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gregbrown's reviews
336 reviews
A Maze of Death by Philip K. Dick
4.0
Feels like an echo of Ubik, but a pretty great one! PKD’s brief flights of transcending physical reality are touching: brief glimmers of hope in an otherwise dire universe.
Twilight of the Bombs: Recent Challenges, New Dangers, and the Prospects for a World Without Nuclear Weapons by Richard Rhodes
4.0
Rhodes' last book on nuclear weapons and proliferation, and necessarily a little more scattershot than his previous work but still an excellent read.
Iraq leads and finishes the story—both their earlier abandoned efforts at a bomb, and the Bush administration ginning up WMD fears to sell an invasion in 2003—but Rhodes also covers securing the USSR's weapons after breakup, along with weapons programs in South Africa, North Korea, and (tangentially) a few other states. Would be well-supplemented by Hersh's The Samson Option about Israel's weapons program.
Iraq leads and finishes the story—both their earlier abandoned efforts at a bomb, and the Bush administration ginning up WMD fears to sell an invasion in 2003—but Rhodes also covers securing the USSR's weapons after breakup, along with weapons programs in South Africa, North Korea, and (tangentially) a few other states. Would be well-supplemented by Hersh's The Samson Option about Israel's weapons program.
The City & the City by China Miéville
5.0
Fantastic, will have me thinking for a while.
Miéville takes a sort of Borges premise—two cities living intertwined, with each resident trained to ignore the parallel city—and fleshes it out through a noir-type mystery, giving him plenty of opportunities to poke and play around with the rules. The end chooses to be a noir over some of the fantastic elements, which is fine and serves a larger point he's making, but is a little less exciting than when he's playing around with the bizarre world.
The metaphor of a parallel city in plain sight (but willfully unseen) is a powerful one. Reminded me of when I was younger and saw a big illustrated cutaway of city infrastructure, all these underground pipes and power lines and other utilities tucked away under our feet, unknown until something goes wrong. Another example might be the employee tunnels at the mall (or even the employee tunnels at Walt Disney World), designed to sequester the pallets of merchandise and other prosaic activity necessary to maintain the illusion. And more recently, the fascinating theme in Tenet of fighting what amounts to a time-war within the giant flows of commercial activity, parties heading forward and backward in time using shipping containers (and freeports as their way stations).
Like I said, the final chunk of the book drops some of the fantastic elements—partially to fulfill some noir genre standards, but also to make a point. There's nothing determined about the arrangements in the book: no physical laws that govern them, only the laws of men. This isn't some fantasy setup but a giant legalism, similar to the legalisms that govern our own world. They can be ignored, changed, and overthrown just as easily as any others—even though most people will choose the devil they know over the chance for something better.
Miéville takes a sort of Borges premise—two cities living intertwined, with each resident trained to ignore the parallel city—and fleshes it out through a noir-type mystery, giving him plenty of opportunities to poke and play around with the rules. The end chooses to be a noir over some of the fantastic elements, which is fine and serves a larger point he's making, but is a little less exciting than when he's playing around with the bizarre world.
The metaphor of a parallel city in plain sight (but willfully unseen) is a powerful one. Reminded me of when I was younger and saw a big illustrated cutaway of city infrastructure, all these underground pipes and power lines and other utilities tucked away under our feet, unknown until something goes wrong. Another example might be the employee tunnels at the mall (or even the employee tunnels at Walt Disney World), designed to sequester the pallets of merchandise and other prosaic activity necessary to maintain the illusion. And more recently, the fascinating theme in Tenet of fighting what amounts to a time-war within the giant flows of commercial activity, parties heading forward and backward in time using shipping containers (and freeports as their way stations).
Like I said, the final chunk of the book drops some of the fantastic elements—partially to fulfill some noir genre standards, but also to make a point. There's nothing determined about the arrangements in the book: no physical laws that govern them, only the laws of men. This isn't some fantasy setup but a giant legalism, similar to the legalisms that govern our own world. They can be ignored, changed, and overthrown just as easily as any others—even though most people will choose the devil they know over the chance for something better.
Miami and the Siege of Chicago: An Informal History of the Republican and Democratic Conventions of 1968 by Norman Mailer
2.0
Mailer may be one of the most frustrating writers I've ever read.
He specializes in excess—never using one clause when three, five, ten would do. It's a blizzard of details and invocations that aims for transcendence, in the sense of someone firing an assault rifle straight up in the air. And the poorly-edited feeling only compounds when, amidst the mess, there's a few pages of clear insight that eggs you on to keep reading the rest.
The book itself is somewhat interesting as a contemporaneous account of the conventions, but just read Rick Perlstein instead.
He specializes in excess—never using one clause when three, five, ten would do. It's a blizzard of details and invocations that aims for transcendence, in the sense of someone firing an assault rifle straight up in the air. And the poorly-edited feeling only compounds when, amidst the mess, there's a few pages of clear insight that eggs you on to keep reading the rest.
The book itself is somewhat interesting as a contemporaneous account of the conventions, but just read Rick Perlstein instead.
A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick
5.0
Sweet, thoughtful, reminded me in tone and subject of DFW's Infinite Jest but with a PDK spin. Carries the same concerns as his earlier work but inflected with more sympathy. Makes me excited to read his other post-1970 novels, judging from this one and Flow My Tears.
Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War by Samuel Moyn
5.0
A nice, neat history covering the attempts to regulate warfare under international law—and the ongoing question of whether it's more important to prevent war in the first place, or ensure it's conducted humanely.
I thought the tension was wholly novel to the present thanks to smart bombs and other "precision" targeting, but activists have been arguing about it for well over a century now, predicting a future that's now come to pass. The book does lend good background to (and makes a great pairing with) Charlie Savage's Power Wars about Obama entrenching Bush administration expansion of military/executive power by building a legal structure to "legitimize" it.
The book goes into less detail about our present moment than I'd like, but it's plenty thought-provoking and endlessly applicable. It certainly makes sense that decreasing the friction and expected human costs (both domestic and foreign) of military action makes it more likely that action takes place—and we've seen that borne out in practice.
Moyn likens the ongoing transnational drone and special forces regime to a more violent form of policing, but I think the idea applies just as well to domestic policing. The reaction since 2014 has been to provide increased training and monitoring through body cameras, but with the intent to try and legitimize an ongoing domination of poor and minority communities. They're spending millions on cop cities, training compounds that mimic neighborhoods where cops can practice violent crackdowns on dissent. Not great!
I thought the tension was wholly novel to the present thanks to smart bombs and other "precision" targeting, but activists have been arguing about it for well over a century now, predicting a future that's now come to pass. The book does lend good background to (and makes a great pairing with) Charlie Savage's Power Wars about Obama entrenching Bush administration expansion of military/executive power by building a legal structure to "legitimize" it.
The book goes into less detail about our present moment than I'd like, but it's plenty thought-provoking and endlessly applicable. It certainly makes sense that decreasing the friction and expected human costs (both domestic and foreign) of military action makes it more likely that action takes place—and we've seen that borne out in practice.
Moyn likens the ongoing transnational drone and special forces regime to a more violent form of policing, but I think the idea applies just as well to domestic policing. The reaction since 2014 has been to provide increased training and monitoring through body cameras, but with the intent to try and legitimize an ongoing domination of poor and minority communities. They're spending millions on cop cities, training compounds that mimic neighborhoods where cops can practice violent crackdowns on dissent. Not great!
Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said by Philip K. Dick
4.0
Another breezy and enjoyable PKD read, one that holds off on giving many answers until the end so you're confused along with the protagonist most of the way.
He's played around with a half-similar premise in some other books, but this one hits a paranoid, nightmarish quality like the first half of North by Northwest. He also lets himself get surprisingly sentimental, more like The Man in the High Castle than some of the other PKD books I've been reading recently.
He's played around with a half-similar premise in some other books, but this one hits a paranoid, nightmarish quality like the first half of North by Northwest. He also lets himself get surprisingly sentimental, more like The Man in the High Castle than some of the other PKD books I've been reading recently.
The Wizards of Armageddon by Fred Kaplan
5.0
Excellent book on the development of nuclear strategy through the years, chronicling the ebb and flow of second-strike, counterforce, minimum deterrent, and other schemes.
The biggest takeaway for me was how the advocated strategies were almost always downwind of what the services needed to justify more spending on their branch. There were a few instances where technological breakthroughs and temporary advantages changed the perceived success or failure of a given strategy, but the actual shifts in doctrine were almost always out of convenience. And since the whole thing is (thankfully) a theoretical project, nothing ever really has to be tested out and shown to fail.
I also appreciated how Kaplan tracked some of the nuclear strategy ideas—counterforce, and holding cities hostage to send a message—as they were used in Vietnam, disillusioning McNamara and others. Biggest drawback is probably that the book ends in 1983, but Kaplan's later book The Bomb carries the story forward to the last decade.
The biggest takeaway for me was how the advocated strategies were almost always downwind of what the services needed to justify more spending on their branch. There were a few instances where technological breakthroughs and temporary advantages changed the perceived success or failure of a given strategy, but the actual shifts in doctrine were almost always out of convenience. And since the whole thing is (thankfully) a theoretical project, nothing ever really has to be tested out and shown to fail.
I also appreciated how Kaplan tracked some of the nuclear strategy ideas—counterforce, and holding cities hostage to send a message—as they were used in Vietnam, disillusioning McNamara and others. Biggest drawback is probably that the book ends in 1983, but Kaplan's later book The Bomb carries the story forward to the last decade.
Uzumaki by Junji Ito
5.0
Pretty excellent choice for my first manga to ever read. Starts out a little serialized as the spiral starts to take hold, has an episodic middle section which reads like Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, and then reverts to a serialized structure at the end to tie everything off.
Obviously draws from a rich history of infection as a motif in literature—Lovecraft, etc.—and even though I can't find it mentioned anywhere, I strongly suspect it went on to influence Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach Trilogy. Artwork is excellent, with the black-and-white ink work abstracting it enough your brain gets more horrified as you assemble and soak in the details. Some panels here that will stick with you!
Obviously draws from a rich history of infection as a motif in literature—Lovecraft, etc.—and even though I can't find it mentioned anywhere, I strongly suspect it went on to influence Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach Trilogy. Artwork is excellent, with the black-and-white ink work abstracting it enough your brain gets more horrified as you assemble and soak in the details. Some panels here that will stick with you!
Now Wait for Last Year by Philip K. Dick
5.0
One of those lovely PKD bangers where he pulls out the rug from under you every thirty pages or so.
Not to get into any spoilers, but It also shows off just how uncreative so much of the multiverse-led pop storytelling of the last few years has been.
Not to get into any spoilers, but It also shows off just how uncreative so much of the multiverse-led pop storytelling of the last few years has been.