Book Review

The Andromeda Strain, Michael Crichton

The Andromeda Strain, Michael Crichton

ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

Ballantine, 1993 reprint of 1969 original, 270 pages, C$7.99 mmpb, ISBN 978-0-099-42765-0

I hadn’t read The Andromeda Strain in more than a decade and a half when a chance viewing of the classic 1971 film adaptation rekindled my interest in Michael Crichton’s breakout novel.  At an admirably concise 270 pages, the novel wasn’t going to crimp my limited reading time, and my accumulated shelves of already-read books aren’t just for showing off, right?

You probably remember the premise, either from the novel’s best-selling reputation, the 1971 film or the 2008 miniseries: a satellite falls back on Earth, bringing back something that kills nearly everyone in a small Arizona town.  Four scientists are asked to investigate: Locked in a secret underground laboratory, they race against time to solve the mystery of the so-called Andromeda Strain before the inevitable “containment measures” escalate.  Briskly told at the cutting-edge of late-sixties technology, Crichton’s first best-seller is an unusual page-turner, enthralling readers through reams of well-written exposition, while codifying the conventions of the techno-thriller genre.

Perhaps the biggest surprise of re-reading a 1969 techno-thriller is how gracefully it has aged.  There is no going around the fact that the book was written a long time ago: Any narrative that spends a few paragraph explaining how “time-sharing computers” work seems almost irremediably quaint in the age of ubiquitous smart-phones.  (If you want to feel old, consider that 1969 is now 43 years distant as of this writing.)  But despite the novel’s carefully-circumscribed focus on contemporary techno-scientific matters (if there are references to Vietnam or hippies in the book, a speed-read hasn’t revealed them), it’s animated by a decidedly contemporary intention to try to explain the world to the reader.  As a techno-thriller, it revels in the telling (sometimes made-up) detail that bridges the gap between fiction and reality.  For readers with finely-attuned genre-protocol antennas, it’s this willingness to engage the cutting-edge of the Known that, ironically, enough, makes the novel feel fresh.  If you accept that the general perception of reality lags behind the time, you can also argue that most people never bother to adjust their perception of reality beyond the model they learned as teenagers (which was often based on pop-culture, and so a few years behind the times).  Techno-thrillers and science-fiction are two genre that sometimes attempt to describe the scary implications of progress, and this attitude show no sign of growing old.  Compare The Andromeda Strain to something like Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle (which applied the same didactic perspective to history) and it’s not hard to imagine that if a 2012 writer wanted to write a circa-1969 techno-thriller, he’d end up with something very similar to The Andromeda Strain.  Older books that age gracefully become period pieces.  In this light, having the author explain time-sharing computers takes on a new and not unpleasant flavour.

The other substantial asset of the novel is Crichton’s uncanny ability to Make Stuff Up.  From 2012, it’s easier to tell fact from fiction: Kalocin (a drug that kills “every known virus, bacterium, fungus, and parasite”, with hideous consequences) doesn’t exist, obviously.  But you’d swear otherwise from The Andromeda Strain’s narrative, as seamlessly as the device is inserted in-between convincing technical details, documentary framing devices (“this is a reconstruction based on interviews…”) and frequent blurring between reality and fiction.  Crichton had a great ear for plausible-sounding nonsense, something that the careful explanation of the “Scoop” program (which is almost meaningless in the movie adaptation) makes amply clear.  Elsewhere in the narrative, the Odd Man Hypothesis (which “proves” that you want a single unmarried man to have a finger on the trigger of a nuclear device, although even the characters acknowledge that it’s an elaborate rationalization for a more sinister purpose) is bunk, but you could almost swear that it was the subject of a Malcolm Gladwell essay not too long ago.  This aptitude for believable lies may be worth recalling in studying Crichton’s entire bibliography, and most notably his romans provocateurs phase in-between Rising Sun and Next.

All of these elements accumulate into a nice tight thriller in which, ironically enough, the characters don’t actually do all that much.  They poke and prod at the mystery, but ultimately can’t do much to fix the problem.  The protagonist’s big act of heroism consists in avoiding death, which may be laudable, but tends to obscure the War-of-the-Worldsian irony of the novel’s plot.  It’s either lazy plotting or a brilliant counter-weight to the novel’s detailed paean to the power of human ingenuity.  Latter techno-thrillers wouldn’t be as willing to acknowledge humanity’s lack of agency over doomsday threats.

There’s little need to add that all of these factors, and a few more I don’t have the patience to list, make up for a 1969 book that is well worth a re-read even today.  It still exerts an undeniable fascination, and its place in history as a seminal thriller is practically assured.  You can find echoes of its impact today, but the original is still resonant.

A Storm of Swords, George R.R. Martin

A Storm of Swords, George R.R. Martin

ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

Bantam Spectra, 2011 reprint of 2000 original, 1216 pages, C$10.99 mmpb, ISBN 978-0-553-57342-8

George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Fire and Ice fantasy series may have been originally conceived as a trilogy, but by the time third volume A Storm of Sword wraps up, it’s obvious that we’re in for a much longer story.  The cast-of-thousands carnival of the story’s sprawling plot has seldom felt as chaotic, and the conclusion is nowhere in sight.  As ironic as the statement can be after a 1,216-pages book, it’s time to settle down and enjoy the ride.

It goes without saying that long-running series have the strengths of their weaknesses, and vice-versa: There’s enough space and time to fully develop the world of the story, to pile on characters and see them evolve through dramatic changes in situation.  Properly handled, this can lead to a fundamentally different reading experience than single novels or even mere trilogies: an entertainment experience closer to a long-running TV series (in which Martin’s series is slowly being adapted) rather than anything else.

On the other hand, multi-strand narratives featuring the proverbial cast-of-thousands can also test readers’ patience.  Not everything is equally compelling, and some characters are just annoying.  The setup/payoff cycles pacing, in particular, can be off for a while as the author builds plot-lines that will resolve later on.

These strengths and weaknesses are particularly obvious in A Storm of Swords, which contains some of the dullest but also some of the finest moments of the series so far.  The first half of the book is about setting up dominoes; the second half is about upsetting them.  The wait is substantial, but the payoffs just keep happening once the book races to a conclusion.

For series fans, it means that Arya keeps wandering around Westeros, never quite reaching her intended destinations.  It also means that she gets a long-awaited payoff late in the book.  Jon Snow keeps trudging through the snowy north, but he also gets a bit of recognition for his efforts at the conclusion.  Far away, Daenerys Targaryen is still in the process of trading a paperclip for a house a trio of dragons for an empire, but even the growing power of her fire-children can’t completely excuse the monotony of her quest so far away from everything we know about this world.  Closer to the center of action, Tyrion Lannister can’t get no respect as the unheralded savior of King’s Landing, but the book ends on a few shocking development that may make readers wonder about him and the nature of his revenge.

Not that he’s the only character to be re-evaluated by readers.  One of the first groans in A Storm of Swords is seeing Martin give viewpoint chapters to Jamie Lannister, the no-good incestuous children-thrower who crippled Bran Stark at the very beginning of the series.  Imagine our surprise as Jamie undergoes enough extreme hardship to deserve some sympathy, and reveals himself to be more than a good-looking psychopathic warrior.  (It helps that he’s one of the wittiest characters around.)  Such, again, are the advantages of lengthy pre-planned series: Villains to heroes, and possibly heroes to villains.

The first half of A Storm of Sword may not escape a bit of tedium (something that the narrative structure of the book, which locks itself in subjective point-of-view for lengthy chapters, does little to soften), but the accumulation of shocks and revelations in the book’s final third more than compensates for the initial slow burn.  Even readers who feel that they have spoiled themselves reading about the book will find that there are more surprises in store than they ever expected.  (Hint: don’t read about the “Red Wedding”.  Just accept that it’s coming and it’s going to be bad.)  HBO recently announced that A Storm of Swords would be adapted as seasons 3 and 4 of the Game of Thrones miniseries; I’m already looking forward to comments and reactions to the second half of season 4, as the body count piles up and characters start doing things that will surprise even their biggest fans.  It’s going to be a wild ride.  If people through season one was merciless, they haven’t seen anything yet…

These adaptation considerations, of course, have no reflection on this third book, which eventually ranks as the strongest volume of the series so far.  Martin has embarked on an ambitious project with A Song of Ice and Fire, and A Storm of Swords suggest that he’s making things even harder on himself as he goes along.  In the wreckage of the book’s multi-strand conclusion, readers are expected to blink in astonishment and wonder… what’s next?

A Clash of Kings, George R.R. Martin

A Clash of Kings, George R.R. Martin

ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

Bantam Spectra, 2012 reprint of 1998 original, 1040 pages, C$10.99 mmpb, ISBN 978-0-553-57990-1

Reading a long and tightly-plotted series of books isn’t like other kinds of reading experiences.  Unlike loose series of novels, a fantasy saga spread over five books (so far) with dozens of characters and almost as many subplots demands commitment, patience and indulgence.  In fact, considering the experience of reading a fantasy series like George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Fire and Ice like a long-term relationship makes a whole lot of sense, especially in considering what to say about the second volume in a series. 

The first volume is all about boundless expectations, the thrills of seeing something new and the giddiness at what’s going right.  A Game of Thrones spent so much time introducing its gigantic cast of characters, discussing eight thousand years of back-story, establishing its harsh and unforgiving tone (most notably in getting rid of its most honorable character) that readers couldn’t help but be enthralled at the result.  With second volume A Clash of Kings, however, the long-term relationship is starting to set and some of the charm is becoming an established pattern.

If nothing else, the novel does deliver on the mayhem promised at the end of the first volume.  The king is dead, there’s considerable turmoil surrounding his succession and no less than five kings are proposing themselves as the rightful heir to the throne.  (How complex is this series’ plot?  Well, consider that one of the self-designated heirs is on another continent and remains unknown to the other four.)  After a first section in which it becomes clear that there will be no gentle alliances, the remainder of the book sees the four pretenders fight it out.  Westeros is scoured (peasants don’t have a good time during wars), various dirty tricks take place, fortresses fall and Martin once again presents his battles in an elliptical, highly subjective point of view.  One major battle midway through the book is averted through a shocking death that still remains unexplained by the end of the book (one of the hallmarks of the series are its longstanding mysteries), whereas the results of the second half of another major battle late in the book is announced through an unreliable character’s ranting.  Fans of battle action may want to confirm their impression that the series is not meant to wallow in lengthy fight sequences (although there’s a rather good naval engagement near the end of the book.)

But never mind the broad strokes of the war of succession: What about the characters?  Long-form series such as this one live or die based on their cast of characters and whether we want to follow them along.  With nine viewpoint characters and about ten times that number of secondary speaking characters (and who knows how many named ones), there’s a lot of ground of cover.  Poor Arya gets hauled from one part of the continent to another, gradually regaining agency in the second half of the book.  Jon Snow goes trekking in the Great White North.  Tyrion Lannister gets the chance to prove how clever he actually is.  Theon Greyjoy gets less and less likable.  Mom-and-daughter Catelyn and Sansa Stark don’t do much but look on as other people do interesting things around them.  Meanwhile, far away, Daenerys Targaryen solidifies her power base and plots her return.  There are, mind you, a few significant plot developments.  Another king dies in mysterious circumstances; a mighty safe haven is burned down; two pretenders to the throne clash leaving one triumphant; and the Starks lose one major engagement, with several supporting characters killed in the process.

More significantly, the series’ mostly hands-off approach to magic gets a bit less hands-off in this volume.  Characters comment that magic spells are becoming more effective; the best-informed of them suspect that dragons have something to do with it.  Reading between the lines, a red priestess seems to be raising all kinds of hell in the parts of the story our viewpoint characters can’t see, whereas the North’s zoo of bad critters seems to be poised to bring even more misery to the Seven Kingdoms.  Slowly, the action is reaching a boiling point.

And “slowly” is a key word in this case.  One of the particularities of long-form series is that they favor depth and scope over pacing and intensity.  We do not experience these stories as a series of events as much as we live with the characters as the events occur around them.  The difference is as significant as watching a long-running TV show over a feature film: The ten-twenty hours of a series make up for a radically different pace from the energy of a two-hour film, and so Martin’s series is meant to be read leisurely.  There’s little instant gratification as plot threads and unanswered questions multiply: there is, however, a far stronger sense of identification with characters and sympathy at their odyssey.  This is a different kind of reading experience, and Martin’s better at building up the atmosphere required for this kind of narrative than most of his contemporaries. 

If it means that readers have to be patient and enjoy the trip rather than being in a hurry to get to destination, then so be it.  The sequels will tell if the journey is worth the trip –in the meantime, it’s best to be swept along with the plot and make frequent reference to the cast of characters at the end of the book.  Because, as in any relationship, you get as much from Martins’ series are you’re willing to invest in it.  With A Song of Ice and Fire so far, Martin’s achievement has been to present a hugely detailed universe that rewards intense attention.  Even small characters can live fully and die (dis)honorably in the back-pages.  Such depth isn’t common, nor can it be found easily in smaller narratives.

While even the kindest reviewers will note that A Clash of King may not carry the same punch as its predecessor (fewer set-pieces, repetition of effects, a sense of languid rhythm are all fair charges against this second volume), it does an effective job at carrying the story forward, delivering on a few promises and setting up further mayhem later during the series.  That’s good enough for most middle-volumes of series, and when it’s done as skillfully on a chapter-by-chapter basis as it is here, there’s little cause to complain.  A long and complex series is what readers asked for in reading this sequel, and A Clash of Kings delivers in that regard.

A Game of Thrones, George R.R. Martin

A Game of Thrones, George R.R. Martin

ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

Bantam Spectra, 2011 reprint of 1996 original, 864 pages, C$10.99 mmpb, ISBN 978-0-553-57340-4

When it comes to long-form epic fantasy, I have no scruples relying on social proof as a reading guide.  I’ll make my own damned reading decision with shorter books or in genres I like, but if I have to read a 5,000+ pages epic fantasy when I don’t particularly like either long-form stories or epic fantasy, it better be worth my time.  It’s been a fixture on the Hugo nomination ballot?  It’s a New York Times best-seller?  It has a monstrously big fan following?  It led to an HBO mini-series?  Those are all reassuring hints telling me that George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Fire and Ice series, as launched by A Game of Thrones, is better than the usual fantasy swill that I’ve become allergic to.

I’ve had the first four books on my shelves for years now, but it took the HBO series and an extended amount of time spent at home to convince me to pull the trigger and start reading.  I have a few rules of thumbs when it comes to selecting books to read, and A Game of Thrones pitted two of them in a match to the finish.  Should “Read the book as soon as you can after seeing the movie” win over “Don’t read a series until all the books are out”?  Well, sure.  It’s not as if the last volume will be published before 2018 anyway…

And let’s make one thing clear: The HBO series couldn’t be a better advertisement for the book.  Adapted with a surprising faithfulness to the source material, it’s a monumental ten-hour achievement that manages to portray an epic fantasy with dozens of characters and sweeping events within the scope of a TV series budget.  SF/Fantasy fans are used to reading books while understanding that they could never be adapted for the screen, but this is an exception. The casting is perfect (something that becomes clearer after reading the book), the advantages of a lengthy miniseries over a motion picture are cleverly exploited (by featuring depth of characters, density of plotting and a rhythm that has time to breathe) and it shows just enough to make would-be readers about the extra depth that the book could contain.  By the time the bittersweet conclusion of the first season rolls, it’s hard to take a look at Martin’s series lying on the bookshelf and resist the impulsion to read the first volume and rush through the subsequent books.

The first surprise is the lack of surprise. Or, rather, it’s the satisfaction of seeing how closely the series has adhered to the novel.  There are a few changes, of course: Most of the young characters are even younger in the book (something that works better on the page that on-screen), the book is told in tight point-of-view that restricts the omniscient viewpoint of the series, and some scenes feel noticeably looser in the book, as if the series had tightened the bolts of an unwieldy mess of plots and sub-plots.

But more significant are the similarities: Fans of the series will immediately recognize the characters, events and complex lineages that end up forming the backbone of the series.  The density of back-story that this first volume has to explain is such that having seen the series pays off almost immediately in the first few pages: References that would be meaningless to first-time reader are immediately understood, enhancing the immersion in this new universe.

Commenting the story on its own merit, it’s now clear that Martin, when this first volume was published in 1996, was trying to deliver a somewhat grittier take on heroic fantasy than many of his colleagues.  The universe of A Song of Ice and Fire is tough and unsympathetic toward its heroes.  One of them falls because he is too moral for his surroundings; he even disgraces himself in vain in a bid to gain mercy for himself and his family.  Another dies of infection following a relatively minor wound.  This is a universe with stillborns, prostitutes, self-deluding would-be princesses and very little explicit magic despite hints that the world used to be far more interesting in this regard.  Most of the book is centered toward palace intrigue writ large, with warring factions being set up and lined for a fall.  (If the series had an earnest subtitle, it would be something like “Problems with the concept of hereditary succession, with many examples.”)  The temptation to be attached to characters is tempered by the suspicion that Martin is only too ready to kill them off at the slightest opportunity. 

In short, A Game of Thrones takes familiar elements of classical epic fantasy and re-uses them competently.  The density of awe-inspiring wonders is less here than in other series, but the attention to characters, the depth of the imagined mythology and family lineage, the deceptively easy prose all combine to produce a smooth reading experience.  This is about as good as long-form epic fantasy ever gets, so it’s no big wonder if the series has gained such a popular following inside and outside the usual fantasy circles: It’s good, it’s handled with skill and (it always helps) it’s now even further enhanced by its TV adaptation. 

The result is good enough to make me ignore my usual “don’t read books before the last volume is out” guideline.  It’s a roaring start to a promising series, and I’ve got four more books to go before I’m as caught up with it than the other fans.  Onward!

The Happiest Baby on the Block, Harvey Karp

The Happiest Baby on the Block, Harvey Karp

ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

Bantam, 2003, 288 pages, C$18.00 pb, ISBN 978-0-553-38146-7

Part One: January 2012

You may expect the reviews on this web site to be intended for visitors, as guides to good or bad reading, movies worth watching or avoiding: the self-styled blogger as one more voice in the cacophony of recommendations.  The truth is that more often than not, this site serves as a public archive of what I was thinking at a given moment –an online journal of striking experiences as mediated by movies and books, if you will.  So it is that in early 2012, few things weigh heavier on my mind than the imminent birth of my daughter.  I have planned in consequence; as far as this web site is concerned, I have made sure the coding can sustain a few months’ worth of inattention; more visibly, I have put up a semi-hiatus notice so that no one can expect me to post much in 2012.

But that doesn’t mean I’m completely off the reviewing game.  You can turn a reviewer in a father, but you can’t entirely erase the reviewing impulse.  When I get my hands on a book such as The Happiest Baby on the Block, my second thoughts (after reading and absorbing its content) are to talk about it online.

I picked up the book in the first place because it is a quasi-universal reference whenever expecting parents ask for recommendations online.  It usually follows the encyclopedic What to Expect The First Year (which is as review-proof as they come –just buy it!) as an essential resource in dealing against the dreaded colics, those endless crying bouts that seem to take so much out of new parents during the first three months of many babies’ lives.  The recommendations usually come along with a variation on “This really works”.  So; is there some truth in this book’s reputation?

The only way to say for sure is to report back in three months.  In the meantime, though, there are a few things to say.

The first is that The Happiest Baby on the Block is a very enjoyable read.  Karp writes at length about a fairly simple topic (much of the book can be summarized in a few words –swaddle, side, swing, shush, suck–, and in fact you will find a handy two-page summary of the book on pages 127-128, right where you’d break the spine to keep the book open) but he does so in a relatively entertaining fashion, with plenty of repetition, anecdotes, call-backs and amusing illustrations to make his point.  The repetition may be annoying, but it may also be essential for a book of this kind –you’re not going to read it at 3AM when baby’s bawling, so it does its best to repeat a simple message in many ways and hope that one of those formulations sticks in your mind long enough to be useful in the wee hours of the morning.

Much of The Happiest Baby on the Block is built around the “Fourth Trimester” theory –based on the observation that babies don’t really start interacting with their environment until the three-month mark; Karp theorizes that the first three months of live are really a “fourth trimester” in which the just-born fetus becomes a true baby.  The better we understand and try to replicate the environment in which the baby has spent the first three trimesters, the better are our chances are at calming it down.  For instance, Carp reminds us that newborns like background noises (the womb is very noisy) and like to be coddled (they’ve been squeezed from every direction for months).  More audaciously, Karp looks at the evidence about colics to suggest that they’re often not about innate factors as much as they’re about developmental anxieties from babies suddenly experiencing the world.  He points at the lack of colics in other cultures and other hints to suggest to parents that colics can be controlled and managed –if not avoided entirely.

There is, of course, a slight cultish tinge to Karp’s book: The first few chapters are classic “don’t listen to anyone else; only I have the truth” indoctrination.  The sometimes-cloying writing style makes the same point over and over.  Keep in mind the intended audience of the book, though: ultra-stressed sleep-deprived parents seeking any kind of reassurance.  At least one friend has compared infant-caring to brainwashing (no sleep, constant focus on one individual and repetitive mindless tasks –hello, Geneva Convention abuse hotline?) and it doesn’t take a stretch of the imagination to imagine Karp trying to impose another kind of brainwashing over the one created by the newborn.  The fact that the book comes accompanied by an online store filled with a small galaxy of related products (Web site!  DVD! CD! Blanket), and is prefaced by celebrity endorsements (including one by “Pierce Brosnan… environmentalist and actor”) will count as negatives for readers eager to distrust the too-slick “baby MD to the stars” approach.

Still, it’s a fun read.  The writing style is easy to grasp and the book is greatly enhanced by a number of adorable Parisian-style cartoons illustrations by Jennifer Kalis (“You will soon fall in love with a bald stranger who doesn’t speak a word of English.”)  The book’s primary value for expectant fathers without much baby-handling experience is to offer a framework of things to do in handling a newborn: Reading the book is a huge confidence-booster while anticipating baby’s arrival.

But, of course, there’s no way to be sure whether the book works until we make it out of the first three months.

Part Two: May 2012

Now that our daughter has celebrated her sixteenth week, we can almost safely say that we’re out of the colics danger zone.  And the biggest news to report on this front is… nothing.  Baby has cried a lot during these past three-and-a-half months (her parents will never take sleep for granted ever again) but there have not been any extended bouts of unexplainable crying.  Most of the time, baby cried briefly or for easily-identifiable reasons (most of them gas-related) and we were able to clam baby down by applying the techniques described in the book.

So there’s your review of The Happiest Baby on the Block.

The confidence-booster in reading the book can’t be overestimated.  We started applying the book’s calming techniques moments after birth (most dramatically trying to calm down baby while blood samples were being taken by the nurses) and haven’t really stopped so far.  As someone with non-existent baby-handling experience, the book’s recommendations were immediately helpful in knowing how to handle a baby and calm her down.  While the effectiveness of some techniques has ebbed over the past sixteen weeks (swaddling was immediately helpful the first three weeks but became counterproductive once baby grew; pacifiers only became useful around week six), the overall message that crying can be controlled was a huge help in approaching the issue.  The book keeps telling readers to apply calming measures vigorously, to be persistent, and meet the baby with an appropriate level of effort: This helped a lot in sticking to the plan and as a result, baby seldom cried more than a few minutes at a time.

The big question becomes; were we exceptionally lucky in having a good non-colicky newborn, or did the book help?  My own suspicion, based on nothing more than a hunch, is that babies can often be “programmed” to go into colics, or conversely avoid them.  Reading the book may have helped us create an environment in which baby has always been effectively reassured, hence unlikely to resort to the kind of constant crying that drives parents crazy.  It helped us calm down the nagging doubts that we may be spoiling the baby by providing this much attention (at nearly four months, we are only now progressively leaving her by herself for longer periods of time) and helped us figure out what was likely happening.

For expectant parents, The Happiest Baby on the Block shouldn’t be your only pre-birth reading material (taking care of a baby is a project of vast scope, and this only covers “calming down baby”) but it’s likely to become an essential set of tools in dealing with the chaos of the first few weeks following birth.  It’s a morale-booster, a conceptual framework (especially helpful if you’re the analytical kind –and here you are reading book reviews, aren’t you?) and a helpful guide at once.  It’ll help.  Don’t worry.

American Steel, Richard Preston

American Steel, Richard Preston

ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

Avon, 1992 reprint of 1991 original, 278 pages, C$12.00 pb, ISBN 0-380-71822-7

Even two decades later, journalist Richard Preston is still best-known for The Hot Zone, a mesmerizing account of deadly viruses run amok.  A few follow-ups, including The Demon in the Freezer and the novel The Cobra Event followed; his collection of non-fiction pieces was even titled Panic in Level 4 as a nod to his best-selling work.  But Preston’s bibliography is more diverse than just deadly viruses, and 1987’s American Steel is a good demonstration of his versatility in telling us about the renewal of the US Steel industry as exemplified by the construction of a Nucor facility in Crawfordsville, Indiana.

Preston was allowed access to the site as it was being built and tested; no insignificant achievement as the “Crawfordsville Project” tried to build a new kind of facility at a time where few were willing to even bet on the company’s chances of success.  The history of US steel-making, explains Preston, is one where gigantic steelwork operations were gradually replaced by nimbler, smaller competitors.  The “mini-mills” led by technological innovation, a willingness to deal in smaller profit margins and a belief that they could do better jobs if they specialized in specific market niches.  The Crawfordsville project was one of those status-upsetting move; an American company using German technology to develop a machine that could transform rusting carcasses into shining new metal.

One of the most surprising facts from American Steel, especially to 2011 readers, is the blanket statement that over half the steel used in the US in the mid-eighties was recycled.  (This figure has since gone up significantly.)  Newer steelworks don’t refine iron ore extracted from the ground as much as they recast existing iron in newer forms; the Crawfordsville location was selected in part because it was geographically located close enough to the ruins of the “rust belt” and amply served by train lines carrying recyclable metal.

But machinery is far from American Steel’s only concerns, especially not when steelworkers prove to be such memorable characters.  It takes a special kind of man to work in a steel foundry, explains Preston; trying to manipulate hot steel with cold steel is a bit like building a water machine with ice, except that renegade hot steel tends to explode, melt human bodies and destroy buildings.  Working in such facilities means always being ready to run outside at a moment’s notice, breaking bones after jumping down platforms if the alternative is being burnt alive.  Those steelworkers are the focus of the book, and hanging with them as they work hard and party even harder becomes one of the Preston’s ways to involve the reader with his subject matter.

You would think that presenting a corporate history of parent corporation Nucor would be relatively dull in comparison, but that’s not considering the tortuous road taken by automobile manufacturer REO (as in “REO Speedwagon”, the O of REO also standing for “Olds” as in Oldsmobile –it’s a complicated story) as it transformed itself in a Nuclear-focused company (hence “NUclear CORporation”), then as a holding company for various ventures before realizing that the best profits were to be made in the steel industry.  Nucor eventually became one of the most aggressive of the US steelmakers that renewed US steel production.  What contemporary readers know is that the electric arc furnace-driven mini-mills as exemplified by Nucor did manage to remake the US steel industry to their image: Once-mighty corporate behemoths such as blast furnace-powered Bethlehem and U.S. Steel have closed down, bought by mini-mills or been restructured in smaller entities.  There’s a darker side to Nucor’s success in its opposition to labour unions, but Preston also portrays a corporation with few management perks, a strong emphasis on humane working conditions and no layoffs to date.  The safety of Nucor’s plants is disputed throughout the book; a spectacular blow-out with fatal consequences at the Crawfordsville plant is discussed in one of the last chapters.

While the book isn’t perfect (some of the dialogues are so steeped in steel-making jargon that they give a flavour of the workers but no real understanding) and could now use at least one updated afterword to bring us up to speed with the latest developments regarding the industry, American Steel is a fine and gripping non-fiction account of a fascinating and dangerous industry.  Considering our reliance on steel produced in facilities just like the Crawfordsville plant, it’s not a bad idea to pay attention to those kinds of things.

The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, Paul Kennedy

The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, Paul Kennedy

ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

Fontana Press, 1989 reprint of 1988 original, 898 pages, C$14.95 tp, ISBN 0-00-686052-4

Continuing self-education for its own sake is seldom acknowledged in contemporary North-American culture.  There is a strong bias in favour of adult education if it has clear monetary advantages (ie; adult students getting degrees required for better employment) but there seems to be little to no discussion of knowledge for knowledge’s sake, simply to learn more about the world.  We’re expected to perfect our knowledge of matters such as world history in High School, and never think about it again unless it’s somehow part of our jobs.

Nice theory, but if you’re a product of the modern education system, chances are that world history wasn’t your most compelling subject.  You probably learned about history as it led to the state of your country, with next to no overview about what else happened in the world at the time.  That’s… not ideal, but neither is it one of the big scandals of our society.  History, it can be argued, can’t be fully appreciated by individuals who scarcely have any sense of antecedents.  High School students barely have a past of their own –how can they be expected to think of civilizations are entities lasting hundreds of years?

This ties into Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers insofar as it remains, even nearly twenty-five years later, one of the best and most readable overviews of world history between 1500 and 1988.  (The book’s subtitle promises “Economic change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000” and that’s a fair assessment, but then there’s the important “1989 – Fall of the Soviet Empire” asterisk to consider.)  This is the remedial class-in-a-book that adult readers may have been asking for, looking at world history from a very broad perspective in an attempt to contextualize the rest.

It begins by describing the world circa-1500, noting as part of its first sentence that nothing at the time would have suggested Europe’s dominant role in world affairs during the next 500 years: Barely out of the dark ages, severely backwards compared to the Ming, Mogul, Persian or Ottoman Empires, Europe wasn’t seen as a particularly interesting player.  But Europe had the advantage of many smaller opposing kingdoms, all of them jockeying for dominance and nearly all of them ready for radical experiments with technology, economics and political systems.  Over the next half-millennium, the intense wars played over a small territory would lead Europe to dominance over their complacent neighbors.

Of course “intense wars played over a small territory” is all of European History until 1945 and “Western Europe” is really a basket full of various empires fighting it out viciously.  (For a French-Canadian, reading about European history is an exercise in cheering for either England or France as they take on the rest of the world.)  The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers does an exemplary job at explaining the changing fortunes of each empire as it rises or declines, based on technological advances, enlightened policy decisions or the availability (or lack) of resources.  Names from the past emerge and disappear; why is it that I was never taught about the Habsburg Empire?  Who forgot to tell me about Amsterdam’s pivotal role in world affairs?  Ah, and this is what happened to the Austrian Empire…  and here’s why France squandered its advantages despite all the pro-French propaganda I was taught in High School.

As much as any other book I’ve read this year, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers was a learning experience.  Kennedy writes about world-spanning subjects, but does so with a witty prose style, clear explanations, solid documentation and well-developed theses.  It took me much longer than usual to page through the book, but I don’t regret a moment of it.

The weaker portion of the narrative follows World War 2, as Kennedy studies Cold War history and engages in nearly a hundred pages’ worth of predictions regarding the world’s circa-1988 power blocks.  It’s duller because it’s more familiar, but I should note that much of his predictions seem spot-on nearly a quarter of a decade later.  Kennedy isn’t particularly optimistic about Japan’s chances (something that economic crises and demographic implosion have since confirmed), is bullish about China (confirmed), thinks well of Europe’s chances as a unified power block (damaged by 2011’s Euro crisis, but still very much the case), is pessimistic about the Soviet Union (confirmed in spade by is implosion two years later) and is cautiously bullish about the United States.

That last statement unpacks a bit with nearly 25 years’ worth of hindsight.  After considering half a millennium’s worth of history, readers may look at the invasion of Iraq and the United States’ current fiscal problems as a chilling demonstration of the kind of imperial overreach that have doomed empires before.  You can make a case that resource acquisition, at least in 2003, was behind the US actions in the Middle-East; you can also now make a case that like many empires before (or, ahem, during the Vietnam war), the US severely over-extended itself in a doomed attempt to secure its vital resources.  Kennedy, by 1987, was already predicting the end of the bipolar world in favour of geopolitics with several competing power blocks and it’s hard not to use the hindsight offered by his book as further evidence that this is happening.  It’s even possible that, having weakening itself through an entirely optional military adventure, the US has hastened its ongoing decline vis-à-vis other power blocks.

So it is that by the time I re-emerged from The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, eyes blinking in the sunlight, I felt as if I had crammed a semester’s worth of world history and written a paper on the topic.  The kind of heady sensation isn’t the only reason to keep on learning new things, but it’s near the top of the list.

An Unusual Angle, Greg Egan

An Unusual Angle, Greg Egan

ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

Norstrilia Press, 1983, 200 pages, ISBN 0-909106-12-6 

Authors who publish at a very young age (that is; before they’re ready) should be aware that anything they’ve written remains in their bibliography forever.  I’m not a big fan of holding earlier works against authors who later went on to write more polished works (everyone is allowed a few youthful indiscretions, and mine happen to be available elsewhere on this web site), but it’s certainly interesting to go and have a look at early works and draw links with what followed.

Ask around, for instance, and most Science-Fiction fans will tell you that Australian hard-SF superstar Greg Egan’s first novel was 1992’s Quarantine, published after Egan made a name for himself as a writer of fine short stories.  The truth, as more knowledgeable bibliographers know, is that Egan’s real first novel publication dates back to 1983’s An Unusual Angle, a novel that straddles the line between psychological drama and deniable fantasy.  Egan having being born in 1961, it would mean that the novel would have been written and published in his early twenties.

From the plot summary, we can guess that this is a novel by a writer barely out of school: It’s about a young man going through Australian high school and commenting on the inanity of what surrounds him.  Our narrator tells us that he has a camera in his skull, but that he can’t get the film out.  Much of the novel allows for some artistic discretion as to whether this is a literary device, a delusion or the truth.  (The final chapter, if taken literally, settles the question more conclusively.)

The point of the conceit is to allow Egan to describe four years of high school with a strongly detached narrator and movie-based metaphors.  Our narrator is brighter than anyone else around him, and seems passionate about film.  He describes school assemblies on a shot-per-shot basis, with occasional flights of fancy disavowed a few lines later.  Strongly isolated in his own head, the narrator has few (if any) friends, certainly nothing as conventional as a girlfriend and actually seems to despise both everyone and everything that’s not from him.  The cumulative impact of such an attitude against the world is toxic; the narrator becomes obnoxious, as the narrative can’t seem to find any joy in the world.  (And I say this as someone who often regarded high school in much the same “I’m bored; when does the real world begin?” attitude as our narrator here –twenty years of perspective works wonders at being embarrassed at our younger selves.)

Here and there, mind you, we can find glimmers of Egan’s later motifs and techniques.  Our narrator is unusually quick to explain the world in scientific concepts that wouldn’t be out of place in much of Egan’s later fiction.  The way he explains the camera in his skull is the kind of exotic biology that would pop up in his latter short stories.  Furthermore, the impulsion to dismiss much of the imposed events of the ordinary world and seek excitement in outlandish fantasies is common to many hard-SF readers, regardless of their age.

All of these quirks and hints make An Unusual Angle an unusually interesting read, especially for those who have read nearly everything else by Egan.  Even by SF standards, Egan often stands alone (his hard-SF novels often earn the distinction to be too hard for even dedicated hard-SF readers) and this sense of exceptionality permeates his first novel from beginning to end.  While Egan hasn’t disavowed this novel, he may regard it as non-essential work: a trawl through his extensive web site reveals only two mentions of An Unusual Angle: Once within his official bibliography, and another within an interview discussion of early publishing efforts.  So let us regard this first novel as a curio, and celebrate Quarantine as the real start of his body of work.

Slow Death by Rubber Duck, Rick Smith & Bruce Lourie

Slow Death by Rubber Duck, Rick Smith & Bruce Lourie

ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

Vintage Canada, 2010 expanded reprint of 2009 original, 339 pages, C$19.95 pb, ISBN 978-0-307-39713-3

One of the most depressing consequences of environmental awareness is the gradual understanding that it’s a never-ending battle.  You can remove the belching smokestacks, recycle the garbage dumps, stop dumping waste in the environment and stop clear-cutting forests, and the job still won’t be done.  In Slow Death by Rubber Duck, Rick Smith and Bruce Lourie eloquently demonstrate that even in our everyday life, there are still dangers from everyday products even though those products may be manufactured, shipped, sold and recycled more responsively than ever before.

The analytical centerpiece of the book is the kind of analysis that can now be cheaply done to verify the levels of various toxic materials in our own blood.  Everyone today is tainted to some degree by heightened levels of products that don’t belong in our bodies.  We have all breathed dangerous metals, cuddled next to treated fabrics, used products made out of toxic products… and the cumulative effect of our daily lives shows in blood tests.  In eight chapters, the authors willingly subject themselves to common products to show how easy it is to poison ourselves.

For instance, in the chapter “Rubber Duck Wars”, the authors seek out phthalate-containing products (phthalates being a handy industrial lubricant used in plastics and personal products, now thought to increase infertility risks) and willingly expose themselves to them.  Within days, before-and-after tests show how their levels of phthalates skyrocketed.  (The good news being that phthalates break down relatively quickly, meaning that returning to normal non-exposure quickly led to more normal toxin levels within a few weeks.  This is not the case with all contaminants.)

Phthalates are an interesting case study given how, over the past decade, they were banned after consumer pressure.  Slow Death by Rubber Duck is a clever book in not only showing us the toxicity of ordinary products and the extent to which even normal exposure can quickly lead to elevated levels of blood toxins, but also in showing how concerted activism can have an impact.  One of the book’s best moments is found in Chapter Eight, “Mothers Know Best”, which shows how environmental groups were able to work with the Canadian Conservative government in order to announce a ban on the use of Bisphenol A (BPA) in products, and paving the way for other countries to do the same.  It’s this kind of result-based activism that steadily makes the world incrementally safer for everyone.

Reading the book, there’s no doubt that regulation is the way to go for most of those environmental issues.  Smith and Lourie (plus Sarah Dopp, who gets third billing everywhere but on the cover) make a compelling (and recurring) case that many of these toxic products find their way in our environment thanks to industry marketing and pressures to solve minor problems with worse solutions.  We increasingly create our problems in response to relatively trivial concerns, and it takes us years to realize the error of our ways.  In the meantime, it is concerted action that leads governments (even by governments not known for environmental activism, as shown by positive Bush-administration actions) to take action and codify our understanding of biological science into industry guidelines.  Left to itself, the industry can’t really be counted upon to self-regulate –especially considering past examples such as the history of mercury use in dental filling and other hair-raising practices.

Until regulations catch up to science, it’s really up to the individual citizen to start taking action.  Slow Death by Rubber Duck has a few recommendations to make in order to act as more responsible individuals.  The book ends on a series of recommendation that finally got me to stop cooking stuff in Tupperware, get rid of my old water bottles and trash the plastic shower curtain in favor of a fabric one.  Small things that amount to real changes, even while industries and government race to catch up to the latest science and tighten up manufacturing and importation standards.  Even-tempered, compelling to read and even funny at times, Slow Death by Rubber Duck has earned its national best-selling status.  Read the paperback edition for a new afterword describing the reaction to the book, and why the people complaining loudest about the book (the usual environmental deniers) may be the most compelling reason to read it.

Moneyball, Michael Lewis

Moneyball, Michael Lewis

ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

Norton, 2011 movie tie-in expanded reprint of 2003 original, 317 pages, C$18.50 pb, ISBN 978-0-393-33839-3

Sport meets science in Michael Lewis’ Moneyball, a fascinating case study of the way fact-based analysis is slowly replacing traditional instinct as a guide to a baseball team’s performance.  Written after Lewis was allowed behind-the-scene access to the Oakland Athletics’ 2002 season, Moneyball explains how the desire to improve performance on a limited budget, coupled with the willingness to adopt new analytical methods collectively known as “sabermetrics”, allowed a small team like Oakland to compete successfully with team with far bigger budgets.

The keyword here is “money”: Lewis, after making a splash with Liar’s Poker and The Big Short, is best-known as a financial writer and this focus is never too far away from his topic matter as he explains the difficult situation of a poor baseball team in a league where other teams can easily outspend them.  Coupled with a renewed interest in number-based analytical methods, these constraints allowed Oakland general Manager Billy Beane to retool the usual scouting process.  Never mind studying players in the minor-leagues fields and filing reports based on scouts’ gut instinct: Beane’s analytical team would rather pore over seasons’ worth of numbers in order to find not necessarily the best players, but the ones that are undervalued by the market.  You can’t buy who you want when other teams have deep pockets, but you can get great bargains by targeting players who aren’t being paid what they’re worth.  Sabermetrics isn’t about having a huge advantage; it’s about working the margins until you can extract a few reliable percentage points’ worth of advantage, which ends up making a difference over the long run.

Lewis blends this story (as exemplified by the 2002 Oakland season) with that of Bean, a talented baseball player who somehow never met the considerable expectations placed on him by major-league teams.  Beane, after a few mildly successful years in the major league, did what practically no one else did and decided to take up the management of a baseball team, re-starting from the ground up.  This sensibility led him to champion analytical methods developed from the mid-seventies by statistical nerds over the advice of seasoned scouts.

In Moneyball, these innovations work: By being the first to pioneer the principles of sabermetrics, the Athletics get first-mover advantage, seeing easy bargains where other teams aren’t even looking.  It’s a temporary advantage as other teams, such a Toronto and Boston, eventually adopt similar techniques… but for a while, it works to the Athletics’ advantage.  (Hilariously, the centerpiece of the 2002 Athletics season is an unprecedented 20-game winning streak, a freak succession of victories that has almost nothing to do with the percentage points earned by sabermetrics.  Lewis explains this in the book, but the movie adaptation misses the point by using it as the film’s climax.)

Thanks to Lewis’ vulgarization talents, Moneyball will find an audience far beyond numbers-minded baseball fans.  The book is a joy to read, and even casual baseball observers will find plenty of good material to chew upon.  (There are exceptions: a chapter on trading is so deeply steeped in traditional baseball jargon that casual readers will find it nearly impenetrable.)  It’s a story about how cleverness can defeat brawn, or how facts can check instinct and as such is likely to appeal to science-minded readers.

This “revenge of the nerds” plotline is more fully explained in the paperback version’s afterword, which describes the controversy with which the book was received by traditional old-school baseball managers and fans.  To hear Lewis tell it, the sabermetrics principles were threatening because they upset an entrenched scouting system largely made up of ex-players seeking to uphold their own tradition: Having back-room math analysts tell them that they were making bad decisions wasn’t the kind of news warmly received.  And it may serve to explain why, even almost ten years later, the Athletics are still doing well in implementing sabermetrics: not every team administration may yet be willing to understand how letting go of traditional methods can improve their results.

In short, it’s a story very similar to the kind of competitiveness that has taken over Wall Street, with trained scientists and engineers seeking minute percentage advantages over their rivals.  Blending the two American passions of baseball and money in one easy-to-read package, there’s a good case to be made for Moneyball as a quintessential American non-fiction book.

Filthy Lucre, Joseph Heath

Filthy Lucre, Joseph Heath

ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

Harper Collins, 2009, 338 pages, C$29.95 hc, ISBN 978-1-55468-395-6

Given the importance of money, it almost goes without saying that a good understanding of the world goes hand-in-hand with a good grasp of economics.  “Follow the Money” isn’t just good for crime thrillers: it’s a solid way to figure out what’s really happening around us.  Unfortunately, economics isn’t called the dismal science for nothing: often politicized into uselessness, the study of money has attracted, well… people with money, intent of using the results to further their political aims.  As a result, activists from the right and the left now come with preconceived notions about economics that are actively harming any rational policy discussions.

To truly understand economics, argues Joseph Heath in Filthy Lucre (subtitled, somewhat incompletely, as “Economics for people who hate capitalism”) we have to let go of a few myths, cherished preconceptions and long-held statements of faith about economics.  To this end, he presents and demolishes twelve fallacies about economics: six that are favoured from a right-wing perspective, and six that are usually held by the left.

Heath isn’t an economist; he’s a philosophy professor at the University of Toronto and already well-known in Canada as one of the country’s most interesting intellectuals after a few well-received books such as The Efficient Society and The Rebel Sell.  He’s a skilled rhetorician, and Filthy Lucre is at its best when it starts poking at beliefs that have been ingrained in us through lazy consumption of political debates.  (His metaphors aren’t always convincing, but he can usually offer further sources for readers who would like a deeper understanding of his arguments.)

In the first half of the book, he demolishes a few right-wing fallacies: Libertarianism is the first target in explaining why capitalism isn’t natural.  In successive chapters, he argues that incentives aren’t all that matters, that competition isn’t always better, that taxes are usually at their optimal level, that international competitiveness isn’t required and that moral hazard doesn’t necessarily embed morality into economics.  Game theory figures heavily in his metaphors and readers are almost guaranteed to come away from this section with a better understanding of economics in general.

What’s more interesting, however, is the second section which takes aim at economic fallacies cherished by the kind of left-leaning readers most likely to pick up a book on “economics for people who hate capitalism”: Here, Heath serves some tough counter-examples to people who still believe that prices must be set by governments, that the pursuit of money is evil, that capitalism is doomed, that equal pay is an ideal, that all wealth accumulates to the top or that equality is more desirable than efficiency.  If the book’s first section is fun to read, this second half makes the book even better, because it forces equality-minded left-leaning readers to confront their own prejudices with colder facts and ponder the trade-offs required to get to their shiny progressive utopia.

Anyone who’s familiar with Heath’s previous work will find a continuity of argument in Filthy Lucre: Heath may be writing from a deep and self-acknowledged left-wing perspective, but he’s remarkably successful at explaining the status quo, its advantages over most alternatives and the wonders of steady incremental changes.  The book argues for a keener, more nuanced understanding of the current system before setting out to improve it, and it’s hard to argue with such even-handed reason.

After The Efficient Society and The Rebel Sell, Filthy Lucre also marks a third great popular book in a row for Heath.  If anyone has missed his work so far, don’t wait for another excuse: Read the books and wait for his next one –he deserves a spot on anyone’s must-read list.

Make’em Laugh, Laurence Maslon & Michael Kantor

Make’em Laugh, Laurence Maslon & Michael Kantor

ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

Twelve, 2008, 383 pages, C$50.00 hc, ISBN 978-0-446-50531-4

Tie-in books don’t have a very good reputation: They’re often seen as schlocky derivative products, churned on tight deadlines and little inspiration by writers needing the money, the result selling on the basis of something else (“Seen the movie?  Buy the novelization!”).  But Laurence Maslon & Michael Kantor’s Make’em Laugh is an entirely different kind of book.  It’s gorgeous, detailed and presents a compelling history of comedy in America.  Based on the 2009 PBS series of the same name, which attempted to describe the history of American comedy in six hour-long episodes, the book has the luxury of packing much more detail in nearly 400 superbly-designed pages.

Presented in oversized hardcover format, Make’em Laugh at first looks like a particularly thick coffee-table book filled with illustrations, a strong structure and short texts.  But look closer, because there is a lot of content here.  The book is divided in six sections meant to present an overview of the different kinds of comedy in the cultural American landscape: The Knockabouts (physical comedy); Satire and Parody; Smart Alecks and Wiseguys; Nerds, Jerks, Oddballs and Slackers; Bread-Winners and Homemakers; and, finally, The Groundbreakers.  Every section is introduced by a general essay, and then divided in a series of artist profiles, detailing the career, humor and influence of comedians ranging from Charlie Chaplin to Bill Maher.  The profiles take up from three to six pages, mixing a life narrative of the artist, best-known jokes and a generous number of photographs.  Additional material discusses various comedy venues such as radio, Catskills Mountain resorts, vaudeville and comedy albums.  You can certainly read Make’em Laugh as a coffee table book, dipping in and out of profiles as the day goes by, but it will take you a while.

At the end, though, Make’em Laugh offers a convincing overview of American comedy in the twentieth century.  Reading profile after profile, you get an impressive sense of some people’s careers (You mean that this George Burns is also that George Burns?!), learn fascinating historical trivial (Mel Brooks fought in World War 2?) and also, more importantly, get to understand the place of comedy in the development of American self-expression.  This never becomes more important than in discussing “The Groundbreakers” which, from Mae West to Lenny Bruce to Richard Prior to George Carlin, were often undistinguishable from civil rights activist and first-amendment warriors.

There’s also the sense that, by spanning the ages from vaudeville to the web, Make’em Laugh offers a few clues as to the development of pop-culture in the US during an entire century.  Reading accounts of Will Rogers or Bob Hope (among many others) is getting a glimpse in the cultural obsessions of a nation’s history, and some of the trappings of popular fame in the early twentieth century look suspiciously like the celebrity culture of today.

As good as Make’em Laugh can be, its reading experience can be improved by modern tools: Savvy readers will bring the book close to an internet-enabled device, and search YouTube for relevant clips as they come across mentions in the text.  You could also watch the original series but isn’t it more fun to go down the rabbit hole of funny video clips?

Now available on bookstores’ discount tables all around the continent, Make’em Laugh is a fine purchase for anyone even remotely interested in cultural history, comedy or simply an entertaining read.  The authors never forget to slip in representative jokes, and make their cultural history easy enough to read.  When you’re done with the book, leave it on your coffee table to share the fun with guests.

The Ultimate Game Guide to Your Life, Christopher Monks

The Ultimate Game Guide to Your Life, Christopher Monks

ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

Tow Books, 2008, 238 pages, C$14.95 pb, ISBN 978-1-58297-534-4

I’m not quite sure what I was expecting from Christopher Monks’ The Ultimate Game Guide to Your Life, except that it was sitting cheap on the remainder cart, was billed as humor and anything with a subtitle like “The Video Game as Existential Metaphor” interests me.  Flipping through the book showed a few cute illustrations; what else could I hope for?  Life’s hard enough –don’t we all need a comforting walkthrough?

For a while, though, it looked as if I may have made an error in picking up the book.  The first few pages are a tough slog, as the game/life metaphor initially fails to gel, and the putative protagonist of the walkthrough hasn’t yet been developed enough to sustain the comic narrative that later emerges.  There are a few good lines about you, the baby, not yet being too sure about “mom’s friend”, and how the game’s control at this early stage aren’t just unlabeled but don’t do the same thing.  Still, the first chapter seems like a fairly conventional way to talk about infants and toddlers.  Where’s the substance?

Things show some clear improvement in Level II (“Your Childhood”) as the rules and complex meta-fictional devices of the narrative start settling down.  Suddenly, the life being described becomes a story of sorts, with recurring characters emerging through the successive narratives (that darn Dennis!).  By Challenge Eight (“Losing your sister at the Huddy Sizzlebolt Happy! Fun! Learn! Show!”), the book loosens up and finally benefits from a protagonist old enough to have adventures and feature more darkly absurd material.  By this time, we’re also becoming more familiar with the conventions of the book, as The Ultimate Game Guide to Your Life isn’t just a gaming walk-through, but an unauthorized one that sometimes second-guesses what the designers were thinking.

Like life itself, the book reaches a certain narrative velocity as it hits the protagonist’s teenage years.  Making it through high school is amusing, and the fun doesn’t stop by the time the character reaches college and then takes a job at the donut store.  Hilarious bits include high school cliques, a memorable reunion with a high-school crush that somehow involves freeing minks, and using hostage crises at the donut shop as an advancement mechanism.  There are also a few throwaway gags about an optional robot war.  The first chunk of the early adulthood stage ends with the hero becoming a father…

…and without getting too personal, this is where the book sucker-punched me.  You’d have to be at my place in life and read pages 169-172 to understand why.  Maybe I suspected something in picking up the book.

Much of the rest of The Ultimate Game Guide to Your Life seems to be downhill from that moment, as (and this is where the book’s existentialism becomes obvious) much of life also seems to be.  Kicking back from the content of book for a moment to indulge in a bit of idle thoughts about video-gaming and life, there’s some wisdom in realizing that most people never get a satisfying dramatic arc; that lives go on after their main stories end, and that preparing another generation to play is the closest we’ll ever get to “winning the game”.  No wonder new parents give up gaming… at least as they focus on something else.

Back to The Ultimate Game Guide to Your Life, it’s not much of a surprise if the last third of the book seems to turn grimmer as the end approaches.  Despite the jocular consistency of the game’s challenge, it doesn’t take much of a subtext to cringe during the last challenge set in an Assisted Living Facility.  As the line goes, “Old age isn’t for Sissies.”  Appropriately enough (this isn’t a spoiler), the book ends at the end of the protagonist’s life… that is, Your Life.

One thing is for sure: I wasn’t expecting such a kick in the pants from a humour book making parallels between gaming and an ordinary life.  It’s enough to make you sit quietly in a chair and ponder the meaning of it all.  We all, I suppose, create our own mythological frameworks for what happens to us, and the future we can reasonably expect to have.  At the moment, it’s a surprisingly effective tactic to draw upon the modern mythology of the age, video games, to tackle the question.  Uneven but amazingly effective when it works, The Ultimate Game Guide to Your Life is a memetic wolf in sheep’s trade binding.  Open it carefully if you’re going through one of life’s big transitions.

Barrayar, Lois McMaster Bujold

Barrayar, Lois McMaster Bujold

ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

As second half of Cordelia’s Honor, Baen, 1996, 596 pages, C10.99, ISBN 0-671-57828-6

I first read Lois McMaster Bujold’s Barrayar more than a decade and a half ago, as I was making my way through the long list of Hugo award-winning novels.  At the time, the only copy I could find was a French translation, and I didn’t have a lot of knowledge about the Vorkosigan universe in which Barrayar is such a keystone.

Recently, though, I happened to pick up a copy of Cordelia’s Honor, an omnibus containing both Barrayar and its prequel Shards of Honor.  Filling the blanks in my Vorkosigan series, I read Shards of Honor and then, while I was at it, started on Barrayar to see if there was anything I’d forgotten in the meantime.

It turns out that I had forgotten quite a bit, and didn’t know about many other things.

The first thing that struck me going from Shards of Honor to Barrayar is how seamlessly the story flows from one book to the other.  Barrayar picks up pretty much where Shards of Honor leaves off: Cordelia’s Honor makes for a far more justifiable omnibus than the other collections of Vorkosigan material that Baen has been throwing together for a while.  There’s a five-year difference of writing experience in-between both books, and it shows: While I had some trouble staying interested throughout Shards of Honor, such unevenness isn’t as apparent in Barrayar as the novel starts out strong and stays that way: Bujold’s prose flows more easily, and her gift for portraying characters get better and better.

The second thing I noticed is that even if Barrayar is chronologically one of the first volumes in the Vorkosigan saga, it’s quite a bit more enjoyable for veteran readers of the series.  Dramatic irony abounds for those who know where the universe is going and what the fates of the characters introduced here will be.  It’s amusing to see familiar characters during their younger years and heartbreaking to see doomed characters get their moments of glory.  It’s also hard to overstate how crucial the events of this novel are to the rest of the series: Globally, Barrayar describes how Aral Vorkosigan is designated as regent and takes over the reins of power during a difficult civil war.  More personally for the characters of the series, this is where a pregnant Cordelia Naismith suffers from a neurotoxin attack, something that will forever shape her unborn son (and series protagonist) Miles.  Less seriously, it’s intriguing to see here the first seeds (Ivan’s birth; the Kou/Drou romance) of plotlines that will keep going through much of the series so far.  I don’t, as a rule, tend to like long-running series, but Bujold does it better than anyone else, and setting a novel a generation before the main body of the series allows her to bring the most out of her overarching plotlines.  It’s one thing to read through the Vorkosigan series and hear about the history of the characters; it’s another to directly experience it here.

We can also see in this novel the beginning of Bujold’s middle-period Vorkosigan era: From 1991’s Barrayar to 1999’s A Civil Campaign represents, to date, the peak of this series, past the initial throat-clearing and before the relatively minor exercises of Diplomatic Immunity and Cryoburn.  It’s during that time that she’s at her best blending SF plot devices, strong character development, pitch-perfect transparent prose and ingenious plotting with whatever tone any particular novel mar require.  Few other SF writers have ever reached the kind of sustained excellence of that series, and Barrayar is without a doubt one of the major novels in that cycle.  Never mind the Science-Fictional trappings and the accumulated knowledge of the series you need to have in your head in order for the book to work best: This is one great novel, beautifully conceived and skilfully written.  It’s worth a read if you’re not familiar with the Vorkosigan saga, and well-worth a re-read if you are.

[August 2011: Let me hide in a footnote another difference in reading the novel that should have headlined the review if I wasn’t so reluctant to discuss my private life on-line: Reading Barrayar, with its embryonic neurotoxin subplot, as an older teenager is one thing.  Reading it while my wife and I are experiencing the first trimester of our first pregnancy is positively terrifying.]

The Efficient Society, Joseph Heath

The Efficient Society, Joseph Heath

ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

Penguin Canada, 2002 reprint of 2001 original, 339 pages, C$22.00, ISBN 0-14-029248-0

From time to time, I find myself wishing that I’d read some books earlier.  Part of it is a reflection on my stack of things to read: Even if I completely stopped buying books right now, I would still have about two years’ worth of stuff to read.  Part of it is the vertiginous realisation that the universe of good books is vast, and there are still thousands of them to read.  The Efficient Society is one of those; a book that, in 2001, first brought philosophy professor Joseph Heath to national attention.  Heath would go on to write The Rebel Sell with Andrew Potter, which is the book that made me realize that I should be reading more of Heath/Potter’s work.  Going back in time to The Efficient Society, I end up cursing myself for not reading it ten years ago.

The basic thesis (“Why Canada is as close to Utopia as it gets”) is that our country is one of the best in the world largely because of its pragmatic efficiency.  This may be surprizing, even worrying to some: after all, most people frown at least a little when “efficiency” is praised.  Trained by decades of cost-cutting exercises presented as the epitome of efficiency, all-too-aware that “efficient” usually means cutting away the extras, fat, lubrication and slack time that make life worthwhile, readers may be forgiven for not being entirely well-disposed toward the notion of “an efficient society”.  But Heath isn’t using the word in that sense.  In his mind, efficiency means finding the best way of co-existing, the best way to deliver services, the best way to live.  It means not caring about the proclivities of other people (because being nosy is inefficient), finding a balance between private and public service delivery (because ideological approaches are usually wasteful) and understanding how social forces compel us toward common lifestyle decisions (because society works like that, and understanding why is the first step toward changing it).

As a philosophy professor, Heath is well-equipped to vulgarized grand ideas.  For instance, in the section of the book which concerns itself with moral efficiency, he proposes that old-fashioned morality is based on an ideal of human perfection.  Living up to these expectation is practically impossible; hence, the more efficient idea of tolerance; as long as others aren’t actively interfering in our lives, as long as everyone’s actions aren’t harming others, what’s the point of measuring others against an ideal that is impossible to reach?

The book is on even firmer ground in discussing economics and efficiency.  Canada, argues Heath, has found an ideal balance between European pro-state and American pro-business ideologies.  The United States, after all, seems perfectly happy wasting a few percentage points of GDP to health care billing services that a single-payer model doesn’t even need.  Europe, on the other thand, wastes GDP points by over-nationalizing businesses that should be handled by the private sector.  This efficient Canadian equilibrium between the state and private enterprise is to everyone’s benefit.  Many other examples abound, exploring the delicate interaction of the market in its modern, efficient form.  Eventually, the narrative becomes an argument for improving the status quo rather than burning everything down –a theme that Heath carries through to The Rebel Sell.

From this promising start, The Efficient Society wanders a bit during a last third notionally dedicated to social efficiency: While there are a few striking passages –the deconstruction of typical gender roles in couples raising young children seems particularly implacable- the book seems to become an anthology of Health’s ideas without much of a guiding theme to carry it along.  It’s also in this segment that The Efficient Society most clearly shows its age.  The technological references are obviously a decade old, and developments since then (particularly in democratization of web publishing, and the increasing universality of web access devices.) would be interesting to study through the efficiency prism.

Still, The Efficient Society easily contains more thought-provoking material than most other non-fiction books of its length.  Heath interrogates economics from a philosophical viewpoint (a left-wing one, albeit a more sophisticated left-wing perspective than the activist fringe) and the rest of his investigation can be just as revealing as any of the Freakonomics-style books that have been published since then.  I wish I’d read this book upon publication; maybe the world would have made a bit more sense.