Another Books I’ve Read post

THE BLACK THRONE by Roger Zelazny and Fred Saberhagen reminds me a lot of TV’s THE SECRET ADVENTURES OF JULES VERNE as Poe and his swashbuckling parallel-world counterpart are caught up in an adventure with psychic Annabelle Lee, mage Ligeia, revenant M. Valdemar and M. Dupin and battle the Red Death and King Prospero. Not bad, but not terribly distinctive (that is, I’m not sure the Poe elements really added anything).
THE GREAT FUNK: Coming Together and Falling Apart (On a Shag Rug) in the Seventies by Thomas Hine argues that the essence of the Seventies can be found in OUR BODIES OURSELVES (“The book’s message is that the system has failed us, so we must come together to fix things, and our feelings while doing this are as important as the hard facts.”), and that the decade’s efforts to Find Truth, Keep it Real and Reject Expertise can be seen as the broad thread running through hippie fashion, Afros, THE JOY OF SEX, the failure of the midiskirt (“The fashion overlords spoke and for the first time, nobody listened.”) and putting nude portraits of human beings on Voyager (“They wouldn’t have done it in the fifties—and probably wouldn’t do it in the 21st century.”). An interesting look at such trends as pet rocks, plant telepathy, leisure suits (“The seventies weren’t about bad txaste—they were about rejecting taste as yet another form of authority.”).
GILDED YOUTH: Three Lives in France’s Belle Epoque by Kate Cambor takes a look at fin-de-siecle France through the lives of Victor Hugo’s granddaughter, the son of Realist novelist Alphonse Daudet and the son of the great neurologist Charcot attempt to carve out decent lives in the space between expectations of their future greatness, the fall of Napoleon III and the rise of Vichy, with all the other changes in that period. Good, if not terribly groundbreaking.
LOOP GROUP is a flat bit of chick-lit from Larry McMurtry in which a sixty-year-old film sound-woman finds herself increasingly unnerved after her hysterectomy, leaving her desperately trying to figure out who she is now that she no longer has all her body parts. The sexist overtones of this are rather annoying, but a bigger problem is that the strong-minded, sexually active protagonist is an interesting character, the first three discs of the audiobook seemed mostly expository conversations about her life, and not the interesting kind. Not the best introduction to the author, by far.
RUNNING TIME: Films of the Cold War, by Nora Sayre, left me feeling cheated, since the title implies a different focus than FILMS OF THE FIFTIES which is what this turns out to be. The section devoted to actual Cold War films doesn’t tell me much I didn’t know (and the section on pro-USSR WWII films told me stuff I’m already too familiar with—though that’s not her fault), and the section on SF strains even harder than the usual Fear Of The Bomb cliches (“The parallels between the INVADERS FROM MARS and the Russians are undeniable.”) plus she gets a few too many details wrong.
THE ACADEMY by Bentley Little has a California school turning into a charter school—and if the creepy principal and the sudden profusion of new rules weren’t unsettling enough (“Check the charter—the administration can amend it without a vote.”), how about the ghosts on the playground, the Mysterious Deaths, the passages that seem longer than they should be  … Effective, though I’m skeptical about the insistence that none of the administrative insanity could have happened in a conventional non-charter school.
THIS TREE GROWS OUT OF HELL: MesoAmerica and the Search for the Magical Body by Ptolemy Tompkins, argues that the rivers of blood spilled by the Aztecs and their predecessor civilizations (including the Mayans, who were nowhere near as spiritual and pacifist as used to be thought) was a desperate quest to re-establish connections with the gods when their steadily expanding cities and civilization seemed to be cutting them off from their shamanic roots. Tompkins argues that by the time of the Spanish conquest, this had become a rather onerous burden with the Aztecs themselves believing their was something unstable about the mess (“But to give them their credit, they stuck with their beliefs even when they started to suffer for them.”), and might eventually have spun off into another direction. While speculative, a very interesting work.
WOMEN WATCHING TELEVISION: Gender, Class and Generation in the American Television Experience by Andrea L. Press is a look at how different groups of women (older/younger and working/middle class) respond to television images from the fifties, more feminist shows such a MARY TYLER MOORE and CAGNEY AND LACEY and “postfeminist” TV (“The women have jobs but also a full load of domestic responsibilities—and unlike Lucy, they’re never shown scheming to challenge the family dynamic.”). Press finds that generally working class women have a higher requirement for “realism” in their viewing (albeit a rather subjective assessment of it) and that people are generally found yearning for what they don’t have (children of divorce yearn for FATHER KNOWS BEST, older women are intrigued by more liberated characters they can see as a What If, working class women are fascinated by middle-class characters they do find “realistc”) and pretty much everyone loved COSBY (whether identifying with the family situations explored or Claire’s role as a Professional Woman Who Is Also A Full Time Mother).
BRAINWASHING: The Fictions of Mind Control-A Study of Novels and Films Since World War II by David Seed shows that the term “brainwashing” actually preceded the furor over Korean War prisoners, being how one CIA administrator described China’s supposed efforts to establish 1984-style control over its citizens, thereby making the term propagandist from the first (though some government officials objected that by claiming Communists could control our thoughts it painted them as supermen), with psychiatrists who pointed out that it was neither anything new or anything effective being relegated (“It was pointed out that none of the men who confessed to war crimes in Korea went on to become a devoted Communist after their return.”) to medical journals. Very good in discussing the Cold War themes along with the flip side as critics of American society charged that the CIA, Madison Avenue or society itself were brainwashing us all.
THE SHAPE CHANGER was Keith Laumer’s third adventure of Lafayette O’Leary (and the last until his spate of revisiting old series in the eighties) in which Lafe finds himself getting bodyswapped with a gypsy rogue, then landing in a bird-man, all the while wondering who’s behind it, and what they’re getting up to in his body. A good one, though by this point in the series Lafe should know enough not to start assuming he’s in a Pretentious, Surreal Dream Sequence.
THE KNOT BOOK: An Elementary Introduction to the Mathematical Theory of Knots by Colin C. Adams was a disappointment—having been practicing knot-tying for my own amusement for several years (without, I note, ever actually needing to tie one for real) I thought this would cover some of the physical properties of knots but it’s actually discussing knots as idealized mathematical figures and the properties thereof. Not as fun as I thought (but that’s not Adams’ fault)/
ONCE AN EAGLE by Anton Myrer is a late sixties military drama chronicling the life of Midwestern-born soldier boy Sam Damon from his enlistment in the years before World War I through the long, dreary postings between the wars, then into the Big One before finally ending as we start our slide into Vietnam. I was surprised his calculating adversary (an officer whose sole interest is his personal advancement) outlasted him, but that’s because his triumph is an explanation for how we wound up in Vietnam (Sam representing the Voice of Reason that didn’t get listened to).