various books

Tuesday, July 01, 2008 8:04 AM
Kevin Black wrote:

The Hot Zone, A Terrifying New Story, by Richard Preston. Anchor, 1994.
This book is a fictionalized nonfiction narrative that teaches about Ebola virus by describing the cases of the apparently benign (in humans) Ebola Reston variant found in Virginia in 1989. I liked it. It was a page-turner. A few facts about human disease and monkeys were a little off but by and large it should provoke discussion at any dinner table . . . as long as you leave out the rather florid descriptions of death and dying the author seems fond of.

Saturday, July 05, 2008 8:32 PM
Kevin Black wrote:
Smithsonian Magazine review of _The Hot Zone_, http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/book_0695.html

Mansfield Park, by Jane Austen (1814).
I read this book by accident, thinking it was another book from the same period that had something to do with psychiatry. I can't hope to say something new or profound about such a famous work, but here are the things that stood out to me. 1. Characterization. Even the dull Mr. Rushworth becomes more real at the end. 2. Reality. I don't know how to say this except that it reminded me of an essay by Orson Scott Card about Book of Mormon authorship. He pointed out that much science fiction says things like "he waved his hand clockwise so that the motion-sensing door would iris open, powered by the small fusion generator," whereas no one in real life ever thinks about how to open a door. A book would instantly sound false if it said, "he grasped the waist-high doorknob, twisted it a half-turn clockwise, and pulled, so that the door swung open on the hinges that held it to the frame along one side." Anyway, even though the world she describes is almost bizarre to a 21st-century reader, the narrator is steeped in it and makes it feel natural. 3. Even though the plot, if summarized in a few sentences, would sound boring, and even though you expect that in the end true love will prevail and all that, for some reason after I'd started I wanted to keep reading to find out what happened, and in fact the outcome was not at all certain until near the end.

Other junk I read on vacation:

= Lost City, "A Novel From THE NUMA FILES", by Clive Cussler

= some single-author collection of scifi short stories that was fairly forgettable; one of the short shorts was about some alien culture that visits earth and inspires people with hopes of sharing the alien technology, but soon bores everyone with their ceaseless and somewhat incomprehensible door-to-door proselytizing. Then it gets worse when another alien culture visits, shooting down the boring missionary aliens in the name of their own religious fervor. The Common Man In The Street character closes the story with words to this effect: "I thought it couldn't get worse. We had the Mormons. But now it's the Muslims." (Disclaimer: I know this is politically incorrect, it's not about Islam per se, but radical islamist elements, etc., but after all the thing was written something like 50 years ago.)

= Scent of Magic, by Andre Norton
A typical fantasy novel, okay except for the unsatisfying ending.