A. C. Corbett

Stunningly good

Revisado: 01-26-24

Parker-Chan has achieved that rare gem, a series that ends as well as it begins.

The Radiant Emperor Duology is easily the best thing I’ve “read” in the last five years. The story is grounded in Chinese history and culture, but universal in appeal. No specialist knowledge is required of the reader, Parker-Chan meets you where you are and the story takes you along for the ride. It’s queer and kinky but never pornographic, violent and exciting but never gratuitous. The characters are so well formed and so kindly portrayed that you will love even the most terrible of them. And, in He Who Drowned the World, their fates, however brutal or tragic, have a satisfying harmony. The story is complete, wholly resolved in a way I can compare only to the best pieces of music. Though it took us to some dark places, the final chord is uplifting and hopeful.

This work is a treasure. I cannot recommend it highly enough.

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Not Stephenson's best

Revisado: 10-12-23

I enjoyed this book, but it's far from Stephenson's best. The concept is good, but the execution is very spotty and the plot doesn't entirely work. In particular, the idea of a VR afterlife populated by digital "souls" is great, but the idea of living people treating it as entertainment media, just sitting and watching the war between Heaven and Hell is pretty incoherent. Overall, "Fall" lacks the sort of balance, grace, and insight that I've come to expect from Stephenson.

I'd recommend this to anyone who enjoyed Reamde as it's a good follow up. But for those with a general interest in sci-fi or looking to sample something by Neal Stephenson, I'd suggest Seveneves or Cryptonomicon as a better place to start. For a more thoughtful take on virtual afterlives, try Surface Detail by Iain Banks.

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Flawed but essential

Revisado: 02-06-23

“Worse than war” is certainly a must-read for any student of social science or for anyone who has an interest in the genocides of the 20th century. Goldhagen’s central thesis is that genocide (which he calls “eliminationism”) is a political act, and has to be analyzed the same way we would analyze any other aspect of politics. This book is a start on such an analysis.

I’m on my third listening— I keep coming back to it in order to add context and nuance to other aspects of history or social science. It’s easily in my top-20 core nonfiction books.

But that makes the books serious flaws all the more frustrating. First, Goldhagen’s insistence on using his own terminology rather than just calling “genocide” the spade that it is, is just maddening. I understand why he doesn’t think the idea of “genocide” is useful, but I find it so obviously wrongheaded that it’s a thorn in my shoe for the whole book.

The other big problem that I struggle with is Goldhagen’s obvious anti-Islamic bigotry, and his related silence regarding Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians. Here, too, I understand what he’s trying to do, and I think he’s utterly wrong. Religiously motivated terrorism is an atrocity and a crime, but it’s not the same thing as genocide. And neither the antisemitism of Muslim terrorists nor the horror of the holocaust justifies Israel’s ongoing project to eliminate the Palestinian people from its territory.

Every time I revisit this book, I find myself arguing with it. Goldhagen’s particular blind spots are like Isaac Newton’s obsession with alchemy; all the more infuriating because of the tremendous insight in the rest of his work. Argh!

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Good book, awful narration.

Revisado: 10-14-22

I enjoyed the book— enough that I think I’m going to get the text version— but the narration was just awful. Pitts’s reading was full of awkward pauses, inappropriate uptalk, and misplaced emphasis that actually obscured the meaning of the sentences. I found myself having to mentally “transcribe” back into text to make sense of some passages. And she gave a couple of important characters comical voices, which was entirely out of keeping with the tone of the story and the characters’ role in it.

I’d love to see this one re-recorded by Robin Miles, who’s read some of Jemisin’s work. Till then, I recommend you buy the text and get a friend to read it to you.

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For fans of "The Turner Diaries"

Revisado: 08-09-22

First: this is the kind of book I like. I enjoy espionage thrillers and violent revenge fantasies. I like antiheroes. Books, audiobooks, movies, TV shows– I appreciate this sort of story, whatever that says about me. And, on its face, “The Terminal List” is a pretty good example of its type. I appreciate the technical detail and jargon, which is authentic to the reality of modern combat (in my admittedly inexpert experience.). It’s well paced and engrossing.

But, really, I just can’t even. Scratch the surface and you’ll find a crude roman-a-clef, with a plot cribbed from the Punisher comics. There’s no missing the public figures who appear in the book, or the political valence of the author. That framing is vicious, and takes the depicted violence well past the realm of fantasy. I couldn’t avoid picturing the events in the book occurring to their real-world examples. And, given the initial authors note, that’s exactly how Carr intended it to be read.

“The Terminal List” isn’t really a thriller. It ain’t “The Bourne Identity”. It’s more “Turner Diaries”. It’s a fantasy of far-right domestic terrorism; it glories in the torture-murder of recognizable political leaders. That sort of thing can be palatable only for the ignorant, the indifferent, and those already radicalized. I hope most of the people who like it are politically clueless– if not, we’re in serious trouble.

<<<spoilers follow>>>

Oh, and also? That whole thing about a guy walking around a tree to disembowel himself? It wouldn’t work. The entrails aren’t a rope, they’re a coil of rope tied up in a sack (the mesentery). Open the sack, and the victim bleeds out.

The author needed to do his bloody research and talk to a trauma surgeon. If you’re going to write about torture, at *least* get your anatomy right.

Disgusting, on so many levels.

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Terrible narration, great book?

Revisado: 05-19-21

This may be the best of the “World of the Five Gods” series. It may be, but it’s hard to say, because the narrator was *awful*. Marguerite Gavin reads with exaggerated gravity, like she was giving a prophecy— or telling a ghost story to ten-year-olds around a campfire.

Her ponderous intonation actually obscures the meaning of the prose, because she pauses and puts stress in the wrong places. It’s like every sentence is disconnected from the context of the one before. There are jokes in this book— funny ones! But I had to listen two or three times and mentally “transcribe” the words back into text before I could make sense of them.

I’m going to go buy the Kindle edition. And I would suggest that, if you can’t access the written book, you should skip this one (or find another reader.) The book is worth the time, but Gavin’s narration is a waste of time.

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Awful narration

Revisado: 02-21-21

I’d really been looking forward to this, but I simply could not stand the narrator. Like fingernails on the chalkboard. Glad this one was included— I’m going to go pay for a different edition.

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Tainted by politics

Revisado: 09-16-15

I listened to this because I saw it quoted many times in useful contexts, so I thought I'd go to the source. I knew it was dated, but that didn't trouble me-- I'm familiar with the more recent work done on the subject of BPD. But midway through, the book went off the rails completely into reactionary social politics and abuse apologetics.

I should have expected this, when the very first case study was of a woman whose symptoms of Borderline Personality Disorder included "provoking her husband into hitting her." I gave the book a second chance it didn't deserve, and it did seem to improve was was even useful for a bit. However, the author devotes two chapters to the way that the breakdown of the nuclear family, changing gender roles, and liberalizing sexual mores cause Borderline Personality Disorder, apparently by leaving people without a solid connection to the past or strong standards for behavior. I can see what he's getting at, especially considering that BPD is demonstrably more common in women and sexual minorities. However it's also more common in people of lower socioeconomic status and in oppressed racial minorities. And forgive me if I don't think it likely that women were happier being treated as chattel, or LGBT folks were healthier living in a socially mandated closet. Maybe, just maybe, the connection between the increased visibility of BPD, its disparate impact, and the social changes of the 20th century, is that it's more common in people who experience structural violence, and society is finally starting to care about the troubles of the oppressed?

If you're able to screen out the politics, if that doesn't matter to you, or if you agree with the author, you may find this book valuable. But be aware that Kreisman will subject you to the assertion that women have BPD because they've lost their role as wives and mothers, BPD folks are more likely to be LGBT because they have no sense of personal identity, people with BPD are abused because they deliberately provoke it (even as children), people who practice BDSM have BPD because their emotional dysregulation makes them masochistic, and women with BPD are more likely to be prostitutes, because they seek the validation of being paid by multiple sexual partners. If you can stomach that, then listen and enjoy.

I found that, knowing that the author was completely off-base in his basic understanding of the biopsychosocial underpinnings of personality and violence, I couldn't trust the observations I lacked the knowledge to critique.

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