What I read this June
History and Social Sciences:
Plague and Fire: Battling Black Death and the 1900 Burning of Honolulu's Chinatown, by James C. Mohr. Shortly after the Annexation of the Kingdom of Hawaii by a group of (mostly American) businessmen, bubonic plague broke out in Honolulu . President Dole and the Council of State unanimously gave the Board of Health emergency medical powers--and in fact, ceded absolute control over the entire Hawaiian archipelago to the Honolulu Board of Health for the duration of the plague crisis. Thus, three white American physicians were given absolute dictatorial authority over all off Hawaii . To my surprise, Dr. Nathanial Emerson, Dr. Francis Day, and Dr. Clifford Wood did an excellent job during the four months of their absolute rule. They knew that plague was caused by bacteria (Yersin&Kitasato had identified it six years earlier), but not how the bacteria spread. Thus, they were reduced to doing what they could: twice-daily health inspections of all citizens, careful quarantines, disinfectant, fumigation, and controlled burning of buildings where people had caught plague, wide-spread immunization against plague. The islands were populated by Chinese, Japanese, American, European and native Hawaiian peoples, but racial tensions (though absolutely present) were kept to a minimum throughout the crisis. As of April 1900, plague cases were no longer reported in the Hawaiian islands .
The American Plague: The Untold Story of Yellow Fever, the Epidemic that Shaped Our History, by Molly Caldwell Crosby. During a single summer in 1878, yellow fever killed more people in Memphis than the Chicago fire, the San Francisco earthquake, and the Johnstown flood combined. Memphis was turned into a city of corpses. Scientists, doctors, nuns--no one knew how to turn back the tide of disease. There was no known cause, no known treatment, and certainly no cure or prevention. Crosby does a passable job evoking the feelings and political implications of the epidemic, but falls apart when it comes to scientific writing.
Birth, Marriage, and Death: Ritual, Religion, and the Life Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England by David Cressy. My basic problem with this book is that it is not so much history or even an examination of "Birth, Marriage and Death" in Tudor and Stuart England, but rather a long series of quotes from sources. Cressy doesn't seem to have any real agenda or point--he's not trying to prove anything. Instead, he just throws everything on the page for the reader to drawn their own conclusions. That could be good, but...his writing reads like this:
"With shifting emphasis and scope for additions, the issues raised by Latimer and Bonner would resound for more than a century: the efficacy of the service, on both spiritual and social levels; its role as a marker between clean and unclean states, as a sign of altered condition, and of renewed sexual contact between husbands and wives; whether the ceremony was a matter of law or custom, and the degree to which ecclesiastical authorities were concerned with its regulation; whether it could be performed in private or needed public display in the congregation; and how much of the responsibility for its conduct and interpretation came from the established church, 'sinister counsel', or from women themselves."
Note: that sentence was not the beginning or end of a chapter, part of the introduction, part of the conclusion--it was smack dab in the middle of the hundreds of pages about "churching". Cressy is like grad student who has done a lot of research but doesn't have anything to say. He just hopes if he writes 600+ pages, people will assume he's added something to the discourse.
Red Princess: A Revolutionary Life by Sofka Zinovieff. Princess Sophy Dolgorouky (called Sofka) was born in 1907 into an ancient family of nobility. She grew up in an atmosphere of incredible privilege and cossetting, raised by her stiff grandmother and, intermittently, her rebellious surgeon mother and dilettante father. Her family fled to Europe during the Bolshevik revolution, and lived nomadic lives while their prestige and money slowly dribbled away. Sofka, strong-willed, intellectual, sensual, charismatic, and with a fire for social justice, shocked her family throughout her life. She divorced her suitable first husband, spent little time or energy on her children, and by her thirties was a card-carrying member of the Communist Party. Despite desperate situations (she nearly starved several different times, lost the love of her life after only a few years of marriage, was interned in a Nazi camp, her mother committed suicide while she was in the house, etc), Sofka refused to do anything less than what she wanted and felt was needed. From a jeweled upbringing to a homey little cottage in Cornwall , Sofka's journey is a riveting one.
Regency:
The Courtesan’s Secret by Claudia Daine. Apparently this is a sequel, which explains one of the problems I had with this book. The reader is introduced to about a dozen characters in the first few pages, each of whom is languid and rich and pretty and full of desire. I really couldn't tell them apart. I certainly couldn't tell which characters I was supposed to care about. Despite their varying backgrounds--one is a prostitute turned infamous society lady, another a debutante, etc--they all play the same role: they speak cattily at each other and yearn for more intimate connections. After a chapter or two of their non-witty wityicisms and blunt reparte, I was done.
Fantasy and Science Fiction:
Serenity: Those Left Behind, by Joss Whedon, Laura Martin, Josh Conrad. Set between "Firefly"'s end and "Serenity"'s beginning, this short graphic novel doesn't contain any new characters or plot. (Although it does have the first Asian person to be seen in the 'verse.) The art's pretty good, and the writing is fine.
Moon Flights by Elizabeth Moon. A collection of short stories from Elizabeth Moon, author of the acclaimed The Speed of Dark and the awful Paksenarrion series. Like her novels, this is a mixed bag of scifi, fantasy, and straight military tales; equally like her novels, the stories range from good to dreadful.
The Ladies Aid and Armory Society stories (about a group of female guards) are funny, though one of them really bothered me. (Why on earth would courtly ladies in a medieval society be concerned with having perfect abs and muscled legs? If anything, shouldn't they be aiming for dimpled thighs and round wrists? Felt anachronistic in its reaffirmation of the "lean is the only beauty" bs of modern times.)
I was impressed by the world-building in "Judgment".
"Gravesite Revisited" was a cool look at ancient burial practices, from the perspectives of both the people burying and the people discovering the graves. Reminiscent of Kage Baker's Company series, or Connie Willis's Doomsday Book, Firewatch etc world.
The nicest aspect of these stories is their focus. None of the main characters are the smartest, bravest, strongest person in the story. No one is a Chosen One. No one is royalty, not even secretly. Every single one of them are ordinary people who mostly pay attention to the mundane details of their lives--sometimes something extraordinary happens, but mostly it doesn't. It's a refreshing change, and in the hands of a better writer it would be truly wonderful. As it is, the "mundane details" are too often the entirety of the story.
River’s Daughter, by Tasha Campbell. Born "colored" in a post-Civil War frontier town, Gail grows up struggling against everyone--everyone but her mother. Her mother is her only ally and refuge from the pointed bigotry of the townsfolk and the casual misogyny of their family. And it is her mother who teaches her not to fear the creek, but come to it as a refuge. When matters reach a breaking point, it is to the creek Gail runs. And there, she discovers there is much more to her heritage than she ever dreamed.
This is not a perfect story by any means--the dialog is clunky, the characters a bit undeveloped. I'd have loved more exploration of the supernatural societies. I can't think of another selkie story that deals with selkie society, or how someone "landlocked" for years would transition back into it. This story doesn't get into it in-depth, but there were hints. But, this is very much a novel story for the fantasy genre. Not only is the story set in America (rare enough in an Anglophile genre), but race is actually *part of the story*.
My one caveat: rape is talked about explicitly (though never graphically) throughout, and the novella literally ends with a murder. So although this is definitely a YA book, it's for older, rather than the younger, "young adults."
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, by Robert Heinlein. Moon is used as a penal colony. Generations of "Loonies" have grown up knowing nothing but minimal gravity, rigid social conventions, and the grasping Lunar Authority. The Loonies are tired of being Earth's grain producers without receiving appropriate recompence, but have no political power or weapons. Luckily for them, computerman Mannie teams up with the first AI, Mike, an old professor, and a professional revolutionary from the Hong Kong colony, the beautiful Wyoh. Together (although not really, because Mike and the professor plan everything and then explain it in tiny words to Wyoh, who stares at them with Bambi eyes and a heaving bosom) the group forments Loonie revolution. Everything goes pretty much exactly according to plan, because they have a supercomputer on their side. That, and, like all other Heinlein main characters, they are just so much more sensible and forward thinking than everyone else.
My main problem with this book was not the rampant sexism, racist tropes, unbelievable Loonie society, clunky dialog (as usual, most characters exist soley to have things explained to them) or laughable political ideals. There was no emotion to this book. No Loonie feels oppressed or downtrodden. Nobody lives in fear or repression. The rebellion occurs for completely commercial reasons. When the war is won, everyone cheers, but there's no feeling of relief or achievement.
Plague and Fire: Battling Black Death and the 1900 Burning of Honolulu's Chinatown, by James C. Mohr. Shortly after the Annexation of the Kingdom of Hawaii by a group of (mostly American) businessmen, bubonic plague broke out in Honolulu . President Dole and the Council of State unanimously gave the Board of Health emergency medical powers--and in fact, ceded absolute control over the entire Hawaiian archipelago to the Honolulu Board of Health for the duration of the plague crisis. Thus, three white American physicians were given absolute dictatorial authority over all off Hawaii . To my surprise, Dr. Nathanial Emerson, Dr. Francis Day, and Dr. Clifford Wood did an excellent job during the four months of their absolute rule. They knew that plague was caused by bacteria (Yersin&Kitasato had identified it six years earlier), but not how the bacteria spread. Thus, they were reduced to doing what they could: twice-daily health inspections of all citizens, careful quarantines, disinfectant, fumigation, and controlled burning of buildings where people had caught plague, wide-spread immunization against plague. The islands were populated by Chinese, Japanese, American, European and native Hawaiian peoples, but racial tensions (though absolutely present) were kept to a minimum throughout the crisis. As of April 1900, plague cases were no longer reported in the Hawaiian islands .
The American Plague: The Untold Story of Yellow Fever, the Epidemic that Shaped Our History, by Molly Caldwell Crosby. During a single summer in 1878, yellow fever killed more people in Memphis than the Chicago fire, the San Francisco earthquake, and the Johnstown flood combined. Memphis was turned into a city of corpses. Scientists, doctors, nuns--no one knew how to turn back the tide of disease. There was no known cause, no known treatment, and certainly no cure or prevention. Crosby does a passable job evoking the feelings and political implications of the epidemic, but falls apart when it comes to scientific writing.
Birth, Marriage, and Death: Ritual, Religion, and the Life Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England by David Cressy. My basic problem with this book is that it is not so much history or even an examination of "Birth, Marriage and Death" in Tudor and Stuart England, but rather a long series of quotes from sources. Cressy doesn't seem to have any real agenda or point--he's not trying to prove anything. Instead, he just throws everything on the page for the reader to drawn their own conclusions. That could be good, but...his writing reads like this:
"With shifting emphasis and scope for additions, the issues raised by Latimer and Bonner would resound for more than a century: the efficacy of the service, on both spiritual and social levels; its role as a marker between clean and unclean states, as a sign of altered condition, and of renewed sexual contact between husbands and wives; whether the ceremony was a matter of law or custom, and the degree to which ecclesiastical authorities were concerned with its regulation; whether it could be performed in private or needed public display in the congregation; and how much of the responsibility for its conduct and interpretation came from the established church, 'sinister counsel', or from women themselves."
Note: that sentence was not the beginning or end of a chapter, part of the introduction, part of the conclusion--it was smack dab in the middle of the hundreds of pages about "churching". Cressy is like grad student who has done a lot of research but doesn't have anything to say. He just hopes if he writes 600+ pages, people will assume he's added something to the discourse.
Red Princess: A Revolutionary Life by Sofka Zinovieff. Princess Sophy Dolgorouky (called Sofka) was born in 1907 into an ancient family of nobility. She grew up in an atmosphere of incredible privilege and cossetting, raised by her stiff grandmother and, intermittently, her rebellious surgeon mother and dilettante father. Her family fled to Europe during the Bolshevik revolution, and lived nomadic lives while their prestige and money slowly dribbled away. Sofka, strong-willed, intellectual, sensual, charismatic, and with a fire for social justice, shocked her family throughout her life. She divorced her suitable first husband, spent little time or energy on her children, and by her thirties was a card-carrying member of the Communist Party. Despite desperate situations (she nearly starved several different times, lost the love of her life after only a few years of marriage, was interned in a Nazi camp, her mother committed suicide while she was in the house, etc), Sofka refused to do anything less than what she wanted and felt was needed. From a jeweled upbringing to a homey little cottage in Cornwall , Sofka's journey is a riveting one.
Regency:
The Courtesan’s Secret by Claudia Daine. Apparently this is a sequel, which explains one of the problems I had with this book. The reader is introduced to about a dozen characters in the first few pages, each of whom is languid and rich and pretty and full of desire. I really couldn't tell them apart. I certainly couldn't tell which characters I was supposed to care about. Despite their varying backgrounds--one is a prostitute turned infamous society lady, another a debutante, etc--they all play the same role: they speak cattily at each other and yearn for more intimate connections. After a chapter or two of their non-witty wityicisms and blunt reparte, I was done.
Fantasy and Science Fiction:
Serenity: Those Left Behind, by Joss Whedon, Laura Martin, Josh Conrad. Set between "Firefly"'s end and "Serenity"'s beginning, this short graphic novel doesn't contain any new characters or plot. (Although it does have the first Asian person to be seen in the 'verse.) The art's pretty good, and the writing is fine.
Moon Flights by Elizabeth Moon. A collection of short stories from Elizabeth Moon, author of the acclaimed The Speed of Dark and the awful Paksenarrion series. Like her novels, this is a mixed bag of scifi, fantasy, and straight military tales; equally like her novels, the stories range from good to dreadful.
The Ladies Aid and Armory Society stories (about a group of female guards) are funny, though one of them really bothered me. (Why on earth would courtly ladies in a medieval society be concerned with having perfect abs and muscled legs? If anything, shouldn't they be aiming for dimpled thighs and round wrists? Felt anachronistic in its reaffirmation of the "lean is the only beauty" bs of modern times.)
I was impressed by the world-building in "Judgment".
"Gravesite Revisited" was a cool look at ancient burial practices, from the perspectives of both the people burying and the people discovering the graves. Reminiscent of Kage Baker's Company series, or Connie Willis's Doomsday Book, Firewatch etc world.
The nicest aspect of these stories is their focus. None of the main characters are the smartest, bravest, strongest person in the story. No one is a Chosen One. No one is royalty, not even secretly. Every single one of them are ordinary people who mostly pay attention to the mundane details of their lives--sometimes something extraordinary happens, but mostly it doesn't. It's a refreshing change, and in the hands of a better writer it would be truly wonderful. As it is, the "mundane details" are too often the entirety of the story.
River’s Daughter, by Tasha Campbell. Born "colored" in a post-Civil War frontier town, Gail grows up struggling against everyone--everyone but her mother. Her mother is her only ally and refuge from the pointed bigotry of the townsfolk and the casual misogyny of their family. And it is her mother who teaches her not to fear the creek, but come to it as a refuge. When matters reach a breaking point, it is to the creek Gail runs. And there, she discovers there is much more to her heritage than she ever dreamed.
This is not a perfect story by any means--the dialog is clunky, the characters a bit undeveloped. I'd have loved more exploration of the supernatural societies. I can't think of another selkie story that deals with selkie society, or how someone "landlocked" for years would transition back into it. This story doesn't get into it in-depth, but there were hints. But, this is very much a novel story for the fantasy genre. Not only is the story set in America (rare enough in an Anglophile genre), but race is actually *part of the story*.
My one caveat: rape is talked about explicitly (though never graphically) throughout, and the novella literally ends with a murder. So although this is definitely a YA book, it's for older, rather than the younger, "young adults."
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, by Robert Heinlein. Moon is used as a penal colony. Generations of "Loonies" have grown up knowing nothing but minimal gravity, rigid social conventions, and the grasping Lunar Authority. The Loonies are tired of being Earth's grain producers without receiving appropriate recompence, but have no political power or weapons. Luckily for them, computerman Mannie teams up with the first AI, Mike, an old professor, and a professional revolutionary from the Hong Kong colony, the beautiful Wyoh. Together (although not really, because Mike and the professor plan everything and then explain it in tiny words to Wyoh, who stares at them with Bambi eyes and a heaving bosom) the group forments Loonie revolution. Everything goes pretty much exactly according to plan, because they have a supercomputer on their side. That, and, like all other Heinlein main characters, they are just so much more sensible and forward thinking than everyone else.
My main problem with this book was not the rampant sexism, racist tropes, unbelievable Loonie society, clunky dialog (as usual, most characters exist soley to have things explained to them) or laughable political ideals. There was no emotion to this book. No Loonie feels oppressed or downtrodden. Nobody lives in fear or repression. The rebellion occurs for completely commercial reasons. When the war is won, everyone cheers, but there's no feeling of relief or achievement.