Evergreen - Belva Plain 593 p.

Evergreen is one of those novels that span several decades as seen through the eyes of generations of a family.  Such books always contain themes of continuity and change, personality and situation, and how every person's combination of inner self and social world sets her on a trajectory that overlaps and intersects with the trajectories of others, and produces a vast alone-ness in each individual life.

The other major theme in this book is: what is love, and what is its relationship to personality experience, to loss, to truth, to religion, to money and to family?   The central impact that causes the ripples forming that theme in Evergreen is the two very different loves of Anna, the main character.  Paul is the man with whom she feels an instant bond, and Joseph is the man who adores her.  Both men remain in different ways in her life, and so she is doomed never to be whole.  But in this early-to-mid-20th-century world of Jewish immigrants fighting to make their own place in New York, of wars and the Holocaust in Europe, turmoil and tragedy everywhere, is anyone really whole?  Anna's are not the only hard choices that must be made.

Though it was published in 1978, this novel did not feel the slightest bit dated to me, but warm-blooded and real.

Zeitoun / Dave Eggers / 337 p.

What to say about Zeitoun, other than, "Read it, the sooner, the better?"

This book was an incredibly good read.  The first part introduces you to Abdulrahman Zeitoun and his wife Kathy and their children.  They're an all-American family.  He was born in Syria, she in Baton Rouge, an American convert to Islam before she met her husband.  They and their children live in New Orleans where they run a frenetic and thriving family business.  They have lots of relatives in Louisiana and across the world, with whom they are in various degrees and qualities of relationship.  As Hurricane Katrina approaches New Orleans, they talk about whether to stay or go.

After the hurricane hits, the levees break, and all the systems in which the Zeitoun family lives are tested: the family system, the communication system, the media networks, the physical systems of the city infrastructure, the bureaucratic, police and judicial infastructure, and in essence, everyone's ability to talk, to listen and to trust.  I will say nothing else about what happens, but if you are like me, you will feel a wide range of emotions as events unfold, and you will learn some things that will shake your faith in humanity, and other things that will strengthen your belief in the human spirit.

Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking / Malcolm Gladwell / 286 p.

I've heard several people talk about this book since its publication five years ago, but I just now got around to picking it up myself.  I have a certain prejudice against the idea that we make our best decisions when we do not analyze or make a point of bringing additional information to the question.  Knowing about the recent psychological experiments that show how our instantaneous reactions to photos of people of various ages and races are usually painfully ageist and anti-nonwhite makes me extremely suspicious about any argument extolling the virtue of such instant reactions as the best means of decision making.

For the first chapter or so, this is precisely the idea that the book seems to advance.  However, before very long, Gladwell introduces complications to the idea.  Alongside the many examples of elegantly correct intuition, he shows counterexamples of intuition clouded or distorted by exactly the kind of prejudices I was thinking of; at one point, he even cites the very studies I had read, and in the end, he has some interesting ideas about reducing the impact of prejudice on decision making. He also comes to make a key distinction between the quick judgment of experts and that of non-experts, which addresses another objection of mine.

As with Gladwell's other books, there are parts of the book where the connections among the examples seem stretched, but overall, the book is an enjoyable and thought-provoking read.

The Ugly Little Boy / Isaac Asimov and Robert Silverberg / 387 p.

This novel is a 1992 expansion of Isaac Asimov's 1958 short story by the same name, by Asimov and equally famous sci-fi author Robert Silverberg.  The premise is that a private company has found a way to take a Neanderthal boy 40,000 years into the future, which in this case is around 2100, and it rapidly becomes clear that there are, well, issues with that, to use a properly 1990's word.  Most of the story is narrated by one Miss Fellowes, the woman hired to be a sort of full-time nurse for the boy.  There are also "interchapters" from the perspective of the Neanderthal group from which the boy is plucked.

I found the book a bit of a curiosity.  The authors' attempts to reconcile 1958 and 1992 gender norms in the ways the 21st-century characters relate to one another in thought, word and deed ranged from semi-believable to amusing to downright unmotivated.  And speaking of gender and unmotivated, what is the deal with Dr. Marianne Levien?  Her character raises a good many unanswered questions in the first chapter, and she resurfaces, tantalizingly, toward the end, only to play no role whatsoever in what eventually happens. Is her entire function in the novel to embody the "cold bitch" stereotype?  Seriously?  The themes of ugliness and other-ness and the rarity and value of humans' ability to comprehend one another accurately are still themes that shine through and help make up for some of this weirdness, though.

The remake I'd really like to see of this story would involve reconstructing a Neanderthal child genetically, rather than actually grabbing him from the past.  That would eliminate some of the problems that the fictional scientists inexplicably (to me) fail to plan for, in this story while allowing other, more subtle and interesting issues to arise.

Nothing To Envy: Ordinary Lives In North Korea / Barbara Demick, 314 p.

You can read all the facts and statistics you want about totalitarian regimes like the one in North Korea, but nothing puts you inside that Orwellian universe like having the lives of six different people narrated, year by starving, repressive, life-twisting year, by the L.A. Times reporter who interviewed them after all of them, in their own ways, managed to escape the troubled country of their birth.  When you see how people meet, fall in love, marry, live in families and neighborhoods and cities, it is hard not to care what happens to them.

There are elements here of post-apocalyptic novels like Julian Comstock (reviewed earlier) or World Made By Hand, as lives previously lived in quiet, disciplined austerity descend into anarchy punctuated by brutality,  as electricity, medicine and food depart and some rules of social and physical survival change...and others do not.  The whole while, government street-criers, newspaper reporters, and eventually homeless orphans chorus on with paeons to the fatherly benevolence of North Korea's rulers, past and present. Of course, this book is nonfiction - the author has dedicated some ten years of her life to the book, conducting multiple in-depth interviews, finding documentary evidence and other corroboration under incredibly constrained conditions inherent to dictatorship.  That simply makes it all the more compelling.

The Gift of Fear / Gavin de Becker / 420 p.

The full title of this 1997 nonfiction bestseller is The Gift of Fear and Other Survival Signals That Protect Us From Violence.  I bought myself a copy because Carolyn Hax recommends it so often in her "Tell Me About It" advice column and online chats, especially when a letter writer shows signs of being the victim of domestic abuse, stalking or other potentially violent circumstances. 

At first, I was not sure if I was going to like the book.  Having read, and mostly agreed with, sociologist Barry Glassner's Culture of Fear (1999), which points out how much media portrayals of violence and other fear-inducing phenomena grossly distort people's perception of what they truly need to be afraid of, I thought this book would simply urge people to trust their every fearful instinct.

In fact, de Becker's and Glassner's books fit together very well.  De Becker is the founder and CEO of a major personal security firm, Gavin De Becker and Associates.  He is in the business of predicting and preventing violence, so he has no truck with what in the later chapters of his book he calls "manufactured" fears brought on by an eyeball-hungry media.  Unlike Glassner, though, de Becker explicitly values the sensation of "true fear" as a valuable signal that can save one's life in a truly dangerous situation - a signal that is all too frequently suppressed.  That observation will be familiar to reader's of Malcolm Gladwell's Blink (2005), another book exploring the power of rapid cognition in situations in which one is forced to think fast.

Both Gladwell and de Becker recognize that intuition, like chance, favors the prepared mind - even the evolutionarily-honed survival instinct that de Becker believes resides in every one of us. De Becker's aim in The Gift of Fear is to bring his own expertise to bear on the ordinary and extraordinary instances of his readers' lives in which "high-stakes prediction" of violence is necessary.  He does this through many stories drawn from his clients' experiences with crimes as unusual as assassination and as common as spousal abuse and stalking, interspersed with glimpses into his own process of judging the likelihood of violence in the situation at hand.  He wants his readersto accept that violence is inherent to human society,  to trust and act upon intuitions warning them of immanent violence, (here de Becker urges women, especially,  to overcome their social conditioning toward "niceness") - but to reduce the intrusion of worries that can actually detract from one's ability to respond to "real fear." 

This seems like a very tricky line to walk, but de Becker manages it, with authority.  I would recommend this book to many people, for many reasons.

Julian Comstock: A Story of Twenty-Second Century America / Robert Charles Wilson (413 p.)

In an interview with Tor.com about his latest book, Canadian sci-fi author Robert Charles Wilson revealed that, upon deciding to write a novel set 150 years in the future, he looked to popular books of 150 years ago, to see the difference in culture and worldview that he would have to convey between today and his future setting.  As it turns out, this look backward ended up influencing Julian Comstock much more directly: the characters speak as if they had stepped from the pages of a mid-19th century novel, often to hilarious effect; the post-oil future looks uncannily like a coal and steam driven Victorian era...and somehow, nary a machine gun has survived what the novel's religious establishment calls "The False Tribulation" that followed the end of the "Efflorescence of Oil" and the era of "The Secular Ancients" (that is, us), despite ongoing war with the Dutch over Labrador, and various other conflicts.  As prediction in any linguistic or technological sense, the novel cannot be taken seriously.

Nonetheless: once one accepts the idea of a chunk of the 19th-early 20th century being picked up and plunked into the 2170's...this novel is a treat: a splendid read, with memorable characters, a social, political and religious world spun and extrapolated comically and tragically from the substance of America, past and present, and a narrative that is capable of stirring the mind and moving the heart.

-Rachel

Links to Tor.com Interview, Part I and Part II.

The Sunborn / Gregory Benford / 436 p.

I picked up The Sunborn on a rushed descend-and-grab mission to Columbia Public Library, just before it closed for the night, so that I'd have something besides the South Carolina history item (review coming later) to read on the way to a conference in Charleston, SC.  As it turned out, this sci-fi paperback was anything but light reading - for one thing, it was written by a physics professor and contains diagrams of the heliosphere. 

In much of science fiction (or at least, much of that genre that I read), fairly ordinary human dramas of the political, military, social or sexual kind are played out against a background of some future, spacefaring civilization, or some other universe and cast of characters and species.  But in this novel, the scientist-astronauts deal primarily with problems of...science.  (Imagine: the two main characters are female scientists, including one of reproductive age, and there's no romantic or sexual plot at all, for a change!)  Sure, some of the most amusing moments deal with interpersonal tensions between the explorers and the corporate and political interests "Earthside" in the mid- 21st century, and their troubles with information overload and battling bureaucracies, but that's all just background noise compared with the tumbling cascade of events that begins when weird electric energies on Mars and vast, methane-based...um...entities on Pluto show signs that seem, beyond all human expectation, remarkably like intelligent life.

By the end of The Sunborn, the characters still seem hardly more than sketches, yet deep questions of philosophy and even glimmers of theology are sparking through the pages, spiraling at once outward to the cosmos and inward to the memory and art.  I came away thinking, "Now this is true science fiction, worth every diagram."