Book Review - Black Like Me, by John Howard Griffin

In honor of Black History Month, I have finally read the book that I have been meaning to read for a long time but was afraid to. Black Like Me is, quite simply, the true story of a white man in 1959 who dyed himself black, lived in the Deep South for a few weeks, and gauged how people treated him. In his own words:

In order to make the test, I would alter my pigment and shave my head, but change nothing else about myself. I would keep my clothing, my speech patterns, my credentials, and I would answer every question truthfully. Therefore, if we did, as we claimed, judge each man by his quality as a human individual, my life as black John Howard Griffin would not be greatly changed, since I was that same human individual, altered only in appearance...I learned within a very few hours that no one was judging me by my qualities as a human individual and everyone was judging me by my pigment...They saw us as "different" from themselves in fundamental ways: we were irresponsible; we were different in our sexual morals; we were intellectually limited.

The book is to-the-point: it shows human beings' tendency to judge, and how judgment leads to violence and perversion of the soul. It is perhaps the most painful work of nonfiction I have ever read, rivaled only by Schindler's List, and even then I think Black Like Me affected me more, because its events are more recent and it took place in my own country rather than in Europe.

I can say little about the book except that everyone needs to read it. As much as it dwells on the subject of racism, it is also about vanity. Griffin noted that, during his travels, the number of people who were rude to him merely out of fear that they would be seen as being "nice" to black people, was just as great as the number of people who were rude to him out of some true conviction. Strange, how working to please other people can be just as misguided as working to please yourself.

I suppose the real question this work brings up, the question that will outlive all other issues Mr. Griffin wrote about, is that of one's "place" in the world. Is a person's destiny ever really set in stone? When a baby is born, can that baby really grow up to be anyone, and accomplish anything, with the right upbringing? It is so easy to judge people in this world, and I know I have done plenty of judging myself. A friend of mine once told me that charity is ultimately counterproductive, because there have always been poor people and always will be. I can only respond by saying this: imagine it's you.

And, yes, I understand the irony of reading the writings of a white man in honor of Black History Month. It's a strange world.

Book Review - Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, by Seth Grahame-Smith

I have just finished reading the oddly enjoyable Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, by Seth Graham-Smith. It is the first novel of his I have read, although I have certainly heard of his other works.

The novel is written with a biographer's dispassion, summarizing the defining episodes of Mr. Lincoln's life, based on a series of well-repressed journals that Lincoln penned throughout his life, as well as on interviews that the narrator conducted with several unnamed people - who, I suspect, are vampires.

What follows is a nearly seamless blending of American history and dark, gothic fantasy. It is at once a brilliant satire on revisionist history, a wonderful tale of mythological creatures, and a subtle set of jabs at what we think we know about our beloved 16th president. Lincoln is, after all one of the most controversial presidents in our history. He led an attack against what was essentially one half of his own country; he was the first president to be born in poverty, with very little formal education; he was the first president to be successfully assassinated; and in spite of the fact that more books have been written about him than about any other president of this country, he remains today a subject of debate, inspiring authors even today to raise new questions about him, attacking his supposed rational for trying to "preserve the union." There is even a webpage - and I apologize in advance for bringing this up - that questions the existence of Abraham Lincoln:

http://www.reasonsforgod.org/2013/03/did-abraham-lincoln-exist/

But, enough about that. What about the vampires?

Lincoln's hatred of vampires began with an event that took place before his very conception: his father, Thomas Lincoln, witnessed his own father, Abraham Lincoln Sr., being brutally murdered by a vampire. Thomas Lincoln tells young Abe of this terrible day, and then Abe watches in horror as Thomas Lincoln suffers at the hands of another vampire who demands redress (Shylock-style) for a loan which Thomas failed to pay back. Abe makes a wooden stake, confronts the vampire, and stabs him through the heart. But Abe's thirst for vengeance is not quenched, and so he sets off on a journey to rid the country of vampires - only to find that this mission is far more difficult than he would ever have imagined. Abe (thus the author refers to Mr. Lincoln throughout the book) eventually finds help, from the most unlikely source: another vampire.

Henry Sturges, vampire and 16th-century Englishman, claims to be the only survivor of the doomed Roanoke Colony. He carefully advises Abe that some vampires prefer to be left alone and to do as little damage to society as possible, while other vampires crave dominance over the human race. "Judge us not equally," he tells Abe; "We may all deserve hell, but some of us deserve it sooner than others." After this life-changing encounter, Abe begins to receive letters from Henry, instructing Abe to hunt down certain vampires who threaten innocent citizens of this country. These letters increase in number, and this crescendo is paralleled by another crescendo, that of slavery spreading and gaining political justification (as with the Dredd Scott Case, which is mentioned briefly).

Eventually the two issues meet, in a revelation that is at once horrifying and strangely logical: the vampires are in league with the southern confederates. Vampires are planning to take over the country, and the southern slaveholders have agreed to help them in return for a few positions of power in the new undead regime (actually, I do not think Grahame-Smith ever gives a name to the supposed new country that the vampires wish to create; perhaps it would just continue to be called the U.S.A., and other people around the world would come to think of "America" as synonymous with "Vampire"). The vampires like the slaveholders, because the partnership gives them first dibs on the flesh of slaves. Thus, it is with the help of super-powerful "vampire soldiers" that the South successfully fends off Lincoln's armies for four blood years.

Now, I can see a problem here. So easily we can come to the conclusion that we might already be seeking: here's the proof that the Confederate States of America was evil. They were allied with vampires! Aha, I knew it! Those damned slaveholders had a deal with the devil, right there, it's finally just black and white. Yes, it's very easy to say that about a lot of things. Maybe it would be better to think of all southerners as people who are bedfellows with vampires. Swap "southerners" with "Jews," and you would more or less have what a certain Austrian said eighty years ago. The book approaches this idea of absolutism, but does not carry it through entirely, and this ambiguity is one of the book's finest qualities. "Judge us not equally," Henry's refrain goes. There are shades of grey in the humans of the story, just as there are shades of grey in the vampires. Stephen A. Douglas, Lincoln's rival, eventually comes to support Abe. Jefferson Davis is portrayed as a vile man, but also as a victim of supernatural creatures who give him very few options.

Whatever its messages, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter is a splendid novel. It is fast-paced, brilliantly researched, and includes many early "daguerreotypes" that show the dark-eyed vampires lurking in the midst of our history. I do not think there is much didactic intent in the novel. The vampires are not models of virtue, nor are they evil incarnate. They are simply higher forms of life (or "un-death"), making attempts here and there to interfere with human society for their own gain. Abe's rashness to kill the vampires gets him in trouble more than once. Toward the end of the novel there is heartbreaking scene. Abe, having just lost his youngest son to a poison administered by a vampiric assassin, admits an apologetic Henry Sturges to his office. Yet anything Henry says will only incense Abe more, reminding Abe of how vampires, whether southern or abolitionist, have taken over his life and turned it into a waking death. Abe grabs his axe and tries to kill Henry, and Henry takes the icon and snaps it in two. When a man has lost so many things that used to define him, what is left? Where does the man begin and his surroundings end? When Abe resolved to spend his life destroying vampires, did his life become a force of destruction, dooming any possibility of peace for the man?

Because that image of destruction, however fantastical, epitomizes Lincoln's plight when he became president. In order to keep his country, he had to attack it. Can this plan of action ever be truly justified? The killing of approximately one million American people, just so that a few more million people could be free? If southern slaveholders were so narrow-minded as to enslave their fellow man, then why did Lincoln want so badly to keep them a part of his own country? Might we have been better off without them? Most of the countries in Europe had already abolished slavery by the 1860s; I'm sure the Confederate States would have freed them eventually, though every day of slavery was another day of godlessness.

I think Grahame-Smith's reason for choosing Lincoln as his novel's vampire hunter (as opposed to, say, Jack Kennedy, or Alexander Hamilton, or Cab Calloway, or Regis Philbin), was to show that resolution is simply a part of life. We have to make decisions sometimes. Lincoln made a great and terrible decision when he chose to wage the Civil War. Grahame-Smith focuses on that decision, enhances and exaggerates it, when he portrays Lincoln as a man who has accepted a double-life. I think that, in a way, Abraham Lincoln was the 19th-century Peter Parker, pushing himself to do more than one man would ever be expected to do, while still trying to lead a normal life. No one will ever know if he did the right thing, but one thing is certain: he will never be forgotten.

Judge us not equally. Because how can we ever be sure who a person really is?

Book Review - Cloud Atlas, by David Mitchell

The term "cloud atlas" is an oxymoron - not because an atlas of clouds would be meaningless to the average person, but simply because such an atlas could never exist. An atlas is a bound collection of maps, and the very idea of a map presupposes that whatever the area being represented, that area will continue to take up the same size and shape for an indefinite amount of time. A map of Europe, for example, will always be accurate at least in a topographical sense, because Europe's land does not shift drastically on a daily basis. But clouds do not stay in the same formation. They move constantly - breaking apart, pulling together, traveling with the wind, exhausting themselves in rainstorms, engorging themselves with evaporated water. The title of this book, therefore, refers to something that cannot exist: an atlas of things whose deviating masses resist the defining power of maps.

At its most basic level, Cloud Atlas is a series of short novels that occur at different points in time. Mitchell has arranged six different narratives, in a sort of pyramid structure: we read the first half of the first narrative, next the first half of the second narrative, and so on, until we reach the sixth narrative and read it in its entirety uninterrupted. Then we read the second half of the fifth narrative, the second half of the fourth narrative, until we have finally gotten back to the first narrative and learn what happened to the characters who last appeared four hundred pages earlier. Decades, if not centuries, separate each narrative; the author does not always specify the year.

Doubtless, critics have taken great pains to analyze the different narratives: I will summarize them here. In the first story, we read the diary of an American notary in the 1800s named Adam Ewing, who witnesses the savage treatment of colored natives at the hands of white settlers while he is on an expedition by boat. In the second story, we peruse the letters that the British musician Robert Frobisher writes to his friend while apprenticing himself to an ailing composer in the 1930s. In the third story, an American journalist named Luisa Rey pursues the truth about the safety flaws of a nuclear power plant in the 1970s. In the fourth story, an aging publisher named Timothy Cavendish struggles to prove his intellectual acumen to the world as he navigates an unfriendly world in the early twenty-first century. In the fifth story, we hear the testimony of a genetically-modified servant-woman named Sonmi-451, who criticizes a technologically advanced but morally bankrupt future as she explains her rebellion against it. And in the sixth story, which probably takes place many centuries later and in a dystopian distant future where most technology has perished, a teenager named Zachary ponders how to deal with a series of terrible events when he believes that he has brought bad fate upon everyone with his own actions.

As an author, I was tempted to interpret this structure in an elemental sense - that is, to classify each story as a representation of a certain general quality, with the different qualities adding up to a sort of philosophical whole that the author offers as an ideal for the human mind. Adam Ewing, with his sympathy for those who suffer the ill effects of colonialism, represents compassion; Frobisher, reveling in a world of music and having an affair with the composer's wife, represents sensation; Luisa Rey, in her relentless pursuit of the journalist's perfect "scoop," represents impulse; Cavendish, who quotes every book he has read (his favorite author seems to be Solzhenitsyn) in a futile attempt to convince the staff of a nursing home that he is of sound mind, represents intellect. These four qualities then correspond to the four elements of Greek mythology: water (compassion), earth (sensation), fire (impulse), and air (intellect).

Sonmi-451's statement just before her execution, however, shows a break from any of these attempts at a philosophical outlook on life. Horrified by the depravity she has witnessed in a bleak world that reminded me of why I don't like the movie Blade Runner, derisive at any pretensions the court officials have about their own understanding of justice, Sonmi-451 coldly tells the attentive Archivist that any sense of order in the world will collapse eventually, that a belief in one's permanence is precisely what causes one's downfall. "As Seneca warned Nero," she tells him, "No matter how many of us you kill, you will never kill your successor." After a life of being manipulated by people, most of whom she has learned to recognize as pompous fools, she sees everything as an illusion. And in the sixth story, the apex of the novel, Sonmi is the deity of Zachary's village. Her ability see past illusions, and to shame people for their hubris, is at once an oppressing force in Zachary's world and a source of hope that someday they will transcend their conditions.

It is not progress; but perhaps we are better off that way.

The writing of the novel is extraordinary. Each story has a unique voice, and I almost had trouble believing that a single author wrote all of it. Every protagonist somehow becomes aware of the previous protagonist: Frobisher discovers the journals of Ewing; Luisa meets Dr. Rufus Sixsmith, the man to whom Frobisher sent his letters decades ago; Cavendish decides to publish a manuscript of "The First Luisa Rey Mystery"; Sonmi-451 watches a "disney" about the life of Timothy Cavendish; and Zachary witnesses a holographic recording of Sonmi-451's testimony, though he does not understand her language at all. The connections between the characters are thin, and Mitchell shows little interest in bridging the gaps in the overall timeline. We have only a vague idea of what destroyed civilization as we know it and brought Zachary's world back to the stone ages. So many causes probably contributed, so many people probably worked so hard to protect one another (or perhaps just protect their own private interests).

Cloud Atlas is, as I noted before, a thing that does not exist. And Mitchell does not try to tease it into existence. We see no grand plan, no progression, no symbolic journey that leaves us with the taste of "true meaning" on our tongues. It is a profound exploration of all the wonderful and terrible things people can do, without the author plastering the inside of the cover with a "map" that shows how it all fits together. The novel has very little science-fiction or fantasy. And while I would not call it a "celebration of life" (as I did with the novel Forever; I get the feeling David Mitchell does not enjoy himself writing a novel the way Pete Hamill does), Cloud Atlas has moments of relief and wonder, in spite of the erratic, destructive nature of the plot. When Adam Ewing's father-in-law chastises Adam for his idealism, his pointless dedication to abolitionism, the father-in-law predicts, "Only as you gasp your dying breath shall you understand, your life amounted to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean!" Unruffled, Adam merely responds, "Yet what is any ocean but a multitude of drops?"

I will confess that I really just don't know what to make of this book. If I had written it, I would have enabled the different protagonists to meet each other, and work together toward some greater goal. But, from what I have read, Mitchell had no interest in a greater goal. Cloud Atlas is a masterpiece, but it is perhaps the least teleological masterpiece I have ever read. Somewhat in the spirit of Nabokov, Mitchell paints a world where nothing quite fits in, where everyone is "doing his own thing" and occasionally elbowing someone in the ribs because we've all been squeezed into a room that's just a bit too small. Because, if everything is connected, then the connections become pernicious snares that restrict our movements. The first four protagonists of the novel operate under the illusion of personal freedom; the last two know that everything influences and is in turn influenced:

Souls cross ages like clouds cross skies, an' tho' a cloud's shape nor hue nor size don't stay the same, it's still a cloud an' so is a soul. Who can say where the cloud's blowed from or who the soul'll be 'morrow? Only Sonmi the east an' the west an' the compass an' the atlas, yay, only the atlas o' clouds.

In 1931, Robert Frobisher begins work on the "Cloud Atlas Sextet," a piece destined to resound throughout the rest of the novel. Whereas some novels manage to be more than the sum of their parts, I think Cloud Atlas aims to expose the weakness of this technique. The stories counter and undermine each other, like harsh waves slapping the ocean's surface endlessly in the middle of a sea that does not care how many ships divide its waters. Cloud Atlas is a thoroughly unique novel, and while I am not sure if I enjoyed it, I highly recommend giving it a try.

Book Review - Forever, by Pete Hamill

I have just had the wonderful experience of reading the novel Forever, by Pete Hamill. It is the first novel I have read by this author, although I hope it will not be the last.

It is a sprawling, all-challenging novel, with a time span of nearly three hundred years, and a cast of characters both fictitious and historical. It is a story about New York City (specifically, Manhattan), seen through the eyes of an immigrant who comes to the city for a single cause but remains to explore the city's every aspect, inch, crevice, and mutation. It is a story that shows how a city is both a living creature and a constantly-growing graveyard, a place where ideas are born and die, a constant conflict between love and destruction.

The novel begins in early 1700s Ireland, where a young man named Cormac Samuel O'Connor watches his father die at the hands of an Earl. Cormac is told that he must avenge his father, and he follow the Earl to New York City, where the Earl handles the business of a slave-trading company. On his voyage there and in the city, Cormac meets a variety of people from different cultures, each beautifully sketched by the elaborate conversations and confrontations that Hamill depicts.

Cormac eventually finds the Earl and kills him, but instead of leaving the city for Ireland, Cormac stays and defends the freedom that his companions are fighting for. Armed with his father's sword, Cormac fights oppression wherever he sees it - only to be shot, and mortally wounded, in 1741.

The novel could have ended right there, but it does not, because Hamill wanted to do something that I have never seen an author do before: give one person the opportunity to see a city grow and develop over a period of several centuries. Cormac is brought to a cave and revived by a "Babalawo," an African priest, who tells Cormac that he has been given the gift of eternal life. It comes at a price, however: Cormac's life is now inextricably bound with the life of Manhattan. He cannot leave the island, and he must constantly immerse himself in the different cultures in order to stay young and alert. Cormac accepts this gift, and the Babalawo is not seen again for sever hundred years.

Cormac meets George Washington, becomes involved in the Underground Railroad, watches the city grow and stumble and burn and grow again. Throughout the novel he works as a reporter, observing murder scenes, coldly noting the corruption of politics and prostitution, pointing out details in paintings that he himself had painted a century earlier. It is a story that we all want to experience, the ability to know the entire of a city because we have been there the whole time - a feeling of true connection with the environment around us, even if it is only a small fraction of the whole world.

I am not fit to judge the historical accuracy of this work, but the detail of the novel is extraordinary. Everyone has their own desires and ingenuities and shortcomings. What ails Cormac is that every person he meets eventually dies, and their ideas are either forgotten, or perverted to some new agenda. As the novel progresses he grow weary, sluggish, and cynical.

Cormac's weakness becomes the novel's weakness, in my opinion. That is, no person could ever take this much in, all of this death and cruelty and frivolity and apathy and ignorance. In spite of the Babalawo's gift, Cormac is only human, and he cannot study the city objectively or dispassionately. He falls in love (several times, with some rather anatomical descriptions), but he cannot leave Manhattan, and so each partner eventually leaves for some other part of the country or the world. He saves people's lives, and people aid him, and every friend he makes is eventually torn from him by the forces of time. By the time is two hundred years old, I could sense that he has had too much of life. Eternal life does not make one a god.

Hamill has taken a mortal and given him an experience that no mortal could entirely appreciate. The last quarter of the novel sags, as Cormac attempts to find a way to leave this world for the "Otherworld" that his Irish family once spoke of. Whether he reaches it or not is of no consequence. What matters is this: history has no beginning, no end, and no obligation to fulfill the expectations of reason. Cormac sees the patterns of creation and decay, arrogance and gratitude, but patterns that do not transcend themselves or bring their subjects to a higher level of understanding. What makes history fascinating is how much detail it can encompass without destroying its own drive for constant motion, as if Hamill added the element of immortality precisely because it belittles the historian: no one could make sense all of these occurrences. When Cormac realizes this, he loses his nerve to continue documenting everything in Manhattan, and the city moves on without him.

Nevertheless, Hamill has executed this ambitious novel with much success, and I do not think there will ever be another like it.

November 21 - What should we celebrate?

November 21st is World Hello Day.
For books about social communication, see 302.2.
For books about developing speech and language skills, see 401.9.
For books about how knowledge is communicated, see 001.5.
For books of universal history, see 909.

October 29 - What should we celebrate?

October 29th is Internet Day.
For books about the networking aspects of the Internet, see 004.67.
For books about various information resources on the Internet, see 025.06.
For books about the Internet as a form of social interaction, see 302.231.
For books about the Internet as a type of telecommunications, see 384.3.
For books about website and database design, see 005.7.

October 29th is also Cat Day.
For books about taking care of cats, see 636.8.
(October 16th was Feral Cat Day, so this seems a little redundant...)

October 29th is Republic Day in Turkey.
For books about the republic as a form of government, see 321.8.
For books about the history of Turkey, see 949.6.
For books about the history of the Ottoman Empire, see 956.1.
The book Plato's Republic has nothing to do with the concept of a "republic"; the time-honored mistranslation of the title is misleading. The original title is Politea, which roughly translates to "city." For a copy of Plato's Republic, look under 321.07 or 888.4.

Halloween is drawing closer. Here is one of my favorite Halloween songs: