D_Spider

A Unique Perspective on the Very Earliest Humans

Revisado: 05-05-24

Richard Leakey is the son of Louis and Mary Leakey, whose paleoanthropological discoveries account for the basis of what we know about the origin of Homo in Africa. He was not at first interested in following their example, but he could not escape their influence, and he later became a paleoanthropologist himself. This book is his account of how our biped ancestors evolved, informed by his unique lifelong experience of the discovery of their fossils and the scholarly anthropological milieu surrounding what became the practically incontrovertible out-of-Africa theory of human origins. It's not the defining work about the centrality of bipedalism to how we came to be what we are, but it's extremely valuable as a sort of independent or parallel view, rather like Wallace's co-discovery with Darwin of natural selection as the driver of evolution. It's very well written and, if anything, narrated even better. The listener gets a good sense of Richard Leakey the person that does not distract from Richard Leakey the anthropologist's story of how those bipeds became humans over a several-million-year span.

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I think it was the editor . . .

Revisado: 03-08-23

_A Queer History of the United States_ is not the excellent book it should be. Given its author's long, laudable connection with American queer activism, the book comes across as restrained. Some readers may attribute this to "academic writing," which a professor must produce and which some reference-heavy, dull scholarly books epitomize in the worst way. The first several chapters, for example, have extended passages full of concrete historical detail which are then followed by prose that connects the details to some a priori demand for scholarly forms of expression. I think it was the editor of this book who toned down the activist's voice, believing that readers should be told about but not excited by aspects of their culture that have been rigorously censored from our national consciousness. Later, the account of (the first decades of) the AIDS epidemic seems not aimed to evoke outrage and horror in its readers, but it should. It should move its readers to weep.

My overall estimates are: Here's a book that's written pretty well. Here's a book that, for most American readers, contains fascinating, powerful, and unexpected revelations about how Americans in the past (continuing, also) have lived their lives and acted on their values. Here's a book that belongs in almost all public libraries, at least for a decade or two. And here's a book that needs to be rendered obsolete by others the authors of which are now freer to celebrate queer history.

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Tough As Constipated Shit

Revisado: 10-25-21

A heroic job by the narrator and by all who listened to it nonstop. This kind of character development is not cathartic, and catharsis is the only excuse for the vicarious experience of normalized violence and unremitting ugliness. Does my review's title bother you just a little bit? If you like it, you may still find "The Hospital" a bit too vulgar-tough.

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It's Really Agatha, Hurray

Revisado: 11-25-20

R. W. Green's collaboration is almost seamless in what may be the final Agatha Raisin mystery. The novel is a fine tribute to M. C. Beaton. If this is the last, then Green has filled out Agatha's character with a selection of believable little details, so we get to see her more fully and get to leave her more consoled at our loss. If it is not the last--if Green was persuaded or granted permission to use Agatha in future--Hot to Trot is a promise of more thoroughly enjoyable Agatha Raisin mysteries to come. Green and Beaton have made this novel one of the best four or five of the series. I think I've noticed a slight falling off in Beaton's sure-handedness in the more recent of her novels, and I was delighted at how excellent this one is. Penelope Keith's narration is part of that excellence, of course: she tells this story just as well as she's told any of the others, and that means she imparts a singular quality to the narrative and also manages to "disappear" so that we're in contact not with an expert actor's voice but with the world that Beaton's language creates. I realize I haven't said anything in detail about the usual literary elements of Hot to Trot, but I don't think I have to. This novel will be a treat for readers and listeners who've read/listened to others in the series, and I think it's good enough to convince new readers and listeners to enjoy more Agatha Raisin. I'm happy to have heard it, and I know I'll be listening to it again.

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Not McCaffrey's Best, and Poorly Narrated, But ...

Revisado: 09-18-20

This novel would be a challenge to narrate under any circumstances, for McCaffrey uses it to tie together many loose ends in the Dragonriders saga that are not themselves integral to the story of Readis, the young boy then young man who re-establishes the forgotten tradition of the dolphineers. Mel Foster does not help. He consistently mispronounces "subsidence," an important feature of the Western Ocean. (Dolphins live in the ocean; the novel is about the dolphins. Ignorance of their habitat is inexcusable.) He makes Robinton seem a doddering old pompous fool. Not only is this a misrepresentation of one of McCaffrey's most important and most sympathetic characters but it undermines the universal shocked grief at Robinton's death . I don't know what to think of what McCaffrey has done to Aramina. In _The Renegades of Pern_ she is at the very least respectable, accomplished as a woman holder, worthy of Jayge's love and high opinion. Only ten years or so later, in _Dolphins_, she is an overcontrolling mother whose irrational, inflexible hatred of the dolphins twice causes Readis to suffer serious bodily harm. Foster does not lack dramatic ability; he can and does individualize the characters with his versatile voice, and I found myself admiring the range he displays. But he seems not to understand the characters, or perhaps he does not value them. As I said, McCaffrey's Aramina is problematic. But Foster could have portrayed her as sympathetic, someone helplessly out of control with a condition like PTSD; or he could have done the opposite and make us see her as a cautionary warning against the kind of parenting that can really damage a child. But he does neither. We listeners are left without guidance, confused or simply indifferent to an important McCaffrey theme. If I'm demanding too much of this narrator, it's because McCaffrey is so important an author, and when, as in this novel, she's not in top form, I want the presentation to emphasize the qualities she displays in her better works. This novel contains incidents--obviously, the rediscovery of the dolphins, but also the end of the threat of Thread, the death of Robinton, the impact and the demise of AEVIS, the radical change in the institution of the Dragonriders, the recolonization of the Southern Continent--that are critical to the larger story of Pern. Listening to _Dolphins_, I didn't get a sense that they were momentous, only that they happened. So why did I continue to listen? --for the dolphins, for yet another non-human species that McCaffrey has created. It's one of the things she does best, this calling into being believable alien characters who are not only fun to get to know, not only interesting in themselves, but at the same time reminders that humans are at their best when they share their lives and their worlds lovingly with other creatures.

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And the Subtext Is . . .

Revisado: 02-27-19

It's good to know what Florence Williams' half-hour presentation tells us, that if breast cancer had not erupted in a group of men who shared exposure to the same environmental toxins during the same interval, we might still be waiting to learn that at least some breast cancers are caused by substances human beings have put into our environment. Read this sentence two ways: [1] as usual, something bad that happens to men is more notable and more consequential than the same something bad that happens one hundred forty-three times more often to women, and [2] the American "scientific community" has only recently been prodded into paying attention to (i.e., funding research into) hypotheses like "carcinogens cause breast cancer." Both interpretations are reasons to be angry, but Williams keeps her tone level: she's reporting, engaging her listeners' interest, not pushing any conclusions at them. I certainly learned from listening, but I'd like to have learned more, and I think I could have if Williams had trimmed some description and narrative to include more factual details..

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And the Subtext Is . . .

Revisado: 02-27-19

It's good to know what Florence Williams' half-hour presentation tells us, that if breast cancer had not erupted in a group of men who shared exposure to the same environmental toxins during the same interval, we might still be waiting to learn that at least some breast cancers are caused by substances human beings have put into our environment. Read this sentence two ways: [1] as usual, something bad that happens to men is more notable and more consequential than the same something bad that happens one hundred forty-three times more often to women, and [2] the American "scientific community" has only recently been prodded into paying attention to (i.e., funding research into) hypotheses like "carcinogens cause breast cancer." Both interpretations are reasons to be angry, but Williams keeps her tone level: she's reporting, engaging her listeners' interest, not pushing any conclusions at them. I certainly learned from listening, but I'd like to have learned more, and I think I could have if Williams had trimmed some description and narrative to include more factual details..

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