shoot-em-up

[snugglekitty]

I think the nonfiction kick is officially over. (And I still haven't read Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea! Maybe I'll have to make an exception.)

This week I read Indemnity Only by Sara Paretsky. First in the popular VI Warshawski series. Boy, was this book ever written in the 80s. The descriptions of clothing and decor kind of made me cringe. But I enjoyed reading it. I've been in a mystery mood, so I think I'll pick up some more in this series. I was not able to predict the plot. Three stars.

Yesterday I finished There Will Be Dragons by John Ringo. I was intrigued by the premise - humans have become utterly dependent on technology for everything, but now it's stopped working. Now, knowing what I already knew about this author (who writes military sci fi) I expected that the book would be not entirely in line with my views about the world. I wasn't wrong, that's for sure.

Here are some of the ideas contained in this book:

- After thousands of years of human evolution, men are stronger than ever. Even women have now attained a level of physical strength similar to that of men in the 13th century.
- Some women make up for their lack of physical strength through smarts. However, even smart women are nowhere near as smart as men, and must count on men to rescue them and solve their problems.
- Psychology and religion are scams.
- The only way to avoid tyranny is to have a law-abiding society in which everyone knows how to use firearms.
- For that matter, if you don't know how to use firearms, you shouldn't be able to vote.
- If you don't work, you don't eat. Dependence on welfare leads to decadent societies. (Luckily for Ringo, there are no disabled vets in his world to make things complicated.)
- Trauma fallout is something that only happens to women. Also, only women get raped.
- Despite the fact that humans have not cooked their own food for thousands of years, women are much better at cooking than men.
- Despite the fact that no human has raped another human for thousands of years, men raping women is epidemic again just a few days after the grid goes down.

I could go on. I wish I hadn't enjoyed this book as much as I did - it makes me want to read the sequel, at least, even though the worldview it's based in gives me an intense headache. I wonder if right-leaning folks feel this way when they read Charles de Lint?

Comments

[chienne-folle.livejournal.com]

One more nonfiction book you might want to consider:

The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science, by Norman Doidge, M.D.

I found the book fascinating, but lest that be chalked up to my being a psychologist, my husband the computer scientist found it fascinating, too.

Scientists used to believe that the brain was relatively fixed and unchanging -- some of them still believe that -- but recent research shows that the brain is way more mutable than anybody'd guessed.

For example, anecdotal evidence had long supported the idea that blind people hear better than sighted people, but scientists pooh-poohed this idea, saying that there was no mechanism for that to occur. Well, they recently discovered that the area of the brain usually called the visual cortex is taken over for auditory processing in blind people. So blind folks have twice as much brain space devoted to processing sounds, which means that they really do hear better, and now we know why. Scientists were astounded to discover that the "visual" cortex was really just brain space that could be used for anything.

The book talks about people with strokes who've learned to walk again, people with vestibular problems who've learned to substitute something else for their missing vestibular system, people who've been helped with ADHD, autism, retardation, and bunches of other stuff by altering their brains.

The downside of the book is that the author is a Freudian, so there are a few stupid comments about how Freud knew it all along, but if you can overlook that, the author does a good job of drawing the reader in with a story about a real person, then elaborating on the ideas by talking about studies and their implications. It blew me away!

[lady-anemone.livejournal.com]

Thanks, I'll look into this. I had to give up on Ben Franklin though. Couldn't get into it, even though I tried a lot. I'm really just not much on biographies...

[lady-anemone.livejournal.com]

That sounded lukewarm, but actually this book looks really cool. So, I mean the thanks.

[coraline]

I wish I hadn't enjoyed this book as much as I did - it makes me want to read the sequel, at least, even though the worldview it's based in gives me an intense headache.

yeah... ringo writes just well enough to make me feel dirty, and not in a good way.
(my run-in was with "ghost" and "kildar" and deciding that while he wrote well, i just couldn't go any further with them.)

[lady-anemone.livejournal.com]

Mm. Thanks for posting this - I'm glad I'm not alone in the strength of my... conflictedness.