Books (#SFWApro)

THE LAST DARK: The Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, Book Four by Stephen Donaldson has Covenant accepting that no power in the Land can stop the Worm of World’s End from destroying it, and therefore redirecting his efforts towards defeating Lord Foul before he can escape the apocalypse and shred all of creation. This leaves only the physical challenges of fighting Foul’s forces to face him and Covenant’s familiar mental obstacles such as self-doubt, uncertainty and possession. Could have been cut some, but overall very good and a satisfactory epilog at the end (so I hope this genuinely is the final chapter).
FLYING CLOSE TO THE SUN: My Life and Times as a Weatherman by Cathy Wilkerson recounts how the author’s developing anti-Vietnam War views led her first from middle-class teen to college activist and then to a radical terrorist willing to blow things up to reach her goals. Wilkerson’s narrative sometimes bogs down in the minutiae of internal disputes in the radical left as Students for a Democratic Society (her spiritual home for much of the sixties) struggled to figure out which of all the causes was worth prioritizing with believers in total revolution and absolute ideological purity slowly coming to dominate. This also confirms most of what I’ve read about the sexism of the radical left, Wilkerson’s growing interest in feminism being repeatedly dismissed as a cause for privileged white women and therefore unimportant compared to the truly oppressed (which is, of course, an argument the right-wing still makes against feminism). Good, and very useful as back-story for Southern Discomforts.