I haven’t read any of the Autobiography books that Star Trek has been putting out in recent years, but when I spotted that Kate Mulgrew did the Audible version of this, I had to give it a try. I consistently enjoyed her character on Voyager, especially when she was with Jeri Ryan or Robert Picardo, the show’s other acting standouts, and developed an affection for the character thanks in part to my high school obsession with Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force. She’s the only captain I have a pet nickname for, so take that as you will. The book’s first half covers Janeway’s life prior to taking command of Voyager, and the second half covers some of Voyager‘s more controversial moments from Janeway’s perspective — here she defends her decision to destroy the Caretaker’s array, for instance, and offers insight into how Voyager’s story progressed. She views the betrayal of Seska, for instance, as tragic but ultimately good, prompting the other Maquis to recoil in horror and rally around the flag of Janeway, Voyager, and even Starfleet. The Voyager bit is shallower than expected, though, given how much happened that should deeply shape the character. The whole “Janeway and Chakotay trapped together maybe forever on a planet and developing Feelings” thing? It’s over like a shot, as if it had no more significance than an unexpected airport layover, and no mention made of any emotions, subtext or otherwise, beyond her suspicion that Chakotay would have been perfectly happy to have remained stranded. Mulgrew’s voice and presentation go a long way to adding emotional heft that would not delivered by the text itself. I don’t know how the development of Janeway’s early life lines up with that which was developed in Mosaic, an early Voyager novel that featured Janeway’s past, but I enjoyed learning about Janeway’s early fascination with flight & the stars, and her being primed by a Starfleet family to want to seek a career in the service. There’s nothing beyond Endgame, so if you’re looking for the Janeway recounting of Nemesis, you’re out in the Badlands with no shields. My favorite thread in the book was Janeway’s close relationship with Admiral Paris, which leads to her meeting young Tom and eventually becoming her mentor’s son’s mentor. Her evolving relationship with Tuvok is also great interest, as when they initially meet he reprimands the young lieutenant for failing to observe proper security protocols. One thing that was jarring to me was that I had the impression from the show that Janeway wanted to be a scientist, and then later became interested in command — but here she’s gung ho for command from the very beginning, taking classes in it at the Academy, and the science department is merely where she begins. Personally, I enjoyed The Autobiography, but in large part because it meant listening to Kate Mulgrew for eight hours: I suspect I’d be panning this a bit had I merely gone from the text itself.
Today’s Top Ten Tuesday is books on our autumn to-be-read lists. I’m going to mix mine up between challenge reads & just for run reads. But first, the Tuesday Tease!
One way to steal from people is to distract them from what you’re doing. A safer way is to bore them. Then they’ll distract themselves. Leave financial stuff to the experts. Leave it to your financial advisor, your asset manager. Leave it to BlackRock, Davos, the credentialed DEI and ESG experts; they’ve given one another certificates that they’re experts. But the acronyms you ignore eventually find their way into your life. You wake up one day and find yourself at the beck and call of strange ideas, and you don’t know where they came from or what they mean, only that you’re required to pretend you believe them with all your heart.
Capitalist Punishment: How Wall Street is Using Your Money to Create a Country You Didn’t Vote For. Vivek Ramaswamy
And now, books I intend to read this fall!
(1) Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction. One of my Mount Doom reward books. Hoping October will see some SF.
(2) Will Storr vs. The Supernatural: One Man’s Search for the Truth About Ghosts, Will Storr. It’s somewhere within Mount Doom at this point.
(3) The Outlaw Ocean: Journeys Across the Last Untamed Frontier, Ian Urbina.
(4) The Shahnameh. Starting it, anyway.
(5) Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language, Robin Dunbar. If I don’t save it for next year’s science survey, anyway. Oh, and speaking of —
(6) and (7) The Moral Animal and The Sun in the Church, two science reads on Mount Doom. I’ve started reading The Moral Animal.
(8) and (9) Neuromancer, William Gibson and The Shockwave Rider, John Brunner. Two SF titles in my CC-II list.
(10) Live, From New York! An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live, Tom Shales and John Andrew Miller.
“What is it with you Enterprise guys? You always have to be at the center of everything, don’t you?”
When Starfleet begins analyzing a series of disruptive and potentially dangerous flares in space, Commander Pavel Chekov realizes there’s a pattern: these flares mostly in places visited by the Enterprise on its five-year mission, albiet in reverse order — and the one exception is a place visited by Uhura. As more flares happen, one in the middle of a city, a death toll begins and Starfleet fixes an accusatory gaze toward the former comms officer whose personal memories were erased by the NOMAD probe, who can recall nothing about her leaves from this time to contribute to the mystery or defend herself. But she’s not alone: the Enterprise crew, despite being on different ships and assignments, rally like the family they are. Admiral Kirk, meanwhile, has a bit of a problem, as a pilot program he endorsed to incorporate a group of young people bred for war into Starfleet (teaching them the ways of peace and Shakespeare-quoting) is causing some strife and a wee bit of murder — and worse, he and Bones are smitten with the same woman, a vocal opponent of the program. Oh, the drama.
Whenever I return to the original series, it tends to be for particular episodes — “Arena”, “Balance of Terror”, etc, and so I’d forgotten about the whole “Space probe tries to exterminate everyone on Enterprise” plot that also caused Uhura’s memories to be wiped…at least, until next week’s episode. Living Memory explains how Uhura bounced back so quickly, using one Federation member planet’s mind-structuring technology to restore her technical/explicit skills — but not her actual memories. Uhura and friends begin exploring Uhura’s past, talking to her family and friends from her Academy days to learn what project she might have been working on so devotedly, and this forces Uhura to face parts of her past she was previously willing to pretend didn’t exist. Although the Uhura A-plot is the novel’s strength and great attraction, the moral issues posed by the Warborne group were interesting, especially given that Bennett does not create simple antagonists or characters, but allows the argument to become truly complex and fascinating to the reader to consider.
Bennett is a Trek author who reliably delivers good reads, and this was another solid one. Motion Picture era books are relatively rare, so I was glad to dig into this one and see the Enterprise crew just as they were beginning careers apart from the salad days of their five-year mission.
Highlights:
“Some officers pride themselves on punctuality,” Kirk said. “You should try it sometime.” “Ha, ha. If I have to be insulted, I’ll just go find Spock so I can get it from an expert.”
“Resisting temptation means nothing if the temptation is not present. The one time they were offered a justification, they took it.” “After resisting it as long as they could.” “True resistance does not yield.”
“I will not dignify that sophomoric insinuation with a reply.” “Sophomoric is next year. I’m just freshmanic.” He shrugged. “And if I flunk my exams, I’ll be freshmanic-depressive.”
“We have believed ourselves to have no leads before. Further investigation has produced new ones.” “Which have all gone nowhere.” “That is not predictive of future outcomes.” She laughed. “You know, Doctor McCoy is wrong. Your logic can be very comforting at times.”
Sulu had smiled. “ ‘It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.’ ” He had shrugged at her stare. “Captain Spock likes to quote Sherlock Holmes.”
Let’s just say that spending time with Jim and Spock tends to get a fellow thrown in an inordinate number of prison cells. I guess some of that rubbed off on you too.”
McCoy reached over and touched her hand. “You want to believe in everyone. It’s a wonderful quality. But it means you’re bound to be disappointed sometimes.” After a moment, she pursed her lips and tilted her head. “Well, I guess you’re right. For instance, I believed you’d be a better cook than this.” He feigned offense. “My dear lady, I am a doctor, not a restaurateur.”
It proved what Surak had taught: No life was incidental. The death of a foot soldier or an innocent bystander could have consequences greater than the death of a king or a general, for all lives were interconnected in intricate and unpredictable ways.
All Chris Pike wanted to do was take a gander at a strange planet from Enterprise’s new shuttle, Eratosthenes. But then the laws of physics went AWOL, and he’s woken up to find himself living in…eh, the Old West? Well, beats waking up partially melded into a tree or half-covered in lava that’s quickly cooling into rock like the rest of his team. The High Country is Strange New World’s debut novel, authored by the very capable John Jackson Miller, who delivered the excellent Enterprise-focused Enterprise War. It features a shuttle crew encountering a planet around which the laws of physics take a holiday crashing onto said planet, escaping via transporter but wildly seperated from one another. They find a world which is both familiar and alien — very much like the Old West, but going off script in certain….important ways. As in, there are aliens…..and no one finds that remarkable.
The High Country is an unusual Trek novel, separating our main characters from the tech that dominates so much of Trek. Captain Pike, Commander Una, Lieutenant Spock, and Cadet Uhura find themselves on a world where electronic technology doesn’t function at all, and even steam engines are regarded as suspect by the authorities. The Enterprise was compromised in its initial attempt to recover the crew, meaning Pike & co are on their own…though Starfleet ingenuity being what it is, the E is not merely a background player. Pike, Uhura, and Una — stranded from one another — discover different parts of the planet’s story as they try to get their bearings. There’s a strong tie-in to the Enterprise episode “North Star”, but the planet’s unique history creates an altogether different story, but I’ll not drift into spoiler territory. Suffice it to say that the stasis that prevails on this planet is not entirely natural. High Country has fine characterization: Miller captures the voices of Pike, Uhura and co quite well, to the strength of these characters we get a story of exploration — scientific, natural, cultural, political, in a world that constantly defies expectations. It’s a western! ….with aliens. But wait, there are also artifacts arranged in a geometric array that allow for crosscontinential communication, and…airships operated by….wizards?
It’s been over a year since I read any Trek lit, and was this a great way to return. Strange New Worlds has me absolutely obsessed, and John Jackson Miller is starting to become one of my favorite Trek authors despite the fact that he cheats on Trek with Star Wars. (See Kenobi, his…Star Wars western.) This proved a solid story, with interesting worldbuilding and a personal connection for Pike after one of the residents proves to be someone he knew in his youth, when she taught him to ride horses at a Luddite colony. I wish Spock had a steadier presence in the novel: he disappears for most of the novel after his intro chapter, and while he comes back strong in the last third, it’s definitely the Pike & Una show to begin with, with Uhura playing an increasingly important role until the climax. Spock, however, has no shortage of novels, so it’s a minor flaw. More importantly, Miller gives this a solid finish in the Star Trek spirit, as he did in The Enterprise War.
“So they didn’t rematerialize.” “Which I might conclude, if the transporter logs could be relied upon. As there is a chance that our own receiver failed before it could receive confirmation, from a mathematical perspective I would describe them as potential people.” That set off a buzz in the room. “Schrödinger’s crew,” Erica Ortegas muttered.
“Is that all you have? The system failed, and you can’t explain why, so it’s out of your hands?” “Yes.” “That sounds like passing the buck.” “If that expression means that I’m running away screaming from responsibility for this mess, then I plead guilty.” Hemmer shuddered. “When physics goes on strike, you might as well send me to my quarters with the day off.”
“People weren’t meant to mill in the winter. That’s why the brook freezes.” Garr looked to the ruins and spat in disgust. “There’s a hundred eighty days in a year, and you can’t expect them all to be the same. I wouldn’t want to live in a world where you had to do everything all the time.”
“Some lessons gotta be taught over and over.”
Spock’s arrival on Epheska, days earlier, had left something to be desired. Nearly drowning had little to recommend it.
“Is the tailgate another kind of gait?” Spock asked. “I’ll ask you not to confuse my lieutenant,” Pike said. “He’s still working on ‘riding shotgun.’ ”
(Yes, this book is why I’ve been so quiet the last two weeks.)
The relationship between Christianity and Judaism has fascinated me ever since I bolted from the Pentecostalism in which I was raised, and began rebuilding my worldview from the ground up, investigating the bones of religions and philosophies to figure out where the truth was. While listening to Jewish lectures at simpletoremember, I was struck by how very different the Judaism expressed there was from the background of the Gospels, particularly in the role of Satan — who leaps from being a mere accuser of humanity to being the Archfiend, the would-be rival to the Almighty in that blank page between Malachi and Matthew. Over the years, I’ve read various books exploring the eruption of Christianity from first-century Judaism, and have eyed this volume (owned by my several priest friends) covetously for a decade. Now, I’ve finally tackled it and and am happy to report that it’s a worthy resource for understanding the world in which the New Testament came into being, and for appreciating the intertangled evolution of both Judaism and Christianity.
The work is divided into two parts: the New Testament itself, subdivided into the Gospels, the Epistles, and Revelation, each with an introductory essay; and then the contextual essays following Revelation. As annotated would indicate, though, there are also in-text comments throughout, spotlighting a custom, a translation, a moment unique to a particular Gospel, etc. These are especially interesting in Revelation, given its fantastic imagery and numerology. These aren’t merely a line or two, though, but often run for several paragraphs –as when the authors analyze the use of “Sanhendrin”, or comment on themes that a particular Gospel is marked by. These comments frequently link to the essays that constitute the bulk of the JANT’s unique content. The essays are substantial, addressing everything from the backgrounds of the New Testament (Jewish life in the first century, the political situation with Rome, the varied manifestations of Jewish thought and belief) to the relationship between Jewish thought & art to the Christian civilization in which most Jews lived within through the 20th century. There are a great multitude of topics within, which would appeal to readers with varying interests. One essay concerns Philo, for instance, a Jewish philosopher whose tripartite view of Deity presaged the Trinity. Some essays would be at home in any study Bible, like the background pieces or the study of how the Jewish and Christian communities came at establishing their respective canons. Interestingly, some of authors often refer to The Old Testament, not because they are Christian but to differentiate the Hebrew scriptures-as-canonized-by-Christians from the Hebrew-scriptures-as-canonized-by-modern-Jews. The Ortho-Catholic tradition includes Jewish texts that are not written in Hebrew, for instance, and which were later dropped by rabbinic Judaism and most Protestants — though most of the latter were just shuffling along in Luther’s footsteps, and he wanted to drop even more of the New Testament than that. Other essays are more concerned with the New Testament within the Jewish tradition — connecting the parables to examples used in midrash interpretation of the law, as well as the way Jews have varied in their approaches to Jesus and Mary over the years: in the medieval era, we can find both insulting nicknames adopted to refer to Jesus, Mary, and Peter while at the same time the use Christian imagery in Jewish art. I wonder if Chaim Potok was aware of that when creating his Asher Lev.
This is a deep book, one that I’ve read slowly over the course of eight months but even still don’t feel as though I’ve done more than broken the surface on. I anticipate returning to it again and again, especially the essays. Although I’ve read into the background of the New Testament before, I still found much of value here, particularly in the book’s general demonstration that first-century Judaism was less a formal, organized Religion and more of a religious culture, with a variety of sects with different emphases — and likewise Christianity, given that the Dead Sea Scrolls and Nag Hammadi texts are brought in for more context. The Sadducees, for instance, were oriented toward worship and the Temple; the Pharisees were oriented more towards the Torah, and the interpretation and adherence to thereof, and more closely connected to post-Temple rabbi-led Judaism than Temple Judaism. The authors argue that Christianity and Judaism was we know it both emerged from this variety of Jewish thought, and are effectively sister religions — a conviction shared by many Christian authorities today, who regard Judaism as an elder brother.
Again, this is a very worthy book for students of the Bible, Judaism, and Christianity, and in the future I want to try the Jewish Annotated Apocrypha and The Jewish Study Bible, all part of this same series. There are a couple of things I’d quibble with in this (one author attributes the Great Schism to arguments over whether the Eucharist used unleavened bread or not — the biggest issue was papal authority, made most salient during the filoque controversy), but those are minor details.
Some quotes:
The New Testament refers to Jesus as “rabbi,” transliterating the Hebrew title into Greek and defining it as “teacher” (Jn 1.38; 20.16). Ironically, this makes Jesus the earliest attested person in literature to bear the title “Rabbi.”
All this “Mary-naming” suggests that these are real, first-century Marys. An author who is writing fiction, and who wants to create memorable characters, would have chosen a variety of names for the heroes and heroines. However, as epigraphic and additional literary evidence suggests, in Jewish society at the time a quarter of the female population bore the name Mary.
[quoting Albert Schweitzer] “But it was not only each epoch that found its reflection in Jesus; each individual created Jesus in accordance with his own character. There is no historical task which so reveals a man’s true self as the writing of a Life of Jesus.” Many of the early historians Schweitzer studied were liberal Protestants, and their reconstructions of Jesus tended to portray him as a liberal Protestant. Along the way, they also “de-Judaized” Jesus, stripping him of his Jewish identity and context.
This type of liturgy was unique to the ancient world. No such form of worship featuring the recitation and study of a sacred text by an entire community on a regular basis was in evidence at this time; we know only of certain mystery cults in the Hellenistic-Roman world that produced sacred texts, which were read on occasion, and then only to initiates. The self-laudatory tone of the Jewish sources in this respect may well reflect their authors’ desire to trumpet this unique form of worship.
One prominent rabbi from the second century believed that crucifixion nails might be worn on the Sabbath (and by implication at all other times), because they were believed to have healing power. Others questioned the value of this remedy and branded it idolatrous (Heb darkhei ha-Emori, lit., “the practices of the Amorites”; cf. the discussion in m. Shabb. 6.10). The power of such nails is known from non-Jewish sources as well, and one could imagine that such nails would have been a sought-after commodity.
The process of translating Jesus’ Jewish–identified Aramaic into Greek sometimes extends to an erasing of Jesus’ Jewish context. Thus, while Jn 1.38 refers to Jesus as “Rabbi” (followed by a parenthetical explanation, “which translated means Teacher”), nearly everywhere else in the New Testament Jesus is addressed with Greek terms that obscure his Jewish identity. In Mt 9.20, when the woman with a bloody discharge comes up behind Jesus and touches the “hem of his garment” (KJV) or “the edge of his cloak” (NIV) [Gk tou kraspedou tou himatiou autou], she is touching his tsitsit, the ritual fringes mandated in Num 15.38 and Deut 22.12, which is similarly (mis)translated in the Septuagint as kraspedon, meaning hem, edge, or border.
Today’s prompt from Long and Short Reviews is “Favorite Legend or Fairytale”. Without a doubt, mine is Robin Hood. Perhaps because when I was a kid, I watched the Disney version of the story, in which Robin appeared as a dashing fox facing off against the patently terrible King John and his henchmen like Sir Hiss. The music of that movie still plays in my head, ooh de lally, ooh de lally, golly what a day. Robin Hood had immediately appeal for a kid like me who spent his spring breaks and summers (and any time he wasn’t boxed up inside) running around in the woods and swamps. The idea of living in the woods with a bunch of friends, shooting bows and having a perpetual campout, still appeals to me. Maybe that’s the reason I like Red Dead Redemption II so much, since that’s exactly what the main character does — complete with robbing corporate tycoons who run roughshod over native Americans and freeholders. I’ve seen most Robin Hood movies, but Men in Tights has particular charms — Cary Elwes, Richard Lewis, and Sir Patrick Stewart’s acting among them. I’ve also read several books related to Robin Hood (one a study of the legends, the rest re-tellings) over the years here.
Today’s TTT is “Top Ten Favorite Character Relationships”. Similar ground to 2011’s “Best Duos”. First up, though, a tease:
“Hemmer, we’re in a place where basic physical laws can’t be trusted, and random things are failing on Enterprise. You’re sure the transporter is the right choice?”
Star Trek Strange New Worlds: The High Country
(1) Sharpe and Harper, from the Sharpe books by Bernard Cornwell. Great dialogue is one of Cornwell’s strengths, and invariably Sharpe and Harper’s exchanges are part of the laughs. These two began as belligerents and then became fast friends, near brothers.
(2) Harry, Ron, and Hermione. I came to the HP books late, beginning in 2007, but was won over completely by The Philosopher’s Stone, especially when Rowling informs us:
Because there are somethings you can’t go through in life and not become friends, and knocking out a twelve-foot mountain troll is one of them
(3) Captain Picard and T’Ressa Chen,Star Trek relaunch books. Introduced in Greater than the Sumby Christopher L. Bennett. Chen is a half-Vulcan officer who rejects that heritage completely, preferring to identity as a professional smartass: despite her frequent sass, Picard immediately spots her potential and becomes something of a longsuffering father figure/mentor to her. It’s a bit like the Picard/Ro Laren dynamic, but without Ro’s chip on the shoulder. Chen is a ball to read.
(4) Macro and Cato, Simon Scarrow’s Eagle series. They’re something of a trope, the grizzled old enlisted man and his trainee-turned-superior, a fresh-faced youth who matures in both age and command in the early Empire.
It seems to me, Jeeves, that the ceremony may be one fraught with considerable interest.” “Yes, sir.” “What, in your opinion, will the harvest be?” “One finds it difficult to hazard a conjecture, sir.” “You mean imagination boggles?” “Yes, sir.” I inspected my imagination. He was right. It boggled.
(6) Aslanand…well, anybody — but especially Lucy and Edmund.
(7) Dagny Taggert and Hank Rearden.These two were an interesting pair — united in their outrage that the businesses they’d built were being compromised and taken over by parasites in the government, but divided in how to respond to that.
(8) Elsa and Loreda. This mother/daughter dynamic is key to The Four Winds, and is the base of much of its drama. It’s agonizing at times: I despised Loreda for much of the book.
(9) The Old Man and the Boy, Robert Ruark. I’m not sure how much of Ruark’s Old Man & Boy stories are factual and fiction, but I love reading them. The Old Man is a fount of wisdom and laughs, intentional or otherwise. (“Set yourself down. I aim to declaim.”)
(10) Jack and Tollers. Okay, neither of them are fictional characters, but their friendship is one of my favorite things to read about.
Today is Star Trek day, which I’m pretty sure is something Paramount made up to compete with May the Fourth. I’ve been a Trekkie since a trampoline accident landed me in a hospital for three weeks and I suddenly got to watch TV — and discovered the original series. (I also saw The Next Generation, whic personally offended me as a seven year old because who were these people? It said ‘Star Trek’, but there was a bald guy and some dude wearing a hair barrette on his face….) Anyway, to celebrate I am going to share ten bits of Star Trek medium that come to mind. Absolutely random.
In the bad ol’ days of dial-up, I downloaded this. Do you have any idea how long that took?
I also downloaded this, long with Dark Materia’s “Picard Song” and “Frame of Mind”. This was before ‘remix’ was really a thing. Pretty sure the explosion sound effect is taken from the classic DOS game Skyroads.
I am Worf, son of Mogh! NONE of you are worthy of my blood or my life — But I will stand for you.
The character of Vic Fontaine, and particularly this song, is why I bought a Frank Sinatra album in 2004 and it’s why I remain a fan of classic pop/swing/big band to this day. Listen to Avery Brooks SING!
Star Trek has introduced me to SO much music — opera, folk, big band — and this is a favorite scene from Deep Space Nine. It introduced me to “Jerusalem”.
Yes, the Klingon K-Pop band in “Subspace Rhapsody” was fun. But THIS……THIS is awesome.
This is and forever shall remain one of the most beautiful scenes in all of Star Trek to me. A formerly mute woman begins to sing with her friends, with improvisation. It was scenes like this made my soul leap for joy, scenes like this that are utterly absent from Disco and Picard but so abundant in Strange New Worlds. If your attention span has been Twitterpated, the really good stuff starts at 1:33. (You should work on the attention span thing, though.)
Okay, they’re not all music. This is from STAR TREK BORG, an FMV game that was extremely immersive. The player is thrown back into time, to Wolf 359, and attempts to save his father from being killed. A mix of storytelling and puzzle-solving. This was later followed by STAR TREK KLINGON, which I did not play but LOVE some of the scenes from. If nothing else, this game is a 2 hour experience with John de Lancie. That’s worth experiencing it alone.
Star Trek and baseball. Ya gotta love it.
“You are attempting to manufacture a triumph where non exists.” “To manufactured triumphs! “HEAR HEAR!”
Back to music, a favorite scene from TNG. This is from “Lessons”, but it incorporates important aspects of “The Inner Light”. Beautiful music and a rare moment of Picard sharing his soul with someone else.
Can’t not give Strange New Words some love, which has reignited my love for Trek after 20 years trying to keep the faith.
The Starship Enterprise feels ELECTRIFIED I’m so proud to be your captain!
{..}
MORE SINGING! MORE VOICES!
HAIL THE KLINGONS!
I could post more, but — as I said, this is just ten random things that come to mind.
“Look for the helpers”, Mr Rogers advised children who were frightened by disaster. L. Douglas Keeney here offers a spyglass to readers. Instead of fixating on the flaming towers, the clouds of smoke filled with dust, jet engine fumes, and god-knows-what-else, he directs our attention to the waters around Manhattan, where the largest evacuation in human history was happening, largely ad-hoc. There was no FEMA plan for “Civilian-Led Evacuation of Manhattan”: emergency services plans for treating disasters at the WTC complex largely fell apart when the debris from the Towers covered roads. Keeney tells — or rather, allows the participants to tell — the story of how that boatlift happened, of how NYPD’s marine units, the Coast Guard, private ferries, tugboats, pleasure craft, etc all began casting their eyes toward the seawall and moving to help those they could. This is not a book exclusively about the boat evacuation, though: more broadly it’s about first responders, of people who were on the scene when the horror began to unfold, who responded immediately. We find firefighters and medics eating their breakfast abandoning their plates and moving toward the inferno to save who they could, the medics creating on-the-ground triage centers in lower Manhattan before 2 WTC’s collapse made the entire area a dangerous hellscape. The boat evacuation began unplanned — first responders realized the fastest way to get the gravely injured to hospitals was to get across the Hudson into New Jersey — and was later given the heft of government support when the towers had both fallen and all ships in the harbor asked to participate. A great multitude were already. Although there are many scenes of horror and tragedy here — do not read this with lunch — the great theme is ordinary human heroism, of people triumphing over their fear and their pain to do What Needs to Be Done. Disasters created by the worse demons of our nature often bring out the better angels — and The Lives they Saved is filled with such angels. One caveat: this book needed some sharper editing. There’s some serious misorganization toward the end, and a lot of repeated facts — some in paragraphs that follow one another. The spotlight on ordinary greatness, however, and the introduction of parts of the disaster I’ve not encountered before, still makes this an easy recommendation. Comparable titles are The Only Plane in the Sky, the best oral history of 9/11 imaginable, and Touching History, the story of the day as experienced by airmen and the airlines themselves.
Highlights:
She didn’t need to be told it was bad—the visible carnage said all that—but how bad was it? How close had the victims been to the impact zone? She wanted to understand the situation. “They brought us to a guy burned from head to toe. I said to him, ‘I know this is going to be a strange question, but I have to know what’s going on in those buildings. For everybody’s safety, can you please just tell me where you were.’ He looked at me and said, ‘I was in the basement of the North Tower.’ I said, ‘My God, these people are coming out from the basement. What is going on in that building?’
Unlike the jetliner that hit the North Tower, which hit it square in the middle, United 175 hit off center, near the edge of the South Tower, which allowed more energy to pass through the building and more debris and burning fuel to surge out into the sky on the opposite side. “(I) could feel the heat from the explosion through the glass in our windows,” said a witness. To give some perspective, he added that his offices were nowhere near the South Tower. “Our offices are about 10 blocks from the Trade Center site.
HROUGHOUT THE DAY, ACROSS THE CITY, THE WELL OF GOOD SAMARITANS ran deep, the unsung acts of kindness too frequent to count. The owners of a corner hot dog stand stood their ground even as frightened people swept past them. No doubt they were just as scared as anyone, and they were certainly covered with as much sweat and dust, but they had their carts and their carts were filled with bottled water and soda and, what with the attacks and the collapses and the injuries, maybe that was just what someone needed. So they stood by their cart leaning into the crowds and handing out a can of soda here and there as if they were a relief station alongside a marathon. One survivor ran past them and saw what they were doing, and it hit him, the kindness of it all standing in such sharp contrast the horror of the attack.
The boat captains went back too, men and women not paid to run toward a calamity, not hardened by years of dealing with emergencies. “We knew we had to go back, but we didn’t know what was going to happen to us,” said Jim Peresi. “We were hearing that there were four planes still in the air. We heard they just hit the Pentagon. You know, you don’t know what to expect. We’re figuring [the terrorists are] coming back up here so, yeah, going up [to Manhattan to take on passengers], you didn’t know if you were coming back. You didn’t know. That’s probably the hardest part about it.” “We were afraid, but we were not afraid,” said EMT Immaculada Gattas, Division 6, FDNY, putting it into her own words. “We never thought about dying, we only thought about helping other people.”
“The response was incredible,” said Coast Guard Rear Admiral Richard Bennis, who at the time was USCG Captain of the Port. “Every single vessel in the Port of New York responded to Lower Manhattan. All you could see was vessels streaming into the harbor … every fast ferry, every tugboat, the pilot boats, the Army Corps of Engineers boats, Coast Guard boats—every able boat in the harbor responded to Lower Manhattan.”1 During World War II a total of 338,226 soldiers were evacuated by boat from Dunkirk, France. In New York, 272,539 were evacuated by boat from Manhattan.2 Dunkirk took nine days, May 26 through June 4, 1940. The boat lift of Manhattan took less than 12 hours. The boat lift of Manhattan was thus the largest single-day boat lift in recorded history.3 The tugs, emergency patrol boats, dinner cruise boats, Randive, the Corps of Engineers, Circle Line, and New York Waterways Spirit—all of them came to the assistance of a paralyzed city.
One of the bosses said, ‘these baloney sandwiches in this box over here, don’t eat those, they’ll make you cry.’ So, I think, ‘they’ll make me cry? What are they spicy or something?’ He just shook his head and walked away.” Puzzled by that, the firefighter reached in and pulled out a brown paper bag and looked inside. “[I] opened the flap and there’s a little crayon picture of a rainbow and flower and ‘we love you’ written in crayon. So, I open the bag up and there’s two peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in there and another little note from a girl named Megan and a girl named Melissa. [It says] ‘We love you firemen. Keep up the good work.’ [There was] like a little drawing of a stick figure and the Trade Center and a flower. On the back of the note it said, ‘Made with love from the Coman Hill Elementary School Kindergarten Class.’ We’re sitting there, grown firemen, rough, tough guys getting chocked up and teary eyed over a frickin’ peanut butter and jelly sandwich.”
Today’s Top Ten Tuesday is books that surprised us. First up. a tease from Jim Butcher’s Storm Front.
I had several enchanted items around—or half-enchanted items, anyway. Carrying out a full enchantment is expensive and time-consuming, and I just couldn’t afford to do it very much. We blue-collar wizards just have to sling a few spells out where we can and hope they don’t go stale at the wrong time.
Storm Front
“Our bodies are programmed to consumne fat and sugars because they’re rare in nature. In the same way, we’re biologically programmed to be attentive to things that stimulate: content that is gross, violent, and sexual, and that gossip which is humiliating, embarrassing, or offensive. If we’re not careful, we’re going to develop the psychological equivalent of obesiety. We’ll find ourselves consuming content that is least beneficial for ourselves or society as a whole.” – Danah Boyd, 2009 speech.
Quoted in The Filter Bubble
(1) The Jungle, Upton Sinclair. I knew going in that this was a novel written for overtly political reasons, so I figured it would on the poorer side. To my surprise, Jurgis was a commandingly sympathetic character, and the novel didn’t disintegrate until the last third of the book where he essentially disappears, supplanted by political speeches.
(2) The Four Winds, Kristin Hannah. I had some notion of Hannah as a romance author, so I was expecting to find this mildly interesting for the setting and then skim past the Fifty Shades stuff. To my surprise, history and character drama take center stage here, and the character drama has almost nothing to do with romance.
(3) & (4) Rachel’s Holidayand The Sleeping Beauty. These were both lent to me by my then-lady friend shortly before I had my transplant. The latter was a fantasy novel set in a realm where literary tropes — The Tradition — actively shape the lives of people, who if they meet certain attributes will recreate stories from legend. Surprisingly fun. Rachel’s Holiday was more serious, and involved a narrator who was in denial about her substance abuse problem. It proved to be one of 2022’s more memorable reads.
(5)The Hidden Life of Trees, Peter Wohlleben. I expected this to be interesting: I didn’t expect it to be one of my favorite science books ever.
(6) The Second Sleep, Robert Harris. Not having read anything about this, I began it absolutely believing it was set in medieval England. It proved instead to be set in the far future, where civilization has collapsed and has rebuilt to a psuedo-medieval level.
(7) Into the Black. What I expected: a history of the space shuttle’s creation. What I was surprised by: the Air Force actively expected to create its own space programmed centered around a Manned Observation Laboratory, and recruited its own version of the Mercury 7 — the “Magnificent Eight” — which would have included the first black astronaut had he not died in ’67.
(8) Ain’t My America, Bill Kauffman. Coming of age in the neocon ascendancy, I took for granted that one party was more married to aggressive foreign intervention than the other, but I was quickly disabused of that notion, both by the supposedly peaceful party’s continuing interventions after 2008, and by discovering Bill’s book here, which demonstrated that the other party was the most anti-intervention voice prior to its takeover by the military-industrial complex, something Murray Rothbard documented in another book.
(9) The Invisible Heart: An Economic Romance, Russ Roberts. An economist and a English teacher form an unlikely attachment, but their interest in one another is tested by their differing political views I’d just started listening to Roberts’ “EconTalk” podcast as part of a project to get the perspectives of various professionals (lawyers, doctors, and economists) on issues of the day, and gotten interest in reading Roberts as a result. Although at the time I was opposed to Roberts’ economic views on moral grounds, listening to him and reading this book made me realize we were on the same page in regards to desiring human flourishing. Indeed, Roberts’ podcast these days is more about the meaningful life than economic analysis.
(10) The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs. A single sentence in this book caused a political paradigm shift for me. It’s one of those “This book is so impactful I can’t review it properly” books.
Reading Freely 