Howdy, folks! Welcome back to The Book Report.

Count Lyev Nikolayevich Tolstoy (1828–1910) is generally considered to be one of the world’s greatest novelists. His two biggest contributions, War and Peace and Anna Karenina, represent the peak of realist fiction. His writing led to worldwide fame and fortune, though as he grew older it left him more and more dissatisfied. He was a devout Christian, and he struggled mightily with how he might become a good Christian. In 1910, at the age of 82, Tolstoy renounced his possessions and his marriage in his quest for Truth, and died of pneumonia at the Astapovo train station.

One lesser known novel Tolstoy wrote, in 1893, was The Kingdom of God is Within You. After its completion in 1893 the book was promptly banned in Russia, so the first publication date was not until 1894 in Germany. The religious influence of the novel is obvious, but for non-religious readers of The Book Report I encourage you to stick with me. The book became, in Ghandi’s own words, one of the three most influential books of his life, inspiring his movement of non-violent protest which turned a nation on its head. The book also inspired Martin Luther King, Jr. as the Civil Rights Movement started shuffling forward. Because of its influence on two of the greatest world-changing protests of the twentieth century, I believe the book is worth a read whether you adhere to a particular religion or not.

If you are religious (especially Christian-based), be forewarned. Tolstoy is highly critical of the Church in this book. As I said before, he was a devout Christian struggling to become a good Christian, and he could find very little good Christianity in the Church. After a close examination of Jesus’s words in the Gospels he notes, “Nowhere nor in anything, except in the assertion of the Church, can we find that God or Christ founded anything like what churchmen understand by the Church.” Hence, the title of the book is not The Kingdom of God is Within the Church.

“Neither shall they say see here or see there, for behold, the kingdom of God is within you” (Luke 17:20).

The crux of the book deals with The Sermon on the Mount, how most Christian religions marginalize or ignore it even though it’s the most direct contribution Jesus made to how Christians should act, and most specifically the idea of non-violent resistance to evil: When Jesus said “turn the other cheek” he actually meant it. He also includes in this idea of Christian pacifism a rejection of war, and all governments who wage war show their rejection of basic Christian principles.

Tolstoy also deals with how Christians and secular philosophers may reply to the command by Jesus to “resist not evil”.

The first reply is “The Use of Force is not Opposed to Christianity.” Coupled with this reply is any number of obscure Old and New Testament verses, usually by Christians in position of political power, which could possibly be interpreted as justification for cruelty so that “a Christian government is not in the least bound to be guided by the spirit of peace, forgiveness of injuries, and love for enemies.” His rejection of this reply is brief and simple, concluding, “If all men were to learn that the Church professes to believe in a Christ of punishment and warfare, not of forgiveness, no one would believe in the Church.”

The second reply is “The Use of Force Necessary to Restrain Evil Doers.” This reply is fairly common: Wicked people exist, and they will take advantage of good people if good people do not use force to restrain them. Tolstoy’s response to this is three-fold. First, he argues that Jesus taught that everyone is a child of God and equally loved in his sight, and to view someone as intrinsically wicked is a rejection of this teaching. Second, he argues that even if Jesus had not prohibited using force against the wicked, there is no perfect standard to define goodness, so what results is that individuals and societies view their neighbors as wicked with chaos and global war as the conclusion (which is pretty much what happens now). Finally, he argues that even if there were a perfect standard to define the wicked, no Christian would be able to punish them and still call themselves a Christian since Jesus expressly commanded to use no force against the wicked.

The third reply is “The Duty of Using Force in Defense of One’s Neighbor.” This reply equivocates that the commandment of Jesus was to resist no evil done to yourself, but you have a duty to resist evil done to your neighbor. Tolstoy rejects this argument, first by pointing out that it is a complete assumption supported by nothing in the teachings of Jesus and generally acts in contradiction to them, and second by concluding, “If every man has the right to have recourse to force in face of a danger threatening an other, the question of the use of force is reduced to a question of the definition of danger for another. If my private judgment is to decide the question of what is danger for another, there is no occasion for the use of force which could not be justified on the ground of danger threatening some other man.” Yet Jesus specifically rejects this line of reasoning, shown in the Book of Matthew, Chapter 26, verse 52. When Jesus is arrested at the Garden of Gethsemane, Peter draws a sword to defend Jesus. Jesus reproves him immediately, saying “He who takes up the sword shall die by the sword.“

The fourth reply is “The Breach of the Command of Nonresistance is Regarded Simply as a Weakness.” This is a situation where a person admits the command of Jesus to “resist not evil” just like any other commandment, but failure to follow a commandment due to personal weakness does not mean a person suddenly stops being a Christian. This argument seeks to turn a conscious deliberate act of disobedience into a casual breach, which Tolstoy condemns as “a very skillful device, and many people who wish to be deceived are easily deceived by it.” His response to such an argument is to compare other “sins”, such as fornication (or to use a contemporary example, homosexuality), and how unbending the church can be regarding such transgressions yet how willing they make excuses for resisting evil by force. Clearly, then, they do not rate this commandment the same as any other and by preaching exceptions they are guilty of hypocrisy.

The fifth reply is to evade the issue “By Making Believe that the Question has long been Decided.” This is an argument which subtly tries to evade the whole issue by securus judicat orbis terrarum (“the world judges right”). This is basically a “majority rules” type of argument, where if all the churches teach allowances to the idea of non-resistance to evil than obviously those allowances, securus judicat orbis terrarum, are supposed to be there. Furthermore, they might argue, since this issue was decided long ago it is a waste of time to bring it up now. This type of argument, Tolstoy says, “At once begins the series of long, clever, ingenious, and solemn speeches and writings, which deal with questions nearly related to the subject, but skillfully avoid touching the subject itself.”

He concludes,

Those who justify themselves by the first method, directly, crudely asserting that Christ sanctioned violence, wars, and murder, repudiate Christ’s doctrine directly; those who find their defense in the second, the third, or the fourth method are confused and can easily be convicted of error; but this last class, who do not argue, who do not condescend to argue about it, but take shelter behind their own grandeur, and make a show of all this having been decided by them or at least by someone long ago, and no longer offering a possibility of doubt to anyone–they seem safe from attack, and will be beyond attack till men come to realize that they are under the narcotic influence exerted on them by governments and churches, and are no longer affected by it.

Tolstoy clearly condemns organized religion in his book. The fact that every denomination of Christianity claims to have exclusive hold on the truth proves their uselessness. He writes, “A man of the present day need only buy a Gospel for three copecks and read through the plain words, admitting of no misinterpretation, that Christ said to the Samaritan woman “that the Father seeketh not worshipers at Jerusalem, nor in this mountain nor in that, but worshipers in spirit and in truth,” or the saying that “the Christian must not pray like the heathen, nor for show, but secretly, that is, in his closet,” or that Christ’s
follower must call no man master or father–he need only read these words to be thoroughly convinced that the Church pastors, who call themselves teachers in opposition to Christ’s precept, and dispute among themselves, constitute no kind of authority, and that what the Churchmen teach us is not Christianity.“
Tolstoy shows that a man calling himself Christian is left with a choice: to accept either the Nicene Creed (the organization of the Church) or The Sermon on the Mount (the direct words of Jesus).

While The Kingdom of God Is Within You remains more of a clarion call for believers, I think it deserves equal study from non-believers as well, given how effective the non-resistance to evil worked for Ghandi and India, Martin Luther King, Jr. and the civil rights movement, and more recently to a lesser extent in Egypt (and also, I think we’re seeing, in Madison Wisconsin).
I hope the bits I’ve shared has piqued your interest. Because of its publication date, free copies are available on the internet in such places as Project Gutenberg.

Until next time,
Still paddlin’ the old knew…
_-Akatzen-_

Hey, folks! Welcome back to The Book Report.

In 1954, a man by the name of John Ronald Reuel Tolkien published the first part of the first volume of a fantasy masterpiece. Seventeen years earlier, his novel The Hobbit had captured hearts and imaginations of all ages, and the people wanted a sequel. Tolkien had originally intended to write a two volume* sequel, and he spent the years of World War 2 writing the first volume, called The Lord of Rings.

For economic reasons, the publishers decided to break Volume One up into three volumes, each volume consisting of two books. The result is that Volume One of The Hobbit sequel is now referred to as The Lord of The Rings trilogy. For the sake of Tolkien’s original vision, however, I’m treating the trilogy as one book with six parts. I encourage anyone who picks up The Lord of The Rings after this to do the same.

The Creation of The World
When Tolkien started writing The Hobbit in the early 1930s, inspiration for the story seemed to come almost out of nowhere. He was a professor at Oxford University of Anglo-Saxon studies, grading papers one day, when he grabbed a blank sheet of paper and wrote “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.” He finished the story in 1932, meaning it to be a story for his children. Other people, including his good friend C.S. Lewis, had seen the draft however, and urged for its publication.
While the story of The Hobbit, or There and Back Again may have sprung from nowhere, the setting of the story was part of a carefully crafted world that Tolkien had been working on for decades. Tolkien’s background was philology (the study of written language), and he spent some years working on the development of the Oxford English Dictionary. His interest in languages and his fascination of the fantasy worlds created by William Morris and George MacDonald inspired him to create a mythopoeia — a complete mythological history — for a world he called Middle Earth. This included inventing not only languages for Middle Earth, but script for the languages as well! Since language doesn’t just spring up out of nowhere, Tolkien invented the Sarati, an early elvish script which eventually evolved into the Tengwar, the script used in The Lord of The Rings.

With The Hobbit’s success, publishers pushed Tolkien for a sequel. In 1937 he started working on a story where Bilbo had lost all the wealth he’d acquired at the end of The Hobbit and went on new adventures to escape impoverishment. But the more he thought about Bilbo’s magic ring, the more he realized the story should be about the Ring. Over the next 12 years, in true mythopoeic fashion, he crafted the story of The One Ring, and of The One Ring’s History, and even of legends leading to the creation of The One Ring.
When a second edition of The Hobbit came out, Tolkien included some revisions to align it more closely to the new story he was crafting, most notably in the character of Gollum. The story Bilbo told the dwarves, that he had won the ring fairly off of Gollum, was what happened in the first edition. The second edition turned Bilbo’s story into a lie and provided a true account of the “Riddles in the Dark” chapter. A third addition of The Hobbit included still more revisions as more and more history of Middle-Earth became fleshed out.
Tolkien finished The Lord of The Rings in 1949 though the first volume, The Fellowship of the Ring, would not hit shelves until 1954. While reviews for The Lord of The Rings have been mixed, they are generally positive. One initial review called it “among the greatest works of imaginative fiction of the twentieth century (Sunday Telegraph).” And truly, the mark Tolkien left on the fantasy genre has been repeated by perhaps no other author on a genre in a similar way.
It’s quite a statement to make, I realize. Even as I think about it, other names pop into my head. What about Shakespeare? What about Shaw? One difference is they did not enhance the popularity of their genre. Prior to Tolkien, fantasy as a literary genre was little more than fairy tales for children or pulp tales for adults. Tolkien’s The Lord of The Rings literally changed how the general populace viewed fantasy, and widened its popularity considerably in the process. His influence is great enough that “Tolkienian” and “Tolkienesque” have been recorded into The Oxford English Dictionary.

The Lord of The Rings underwent a resurgence of popularity recently with the hugely successful movie trilogy released by Peter Jackson and New Line Cinema in 2001–2003. But that was not the first time Tolkien’s story had been told visually. In 1978 animator Ralph Bakshi released a rotoscoped and animated version of the first half of the story, and in 1980 Rankin-Bass produced a made-for-television animated movie of The Return of the King more or less finishing what Bakshi started. In 1977 Rankin-Bass had also made an animated version of The Hobbit. Currently, Peter Jackson is returning to Middle Earth to film The Hobbit with many of the actors from The Lord of The Rings reprising their roles if they were mentioned in The Hobbit.

If you haven’t yet read The Lord of The Rings, I strongly urge you to do so. It’s an important addition to the literary world, and warrants your attention.

Until next time,
Still paddlin’ the old knew…
_-Akatzen-_

*The second volume Tolkien had planned on writing was The Simarillion. A book titled The Simarillion was released posthumously in 1977, based on notes and unfinished/unpublished stories Tolkien had been working on. Given the much shorter length of this novel, it’s hard to believe this was the second volume Tolkien had planned to write. Likely, there was a much longer narrative utilizing these notes and stories we will never see.

Hey there, folks! Welcome back to The Book Report.

Acclaimed writer Tom Clancy has been engaging audiences with his espionage thrillers for more than twenty years, most notably with his “Jack Ryan” series which began in 1984 with The Hunt for Red October. Late last year he returned to Jack Ryan’s troubled world (which so eerily mirrors our own) with the release of Dead or Alive. So this week I thought I’d take a quick look at the illustrious career of Tom Clancy.

Clancy comes from Baltimore, Maryland, and graduated college from there with a degree in English Literature in 1969. Prior to his literary debut, he ran an insurance agency for a few years before selling it to investors. And in 1984 he exploded onto the literary scene with The Hunt for Red October.

The book is set at the height of the Cold War, and a Russian navel commander has taken Mother Russia’s most advanced nuclear submarine, The Red October, to sea and disappeared with it. Soon, all of the U.S.S.R’s navy has mobilized, which worries the American military. One man, CIA analyst Jack Ryan, comes up with the idea that the commander of The Red October is defecting with the submarine to the United States. What follows is a tense, exciting, submarine hunt of a read, filled with incredible detail of submarine engineering and tactics. A film version of the book came out in 1990, starring Alec Baldwin and Sean Connery.

Clancy followed his successful debut with Red Storm Rising in 1986, a thriller about how the Cold War heats up into World War Three. The book is one of two fictional novels written by Clancy not set in the Jack Ryan universe. The book was a critical examination of a modern ground war in Europe, and several of Clancy’s theories and ideas in the book proved reasonably exact during the 1st Persian Gulf War in 1991.

In 1987, Clancy returned to the Jack Ryan universe with Patriot Games. The book is a prequel to The Hunt for Red October, detailing the events which led Jack to work for the CIA. The book also examines some of the conflict in Ireland. The film version in 1992 starred Harrison Ford and Boromir.

Clancy finished his book blitzkrieg of the 80s with two more novels: The Cardinal of the Kremlin (1988), which dealt with Cold War maneuvering of U.S. and U.S.S.R. missile defense programs (remember Reagan’s Star Wars program?), and Clear and Present Danger (1989), which dealt with the extant to which the drug war became a concern of national security and the legal and ethical gray area of covert operations. Clear and Present Danger was the #1 best-selling novel of the 1980s, selling more than a million and a half hard-cover copies and cementing Tom Clancy’s place as a respected author of espionage thrillers. The film version came out in 1994, starring Harrison Ford and Willem Dafoe.

In the 90s, Clancy’s name in bookstores became even more prolific. He released five books in the Jack Ryan universe. In 1991 he released The Sum of All Fears, where Arab terrorists use a nuclear weapon to blow up the Super Bowl (a film version starring Ben Affleck and Liev Schreiber came out in 2002). In 1993 he wrote a prequel for Jack Ryan’s field agent counter-part, John Clark, called Without Remorse. In 1994’s Debt of Honor, nationalist Japanese oligarchs go to war with the United States utilizing a combination of military maneuvers and economic sabotage. As head of the NSA, Jack Ryan becomes instrumental in staving off these attacks, which culminate in a commercial plane piloted by a Japanese pilot crashing, kamikaze-style, into the U.S. Capitol building resulting in the deaths of the President and nearly the entire chain of successors. Jack Ryan, as next in line, ends the book as President of the United States. In 1996’s Executive Orders, Clancy put Ryan’s presidency in immediate Jeopardy, picking up the very moment Debt of Honor ended, with an assassination attempt and biological warfare. Clancy also creates a situation that allows Iran to take control of Iraq with plans to create an Islamic superpower by invading Saudi Arabia. And 1998’s Rainbow Six (a novelization of the video game) once again featured John Clark as he heads an elite multi-national anti-terrorist unit to battle eco-terrorists.
As with aspects of his earlier novels, Clancy has been almost eerily prescient in detailing areas in which America is vulnerable, right up to the idea of using passenger planes as weapons by flying them into buildings.

The 90s also saw Tom Clancy become an actual name brand. In addition to Rainbow Six, Clancy penned SSN in 1996 about a video game of the same name concerning submarine tactics in a fictional war with China. In 1995, Tom Clancy also created Tom Clancy’s Op-Center to coincide with a the made-for-tv movie starring Harry Hamlin. Though the series (12 books, to date) was created by Tom Clancy, the books were written — at least initially — by ghost writers (who’ve since become listed as the actual authors). In 1998 came Tom Clancy’s Net Force, a series (10 books so far) created with a similar idea as Op-Center in mind, only dealing with internet crime. He also released Tom Clancy’s Net Force Explorers in 1999 with young adult readers in mind (18 novels to date). He also created Tom Clancy’s Power Plays in 1997 (starting with Politika) as a companion to the gaming series of the same name.

Also during the 90s, Clancy wrote his Guided Tour series, non-fiction books about the inner workings of different aspects of American armed forces. He also started another non-fiction series called A Study In Command, books he co-authored with 4 military generals.

So although Tom Clancy wrote 11 novels in the 90s on his own (counting the 6 non-fiction Guided Tour books), his name has since been attached to more than 40 others (and counting). The franchising of his name in the late 90s was the result of book deals that totaled almost $100million, not a bad way for an author to make a living. Additionally, Clancy is one of only three authors to sell more than 2 millions books on a first hard-cover printing during the 90s (John Grisham and J.K. Rowling being the other two).

With the turn of the millennium, Clancy continued writing in his Jack Ryan universe, releasing Bear and Dragon in 2000, Red Rabbit in 2002, Teeth of the Tiger in 2003, and now Dead or Alive in 2010. In 2008 Ubisoft bought rights to the video games connected to his name, including the 17 Rainbow Six titles, 10 Ghost Recon titles, 6 Splinter Cell titles, 2 EndWar titles, and 2 H.A.W.X. titles.

With Dead or Alive just coming out, it’s great to see Tom Clancy continuing to thrill his audience with incredible, but frighteningly plausible, stories. I especially encourage you to grab his Jack Ryan stories for an incredibly detailed look at more than forty years of our military’s history and fascinating what-if scenarios that put out military to the utmost test (not to mention being great reads). I also encourage you to read them in chronological order, rather than by the date they were written.

Until next time,
Still paddlin’ the old knew…

_-Akatzen-_

Howdy folks. Welcome back to The Book Report.

Last week I talked a little bit about John Ajvide Lindqvist’s new book Handling the Undead. This week I want to explore the zombie genre a little more.

Wouldn’t you know it? Zombies have been around since humans began telling stories. In one of the earliest known works of literature, The Epic of Gilgamesh, written around four thousand years ago. In it, the goddess Ishtar says:

I will knock down the Gates of the Netherworld,
I will smash the door posts, and leave the doors flat down,
and will let the dead go up to eat the living!
And the dead will outnumber the living!

The book that introduced the word “zombi” to western culture is the 1929 book The Magic Island, by W.B. Seabrook, which offers a narrator’s account of a visit to Haiti and his encounter with voodoo. The writer who did the most to define zombie literature, however, was H.P. Lovecraft, writing in the late 1920s and early 1930s. His 1925 short story In the Vault is the first example of a victim getting bitten by a vengeful undead. His most definitive zombie work was the Frankenstein-inspired Herbert West–Reanimator, written in 1921.

At this point, zombies began to invade other genres of fiction. 1932’s White Zombie, starring Bela Lugosi and drawing from the voodoo themes in The Magic Island, was the first true zombie film. H.G. Wells came up with the zombie apocalypse (people infected with “the wandering sickness”) scenario in The Shape of Things to Come written in 1933, which was adapted into the 1936 film Things to Come.
In the 1950’s zombies began their invasion of comics, including Tales From the Crypt, Vault of Horror, and Weird Science. Many of those images would influence popular zombie filmmaker George Romero. Even Disney turned out an undead cartoon character named Bombie the Zombie in 1949.

Another book which heavily influenced Romero as Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend, published in 1954. Though the creatures in the book are more or less vampires, the book portrays a worldwide apocalypse due to infection and the infection being a disease rather than a magical, religious, or other supernatural curse. Romero admitted how much the book influenced him when he directed the 1964 film Night of the Living Dead, a film which, more than anything else, has helped define contemporary zombie fiction. Other influential films include Wes Craven’s The Serpent and The Rainbow (1988), and my personal favorite, The Evil Dead (1981).
The undead in The Evil Dead are victims of demonic possession, but don’t hold it against them. The film spawned two sequels, and was such a cult hit that a stage musical opened off-Broadway in 2006. The first three rows of the audience were dedicated “splatter” rows, where you didn’t dare wear anything you didn’t want fake blood to get on. The musical featured such great tunes as “What the F#ck Was That?”, “All the Men in My Life Keep Getting Killed by Candarian Demons”, “Ode to an Accidental Stabbing”, and “Blew That Bitch Away”.

The turn of the millennium marked a cultural high point for zombies. On film came the Resident Evil series (based on the video games), British films 28 Days Later and 28 Weeks later, as well as the comedy spoof Shaun of the Dead, a remake of Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, Romero’s return to zombie films with Land of the Dead, Diary of the Dead, and Survival of the Dead, the existential comedy Zombie Strippers, and Zombieland, featuring the best Bill Murray cameo ever.

Literature didn’t escape the recent zombie invasion either. In 2006, Stephen King wrote his best-selling Cell. David Wellington wrote Monster Island in 2004 and turned it into a trilogy with Monster Nation and Monster Planet.
Probably the most well-known work of zombie literature is Max Brooks’s 2006 hit World War Z. The book was written as an oral history of the zombie apocalypse told by the survivors. In 2003 Brooks published The Zombie Survival Guide, a thoroughly researched parody of other survival manuals that has become a cult hit. In 2008 Jonathan Maberry released Zombie CSU: The Forensics of the Living Dead, where he interviews over 250 experts in forensics, medicine, science, law enforcement, and the military about how the world might react to a zombie invasion.
Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials has characters with zombie-like characteristics after they’ve been artificially separated with their daemon (a physical representation of their soul). J.K. Rowling wrote zombies into the Harry Potter series, where they were know as Inferi: dead who’ve been reanimated with magic.
Another popular zombie novel is 2009’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, which mashed a zombie epidemic straight into Jane Austen’s text.

Comics didn’t escape the recent zombie surge either. Perhaps the most popular comic is Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead series (which was turned into an extremely popular television show on AMC this past year). Kirkman also wrote Marvel Zombies in 2006. DC Comics came up with their own zombies during Geoff Johns’s Blackest Night run, where he introduced The Black Lantern Corps.

Like it or not, zombies are here to stay. Max Brooks claims zombies are so popular because “other monsters may threaten individual humans, but the living dead threaten the entire human race.… Zombies are slate wipers.”

Until next time,
Still paddlin’ the old knew…
_-Akatzen-_

Greetings, folks. Welcome back to another Book Report.

In 2004 John Ajvide Lindqvist released Låt den rätte komma in in his native Sweden. The book was a huge success and ultimately has been translated into 13 different languages. In 2007 the book hit American shores with the title Let the Right One In.
In 2005, Lindqvist followed his best-seller up with Hanteringen av odöda. Translated into English in 2009, the book is called Handling the Undead.

Handling the Undead falls under the recently popular category of Zombie fiction, although it is by no means a typical zombie story. I suppose “recently popular” is a loose term to use, since zombie fiction has been around for quite some time, especially on film. But it’s nice to see someone do something different with the zombie genre.

For one thing, the book isn’t a gore-fest. Love, especially the love between parent and child, is a major theme here. Rather than the indiscriminate slaughter of undead by a few survivors trying to find a safe place (or the indiscriminate slaughter of living by a mass of zombies trying to find brains), the book explores the period of grieving in losing a loved one and also the shock to the system that could happen when the loved one comes back.
Don’t get me wrong, there’s some blood. There’s some horror. But Resident Evil or Dawn of the Dead this ain’t.

I suppose there will be some purists out there who won’t like how Lindqvist toys with the genre, but the book presents a truly wonderful ‘what-if’ scenario and invites you along for the ride. But the ride is more psychological than anything. You get a nice glimpse of the human condition and some believable reactions to an unbelievable situation. There’s some panic, but there’s also denial and dismissal, religious zealotry, and scientific testing to see if death, after all, can be defeated.

So give it a read, and next week I’ll explore some of the more traditional zombie literature.

Until next time,
Still paddlin’ the old knew…
_-Akatzen-_

Hello, all! Welcome back to The Book Report.

“Welcome back” carries extra meaning for me, as I’ve just returned from a long and well-earned vacation. For the purposes of The Book Report, two great things happened while I was gone.

The first is that I got a chance to use the nook I got for Christmas. After going through it quite a bit I give it two thumbs up! The only way this thing could be more useful would be if it was in full color (wasn’t given that one) and it actually was The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

The second is that the flight I was on afforded me a lot of time to read a book on my nook. Which means that I have something to write about today.

The book I read was Shades of Grey: The Road to High Saffron, written by Jasper Fforde and published in 2010. I’ve posted about Fforde before; if you want, scour the archives for my review of The Eyre Affair (fyi, there is a new Thursday Next book coming out this year, so look for it). In The Eyre Affair (and the Thursday Next books following), Fforde proved to be a wonderfully zany world inventor, and he gets even more creative in Shades of Grey.

The novel is dystopian, meaning that its a society (often set in the future) that has collapsed or degraded into a repressive, controlled state, often claiming to be a new utopia. Huxley’s Brave New World, Orwell’s 1984, Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, and Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale are all examples of dystopian novels.

Fforde sets Shades of Grey far into the future (there are clues as to just how far), centuries after Something That Happened, an event that nearly destroyed society but no one remembers or wrote down what it was. After Something That Happened, however, everything changed. People began to see only one color, but it was different for everyone. What color you saw (and how much of it) determined your status in the society that rebuilt. Purple was at the top and Greys, individuals unlucky enough to be born completely color-blind, became (essentially) serfs.

The society (called Chromatica) is governed by strict Rules, developed by the founder (and Christ-figure) Munsell. Eddie Russet is a Red, living more or less happily within the Rules and hoping the amount of Red he can see is enough to impress the rich Oxblood family so he can marry their daughter Constance. A prank involving a prefect, however, condemns him to the Outer Fringes of society to conduct a chair census: one of a set of useless tasks designed to impress a particular moral on the individual. In the fringe city of East Carmine, he meets a Grey named Jane, and everything changes.

I think that’s about enough plot for now. The book is incredibly entertaining, and Fforde paints (heh) a fascinating picture of a world defined almost entirely by color. If you are a fan of other dystopian novels, I think you’ll appreciate the generally more light-hearted tone Fforde sets in this novel. If you’ve read other Fforde novels you’ll know what I’m talking about. The novel really is quite good and I found myself ignoring sleep by the end so I could find out what happens next, which is always a good sign.

So give it a read, and then look forward to two more planned novels in the series, hopefully hitting shelves soon!

Until next time,
Still paddlin’ the old knew…
_-Akatzen-_

Hey folks! It’s the first Book Report of 2011, and I’m happy you’re hear to read it.

We covered a lot of ground last year, and I had a lot of fun covering it. Let’s see what kind of trouble we can get into this year.

In 1997, Jared Diamond wrote a 400+ page book titled Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. The book won the Pulitzer Prize in 1998 for covering, in fairly broad strokes, the development of humans as a species. But he did it in an interesting way.

I suppose most historians get their motors revved by asking (or being asked) a simple question: How did we get here? (and also Why did this happen?). Diamond was asked a simple question too. In 1972 he was in New Guinea studying bird evolution as a biologist (a different sort of historian entirely). One of his friends was a politician named Yali, who asked him, “Why is it you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?“
In New Guinea, cargo refers to material goods. In other words, Yali asked Diamond why it seemed white people showed up on their island in such an advanced developed state over them.

Now, you could go ahead an explain the industrial revolution to Yali, but that would not really answer the question. Diamond realized that humans began in one place (true for both creation and evolution theories), and slowly spread across the world. So how was it possible for humans to develop at different speeds when they essentially started at the same point?

Guns, Germs, and Steel attempts to answer this question, and some of the answers are astounding in their simplicity. For instance, when examining the differences between hunter-gatherer tribes and agricultural ones, based on simple geographic location, the amount of acreage that can sustain a hunter-gatherer tribe is much larger than an agricultural acre. Agricultural tribes can produce more food in a smaller area, and the food surpluses meant that not everyone in the tribe had to till the land. Agricultural tribes began to develop specialists: artists, priests, and politicians. These specialists used their time to advance their tribe in ways hunter-gatherers were unable to. Those food surpluses essentially paved the way for the first primitive militaries.

Through this and other examples, the book attempts to disabuse the notion that any European or Asian civilization is intellectually, morally, or inherently genetically superior, despite their long history of conquering less developed cultures. Ultimately, the book seems to conclude that the developmental speed of a culture determined the same three ways property value is: location, location, and location.

Diamond’s book is a fascinating read. His writing is welcoming and friendly, so you don’t feel as though you’re wading through a dry textbook. Many of the insights gleaned about how environment affects a culture seem to me to still be applicable today, proof that an understanding of history helps provide greater understanding of the present.

In 2005, the National Geographic Society produced a documentary based on the book. It’s currently available to watch instantly on Netflix, so if you’re hesitant to go pick up the (excellent) book, I encourage you to watch the documentary instead. It’s truly fascinating stuff.

Until next time,
Still paddlin’ the old knew…

Hey folks, welcome back to The Book Report.

I hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas/Yuletide/Saturnalia last weekend. In a few short days 2010 will draw to a close and 2011 will rain down upon us surprises and changes like ever year prior.

What I thought I’d do today is offer some input concerning the momentous occasion leading up to the New Year: The New Year’s Eve Party.
It’s become almost as big a tradition as Christmas, it seems. One last hurrah before a new year begins.

The first thing I have to say may sound like a given: Be safe.
I’m not sure why people seem to think that it’s only a bad idea to drive drunk on days that aren’t a holiday, but there are a lot more drunk drivers out on New Year’s Eve. Don’t be one of them, and be aware that they are out there if you drive anywhere. If you’re hosting a party, I strongly urge you to collect keys at the door and don’t give them back until you are sure the person using them is okay to drive. Inviting someone to the party who can be a designated driver is also not a bad idea.

Next is also for people hosting a party: Add variety.
I know, hosting a party can get pricey, so you buy cases of crap beer and a couple of cheese trays for hors d’oeuvres. Do you really want your last Hurrah of the year to be sponsored by the Silver Bullet? Bevmo! and Costco offer great prices on decent beers and I promise the effort is worth it.
Additionally, you might want to pick up a book on mixed drinks. I got The Complete Bartender by Robyn Feller on my shelf. It doesn’t get a whole lot of use, true. But a party offering a drink specialty or two can really make an impact on the fun factor. If you really got some money to burn you cannot go wrong with a fully stocked bar.

Also in the Add variety category: offer activities besides drinking. Dancing is good if you like that sort of thing. Just make sure it’s something most of the party would enjoy. Poker is fun, but if half the party doesn’t play you probably shouldn’t start up a game. Something I’ve used in the past to great effect is If…(Questions for the Game of Life) by Evelyn McFarlane and James Saywell. They’ve written several different versions of the book, each containing thought-provoking, yet still fun, questions. It’s a relatively tame game, but it also helps you get to know the people you call friends a little better in a fun way. Add a little veritas that comes from drinking and some of the answers can be quite hilarious.

Regardless, having a party game or two can help keep things under control. Everyone wants to have fun, but it’s a sure bet no one wants to spend the first day of the new year in jail for doing something easily preventable (and probably stupid). But that means the host of the party needs to have an organized plan for the evening, with detailed arrangements for if/when a guest turns out to be an angry drunk, or drank too much, or turns into a sobbing wreck because a certain song comes on, or whatever.

Anyway, I hope all of you have an absolute blast closing out 2010, and I’ll see you next year!

Until next time,
Still paddlin’ the old knew…
_-Akatzen-_

Howdy, folks! Welcome back to The Book Report!

Last year about this time, I talked about zombies for Christmas (the topic was kind of a no-brainer). But I have had a few people ask me about where the Christmas holiday came from. So I thought I’d do a little research and help out.

The word “Christmas” is a shortening of the words “Christ Mass”, and comes from the Roman Catholic tradition of celebrating the birth of Jesus on the 25th of December. Is that really when Jesus was born?
Probably not (in fact, very highly likely not). First off, there is the problem of dating AD (anno domini). Traditionally, 1 AD is considered the first year of Jesus’ birth (Latin would translate this into The first Year of our Lord). A Scythian monk named Dionysius Exiguus calculated when this would be using the following parameters:
The Roman Empire counted years from ab urbe condita (“the founding of the City”). So 1 AUC was the year of the founding of the city of Rome. Caesar Augustus took power in 727 AUC, reigned 43 years, and was succeeded by Tiberius. The third chapter of the Gospel of Luke mentions it being the 15th year of Tiberius’s reign, and mentions as well that Jesus was 30 years old when he began his ministry. That would mean Jesus was born in the 28th year of Caesar Augustus’ reign, or 754 AUC.

The trouble with this calculation is that the Gospel of Matthew places the birth of Jesus during the reign of Herod the Great (“Herod the king” Matt 2:1). Herod died in 750 AUC, four years prior to the calculation of Dionysius Exiguus. Now, it is possible that Matthew was referring to Herod Antipas, King Herod’s son. King Herod’s kingdom was divided by the Roman empire into four client states, and Herod Antipas ruled over one of those states under the title of Tetrarch (not king).
It should be noted that the Gospel of Matthew was not an eye-witness account to history. In fact, none of the Gospels were. The earliest written gospel was the Gospel of Mark, written around 65 CE, and even Mark’s gospel was written second-hand, believed to have come from an account related to him by the apostle Peter. The gospels of Matthew and Luke appear to be based on Mark’s Gospel and at least one other unknown document. The Gospel of John was written by an unknown author using testimony from an unknown apostle, who the early church assumed was the apostle John. Scholars generally attribute the Gospel of John to have been written around 90 CE.

So why December 25th, when we don’t know the day, much less the year, of the birth of Jesus?
When the Christian Church gained ascendancy in Rome, it had difficulty competing with the various pagan holidays, rituals, and festivals that people celebrated in the far-flung reaches of the Roman Empire. (The word “pagan” means “country-dweller”, and since “pagans” would be further from the influence of a church centered in more populous regions their traditions would last longer and be more resistant to change.) One such festival was the saturnalia.

The saturnalia (Feast of Saturn) was a week-long celebration, beginning on the 17th of December, where social order was more or less suspended. Courts were closed, and no one could be punished for damaging property or injuring people. Slaves and their masters switched roles during feasts (though within reason; the slave knew he was going to be a slave again at the end of the week, so he wouldn’t take the role reversal too far), and orgies were fairly common. The various communities would appoint a Lord of Misrule from their community for the festival. During that time, the Lord of Misrule could do anything they wanted: lie, steal, sleep with the wives of other men. It was all tolerated in fairly good humor, for at the end of the festival, the Lord of Misrule had his throat slit on the altar of Saturn as a sacrifice for the benefit of all. (Does the tradition of taking everyone’s sins upon his shoulders to be sacrificed sound familiar?)
Also during the festival, drunken revelers would go naked from house to house singing songs (the origin of caroling), presents would be exchanged, and human-shaped biscuits would be eaten (the origin of gingerbread men).

During the 4th century CE, the Church integrated the saturnalia in order to help convert pagans and placed the birth of Jesus to coincide with the end of the festival. Even with the integration into the church, much of the pagan traditions continued (with the fact that we still have caroling and gingerbread men as evidence; naked caroling, anyone?), leading Puritans to ban what they saw as an essentially pagan holiday. Christmas was illegal in the Massachusetts colony until 1681.

Okay, but what about other Christmas traditions?

The Christmas tree idea also comes from pagan tradition. Druidic and other pagan religions included nature worship, and trees that remained green through the winter months were believed to be powerful. So these pagans would take these trees (or cuttings, and make wreaths) into their homes to be decorated, or enshrined. Mistletoe and holly also had the same reputation for power since they too stayed green through the winter months. Mistletoe was thought to be especially powerful, since a cutting stayed fresh long after it was separated from the tree. The tradition of kissing under mistletoe comes from the belief that a maid who kissed someone under the mistletoe would be married to them within the year (which, for a young woman making out with her beau, would be likely anyway).

The origin of Santa Claus is actually pretty interesting (and also ridiculous that it continues, to be honest). Santa Claus is a derivation of the Dutch Sinterklaus, which refers to St. Nicholas. I’m sure we all knew that Santa and St. Nicholas are essentially the same person. So how did we go from a Turkish bishop who died in 345 CE to a jolly, round, gift-giving, sleigh-riding fellow in red who shows up on December 25th?
Many miracles are attributed to St. Nicholas. Church history holds that he was the orphan of wealthy parents who strongly followed the charge of Jesus to “sell what you own and give to the poor”. He used his inheritance to provide for the sick and needy and became a bishop of Mayra, Turkey at a young age.

One story tells of a poor man who had three daughters. Without a dowry to attract a husband, the man had no choice but to sell his daughters into slavery. The legend states that when Nicholas heard of this, he snuck up to the man’s window and tossed three sacks of gold into the stockings of the daughters, which were drying by the fire. The story inspired the tradition of hanging stockings on the mantle, and the church used St. Nicholas’ gift-giving to help supplant the gift-giving traditions of the saturnalia. In a further bid to attract pagans, they merged the Saint with Woden, a pagan deity who rode his horse across the sky one evening each autumn.
Now we have a gift-giving saint who rides the skies connected to the Christianized version of the saturnalia, dubbed Christ Mass.

In 1809 Washington Irving referred to the flying horse-riding Saint several times in his satire of Dutch Culture Knickerbocker History, using Sinterklaus as his name. In 1822, Dr. Clement Clarke Moore published his poem A Visit From St. Nicholas, using some of Irving’s imagery. Modern readers might recognize the poem as ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas. Images of this Santa Claus, however, still portrayed the Saint in liturgical wear. Then Bavarian illustrator Thomas Nast drew more than 2,000 cartoon images of Santa for Harper’s Weekly between 1862 and 1886.

Nast’s illustrations placed Santa’s home at the North Pole, had his toy workshop full of elves, and showed his lists of good and bad children for the year.
The final look for Santa Claus happened in 1931, when the Coca-Cola company hired Swedish artist Haddon Sundblom to paint a Coke-drinking Santa. Using Clarke’s poem and Nast’s images, Sundblom firmly entrenched in everyone’s mind the idea that Santa wears a red suit with white trim, all thanks to Coca-Cola. What we’re left with is a Santa blend of Christian and pagan religions with commercialism. Which is pretty much what Christmas is about these days.

Merry Christmas, everyone!
Until next time,
Still paddin’ the old knew…
_-Akatzen-_

Hey, folks. Welcome back to the Book Report!

Last month, Disney released Tangled, a new take on the Germanic fairy-tale Rapunzel, collected by the Brothers Grimm. It had an official budget of $260 million, making it officially the second most expensive film ever made. Silly Disney.

But I like the fairy-tale with a twist idea. Quite a few books have been written with the idea in mind, and I thought for today’s Book Report I’d take a look at a few of them.

Probably the king of twisting fairy-tales around is Gregory Maguire. In 1995 he turned a classic villain into a sympathetic heroine in Wicked: The Life and Times of The Wicked Witch of the West. The excellent book was adult-oriented and very dark, and the butchering that happened to it on Broadway hardly does it justice, no matter how much you believe the musical was excellent. He returned to his version of Oz in 2005 with Son of a Witch and again in 2008 with A Lion Among Men, but before that he twisted the Cinderella fairy-tale around in 1999 with Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister (which Disney converted into a TV movie in 2002). In 2003, Maguire twisted another fairy-tale with Mirror, Mirror, presenting a new look at Snow White.

In 1983, Anne Rice (writing under the pseudonym A.N. Roquelaure) published The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty, an erotic Bondage/Dominant/Submissive/Masochist retelling of the fairy-tale. She made the story a trilogy with Beauty’s Punishment in 1984 and Beauty’s Release in 1985. The highly graphic erotica series out-sold her previous best-seller, Interview With the Vampire.

One of my favorite revisions of a fairy-tale is the 1999 novel Enchantment, written by Orson Scott Card. More than just an alternate retelling of Sleeping Beauty, it sets the fairy-tale smack-dab in the middle of Russian folk-tales, mixes it up with a little Jewish home life, and throws in some Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court for good measure. Then he inverts it all and adds the slightest dash of Narnia.
The recipe concocts a delicious yarn, where the villains revel in their villainy and heroes realize just how bloody difficult it is to actually be heroic.

I’ve written about Orson Scott Card before (twice, actually), and it’s a testament to his talent that each time it’s been about a different genre of fiction. I’m not sure I’ve ever agreed with his personal politics or religion, but he manages to tap into something universal in his fiction that resonates strongly with me, and he’s been the most recommended author I’ve given people (seriously, go read Ender’s Game).

Grimm’s Fairy Tales are currently available for free as an ebook at Barnes and Noble right now. If you are so inclined, I encourage you to go give ‘em a read (or reread) and then check out some of these revisions. I think you’ll really enjoy it.

Until next time,
Still paddlin’ the old knew…
_-Akatzen-_