Fiction: Science Fiction
2054 by Elliot Ackerman and James Stavridis
NOTE: I read 2034, the first novel by Elliot Ackerman and Admiral James Stavridis in September 2023. It chronicled a nuclear conflict between China and the U.S. This sequel looks at our country two decades later - 2054.
Publisher’s Description: “A new party has emerged in the US, one that’s held power for over a decade. Efforts to cement its grip have resulted in mounting violent resistance. The American president has control of the media, but he is beginning to lose control of the streets. Many fear he’ll stop at nothing to remain in the White House. Suddenly, he collapses in the middle of an address to the nation. After an initial flurry of misinformation, the administration reluctantly announces his death. A cover-up ensues, conspiracy theories abound, and the country descends into a new type of civil war.
A handful of elite actors from the worlds of computer science, intelligence, and business have a fairly good idea what happened. All signs point to a profound breakthrough in AI, of which the remote assassination of an American president is hardly the most game-changing ramification. The trail leads to an outpost in the Amazon rainforest, the last known whereabouts of the tech visionary who predicted this breakthrough. As some of the world’s great powers, old and new, state and nonstate alike, struggle to outmaneuver one another in this new Great Game of scientific discovery, the outcome becomes entangled with the fate of American democracy.”
2054 begins with a national crisis setting the stage for a civil war, which, I think, would have made a gripping story. But instead, the potential civil war is secondary to remote gene editing, AI (artificial intelligence), and uploading minds into a “Singularity.” The “Singularity” may be bad, but, considering our country’s trajectory today, it just doesn’t generate the interest that a potential civil war does.
Fiction: Post Apocalyptic, Survival (Canada)
Moon of the Turning Leaves by Waubgeshig Rice
This is the sequel to Moon of the Crusted Snow which I read in 2019. That book told the story of small northern Anishinaabe reservation community that suddenly goes dark. In fact, it seems the whole world has lost electricity possibly due to an immense solar storm. With winter looming, and cut off from the rest of the world, people become passive and confused. Panic builds as the food supply dwindles. Residents Evan and Nicole Whitesky struggle to save their young family and help their community to survive.
Moon of the Turning Leaves is the sequel. It takes place ten years later. Evan and Nicole have relocated into a small Anishinaabe community completely isolated from the outside world. For the past ten years they have been renewing their Anishinaabe traditions but now are facing dwindling resources. Their lake is overfished, and the land-based animals have left their hunting grounds. Migration to a new home has become vital and the elders of the community have decided it is time to send a scouting party to their ancestral Anishinaabe home area of the northern shores of Georgian Bay on Lake Huron. They need to discover whether life in their ancestral home is viable.
A handful of people make the harrowing expedition to see what is south, to find the old homeland before moving the whole community. They encounter adversity, loss, bears, and extremist militia groups who are into “some white power shit”.
Nonfiction: Nature, Travel
Return to My Trees: Notes from the Welsh Woodlands by Matthew Yeomans
The author is a past contributor to the Rough Guides travel books and is a journalist. In Return to My Trees he asks the questions: “When and how did we humans lose our connection with nature – and how do we find it again?” To explore this question, Yeomans walks more than 300 miles through the forests of Wales. His walks took him on a series of routes from the border in England in the south, along the spine of Wales to the west coast before heading inland and north. Enroute, he weaves together folklore and environmental science with the history of Wales from the ancient Druids, the Romans who feared them, to the decaying remnants of the industrial past.
Nonfiction: Religion
The Spirit of the Quakers by Geoffrey Durham
The Quakers worship in silence. They do without creeds, clergy, consecrated buildings, and sacraments, and have always had women ministers. Known for philanthropy, inventiveness, zeal for social reform and hardheaded business sense, they oppose war and violence of all kinds without compromise.
The Spirit of the Quakers explains Quakerism through quotations from writings that cover 350 years, from the beginnings of the movement to the present day.
The following resonated with me:
“There is strength is knowing how to keep silent.”
“Quakers joyfully profess an experience-based faith. They do not believe what they are told. Quakers do not proclaim a set of beliefs which they have to follow, they do not preach, and they do not insist that theirs is the only way.”
“One of life’s hardest lessons is that there is no justification for expecting that our neighbor is to traverse precisely the same path as that which we ourselves have followed. The varieties of religious experience are probably far greater than any of us suppose.”
“Our vision of the truth must be big enough to include other people’s truths as well as our own. We must learn to love difficult and unlovable people.”
“Quaker lives are fed by spiritual wisdom from outside the Quaker world. During the first three hundred years of Quakerism, this enrichment came from the Judeo-Christian Bible and the accumulated wisdom of the Christian faith. During the last fifty years, historical and cultural changes have meant that we can draw on many other sources. We recognize this change and give it a positive context of interest and sharing rather than a negative one of theological dispute.”
Fiction: Science Fiction, Fantasy
The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin, translated from Chinese by Ken Liu
NOTE: I started reading this book many months ago, but I did not finish it because it just seemed like a “crazy a** book.” Then a friend mentioned they saw The Three-Body Problem on Netflix and liked it. I don’t have Netflix, so I decided to give reading The Three-Body Problem another chance.
Publisher’s Description: “Set against the backdrop of China's Cultural Revolution, a secret military project sends signals into space to establish contact with aliens. An alien civilization on the brink of destruction captures the signal and plans to invade Earth. Meanwhile, on Earth, different camps start forming, planning to either welcome the superior beings and help them take over a world seen as corrupt, or to fight against the invasion.”
Nonfiction: Legal, Law
The Trump Indictments: The Historic Charging Documents with Commentary, Annotated by Melissa Murray, Andrew Weissmann
NOTE: I read the Mueller Report, Select January 6th Committee Final Report and Supporting Materials Collection, the transcript of the Dobbs oral arguments and the Dobbs Decision. It is only natural that I read The Trump Indictments.
The Trump Indictments contain the four criminal indictments in a single, accessible volume. This volume also includes material (clearly marked as footnotes) from prominent legal scholars Melissa Murray and Andrew Weissmann. Their footnotes “walk” readers through each indictment in turn, with explanatory and contextual notes that enhance understanding of these historic documents.
The book includes:
An introduction providing background―historical and contemporary―for the charges against the former president.
The four indictments with annotations.
– United States America v. Donald J. Trump (2 Counts, 18 U.S.C. 371, Conspiracy to Defraud the United States, 18 U.S.C. 1512(k) Conspiracy to Obstruct an Official Proceeding)
- The State of Georgia v. Donald John Trump, et al. (13 RICO Counts)
- United States of America v. Donald J. Trump, et al. (18 U.S.C., 9 Counts)
- The People of the State of New York v. Donald J. Trump (34 Counts)
A cast of characters, from Trump and his alleged co-conspirators including Proud Boys and Oath Keepers who are now in prison to Trump lawyers and government prosecutors.
A timeline that brings together in one place the critical events that led to the four indictments.
An explanation of what an actual “show trial” (what Trump calls a “witch hunt”) is versus a legitimate trial (following established laws and legal procedures).
The indictments are an interesting, straightforward listing of evidence collected and presented to the grand jury for each count. Some of the annotations are extremely interesting as well. In the Georgia case I learned, under the law, all co-conspirators are liable for each and every act undertaken in furtherance of the conspiracy. Criminal liability is accorded to each participant. In other words, if you have only a small involvement in the “plan” you are still a “player” and criminally liable for the entire conspiracy.
Nonfiction: History, Memoir
A Woman in Berlin: Eight Weeks in the Conquered City: A Diary by Marta Hillers, Philip Boehm (Translated from German), Hans Magnus Enzensberger (Editor)
NOTE: A Woman in Berlin was originally published anonymously in 1954 and then went out of print. The identity of Hillers as the author was not revealed until 2003, after her death. Two years after Hillers' death, a new edition of her diary was published.
Publisher’s Description: “For eight weeks in 1945, as Berlin fell to the Russian army, a young woman kept a daily record of life in her apartment building and among its residents. The author depicts her fellow Berliners in all their humanity, as well as their cravenness, corrupted first by hunger and then by the Russians. A Woman in Berlin tells of the complex relationship between civilians and an occupying army and the shameful indignities to which women in a conquered city are always subject--the mass rape suffered by all, regardless of age or infirmity.”
Without a doubt, this is a gritty memoir of a woman’s life in Berlin at the end of World War II. It contains her and other women’s accounts of sexual assault and rape at the hands of the invading Russian soldiers. I am amazed at her and all the women’s ability to survive. Unexpectedly, my thoughts were drawn to the lives of women today. Reading this book really made me think about how women are treated as – in the author’s words - "lumps of female flesh." Do women exist merely to meet men's "needs" whether it is to “Grab ’em by the pussy” or to be raped as a "weapon of war?"
Nonfiction: Psychology, Philosophy, Holocaust
Yes to Life: In Spite of Everything by Viktor E. Frankl
This short, 127-page, book contains the public lectures Viktor Frankl presented in Vienna eleven months after he was liberated from the Nazi concentration camps.
“Frankl knew well the toxicity of propaganda deployed by the Nazis in their rise to power and beyond. It was aimed, he saw, at the very value of existence itself, assessing the worthlessness of life – at least for anyone, like himself, who fell into a maligned category, like gypsies, gays, Jews, and political dissidents, among others.” - Introduction by Daniel Goldman
Frankl, who would become a world-famous psychologist, explained his fundamental thoughts on meaningfulness, resilience, and the importance of embracing life even in the face of great adversity.
In Frankl's view, people find meaning in their lives in three main ways:
1. By doing something - by creating, by bringing a work into being (purpose).
2. By experiencing something – the beauty of nature, “works of art, or simply loving people”
3. By enduring and adapting to the events and challenges of our lives, and growing - "through loving, and through suffering."
He shares a story of a patient, a young man who was active, healthy, and busy with a successful career in graphic design (#1). Unfortunately, the young man discovered he had a malignant, inoperable spinal cord tumor at the top of his spine. His arms and legs became paralyzed, and he could no longer work as a graphic designer. He had to take a new path in a completely different, physically passive direction. What did he do? He read books he didn’t have time to read before, he listened to music, and joined in discussions with his fellow patients. He experienced art. (#2). In time the tumor advanced so that he was no longer able to hold a book and he suffered severe headaches. He found it difficult to speak. Knowing his time was limited, he called Dr. Frankl aside and asked him to give him a morphine injection before he left for the day so that he wouldn’t “disturb” the night nurses. “Apart from the bravery with which he endured all his suffering and pain, what an achievement, not a professional but an unparalleled human achievement, lies in his simple remark, in his wish to consider others, literally in his last hour!” (#3)
Two profound and timeless lessons from this wonderful, life-affirming book:
1. On being dehumanized by the concentration camp experience: “What remained was the individual person, the human being – and nothing else … he melted right down to his essential self. So, in the end, was there something like a decision that needed to be made? ‘Existence’ is nothing more than a decision.”
*NOTE: Later, in 1959, Frankl expanded on this concept in Man’s Search for Meaning – “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing; the last of the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way… in the final analysis it becomes clear that the sort of person the prisoner became was the result of an inner decision, and not the result of camp influences alone.”
2. On comparing human sufferings: “No human suffering can be compared to anyone else’s because it is part of the nature of suffering that it is the suffering of a particular person, that it is his or her own suffering – that its ‘magnitude’ is dependent solely on the sufferer, that is, on the person; a person’s solitary suffering is just as unique and individual as is every person.”
Frankl’s lectures were given in 1946 but Yes to Life wasn’t translated into English until 2019. Its message is timeless. Packed with wisdom, this is a wonderfully insightful and well written book full of positivity.
No comments:
Post a Comment