nwhyte's reviews
4413 reviews

The Scheme for Full Employment by Magnus Mills

2.0

http://nhw.livejournal.com/208947.html[return][return]It's a short book, written very lightly and so I finished it in a couple of hours. A firm of lorry-drivers whose only task is basically to service their own lorries as part of a nationwide scheme for full employment is hit by industrial action. It's supposed to be funny but to be honest I didn't really get it; who exactly is being satirised? Academics? The NHS? The pre-Thatcher nationalised industries? The last of these seems the most likely but hey man, that was over two decades ago. Or was it really the Soviet Union? All a bit pointless really.

America Right Or Wrong: An Anatomy Of American Nationalism by Anatol Lieven

4.0

http://nhw.livejournal.com/193833.html[return][return]Anatol Lieven's analysis is basically that the driving force of American politics is nationalism; that this has a good side and a bad side; and that at the moment under Bush the bad side is prevailing. I finished the book with a much better understanding of what is going on than I had before.[return][return]I found his second chapter, analysing the "splendour and tragedy of the American Creed", particularly compelling. There are some wonderful things in American political culture and history. The words of Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence, or of Lincoln in the Gettysburg Address, are moving for anyone who cares about big political ideas like freedom and equality - however flawed they may have been in implementation, the rest of the English-speaking world hasn't really come up with anything as powerful.[return][return]Writing a book that attacks the dark side of American nationalism does carry the risk of drifting into polemic, but he manages to leaven this with shafts of sympathy, compassion and even admiration for America. I found most of it utterly convincing. His last chapter, which addresses the US/Israel relationship as a special case where American nationalism has overridden any sensible policy on the Middle East ("what use is a strategic ally when you actually have to ask them not to help you in a war in a nearby country?") has made me reconsider my own thoughts on the Palestinian issue; on the whole his analysis is pretty sympathetic to Israel (though I doubt if everyone will see it that way) and he makes a good point that Israel's actions in 1948 should be judged by comparison with what Europeans were doing in Europe in 1948, rather than by later standards.

Why Europe Will Run the 21st Century by Mark Leonard

4.0

http://nhw.livejournal.com/922824.html[return][return]Leonard's short book is a positive polemic - an assertion that the EU model is not only stable and viable, but that it will prove infectious and beneficial to the rest of the world. He tackles the economics as well, arguing that the demographic crisis is much less grave than some fear, and that the euro will prove a magnet. He writes of the "Eurosphere", the European, Middles Eastern and African states which he believes will naturally look to the EU as their geopolitical centre of gravity, especially as US influence recedes. It's an attractive vision, the kind of thing I always chide Commission officials for failing to produce. One can quibble with the details (eg on Macedonia, where in one brief paragraph he doesn't quite get the sequence of events straight) but the overall thrust of the argument is attractive. Since writing the book, Leonard has been made the head of a new think-tank promoting precisely these ideas.

Buddha Volume 1: Kapilavastu by Osamu Tezuka

http://nhw.livejournal.com/688098.html[return][return]Originally published in 1974, this is the first of eight volumes retelling the life of the Buddha by one of Japan's greatest manga artists, known as the "Walt Disney of Japan" because of his involvement in anime (he invented the "large eyes" style).[return][return]I'm therefore rather sorry to report that this didn't do much for me. The Buddha himself barely appears in this first volume (born about two-thirds of the way through, still a baby at the end); the other characters seemed to me never to move much beyond going trhough the mythic motions, in a way that reminded me of why I am ususally left unsatisfied with books retelling the Cuchullain or other Irish legends. The female characters were difficult to tell apart, apart from the (unnamed) mother of the central character, Chapra, who can be distinguished from other women in that she is permanently topless for some reason. The one intriguing character, a child thief called Tatta, was also somewhat infuriating in that he had the magical power to transfer his consciuousness into animals - a pretty effective mystical trick that didn't really seem to fit with the otherwise rather gritty and realistic setting of the story.[return][return]I did like the fight scenes, though, which are not easy to draw effectively. But I'm unlikely to invest in the other seven books of the series.

City by Clifford D. Simak

http://nhw.livejournal.com/463732.html[return][return]One of those classics of SF that I'd never actually read (also I'm gradually working up a piece on Simak's Hugo/Nebula winning story "Grotto of the Dancing Deer"). A set of eight stories chronicling the disappearance of humanity to new states of mental and physical being, while the Earth is taken over first by dogs and then by ants, all set in a framing narrative presenting the material as fragments being analysed in the far future by canine scholars, slightly reminiscent of The Handmaid's Tale and Arthur C Clarke's "The Fires Within" (I'm sure there are other examples but that's what comes to mind). I had read one story from this collection a few months ago, but it turns out to be atypical, set on the planet Jupiter rather than the small-town American setting shared by all the other stories. The tone is elegiac and regretful, and the conclusion is that humanity cannot be saved in its current form; but there are better beings, and better worlds, to come.

Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang by Kate Wilhelm

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1346180.html[return][return]This is a rather unusual Hugo winner. It's a curious amalgam of the great post-holocaust novels Earth Abides and After London on the one hand, and the suspicion of clones latent in Brave New World on the other. The depiction of sexual politics as humanity tries to reinvent itself is core to the narrative: the clones' society turns out to be intellectually and biologically sterile, and their sequestration of fertile women to drug-addled maternity is pretty appalling. I felt that Wilhelm was asking some pretty serious questions here, if not necessarily providing the answers; in any case, as an author rather than a politician, the former rather than the latter is her responsibility.

The Confusion by Neal Stephenson

http://nhw.livejournal.com/111019.html[return][return]If you liked Cryptonomicon and Quicksilver, and I did, you'll like this as well. Qualifies as sf only on the Damon Knight principle. Set in Europe between 1689 and 1704 with most of it concentrated towards the first three years of that period. I thought actually better than Quicksilver, with more imaginative use of settings including Mediterranean, India, and Spanish America. Good stuff.

The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho

http://nhw.livejournal.com/686099.html[return][return]To be honest, not wildly impressed by this story of the boy who goes to find his Personal Legend in the desert. I think I might have found it deep and meaningful when I was 14. But the images seemed pretty heavy-handed to me now. If I want to read spiritual literature I'll go straight to the real thing.

God's Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It by Jim Wallis

http://nhw.livejournal.com/1049013.html[return][return]Rather sad to report that I'm not going to finish this, even though I agree with a lot of what the author is saying - particularly, that the right wing's capture of the religious high ground in the 2004 presidential election was both crucial and dishonest. But the style rather put me off - Wallis is preaching rather than analysing, and shows off about his own achievements rather too much. I got the message in the first couple of chapters, and don't really feel I need to read the rest - especially since the battle lines of 2008 are rather more blurry, but not really in line with Wallis's prescription.

The Hallowed Hunt by Lois McMaster Bujold

http://nhw.livejournal.com/441943.html[return][return]this is the book I'd been waiting for for ages, and got on publication from Amazon in May - but have only now had time to read it (Anne of course had first crack at it). This is a new book in the world of The Curse of Chalion and Paladin of Souls, with (as far as I could remember) an entirely new set of characters and a slight shift of geographical focus, but the same religious setting of five gods who are very real indeed; in this case there is also an Ancient Curse that has to be lifted. I was worried that it was a bit slow-moving and info-dumping at the start, but once we get the Grand Revelation about one of the central characters it really picks up, and I couldn't put it down while reading the second half. Bujold's usual well-rounded characters, including those who would be villains in a lesser author's book, combined with an intriguing puzzle which is solved with due regard to internal logic. So, I liked it, and it doesn't really need you to have read either of the previous two.