept in suspense.

Everything about life on the new planet Tchaikovsky invented is fascinating. The individual character and societal developments also feel authentic, meaning this novel might rope you in even if you’ve been burned too many times by hard sci-fi historical exposition. The human group too is given time to change. By the time these two civilizations began their inevitable conflict, far later in the book than I’d expected, I didn’t know who would win, nor who I wanted to.

Strengths:

• Dr. Avrana Kern. Both sets of characters are at the mercy of an entity whose dialogue is haunting.

• The commander isn’t a flat character hellbent on the triumph of industry or power for its own sake!

Weaknesses:

• After a certain point, I couldn’t understand or fully picture the ant computers. Admittedly, I have a similar upper limit on comprehending our computers.

• I’m sick of the epilogue trope where a child descended from and named after the main characters marvels at how the new society has worked itself out.

Rating: 18/20 orbits of the Messenger

Ideal Setting: Read this somewhere with minimal chance of encountering a spider.

Series Review: The Kyoshi Novels (Chronicles of the Avatar)

“The Rise of Kyoshi” and “The Shadow of Kyoshi”
Written by F.C. Yee in 2019

Synopsis: This “The Last Airbender” prequel duology* follows Aang’s past life, the Earth avatar Kyoshi, who learns of her identity much later than intended and finds herself in a reckless quest for survival and revenge.

Review: ATLA co-creator Michael Dante DiMartino has a foreword talking about his apprehensions with any spinoff and his personal requirements for an Avatar story. He signed off on Yee’s novels, and it quickly becomes clear why. The series drops readers back into a beloved world, complete with familiar bits like the hybrid animal species and innovative benders with unique signature moves, as well as brilliant scripting of minor characters to develop the main cast’s skills and worldviews as they work up to fighting the true antagonists. Yee’s writing also respectfully handles nostalgia, deprioritizing explicit references to the original series in favor of worldbuilding opportunities. In one memorable dialogue, we learn that Zuko’s obsession with honor in the show is a symptom of his culture as a whole. Kyoshi’s companion Rangi nearly says something that would give away Kyoshi’s identity in a dangerous situation, only to be cut off by someone fed up with hearing Fire nationals talk about their honor.

On the whole, Yee leans into worldbuilding in the places ATLA couldn’t. Plot points surrounding rival Fire Nation clans, a shrewd Earth minister, and ‘Fifth Nation’ pirates all flesh out the politics and culture of this world. This reflects the slightly older target audience of the series, and I was gripped by the dark turns and major twists in both books. Kyoshi’s coming into her own is radically different from Aang and Korra’s stories, and her legend is undoubtedly a worthwhile addition to the Avatar saga.

Strengths:

• We only meet one Airbender in each book, but they and their bison are wonderful.

• My long-standing question of “Can’t you use any element to make yourself fly?” has a satisfying answer.

• There are a dozen more entertaining moments and ideas I could list here.

Weaknesses: 

• Kyoshi’s closest companions don’t experience any development, and there is little to grasp at for any fans wanting more friend group antics.

Rating: 18/20 times Kyoshi is asked if she plays Pai Sho

Ideal Setting: Read this when it’s been too long since you tried moving the elements with your mind.

*The series is technically three books with a planned fourth, but the third begins an entirely new (well, older) story with Yangchen, and I was happy to stop here.

Book Review: Lies My Teacher Told Me

Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong
Written by James W. Loewen in 1995; 3rd edition released in 2018

Synopsis: History and sociology professor James Loewen critically examined twelve of the most popular American history textbooks. He found their content to be oversimplified and nationalistic to the point of being inaccurate (and boring!), failing to present history as an ongoing debate relevant for students today. Half of Lies gives a full, nuanced treatment to major periods in American history, while the rest of the book shows how implicit and explicit cultural agendas have distorted history textbooks and why educational reform has proven so difficult.

Review: I concur with other reviewers that every American citizen age 18 and above should read this book.

Loewen follows my Goldberg Gold Standard of Arguments: He gives a fair treatment of multiple perspectives, then doesn’t just explain why he believes others are wrong but also how they’ve come to hold those positions. Lies is not just revisionist history with a leftist agenda. It’s a plea by a concerned teacher who’s watched a generation of students make it to college stuffed with memorized facts about the War of 1812 and no understanding of Vietnam, students who aren’t even properly taught about America’s strengths despite being aggressively shielded from its hypocrisies.

There are some obvious culprits. Loewen has acted on his values, writing a more accurate Mississippi textbook rather than just calling out others’ flaws, and he places the example of his book being shut down by the state’s school boards within a nationwide pattern of officials and parents explicitly fighting to keep history bright and white. But Loewen doesn’t point fingers so much as splay his hands at systemic issues.  In incisive, documentary-like chapters, he gives sobering statistics on overworked teachers who themselves didn’t study history in college, blatant plagiarism and fact-checking failures by publishers trying to turn a profit, historians who lend their name to the covers of textbooks they neither wrote nor reviewed, and self-censorship from all parties out of an outdated fear of appearing Marxist. The resulting history education is a bland folk tale that leaves many students, myself included, baffled when we learn anything real about other cultures and our own.

The actual history Loewen presents is fascinating, backed in nearly every sentence by primary and secondary sources. I would’ve loved in high school to hear the full story of Squanto, the helpful Indian from the Thanksgiving story. Most textbooks just say he learned English from fishermen; Loewen charts his course being sold into slavery in Spain, escaping to England, convincing colonists to bring him home, and then prudently casting his lot with the Pilgrims after finding that his entire village had been wiped out by smallpox in his absence. If that makes anyone defensive about a beloved American tradition, it’s also worth noting Thanksgiving as we celebrate it today was spearheaded by Lincoln to boost patriotism during the Civil War, relatively recently for a holiday about our founding. 

Lies makes clear that the history of our history is deeply important and relevant to navigating today’s challenges. Here is a history textbook that fills in the gaps we didn’t know we had and that teaches readers to think critically about how we interpret imperfect historical evidence, as my high school textbook should have.

Strength/Weakness: If your interest is just in learning accurate history and less in discussing education and historiography, you can skip Chapters 1, 12, and 13 and still get a full book. 

Rating: 20/20 interventions in Latin America

Ideal Setting: Read this.

Book Review: I Contain Multitudes

 I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life
Written by Ed Yong in 2016

Synopsis: Science journalist Ed Yong explores the monumental role of bacteria in human life and our ecosystems. He walks through the history of microbial science and our changing attitudes toward our omnipresent tiny companions, meets with a balanced variety of scientists across disciplines, and offers an altered perspective of life on Earth, where plants and animals evolved in an environment already chock-full of microbes and our existence has always been completely intertwined with theirs.

Review: Yong is an insightful and entertaining science writer (How to Tackle a Giraffe), and I picked up this book ⅔ for broad faith that he had written this for good reason, and ⅓ for interest in the subject matter, cultivated by some fun research on how microbial infections might affect our personalities. And overall, Yong did not disappoint.

The author’s explanations are clear, leaning into analogies enough to get across an image or point and usually not leaning too much further into anthropomorphization or poetic waxing. His profiles of scientists create memorable characters and anchors to follow. And while the content I was initially excited about didn’t come up in the sections I read, I was fascinated by and moved to care about plenty of other bacterial qualities and applications. There is simply some really cool stuff bacteria do, and if you’re even one part per million a science enthusiast, or you sometimes wonder what people are on about when they say gut bacteria affect your health, this is worth checking out.

But I didn’t finish I Contain Multitudes. I can’t really pinpoint anything wrong that turned me off from reading further—no anecdotes stretched too long, no blind, probiotic fanaticism. It’s just that no amount of quality writing is going to keep me, and probably most of you, invested in microbes for 92,000 words. Coming in as a Yong fan instead of a bacteria fan, I just felt about halfway through the book that I was done. I expect to come back to the rest within a couple years when I need another science fix. 

I won’t go so far as to say that Yong was ill-equipped to transition from short articles to a full-length book—though I do wish he had given the chapters more concrete names so that readers could jump to what excites them most. But since this book isn’t easy to read all at once, I hope that next time an author like him will consider making a website or series of articles as a better vessel to transmit their information.

Strengths:

• Coming off my last review—this book did a much better job of keeping the metaphors and puns in moderation.

Weaknesses:

• Yong wisely addresses that much of the research that has made headlines needs to be replicated or may have alternate explanations. Given that, some sections needed a longer disclaimer about whether a particular idea was well-established or still hotly debated.

Rating: 16/20 microballs*

Ideal Setting: Read this somewhere that will not cause you to be frightened when the book informs you that you are not alone.**

*“I want to call them bioballs,” he adds. “Or maybe microballs.” I tell him that he cannot call them microballs. He sniggers, proving my point.”

**Just a personal thought here: “You’re not alone” is either the scariest or most reassuring thing you can hear, depending on context.

Book Review: Recapture the Rapture

Recapture the Rapture: Rethinking God, Sex, and Death in a World That’s Lost Its Mind
Written by Jamie Wheal in 2021

Synopsis: Wheal argues that a lack of Meaning in our society today, a crisis of faith in both religion and secular institutions, is leading to a rise in rapture ideologies—obsessive belief that the AI singularity, Mars colonies, or an apocalypse will change everything and it isn’t worth fixing our current world. In three parts: 1. Choose Your Own Apocalypse, 2. The Alchemist Cookbook, and 3. Ethical Cult Building, Wheal outlines the problem and its causes, surveys a variety of physiological tools like breath work and music that create mystical experiences, and outlines how we might build community rituals to rehabilitate our faith (recapture the rapture) and move humanity in a positive direction.

Review: Wheal’s writing felt similar to how I would’ve written this book, and I mean that in all the worst ways. Picture an amateur writer wanting to play with language, who’s also fascinated with science that he really wants to tell you about because it’ll save your life and the world. That’s me coming up for the tags for this blog in 11th grade, and that’s Jamie Wheal overstuffing a book with punchy metaphors and neologisms in a string of unrelated science anecdotes that tee up a revolution but lose all steam in the section of the book meant to offer concrete resources.

Here’s an example of Wheal’s language: “‘Buy the ticket, take the ride,’ as Hunter Thompson said. Millions of people are heeding that advice. It’s not surprising that with such inconsistent preparation and repeat visits to the cosmic carnival, some of those roller coasters go off the rails.”

End one chapter like this, and the ‘off the rails’ idiom is a fun button. Start and end every section of each chapter like this, and the reader starts to wonder when we’ll get to the point.

Here’s another: “Church, then, could become something else altogether. Self-organized synchronized consumption of prescription pharmaceuticals in a revelatory, celebratory environment. B.Y.O.E. Bring Your Own Entheogens. Brought to you by your local Groove and Reconciliation Committee.”

Again, each individual bit of language play is clever. But when it’s embedded in every sentence, the educational nonfiction you bought ends up clouded by poetry.

Unfortunately, Wheal takes his creative license far enough make me doubt the content. Recapture the Rapture contains a dozen charts, terms, and theoretical frameworks coined by the author, who is not a scientist himself. Notably, Wheal overlays his own four options for how we respond to a charismatic leader: Follow, Fuck, Fear, Fight, onto a two-axis framework for emotions developed by neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett (positive/negative and active/passive). Barrett’s chart has experimental backing, but we’re given no reason to believe she would accept Wheal’s additions, and connecting them gives a neuroscientific credibility to Wheal’s idea that I’m not sure is earned. There are a few other moments like this where Wheal glaringly oversteps his authority. One is his willingness to prescribe how society might administer psychedelic rituals, after only one anecdote and no experimental, cultural psychology research to back it up. And then there are his “Ten Suggestions,” a blend of moral/health/spiritual guidelines presented as ‘open-source’ alternatives to the Ten Commandments. Wheal graciously acknowledges that this list is not meant to be the last word and that we should “Take what’s helpful, leave the rest,” but the book’s concision and coherency would be better served by scrapping these generic recommendations and their flippant names.

As for the content underneath the stylistic layer: Wheal did his research, and he offers a sufficiently convincing argument of why we need to revolutionize meaning. The ingredients of “The Alchemist Cookbook” also all come with decades of science. However, Wheal has to run through a gauntlet of physiological research when each of the chapters in this section can be and has been made into its own entire book. Frankly, you’re much better off just listening to the podcast interviews that scholars like Barrett and Andrew Huberman have done to improve the relevant areas of your life than working from Wheal’s summaries of their findings. Furthermore, “Ethical Cult Building” was an overly ambitious undertaking. I respect the author for trying, but the individual therapeutic benefits of psychedelics don’t scale up so easily to revitalizing communities, most readers don’t have the leverage to just create new sacraments and deities for their neighbors to try out, and none of us who believe in your philosophy, Mr. Wheal, want to call ourselves Omegans.

Strengths:

• The breath chapter describes specific exercises and their benefits in a clear, actionable way.

• Wheal powerfully illustrates how interconnected the global environment has become, removing any safe “away” to escape to.

Weaknesses:

• The (double-checking my notes here… ah, yes…) BDSM vampires in NYC are never adequately explained.

• When Wheal turned his flowery language to two full chapters on sex, I had to skim them out of second-hand embarrassment.

Rating: 11/20 endocannabinoid system resets

Ideal Setting: Read this book before trying to convince your parents to trip on psychedelics with you.

Book Review: Fair Play

Fair Play: The Moral Dilemmas of Spying

Written by James M. Olson in 2006

The Raccoon: James M. Olson’s career as a case officer for the CIA led him to worry that too many vital moral decisions are left in the hands of individuals. In his book, Olson aims to open the discussion over whether the United States should establish rules of “fair play” and what actions are permissible in the game of espionage. Olson first tells his own story, then outlines historical arguments for and against spying, dating back to the Bible, then summarizes the US’ own changing policies and presidents’ outlooks on intelligence.

Following these introductions, the heart of the book presents fifty scenarios of moral dilemmas that the CIA has or could face in the near future. These scenarios range from more familiar issues, such as administering suicide pills, to deeply complex questions, including posing as another country’s intelligence service to recruit a potential informant who is anti-American, feeding an informant’s addiction to drugs or prostitutes, and using dolphins in suicide attacks against terrorists targeting US submarines. All of the stories use fictional details yet have historical precedent. After prompting the reader to consider his or her own answer to each proposed action, Olson has enlisted the help of other CIA employees, soldiers, professors, and students to offer their perspectives.

UNMASKED: I expected Fair Play to be a quick read. The book is not especially long, and its division into individual scenarios makes it easy to pick up for five minutes at a time, without needing to remember any people or facts for more than five pages. However, in trying to engage with the book as Olson suggests, examining my own feelings and logic toward each scenario, I ended up having to work through each page and wrestle with questions, contingencies, and exceptions that are still turning gears in the back of my mind.

The brilliance of Fair Play lies in how Olson steadily walks the reader through just how many variables are involved in a given question, showing rather than telling us that these decisions can never be black and white. For example, following the scenario of bribing an agent with prostitutes, Olson presents another similar case, with the small caveat that this time, the prostitutes are children. Likewise, readers who accept the use of a CIA case officer entering another country undercover as a journalist may not extend that understanding to recruiting a journalist for CIA operations.

For scenarios like recruiting a journalist, I did not initially appreciate the implications of the case officer being exposed. In these more subtly questionable chapters, Fair Play’s commentators prove invaluable, discussing in this case how thousands of civilian US journalists could be negatively affected. I often found that my answer would change two or three times over the course of a chapter due to the varying arguments presented by these other writers. One of the underlying themes of Fair Play is that moral decisions of this magnitude should not be left to one individual, and Olson’s choice to include dozens of other opinions in his explanations of intelligence operations reveals a true commitment to this idea.

Strengths:

• Olson includes extensive notes in a section entitled “Spying 101,” comprising one tenth of the entire book and explaining everything else I wanted to know about US intelligence agencies and particular operations.
• Even including the aforementioned scenarios that come in series, none of the chapters feel repetitive. Fair Play also employs different, relevant commentators for each scenario.

Weaknesses: Other than there being some hard questions to swallow, I cannot find anything wrong with this book.

Rating: 20/20 Romeo operations

Ideal Setting: Would it be morally acceptable to read a book revealing that the US lacks rules or guidelines to stop its representatives from using espionage tactics you would harshly condemn, and not act on it?

Book Review: Uprooted

Uprooted

Written by Naomi Novik in 2015

The Raccoon: Every ten years, the Dragon, an immortal (human) wizard, takes a girl from the valley to serve him. It is the price everyone pays for the Dragon’s protection against the Wood, an ever-expanding, malevolent forest whose power looms over the whole kingdom. When Agnieszka is unexpectedly chosen by the Dragon, she discovers her own aptitude for magic, and both the wizard and his new apprentice find themselves facing a war between two kingdoms, with the Wood pulling the strings on both sides and everyone’s lives at stake.

UNMASKED: It is near-impossible to write original fantasy today; every trope and trope subversion has been written to death. Uprooted nearly falls into the same trap with its predictable beginning, but Novik’s inspiration from Polish folk tales and the unique premise of the Wood lay the foundation for a rivetingly fresh world and plot.

Uprooted maintains a rapid pace from the first to the last page. While Novik never lets up on the action, she takes care to vary the type of tension in each chapter and have the characters’ decisions organically lead into new problems. Furthermore, every wizard in Uprooted uses magic differently, and this variety in spellcasting helps maintain the excitement, even in intimate conversations, and craft beautiful images in fiery battles. Ultimately, the novel is perfect for both long-time fans of fantasy and readers still trying to find the right shallow first step into the deep waters of the genre.

Strengths:

• “The guards were firing arrows at us. One tore through her cloak and hit her back. Another landed just beside me and stuck into the side of the boat, quivering. I snatched the feathers off the arrow-shaft and threw them up into the air above us. They remembered what they’d once been and turned into a cloud of half-birds that whirled and sang, covering us from view for a few moments.” Again, each feat of magic is resourceful and personal, making use of the environment and tone of its surrounding pages and the character’s values. The overall effect is that Novik’s descriptions of magic feel far more natural than any other spell-slinging scenes I have read.
• Agnieszka’s best friend is equally well-developed as a character and undergoes a parallel yet entirely different arc.

Weaknesses:

• Novik crosses the line from magic armor to plot armor a few times.
• It takes half the book for the reader to completely understand the political situation between the two kingdoms.

Rating: 18/20 corrupted cows

Ideal Setting: Do not read this while sitting under a tree.