Stranger in a Strange Land

I recently re-read (well, listened to) the 1961 science fiction classic, Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein. I read this while I was a teenager, but yeah, that was 20 years ago.

The main premise of the book is that there is a human man, Valentine Michael Smith (“Mike”), who ends up on Mars and is raised by Martians without the influence of humans. Eventually, he comes back to Earth, as kind of a Martian ambassador, and through him and his experiences we learn about Heinlein’s vision of a possible other race, another way of being, a way of thinking, and observations about humans and earth.

This book is classic for a lot of reasons, and those concepts keep it relevant and interesting today – and it is a very rational look at things. Sexuality, religion, politics, society. Some of it is amazing – this book has as one central plot line a megachurch run by the Fosterites (a church with weekly attendance of thousands, with music and all sorts of service for congregants and a casino and a bar and….), a movement that I associate with the 1980s, but Wikipedia tells me actually started during the time Heinlein was likely writing the book – the 1950s. To have this fledgling movement so clearly defined in a work of fiction, described by Heinlein, in a prescient way, so closely to what churches have actually become, is quite amazing to me. Though, in the book, Fosterism and later, the Church of All Worlds, have in their inner circle an element of sexuality that is fascinating and probably reflects and contradicts the air of muted or hidden sexuality in the ’50s.

I also like that Heinlein makes suppositions about humans. Mike, raised on Mars, has a different way of interacting in the world and a different set of abilities, like being able to control his body with his mind – slowing his heartbeat when necessary, losing or gaining weight, etc. He can also do much more than that, things like telepathy and moving objects with his mind – Heinlein is supposing, at least in the universe created for this book, that humans these abilities exist within humans and can be brought out with training.

What I like most about the book is the “water brother” relationship. On Mars, water is a scarce commodity, and sharing water with someone (like, drinking out of the same glass) is a ritual that signifies the beginning of an important relationship, becoming “water brothers.” This relationship is one of family, trust, unconditional love. You don’t enter into it lightly or without considering the consequences. You can’t lie to a water brother, you accept and support them, you defend them – these are all reflected, in some way, in the traditional and ideal relationship of marriage. Where it differs is that Heinlein takes this relationship, combined with his open discussions of sexuality, to the next logical step – that people who are in the same water brother family (“the nest”) share partners and there is a complete lack of possessiveness and jealousy. While the water-brother relationship is not necessarily sexual, and all water brothers in the same nest don’t necessarily pair up, there is an ease and acceptance of sexuality, and a separation of sex from the love relationship. How is that possible? Because within that family unit there is an underlying base of trust, reassurance, support, and love. Mike is very logical. If you think doing something will make you happy, you should do it. If you want to experiment, you should do it. You can see why many many free-love hippies from the ’60s love about this book. It’s fascinating. I like the logical-ness of it, the emphasis on self awareness and self-reflection. This is very much a part of my thought processes (particularly about open relationships), and I wonder how much this book influenced me in that direction when I was a teenager. I also see the trend of how this issue – a long for stability, love, closeness – is reflected in the books that I have been choosing and enjoying lately, such as a totally different and fascinating in its own way book that I also loved called the Likeness by Tana French.

Into the Minds of Babes by Lisa Guernsey

This is a fabulous book that dissects the use of television and video media by children ages 0-5.  Guernsey holds equally the voice of a diligent researcher, looking at existing scientific evidence, and of a concerned parent. It calls to question assumptions that have been made.

On one side, in 1999 the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) recommended no screen time for children under two with little research to back it up.  On the other, we have seen an increase in television shows that value education and development.

She divides parents into two categories, the “whatevers” and the “worriers”. She sees that these often fall along lines of class and privilege. While most of her own inquiries are done in the middle and upper-middle class, she does visit the homes of poor and immigrant families. She sees that in poorer families may not have as much flexibility to keep their children away from media since they often share smaller spaces and may rely on the television for cultural connections.

Research on baby videos (such as Baby Einstein) that are marketed as products that will help your baby’s brain develop is just beginning, following strong market demand that led Disney and Sesame to create their own products.

So far, what they have learned it that small amounts of screen time will probably not help with brain development for children under two.  At that age, babies do not have the perception skills to interpret what they are seeing.  The author says that they will probably get more out of watching a parent fold laundry and much more out of being spoken to.  But it probably won’t hurt them, either and for some parents, it may be the only way to safely occupy their children to make dinner or take a shower.  What they may be negatively affected by is background television.  In this case, the active engagement of parents tends to decrease and also the children will simply hear less because of the background noise.  Because of these two factors, children’s learning opportunities are greatly reduced.

For older children, some television shows and video games fare better as tools to build learning, reasoning and social skills.  Most interesting findings, in my opinion are that the age appropriateness of a show has as much to do with structure as it does content. Those of us that have nostalgia for Sesame Street and the Muppet Show will be disappointed to hear that children 3-5 respond the most positively to a short show with a linear, structured and interactive plotline. Some of the shows mentioned are Dora the Explorer, Dragon Tales and Blues Clues.

Additionally, she warns parents to be wary of anything that contains violence.  There is some evidence that children who see violence are less cooperative.  Surprisingly, even violence that results in resolution is problematic.

“…they came to realize that the “be nice, be good” messages at the end of some children’s programs were not getting through to young viewers.  The resolution was drowned out by the usually more-engaging scenes of conflict that drove the plot.”

Ultimately choosing the media in the family is really tricky, particularly if there are young children of varying ages.  A show that may benefit and be age appropriate for a 6 year-old will most likely not be for a 2 or 3 year-old.  And in the end, it is parent interaction that is always going to benefit a child the most.

Although I have done my best to summarize many of Guernsey’s findings, I highly recommend this book for those interested.  The book provides an inroad to understanding how kids learn by looking at the ways they do and do not respond to screen time.

She delves deeply into the studies and describes them in minute details to help the reader picture exactly what is happening, which I found fascinating.  Additionally, she does a good job of incorporating her own experience and is very practical about using television as a respite.  She supports the studies through follow-up interviews to experts in an attempt to address the questions as thoroughly as possible.  Since the research really is relatively new, there are times that she hits a dead end because the findings are just not there yet.

Diary of an Exercise Addict by Peach Friedman

A good memoir should do at least one of two simple things: make me laugh or cry.  A really good one may be able to do both.  I would still consider recommending a memoir that does neither of these if it is an interesting story with good analysis.  Unfortunately, Friedman’s book is disappointing on all counts.

I picked up this book on a whim when I saw it in the new arrivals section of my local used book store.  I have been thinking a lot about my own diet and exercise recently (and always have historically) and the idea of exercise addiction was intriguing. Certainly the story of someone that has struggled with exercise bulimia – a compulsion to purge calories through excessive exercise – is a solid premise for a useful and engrossing story.

I got off to a bad start with the book when I saw that it wasn’t really a diary (or even a reconstructed diary), while it did use a diary format.  Entries ranged from ½ page to a few pages and covered anywhere from a day to a months time.  But, even some of the entries marked with a single day were written about a longer time period.  Most of the entries are written in the past tense with a reflective tone. Mixed in were what appeared to be entries from Friedman’s actual diary that are printed in computer generated script.   The inconsistent style and time jumps lends to a disjointed voice and disconnected this reader. With better editing, the book may have been a much better read.

Immediately after I finished, I picked up Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress, a memoir by Susan Jane Gilman to reread it. I immediately began cracking up, although the substance of Susan Jane Gilman’s life is really thin.  She just knows how to write about it with such flourishes that make the absolute most of it.  I often feel as if I am right there, relating what she experienced as a child or seeing her through her teacher’s or parent’s eyes.  It is this that Friedman lacks.  I often didn’t feel present and was instead bored, although not too bored to keep reading.

I impressed by the bravery which Friedman bears herself. She shows a lot of ugly parts of herself in order to tell her story, including rage, vanity and shame.  It is these moments that kept me going through the logistical details of her life.  Occasionally, you can relate to her feelings, but mostly you are plodding through the motions of her routines and her life changes over the course of 6 years.

Some of these routines are the substance of her eating disorder and some are only tangential.  These routines seem to have a significance that Friedman implies, but doesn’t really drive home. For example, she speaks many times of eating ice cream and frozen yogurt.  I never really figure out what she is trying to say. Is she guilty for eating unhealthily? Does she use it to rationalize exercise later?  Does she feel free of her disorder enough to indulge?  Also, she talks about her hair a number of times and it is not clear if she is actually this vain or if she is intentionally pointing out the sort of vanity that leads to eating disorders.

Ironically, I most liked Friedman’s voice in the Epilogue.  Here, she discusses the nuts and bolts of her actual recovery, which she gives nods to throughout the book, but doesn’t previously deconstruct.  She looks at her own emotional process and what she has learned about eating disorders and culture.  I wish that her intelligent analysis had been able to permeate the rest of the book instead of countless details that we are never able to make sense of.

The Time Traveler’s Wife

I bought The Time Traveler’s Wife as a fun, summer read. It’s been wildly popular, on all of the mainstream bestseller lists and is now a Hollywood film.

The book is the story of the intermingled lives of Henry and Clare – Henry involuntarily travels through time, mostly to the past. It is told chronologically according to Clare’s life, and includes both Clare and Henry’s perspectives. Niffenegger does a wonderful job of letting this chronology unfold, of letting the reader be just confused enough about what is going on to make it interesting and not overwhelming. I loved Niffenegger’s style, I thought it was easy to read and the story compelling, it was thoughtful and different. Niffenegger supposes and presents the complexities of time travel emotionally, physically – and what it might do to relationships and life. And love. Really, it’s a lot about love. It’s not the same story you read every day.

This was a very emotional read for me, primarily because of the book being placed in contemporary times in the US, in lives that are similar enough to mine that helped me connect with them in a way that reading about other worlds doesn’t. So, Niffenegger accomplished, for me, what I suppose all authors hope for: I felt emotionally connected to the characters. So much so that when things I didn’t like happened to the characters that I had to go through a mental process to pull back and think to myself  that this was just a choice the author made, and nothing else. But I do wonder why the author made those decisions (I’ll have a lot more to say about this topic when I post my review of Perdido Street Station by China Miéville, which I am working on and will post as soon as Manjula gives me back my copy).

Engaging the Muslim World

As I consider Juan Cole’s latest book, Engaging the Muslim World, I cannot help but review it in light of the 2009 Fortune 500 list of top global companies, released this week. My local paper—The Straits Times—sees the Fortune list as a chance to promote two Singaporean companies that made the cut, hail the increase in Chinese corporations in the rankings, and highlight the fall of US firms. Wal-Mart no longer tops the list, and the number of US companies ranked is the lowest it has ever been. I cannot help but notice that seven of the top ten Fortune 500 firms are petro-chemical companies and that the other three (Wal-Mart, ING, and Toyota) are only one degree of separation from hydrocarbon industries. The connection between Fortune’s list and Cole’s book is clear: it’s about the oil and natural gas, stupid.

In Engaging the Muslim World, Cole (professor of history at the University of Michigan, President of the Global Americana Institute, and blogger of Informed Comment) combines in-depth analyses of historical developments and international relations with clear evaluations of the contemporary energy situation, global climate change predictions, and the potential trajectories of encounters between North Atlantic and Muslim States. Anyone who has seen Cole’s previous work (including juancole.com, columns at salon.com, Sacred Space and Holy War (2002) and Napoleon’s Egypt: Invading the Middle East (2007)) knows that his knowledge of the languages, politics, and people of the Middle East is exceptional. He has lived there, studied there, and written about the area for over forty years, and he brings his extensive experience to bear well in this book.

Rather than see the current global situation as a clash of civilizations, Cole frames the contemporary world in terms of two anxieties. The first, Islam Anxiety, is what Westerners feel when they worry about “terrorism, intolerance, and immigration” (1). The second, America Anxiety, is what Muslims experience when they worry about “neoimperialism, ridicule, and discrimination” (1). Both anxieties have some credence, he admits, but too often they have been grounded in crass suspicions and misunderstandings that have provoked cyclical violence, economic collapse, and ecological disaster rather than solve the problems these two worlds face together. (He notes that they are not, in fact, even “two worlds” but one.) In this book, his goals are to clarify the dangers of the present “stand off” (3), articulate the differences between political Islam and radical extremism (which has little to nothing to do with the Muslim religion, which disdains violence as much as most other world religions), and provide specific recommendations for engaging the Muslim world (through dialogue and critique, respect and pressure, diplomacy and intervention) rather than pursuing the already failed policies of containment and control.

Fledgling by Octavia Butler

It is a bit overwhelming, but unavoidable, to consider that this is Octavia Butler’s final novel. She died the year following the release of Fledgling. She was a one-of-a kind author with a broad and adamant fan base, with good reason. All of her novels, including Fledgling, artfully weave creative plots with incisive themes of social justice, race and scientific advance.

I, too, am a fan. And because this is her last novel, it is painful to say that I do not think that it lives up to her previous work. I wonder if the quality of the book was compromised by her ailing health. Maybe, it was because she was attempting to write something “lighter,” as she says in a Democracy Now interview. There are also many internet references (including Wikipedia) that say she “passed Fledgling off as a ‘lark’”. It isn’t exactly light reading since Butler tackles her hallmark questions of racism, power and alternative (possibly better described as “alien”) lifestyles.

She must have had some playfulness in inventing the Ina, a culture of Vampires that live on the edges of society. The themes of the novel surround the Ina’s dependence on humans to survive while valuing both the preservation of the Ina the lives of their human companions. The Ina must feed off of humans, who receive pleasure and sexual gratification from the Ina’s venom. When bitten a certain number of times these human “symbionts” can no longer live without their Ina. Therefore large families living communally are formed, which involve some human coupling and a subtle hierarchy of symbiont relationships.

As expected, in a Butler book, the main character is a powerful, charismatic Ina woman. Shori is under attack and throughout the book uncovers the reasons why. Simultaneously, she is recovering from amnesia due to traumatic injury and is seeking to understand who she is and what this means for her family-in-formation. She is under pressure to find food sources, manage her relationships with her food sources and find links to her past. Butler does what she always does well, which is open up and recontextualize these big questions of social justice that plague her created world in ways that parallel our own.

My Sister’s Keeper by Jodi Picoult

Previews for this movie had me very excited about the premise.  A baby is bred to be a donor for her sister, who is dying of cancer.  When she becomes a teenager, she is tired of it and sues her parents to gain the rights to her own body.  The book caught my eye when I was in a used bookstore looking at this author, who was on some friends’ “like” lists on Goodreads, so I grabbed it.

Cloning is actually one of my favorite topics. My experience with it is in a futuristic, science-fiction way.  Never Let me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro is one of my favorite books and handles a similar topic.  In the case of Never Let me Go, a whole class of clones are being raised to be a source of organs for their sponsors.  The book beautifully handles the character’s (who are clones) coming of age and the evolution of their understanding of themselves.  Movies that handle the topic nicely are The Island (the first half is a remarkable depiction of an imagined cloning industry, the second an entertaining action flick) and Blade Runner (I can’t believe that I haven’t seen the recommended Final Cut that has been out for several years).

So, that is all just background to say that I hoped this novel and movie would be worthy companions of these other works that I have enjoyed.  The setting wasn’t so futuristic, it was actually grounded in reality in a way that made it potentially more interesting, but also may have made it harder to pull off. In the end, I had very mixed feelings about the book.  Since I have not seen the movie, I will not touch on it except to say that from what I have read the plot and devices are substantially different from the novel.

I did like the book more than not. Honestly, it was partly because it was easy entertaining reading. Although it never really challenged me or even excited me much, I never considered putting the book down because it was interesting enough to keep me going and occasionally, the language struck me as incisive.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz or, “The Fukú is Gonna Git You”

I’ll tell you the truth, straight-up:

Hypatia Belicia Cabral de Leon — “Beli” for short — haunted me in a dream. It was this crazy impactful noir-reality anxiety dream. I was in another place, a feverish island that was not called the USA, where I was a tourist. I took a wrong turn, and soon enough a mugger was beginning the dance of our traditional transaction by shooting me in the ankle. And there in the sugar cane field, in the dream, while my mind began to attempt to break down the complexity of my colonially touristic intentions and fears, I saw something. It was fast but unmistakable, and it was the spirit of a proud, hurt girl, who later became a hurtful mother, who later was finally whupped by the invisible beatings of her very own cells — that ultimate thug Cancer. I’m not giving anything away by telling you that. The girl was Beli, who is the mother of Oscar “Wao” de Leon in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.

For the past couple years, critics and literary types have been drooling over Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. This is one of those novels that, by the time it comes out in paperback, has three pages of praise-filled review quotes and blurbs stacked at the front of the book before you even get to the title page. “Genius” is a very common word on these pages; “revelatory,” “groundbreaking,” and “masterpiece” all repeat, too. I’m not sure what to make of all that.

The Mistress’s Daughter by A.M. Homes

The Mistress’s Daughter is the riveting memoir of A.M. Homes and her relationship with her birth parents. The story begins when, at age 31, she goes home for Christmas and her mother tells her that someone is looking for her.

“After a lifetime spent in a virtual witness-protection program, I’ve been exposed. I get up knowing one thing about myself: I am the mistress’s daughter. My birth mother was young and unmarried, my father older and married, with a family of his own. When I was born, in December of 1961, a lawyer called my adoptive parents and said, ‘Your package has arrived and it’s wrapped in pink ribbons.’”

It is her birth mother that is trying to reach her. As she hears the day of her birth described, she plays it like a movie in her head and her birth mother, Ellen Ballman, she imagines to be like Audrey Hepburn.

“In my dreams, my birth mother is a goddess, the queen of queens, the CEO, the DFO and the COO. Movie-star beautiful, incredibly competent, she can take care of anyone and anything. She has made a fabulous life for herself as ruler of the world, except for one missing link-me.”

Homes demands several letters before she has direct contact with her, and immediately a picture very different than her fantasy begins to unfold. She gets a sense of her Ellen’s history and family, health and also finds out the name of her birth father. She sees Ellen’s poor grammar and hears her raspy voice. She describes their phone conversations,

The 5th Inning by E. Ethelbert Miller

The 5th Inning by E. Ethelbert Miller streams from the author’s mind into yours. He made his living as a poet and “literary activist”, and the memoir (the 2nd from Miller) shows it. Deeply connected with the Black community of Washington DC, he writes about failures, life in deep depression of the mind, what it means to be a writer and wondering how much its all worth it. He connects it all together by comparing life to a baseball game, the 5th Inning in particular from a pitcher’s point of view. If a pitcher makes it past the 5th Inning without getting pulled by the manager, he’s usually seen as having a decent game.

A particularly moving chapter ends with “Here comes your manager getting ready to ask for the ball. Inside your glove you hold it and keep waiting for it to speak. The silence tells its own story. The game keeps searching for an author.” Miller gets a lot of his inspiration from baseball, in its slowness and anticipation and balance between the loneliness of the pitcher on the mound and the strength of a team. He turns a sporting game and relates it through metaphor into the triumphs and failures of his own life, especially in family with his brother, wife, and children. Real deep thinker, Miller is.