A Book A Week - Week 46: Undisputed Truth

This week's book:
  Undisputed Truth    by Mike Tyson  with Larry Sloman

Grade:  A-

 This one is two days late, but not because I couldn't make up my mind.  I just started two days later than usual.

I don't think the final chapter on Mike Tyson has been written.  Not even with this book.  He is still a troubled mix of contradictions, but come to find out, he realizes this.  He's even cool with it.  Mostly.

This book is written with a ghost writer.  I say 'with' a ghost writer instead of 'by' because it reads to me like a very long, extended interview.  These are indeed Mike Tyson's words, just organized and edited.

The book begins with a prologue explaining how he did not rape the woman he was convicted of raping, and how even though he hated the process and the judicial system and the boxing organizations that put him in the position to stand accused of rape, he thinks the judge who put him away probably saved his life.
   Then, in the very next chapter he outlines how horrific, abusive, and neglected his childhood was.  How he didn't learn right from wrong, how he idolized criminals because those were the people who were making it in his neighborhood.  How he became a criminal himself to escape bullying at school, and how he grew bolder and bolder with every criminal exploit he got away with.  The bullied kid became the bully.

He doesn't see the contradiction.  Or the irony.  He outlines how he was - his words - 'an animal' and yet claims to have risen above that animal nature, at least in the one instance he was caught and convicted of a crime.  Not only does he not see the contradiction, it's not a contradiction in his mind.  He didn't rape that woman.  He did lie and cheat and steal and do drugs and conceive illegitimate children.  But the one crime he was convicted for he did not do.

This was a fascinating read.  Not the least reason of which is the sociological study of the effect of inner city destitution on children.  Mike Tyson's mother was a prostitute.  And he shared her bed until he was fifteen.  He grew up around thieves and pimps and drug dealers, only to become a thief and drug dealer himself, who victimized women.  In the question of nature vs. nurture, nurture won out. At least early on.

Mike Tyson was a victim for much of his life, even well after his boxing career was over.  He knows this, he says as much.  But he has in recent years risen above it.  Or gone beyond it, perhaps, he does take care to note his constant struggle not to revert to the insecure egomaniac he once was.

This isn't really a feel-good book.  You come away from it realizing that Mike Tyson is much more than his public persona once might have led you to believe.  But you also realize that he was, at one time, much less than that too.  And he's still teetering in between.  Could go either way.  He says in the book he's such an egomaniac he'd need to die in front of a crowd.  That still might happen.  But I hope it doesn't.

Read this book.  It is a genuine glimpse into the mind of a man more fascinating than you might think. 

Next week:
  Heart of Darkness   by Joseph Conrad
Yeah, I should have read this in high school.  I may have given it a try, but 'Apocalypse Now' was on VHS, why would I have wanted to read a book?  Plus, it's short, I can get it in by Sunday and get back on track.

A Book A Week - Week 45: The Wolves of Midwinter

This week's book:
  The Wolves of Midwinter    by Anne Rice

Grade:   B

 Maybe you can tell because this review is two days late, but, man, I could not get into this book.

Once again I picked up the second novel in a series without reading the first one, but that's not it.  Or not just it.  I think it was the premise that did me in.

The story is that werewolves are real.  No big deal, it's a novel by Anne Rice, so it's not going to be like 'Grapes of Wrath.'  The hero, Rueben, has just been changed into a werewolf in the previous novel, and as this one opens he's been welcomed into the family, so to speak, and begins to learn about his new powers.  But it's Christmas, which werewolves also celebrate, natch, and Rueben's education is interrupted by a ghost.  There are secrets deeper than the werewolves, spirits and ancient things in the deep forest in Northern California.

Seems kind of overwrought, doesn't it?  It was.

Anne Rice has been writing for quite a while, so the prose was very good, with tight descriptions and good pacing.  But the dialogue... there was a lot of it.  A lot.  Conversations that were mostly exposition pretending to be revelations of inner life.  It's a delicate balance, I know, between writing good dialogue for a book and realistic dialogue.  You can't write dialogue the way real people speak, it's unreadable.  But you can't have your characters speak like they're reading from the Encyclopedia Britannica either.  There was lot of Britannica here.  Pages and pages and pages of it.  Back and forth, agonized discussion after agonized discussion.  Just not for me.

One a more technical note, I noticed the narrative broke point of view many, many times.  Rueben is the main character, but over and over again we'd get a paragraph from another character's perspective, right in the middle.  Or, even better, Rueben providing another character's inner motivation.  I didn't care for that either.

Overall it wasn't bad.  Leaps and bounds better than Twilight, thank God.  And I can see where someone else might like the dialogues and personal interplay, but it left me flat.  It felt like a Bronte sister novel, but with werewolves.  Maybe that was her intention all along, to make a Gothic horror out of Romanticism, to put werewolves and ghosts and spirits into Wuthering Heights.  If so, she succeeded admirably, because that's precisely what I found.  It was just not to my tastes. 

Next week:
  Undisputed Truth    by Mike Tyson  with Larry Sloman
I've been fascinated with Mike Tyson since the first time I saw him box.  He's a troubled mix of contradictions trying to resolve themselves, and as he gets older I don't know if he's finding a way to get beyond his past or is in danger of being overwhelmed by it.  I'll read his book to find out.

What Time Is It?

I've been thinking about time again.  Yeah, I know there are theoretical physicists getting paid to ponder the same thing - what is time? - but that shouldn't keep me from thinking about it any more than the existence of NASCAR drivers should keep me from getting behind the wheel of my truck.  They're professionals, and they run their race very well, but they can't get me where I need to go, that's my job.

As Einstein demonstrated, space and time are connected, the same fabric.  It's where we get the concept of spacetime.  And we are embedded in spacetime, all four dimensions of it.  Which is why, I think, we experience time as a one-way arrow.  In order to step outside of time, we'd have to be able to experience a fifth dimension which would allow us a separate perspective on our original four.
    Think of it in terms of Flatland, a hypothetical two-dimensional world.  The Flatlanders have forward and back, and left and right, but they do not have up and down.  They can't even conceive of up and down, since that's a third dimension and they have only two.  Everything they do is constrained to those two dimensions, and even if they were somehow transported through a third dimension they'd never know it, since they can't perceive it.

Same thing with us and time.  It's a fourth dimension, but we're stuck in it like it's 4-D flypaper, nothing we can do to get out of it.  It's not only all we know, it's all we can know.

There's a very good question about time travel:  If time travel is possible, where are all the time travelers?  Once time travel is invented, no matter how far in the future, every era would be lousy with time tourists, because every moment in time would essentially be 'now.'  Since we don't see any time travelers, ipso facto, time travel must not be possible.
   But I put this to you:  if time travel is possible, it's only possible through a fifth dimension.  And since we can't perceive that fifth dimension, we can't perceive any time travelers, who must, of necessity, be five-dimensional beings.  So maybe there are time travelers all around us right now.  We'd never know it, just like Flatlanders could never know us higher-dimensional beings.

Which brings us to another notion about time.  We experience time as a linear flow, but if there is a fifth dimension outside of our four familiar dimensions of spacetime, wouldn't someone in that fifth dimension be able to see all of time?  To them, wouldn't time be just another dimension they could move along, forward or backward or sideways or what have you?  Furthermore, wouldn't that mean that time - though we experience it linearly - is actually all happening at once?  Is every moment in time really lined up in order like a huge card catalog* we leaf through from front to back because we have to by virtue of our four-dimensionality?

I think the notion of there being no real 'now,' just a card-catalog moment we experience as now is both disturbing and poetic.  It's like we live each moment like it's a frame of movie film, one at a time, one after the other. 
    Which has all sorts of implications for the notion of free will.  But that's another sleepless night lying in bed.


* kids, a card catalog is what libraries used to keep track of their books in the days before computers did everything for us.

A Book A Week - Week 44: Damned

This week's book:
  Damned    by Chuck Palahniuk

Grade:   ... I don't really know...

Well, at least it's short.

I'm stumped.  Honestly stumped.  I have no idea if this is a work of towering genius I just can't see, or the worst piece of crap pastiche I have ever read.
   One thing I know for sure, it's either one or the other, and nothing in between.

This is the story of Madison, who is dead and in Hell.  She writes to Satan - somehow, maybe in a journal we never see? - at the start of each chapter like the just-teen protagonist of a Judy Blume novel.  She's newly arrived in Hell, stuck in a filth-smeared cage out on an infinite plain, near four other Breakfast Club members.  They break out and go for walkabout in Hell, as the facts of their damnations are slowly made plain.

Yeah...   it is definitely a pastiche, call it 'homage' to make it polite, of a Judy Blume novel.  Thirteen-year-old Madison goes on a voyage of self-discovery that is thinly-disguised as a travelogue of Hell, and then later is not even thinly-disguised when she discovers that, as a dead person, she can reinvent herself into whatever she wants.  You know you're in trouble when the author abandons the metaphor and just states things plainly.
    There are parts, little passages and entire themes, that are really, really good.  But but those tiny bits and brief moments are surrounded by half-assed writing compounded by half-assed editing.  Reading Damned was like sifting through all the gunk in a drain pipe to find the tiny diamond engagement ring your sweetie dropped.  Sure, you get the diamond, but was the kitchen smeared with sewer juice really worth the effort?

This is the problem as I see it: Chuck Pahlaniuk the Best Selling Author doesn't get edited nearly as rigorously or as thoroughly as Chuck Pahlaniuk the Relative Unknown.  In actuality, as we see with many authors over and over and over again, the Best Selling Author needs a great editor even more than the Relative Unknown does.  The Relative Unknown has had years of obscurity to hone his craft, and to nurture his manuscript through the stage of outline to terrible first draft to slightly less-terrible second draft and so on to something worthy of publishing.  The Best Selling Author has to work under time constraint, he has to produce according to his contract, and the editor has to edit to a release date and printer schedule.  Things the Relative Unknown could never get away with are the things the Best Selling Author gets a free pass on.
   And that's how you get something like Damned.

Like I said, there are themes that merit exploration, existential stuff that we're all interested in like free will and how our earthly lives affect those around us.  But...  the whole just doesn't hang together.  It reads to me like what I strongly suspect it was, the author noodling at the typewriter coming up with pages without a clear road map or plan where to go with the story.  Just a dude gettin' a little finger exercise.  Then, when he had to put it into a complete - though mercifully short - novel, the author tacked on bits and pieces to try to make a coherent story, without smoothing the rough edges and making everything neat and tidy.  You can see where he had to add a few lines or pages to something he wrote earlier.  His writing style from later in the book matches those patches, which do not match to the style he had earlier in the book.
    Same thing with the characters, they're established as contemporaries of Madison - they appear in the same plain of infinite cages - and they behave as her contemporaries.  Until the author decides it would be cooler if they weren't.  Character details don't match from the beginning of the book to the end, their behavior isn't consistent, and their demeanor doesn't match what the author has told us of souls who have been in Hell for a long time.  Sloppy.

Who should read this book?  Well, if you read and liked 'Fight Club,' first let me offer condolences, then let me tell you that you will not like this book at all.  If you liked Judy Blume books you might like Damned, as long as you go into it with the proper expectations.  This is not Judy Blume, there is no truth here, even though the author kind-of tried to put some in.
   Read it or don't.  I don't know.  Whatever. 

Next week:
  The Wolves of Midwinter    by Anne Rice
I think this is my second Anne Rice novel.  My first in a very long time.  This is about werewolves, I'm guessing.  I hope it's not werewolves who put on way too much Axe body spray.

A Book A Week - Week 43: Medicus

This week's book:
  Medicus:  a Novel of the Roman Empire   by Ruth Downie

Grade:   A

In college one of my concentrations was Classics, Latin and Greek.  Later I taught Latin, which included a healthy helping of Roman culture and customs.  I always told my students that even though we modern Americans get many of our legal traditions and symbols from Romans - not to mention Christianity - the Romans of classical times were very, very different people from you and I.  Their culture was a slave culture through and through, and that's not something modern people really get.  Sure, we understand it intellectually, but we don't feel it, we haven't ever participated in the cultural evil of holding another person in bondage so our understanding of slavery lies on the shallow end of the enlightenment pool.  It was always tough, maybe impossible, to get the truth across to my students.

I wish this book had been available back then.

Medicus is a murder mystery, set in Roman-occupied Britain back in the Second Century AD.  The hero is the physician - a 'medicus' - Gaius Petreius Ruso, late of Rome itself.  He used to be in the Emperor's favor, but Roman politics and intrigue conspired against him, his wife divorced him, and his family farm in Gaul is in trouble and his brother might have to sell.  Overwhelmed by circumstance, he flees to military medical service in the Empire's hinterlands, among the barbarians.  He's slowly coming undone, becoming less than who he thought he was without finding who he really is.  Then, someone finds a body in the river, and Ruso can't stop asking questions.  His already complicated life becomes much more messy.

So far it sounds like a fairly straightforward mystery.  Sure, the trappings are Roman - and suitably authentic, I can vouch for that - but the situation could be a regular modern mystery.  Then we find out that the dead woman fished out of the river was a slave.  And then we find out there are more dead slaves, all women, and no one seems to know anything.  Slowly the author pulls back the veil and lets the readers see that slavery corrupts.  Everyone touched by the slave trade, even the hero Ruso, becomes soiled by it.  They're all dirty, it's just that some are dirtier than others.

Balancing that tension is what led me to like this book.  More than once characters say 'anyone can buy a girl,' with a casual voice that made me shiver.  It's true, that's the way things work in a slave economy, people aren't people, they're property, and treated only as well as their owner treats his things.  The characters are in a terrible society, but it's the only one they have; they don't know any other way.  They try to do good, but it never works out right.

The story is suitably convoluted for a murder mystery, complicated by the hero's own personal shortcomings, and it comes to a satisfactory conclusion, with all the loose ends tied off.  But even the final pages, where the hero comes to a triumph of sorts, involve slavery and the inherent power imbalance between master and slave.

You can read this book just for the mystery part, which is very good, or just for the Roman culture and history part, which is also very good and incredibly real, or you can read it for the deeper shades of meaning that apply to our own time and place.  I recommend the third one. 

Next week:
  Damned    by Chuck Palahniuk
The dude who wrote 'Fight Club.'  I read 'Fight Club' years ago and didn't really like it.  Too... I don't know... angry white guy?  This is about a dead teenaged girl.  I'm trying to go into it with no expectations, we'll see how well that works out.

A Book A Week - Week 42: The Lies of Locke Lamora

This week's book:
  The Lies Of Locke Lamora   by Scott Lynch

Grade:   B+

I liked this book.  It was mechanically sound, had a decent plot with twists and turns and what-have-yous, and was an entertaining read.  The hero is a con man whose only real talent is lying, a thief who preys exclusively on the wealthy of his city.  But he's not nearly as clever or untouchable as he thinks he is.  Good premise.

So why the B+?  Well, sit down a spell and I'll tell you why...

This is a fantasy novel, and by that I mean adult fantasy.  No, not that kind of 'adult' fantasy, I mean it's more like Game of Thrones than Harry Potter.  For grown-ups instead of kids.  The main character, Locke Lamora, lives in a world where magic is real - but not ubiquitous - and alchemy is real and poverty is real and slavery is very real, and people live by intrigue and trickery or they don't live very long at all.
   When you get a brand-new fantasy world, you have to allow the author the page count to do a decent job of world building.  Some things need explanation, after all, especially if they're germane to the plot.  But it's a fine line between explaining the way your fantasy world works and losing your narration in the details.  Sometimes the author stepped over that line.  Many times, actually.  We don't get to even the hints of the plot of the book until about 50 pages in.  There is actually a Prologue, which in publishing nowadays just isn't done.  Honestly, I'm surprised the term 'Prologue'  survived the editing process, if I were in charge that would have been my first edit.
   The author never gets past this tendency to navel-gaze the details of his world.  Time after time after time the narration is interrupted with an explanation of some point of the world that's going to be important in ten pages or so.  I get it, you thought this through, but this over-reliance on exposition of the details of the world is just like when other authors over-share their research.  Dan Brown, I'm looking your direction here.  It gets in the way and only calls attention to itself.

There is too much dialogue.  Luckily, the author avoids - mostly - the kind of too-clever 'author's voice' dialogue I loathe; the characters speak in their own voice.  They just do too much of it.  There is banter between characters, which is the author's self-indulgence leaking through, and it persists long after establishing mood and defining relationships.  Towards the end the dialogue veered into exposition from time to time.

Because of the first two points, too much world-building and too much dialogue, the book is too long.  Much too long.  The plot, even with its twists and setbacks, could have been accomplished in 450 pages instead of 650.  When I actually have to turn off the page count on my e-book reader because the countdown to the end is interminable, you know the book is too long.

Also, even though this is a fantasy world, the author clearly based it on the Italian Renaissance, probably Venice or Florence or a combination of both.  There are many Italianate words and names and terms, which keeps them from sounding like Fake Fantasy names, but doesn't allow them to fade into the background either.  I got the feeling that the heroes would take a gondola to St. Mark's Basilica any moment.

Even though I have my complaints and I graded it a B+, I really did like the book.  It's clever, and the fantasy elements hang together.  The hero is likable even though he's a rogue and a con man, and the bad guys' motivations seemed reasonable enough.  As far as first novels go, it was much, much better than Twilight or Ready Player One, but not quite as good as The Golem and the Jinni or The Panopticon. 

Next week:
  ????
I have absolutely no idea.  I need to go to the bookstore and find something tomorrow. 

A Book A Week - Week 41: Why I Jump

**  Fair warning, I get very, very, very cussy below.  If you don't like a lot of bad words spread around like spiteful mayonnaise on an anger sandwich, skip this one and wait until next week.  **

This week's book:
  The Reason I Jump   by Naoki Higashida  -- really by his mother

Grade:   F--      this is a bullshit scam using 'facilitated communication.'  Do not buy this book, it's charlatanism of the highest order.

Fuck this guy, fuck his mother, and fuck his transcriber.  Fuck his Japanese publisher, fuck his American publisher, fuck his English translator and fuck Apple and iTunes for making it available.
   And a very special two-middle-fingers-waaaaaaay-up for Jon Stewart.  Fuck him sideways with a watermelon for giving this awful, despicable, entirely-discredited and thoroughly exposed fraud a fresh start on national cable TV (more on that below).

This book is a fraud.  From start to finish.  Do not buy this or even read it if someone gives it to you, it's pure fakery.

I suspected as much, when I heard about Mr. Higashida.  He's severely autistic, essentially non-verbal, and the means he used to 'write' this book is facilitated communication.  You may have heard about this in the 90's, it's where an assistant - in this case his mother - holds a disabled person's hand or arm, allowing them the smooth control to point to letters or words (or ideograms in Japanese) and make themselves understood.
    The problem is, the disabled person isn't the one doing the pointing.

Study after study after study has proved that facilitated communication is nothing more than the 'facilitator' doing the typing.  With very simple methods it's been demonstrated time and again.  For instance, when the disabled person is shown a picture of a cat, but the facilitator sees a dog, the disabled person types 'dog.'  Or when the facilitator can't see the word, oddly enough the disabled person types something random.
   Even better, the facilitator usually has to be the same person all the time.  If the disabled person really just needed a steady hand it wouldn't matter whose hand it was, or even whether they could see what the disabled person could.  And yet, when the disabled person's special facilitator is taken away, the disabled person stops being able to communicate.  Like when 'psychics' are asked to reproduce their methods in lab settings, the ability just flees them for some reason.  Because they're faking.

Naoki Higashida did not write this book.  His mother did, using long-disproved methods.  For a week I have looked for proof of Mr. Higashida's independence in this matter.  I just need one video, or one reliable first-hand account of him writing on his own, where his mother isn't looking at his alphabet board or a disinterested third party does the facilitating.  I found nothing.  Not a single independently verified instance of Mr. Higashida doing anything like writing.
   ** If someone can provide me this proof, I will gladly retract everything in this review.   I'll start holding my breath now. **

I understand why Mr. Higashida's mother does this.  It was hard enough for me to try to know the mind of the autistic kids at camp and fail, and I only had them for a week, five nights.  The parent of a person locked away into autism craves understanding, they want to know - or feel they know - what's going on with their child.  So they buy into this kind of crap, hoping their child can reveal themselves.
   Facilitated communication tells parents they can know their child, that it's simple and easy, all the child has to do is point.  But it's just a late-20th Century version of spiritualism, nothing but fakery and self-deception.  And so very cruel.  I wouldn't wish the false hope 'facilitated communication' offers on my worst enemy.

Which is where Jon Stewart comes in.  He of 'The Daily Show,' a man who is adept at parsing political speech and asking tough questions, never questioned this book at all.  He took at face value the proposition that a severely autistic man, who can't even be demonstrated to read let alone write, dictated a book word by word.  Jon Stewart researches his comedy assiduously, and picks apart situations to shovel away the bullshit and expose the lies.  But he just sat in awe of this garbage, and whole-heartedly recommended this miserable excuse for book to all his viewers.  Then he crowed about it shooting up the charts, never suspecting that it was complete and utter bullshit.
   So fuck you, Jon Stewart.  Fuck you to Hell and back for all the damage you're going to do to families with autistic kids because you couldn't be bothered to do your homework.  People are going to read 'Why I Jump' and expect their autistic children to be able to make their wishes known using 'facilitated communication.'  At best they'll be heartbroken when it doesn't work, and at worst they'll be victims of their own hope and believe, even for a short time, that their child can actually communicate, before the veil is ripped away and they learn the awful truth.  Fuck you. 

Next week:
 The Lies Of Locke Lamora   by Scott Lynch
A first novel.  I'm kind of hit or miss with first novels, but I've found I like rolling the dice.  Maybe because with the last few I've hit my point.  Some day I'm going to crap out again, though.

A Book A Week - Week 40: Doctor Sleep

This week's book:
  Doctor Sleep   by Stephen King

Grade:   A      for the novel itself
             B-     for the horror

This is my very first Stephen King novel.  I kind-of read a short story decades ago and that was as far as I got.  I've seen more Stephen King movies than I have read Stephen King books.  I have to say, I liked it.  But then again, Mr. King has been a professional novelist for almost as long as I've been alive, so he'd better have learned a thing or two about telling a story.

Here it is in a nutshell:  the kid from The Shining, Danny, has grown up.  He's reliving all his father's mistakes, becoming an alcoholic and drug addict.  He tells himself it's a way to numb the 'shine' that shows him when people will die, but he knows that's not the real reason.  He hits rock bottom and starts to climb his way out with the help of Alcoholics Anonymous.  Then he meets a little girl named Abra (no, really, that's her name) who has more of the shine than he does.  Trouble is, there are others after her as well, and they're not nice at all.

I liked this story more for its first part, where Danny - now Dan - is on his slow slide to the lowest point in his life.  Mr. King is himself a decades-sober alcoholic, and the description of Dan's worst moment rings completely true.  In the story it's complicated by his shining (psychic powers), but those chapters felt to me like the author ripping the scabs off his own addiction and ascribing the pain and remorse to a character.  Really good.  Beyond good.

The rest of the story... meh.  It wasn't bad. but it didn't feel so much like a horror novel to me as a comic book in novel form.  There's astral projection, telepathy, telekinesis, precognition, all sorts of mental powers.  And then there are bad guys who feed off the shine of non-bad guys.  Yup... vampires.  Not blood-sucking vampires, soul-sucking vampires.  Same diff.  At least they weren't glowing and angsty teens, they were old.  And drove RVs.  Like vampire Travelers.

In the first half of the novel, when the narrative got to the horror parts where the bad guys were preying on their victims, who have to be children because the shining is strongest in them, I felt uncomfortable.  Like I didn't want to read it.  Then I realized that was pretty much the aim, the author intends those passages to be uncomfortable (scary?) as part of the genre convention.  Thing is, after a couple of these I got numb to it.  It stopped making me uncomfortable. And with all the psychic comic-book-y stuff going on, it kind of got lost in the whirl.  This is why I graded the novel down for its horror elements.  Sure, there are ghosts and vampires and revenants and what-have-yous, but they're opposed by two of the most powerful psychics around.  Tight and suspenseful, but not terribly scary.

Maybe one of my favorite parts of the story is what Danny does with his gifts.  Since he can read minds, and move stuff, and see ghosts, you could imagine what sort of charlatanism he might engage in.  But after he finds sobriety, he settles into a hospice, where he provides comfort for the residents in their last minutes alive.  It's a kind, gentle sort of application of an amazing talent, one that makes the character more human despite the incredible things he can do.  It's also why the staff call him 'Doctor Sleep.'  Good choice, Mr. King. 

Next week:
 The Reason I Jump   by Naoki Higashida
Years ago I worked several summers at a camp for handicapped kids, including severely autistic ones.  I know many autistic people, and a hallmark of for-real, no-shit autism is the inability to communicate, it's almost the defining characteristic.  This is a book purportedly written by an autistic boy.  Or maybe 'written,' you can make your own finger quotes.  I'm not buying it until someone proves it to me.  Stay tuned.