R.F. Kuang's prose is easily digestible. Unlike the pandan pancakes that stick in the throat of the protaganist's erstwhile friend, brilliant young auR.F. Kuang's prose is easily digestible. Unlike the pandan pancakes that stick in the throat of the protaganist's erstwhile friend, brilliant young author Athena Lui. After Athena chokes to death, June Hayward can't stop herself from absconding with the rough workings of one of Athena's projects that are just sitting there on her desk. Thus starts June's strange, sad story of plagiarism. As keen readers start to see the similarities between Athena's work and June's out-of-nowhere novel, which is nothing like her lack-luster debut, accusations of "yellowface" begin. Just as white folks would use dark brown makeup and pretend to sing the songs of popular negro entertainers in the early 20th century, June is rightfully accused of donning, albeit somewhat unconsciously, the story-telling persona of an Asian American.
I found it especially interesting how, even though they wanted to do a racial sensitive reading, no one on her publishing team thought it was dangerous to use June's middle name as a penname for this book: Song. Juniper Song or June Song sounds pretty Asian to me! In fact, the crass, ugly commercial processes of the self-serving publishing industry is another whole aspect that Kuang exposites.
Also, even after the first scandal, which shakes but does not destroy June's career has unfolded. She creates a somewhat more personal memoir-novel, which unfortunately opens with a paragraph again lifted directly from Athena. Not a quick learner, our Junie...
Kuang has created a modern tale that presents us with a lot of good questions relevant in today's world of publishing and entertainment. Who has the right to tell whose story? Where is the line between borrowing an idea from another artist and running with it to completion? Is not all art, as they say, somewhat derivative?
The book was most interesting, but left me with a bit of a sad chill, as you can see so many reflections in today's storytelling, especially in those who like to self-justify and rationalize their "truths"....more
Barry Gough is an unsung hero of Pacific Northwest history. Although he can sometimes go off on circular tangents and introduce inconsistencies in theBarry Gough is an unsung hero of Pacific Northwest history. Although he can sometimes go off on circular tangents and introduce inconsistencies in the occasional date, reading his books has increased my knowledge of my home region's history tenfold.
In this book, Gough sets the scene for the eventual mapping expeditions of Captain George Vancouver in the early 1790s that finally proved that there was no "Northwest Passage" in latitudes lower than the Arctic Circle and that Cook's Nootka Sound was actually located on a rather large island that soon came to be known as Vancouver Island. As far back as 1592, a Greek sailor who sailed for Spain as Juan du Fuca, who lost a fortune to Francis Drake, told the tale of a large straight around the latitude of 47 or 48 degrees North, that drove eastward into the North American content into a large inland sea. He speculated that this inland sea probably led back all the way to Europe, the fabled "Northwest Passage."
The Spanish navy eventually investigated his claims when they discovered the British, starting with Captain Cook, had sparked an enticing trade in sea otter pelts centered on Nootka Sound on eastern Vancouver Island. Gough weaves a story with Spanish naval officers sent to deal with these British interlopers (leading to an unfortunate international incident), American fur traders, Russian fur traders, all coming to explore the Pacific Northwest to find riches in the fur trade or determine if the rumours of a Northwest Passage were actually true.
The more I read about my local history, the more surprised I am to find how it links to worldwide events. I didn't know that the Spanish had spent a lot of time patrolling this coast in the name of Spain, that the infamous Captain Bligh sailed as a junior officer with Captain Cook in BC waters, that the Spanish namesakes of Galiano and Valdes Islands fought bravely against Admiral Nelson at Trafalgar, and on and on... These stories would make at least one or two marvelous historical fiction pieces....more
I spotted this book in the Manning Park gift store during my last visit to my favorite BC park in the southern interior. Having read a fair amount of I spotted this book in the Manning Park gift store during my last visit to my favorite BC park in the southern interior. Having read a fair amount of BC history, this book caught my attention because it fills in the gap of knowledge I had on the southern interior trails history as the fur trade wound down and the rate of pioneer settlement ramped up in the mid 19th century.
Ken Mather has written a lot about the cattle trade and "cowboys" in the Pacific Northwest of the late 19th century, so his focus is somewhat heavy on the various cattle drives that took place to originally support the thousands of pioneers who flocked to the gold rushes on the Fraser River and then the Cariboo in the 1850s and 60s. However, he does a fantastic job of describing how the routes from the lower Columbia River (modern-day Portland) and eastern Washington State into the Okanagan, Similkameen, Thompson, Shuswap, and Cariboo regions of British Columbia were first established by the indigenous peoples, adopted by the fur traders, and eventually white settlers in general. Mather takes us on a journey through time, geographical space, and history of the region as trade routes developed and expanded in this scenic western frontier, a history that I find is rich with incredible stories that never seem to gather much attention.
I really enjoyed this book as it filled in the previously mentioned gaps in my knowledge. I knew the story of the Okanagan fairly well after the time of Father Pandosy's Mission was settled in the early 1860s, and I had recently learned how the Oregon Territory and Kootenays were opened up by David Thompson and the subsequent fur traders of the NW Company, Pacific Fur Company (Astor), and Hudson's Bay in the early 1800s, but Mather's book filled in that middle era from the 1830s to the 1860s when British interests retreated about the 49th parallel as the border with the United States was firmly established.
My imagination is filled with those early fur traders and cattle drovers, trekking up from Fort Okanogan south of the 49th, up the west side of my beloved Okanagan Lake over to Kamloops and into the Fraser and Cariboo regions beyond, seeing the beautiful natural landscape that was to become my childhood home one hundred years later....more
A good solid novel that tells the story of the Nazi Germany's V2 rocket program through Rudi Graf, a conflicted scientist and associate of Werner von A good solid novel that tells the story of the Nazi Germany's V2 rocket program through Rudi Graf, a conflicted scientist and associate of Werner von Braun. On the English side, we see the literal fallout from the perspective of WAAF officer, Kay Caton-Walsh, who becomes part of a special operations team that specializes in calculating the positions of the launch sites from Holland's North Sea coastline after her personal life is directly affected.
It's a decent, well-researched story, but I sometimes lost track of present and past through Graf's constant flashbacks that the author uses to give us the backstory and context of the rocket scientist's disillusionment with the weaponization of amazing 20th century technology. Graf and other foresighted members of Von Werner's team are troubled by the use of their dream to wreak havoc in a war already lost, when they know it could instead take humanity into orbit and beyond into a new age. Luckily, the plot is fairly simple and is easy reading. Harris has authored a decent yarn of the final stages of WWII, when Hitler had nothing much left to hurl at the allies other than Vengeance.
For me personally, it was also interesting to read about the coastal area around Scheveningen being used as the launching point for the Vengeance Weapons, as I have traveled there several times on family trips to the Netherlands in later, happier times....more
I had read this autobiographical piece by the Rush drummer, Neil Peart, some years ago, but I decided to read it again after finishing Geddy Lee's recI had read this autobiographical piece by the Rush drummer, Neil Peart, some years ago, but I decided to read it again after finishing Geddy Lee's recent biography My Effin' Life.
I don't know what it is about these Canadian rock icons, but the way they tell stories and describe life is quite resounding with me. All us Rush fans need next is for guitarist Alex Lifeson to write his story!
Neil Peart wrote Ghost Rider in the early 2000s, when he was just getting his life back on track from a crushing double-whammy loss: in August 1997, his daughter, on the cusp of adulthood, was killed in a tragic car accident, and within months, his wife was diagnosed with terminal cancer and died.
The stars are not wanted now Put out every one Pack up the moon And dismantle the sun Pour away the ocean And sweep up the wood For nothing now can ever Come to any good W.H. Auden
The book briefly recounts the tragic context and then launches into his account of a sort of self-imposed exile. Not knowing what else to do with his life, Peart gets on his BMW GS motorcycle and just keeps driving throughout North America as a form of therapy for his undertandably fragile "little baby soul".
Neil Peart is not only the drummer of Rush but acts is the group's lyricist as well. The guy has a way with words, likely because he is also an avid reader. If you are a Rush fan, you know that Rush's music explores themes related to life philosophy, science, science-fiction, mythology and all sorts of esoteric stuff, and these are driven by Peart's lyrics, which in turn are driven by his very large reading list. So, although there is obviously a certain degree of "woe is me" throughout this autobiography, there is also a lot of keen insight about love and loss, coping with tragedy, and the human condition in general. On top of that, Peart adds his keen observations on the geography and sense of place along the varied route of his travels: the Canadian shield, Canada's Northwest and Yukon Territories, British Columbia, the Western US deserts, and Mexico and Belize.
The text is not only made up of his later narrative as he writes the book, but it also includes snippets from original journal entries he made throughout the travels, as well as letters and postcards he wrote to friends and family. Especially interesting and prevalent amongst his letters are those to his best friend abd erstwhile riding buddy, Brutus, who has been sadly detained by the US justice system.
There are so many poignant layers to this partial life story of a very private yet introspective man. Partly a travelogue, partly a journal of healing, partly a search for the meaning of life, and partly a primal scream at the injustice life has handed him, Peart gives the reader much to think about and savour through his tale of personal suffering and renewal.
Little by little, you can see the tone of Peart's diary entries and letters change as he starts to come to terms with his loss, finds new love, and ultimately reboots his life and musical career with his bandmates.
Sadly, 20 years after he wrote this book, Neil Peart himself died of cancer after being diagnosed with a terminal glioblastoma....more
Full disclosure: I have been a Rush fan since high-school, which is perhaps why I rate this biography so highly.
Geddy Lee was the bassist of the CanaFull disclosure: I have been a Rush fan since high-school, which is perhaps why I rate this biography so highly.
Geddy Lee was the bassist of the Canadian power-trio Rush, a band that started out of Geddy Lee and fellow guitarist Alex Lifeson's highschool dreams and became a multi-platinum giant of the global music business over 40 years, while still maintaining the highschool nerdiness of its admittedly nerdy founders. Drummer Neil Peart joined the band just as they broke into the mainstream in 1974, and these three truly became like brothers.
This genuine and open style, with often self-deprecating, Canadian humour makes this book a treat to read for not only Rush fans, but perhaps anyone who grew up in Canada in the 1970s through 1990s. Lees narrative style is much like sitting in your suburban basement with your best friend, shooting the breeze and reliving memories.
Not all the memories that Lee shares are sunshine and rainbows either. He quite rightly delves into some sad and scary family history, explaining how his parents met and miraculously survived the holocaust as Polish Jews. You can see how this left an indelible mark on the young Gershon Lee Weinrib, living in suburban Toronto. He became somewhat of a rebel when his father died when he was just a young teenager--growing his hair long, listening to "weird" music, changing his name to something "stage-friendly" and losing all interest in school. Although he had quite a different highschool experience than me and most Canadian kids, there is something familiar about the alienation of adolescence that people of all different strokes can easily identify with.
After exploring his early years and family of origin story, the book moves logically and chronologically through the band's development and the adventures they have as a prolific album producing and touring group.
Geddy is not too shy about getting into more personal details that play into his story, while adroitly avoiding salaciousness and gossip. I must admit, the stories of drug consumption surprised me a little, as the band members always comported themselves with such dignity in public and pulled off amazing and professional stage performances. But this is the essential thing about Rush and those three gentlemen: they were genuinely interested in expressing their art to the fullest without the pretensions that others at that level may fall into. To the very last show in the summer of 2015, they were essentially three high-school nerds, living their musical dream. The drug scene of the 70-80s was perhaps unavoidable, and it seems not to have negatively affected them.
Of necessity, the closing chapters are tinged with sadness with the passing of drummer Neil Peart, whose life had already stumbled over earlier tragedies due to the untimely death of his teenage daughter and his wife, both within a year in 1998. Once again, Geddy handles it well, expressing his emotions with dignity and candor while letting his fans know what those days were like for him and Alex and their families. Rush can never exist again as it was, but the amazing story of these guys should last a very long time.
I consumed this book quickly, reading its 500 pages, also filled with wonderful photographs, in just two weeks. It also got me listening to Rush again, which I haven't done much of in the last few years! ...more
At times, this read more like a Neil Gaiman than an Adrian Tchaikovsky novel: a child, Liff, living on one of the terraformed worlds in Avrana Kern's At times, this read more like a Neil Gaiman than an Adrian Tchaikovsky novel: a child, Liff, living on one of the terraformed worlds in Avrana Kern's universe encounters a group of strangers who capture her attention. Are they from one of the outer farms? Why do they seem different from the other settlers of her world? Why is her teacher, Miranda, who is one of these strangers, so compelling? Why does she have memories of meeting them before, and horrific memories of them dying sometime ago? It is a story with talking birds and a witch on the borderlands of childhood memory...
Tchaikovsky confuses us, the readers, much like the characters in the book get confused. Liff fondly remembers her grandfather who founded the settlement with his fellow terraformers. She has a memory, or is it a vision, of him embarking on an important search from which he never returned. Was he seeking the witch? But Captain Holt died generations before Liff was born. But she remembers him as her grandfather.
Don't worry that you are losing the thread of Tchaikovsky's narrative as he weaves through time, as he does in this entire series, and the stories of the different groups. I thought I had missed something important, but apparently, so did all the characters in the story. As we learn the tale of Miranda's group, an exploration team made up from the Portiid, capital-H Human, Octopus, and parasitic bacterial hybrid civilization we met in the earlier books, Tchaikovsky ultimately clarifies the confusion. To explain it in this review would be a huge spoiler. It was indeed something tricky to get your mind around, and the characters themselves had some trouble accepting it too.
That said, this third book of the Children of Time series again makes us think about what the far-future might hold for our civilization. What would we be like if we could download our consciousness into artificial media? What if we could generate new organic bodies at will? What if we could merge the memories or "understandings" of other species into our own?
"What if...?"-- is the essence of all good science fiction, and Tchaikovsky serves that up in style. I think this series will make the Asimov of our generation, if he isn't already!...more
Having previously read Winston Churchill's WWII series, I knew I wouldn't be disappointed in his broader history of the "English Speaking Peoples", thHaving previously read Winston Churchill's WWII series, I knew I wouldn't be disappointed in his broader history of the "English Speaking Peoples", the first book of which covers pre-Roman Britain to the end of the War of Roses with the dawn of Tudor England.
Churchill definitely has a flair for weaving good story-telling into this extensive, epic history. Perhaps my only complaint is that, being of a more rigorously detailed age where a good grounding in British history was basically expected of readers, he sometimes assumes everyone can follow or knows the essentials of these immense details than may be expected for a reader of our age. Nonetheless, as a beginner's survey course of English history, you can't go wrong with Britain's most famous prime minister. This first book has filled many gaps in my knowledge of the royal lines of the medieval ages.
One thing that stands out is how often brothers rather than sons inherited the throne of England, especially in the medieval times where death lurked around every corner, and the reluctance to include daughters in the royal ascension. The English seemed plagued by civil wars due to the confusion around the rightful heir: Stephen vs Matilda, Richard II, the War of Roses, it goes on and on...
Despite all the details of thousands of names and events, Churchill makes the unfolding story of our English history come alive.
Perhaps I expected more of a hiker's travelogue depicting backpacking adventures throughout the Pacific Northwest, but Egan's approach also injected aPerhaps I expected more of a hiker's travelogue depicting backpacking adventures throughout the Pacific Northwest, but Egan's approach also injected a lot of geographical, historical, and cultural content, much of which was especially relevant to the time of writing in the early 1990s.
I am definitely not disappointed, as Egan does set out on various adventures of the backpacking kind, but that is not the book's focus. He indeed takes us around different parts of the region, often re-examining the 19th century perspective of Theodore Winthrop, an early traveler to the area from the eastern U.S. He compares Winthrop's enthusiastic musings of a bountiful future for this new, virgin territory of pristine forests, mountains, rivers and farmland that is just being settled and the late 20th century issues of deforestation, urban development, and damming of rivers and the decimation of salmon, the fish that was the basis of the indigenous culture for this region.
In summary, Egan describes the region's natural scenery with beautiful prose and its modern issues with the insightful cutting edge of a good journalist....more
It definitely appears that Adrian Tchaikovsky is our generation's Arthur C. Clarke or Isaac Asimov. I really must get around to his other works of ficIt definitely appears that Adrian Tchaikovsky is our generation's Arthur C. Clarke or Isaac Asimov. I really must get around to his other works of fiction, but right now, I'm really enjoying his world (or should I say worlds) of the remnants of humanity and their portiid spider allies!
At first, this sequel to Children of Time (#1) seemed to follow the same formula as the original: a terra-forming team from the late stages of "imperial earth" has found a promising system, just like Avrana Kern's team did. When the final war erupts back home and they realize they cannot go back, they do their best to set about their job, this time using the same Rus-Califi Virus to help evolve octopuses brought from earth to help create human-habitable worlds on the planets of Damascus and Nod. Once again, complications ensue, and things don't go according to plan. However, in this book, the Old-Empire team's story is told as historical flash backs interspersed between the story of a current mission of Kern's World Portiids and Humans seeking out other survivors of the Old Empire. This latter group, with the latest familiar Portia/Bianca/Fabian generation and Human descendants of the Gilgamesh, come across the Octopus civilization of Damascus and something else amongst these cephalopods that is strange and dangerous. This is where the book takes on a somewhat different aspect.
The clever spiders and humans have a lot of trouble communicating clearly with their newly found Octopus cousins, so they are not sure if they are friend or foe, especially with the dark menace lurking in the background. The challenge of figuring all this out is the essential conflict in the story. Meanwhile, Tchaikovsky continues to pile on extensions to his numerous wild ideas started in book one. As readers, we marvel at the weirdness created when consciousness can be stored electro-mechanically (or via a network of ants in Kern's case) and how such stored consciousnesses can interact with one another. We begin to ponder upon the possible communication challenges between species that evolved in wildly different contexts of cognition and environment. And then...we are introduced to an entirely alien microscopic species that can store information and consciousness at the atomic level.
I imagine that this review itself must be hard to understand if you are unfamiliar with the "Children or Time" universe, as I am simply throwing out to you these wild yet difficult concepts that Tchaikovsky uses as his underlying plot structures. Perhaps that is actually the one weakness in these books: the underlying ideas are so very different, even for science fiction (or at least the sci-fi I grew up with), that it can sometimes be hard to fully understand and appreciate what's actually happening in the narrative, especially as it first unfolds. Like every good author, Tchaikovsky doesn't just tell you. He shows you. When the ideas are this wild and complex, though, it's difficult to catch the plot turns right away.
Even with the weirdness and complexity, there is something reassuring about these stories. I think Tchaikovsky never loses sight of universal human truths and patterns of history, and we see those as touchstones within his worlds of wonder and strangeness....more
This is the science fiction I've been waiting for! If you like pondering the possibilities of space travel, deep-space hibernation, terra-forming, nonThis is the science fiction I've been waiting for! If you like pondering the possibilities of space travel, deep-space hibernation, terra-forming, non-human intelligence, all of which makes you re-examine our present, human condition, Adrian Tchaikovksy's "Children of Time" books are for you.
The book opens as human civilization seems to have just passed its peak. It is off terraforming far-flung planets with amazing technology, but at home, things are falling apart politically as the earth has reached its social and environmental limits. In a terraforming experiment gone slightly awry, one mission has found a suitable, green-blue, earth-like world for future habitation, but the virus that was to speed up the evolution of intelligent life on the planet gets mis-targeted due to an insurrection on the mission. In the meantime, a civilization-ending war breaks out on Earth. Fast forward a few thousand years to when the revamped humans come along, once again fleeing the chaos of the rebuilt Earth, to find a care-taker Artificial Intelligence orbiting the green planet wich is now inhabited by sentient spiders who benefited from the terraform virus.
The story goes back and forth cleverly between the latest human survivors struggling on their ark ship to the portiid spiders on the green planet, ever evolving, learning and developing not only technical skills but a keen morality. This point-counterpoint between familiar humans and the seemingly alien arachnids is very thought-provoking. The reader is torn between wanting the humans to come to a safe haven without destroying this incredible spider-society their ancestors unintentionally created. The ending does not disappoint.
Tchaikovksy uses some interesting techniques here, given the back-and-forth between the two civilizations. I enjoyed how, because the spider lifetimes are still much shorter than the human, he recycles the same character names of the spiders over the succeeding generations. On the human side, we have the convenience of going into hibernation to pass the centuries in between points of their voyage. It was interesting to think about how the characters' lives spanned centuries and even millenia, but their actual lives were all in short bursts of activity in between hibernations cycles of centuries. It gives one an interesting perspective of the meaning of "a lifetime".
Perhaps one disappointing aspect was the lack of character development in some individuals. I couldn't quite understand the love-affair between Lain, the female engineer of the ark ship, and Holsten Mason, its cultural historian. I guess things get confusing when the age difference between the characters gets distorted through their "on-again/off-again" relationship, so to speak.
That said, this was an incredible, thought-provoking work that does what good science fiction should: make us think about our humanity....more
Perhaps, like many, I found all-too-familiar reflections in the descriptions of the modern phenomenon of jobs that don't quite make sense in a modern workplace that itself doesn't quite make sense. I felt this so strongly while reading, I could hardly put it down and finished this in less than two weeks, which is likely a record for me, a fairly slow reader.
Throughout my working life, I've been asking myself, "What happened to the pre-WWII predictions that we'd all be working less and less as technological advances increase productivity with less human labor"; yet we all seem to be working longer and harder on inane tasks. Many of us ask ourselves why our jobs seem to be focused on meaningless and perhaps often harmful activities. Graeber believes we really could be working 15-20 hours per week, but we don't because of some weird idiosyncrasies built into our current corporate-capitalist system.
Graeber explains this much better than I can in a short review, but I like to think of it this way: in a world where the top 1% call the shots on what items to produce and activities to perform, we are conditioned to work on activities that maintains their lifestyles and this system. Why would we labor to teach or take care of children, convert our infrastructure to green energy sources, or do other utilitarian things for the good of society at large when these don't directly benefit the most wealthy? The 1% rarely care about public health care, climate change, or other peoples' lives, so we worker bees focus instead on extracting resources and finding loopholes in laws so that the rich don't pay taxes and can buy more yachts.
Besides the capitalist vs socialist angle, parts of which I don't wholly agree with, Graeber lists other interesting effects. For example, some high-level employees estimate each other's importance by how many lower-level employees they oversee, so they hire team members more as a status symbol than out of necessity. Also, even President Obama admitted that over-staffing and redundancy in companies like HMOs help keep people employed, so they can pay taxes. Interesting stuff...
The anecdotes collected by Graeber from hundreds of disaffected employees, really resounded with me. I think most of us would find familiar shades of our working life described in this book....more
I read this book as a follow up to my readings earlier this year on the exploration of the Pacific Northwest, specifically British Columbia, and my piI read this book as a follow up to my readings earlier this year on the exploration of the Pacific Northwest, specifically British Columbia, and my piqued interest in explorer David Thompson.
After an initial chapter or two to set the contextual stage of the fur trade system in British North America, Alan Twigg's approach becomes somewhat unique in that he doesn't present a chronological narrative but a series of short vignettes of the various key players who explored the North-West Coast to expand the fur trade and set the stage for the pioneer settlements of BC.
Puzzlingly, for a book entitled Thompson's Highway, Twigg's sketch of David Thompson gets a bit lost in all this, and I feel Thompson doesn't get the attention he deserves in the narrative. Sadly, this was much the case in real life, as the low-born explorer never made much of a fortune from all his mapmaking and died an obscure pauper.
That said, Twigg has collected a wealth of information here for anyone interested in the origins of British Columbia and the men and women who helped build it. I think it would actually make a decent high-school or college textbook, as he provides lots of rich detail of the lives of fur traders and explorers. I still, however, for very thorough and exhaustive histories, prefer the work of academic Barry Gough....more
Maybe I am being slightly stingy with just 3 stars, as this book was indeed a good read, but some things just didn't quite seem to work for me.
Having Maybe I am being slightly stingy with just 3 stars, as this book was indeed a good read, but some things just didn't quite seem to work for me.
Having seen and enjoyed the 2003 movie with Russell Crowe, and being a general fan of historical fiction, I thought I'd give this first book in Patrick O'Brian's masterwork series a try. O'Brian definitely seems to portray life in the British Navy in the time of the Napoleonic wars very well. He immerses you in the naval-jargon, without completely losing you, and seems to generally use dialog and description that brings a sense of reality to the early 19th century. For the first few chapters, I felt quite engaged in the events around Jack Aubrey's promotion to Captain, his new friendship with the scientific Dr. Stephen Maturin, and the hustle and bustle of the 19th century British post of Minorca.
After a while however, the various engagements with French-Spanish shipping seem to blur into one another slightly. Emotionally charged events occur, but the emotion seems to get lost in the descriptions and abrupt shifts into the next mini-adventure. Something felt a bit "off" in the pacing: one moment we are standing on the quarter-deck with Aubrey and Maturin studying a sunset and deeply discussing how this beautiful display of nature seems at odds with the possibility of approaching battle, while the next moment we are two weeks on and the sea battle is already long past.
But for those issues, this is definitely a must read for anyone interested in the heyday of the British navy. O'Brian uses great historical detail, decent prose, and an interesting mix of human interrelationships, especially the bond that forms between Stephen and Jack....more
I find this a difficult book to rate, mostly because it debates key social science issues which were a scant part of my academic experience. EssentialI find this a difficult book to rate, mostly because it debates key social science issues which were a scant part of my academic experience. Essentially, Graeber and co-author David Wengrow begin the book by examining the question of the historical/anthropological roots of inequality, starting with the old academic chestnut of Rousseau's "noble savage" concept of a world where our ancient ancestors had much more equalitarian systems due to the simplicity of their lifestyles that were eventually overwhelmed by hierarchies imposed by growing complexities adapted to the technology of agriculture and war.
They quickly begin to look at various anthropological case studies, really going back to the "Dawn of Everything", in which it appears that mankind did not necessarily need to follow a set, expected evolutionary path from goddesses and gardens to farms, guns, germs and steel that most historians seem to focus on. In fact, they point out that many alternatives arrangements seem to have possibly existed and could still exist for the ways in which we politically organize ourselves.
A highlight of the book for me were the counter-cases of how much the "noble savages" of North America may have encouraged the European enlightenment throughout the 16th to 18th centuries. I had never heard of the Baron of Lahontan's travels and his records of the indigenous sage Kondarionk's wisdom. Interesting stuff there!
One aspect of the book that folks may nitpick about is how the authors criticize past historians' and anthropologists' assumptions and cherry picking of facts to reach their conclusions about the inevitability of our current social hierarchies while they themselves may be doing a bit of this with their own counterpoints. Again, I don't have the background in anthropology to be able to criticize this myself.
All in all, this was an enjoyable, yet somewhat lengthy book about how humankind's social inequalities and social structures may have evolved from, while pointing out possibilities that they were not inevitable. One is left pondering why we can't creativity rethink our way out of many of our current messes given the apparent flexibility and adaptability of our ancestors. Perhaps we can, and there is hope!...more
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