Summary:

A loosely linked series of auto-biographical essays by Brisbane based (yes Brisbane!) gay, Chinese Australian, Benjamin Law. David Sedaris light with an Australian aspect.

My Take:

Given that identity humour is such a focus of “The Family Law”, it’s difficult to avoid applying a stereotypical overlay onto Benjamin Law’s writing. In fact, “The Family Law” isn’t a single literary stereotype, but manages to position itself within three distinct auto-biographical cannons; Growing up in Qld, Growing up Gay and Growing Up Asian. This isn’t a necessarily problem to my mind, I’m a strong believer that most clichés became clichéd because there was something at their core that worked.

That being said, if you’re working in an area that’s been well covered in the past, you either need to have a slightly new angle or to execute extremely well. Sadly, I think this is where “The Family Law” falls down. It’s not that it’s a bad book, in fact I quite enjoyed it, but I just couldn’t avoid the reoccurring feeling that “This has been done better before”. A humorous autobiographical account of growing up in Brisbane was done better by Hugh Lunn’s, “Over the Top With Jim”. Alice Pung’s, “Unpolished Gem” did growing up Asian in Australia both more amusingly and more movingly. And David Sedaris (“Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim”) and Augusten Burroughs (“Magical Thinking, but “Dry” in particular) perfected the mass market Gay autobiographical essay series years ago.

I like Benjamin Law as a writer want to read more of his stuff in the future, but there are a number of books covering similar terrain that I’d recommend before “The Family Law”.

Excerpts:

“We preferred theme parks. For parents raising five children, theme parks made so much sense. They were clean and safe. There were clearly designated activities, and auditory and visual stimuli that transcended racial, language and age barriers. Also, you could buy heaps of useless shit. This is an exercise at which Asians of all backgrounds seem to naturally excel.”

“Whether it was a birthday, a wedding or a marriage, a lot of Chinese parents took the same approach to gift-giving, one shared by Mafia hitmen and pirates: just hand over thick wads of cash.”

While his brother listened to In Utero..

“I immersed myself in another seminal album that was released the same year: Mariah Carey’s Music Box, a serious and studied meditation on love (‘Dreamlover’), bravery (‘Hero’), loyalty (‘Any Time You Need a Friend’) and profound loss (‘Without You’). “

“After I was born, my parents reached an exciting turning point in their marriage: they began to fight openly and without reserve, like two cats thrown in a sack and swung around wildly…. Every marriage starts with passive aggression, but couples soon realise that being passive requires effort. It’s easier to be openly hostile.”

Synopsis: By lowering the transaction costs of group action, the Internet has made possible a new model of production – commons based peer production. Not market driven, not government directed and not organisationally controlled, peer production within online communities of interest represents a qualitatively new form of production. Benkler was the first to identify it.

My Take:

Yochai Benkler, a Law Professor at Yale University, is the grand-daddy of the theoretical analysis of online peer production. While Richard Stallman and Eric Raymond preceded him in making the philosophical/political case that underpinned the F/LOSS movement, Benkler was the first to engage in serious theoretical analysis of internet enabled peer production using established economic approaches.  While others had previously written about the unique economic characteristics of information economics (ie high fixed costs, low marginal costs, non-exhaustion and difficulty of exclusion), Benkler was the first serious academic to identify and describe the way that falling transaction costs of collaborative group action facilitated this kind of peer production. In fact, Benkler’s 2002 article, “Coase’s Penguin, or Linux and the Nature of the Firm” is probably the seminal article on peer-to-peer production in the networked information economy. Benkler’s early work underpinned a slew of more recent and highly influential publications (Clay Shirky’s “Here Comes Everyone”, James Surowiecki’s “Wisdom of Crowds” and Don Tapscott’s “Wikinomics”).

Benkler’s great insight was that the series of internet enabled phenomena like the Open Source Software movement, Wikipedia and a multitude of communities of expertise centred around blogs represented a genuinely new model of information/cultural production; a model he described as Peer Production. Benkler recognised that internet enabled social tools such as email, blogs and social networking sites have dramatically reduced the transaction costs of finding and maintaining contact with likeminded individuals. As a result, communities of interest allowing large scale collaboration outside traditional organisational or market relationships have only proliferated in recent times.

Within the blogosphere (a key example of this phenomenon at the time of the writing of “The Wealth of Networks”, communities of interest form around and between topic oriented blogs. Individuals with an interest in the topic of the blog converge around the site and interact with the blogger and each other through the comments section and other social media tools (eg email, social networking sites). Other interested bloggers also interact with the blog through almost ubiquitous comment ‘trackback’ functions that aggregate incoming links and comments for the blog. As a result, each blog acts as both a platform for, and a participant in, collaboration within communities of interest.

According to Benkler, each blog constitutes a node in the networked public sphere around which a community of interest may form. The contributions of participants in each community of interest are aggregated at the intra-blog level through the comments section and via direct communication with the blogger. The blogger then performs an initial filtering function, exercising discretion as to which contributions are then integrated into the body text of the blog in subsequent posts. The body text of each blog is then subject to filtering at the inter-blog level through a process of peer review within the broader community of bloggers writing on the relevant topic. Benkler theorises that this process of decentralised peer review will result in attention in the blogosphere being distributed according to the quality of each contribution, regardless of its source.

Benkler theorises that this will occur because high quality, salient contributions within the networked public sphere are likely to attract increased attention in the form of favourable coverage at other blogs and resulting links back to the original post. Low attention nodes have an incentive to try to draw attention to their higher quality posts by alerting more prominent bloggers in their immediate communities of interest to their posts via email, comments or trackbacks. These more prominent bloggers will filter these submissions and link back to high quality posts. As a result, high quality content that emerges from a low visibility node will diffuse through the community by moving up the attention distribution to be incorporated in high attention blogs. This attention distribution process is further accelerated by Google’s link-reliant, PageRank search algorithm that provides increased prominence to posts on blogs with more links.

In contrast, according to Benkler, a low quality contribution from a low attention node is likely to be ignored, or at most criticised by other bloggers within the community and is unlikely to attract further attention from within the community of interest. A high attention node that produces a low quality post is likely to attract criticism the community in the comments of the post in the short term and if the node continues to produce low quality information in the longer term, is likely to lose attention within the community. While inaccuracies are not prevented from being published, they are unlikely to be systemic and accuracy is likely to increase in the long term.

Benkler theorises that while not perfect, over time this process will generally result in higher quality, more salient information attracting more attention and low quality, low salience information being rejected or ignored. The implication of this community judged, meritocratic attention distribution process is that the reliability of information aggregated at any node within the networked public sphere will increase with the prominence of that node within a community of interest. In this way, Benkler essentially uses attention within the blogosphere as a proxy for quality and uses the skewed distribution of attention within communities of interest as a heuristic for judging the quality of blog content.

On top of this attention distribution filtering mechanism, the reliability of the content incorporated into the ‘A-list’ blogs within a community is further reinforced by the complimentary effect of “Linus’ Law” of Peer Production on the attention distribution process. Linus’ law provides that “Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow”, that is that the participatory nature of the blogosphere will ensure that if enough people are viewing a piece of information someone will highlight any inaccuracies in this information, allowing it to be corrected. As such, the more people that are reading a blog, the more likely it is that someone will highlight an error in a post. In this way, filtering within the blogosphere occurs post-publication rather than prepublication. Benkler shows that while there are generally no formal editors vetting the content of an individual blogger pre-publication, the skewed distribution of attention within the blogosphere creates points at which an editorial filtering process can occur post-publication.

Sadly, Benkler isn’t the most accessible writer. A lot of the time he can get himself needlessly lost in esoterica and jargon. Further, when he strays from economics and moves into political economy and media studies  in Parts 2 and 3 of “The Wealth of Networks” both his persuasiveness and credibility suffer (in particular, Benkler seems to unquestioningly swallow a lot of the assertions of the Frankfurt School about the nature of traditional mass media and it’s normative inferiority to what he describes as the emergent online ‘networked public sphere’).

Highlight:

“Sometimes, under conditions I specify in some detail, these nonmarket collaborations can be better at motivating effort and can allow creative people to work on information projects more efficiently than would traditional market mechanisms and corporations. The result is a flourishing nonmarket sector of information, knowledge, and cultural production, based in the networked environment, and applied to anything that the many individuals connected to it can imagine.”

Political hack turned apparatchik Jack Burden, narrates the rise and fall of “The Boss”, depression era Louisiana Governor and demagogue, Willie Stark. The roman à clef par excellence.

My Take:

“All the King’s Men” is quite simply the best dramatic exploration of the political experience in any medium. While it’s most famously known as a thinly veiled fictionalisation of the political career of real life 1930s Louisiana Governor, Huey “The Kingfish” Long, ATKM is much more than more than a curiosity of political history. In fact, its themes are so timeless and its execution so perfect that ATKM is arguably a more rewarding when read in today’s political environment than when it was released more than 50 years ago.

A Pulitzer Prize winning novel that was adapted into a Best Picture Academy Award winner, the genius of ATKM is that it is a fully realised success at both the politico-historico-philosophical level as well as the level of the individual characters. Robert Penn Warren once claimed that ATKM was “never intended to be a book about politics” and he’s right. ATKM is a book about people. People with the same emotional baggage, complex personal relationships and rich emotional palates as anyone else. But also people who happen to be living and working in a political environment and are expressing their ambitions, insecurities and passions within this context. By treating his characters as people first and political actors second, Warren is able to produce a much more realistic and insightful exploration of the political experience than someone who had set out to write “about politics”. In this sense, ATKM reminded me more of “To Kill a Mockingbird” than the more obvious political analogues (eg “Primary Colors”, “Power Without Glory” etc). Yes, it has a “big picture” message, but the core of the novel, what makes it a classic, is a lyrically written, nuanced character examination.

That being said, I thoroughly enjoyed Warren’s perceptiveness about the political process. ATKM rings very true to my experience of professional politics. ATKM portrays politics in all of its glorious idealism, compromises, corruption and malevolence but without the cynicism or naivety that generally undermines the realism of most of the political fiction I’ve seen (whether literary, TV, or Film).  A big part of the realism of ATKM’s politics is a result of Warren insisting that all of the facets of politics, good and bad, are recognisable to varying degrees in each of the actors. Warren doesn’t offer any judgement of the actions of his characters other than to show that they have consequences that are frequently equally morally complex.

Highly recommended.

Excerpts

ATKM contains a wealth of home spun aphorisms and anecdotes from the Whatever It Takes school of political practice.

The most famous aphorism is Willie Stark’s classic invocation of ‘the ends justify the means’:

“You got to make good out of bad. That’s all there is to make it with.”

But there are many, many more.

At one point, Willie Stark describes one of his key political operatives, Tiny Duffy thus:

“The beauty about Tiny is that nobody can trust him and you know it. You get somebody, somebody can trust maybe, and you got to sit up nights worrying whether you are the somebody. You get Tiny, and you can get a night’s sleep. All you got to do is keep the albumin scared out of his urine.”

In a similar vein, when Stark sends his minions out to smear a seemingly high-minded political rival, he is adamant that he will be equally susceptible to blackmail as any other political actor:

“Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption and he passeth from the stink of the didie to the stench of the shroud. There is always something.”

In another memorable passage, Stark defends his blackmailing of his rivals with ‘dirt’ with a home spun articulation of the ends justify the means:

“Dirt’s a funny thing. Come to think of it, there ain’t a thing but dirt on this green God’s globe except what’s under water, and that’s dirt too. It’s dirt makes the grass grow. A diamond ain’t a thing in the world but a piece of dirt that got awful hot. And God-a-Mighty picked up a handful of dirt and blew on it and made you and me and George Washington and mankind blessed in faculty and apprehension. It all depends on what you do with the dirt.”

In addition to being a compelling narrative, ATKM is also brilliantly written. It’s the kind of book that leaves you constantly dog earring pages containing extended sections of brilliant prose.

Burden on his first wife:

“As long as I regarded Lois as a beautiful, juicy, soft, vibrant, sweet-smelling, sweet-breathed machine for provoking and satisfying the appetite (and that was the Lois I had married), all was well. But as soon as I began to regard her as a person, trouble began. All would have been well, perhaps, had Lois been struck dumb at puberty. Then no man could have withstood her. But she could talk, and when something talks you sooner or later begin to listen to the sound it makes and begin, even in the face of all other evidence, to regard it as a person. You begin to apply human standards to it, and the human element infects your innocent Eden pleasure in the juicy, sweet-breathed machine. I had loved Lois the machine, the way you love the filet minon or the Georgia peach, but I definitely was not in love with Lois the person. In fact, as the realisation grew that the machine-Lois belong to, and was the instrument of, the person-Lois (or at least to the thing which could talk) the machine-Lois which I had innocently loved began to resemble a beautiful luscious bivalve open and pulsing in the glimmering deep and I some small speck of marine life being drawn remorselessly.”

Burden on his unrequited love:

“It is the way a woman laughs for happiness. They never laugh that way just when they are being polite or at a joke. A woman only laughs that way a few times in her life. A woman only laughs that way when something has touched her way down in the very quick of her being and the happiness just wells out as natural as breath and the first jonquils and mountain brooks. When a woman laughs that way it always does something to you. It does not matter what kind of a face she has got either. You hear that laugh and feel that you have grasped a clean and beautiful truth. You feel that way because that laugh is a revelation. It is a great impersonal sincerity. It is a spray of dewy blossom from the great central stalk of All Being, and the woman’s name and address hasn’t got a damn thing to do with it. Therefore, that laugh cannot be faked. If a woman could learn to fake it she would make Nell Gwyn and Pompadour look like a couple of Campfire Girls wearing bifocals and ground-gripper shows and with bands on their teeth. She could set all society by the ears. For all any man really wants is to hear a woman laugh like that.”

Willie Stark’s father on his uncooperative dog:

“If he was hongry now, we could guile him. But he ain’t hongry. His teeth gone bad.”

University of Chicago Professor of Jurisprudence and polymath at large, Cass Sunstein reviews traditional models of aggregating and filtering information in the context of the impact of rapidly evolving technological change. If it was published on Twitter, I’d give it a re-tweet.

My Take:

The best summary of Cass Sunstien’s “Infotopia” comes from a review by Ethan Zuckerman:

“You can think of Info-topia as a caged deathmatch between Hayek and Habermas, streamed live on the Internet. Habermas taps out somewhere around page 200.”

If  this gets your intellectual juices are flowing, you can pick up this book for some first class discussion of the competing theoretical approaches to the aggregation and utilisation of dispersed information. If you’ve never heard of either Hayek of Habermas, you should probably pass up this fairly academic book for a more accessible take on the topic (Clay Shirky or James Surowiecki should do the trick).

Infotopia offers an engaging, if at times slightly academic, discussion of the various established models of information aggregation and filtering, their strengths and short-comings and the way these models are being influenced by the technological changes occurring under the umbrella description of Web 2.0.

Sunstein surveys the academic literature underpinning four models of information aggregation and usage:

1. The statistical averaging of independent judgements of members of a group (ie the Condorcet jury theorem);
2. Deliberation and reasoned exchange of individually held facts, ideas and opinions between members of a group (ie the Habermasian norm of the Public Sphere);
3. Allowing members of a group to buy and sell on the basis of their judgements and examining pricing within a market to aggregate diverse individual judgements (the Hayekian model); and
4. “.. enlist(ing) the Internet to obtain the information and perspectives of anyone who cares to participate.” (eg through online collaborative tools like blogs, wikis etc).

The most interesting sections of Infotopia come when Sunstein engages with this fourth model. I found this quite surprising as I thought Sunstein’s previous effort in this space (Republic.com) was overly pessimistic and relatively uninformed. But in “Infotopia”, Sunstein quite convincingly comes to the conclusion that online communities of interest are something qualitatively new for information aggregation and filtering; in Sunstein’s words “Neither Hayek nor Habermas”. Sunstein recognises that while online communities are able to utilise the ability of the Hayekian model to aggregate diverse information without reference to the formal authority of the source (and favourably cites Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales’s declaration that “Possibly one can understand Wikipedia without understanding Hayek… But one can’t understand my ideas about Wikipedia without understanding Hayek.”), the lack of a price signal prevents it being a perfect analogue. Similarly, whilst online communities can perpetuate many of the short-comings of Habermasian deliberation models, particularly in the way that they can increase the ideological extremism of their members (“When like-minded people cluster, they often aggravate their biases, spreading falsehoods.” ), it can also avoid some of the worst instances of group think by allowing everyone to have a voice.

Both the strength and weakness of “Infotopia” is its academic grounding. Sunstein takes a much less evangelical approach to the potential of both groups, and technology, looking in detail at the circumstances that must be present before groups can outperform individuals at filtering information. In Sunstein’s words:

“A lot of the book is about how and why groups utterly fail to get the information that they need — about how and why private and public institutions (1) do not elicit the information their own members have, (2) amplify the errors of their most confused members, or (3) go to unjustified extremes.”

This cautious, caveated approach can make “Infotopia” a little dry at times, but it does give additional credence to Sunstein’s conclusions when he does definitively come to a conclusion (in particular with respect to his generally depressing conclusions regarding the shortcomings of deliberation and rational exchange in reaching good group decisions).

There’s an element of “an excellent review article stretched into a less impressive book” here, but on the whole it’s a worthwhile read.

Synopsis:

In a dystopian alternative reality in which the US Government imposes ever greater burdens on America’s industrialists, one man, John Galt, leads the “men of the mind” to withdraw their productive capacity from society. And then talk about it for 1200 pages. Crypto-fascist.

My Take:

Oh dear, Where to begin?

Atlas Shrugged is much more than a book. It’s an unavoidable monolith on the politico-literary landscape. Still a monumental best seller, Atlas Shrugged is frequently cited by pluralities of Americans as the most influential book in their lives. An early influence on the current US Secretary of State and a life-long influence on the previous Chair of the US Federal Reserve, Atlas Shrugged has probably done more to shape the attitudes of US politicians and policy makers than any other novel.

Frankly, the mind boggles.

At the highest level, there’s nothing wrong with the premise. As Tyler Cowen correctly points out a moral defence of both capitalism, and selfishness as its essential cornerstone is important. Further, making the point through the intriguing ploy of having the productive class go ‘on strike’ because of the diminution of incentive caused by extreme Government intervention is a handy thought experiment.

“John Galt is Prometheus who changed his mind. After centuries of being torn by vultures in payment for having brought to men the fire of the gods, he broke his chains and he withdrew his fire—until the day when men withdraw their vultures.”

However, it’s in the execution that things go badly astray.

It’s been said many times before, but the quality of both the writing and the story-telling in ‘Atlas Shrugged’ is utterly terrible. A book of this length has no excuses for shallow characterisation, but the characters in “Atlas Shrugged” are unvaryingly caricatures sketched solely according to the dictates of Rand’s warped world view. As a result, the characters are unbelievable at every turn. At turns they alternatively exploit or abandon those they care about with no emotional reflection or angst. The ‘good’ characters are capable only of good. The ‘bad’ capable only of bad. In short, Rand’s characters simply do not act like real people.

What “Atlas Shrugged” neglects in characterisation, it more than makes up for in mind-numbingly repetitive political exposition. Rand never makes a point once. She never allows the reader to draw their own conclusions. Instead, she repeatedly outlines her political theory in turgid detail. She’s waiting with a sledge-hammer of political meaning at every turn of the story. It’s genuinely painful. In one infamous section, in the middle of the narrative, the leader of the strike, delivers a radio broadcast outlining his political philosophy that runs to over 100 pages. It’s Castroesq. For perspective, if Orwell could skewer Communism in 250 pages and Hayek could have a decent crack at Socialism in 320 pages, why does Rand need 1200 pages to tell us what’s wrong with Social Democracy?

It’s worth reiterating how painfully bad “Atlas Shrugged” is as a piece of writing to make it clear that this book isn’t a best seller because of the power of its story telling. This ain’t “The Da Vinci Code”.

This leaves the books political message as the source of its appeal. The more philosophically minded will summarise Rand’s thesis better than I, but Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism seems to be able to be boiled down to selfishness guided by rational thought. According to Rand, the only morally ‘good’ action that an individual can undertake is the one based on a rational evaluation of the individual’s self interest.  Ultimately, if all are free to act in their own self interest, Rand assumes that utility within a society will be naturally maximised.

At this level, there’s nothing inherently offensive to my mind in Rand’s philosophy. The problem is the absolutism with which she approaches the application of this philosophy. To Rand’s mind, a corollary of rational selfishness as the fount of all moral good is that any form of subversion of this principle is treated as an expression of evil. It’s not just misguided, it’s actively malevolent. Most famously, this led Rand to conclude that altruism, that is an action motivated by a desire to help others, is inherently evil.

One of many fables that are littered through the text to reinforce Rand’s message lionises a character whose hatred for an altruistic government outweighed his love for his wife:

It was said that Nat Taggart had staked his life on his railroad many times; but once, he staked more than his life. Desperate for funds, with the construction of his line suspended, he threw down three flights of stairs a distinguished gentleman who offered him a loan from the government. Then he pledged his wife as security for a loan from a millionaire who hated him and admired her beauty. He repaid the loan on time and did not have to surrender his pledge. The deal had been made with his wife’s consent. She was a great beauty from the noblest family of a southern state, and she had been disinherited by her family because she eloped with Nat Taggart when he was only a ragged young adventurer.

In sections like this, “Atlas Shrugged” feels like an extended exercise in reductio ad absurdum, but it’s clear that Rand is deadly serious.

[As a side note, one wonders how many bankers who took money as part of the US Government bail-out had a copy of Atlas Shrugged on the bookshelf.]

Similarly, Rand repeatedly makes it clear that there’s no room in her philosophy for supporting family members. At one point, two millionaires discuss the demands being put upon one by the Government and his family:

“Why are you willing to carry them?”

“Because they’re a bunch of miserable children who struggle to remain alive, desperately and very badly, while I—I don’t even notice the burden”

The use of this kind of language of contempt to describe the non-productive in “Atlas Shrugged” is pervasive. They are variously “parasites”, “leeches”, “moochers”, “feckless” etc. Rand doesn’t address how the elderly, the sick, the disabled and other inherently non-productive members of our society ought to be treated in “Atlas Shrugged”, but it’s clear how she would view them as a matter of principle. The extent to which this absolutist and extremist view is contrary to fundamental human nature is easy to see.

But it’s not Rand’s outright rejection of altruism that is the source of the popularity of “Atlas Shrugged”. Instead, it’s a more central application of selfish rationality – that of the primacy of what Rand describes as “the role of man’s mind in existence”. Rand’s central message in this regard is that man answers to nothing but the dictates of his rational mind. Rand’s ultimate hero is the man who backs his intellectual judgement against that of the world and in spite of the slings and arrows of disapproval of the society in which he lives.

It’s easy to see the appeal of this message and at a basic level it’s admirable. The problem, once again, is the extremes to which Rand takes the principle. While it’s admirable at a first principles level for someone to back their judgement, Rand’s elevation of this as the fundamental basis of all morality has extremely troubling implications. It’s easy to admire a subject matter expert taking a principled stand against the prevailing common wisdom. It’s less admirable when that person is Mohammad Atta or Ted Kaczynski.

Even worse, it’s clear that Rand understood the implications of her theory of rational selfishness when taken to its logical conclusion. An excellent examination of Rand’s thought processes at Slate provides a chilling insight to the extent to which she truly believed in the moral superiority of absolute subjective rationality:

“Her diaries from that time, while she worked as a receptionist and an extra, lay out the Nietzschean mentality that underpins all her later writings. The newspapers were filled for months with stories about serial killer called William Hickman, who kidnapped a 12-year-old girl called Marion Parker from her junior high school, raped her, and dismembered her body, which he sent mockingly to the police in pieces. Rand wrote great stretches of praise for him, saying he represented “the amazing picture of a man with no regard whatsoever for all that a society holds sacred, and with a consciousness all his own. A man who really stands alone, in action and in soul. … Other people do not exist for him, and he does not see why they should.” She called him “a brilliant, unusual, exceptional boy,” shimmering with “immense, explicit egotism.” Rand had only one regret: “A strong man can eventually trample society under its feet. That boy [Hickman] was not strong enough.”

In this respect, Jennifer Burns, the author of “Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right” touches on something important when she notes that Rand has always appealed to the ‘accomplished yet alienated overachiever’. At its core, “Atlas Shrugged” is a book for those who think they are better/smarter/more deserving than those around them and can’t understand why they aren’t afforded what they believe to be their due. “Atlas Shrugged” is a salve for the alienation of the accomplished overachiever because its central message is that “Nobody matters but you”. Everyone who feels unappreciated is able to sit back while reading “Atlas Shrugged” and tell themselves ‘They don’t know how much they need me’.

That’s why this book sells hundreds of thousands of copies – it strokes the infantile desire in all of us to be told that we’re better than everyone else. It’s also why it is truly dangerous.

Ultimately, I think Andrew Norton sums Rand up well:

Jerome Tuccille’s book title “It Usually Begins with Ayn Rand” nicely captures her effect. Rand’s novels engage teenagers and early 20-somethings in a way that more theoretical books cannot, but often lead them to more mainstream libertarian or classical liberal ideas.

I wouldn’t judge a Libertarian or Conservative for a youthful flirtation with Ayn Rand. She has a certain undergraduate appeal to the intellectual arrogance in all of us. But I’d have serious questions about someone’s judgement if they were still thought her views had much relevance after a few years in the real world.

Excerpts:

*********************

“Mr. Rearden,” said Francisco, his voice solemnly calm, “if you saw Atlas, the giant who holds the world on his shoulders, if you saw that he stood, blood running down his chest, his knees buckling, his arms trembling but still trying to hold the world aloft with the last of his strength, and the greater his effort the heavier the world bore down upon his shoulders—what would you tell him to do?” “I . . . don’t know. What . . . could he do? What would you tell him?” “To shrug.”

***************

“I am trying to raise money for Friends of Global Progress.” Rearden had never been able to keep track of the many organizations to which Philip belonged, nor to get a clear idea of their activities. He had heard Philip talking vaguely about this one for the last six months. It seemed to be devoted to some sort of free lectures on psychology, folk music and co-operative farming. Rearden felt contempt for groups of that kind and saw no reason for a closer inquiry into their nature.

My Take: I found “Band of Brothers” to be a deeply frustrating book to read. On the one hand, the story of Easy Company is more than compelling. The company featured prominently in D-Day, Operation Market Garden, The Battle of the Bulge and the famous siege at Bastogne, the liberation of Nazi Concentration Camps and the occupation of Goering’s Palace and Hitler’s Eagles Nest. Further, the fact that the Company was a volunteer unit formed before the war offered “Band of Brothers” a group of characters that readers could get to know and follow throughout Easy Company’s experiences.

However, these strengths are more than off-set by two major, and in my mind related, weaknesses in this book.

First, Ambrose completely over-eggs the dramatic story telling aspect of the book. I’m certainly not against using a dramatic narrative to improve the accessibility of history, in fact there’s clearly a lot of value in this, but at times “Band of Brothers” read like a teenage boy’s G.I. Joe Fan Fiction. I wish I was exaggerating in this regard, but take for example the following, not atypical paragraph:

“Get ‘em?” Winters yelled. Lorraine hit one with his tommy-gun, Winters aimed his M-1, squeezed and shot his man through the back of his head. Guarnere missed the third Jerry, but Winters put a bullet in his back. Guarnere followed that up by pumping the wounded man full of lead from his tommy-gun. The German kept yelling, “Help! Help!” Winters told Malarkey to put one through his head.”

I’m sure I’m not the only non-American who was grimacing while reading the passages like this. What made this even more frustrating was that the substance of Easy Company’s war experiences were more than dramatic enough without the jingoistic, melodramatic flourishes. The “Fan Boy” dramatic passages of the book were both embarrassing and unnecessary.

The second glaring weakness of “Band of Brothers” was the complete lack of perspective and objectivity that Ambrose shows throughout the book. Ambrose doesn’t just describe Easy Company’s exploits with added schlock, he views them through rose coloured glasses tinted with the Stars and Stripes. As described in Band of Brothers, Easy Company were the All-American, pure of heart, defenders of democracy and the Free World. He’s so close to his subject that he is completely unable to position the Company’s actions within any kind of broader context or offer any meaningful insight into the experience of war.

It is clear from even a superficial reading that “Band of Brothers” is heavily dependent on the accounts of members of Easy Company. Even more disturbingly, Ambrose offers little or no critical perspective on these accounts. Jarringly, at one point, after quoting extensively from a Staff Sergeant’s account of a heroic battle field experience, Ambrose goes so far as to add the following post script:

“If that sounds idealised, it can’t be helped; that is the way Lipton and many others in Easy, and many others in the Airborne and through the American Army – and come to that, in the German and Red Armies too – fought the war.”

Forgive me if I become sceptical when historians are defending ‘idealised’ accounts of the experience of war. Ambrose genuinely sounds more like a cheer-leader than a historian at times in this book.

Even worse, Ambrose has been caught out a number of times copying extracts from veteran’s accounts almost verbatim. As Patricia Nelson Limerick, a professor of history at the University of Colorado has observed:

“You can’t get a more striking example of lack of critical distance from your sources than simply typing it into your own word processing program,” said

After reading philosophically substantial war historians like Antony Beevor and Vassily Grossman, “Band of Brothers” feels more akin to reading a comic book account of war – a one-dimensional, triumphalist sketch of something far more complex and nuanced.  I suppose “Band of Brothers” works as a piece of pop non-fiction written for an American audience – it certainly sold enough copies. But for those wanting a bit more substance and perspective and a bit less myth-making and self congratulation, there are far better options.

Highlight:

“Webster (a Harvard English literature graduate and member of Easy Company) went back to the road to get in on the shooting. A German turned to fire back. “What felt like a baseball bat slugged my right leg,” Webster recalled, “spun me around, and knocked me down.” All he could think to say was, “They got me!” which even then seemed to him “an inadequate and unimaginative cliché.”

Synopsis:

My Take: While I’m not much of a science fiction fan (relative to its real adherents), as a general principle I do try to give the seminal authors of all genres the benefit of the doubt. Most of the time, if you’re the best of breed in one genre, you probably have something to offer people outside of your niche. As a result, H. P. Lovecraft has always been on my list of authors to give a try.

His work, most of which was released in the mid-1920s has been deeply influential both within the Sci-Fi community (frequent references to his work on Boing Boing is a testament to this) and a broader fraternity of artists who take a darker perspective on the progress of human civilisation (including Stephen King, Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, Guillermo Del Toro, and Jorge Luis Borges). Writing before the Sci-Fi/Fantasy/Horror genres were even recognised (they were collectively referred to as simply weird fiction at the start of the 20^th Century) Lovecraft has subsequently become a canonical writer in all three.

So with this in mind, thanks to my trusty Kindle, copyright expiry and Project Gutenberg, I recently sat down with Lovecraft’s most famous work “The Call of the Cthulhu”.  TCOTC tells the story of a young man who stumbles across a pre-historic blood cult that worships extra-terrestrial beings who look like a cross between a squid, a dragon and a man and inhabited the earth before mankind. In the abstract, it all sounds more than a little absurd, but Lovecraft is a dab hand at the art of story-telling and “The Call of the Cthulhu” unfolds with impressive suspense through three independent, documentary style narratives. While each narrative largely stands alone, as each develops, the narrator reveals a bigger, horrifying picture to the reader.

Lovecraft’s admiration of Edgar Allan Poe and the influence that the great author had on his work is obvious in TCOTC. Despite its globe-wide setting, the book’s first person retrospective format gives the story a dark and claustrophobic feel. Overall, it’s first class horror. Amusingly enough, despite its fame and cultural influence Lovecraft himself was not particularly enamoured with TCOTC describing it as:

“rather middling—not as bad as the worst, but full of cheap and cumbrous touches.”

I think Lovecraft is being a bit hard on himself here. Yes, it’s a bit absurd – but it’s well told and atmospheric – more than enough for a good ‘weird fiction’ tale.

Highlight:

“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.” Lovecraft’s protagonists are nevertheless driven to this “piecing together,” which becomes a primary plot device in many of his works.

My Take: You know you’ve written a story that has really had an impact on popular culture when it forms the basis of not one, but two episodes of The Simpsons. Throw in an Academy Award winning movie adaptation, a Hugo Award for Best Short Story and a Nebula Award for Best Novel and you’ve got a real cultural icon.

“Flowers for Algernon” (first published as a short story in 1959 and as a novelisation in 1966) tells the story of Charlie Gordon, a middle aged intellectually disabled man, and Algernon, a laboratory mouse, who both undergo experimental surgery to triple their IQ.  Told in the first person via contemporaneous entries in Charlie’s personal journal (an ‘epistolary novel’ for the pedants), Keyes’ story explores a number of complex moral and philosophical questions through his protagonist’s intellectual awakening. Given that “Flowers for Algernon” tackles subjects as significant as the meaning of happiness, the relationship between the intellectual and the emotional and the proper role of science in an engaging and accessible way, it’s easy to see why it has had such an impact.

The central dramatic engine of “Flowers for Algernon” is provided by Charlie’s growing understanding of the world around him. This knowledge opens up new worlds and opportunities for Charlie – both intellectual and emotional, but it also destroys many of his simpler pleasures as well as the naïve illusions that have protected him from hurt in the past. Most challengingly, his ever increasing IQ allows Charlie to understand both what has been done to him in the past – by family, friends and his doctors – as well as what lies in his future. In light of Charlie’s tormented sentience, the reader is left to ask whether he would have been better off remaining in blissful ignorance. Thought-provoking and engaging reading.

Highlight:

“Now I understand that one of the important reasons for going to college and getting an education is to learn that the things you’ve believed in all your life aren’t true, and that nothing is what it appears to be.”

Synopsis:

My Take: Strangely enough for a recent Pulitzer Prize winner, I only heard about Junot Diaz’s “The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” whilst perusing a few ‘Best books of the Noughties’ lists earlier this year. I’m not sure how I missed it when it was released in 2007 because it’s just the kind of thing that I’m naturally drawn to – a quirky, cross-cultural narrative with a prose that fizzes and pops with life. Better late than never though I guess, because “The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” is one of the best books I’ve read in recent times.

TBWLOW is a difficult book to categorise. It somehow manages to combine elements of an urban modernist tale, a multi-generational family epic, a cultural history of the Dominican Republic and a magical realist fable into a genuinely unique literary form. Similarly, it’s not often you read prose that combines Hispanic street slang, obscure science fiction references, high literary allusions and magic realist metaphors in a single novel. It’s bizarre – but it works.

These disparate literary forms are bound together by the eponymous Oscar de Leon (mockingly known as “Oscar Wao” in reference to the Spanish pronunciation of Oscar Wilde, whom Oscar’s peers disparagingly claimed he resembled when in costume as Dr Who). Oscar is a strange and sad protagonist. Growing up as a poor Hispanic immigrant in Patterson, New Jersey, Oscar is saddled with the dual burdens of a morbidly obese frame and a personality shaped by his devotion to Science Fiction/Fantasy (or as Oscar describes the “the more speculative genres”).

As Yunior, the third-person narrator of Oscar’s story sums it up “Our hero was not one of those Dominican cats everybody’s always going on about – he wasn’t no home-run hitter or a fly bachatero, not a playboy with a million hots on his jock”. These afflictions are particularly tragic because beneath his overweight and nerdy exterior beats the heart of a hopeless romantic. Oscar is no wall flower – against all odds he continues to put himself out there in pursuit of his frequent crushes however his appearance and his “Dune” allegories, “The Matrix” quotes and “Lord of the Rings” references are unable to win him even a single kiss (strangely enough proclaiming that a girl is “orchidaceous” is not a winning strategy). Even worse, Oscar knows he needs to lose the weight, as well as the comic books and role-playing games if he is going to get the girl, but for some reason is powerless to become the master of his own destiny.

This is where TBWLOW takes a very strange turn. Through the eyes of Oscar’s mother, Beli, and his sister, Lola, TBWLOW takes on an epic aspect and Diaz portrays the sweep of Dominican history and the story of the D.R.’s U.S. Diaspora on a grand scale. We learn that a run in with the Trujillo dictatorship in the Dominican Republic two generations ago has left Oscar’s family as the victim of a ‘Fuku’, a curse that pervades all aspects of the family’s life.  As this new aspect of the story unfolds, a strong magic realist thread emerges opening up a completely unexpected dimension to the novel.

It’s all very strange, but somehow it works perfectly. The novel never seems to jar despite the jumble of literary methods it employs and the core narrative of the story feels like it is unfolding completely naturally. It’s only when you look back on the story and think “how did I get here?” that you realise the strange mix of approaches that are brewing in this novel.

I can’t recommend the Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao enough.

Highlight:

Sophomore year Oscar’s weight stabilized at about two-ten (two-twenty when he was depressed, which was often), and it had become clear to everybody, especially his family, that he’d become the neighborhood pariguayo. He wore his semikink hair in a Puerto Rican Afro, had enormous Section-8 glasses (his anti-pussy devices, his boys Al and Miggs called them), sported an unappealing trace of mustache, and possessed a pair of close-set eyes that made him look somewhat retarded. The Eyes of Mingus (a comparison he made himself one day, going through his mother’s record collection; she was the only old-school Dominicana he knew who loved jazz; she’d arrived in the States in the early sixties and shacked up with morenos for years until she met Oscar’s father, who put an end to that particular chapter of the All-African World Party). Throughout high school he did the usual ghettonerd things: he collected comic books, he played role-playing games, he worked at a hardware store to save money for an outdated Apple IIe. He was an introvert who trembled with fear every time gym class rolled around. He watched nerd shows like “Doctor Who” and “Blake’s 7,” could tell you the difference between a Veritech fighter and a Zentraedi battle pod, and he used a lot of huge-sounding nerd words like “indefatigable” and “ubiquitous” when talking to niggers who would barely graduate from high school.

He read Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman novels (his favorite character was, of course, Raistlin) and became an early devotee of the End of the World. He devoured every book he could find that dealt with the End Times, from John Christopher’s “Empty World” to Hal Lindsey’s “The Late Great Planet Earth.” He didn’t date no one. Didn’t even come close. Inside, he was a passionate person who fell in love easily and deeply. His affection—that gravitational mass of love, fear, longing, desire, and lust that he directed at any and every girl in the vicinity—roamed across all Paterson, affixed itself everywhere without regard to looks, age, or availability. Despite the fact that he considered his affection this tremendous, sputtering force, it was actually more like a ghost because no girl ever seemed to notice it.

Anywhere else, his triple-zero batting average with the girls might have passed unremarked, but this is a Dominican kid, in a Dominican family. Everybody noticed his lack of game and everybody offered him advice. His tío Rodolfo (only recently released from Rahway State) was especially generous in his tutelage. We wouldn’t want you to turn into one of those Greenwich Village maricones, Tío Rodolfo muttered ominously. You have to grab a muchacha, broder, y méteselo. That will take care of everything. Start with a fea. Coge that fea y méteselo! Rodolfo had four kids with three different women, so the nigger was without doubt the family’s resident metiéndolo expert.

Oscar’s sister Lola (who I’d start dating in college) was a lot more practical. She was one of those tough Jersey Latinas, a girl soccer star who drove her own car, had her own checkbook, called men bitches, and would eat a fat cat in front of you without a speck of vergüenza. When she was in sixth grade, she was raped by an older acquaintance, and surviving that urikán of pain, judgment, and bochinche had stripped her of cowardice. She’d say anything to anybody and she cut her hair short (anathema to late-eighties Jersey Dominicans) partially, I think, because when she’d been little her family had let it grow down past her ass—a source of pride, something I’m sure her rapist noticed and admired.

Oscar, Lola warned repeatedly, you’re going to die a virgin.

Don’t you think I know that? Another five years of this and I’ll bet you somebody tries to name a church after me.

Cut the hair, lose the glasses, exercise. And get rid of those porn magazines. They’re disgusting, they bother Mami, and they’ll never get you a date.

Sound counsel, which he did not adopt. He was one of those niggers who didn’t have any kind of hope. It wouldn’t have been half bad if Paterson and its surrounding precincts had been, like Don Bosco, all male. Paterson, however, was girls the way N.Y.C. was girls. And if that wasn’t guapas enough for you, well, then, head south, and there’d be Newark, Elizabeth, Jersey City, the Oranges, Union City, West New York, Weehawken—an urban swath known to niggers everywhere as Negrapolis One. He wasn’t even safe in his own house; his sister’s girlfriends were always hanging out, and when they were around he didn’t need no Penthouses. Her girls were the sort of hot-as-balls Latinas who dated only weight-lifting morenos or Latino cats with guns in their cribs. (His sister was the anomaly—she dated the same dude all four years of high school, a failed Golden Gloves welterweight who was excruciatingly courteous and fucked her like he was playing connect the dots, a pretty boy she’d eventually dump after he dirty-dicked her with some Pompton Lakes Irish bitch.) His sister’s friends were the Bergen County All-Stars, New Jersey’s very own Ciguapas: primera was Gladys, who complained constantly about her chest being too big; Marisol, who’d end up in M.I.T. and could out-salsa even the Goya dancers; Leticia, just off the boat, half Haitian, half Dominican, that special blend the Dominican government swears no existe, who spoke with the deepest accent, a girl so good she refused to sleep with three consecutive boyfriends! It wouldn’t have been so bad if these girls hadn’t treated Oscar like some deaf-mute harem guard; they blithely went on about the particulars of their sex lives while he sat in the kitchen clutching the latest issue of Dragon. Hey, he would yell, in case you’re wondering, there’s a male unit in here. Where? Marisol would say blandly. I don’t see one.

Thankfully while my blogging has suffered, my reading time has held up well (the one saving grace of interstate commuting) and I’ve had a good run of very enjoyable books in recent weeks including “The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” by Junot Diaz, “Stalingrad” and “Berlin” by Antony Beevor and “The Uninvited” by Geling Yan. So I’ve got a long backlog of freshly read books ready for blogging once I get some more free time.

The most exciting and blog-worthy arrival on my bookshelf in recent times however is my brand new shiny Amazon Kindle. I am a long time ‘early adopter’ of gadgetry, or as some have less charitably characterised it, a ‘prolific buyer of toys that I don’t need’. However, I have to say that so far I am especially pleased with my kindle purchase.

As a biliophile with hundreds of hard copy books on their bookshelf and a passion for stalking second hand book stores at every opportunity, I didn’t make the jump to e-books lightly. Given the (significant) upfront cost of a Kindle, you pretty well have to swear off buying hard copy books for quite a while to justify the purchase – a difficult sacrafice for someone with my proclivities.

However, after a lot of reflection during the extended period between the announcment of the international version of the Kindle and it’s availability for purchase, there were a few factors that ultimately tipped the balance in favour of taking the plunge:

Never having to pay for literary classics again

As an earnest young reader with pretentions of literary seriousness I’ve been slowly but steadily trying to work my way through the cannon of literary classics. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m really not a library person – it feels like a fascist imposition to me to have someone tell me when I need to read a book – so every classic means another purchase. Even at second hand prices this adds up.

However, thanks to the joy of copyright expiration and the non-existent distribution costs of electronic books, there is a mindblowing number of literary classics available for free download from sites like Many Books and Project Gutenberg. Kafka, Camus, Dickens, Twain, Joyce, Austen, Bronte, Carroll, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Chekov etc etc. There’s more than enough free content out their for the Kindle to keep you occupied for a very long time.

Savings on Amazon Shipping Costs

Yes, Kindle books retail on Amazon for around half their hard copy list prices (plus a 15% increase for Australian readers), but to my mind, the real savings a realised through not having to pay the exorbitant costs of having books shipped half way around the world to be delivered to Australia (not to mention the agonising wait!). There’s real potential for savings here.

Kindle’s Versatility

The final tipping point for my purchase was the fact that Kindle provides each user with an email account to which they can send documents for uploading onto their device. The benefit of this? Anyone (like me) who has a job that involves voluminous amounts of reading can easily email whatever documents they are working their way through to their Kindle for a portable, and more pleasurable reading experience. Instead of staring at an electronically lit rectangle for hours, or lugging around a bulldog clipped print out of the report de jour, I now transfer these documents onto my Kindle for my civilised consumption. I had heard a number of people in the US blogosphere spruiking this function for sometime before the Kindle’s release in Australia and was keen to take advantage.

The Reading Experience

What I couldn’t be sure of until I got my hands on one in real life was what the reading experience would be like. After a week’s reading I am happy to say that it is fantastic. The Kindle is light enough to be more comfortable in the hand than a paperback, but solid enough that you don’t feel like you’ll fumble it. I’ve already found myself strongly prefering it for reading in bed or on the couch where previously I needed to prop up books somewhere. The screen is very easy on the eye and if anything is a better experience than reading print on paper.

However, the most satisfying aspect of the Kindle reading experience was completely unexpected. Because the Kindle screen fits slightly less text than a paperback page, the more frequent ‘page turning’ gives you a satisfying feeling of momentum whilst reading. The progress bar at the bottom of the screen reinforces this effect and gives you a graphic appreciation for how much you’ve read in a sitting.

Gripes

As you can see, on the whole I love my Kindle. I do however have a few gripes – and they are pretty well all functions of being an international Kindle user. You really are a second class citizen as an international user of Kindle. No access to content that is widely used in the US: no blog content, a very limited library of magazine content (no Economist, no New Yorker, none of the literary reviews) and a sadly limited library of books for purchase. It’s not just Australian specific authors who aren’t available to Australian Kindle readers – but many major new release books. Hopefully this will improve with time as Amazon reaches agreements with Australian rights holders, but it’s far from ideal at present.