Michael

Trauma's Children

Revisado: 09-26-20

I've listened to many books over the years and am often educated, edified, enchanted, disheartened or just plain gobsmacked. Seldom have I experienced all of these things in one remarkable book.

I have to confess that "Becoming Superman" was a book that I picked for no other reason than because I knew that J. Michael Straczynski, or Joe, had created Babylon 5; which is amazing, because I never never saw even a single episode. But I admire television and movie writers who have a diverse resume.

What I had casually chosen as a nice pleasant read, then, turned out to be one of the most harrowing, disturbing and ultimately uplifting books I've ever read or listened to.

This book is about the endless cycle of trauma human beings have been heir to. For generation after generation, the horror and sorrow that most of humanity has suffered has imprinted itself onto--if not our genes--then our epigenetics. Scientists now know that epigenetics have the remarkable and often tragic capacity to pass down the intense reactions to those traumas on to yet unborn generations in the form of psychological and physical child abuse.

Yet, for our species to evolve emotionally and psychologically, we must break the chain of generational abuse. And more than anything, this book reveals a man who easily could have become the same terrible man his forebears had been. But somehow, a strength unimagined won out, and against all odds and a diabolical, Dickensian father that one thinks could only be fictional, he finds an internal reservoir of independence and fortitude by turning to his childhood hero, Superman.

We find that, for Joe Straczynski, Superman was so much more than a comic book character. Like the man in the comics, he saved our book's hero from the most egregious abuse imaginable that would continue until his father's death in 2011 when Joe was 57, even though he had cut off all physical contact with him in 1984.

Yet, we discover that his father, too, had suffered many of the same horrors he had inflicted upon his son, wife and daughters, and which went back for generations to an Eastern Europe that had known little but war and suffering for centuries.

What becomes of Joe in the telling of his life seems like an incredible novel, but the personal blood, sweat and tears that permeate every chapter supersedes even the best fiction.

Since I read this book, I've watched a number of movies and TV series written by Joe Straczynski and can see how his life defines his art; the many comic books he's authored, the TV series and movies he's written and most importantly, this autobiography.

Joe has received many accolades and awards for his work over the years, but until this autobiography, few knew the lifetime of torment, struggle and heartache he has endured and overcome.

This book is like a modern day morality play that shows us that no one is powerless to confront the evil that surrounds us. Somewhere, inside all of us, perhaps cowering like an abused child in a corner of our soul, there is a strength that could lead us all to become Superman.

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An Archaelogical Expedition of Our Minds

Revisado: 10-08-15

Any additional comments?

I first read this book a couple of decades ago and was totally enthralled with Julian Jaynes' thesis. Since then, I've been an avid student in the Study of Consciousness and watched with great interest as it evolved using the newest imaging tools and techniques to study the brain.

Yet it's apparent that Neuroscience is still in its infancy in regard to what causes conscious self-awareness to manifest in our 3 pound mass of neurons we call the brain. First and foremost, this book is no mere academic treatise. Instead, it is an incredibly literate and poetic narrative that deftly weaves evolutionary psychology, archaeology, history, philosophy and religion into an argument that is both radical and shocking in its implications. Even in the nearly forty years since it was first published, the arguments Jaynes submits in this well-researched book are controversial and rejected by many.
Nevertheless, Jaynes' ideas also have a lot of supporters in the field and the arguments on both sides continue.

While current Neuroscientists, however, are doing fascinating and provocative work in their attempts to learn about who we are and why we do the things we do, the important work that Jaynes pioneered can't be ignored or understated. Our homonid line has been in existence for six to seven million years, while our species Homo Sapiens has been on this planet for around 200,000 years. Yet--as Jaynes argues--modern conscious thought has only been part of our species for about 2500 years; a tiny fraction of the time our species has been in existence. This book elaborately and eloquently tries to explain why.

No book on the important subject of Consciousness has for me been so intriguing, so captivating, and so enjoyable to read as this one. The tragedy is that Julian Jaynes, who died in 1997, had so much more to say on the subject of his life's work. Fortunately, others have come forward to preserve his writings and ideas, and to hopefully inspire others to continue his important work. I suggest anyone who reads this and is interested in what has come of Jaynes ideas since his death Google the Julian Jaynes Society.

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An Anthropologist's Adventure in Thailand

Revisado: 03-30-13

Would you recommend this audiobook to a friend? If so, why?

This book is an compelling narrative by a 38-year old female graduate student in anthropology whose thesis research covered Patpong--one of Bangkok's most well-known sex districts--in the 1980's. While studying the touts, mama sans, pimps and prostitutes she meets there, she finds herself becoming involved with and falling for two very different Thai men and discovers that experiencing love in any culture can be a convoluted and sometimes tortuous endeavor. Her conclusions about the Thai women who ply their trade in Patpong are surprising yet valid as she compares the poverty a great many of these women and girls come from to the power and relative affluence they derive from their sexual and emotional interactions with foreign men, called farang. At few times, author Cleo Odzer hints about her own life growing up in wild 1960's America, but does not elaborate. However, visiting a few web pages about her, it became apparent that her own life would have made a fascinating book in and of itself. Sadly, Odzer died in 2001 at the age of 50; some say of AIDS. The growing worldwide AIDS epidemic of the 1980's was a forbidden subject in tourist-conscious Thailand and was something Odzer wanted to find out about in her research. Ironically, if she did die of AIDS, her unprotected sexual experiences with the Thai men she writes about in this book may have been the cause of her eventual demise.

What was the most compelling aspect of this narrative?

The discovery that the lives of many Thai prostitutes were greatly superior to the abject poverty of the peasant village life they came from. In some respects, these women were the most independent women in Thailand--at least in 1988. I would hope that female empowerment has improved in Thailand as business and industrial growth has increased and more people have climbed into the middle class.

What about Amanda Carlin’s performance did you like?

Carlin's accents, Thai, Australian, Dutch and others were spot on. Her performance was certainly a highlight of the Audible version of the book.

What’s the most interesting tidbit you’ve picked up from this book?

Prostitution in Thailand is long-standing and only became illegal (although almost entirely ignored) in the 20th century. Yet a significant percentage of the Thai Gross Domestic Income comes from the sex industry. And Western men supply a large portion of that income. Many of these men, however, become thoroughly enchanted by this gentle society and its beautiful, enticing women and decide to stay with the women they've fallen in love with from the go-go bars and massage parlors of Bangkok, Pattaya and Phuket.

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Limited Intelligence

Revisado: 06-24-05

A thoroughly fascinating history of SIGINT (Signal Intelligence) as invented and practiced by the security agencies of the five major English-speaking nations after WWII.

With the ability to capture every phone call and email message in the world, the Echelon surveillance system is run by the super-secret NSA which must then rely on sophisticated computer software to cull and filter the terabytes of data retrieved daily. After that, it is up to human intelligence analysts to give meaning or alert to the thousands of messages received.

And this is where Echelon has failed since its inception.

'Chatter' documents the politics and policies of institutions so infatuated with technology that they have all but ignored the fact that it still takes human beings to interpret the intelligence being gathered.

The inept and ineffectual operations of our intelligence agencies led in good measure to the tragedy on 9/11 and this book outlines reasons for those failures.

Intelligence is a nether world that lies just under the surface of our high-tech society, and when directed by politicians to advance their own ideologies and agenda, can be highly detrimental to the security of a nation. We only have to look at how Vice President Cheney allegedly coerced the CIA to "cook the books" on how many WMD's existed in Iraq to make a case for a war that has claimed far too many lives and has greatly increased the dangers of terrorism in the world.

'Chatter' is a thoroughly researched cautionary tale that sheds important light on an area of government that has always existed in the dark.

Click on the light and find out for yourself what all the chatter is about.

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