I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings - Maya Angelou

   1969; 310 pages.  New Author?  : Yes.  Genres : Biographies & Memoirs; Banned Books; Civil Rights Movement; Non-Fiction.  Overall Rating: 9½*/10.

 

    When we think about the start of the Civil Rights movement in America, the 1950s will most likely come to mind.  Things like Martin Luther King Jr., Selma, bus boycotts, Rosa Parks, protest marches, and much more.

 

    But what was life like for Blacks in the years just before all that?  In the 1930s everyone struggled with the Great Depression, and in the 1940s, World War 2 saw over a million American soldiers either killed or wounded, including both blacks and whites. What was it like for black children growing up in those years?

 

    Also, were conditions different for blacks depending on what geographic area of the United States they were living in?  For instance, were things better in Missouri than in Mississippi?  Maybe being Black in California was better than both of those places.  If so, how much better?

 

    Maya Angelou, American memoirist, poet, and civil rights activist, was born in 1928, so grew up in the 1930s/40s. and lived in all those areas along the way.  I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings recounts her turbulent experiences during those decades.

 

What’s To Like...

    I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is the first book in the 7-volume autobiographical series.  It details her childhood experiences starting when she was three years old and, along with her four-year-old brother Bailey, moved in with her grandmother due to the divorce of her parents.  The book ends with a momentous life-changing event in her life when she was sixteen, and presumably the sequel, Gather Together in my Name, continues from there.

 

    The 310 pages are divided up into 36 chapters, which averages out to 8+ pages/chapter.  There is heavy emphasis on Maya’s interactions with her family members, particularly her brother Bailey.  We also watch the child Maya struggle to come to grips with racism (be careful when going to “whitefolksville”), sexual assault (Maya was raped when she was eight years old), and self-reliance (she grew up in a world where circumstances were heavily stacked against her).

 

    Maya’s birth name was Marguerite Annie Johnson, and it was fascinating to learn how her first name morphed into Maya (Marguerite --> Margaret --> Mary --> Maya).  I presume the changing of her last name is due to marriage, but that doesn’t happen in this book. Religion plays a prominent part in Maya’s entire family, and along the way the reader accompanies her to a tent revival (I’ve been to a couple) and learn why the phrase “by the way” is considered blasphemous in some fundamentalist circles.  

 

    Maya’s teenage years were just as unsettled as her childhood, but the reader gets to watch Maya evolve from someone “ignorant of her ignorance” into someone “being aware of being aware”.  In a show of perseverance, Maya applies for, and is eventually hired as San Francisco’s first Negro streetcar conductor.  A short time later, she learns to drive a stick-shift car, with no advance training, at night, on a lonely stretch of road in Mexico, with her dad passed out in the back seat.  Which then leads to her getting stabbed by her dad’s girlfriend.

  

Ratings…
    Amazon: 4.7*/5, based on 36,661 ratings and 4,245 reviews.

    Goodreads: 4.30*/5, based on 555,423 ratings and 17,684 reviews.

 

Kewlest New Word ...

Powhitetrash (n.) : someone so poor (and white) that they cannot afford the missing “o” and “r”.

Others: Siditty (adj.); Chifforobe (n.); Ordurous (adj).

 

Excerpts...

    San Franciscans would have sworn on the Golden Gate Bridge that racism was missing from the heart of their air-conditioned city.  But they would have been sadly mistaken.

    A story went the rounds about a San Franciscan white matron who refused to sit beside a Negro civilian on the streetcar, even after he made room for her on the seat.  Her explanation was that she would not sit beside a draft dodger who was a Negro as well.  She added that the least he could do was fight for his country the way her son was fighting on Iwo Jima.  The story said that the man pulled his body away from the window to show an armless sleeve.  He said quietly and with great dignity, “Then ask your son to look around for my arm, which I left over there.”  (loc. 2590)

 

    The Black female is assaulted in her tender years by all those common forces of nature at the same time that she is caught in the tripartite crossfire of masculine prejudice, white illogical hate, and Black lack of power.

    The fact that the adult American Negro female emerges a formidable character is often met with amazement, distaste and even belligerence.  It is seldom accepted as an inevitable outcome of the struggle won by survivors and deserves respect if not enthusiastic acceptance.  (loc. 3284)

 

Kindle Details…

    The e-book version of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings sells for $7.99 at Amazon right now.  The other six books chronicling Maya Angelou’s life range in price from $5.99 to $13.99.  Maya Angelou was a prolific writer of poetry, plays, screenplays, memoirs, essays, children’s books, and cookbooks.  Most of her works are in the $3.99-$14.99 price range for the Kindle format.

 

Without willing it, I had gone from being ignorant of being ignorant to being aware of being aware.  (loc. 3268)

    For such a tough start to her life, there is a surprisingly small amount of profanity in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.  I noted just eight instances in the first 50% of the book, and most of those were the N-word racial epithet.  The sexual molestation is handled as tactfully as possible, and later on there is one roll-in-the-hay.  I caught only one typo in the whole e-book: staring/starring.

 

    The Wikipedia article mentions that some reviewers categorize I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings as “autobiographical fiction” but it also cites other reviewers (in the “Style and Genre” section) as fully meeting the requirements to be called an “Autobiography”.

 

    I have always suspected that any autobiography will be inherently slanted to some degree in the author’s favor.  For that matter, I think this happens even in most biographies.  If you’re an biography writer, and you want to get paid for your work by your subject, you’re naturally going to present the life you’re writing about in a favorable light as much as possible.

 

    For me, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings was a thoroughly captivating and heartfelt work.  I grew up in the Civil Rights era, but that was during the 1960s, not the 1940s/50s.  It was enlightening to read about the roots of the Civil Rights movement.  My only quibble is that I have to read six more books to learn the complete story of Maya Angelou’s life.

 

    9½ Stars.  One last thing.  I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings has been one of the most banned books in the US school system for many years.  Wikipedia’s article on the book devotes a whole section, titled “Censorship”, to the details and statistics of the bans.  It is worth your time.

Fuzz - Mary Roach

   2021; 292 pages.  Full Title: Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law.  New Author? : No.  Genres : Animal Rights; Wildlife Science; Non-Fiction; Humorous Essays.  Overall Rating : 9½*/10.

 

    He came with the house.  A cute little field mouse with reddish-brown fur and a white snout.  Actually, he was probably here first, back when the orange grove had not yet been cleared to make a housing subdivision.

 

    He was mostly a nuisance, scampering around from room to room.  The standard mousetraps we set up didn’t fool him at all.  So the exterminator suggested we buy some "glue traps" and set them around.

 

    One night, a week or so after we did that, there was a sorrowful squealing in the laundry room.  The little mouse had run into a glue trap, got stuck, but didn’t immediately die.  He started hyperventilating when I picked up the trap-plus-mouse and eyeballed him.

 

    What to do?  I could toss him into the trash can and let him starve, but that would be cruel. So I bopped him on his stuck head with a screwdriver and that did the trick.  He died instantly, executed for merely being in the way of human encroachment.  But I’ve always wondered…

 

    Was there a more humane way to handle the “mouse in the house”?

 

What’s To Like...

    Fuzz is Mary Roach’s latest book, and the fifth of hers that I’ve read.  In it, she examines the inevitable tensions that arise when humans overrun areas where other animals are already comfortably existing.  We humans will prevail, of course, but figuring out how to best handle those displaced species is quite the challenge.

 

    The diversity of animal groups examined is impressive.  Bears and wolves can get territorial when hikers and campers invade their domain; but they also take keen delight in raiding the dumpsters of any nearby cities.  In northern India, elephants and leopards are an obvious hazard, but deaths by macaque monkey attacks are also a problem.  California has its cougars, the Vatican has its gulls, farmers have their crows, and everyone everywhere (including me) may have to deal with rats and mice.  Even the plant kingdom gets involved.  Douglas firs engage in what the author calls “arboreal manslaughter”, and legumes such as rosary beans and castor beans are accomplices in murders.

 

    Mary Roach is a “hands-on” writer.  She takes an intensive 5-day WHART course (Wildlife-Human Attack Response Training) to learn what to do if you come face-to-face with a bear.  Hint: the answer is different for black bears vs. grizzly bears.  She travels to India to learn about controlling elephants and to Rome to learn whether it’s a sin to take the life of a rodent or bird.

 

    As always, the text is loaded with Mary Roach’s wit, humor, and trivia tidbits.  You’ll learn whether hibernating bears pee and poop during their long nap, the intricacies of “rabbit arithmetic” (2 x 3 = 9,000,000), and the German word for scarecrow (“Vogelverschrikker”).  But she discusses the serious issues of wildlife conservation as well.  You’ll learn why poisoning, relocating, importing predators for the pests, scarecrows/loud noises/lasers, glue traps and doing nothing are not permanent answers to the problem.

 

Kewlest New Word ...

Bejesus (excl.) : an exclamation of surprise or emphasis.

 

Excerpts...

    On June 26, 1659, a representative from five towns in a province of northern Italy initiated legal proceedings against caterpillars.  The local specimens, went the complaint, were trespassing and pilfering from people’s gardens and orchards.  A summons was issued and five copies made and nailed to trees in forests adjacent to each town.  The caterpillars were ordered to appear in court on the twenty-eighth of June, at a specified hour, where they would be assigned legal representation.

    Of course, no caterpillars appeared at the appointed time, but the case went forward anyway.  (loc. 61)

 

    There is, or there was, a hunter gull that hung around St. Peter’s Square, site of the aforementioned floral vandalism.  We know this because the bird was caught on camera in 2014.  You can watch it in slow-motion as it swoops in, beak first and irony ablaze, to nail the white “peace dove” that Pope Francis had just released.  Every January the pope appears on a balcony with children from a Catholic youth group to read a message of peace and release a dove.  The dove survived, but the tradition did not.  In later years, a helium-filled balloon in the shape of a dove was released.  (loc. 3089)

 

Kindle Details…

    The e-book format of Fuzz costs $8.98 at Amazon right now.  Mary Roach has seven more e-books for your Kindle, ranging in price from $8.98 or $11.99.

 

Ratings…
    Amazon:  4.4/5 based on 3,122 ratings and 201 reviews.

    Goodreads: 3.84/5 based on 26,239 ratings and 3,574 reviews.

 

“It’s hard to be tolerant when there’s a bear in your kitchen.”  (loc. 623)

    There’s a small amount of profanity in Fuzz.  I counted just 12 instances in the first 50% of the text, but that included a pair of f-bombs.  Later on, the slang term for male genitalia was utilized four times.

 

    I don’t really have anything else to quibble about.  Some of the negative reviewers at Amazon and Goodreads didn’t like Mary Roach’s sense of humor and/or thought the text was boring.  I respectfully disagree on both counts.

 

    The final chapter is a poignant personal note by Mary Roach.  She finds peace and coexistence with a roof rat in her home, solving the problem by discovering, and closing, the entryway the rat uses to get into her attic.  I wish I had done that when I dealt with my field mouse.

 

    9½ Stars.  One last thing.  One of the highlights in Chapter 9 was Australia’s Great Emu War, fought in the 1930s, and which has always made me chuckle.  It shares the spotlight with a conflict I was unaware of: the American military versus the gooney birds (albatrosses) on Midway Island.  The winner in both cases was . . . well, Mary Roach tells it better than I can, so read the book.

The Invention of Yesterday - Tamim Ansary

   2019; 407 pages.  Full Title: The Invention of Yesterday: A 50,000 Year History of Human Culture, Connection.  New Author?  : Yes.  Genres : Ancient History; World History;  Non-Fiction; Anthropology.  Overall Rating: 9½*/10.

 

    Okay, I admit it.  I’m a history nerd.  I’ve been one ever since 7^th grade when Mrs. Stoudt taught “World History 1”, introducing us to ancient empires and closing with the fall of the Roman Empire.  She made a profound impact on me, but I have noticed, however, that there’s a subtle bias in history classes, even if it’s a college history course.

 

    For instance, in the “Greeks vs. Persians” chapters (Alexander the Great, Thermopylae, Socrates, etc.) the Greeks are always portrayed as the heroic defenders of democracy; the Persians are always the evil bullies.  The Crusaders are invariably cast as the defenders of the Faith, even though they were invading the Near East.  And in 476 CE, after Rome was sacked, we entered the Dark Ages where evidently nothing notable happened anywhere in the world for the next 400 years.

 

    But how did those Persians view their wars with Greece?  What went through the minds of Palestinian Muslims (besides swords and arrows) when the Crusaders fought into the streets of Jerusalem?  And surely the empires in China, India, and the Middle East were doing something while Europe was enduring four centuries of the Dark Ages, right?

 

    Tamim Ansary examines all those questions, and a whole lot more, in his book, The Invention of Yesterday.

 

What’s To Like...

    As the subtitle indicates, Tamim Ansary places the dawn of human civilization at 50,000 BCE (after a brief review of terrestrial life dating back to 15 million BCE), when homo sapiens separated themselves from the rest of animal world via three innovations: tools, environment adaptation, and most importantly, language.  He divides The Invention of Yesterday into 31 chapters, covering world history from way back then up until now, with the last three chapters even giving his musings about where we’re headed.

 

    Squeezing 50 millennia of history into 400 pages is amazing, but what impressed me even more was the breadth of the realms that Ansary focuses on.  Events in China, India, Mesopotamia, and Egypt get just as much attention as European happenings.  The Americas and Africa also get some ink, albeit not as lengthy due to a lack of annals in those areas.

 

    The main point of the book is that there inevitably were a lot more interactions between all the various empires (aka “social constellations”; more on that in a bit.), not only via wars, but also through trading, traveling, technological advancements, and even plagues.  The author even goes so far as to suggest that “the policies of China’s Qing government did contribute to the birth of the United States.  Thank you for asking.”

 

    There are lots of maps, all of them easily expandable.  There are lots of footnotes, a majority of which are the author’s asides, and worth your time reading.  The text is crammed full of fascinating historical tidbits, including Mithraism (I once knew a devotee of it!); the “People of the Sea” (one of the great historical mysteries); Daevas (who?!); and the etymology of the word “Lombards”.

 

    So if you’re looking for a comprehensive history book that’s both enlightening and interesting, which goes beyond just “Western Civilization” and is filled with lots of facts and trivia, The Invention of Yesterday might be a perfect fit.  You’ll even get to see those invading Persians, the Crusaders, and the Dark Ages in an entirely different light.

 

Ratings…
    Amazon: 4.6*/5, based on 307 ratings and 61 reviews.

    Goodreads: 4.27*/5, based on 1,022 ratings and 151 reviews.

 

Kewlest New Word ...

Concatenation (n.) : a series of interconnected things or events.

Others : Reifying (v.).

 

Excerpts...

    In many cases, the paintings in a given cave were made over the course of thousands of years; people were coming there to paint, generation after generation.  But the oldest of them were made about forty thousand years ago, and the odd thing is, those earliest paintings were already quite sophisticated.  What hasn’t turned up are transitional products.  It’s not like Stone Age painters spent a few hundred generations learning to doodle and then a few hundred making blotches vaguely suggestive of animal shapes and then finally figuring out how to make recognizable horses and hunters.  Instead, it seems that around thirty-five to forty-five millennia ago, people rather suddenly started making sophisticated art.  (pg. 13)

 

    The Americas had grasslands too, but the hunter-gatherers who lived there never developed into pastoral nomadic civilizations capable of taking on the big urban powers.  Instead, they continued to refine their hunting-and-gathering way of life.  The reason is simple: North America had no animals that could be domesticated.  It had no sheep, no goats, no cows, nothing that could be herded.  It’s true that millions of bison roamed the great plains, but for some reason, these ill-tempered animals can’t be tamed, and when you can’t domesticate a grouchy two-ton animal with horns, you’d better not try to milk it.  (pg. 170)

 

Kindle Details…

    The Invention of Yesterday sells for $17.99 right now at Amazon.  Tamim Ansary has eight other e-books for your Kindle, ranging in price from $2.99 to $17.99.

 

In 1290, after populist rumors arose that Jews were eating Christian babies for Passover, all Jews of England were expelled.  (pg. 220)

    As one would expect, there’s very little cussing in The Invention of Yesterday; just 4 instances in the entire book: two “damns”, one “hell”, plus one “for Christ’s sake”.  The typos were few and far between, but more than I expected.  Examples: Atilla/Attila; lamas/llamas; unleased/unleashed; Columbia/Colombia; identity/identify; honey bees/honeybees.

 

    The author likes to coin phrases such as social constellations, social organisms, trialectic (a modification of “dialectic”), progress narrative, belief systems, and my favorite: bleshing (a portmanteau of ‘blending’ and ‘meshing’, referring to what happens when cultures, religions, and/or nations collide).  These are quite innovative, but sometimes I struggled to remember exactly what they meant.

 

    That’s all I can gripe about.  For me, The Invention of Yesterday was a great read, giving me new insights into all sorts of historical interactions and an opportunity to learn about various ancient empires that existed in places outside of Europe.  I’m looking forward to reading more books by this author.

 

    9½ Stars.  One last thing.  There’s a small town here in Arizona called Bisbee.  It’s not well known, and mostly exists for artists and tourists who want to experience that “Old West” feeling.  Incredibly, it gets mentioned in The Invention of Yesterday (pg. 75).  Wowza.

The Tainted Cup - Robert Jackson Bennett

    2024; 406 pages.  Book 1 (out of 1) in the “Shadow of the Leviathan” series.  New Author? : Yes.  Genres : Intrigue; Epic Fantasy, Murder-Mystery.   Overall Rating: 9½/10.

 

    Taqtasa Blas, one of the Commanders of the Engineers, has met a gruesome end.  You can read about it in the first excerpt below.  The “how” is easily determined – exposure, either through ingestion or inhalation, to the malignant blooms of the dappleglass.  It appears there is a murderer afoot. 

 

    Interestingly, ten other engineers also perished recently from dappleglass poisoning.  But they were nowhere near Blas, and they died at somewhat different moments, which indicates they weren’t all infected at a single time and place.

 

    Iudex Inspector Ana Dolabra has been assigned to the case, along with her assistant, Dinios “Din” Kol.  Their task is to figure out who the poisoner, or poisoners, were, and when and where those lethal doses were administered.

 

    But Ana is a topnotch investigator.  She intends to also find out who hired the poisoner(s), which will answer the question of why someone wanted so badly to kill a bunch of engineers.  Good luck on that quest, Ana.

 

What’s To Like...

    The Tainted Cup is an epic fantasy tale set in the Holy Empire of Khanum.  Ana and Din are emissaries of its ruler, the Conzulate, but they are a long way from the capital city, Imperial Sanctum.  Khanum is a hierarchal society where one’s rank is of utmost importance.  Ana’s and Din’s loyalties will be tested, but this is also true for those whom they will question about Blas’s murder.

 

    Our two protagonists reminded me muchly of Arthur Conan Doyle’s heroes.  Din assumes the role of scribe, chronicling the events like Dr. Watson did for Sherlock Holmes.  Ana has some remarkable deductive talents, just like Sherlock, and uses some quirky habits, including most of the time interacting while blindfolded, to better “read” the tones and nuances of witnesses’ testimony.

 

    Din himself has some special talents as well.  He’s an “engraver”, which means he has eidetic memory, which in turn means he is the perfect set of eyes and ears to witness events and to “record and playback” testimony.  And unlike the usually clueless Dr. Watson, Din frequently injects biting sarcasm into his snappy remarks, even when conversing with his boss, Ana.

 

    The action starts immediately with Ana and Din arriving at the manor where the remains of Taqtasa Blas repose.  The servants there seem to be covering something up, but what?  From there the case quickly gets more complicated as additional bodies are found.  The worldbuilding overall is superb, with Robert Jackson Bennett deftly blending it into the storyline, yet somehow avoiding bogging things down with long descriptions.

 

    The ending is how I like them: tense and exciting, with lots of twists, yet quite logical.  All the murders are solved, and both Ana and Din reveal personal secrets to each other.  It is obvious that they are going to be a formidable investigative team for the Conzulate of Khanum.

 

Ratings…
    Amazon: 4.6*/5, based on 3,017 ratings and 463 reviews.

    Goodreads: 3.69*/5, based on 22,048 ratings and 4,903 reviews.

 

Things That Sound Dirty, But Aren’t…

    “Pick a glass and stick it up your damn nose quick!”

 

Excerpts...

    The most remarkable feature of the room was the clutch of leafy trees growing in the center—for it was growing from within a person.

    Or rather, through a person.

    The corpse hung suspended in the center of the bedchamber, speared by the many slender trees, but as Otirios had said it was initially difficult to identify it as a body at all.  A bit of torso was visible in the thicket, and some of the left leg.  What I could see of them suggested a middle-aged man wearing the purple colors of the Imperial Engineering Iyalet.  The right arm was totally lost, and the right leg had been devoured by the swarm of roots pouring out from the trunks of the little trees and eating into the Stonewood floor of the chamber.

    I stared into the roots.  I thought I could identify the pinkish nub of a femur amid all those curling coils.  (pg. 9)

 

    “The number of people holding a grudge against the Hazas is beyond count.”

    “Might you also count among that company, ma’am?” I asked.

    She raised her eyebrows at me behind her blindfold.  “My, my.  That’s rather insolent of you, isn’t it?”

    “I would simply note, ma’am, that Vashta just referenced your old grudges with them.”

    “A rumor,” she said dismissively.

    “And you also once said of the Hazas—I wouldn’t mind seeing all their progeny rotting in the ground like a bunch of f**king dead dogs.  Which is, I feel, mostly how one talks of one’s enemies.”

    “Oh, yes, well,” she said, sighing.  “This is why people are so loath to talk before an engraver. . .They never forget a f**king thing you say!”  (pg. 241)

 

“What a tool cynicism is to the corrupt, claiming the whole of creation is broken and fraudulent, and thus we are all excused to indulge in whatever sins we wish.”  (pg. 286)

    There’s quite a bit of profanity – 22 instances in the first 10%, seven of which were f-bombs.  Later on, “localized” expletives were used—“by the Harvester” and “by the titan’s unholy taint”—which I always like.  I don’t recall any adult situations, but homophobes beware, a gay relationship is alluded to.

 

    I didn’t note any typos at all.  Kudos to the editors.

 

    For me, The Tainted Cup was a captivating first book in a series, with fantastic world-building, mystery-composing and witty interactions.  My only gripe is that the second book, A Drop of Corruption, won’t be released until next April.  I have very little patience when I’m forced to be patient.

 

    9½ Stars.  One last thing.  Here’s hoping that the next book’s cover includes a drawing of the main creature in this story, the leviathan.  It has a major impact on the storyline, periodically comes out of the sea, and wreaks havoc on the human coastal bulwarks, even when the humans are tipped off that it’s on its way.  Yet I don’t recall it ever being described. Is it a giant whale-like beast?  Inquiring minds want to know.

2010: Odyssey Two - Arthur C. Clarke

   1982; 285 pages.  Book 2 (out of 4) in the “Space Odyssey” series.  New Author? : No.  Genres : Space Exploration; Hard Science Fiction; Movie Tie-In.  Overall Rating: 9½*/10.

 

    It’s 2010, and it’s been almost a decade since the first manned space mission to Jupiter.  That one was a disaster, due to a computer malfunction.  Everyone but Dave Bowman perished, and no one knows what happened to him.  The space vehicle Discovery was abandoned, and presumably is still orbiting around Jupiter.

 

    That ship is still American property though, and now US Intelligence has just learned that the Russians are building a spaceship to go to Jupiter and claim the Discovery as "salvage".  The USA has started a crash program (no pun intended) to build a spaceship, but there’s no way we can beat the Russians’ projected launch date.

 

    But aha!, we’ve got a trump card: Dr. Sivasubramanian Chandrasegarampillai (called ‘Dr. Chandra’ for short), who programmed HAL-9000, the computer on Discovery that caused all the trouble.  He works for us, and he will be a great asset to anyone trying to get Discovery up and running again.

 

    So let's do something unexpected—call the Russians and propose the venture to Jupiter be a joint American-Russian mission, with Dr. Chandra as one of the American guests.

 

    Those Russkis are probably dumb enough to accept the offer.

 

What’s To Like...

    2010 – Odyssey Two is the sequel to 2001- A Space Odyssey, both in movie and book format.  I’ve seen the 2001 movie three times, a record for my cinematic attendance.  I haven’t seen the 2010 movie.

 

    I liked the book’s premise of Russian and American scientists cooperating with each other.  2010 – Odyssey Two was written in 1982, when the Cold War was still very much a reality.  To portray a group of Russians as normal human beings, and not the usual brainwashed Communist stereotypes, was a pleasant change.  Arthur C. Clarke also inserts a number of Russian phrases into the text, usually without translations into English.  Thank goodness for Google.

 

    There’s a multitude of plotlines to keep track of.  It’s not a spoiler to say that HAL-9000 is successfully reactivated, but how trustworthy will he be?  Will they find out what happened to David Bowman?  Is there life of Jupiter’s moons?  What’s with those monoliths?  And why is a cryptic deadline given for them to leave and return to Earth?

 

    I loved the attention to scientific details.  Arthur C. Clarke writes in a “hard science fiction genre” style.  I’m proud to say I knew what “Lagrange points” were, but had to look up “von Neumann machines”.  The “1:4:9 Ratio” twist was sheer genius, and I was amazed to learn that the name of the “EPCOT center” is actually an acronym.

 

    The pacing was similar to the 2001 storyline.  There’s not a lot of action in the first 2/3 of the book, but the reader’s interest is kept by the interactions of the multinational and mixed-gender crew, plus the reawakened HAL.  Then comes an extended and exciting ending, which resolves some questions about the mysterious monolith-building extraterrestrials, while posing new ones.  Presumably those will be addressed in the remaining two books in the series.  Things close with an altered solar system, one that is both hopeful and scary. 

 

Ratings…
    Amazon: 4.5*/5, based on 3,323 ratings and 410 reviews.

    Goodreads: 3.95*/5, based on 58,208 ratings and 1,601 reviews

 

Kewlest New Word ...

Perijove (n.) : the point in a spacecraft’s orbit around Jupiter when it is closest to the planet.

Others: Posmotri (v., Russian).; Lingam (n.).

 

Excerpts...

    “You naïve Americans! We’re more realistic; we have to be.  All your grandparents died of old age, Heywood.  Three of mine were killed in the Great Patriotic War.”

    When they were alone together, Tanya always called him Woody, never Heywood.  She must be serious.  Or was she merely testing his reactions?

    “Anyway, Discovery is merely a few billion dollars’ worth of hardware.  The ship’s not important—only the information it carries.”

    “Exactly.  Information that could be copied and then erased.”

    “You do get some cheerful ideas, Tanya.  Sometimes I think that all Russians are a little paranoiac.”

    “Thanks to Napoleon and Hitler, we’ve earned every right to be.”  (loc. 922)

 

    “It’s all very well to feel grateful to Bowman—or whatever gave that warning.  But that’s all they did.  We could still have been killed.”

    “But we weren’t,” answered Tanya.  “We saved ourselves—by our own efforts.  And perhaps that was the whole idea.  If we hadn’t—we wouldn’t have been worth saving.  You know, survival of the fittest.  Darwinian selection.  Eliminating the genes for stupidity.”  (loc. 3821)

 

Kindle Details…

    2010 – Odyssey Two sells for $7.59 at Amazon, the same price as Books 3 and 4.  Book 1, 2001 – A Space Odyssey, costs $9.99.

 

How did one annoy a two-kilometer-long black rectangular slab?  (loc. 1764)

    Profanity is almost nonexistent in 2010 – Odyssey Two, which is what I expected.  I noted only 4 expletives in the whole book, all of which were of the “milder” variety.

 

    The quibbles are minor.  Tame, playful, intelligent dolphins are worked into the storyline several times, and I kept waiting for them to make some sort of impact, presumably of the “goodbye, and thanks for all the fish” ilk.  Alas, it never happened.  Maybe they play more important roles in the remaining two books in the series.

 

    A Chinese space team also enters into the plotline, although it sort of a cameo appearance.  But theirs was an obvious fate since only one of them is even identified by name.  I suspect they'll all be wearing red shirts in the movie version.

 

    That’s all I can gripe about.  If you read 2001 – A Space Odyssey and liked it, you’ll enjoy 2010 – Odyssey Two just as much.  Now I'm wondering how Stanley Kubrick handled the cosmic ending in the movie version.  I'll have to search the Netflix files to see if they carry it.

 

    9½ Stars.  A brief mention of a novella by Leo Tolstoy called The Kreutzer Sonata intrigued me  Wikipedia says it was published in 1889 and promptly censored by the Russian authorities.  Here, it is described as “Russian erotic fiction”.  I never knew such a genre existed.

The Collected What If? - Robert Cowley

    2001; 827 pages.  New Authors? : Yes.  Full Title: The Collected What If?  Eminent Historians Imagine What Might Have Been.  Edited by Robert Cowley.  Genres : Essays; World History; Speculative History; Non-Fiction.  Overall Rating : 9½*/10.

 

    I remember the first Alternate History book I ever read.  Its title was If the South Had Won the Civil War, and Wikipedia lists its author as MacKinlay Kantor and that it was first published in 1961.  The book was short, there were some neat pictures in it, and I still recall a lot of the plot details.

 

    I’m guessing it was a Weekly Reader offering, meaning the target audience was Juveniles.  It sparked a lifelong love of the Alt History genre in me; I still read the genre quite frequently.

 

    Which means Robert Cowley’s opus, The Collected What If, was a personal must-read.  Forty-five essays, penned by all sorts of historians, each one examining a pivotal point in history and speculating as to what would happen if things went differently.

 

    Me reading it was a match made in Alternate History heaven, and the three alternate timeline scenarios for the Civil War brought back fond YA reading memories.

 

What’s To Like...

    The Collected What If is a compilation of two of Robert Cowley’s collections of “counterfactual” essays that contains 20 (plus 14 sidebars) and 25 entries (no sidebars) respectively.  The entries are arranged chronologically in both volumes.  Volume One was strictly military what-ifs; Volume 2’s contents were broadened to include some non-military topics, such as what the USA would’ve been like if Richard Nixon, Lyndon Johnson, and John F. Kennedy had never made it to the White House.

 

    Despite the titular “What If” motif, there is a lot of factual history covered here.  That’s logical, since you can’t discuss alternatives until you’ve presented what really occurred.  In fact, a majority of the essays spend much more time on the actual historical events than on what might have been.  The introduction also points out that the book’s content deliberately avoids “frivolous counterfactuals”.  Musing about what Hannibal could have done if he had an H-Bomb, or Napoleon with a stealth bomber, is just plain silly.  The counterfactual has to be plausible.

 

    Personally, I found the actual history accounts just as fascinating as the counterfactuals.  The British could have easily won the Revolutionary War, and Lincoln’s famous Emancipation Proclamation was more a clever political ploy than a great moral step forward.  My favorite essays were mostly those that dealt with ancient history (such as what if the Persian armies had won the Battle of Salamis), but that’s probably a reflection of my personal tastes of reading history books.

 

    The essays are replete with trivial tidbits.  I learned that the concepts of “freedom” and “citizen” did not exist until the Greeks came along.  The etymology of the word “slave” was interesting, and there’s a good reason why George Washington never wrote any memoirs.  It was neat to see two of my heroes, Vercingetorix and Wilfred Owen, getting some ink, and the eerie circumstances and timing around the 1948 deaths of Lawrence Duggan and Harry Dexter White makes me wonder what really goes on in the higher echelons of American national security.

 

    There are some helpful counterfactual maps and illustrations scattered throughout the book.  The longest essay was 34 pages long; the shortest was a mere 9 pages.  Each essay has a catchy title and subtitle to go with it.  For example: “Napoleon’s Invasion of North America: Aedes aegypti takes a holiday”, which should whet the literary appetite of any alt-history reader.

 

Ratings…
    Amazon:  4.4/5 based on 76 ratings and 35 reviews.

    Goodreads: 3.82/5 based on 603 ratings and 77 reviews.

 

Kewlest New Word ...

Diapason (n.) : a grand swelling burst of harmony.

Others: Auto da-fe (n.); Legerdemain (n.); Irrupted (v.).

 

Excerpts...

    Only eleven [German U-boats] were delivered in 1914.  But (. . .) attrition remained very low, since the Royal Navy had little in the way of defenses.

    The initial English efforts against the submarine bordered on the laughable.  Picketboats armed with blacksmiths’ hammers were sent out to smash periscopes; attempts were made to catch submarines with nets like cod; sea lions were even trained to seek out unwanted submerged intruders—none of which met more than the slightest degree of success.  (pg. 602)

 

    But for the potato, what different roads history might have taken?  Would Spain have become such a vast Imperial power, presiding over the first empire in history on which the sun never set?  (Its wealth would be rooted in a mound of silver mined by potato-fed conscript laborers.)  Would Frederick the Great’s Prussia have survived without the potato in the Seven Years’ War (1756-63), paving the way, ultimately, for the ascension of Germany?  . . .  How many crises of the Cold War, one wonders, were fueled by potato-based vodka?  And would we now, in a rare interval of relative peace, be appreciating van Gogh’s first major, and truly memorable, painting, The Potato Eaters?  (pg. 813)

 

Pascal suggested (in his Pensées) that if Cleopatra had been born with a somewhat larger nose, Mark Antony would have defeated Octavian at Actium.  (pg. 429)

    Unsurprisingly, profanity is sparse in The Collected What If; I spotted just ten instances in the entire 827 pages; and those were mostly in direct quotes of historical figures.  One of those was an f-bomb.

 

    There also were a few typos, such as: cause/caused; want/wont; lead/led; and the bizarre enchiphered/enciphered.  How spellchecker missed that last one mystifies me.

 

    Some readers were understandably disappointed in the factual/counterfactual ratio.  That didn’t bother me, but I love reading about history, no matter whether it's actual or speculative.  Also, keep in mind this is an 827-page, full-sized, hardcover book; reading it will be a significant investment of time.  It took me a full month to get through it.

 

    For me, The Collected What If was a great history read, both the real and the imagined parts.  As memorable as MacKinlay Kantor’s book was, it was neat to see what a bunch of historians can do to make the genre a reading delight for adult audiences as well.

 

    9½ Stars.  We would be remiss if we didn’t mention the final entry in the book, and the only one that violated the chronological order system: “What if Pizarro had not found potatoes in Peru: The humble roots of history”.  The second excerpt above, is from it.  It borders of being whimsical, but was actually food for thought.  Pun intended.

And The Rest Is History - Jodi Taylor

   2016; 432 pages.  Book 8 (out of 14) in the series “The Chronicles of St. Mary’s”.  New Author? : No.  Genres: Time Travel; British Humor; Historical Adventure.  Overall Rating: 9½*/10.

 

    Clive Ronan is the biggest enemy that the Historians at St. Mary’s (don’t call them time-travelers!) have.  He routinely jumps through the security measures of St. Mary’s as if they weren’t even there.  And today is no exception.

 

    He apparently knows what jogging path his archenemy Dr. Maxwell (“Max”) uses, and has plopped himself on it.  Clive meets her as she comes trotting along, and has a surprising proposal for her: how about a truce?

 

    Naturally, Max is leery of it.  Neither one trusts the other, and both have good reason not to.  But she agrees to meet in a very open place of Clive’s choosing.  Namely, the Egyptian desert, 25 centuries in the past.  What’s the worst that could happen?

 

    Well, either party could arrange a double-cross.  Saharan desert storms can be killers.  The Time Police, who don’t particularly like St. Mary’s or Clive, could try killing two birds with one stone.  And the anthropomorphic muse called “History” might override everyone else’s plans in order to keep the correct timeline unchanged.  And you really, really don’t want to mess with History.

 

    But don’t call it Time Travel.

 

What’s To Like...

    And The Rest Is History is the eighth book in the Chronicles of St. Mary’s series by Jodi Taylor.  To no one’s surprise, the hastily arranged meeting betwixt Max and Clive runs amok immediately.  Clive feels that Max set him up, and vows revenge.  And if you’re reading this series in order (which I am), you know an angry Clive is a dangerous Clive.

 

    There is a pleasant balance of time travel and personal interaction ion the storyline.  Various St. Mary’s employees are in various relationships with coworkers, which can be a hazardous situation when you’re traipsing all over the historical timeline.  I like how Clive’s character is being developed; his “all black” persona is starting to turn just a bit “gray”.

 

    Once again, Jodi Taylor doesn’t skimp on the time-traveling.  The reader is treated to eight chrono-hops, including one to the future, one by others to St. Mary's, and several of them chronicling events leading up to the historically crucial Battle of Hastings in 1066 CE.  Yes, this is fiction, but it’s obvious the author did some deep research of the lives and aspirations of both Harold Godwinson and William of Normandy, and I learned a lot because of that.

 

    And The Rest Is History introduces three new characters to the series.  The first is Max and Leon’s son, Matthew.  The storyline hints that since he was born at an impossible time (due to his time-traveling parents) he has some very unusual talents.  Then there’s Adrian & Mikey, who reminded me muchly of Bill & Ted from their most excellent adventure movie.  They make only a cameo appearance here, but I have a feeling all three of these will play important and recurring parts in this series.

 

    The ending is, as always, exciting, historically enlightening, and spine-tingling.  St. Mary’s and the Time Police, who tolerate each other grudgingly at best, are forced to team up to carry out a rescue endeavor which turns out to be quite a gory affair.  Once the crisis is resolved, both agencies are more than happy to get back to their normal bickering and feuding.

 

Ratings…
    Amazon: 4.6*/5, based on 5,774 ratings and 476 reviews.

    Goodreads: 4.44*/5, based on 9,083 ratings and 687 reviews.

 

Excerpts...

    “Are you a glass half full or a glass half empty person?”

    I said, “Well, it depends where you are at the time.  The Technical Section will say never mind whether it’s half empty or half full, the glass was obviously too big in the first place.  Dr. Dowson will tell you it’s not contemporary to the time period and you should be using a goblet.  The History Department will enquire what bloody glass?  The Security Section will be gloomily surveying the broken shards on the floor, and Mrs. Mack will just tell you to get out of her kitchen.”  (pg. 111)

 

    It takes a lot to catch St. Mary’s off balance.  Over the years, we’ve been attacked, blown up, gassed — several times actually, because Professor Rapson just can’t work out where he’s going wrong — mobbed by swans, crushed and drowned by a runaway monolith, the list is long and we’ve risen above all of it.  We’re St. Mary’s, we say, and our proud boast is that we can handle anything, and that’s true, but you can imagine my surprise and consternation when, out of the blue, a bloody great teapot materialised.  Right in front of us.  Right in the middle of the South Lawn and flattening a croquet hoop at the same time.  (pg. 325)

 

Kewlest New Word ...

Firkled (v.) : searched; rummaged

 

I’ve been at St. Mary’s long enough for the kookaburra of caution to hover over my head occasionally.  (pg. 352)

    The cussing in And The Rest Is History is negligible.  There were only three instances in the first 25% of the book, all of them “hell”.  Later on a couple more profanities were used, mostly the scatological word.

 

    As always, I greatly appreciated Jodi Taylor’s inclusion of a Dramatis Thingummy.  Here, however, it felt like the list of “Security Department” personnel was for some reason omitted.  The spelling typos were few: see/seen, though/thought, and, incredibly, Ort cloud/Oort cloud.  Punctuation typos were more numerous: at least one missing comma, one missing period, and a slew of missing “close quotation marks”.

 

    But these be quibbles.  And The Rest Is History was sheer delight to read, and fully deserving of those lofty Amazon and Goodreads ratings listed above.  The series shows no sign of succumbing to the “let’s just crank another one out” syndrome, I’m so wrapped up in this set of stories, I haven’t even had time to explore Jodi Taylor’s related series: “The Time Police” (5 books) and the “Frogmorton Farm” series (2 books).

 

    9½ Stars.  Acronym Appreciation Moment.  On page 317, the acronym SPOHB is used, which is short for Society for Preservation of Historical Buildings.  Shortly thereafter, the acronym BDSM is used, causing everyone at St. Mary’s to get all excited.  It turns out it stands for… well, we’ll let you read the book to find out, but its not what you think.