book review: hidden figures

Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race is pretty much what the title implies. Margot Lee Shetterly tells the story of the West Computers, starting from the WW2 days when computers meant people who did math, up to the Apollo 7 mission. It was a story I hadn’t heard before, not like the women of Bletchley Park breaking the Nazi codes in WW2 (though I suppose even the Bletchley story isn’t something I grew up hearing).

The story is interesting and Shetterly tells it well, though it does meander through a few people’s stories, meaning it doesn’t have a person to hang the story on (I imagine the movie version was more focused than the book is). It felt a bit like a lot of anecdotes plus authorial interjections about how meaningful that was.

One thing I wanted a lot more of was what exactly these women did. I wanted to see some math, instead of just taking the author’s word that they were doing very smart things. I kind of got the impression that Shetterly didn’t trust her audience to actually find the math interesting, and that put a bit of an interpretive distance between the text and me. It also felt a bit like a model-minority narrative, but that’s less about the book than about the decision to write this specific book, so whatever. Also, the military-industrial-complex rah rah ing (look how much these scientists had to do with the B-29 that delivered death to millions of people) was something that raised my hackles.

But in all, it was good.

book review: the last days of new paris

I’ve been waiting to read China Miéville’s The Last Days of New Paris since it came out. I own a copy. It’s in one of the boxes of books I still haven’t unpacked. After reading about Hitler I was ready for something beautiful and this book was.

It’s mostly about Paris and Surrealist art. Because it’s a Miéville book we’re following Paris’ 1950s resistance against the occupying Nazis in a city where art and demons fight in the streets. It’s about how art can’t be controlled and about secret agents and heroism and discernment.

I loved it, and loved that the appendix has a list of most of the artworks referred to in the novella so if you wanted to study up on surrealism, you have a good launching point.

book review: hitler – ascent 1889 – 1939

I’ve mentioned before that I’m trying to read more nonfiction in 2017. Part of that is to avoid the constant churn of shit that is the news cycle of doom, but without going full-on escapist all the time. It’s a shitty testament to my ability to objectify other times and their inhabitants that reading a book about the rise of Hitler feels less depressing than opening my Twitter app, but here we are.

There were a number of pieces of the rise of Hitler that I knew of, like the Beer Hall Putsch and The Night of the Long Knives, but I didn’t have a clear idea of what actually happened in those events. Volker Ullrich’s Hitler: Ascent 1889 – 1939 was good at filling in the gaps in my knowledge.

I came to this book through Michiko Kakutani’s excellent (pre-2016 US election) review of it. That definitely influenced my reading, and made me draw more parallels to the US today than I might have otherwise. I think that this book made it pretty clear that Hitler and Trump are different, but the interesting thing is how the public and politicians that facilitated Hitler’s ascent are so similar to the US of the mid 2010s.

Anyway. It was a good book, but I was glad to be done with that curious moustache peering out at me from my ereader every day.

book review: siege 13

I read Tamas Dobozy’s collection of short stories entitled Siege 13 on the recommendation of one of our library members. Dobozy writes about Hungarian immigrants to Canada and their communities, sort of. I didn’t know much about 20th century Hungarian history before reading this book, but the WW2 occupation by the Nazis and then the Communists led to a lot of traumatic life-shattering events, even for those who managed to emigrate to the west, so that forms the backdrop to most of these stories.

They were well-written enough, but I was lured in by a promise of beguiling weirdness, which there definitely wasn’t enough of for my taste. They were stories of informers, and of relationships between people who hid themselves away and who tried to falsify histories. They weren’t bad, and Dobozy is very skilled but they just weren’t my kind of thing.

book review: the path to the nest of spiders

The Path to the Nest of Spiders is Italo Calvino’s first novel and is very different from the ones that came after. It’s a story of Italian partisans in World War 2, told from the perspective of Pin, an orphan boy who attaches himself to a unit through the act of stealing a pistol from a German soldier.

It was designed to be a story of non-heroic participants in the war and succeeds in that. The people in the book are full of lice and weaknesses. The thing that is strangest is how un-strange the story is. The spiders’ nests are the only sort of fantastical and Calvino-ish thing about the story, and even they are described in ways that don’t place them undoubtedly outside the world of actual experience.

It’s a fine story, but I don’t know to whom exactly I’d recommend it. It’s kind of like Rushdie’s Grimus, which feels like it wasn’t written by the famous writer at all.

book review: angelmaker

Angelmaker was my first Nick Harkaway book. It’s about superspies, the clockworking son of London’s criminal king (but the good kind of crimes that are all about sticking it to society’s betters), a corrupted cult of technologists against mass-production and a globe-spanning swarm of mechanical bees. It’s pretty amazing.

In a lot of ways it reminded me of a more pulpy-fun Thomas Pynchon novel, though Neal Stephenson might be a bit more apt a comparison. Joe Spork doesn’t fall into the Stephenson-ultracompetence trap though. He’s just a guy caught up in things too big for him to deal with on his own. There’s a murder and torture and with the support of his lawyer and some revelations about himself and his ancestry there’s a plot to save the goddamn world. Very good book. Lots of fun.

book review: onward towards our noble deaths

Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths is the story of a group of Japanese soldiers in World War 2 who are stationed on the South Pacific island of New Britain in 1943. There’s no one character that’s the hero, just a bunch of poor saps who have malaria, malnutrition and get eaten by alligators. It’s bleak as hell.

The characters are drawn in this cartoony style while the backgrounds and animals are very detailed, which is an interesting effect. I feel it put me in their shoes as the rookies got slapped for no reason, or as they decided they needed to eat their fill before going on their suicide mission. This kind of manga is a bit different from what the kids these days are all about, but this was a really good comic.

book review: once

Once, by Morris Gleitzman, is a YA holocaust story with a naive young narrator who’s good at telling stories. The story starts with Felix in an orphanage and he’s trying to cheer up the other orphans by telling them stories about his bookselling parents. The thing is that he’s a Jewish kid sent to a Catholic orphanage to hide. He’s convinced his parents are out on a bookselling adventure and are sending him messages.

Then the Nazis show up and he escapes. He finds a burning house and saves a little girl and then they’re marched off to a ghetto in the city. More stuff happens and Felix loses faith in the power of stories, even while he helps an underground dentist.

It’s really hard not to compare this with The Boy in the Striped Pajamas and it comes out ahead in pretty much every way. Felix is naive and believes some things we know are untrue (and he prays to God Jesus Mary and Adolf Hitler all in one breath), but he’s also clever. There are many things Felix doesn’t understand but you don’t get ticked off at him for it. You can see him trying to keep just ahead of the situation, and wonder at the doublethink that’s helping him survive. The language feels much less like an Englishman approximating what German-speakers might say. The whole book felt much more real, so if you liked The Boy in the Striped Pajamas you should really give Once a look.

book review: the boy in the striped pajamas

John Boyne’s The Boy in the Striped Pajamas is a strange little book. It’s about Bruno, a very naive 9-year-old boy from Berlin whose father is a Nazi commandant transferred to Auschwitz.

Bruno, being nine, thinks life on the other side of the fence from his house must be gobs of fun, what with the pajamas they get to wear. He meets a boy on the other side of the fence and they strike up a friendship, in which Bruno displays his ignorance and privilege. It’s not a terribly realistic story and belongs in the zone of fairy tale, but set in our own monstrous history. Nothing really sounded very German, but did sound very much the way a British person would portray a naive little German boy. It’s like Bruno was Pooh, stuck very far from the Hundred-Acre Wood. I liked it, but if you want a more in-depth German kids in WW2 story read The Book Thief.

book review: denied to the enemy

Dennis Detwiller’s Denied to the Enemy is a Cthulhu mythos novel set in World War 2 and early operations with the organization that came to be known as Delta Green (in a fictional universe – DG isn’t real).

This book takes place in 1942-43 and jumps between a lot of viewpoint characters. These are mostly the heroes but a few interludes in the heads of members of the alien Great Race who’re travelling through time, trying to manipulate the forces of human history for their own benefit.

The book starts with a sympathetic Nazi officer who gets pulled into one of his compatriot’s occult schemes. His partner is sacrificing jews and communists to creatures from under the sea to try and negotiate some sort of alliance to destroy Allied shipping. This isn’t such a bad thing but the creatures are very clear they need females to mate with, which would betray their racial purity ideals quite severely. The Nazi gets information about another Nazi project called Thule to the Americans who come in and blow the whole human sacrifice camp up good. The Nazi dies.

Then we’re mostly with an American who’s trying to figure out this Thule mystery. There are other agents involved and they go to Miskatonic University. There are also scenes in Burma, Australia and the Belgian Congo. A lot of people die.

It’s a good story (I think it’s much better than Detwiller’s Through a Glass, Darkly, but I’m not entirely sure why). The jumping around from person to person makes it a story that feels bigger than one person, or even a handful of people. It’s in the middle of a glabal conflict that the aliens see as insignificant except when it interferes with their plans. It’s all very Lovecraftian (a bit more pulpy than he would have written, I grant) and though the universe doesn’t give a shit about anyone involved, you’ve also got to keep an eye on the people.

This is probably my best recommendation for someone looking for Mythos fiction written without all the racism that makes HPL so problematic.