Just about one month left and session and it won’t be over a single second too soon, I am so wiped!
In Books…
- The Scientist in the Crib: Sometimes I feel like I’m very literally watching my son learning before my very eyes, which makes me wish I’d been more interested in developmental psychology when I was getting my degree! This book, co-authored by three Ph.D. psychologists, was in part an attempt to remediate that. Gopnik, Meltzoff, and Kuhl review what was at the time (the book was published in 1999) the latest in research into childhood learning. The book is clearly meant for a popular rather than academic audience, with the authors breaking the science down to easily understood concepts and clearly aiming to empower a parent reader in trusting their instincts as their child’s first and most important teacher. They focus on how parents teach their children first and foremost about people, and then about things, and then about language. They also tie these types of learning back to their central theory, reflected in the title: children learn like scientists by devising and then testing theories that might explain the problems they are trying to solve. If one theory does not prove fruitful, both babies and scientists turn to the next one, with occasional large strides forward in understanding punctuating what is otherwise mostly steady, incremental gains. The team writes with clarity and humor, making for a largely pleasant reading experience. There are some things that didn’t quite work for me, though. The most significant is an extended riff comparing children to computers. It feels very of-the-moment for when the book was published (right around the turn of the century, when the pop culture atmosphere had a bit of a techno-futuristic bent) but it never really feels all that compelling because there are many, many more differences than there are similarities in how children process information and how computers do. It also starts to feel repetitive after a while despite being only about 200 pages long before endnotes. It wasn’t a bad book by any means, and this sort of book is hard to evaluate, but there’s a sense of wonder and curiosity that fuel the non-fiction science-type books that work best for me and that wasn’t really what was happening here. It’s fine but nothing more than fine.
- Prophet Song: It’s the near-future in Ireland when Eilish Stack opens the door to two policemen on her front stoop. They’re looking for her husband Larry, a leader in the national teachers union, which has been organizing rallies against the policies being instituted by the newly-elected authoritarian regime. Not too long afterwards, Larry disappears at one of those rallies, leaving research scientist Eilish alone to care for their four children (three in their teens, one new baby), be the sole breadwinner, and take care of her own father, whose memory issues are becoming increasingly troubling. The walls around society start to close, first in smaller ways (Larry is not the only opponent of the government who has vanished) and then in increasingly large ones. Seventeen year-old boys like her oldest son Mark are notified that they are subject to conscription. A rebellion movement materializes. Things that once seemed impossible become everyday events. Eilish spends far too long believing that a return to normal is with reach, as her sister in Canada begs her to get out and even arranges for someone to help her do so. How do you know when it’s time to leave? How do you abandon your loved ones to their fates, abandon the home you’ve never stopped hoping to see them return to? What do you take with you when you need to fit your whole life into a bag or two? Paul Lynch was open about being inspired by the Syrian refugee crisis in creating this story, which both works and doesn’t. The book can’t quite seem to decide whether it’s meant to be a parable or a work of narrative fiction. There’s little sense of setting (Ireland’s long history of resistance remains frustratingly unevoked) and little character development. Eilish is a bit like the proverbial frog in the pot of water that boils gradually, not able to fully grasp how hot things have gotten until it’s all but too late. The story needs her to be a sort of everywoman, so despite the fact that we spent a lot of time closely focused on her, she’s a bit of a cipher. As a reader who likes character-based books, this made it hard to really get drawn into the novel. Also making it hard to engage with the book were the stylistic choices Lynch made to both omit quotation marks (which I don’t usually find especially bothersome) as well as paragraph breaks. These two things combined made it feel like work to read. The general vibe doesn’t make it any easier: it’s bleak and just gets bleaker. Do I think this book has merit? Yes. But there was little to enjoy about reading it without interesting characters and a depressing plot. I wouldn’t recommend it.
- Fourth Wing: Violet Sorrengail loves books and is easily injured, so she and everyone else have always assumed that when she entered Basgiath War College she would join the scribes. Instead, her mother, a top-ranked general, has insisted that Violet join the dragon riders, the deadliest path to take as a part of mandatory military service in the country of Navarre. It’s not what she wants, but Violet swallows her fear and is determined to not leave her older sister Mira (a dragon rider herself) an only child after the death of their older brother Brennan. Violet has what is clearly meant to be but never named as Ehlos-Danlos syndrome, so the already significant physical challenge of the Riders Quadrant, where cadets are regularly tested against each other in sparring matches, is even more pronounced for her. Complicating matters is the presence of Xaden Riorson, whose father was killed by Violet’s mother after a failed rebellion. Violet is sure that Xaden wants to engineer her death, but he might as well get in line…plenty of people are interested in taking out the General’s daughter, and the riders are famous for attacking and killing their own in order to root out any weakness that might jeopardize them later in battle. Her lifelong friend Dain is a year ahead of her, but his idea of helping her is to plan to smuggle her out of the Riders altogether, and Violet doesn’t want that. She wants the chance to prove herself, to bond with a dragon of her own. It takes strength, determination, and cleverness, but she makes it through to the dragon selection ceremony known as the Threshing, where things develop in an entirely unexpected direction. So too do her feelings, towards both longtime crush Dain and Xaden, who she finds herself drawn in close proximity to. And the stakes soon get even higher than she could have ever imagined. So here is the thing. This book is objectively, not good. From a plot perspective, it is chock full of tropes and cliches. The parallels to both the Twilight series and Divergent are strong. The action is driven by cycle after cycle of “there is a serious, impossible-seeming threat in front of Violet, which she somehow manages to conquer, which leads her straight into another serious, impossible-seeming threat…”. Violet does fare the best from a character development perspective (she’s pleasingly sure of herself and firm about setting boundaries for a female main character in this kind of book), but she’s still pretty thinly-sketched. Virtually everyone else hails from stock character land, including characters who should be important like Mira and Xaden. The prose is never more than serviceable. And yet…I really enjoyed the experience of reading it. It has a propulsive energy, and Yarros has a deft sense of when to hurtle forward and when to take a couple beats to slow down before taking off again. I absolutely flew through it. The growing romantic tension between Violet and Xaden definitely helps in keeping the narrative engaging. She renders the training montages nearly as enjoyable on the page as they can be on the screen. For story beats that are often objectively pretty silly, she manages to treat them neither with self-important seriousness nor leaning into what could be campy, letting them just be fun instead. I have heard repeatedly that the second and third books are both worse than this one, which is already significantly flawed, so I can’t imagine continuing on in the series, but I did have a good time reading this one and recommend it for something requiring exactly zero intellectual engagement.
- The Coming of the Third Reich: There are a lot of simple explanations for how Nazism happened. It was the crushing reparation debts on Germany in the Treaty of Versailles that ended the Great War which left Germans impoverished and looking for a strong leader to change their fortunes. It was long-term European antisemitism finally boiling over. It was the shakiness of the Weimar Republic, its permissive cultural milieu antithetical to a fundamentally conservative German spirit. Hitler was a brilliant politician with an implicit understanding of how to sway the masses and oratorical skills that won him overwhelming public support. While there is a kernel of truth in all of these ideas behind how the Third Reich came to be, none of them is entirely representative of what happened. The first of Richard J. Evans’s three-part series on the Nazis, he focuses here on a full portrait of how Hitler came to power. He touches briefly on the First Reich, the Holy Roman Empire, before delving more in-depth into the Second Reich, the reign of Otto von Bismark, to trace the phenomenon of Nazism to its roots. This is a book that had been on my shelves for years, and I’d been scheduled to read for quite some time. That I happened to read it right now, with…everything that is happening, is pure coincidence. It was both an alarming and a strangely reassuring read. Evans chronicles the ambition of the von Bismark period, the belief it inculcated in the newly-united German people of their destiny as a worldwide power. Germany’s loss in the Great War came as a bitter surprise to most Germans, who believed the state-controlled media narrative that portrayed them as on the precipice of a victory that would achieve that destiny only to have it not only fail to come to fruition, but result in war debts that crushed life out of the economy and triggered a hyperinflation which left many destitute. That there had been some terrible internal betrayal seemed the only rational explanation, and in an environment in which Jewish people had long been viewed with suspicion and hostility, they became a natural target of speculation that they had played a role in this sudden, shocking loss of national face. The Great Depression’s economic turmoil only heightened the desperation within Germany’s borders, placing tremendous pressure on a political structure in which democracy was a very new organizing principle. The Russian Revolution triggered fears, particularly among the social classes which did still have some measure of fiscal stability, that similar movements would overturn the rules of the world as they understood it. Political parties lurched to the right in response. There was no long-term tradition of democracy, so faith in state institutions was weak and easily undermined. Paramilitary activity from both the right and left intensified, leading to street skirmishes which frightened ordinary citizens. Into this volatile cocktail came Adolf Hitler, whose so-called National Socialism had populist tendencies but a fundamentally right-wing, authoritarian bent. Despite his considerable skill as a speaker and Joseph Goebbels’s talent for propaganda messaging, the Nazis never did achieve a majority vote in a democratic election, depending on electoral strength in coalition with more established conservative parties to achieve the appointment of Hitler as Reich Chancellor, the platform from which he and his fellow Nazis destroyed what remained of Germany’s democracy. Are there parallels to the current political situation in the United States? Very much so. But there is also so much that is specific to the time and place and circumstances. Evans’s work is richly textured, sometimes veering towards density. It is honestly too detailed for a truly wide popular audience, but rewards close reading and real engagement. It doesn’t have much in the way of narrative momentum, but it’s not trying to tell a single story. It’s trying to paint a comprehensive portrait of a time and place with enough context for it all to make sense but not so much that the forest can’t be seen for the trees. It doesn’t always succeed on this front, there are quite a lot of trees, but I found it a very thorough portrait of a time I had only a relatively simplistic view of beforehand and I appreciate the experience of having read it.
- Things Left Unsaid: Shirin, in her mid-20s, is living what she thought was her dream. She’s escaped her hometown of Kingston upon Hull, gone to university, and gotten a job in the publishing industry on London. But the dream isn’t all it was cracked up to be. The path to promotion out of her low-paid assistant editorship is unclear and as one of just a few people of color in the office she’s expected to take on unpaid work on diversity initiatives that don’t accomplish much of anything at all, she lives in a falling-apart apartment with roommates she barely knows, and her relationships with her friends are changing. She’s in a rut, but a chance meeting at a housewarming party shakes things up when she sees Kian again. They’d been best friends at one point in high school, but an incident happened that estranged them from each other for a decade. They reconnect and begin growing closer again, but the weight of the past lingers. As they negotiate their renewed bond, Kian works towards a future as an artist and Shirin tries to figure out how to deal with the increasingly challenging environment at her job…and she watches Rob Grayson, the bully that harassed both her and Kian for their Persian ancestry as teenagers, become more and more famous as a comedian who makes racist jokes and then decries “cancel culture” when he’s criticized. The pressure Shirin feels mounts, and she finds herself with many decisions to make about how she wants to live the rest of her life. This started out very promising. Shirin is a well-constructed character, and the rootlessness she feels in her mid-20s feels achingly familiar. Trying to manage family dynamics, getting established in your professional field (or trying to figure out how to change direction), feeling out of sync with your friends, dealing with roommates…it can be a very heady time, and Sara Jafari renders it thoughtfully and realistically. Shirin and Kian’s hesitance to talk to each other about the depression and anxiety they’re experiencing, and their relief at having their disclosures met without judgment, is refreshing. These are not incredibly dynamic characters, there is a lot of restraint and withholding and shyness, but for most of the way through the book that worked for me because their inner lives (particularly Shirin’s) are developed nicely. There’s a delicacy in the early going that was intriguing. In the end, though, it doesn’t hold together and for me that was due to two factors: the increasingly unsubtle messaging, and the underwhelming nature of the reveal of the reason for Shirin and Kian’s falling-out. To take the latter first, there’s a lot of build-up throughout the novel to the enormity of what happened. Which turns out to be a major but not cataclysmic situation in a way that feels anticlimactic and might not have if it had been given less weight. But the larger failing was that Jafari seemed to have less and less faith in her reader as she came to the end of the book to understand the points she’d like to make, and so starts all but underlining what we’re supposed to get out of the situations she portrays. I started to feel preached to, not because of any of the plot developments themselves, but because the prose did not trust me to understand the subtext and made it text. The ending also felt rushed and almost perfunctory in a way that made it emotionally unsatisfying. It’s kind of a bummer, I enjoyed the first two thirds quite a bit, so I wished I’d felt like it nailed the dismount. There is a lot to like here regardless, but it’s too uneven for me to really affirmatively recommend.
- Ada Blackjack: Wrangel Island is a piece of land in the Arctic Ocean off of Siberia, about the size of Crete. In 1921, Canadian explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson (born William Stephenson) arranged an expedition there in an attempt to seize it for the Canadian and/or British government, which he hoped would compensate him for his efforts. His four-man crew consisted of two who had spent time in the Arctic before (Fred Maurer and Lorne Knight) and two (Allan Crawford and Milton Galle) who were fresh to northern exploration, lured in by Stefansson’s tales of a “friendly Arctic” where survival was simple and there were no more dangers than any that might have been present anywhere else in the world. The team was meant to hire on several Native Alaskans to perform hunting and camp maintenance, but when the ship was ready to leave the dock in Alaska for the journey to Wrangel, only one turned up. Her name was Ada Blackjack. Only 23 years old, raised primarily in Nome and educated at a missionary school, she’d already been married and divorced from an abusive man. The only surviving child from that marriage, Bennett, had contracted tuberculosis and Ada wanted desperately to get him treatment, but her work as a seamstress in Nome did not even garner enough money to keep him at home with her. It was her skill with a needle and ability to speak English that led to her recruitment for the expedition, which she only agreed to despite her fear of polar bears and desire to remain closer to her son because the money she would be paid would allow her to take the child to the hospital. When they landed on Wrangel and raised the British flag, things seemed like they might go well enough: a boat would be back the next year to re-supply them and bring fresh faces to the island, allowing anyone who wanted to leave to return home, and game looked plentiful. If the boat had turned up on time, the only consequence might have been the international incident that was stirred up over Russia’s objection to the claim on the island, which it believed was its territory (it is a part of Russia today). But a very icy year kept the relief boat from reaching the party, who quickly began to run out of food. Knight began to develop symptoms of scurvy, and the three other men agreed to attempt a trip over the ice to Siberia to seek help. Over the next five months, Blackjack nursed the increasingly weak and ailing Knight while shouldering all responsibility for keeping them both fed and sheltered, but he ultimately succumbed to to the disease, leaving Ada all alone with the exception of the expedition’s cat, Vic. When she was rescued two months later, she’d lost 30 pounds from her small frame and was traumatized by her experience. But that wasn’t the end of her troubles, as her rescuer and Stefansson exploited her story in various ways without compensating her beyond the salary she had earned for her time on the island. I’d never heard of Ada Blackjack before, nor Vilhjalmur Stefansson or even Wrangel Island, so this book had a lot of interesting information for me. It also provided perspective on the last gasps of a time that someone could quasi-credibly describe themselves as an “explorer”. I was left with a pretty low opinion of Stefansson, who published and repeated information he knew or should have known to be total nonsense about the safety of the Arctic, as well as fellow explorer Harold Noice, whose struggle to get to the Island was motivated not at all by humanitarian concerns about those who may have remained there and entirely by a desire to secure Stefansson’s attention and/or acquire stories he himself could use to bolster his own reputation. While he saved Ada’s life, he also caused her significant and needless heartache later down the line by casting aspersions about her character and her conduct on the Island. The writing is reasonably engaging and the story is told clearly and straightforwardly, but I ultimately wanted this to be different than it was. Jennifer Niven clearly did extensive research and uncovered what was there to uncover, but I was hoping for a more complete picture of Blackjack’s life. Her early and later years are especially thin, which isn’t Niven’s fault, but is frustrating when the book implicitly promises in its title to be Ada’s story and is much more the story of the whole expedition. It’s a relatively quick read despite its length and tells a little-known story, but a reader looking for something more in-depth will likely be a bit disappointed.
In Life…
- Session is about to get real: Tomorrow, we find out how far the state’s projected revenues for the next two years have fallen below the projections made in mid-December on which the state’s budget is based. Given how much of Nevada’s budget is based on tourism and how things are going on a national level, it does seem almost certain that it’s a how much rather than if situation on cuts. If the number is on the smaller end, those will be easier to stomach. If not, we’re looking at more significant changes to the budget. And of course, we’re all waiting until the fall to find out what kinds of changes will be made to programs like Medicaid, which have an enormous impact on the states, so a special session to adjust seems very likely for the future. But having the number is always the beginning of the end of a legislative session as things start coming together very quickly in terms of what programs and ideas will move forward and which will not.
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