This Week at the Library (7/7)

Posted on July 7, 2010 by smellincoffee

I never intended to make this last week “Science Fiction Week”, but it emerged that way following a series of coincidences. I finished Carl Sagan’s Contact a few days later than anticipated: his book, which portrays humanity’s first contact with an alien race via radio signals, changed the way I thought about the search for extraterrestrial life.  I found American Nerd, an entertaining if limited “history of nerds”, while looking for a science book. My decision to read Jurassic Park owed to my seeing the movie the night before I made my weekly visit to the library,  and after watching the first six Trek movies in marathon form, I was in a mood to read something in Trek literature — which I did with Greater than the Sum,  an excellent contribution to the TNG relaunch that sets up the big Destiny series. I just so happened to finish Quotable Star Trek this week, as I’ve been reading it on-and-off at the computer while waiting for programs to load and save. Also, after reading a July Fourth-themed story for the Fourth this Sunday, I just had to finish the collection in which I found it, The Complete Robot.

See? Complete accident.

Selected Quotations:
1. “You know, at times like this, one feels….. well, perhaps extinct animals should be left extinct.” – Dr. Ian Malcolm, awaiting to be mauled by a T-rex.  (Jurassic Park)

2.  “Your willingness to participate in this mission is commendable, Lieutenant Chen. Or do you prefer Lieutenant T’Ryssa?”
“Chen, please,” said the lieutenant, a slender woman with tomboyish Asian features under slanted brows. With her hair worn over her hears, those eyebrows and the greenish flush to her golden skin were the only clear evidence of her Vulcan ancestry. “Uh, sir. Or Trys. I’ve been known to answer to ‘Hey you'”.
[Picard] glared at her. “As you were, Lieutenant.” (Greater than the Sum, p. 68. )

3. Captain Jean-Luc Picard: Your… arrogant pretense at being the moral guardians of the universe strikes me as being hollow, Q. I see no evidence that you’re guided by a superior moral code or any code whatsoever. You may be nearly omnipotent, and I don’t deny that your… parlor tricks are very impressive. But morality? I don’t see it. I don’t acknowledge it, Q! I would put human morality against the Q’s any day. And perhaps that’s the reason that we fascinate you so – because our puny behavior shows you a glimmer of the one thing that evades your omnipotence: a moral center. And if so, I can think of no crueler irony than that you should destroy this young woman, whose only crime is that she’s too human.
Q: Jean-Luc… Sometimes I think the only reason I come here is to listen to these wonderful speeches of yours.
(Quotable Star Trek, maybe. I’m sure it’s in there somewhere. Original source is TNG’s “Hide and Q”. I like it mostly because the same statement condemns the morality of revered “ancestors” and their deities….gods who claim to be just when their stock in trade is genocide, theft, and murder.)

Upcoming Reads:

  • The Andromeda Strain, Michael Crichton.  I enjoyed my first Crichton read, and decided to continue exploring the author’s work.  This work, which concerns the outbreak of an alien virus on Earth, reminds me of The Stand.
  • I’m going to be starting Citizens: a Chronicle of the French Revolution in honor of Bastille Day, which falls next week. (The holiday, not the Bastille. It fell back in 1789.) My Western Civilization II history professor recommended the book to me a few years ago.
  • I first read Travels with Charley in Search of America back in 2005, which contains John Steinbeck’s account of traveling through the United States in the 1960s to see the new, economically booming America. I’ve been itching to read a book about taking off on the road and exploring, and so decided to revisit this.
  • Right next to Travels with Charley was A Walk Across America, a 1970s memoir about a young college graduate who decided to explore the United States on foot, accompanied by his big husky, Cooper.  If memory serves, Steinbeck’s “Charley” was his dog, so I’ll be reading two books about people who set off on journeys across America accompanied by their dogs, one old and one young. That’ll be interesting. 
Posted in Reviews | Tagged | 2 Comments

Greater than the Sum

Posted on July 7, 2010 by smellincoffee

Greater than the Sum
© Christopher L. Bennett 2008
368 pages

Fresh from his honeymoon with Dr. Beverly Crusher, Jean-Luc Picard has returned to the Enterprise-E to assemble a new command staff in the wake of recent losses in battle. Finding the right people to meet the demands of the Federation flagship is problematic, but news from the Beta Quadrant will render staffing problems trivial: the Borg are back.

After the events of Death in Winter, a Borg cube launched an attack on the Federation and brutalized it in a way not seen since Wolf 359. They were driven way, but assimilated a Federation science vessel before vanishing completely. That science vessel, the USS Einstein, was reported destroyed, but its attack on the USS Rhea, a Federation starship assigned to investigate a system in the Beta Quadrant proves otherwise. The Borg-controlled Einstein — known in Starfleet enlisted ranks now as the Frankenstein — is a threat to the Federation, not for its own armament but for the knowledge it possesses. The Federation’s greatest defense against the Borg is the gulf of space between the Federation and the Borg Collective — but that curious system in the Beta Quadrant may hold the secret to quantum slip-stream warp drives, which would make the Milky Way as transversable as a local star system. The Frankenstein cannot be permitted to return to the Delta Quadrant, lest the Borg gain that knowledge.

Picard is given ultimate discretion in how he chooses to combat the threat, and reluctantly chooses to include the young officer who survived the attack on the Rhea as part of his staff. The excitable, immature officer doesn’t appear to be Starfleet material, let alone an officer distinct enough to serve on the bridge of the Federation flagship — but something about her compels Picard to give her a chance. Together with a ship of ex-drones — the Liberated, led by Hugh — Picard must find a way to destroy the ever-adaptive and increasingly aggressive Borg before they are able to adapt slipstream technology to their uses and return to the Collective, where they will share that knowledge and give the Borg a way to dominate the entire Milky Way.

Greater than the Sum is one of the best Trek books I’ve read. Although the mission is essentially military, Bennet focuses on character development, diplomacy with a new form of life, and scientific investigation. Bennett’s pacing worked well for me: ultimate confrontation with the ship is delayed, allowing tension to build. In the meantime, Bennett focuses on Picard and his new officer, Lieutenant Chen. I didn’t like Chen at first, thinking her sophomoric: I didn’t realize her immature disposition was deliberate until Bennett starting bouncing her personality off of Picard’s, at which point hilarity ensued.  While she begins as a hyperactive and childish Ro Laren-type with pointed ears, Chen matures throughout the book and I looked forward to her scenes. Bennett also explores Picard and Crusher’s married life, particularly the motives behind Picard’s reluctance to start a family. His official explanation is that having children would be irresponsible in light of the Borg threat, but the real motives are more nuanced and draw from various Trek episodes, including The Inner Light.  Although Greater than the Sum continues the story begun in previous TNG Relaunch novels, Bennett’s background exposition was sufficient and unintrusive. It’s thus a easy recommendation for both fans of Trek literature and of The Next Generation itself.

Related:

Posted in Reviews | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Teaser Tuesday (7-7)

Posted on July 6, 2010 by smellincoffee

Once a week you get a peek, although Teaser Tuesdays must be discrete.

Across the table, Worf was still being Worf. “A junior lieutenant with a history of discipline problems walks out of the woods naked and tells us the Borg are coming,” the Klingon asked, “and we are supposed to believe her?”

Greater than the Sum, Christopher Bennett. p. 38.

Posted in General | Tagged | 12 Comments

Quotable Star Trek

Posted on July 5, 2010 by smellincoffee

Quotable Star Trek
© 1999 ed. Jill Sherwin
374 pages

“…good words. That’s where ideas begin.” – David Marcus, The Wrath of Khan.

With over seven hundred television episodes and eleven movies constituting its ‘canon’, Star Trek has a lot to say for itself. Although a science fiction action-adventure series in which humanity explores the wonders of the universe, Star Trek has survived and flourished where Lost in Space and others have faded away because at its essence, it is about ideas — about the human condition, philosophy, ideals, values, and beliefs. Star Trek and the shows that followed not only entertained, they provoked discussion: they challenged people to consider ideas.

As a show with an intellectual or philosophical bent, Star Trek relied upon good writing to give voice to discussion. Within the shows, there are grand speeches, witty retorts, lines drawn in the sand, gentle reassurances, and thoughtful musings aplenty. Those speeches and retorts are here, organized into diverse topics: the human condition, the search for knowledge, good and evil, love, humor, respect, justice, peace and war, politics, prejudice, logic and emotion are just a few. These are followed by a section of quotations wherein the characters refer to themselves, a section of the most memorable lines from the show, and the author’s personal favorites. The collection does not draw from the later TNG movies or Enterprise given its publication date, which is a minor loss.

This book gathers together some of my favorite moments in Star Trek. I dearly love the series, chiefly for the way it affirms and celebrate humanity. Whether in fighting for justice or trying to be good friends, the Starfleet personnel in the series do their best to live up to humanity’s promise. Quotable Star Trek brings together some of the best lines in Star Trek, neatly organized, and so I can recommend it easily.

A few favorites…

  • “Give me your hand … your hand! Now feel that: Human flesh against human flesh. We’re the same. We share the same history, the same heritage, the same lives. We’re tied together beyond any untying. Man or woman, it makes no difference, we’re human. We couldn’t escape from each other even if we wanted to. That’s how you do it, Lieutenant. By remembering who and what you are: a bit of flesh and blood afloat in a universe without end. And the only thing that’s truly yours is the rest of humanity. That’s where our duty lies. Do you understand me?” – Captain Kirk, “Who Mourns for Adonais?”
  • “Why does God need a starship?” – Captain Kirk, The Final Frontier.
  • “Sometimes, Number One, you just have to bow to the absurd….” – Captain Picard, “Up the Long Ladder”. 
  • “You know, there are some words I’ve known since I was a schoolboy: ‘With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censured, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably.’ Those words were uttered by Judge Aaron Satie as wisdom and warning. The first time any man’s freedom is trodden on we’re all damaged.” – Captain Picard, The Drumhead
  • “Laws change, depending on who’s making them, but justice is justice.” – Constable Odo, “A Man Alone”
  • “My god, Bones — what’ve I done?”
    “What you had to do. What you always do — turn death into a fighting chance to live.” – Kirk and McCoy, watching the Enterprise go to her grave in The Search for Spock. 
  • “There! Are! FOUR! Lights!” Captain Picard, “Chain of Command”. 
  • “I’m no angel; but I try to live every day as the best human being I know how to be.” – Miles O’Brien, “Tribunal”. 
  • “Second star to the right…and straight on ’til morning.” – Captain Kirk, The Undiscovered Country, giving the helm course orders. 
Posted in quotations, Reviews | Tagged , | 2 Comments

The Complete Robot

Posted on July 4, 2010 by smellincoffee

The Complete Robot
© 1982 Isaac Asimov
688 pages

A boom in electronic engineering followed World War 2, one that led to consumer televisions, the first computers, and a wide variety of other electricity-using gadgets. As people looked more toward the future, they conceived of mechanical men: these robots often ran amok in the style of Frankenstein’s monster. Isaac Asimov thought this silly: robots were tools explicitly designed by intelligent people. It made no sense for them to run amok. He subsequently developed in full the Three Laws of Robotics, and later wrote a host of stories and novels based on them.

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

2. A robot must obey any orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Asimov used his stories to explore how humans might use robots to better the human condition, but he also explored questions of intelligence, creativity, sentience, and prejudice. He coined the phrase robotics and his body of work subsequently left various marks on our culture: the android Lieutenant Commander Data of Star Trek possesses one of Asimov’s “positronic brains”, for instance. The Complete Robot collects just over thirty of his short stories in this theme, written throughout the fifties, sixties, and seventies. Because other robot stories and essays followed it, its name has not remained accurate: still, the book constitutes the sizable bulk of his robot short fiction, including the Susan Calvin stories and classics like “Robbie”.

The stories vary slightly in setting, but cover the latter half of the 20th century and human history throughout the 21st, until the dawn of hyperdrives that allow for interstellar travel. Most of the stories share a same canon: at some point in the late 20th or early 21st century,  the many political entities on Earth unite under a weak confederation. Essential parts of the economic (agriculture, for instance) are planned, and crucial to the planning are large computers. These globe-monitoring computing machines in the style of UNIVAC may be subsidiaries to Multivac — a massive supercomputer at least the size of a building. Several stories here concern Multivac, the machine that bears all the cares of humanity upon its transistor- and vacuum-tube employing shoulders.

Robots in the style of Commander Data come later: while designed to emulate human beings in essential form and size, they exist chiefly for industrial work or for the amusement of wealthy individuals. The people of Earth later react against the employment of robots in this way, relegating them to maintaining space posts in a dozen or so of the stories here. Three stories follow Mike Donovan and Gregory Powell, two quality-assurance technicians in the employ of US Robots and Mechanical Men, as they observe the latest robot models at work, “manning” the stations that beam intense sunlight to Earth, powering its electric grid. Later on, robots nearly vanish from Earth history altogether: in the Empire age, only humans who have left Earth to colonize other worlds use robots. Little of the Empire age is seen here, though — only its prelude in a short story about detectives Elijah Baley and R. Daneel Olivaw, the latter being what we call today an android.

Asimov’s stories are as ever simple and charming. They bear the mark of the fifties and sixties, not only in their portrayal of marriage (husband goes to work, wife keeps house), but in the way they grapple with the future. Some predictions seem banal by modern standards, others still far off and bordering on fantastic — but the optimism and hope are undeniable. Asimov is refreshing and endearing, and the retro-feel has its own appeal to me. The Complete Robot is a solid hit, taking me back to that summer in which I first delighted in Asimov’s short stories. I definitely recommend it.

Highlights:

  • “Sally”, a favorite of mine about automated cars with personalities.
  • “True Love”, in which a computer designed to find its maker the perfect match finds his own.
  • “The Tercentenary Incident”, set on 4 July 2076, follows the aftermath of an attempted assassination of the US President. The assassins seemed to have only vaporized the president’s android decoy — but who can know that that puff of atoms following the disintegration blast belonged to an android, and not to an unpopular president?
  • “Reason”, in which quality-assurance technicians struggle with the first sentient robot after it establishes a religion based on the worshiping the station which it was designed to serve. 
  • “Mirror Image”, an unexpected treat featuring the Robots trilogy team of Elijah Baley and Daneel Olivaw as they attempt to settle a matter of academic fraud.
  • “The Bicentennial Man” follows a robot’s quest for humanity. Watching the Robin Williams movie of this prompted me to read The Positronic Man back in high school, my first involvement with Asimov. The link leads to the trailer.

“To those of you who have read some (or, possibly, all) of my robot stories before, I welcome your loyalty and patience. To those of you who have not, I hope this book has given you pleasure — and I’m pleased to have met you — and I hope we meet again soon.” – p. 683, ‘the last word’.

Indeed, Dr. A.

Posted in Reviews, science fiction | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

Jurassic Park

Posted on July 2, 2010 by smellincoffee

Jurassic Park
© 1990 Michael Crichton
399 pages

To the south, rising above the palm trees, Grant saw a single trunk with no leaves at all, just a big curving stump. Then the stump moved, and twisted around to meet the new arrivals. Grant realized he was not seeing a tree at all. He was looking at the graceful, curving neck of an enormous creature rising fifty feet into the air. He was looking at a dinosaur.  (p. 80)

Professor Alan Grant has spent his life digging in remote desert environs, looking for fossils that offer clues into the lives of dinosaurs. Carefully extracting specimens from the ground, he pieces the puzzles of anatomy and behavior together. His job is made a little easier by enthusiastic supporters like John Hammond, an eccentric old billionaire who finances dinosaur digs all over the world — although Hammond can be a trifle annoying at times, pestering Grant with questions of what a particular species of dinosaurs might eat, especially as newborns. What possible need could the man have for that sort of information?

When a lawyer in the employ of Hammond visits Grant’s latest dig and offers him a substantial fee to visit a resort of Hammond’s over the course of a weekend, he reluctantly accepts: that much money will go a long way in maintaining his research. What he, his graduate student, and a quirky mathematician find when they arrive at the resort is beyond belief: a theme park the size of an island, where plants and animals dead for 65 million years live again. Advances in genetic engineering and a novel approach to obtaining dinosaur DNA have allowed Hammond to clone dinosaurs and artificially incubate them. His goal is a worldwide empire of theme parks filled with biological attractions, but his first has yet to see the public. He has all the problems of an amusement park and all the problems of a zoo, the latter particularly difficult in that no one has ever maintained hundreds of dinosaurs in captivity. Hammond responds to his investors’ doubt and concerns about the park’s delayed opening by inviting his team of consultants — Grant and company — to take the first tour.  A palaeontologist’s approval will go far in soothing their fears.

As impressive as Jurassic Park may be, a system so complex – being a heavily automated park controlled by central computers maintaining a firm hand on a delicate ecosystem — is doomed to fail at some point, at least in the opinion of Ian Malcolm, the mathematician and chaos theorist invited to tour the park. Malcolm’s cassandra-like warning comes to pass (as such warnings are wont to do) when deliberate sabotage on the park of an employee rendering the park’s security network inoperative coincides with a massive storm, imperiling not only the tourists but everyone on the isle. Grant, Malcolm, and the rest must pit human technology and intelligence against the dinosaurs’ own brute strength, devastating quickness,  surprising array of biochemical defense mechanisms, and intelligence. The struggle for existence is a brutal one — even in the artificially created Jurassic Park.

Jurassic Park is my first read by Michael Crichton, whom I have ignored in the past out of the impression that his works were too technical for reading comfort. I don’t know what gave me that impression, but Jurassic Park was a breeze even while employing more scientific exposition than your usual novel. Although my reading experience was augmented by having watched the movie only a night prior, I enjoyed it to the point that I will be browsing Crichton’s other works. The book’s introduction gives the text the feel of a warning against the dangers of uncontrolled genetic engineering on the part of companies, perhaps an explicit message on Crichton’s part. I’ve not read any of his other works, so I don’t know if he employs his novels as warnings or messages in this manner. We’ll see, for I plan on looking at The Andromeda Strain next week.

Posted in Reviews, science fiction | Tagged , , , | 3 Comments

American Nerd

Posted on July 2, 2010 by smellincoffee

American Nerd: the Story of my People
© 2008 Benjamin Nugent
224 pages

First in my class here at M.I.T /
Got skills, I’m a champion at D&D
M.C. Escher, that’s my favorite  MC
Keep your forty, I’ll just have an Earl Grey Tea
My rims never spin, to the contrary
You’ll find that they’re quite stationary 
All of my action figures are cherry,
Stephen Hawkings’ in my library
[…]
Look at me, I’m white and nerdy. 
(“White and Nerdy“, Weird Al)

My local library’s web catalogue offered American Nerd as a result when I searched for titles in popular science, and the premise — a book on nerd culture — hooked me immediately. Author Benjamin Nugent is an ex-nerd, who as boy grew up “boffing” and playing long rounds of Dungeons and Dragons when he wasn’t busy with an NES system.  After opening with an analysis of Wikipedia’s definition for nerd, Nugent gives a brief history of nerd-types, beginning with the characters of Mary Bennet in Pride and Prejudice and Victor Frankenstein in Frankenstein. The most general characteristic of Nugent’s nerds is that they prefer worlds of rationality to physical or sensual stimulation, and that they are out of place in a post-industrial revolution world that increasingly associates reason and rationality with  machinery, not humanity — humanity being represented by emotion and romanticism. Other elements branch from this, as with a preference for Standard English over language replete with slang.

From there, Nugent devotes chapters to individual elements in the “nerdy” spectrum: the old-fashioned Steve Urkel types, the Renaissance Faire enthusiasts, video gamers, ‘hackers’, anime buffs,  science fiction or fantasy fiction fans, and those who pretend to be nerds to be seen as controversial and nonconformist.There are also “case studies” in which Nugent focuses on his childhood friends; the most memorable case study was that of a refuge from Mormonism, who saw the rule-governed world of Dungeons and Dragons as a redoubt against his mother’s violent and unpredictable religiosity.

It’s an interesting book, best received by confused parents and loved ones of nerds who don’t particularly understand why their child or friend likes dressing up as a feudal knight, spending hours at a time exploring ‘dungeons’ on paper occupied by figurines, or animatedly discussing competing operating systems. Nugent’s approach strikes me as casual, cavalier — and sometimes careless. He identifies a passage from a forum as being a prime example of “leet speak”, for instance, but the passage in question only contains one word (pwn) associated with “leet speak”. The rest is the kind of butchered English associated with twelve-year olds using instant messaging for the first time, more accurately known as “AOLspeak“. In another instance, he characterizes The Big Bang Theory as two nerds’ quest to win the heart of a girl, which…it isn’t.

Fairly entertaining and a little sloppy, but it may be of use to someone who wants to understand the nerds in their midst.

Posted in Reviews | Tagged | Leave a comment

Contact

Posted on July 2, 2010 by smellincoffee

Contact
© 1985 Carl Sagan
432 pages

“We could be in the middle of an intergalactic conversation — and we wouldn’t even know.” – Michio Kaku, “Our Place in the Universe“.

Dr. Eleanor Arroway, known as “Ellie” to her few intimates, is long accustomed to being marginalized. She’s a woman in a field dominated by men, and her interest in using radio telescopes to search for intelligence life in space further isolates her. Even those who take note of her brilliance do so only to suggest that perhaps she’s wasting her time looking for “little green men”.

And then….the signal. Steadily pulsing, it cannot be tracked to a satellite in Earth orbit, nor is the region of space it appears to emanate from a source of pulsars. This signal comes from outside — and it comes with purpose. The initial signal contains prime numbers, but as Ellie and her coworkers begin to dissect the data, they find a recording of the first signal from Earth to find its way into space — and then, The Message, a massive transmission of data that unites the world’s scientific, political, and economic authorities as they search for the Message’s meaning.

While Contact is in part a science fiction tale that depicts humanity’s first contact with extraterrestrial life, Sagan also offers a story about the human search for meaning. He does this by bouncing the nonreligious Ellie, who finds meaning in science, off of Christian guru and television personality Palmer Joss,  who sees a transcendental deity and revealed truths as the source of ultimate meaning. Later, Sagan puts Ellie into the position of defending what might be called a religious experience.

To my knowledge, Contact is Carl Sagan’s only fictional work.  I first read it in 2005 or 2006, and Sagan’s depiction of radio astronomy changed the way I thought about extraterrestrial life. In the years since, my readings in astronomy and physics have convinced me that Sagan’s Contact scenario is more likely than say First Contact. Contact is among the more interesting novels I’ve read, and it’s one I can recommend. While the opening premise is interesting by itself, the role of scientific wonder and the advocation of the human spirit make it all the better.

“She had studied the universe all her life, but missed the clearest message: for small creatures such as we, the vastness is bearable only through love.” – 429

Related:

  • Contact, a film adaption of the book that stars Jodie Foster. Although it takes a few liberties with the plot , the visuals are solid and the acting makes even the more despicable characters fun to watch. The intro, in which the camera soars through space, following the advance of Earth’s oldest television transmissions, is particularly memorable. 
  • The Symphony of Science videos, all starring Sagan in part. “Our Place in the Cosmos” has a line that neatly refers to the pretext of Contact. 
Are we all alone, or are there others standing by.
Waiting to see what we will do, how hard we’ll try?
It costs a lot to live, even more to fly.
Kindly send a prayer my way while I shoot up in the sky.
We’ll send the best from Earth, to find out what it’s worth.
We’ll send the best from Earth, to find out what it’s worth.
– “Others Standing By”, Prometheus Music
Posted in Reviews, science fiction | Tagged , , | 5 Comments

Chainbreaker’s War

Posted on June 29, 2010 by smellincoffee

Chainbreaker’s War: a Seneca Chief Remembers the American Revolution
© 2002 ed. Jeanne Winston Adler
224 pages

On the eastern seaboard, young militia men marched around their town squares, tea-chests floated in Boston Harbor, and the bells of war tolled. Only a few hundred miles away in upstate New York and in Michigan, the six nations of the Iroquois lived quiet and enjoyable lives separated from the ruckus. They hunted, met together in congress to discuss matters between the tribes and their neighbors, and saw to their families — and then the emissaries arrived.

Officials from both Great Britain and the newly-formed United States send word to the Iroquois that there is war on the coast. The royal government ask the Iroquois to avoid being drawn into the conflict: the colonials request assistance from the Iroquois. The Six Nations are divided: some believe their neighbors to be insolent for rebelling against their Father nation. Others believe that the Americans are the victims of a great injustice. Years of peace and prosperity fall to war as the nations choose sides. The Seneca support Great Britain, and a young Seneca named Chainbreaker leads his brethren in combat against the Americans. Fighting chiefly with traditional weapons, he engages in bloody battle with the colonials,  engaging in tit-for-tat village- and town- razings against George Washington, the “Devourer of Villages”. After the war, the Iroquois attempt to return to their former lifestyle, but both unity and territory have been lost in the war.

This is the tale told by Chainbreaker in his old age, recounting the lives of the Iroquois amidst the war. The book proper has a conversational, almost rambling style, and is supplemented by sidebars quoting from related sources that add greater context or explain obscure references. The editor also supplied in-text illustrations depicting the homes, clothing, tools, and weapons of the Six Nations.

Chainbreaker’s War made for an interesting read, although the amount of useful information is limited. Diplomacy and politics kept my attention more than the descriptions of battle: most remarkable for me was the respect Chainbreaker obviously held for Washington — during the war as a general, but afterwards as a man. This memoir offered at the start a look into Iroquois culture, and it has whet my appetite for both learning more about the Iroquois and the role native Americans played in the Revolution. Although Chainbreaker’s recollections of the Iroquois motives seem shallow,  tribes losing ground against aggressive colonial expansion would have had a vested interested in supporting the monarchy, which restricted expansion to avoid retaliation on the part of the displaced natives. I’m curious as to what motives would have driven tribes to support the departure of the monarchy.

Posted in history, Reviews | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Teaser Tuesday (29/6)

Posted on June 29, 2010 by smellincoffee

Teaser Tuesdays are out of this world, from ShouldBeReading.

With deliberate composure, Ellie left the assembled group crowded around the consoles and returned to her office. She closed the door very carefully behind her.
“Holy shit!” she whispered. (Contact, Carl Sagan. p. 79)

Posted in General | Tagged | 6 Comments