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November 9th, 2009
02:38 pm - The Sexual Politics of Disability
 The Sexual Politics of Disability: Untold Desires by Tom Shakespeare
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
An issue survey book built around a structured interview study of a sample of British persons with disabilities. Thorough and inclusive – if anything, the author suggests he oversampled the LGBT population. It's particularly good on barriers to disabled sexual expression, and on unpacking the duel popular perception of disabled sexuality as non-existent but simultaneously perverse. Frustrating in the way of survey books in that I really wanted a half dozen books, each built off a fifteen page section here on the disability fetish market, institutionalized rape, sex surrogacy, etc.
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11:25 am - Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld
 Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Alternate history 1914, where the Austro-German contingent has massive, striding mechanical walkers, and Darwin's work gave the west DNA and hybridized living creatures for flight and battle. Franz Ferdinand's son flees west, while a British girl dresses as a boy and enlists for the coming war.
Heee. It's kind of like Fullmetal Alchemist with cross-dressing. The alternate world technology is the best thing about this book – giant hydrogen-floating whale ships versus Star Warsy many-legged metal walkers! The story is otherwise cute, and fluffier than you might expect for, you know, the first world war. Relatively light-weight young adult, with a lot of nice color and zing. I'm certainly intrigued enough to pick up the sequel when it arrives.
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November 3rd, 2009
09:07 pm - The Science and Fiction of Autism
 The Science and Fiction of Autism by Laura Schreibman
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Researcher/clinician paints a pretty thorough but accessible picture of autism, from symptomology to history to treatment modalities, with one of the better breakdowns on clinically-verified treatments versus wild speculation that I've seen in a while.
There's only one huge, overwhelming problem: it's a book about autism that fails completely to be about autistic people. Clinicians talk a lot here, and neurologists, and parents, but not a single autistic person puts in a word. This book is pretty much the epitome of the medical model, and there isn't a blink of acknowledgement that there are other paradigms at play, that some persons with autism are rejecting full-time residential treatment and proclaiming their autonomy and rights to live as they are, just as an example. Writing a book about autism in the twenty-first century that never even mentions neurodiversity is pretty shocking to me.
It's a good book, for what it is, but you have to know what that is before reading it.
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November 2nd, 2009
11:28 am - The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets's Nest
 Luftslottet som sprängdes by Stieg Larsson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
[Out in the U.S. next summer, acquired now because I have my vays.:]
More weirdly compelling Swedish reporter/hacker mystery adventures, this time with extra government conspiracy. If you don't know about this series yet, for God's sake don't start here. Because when I bitched that the last book had no denouement at all, it turns out that's because there's actually 600 pages of more plot instead.
This book shouldn't really work, but mostly does. It has this slow, grinding pace, full of starts and stops, which is totally appropriate for the tedious and convoluted investigations that surround Salander in the hospital and then in jail. But this routine with swaths of meetings and new characters and endless back-and-forth is great reality pacing, but bad book pacing. And yet, things really do happen, and the book is emotionally satisfying, and I can cut it a lot of slack for probably not being as thoroughly edited before the author's death as he would have liked.
And really, if this is the last of the series we get, it's not a bad place to stop. I mean, all told, we have three books of convoluted plotting with a cast of vivid characters whose assorted traumas and polyamorous* relationships ring really true to me. And these books are not violent against women in ways that make it difficult for me to pick up other random mysteries now, because the comparison is just too awful.
*Apparently Word knows "polyandrous," but not "polyamorous." Eh?
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November 1st, 2009
09:15 pm - Eifelheim
 Eifelheim by Michael Flynn
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
In 1348 aliens are stranded in an isolated medieval village, while in modern times a physicist and a historian investigate the mystery of that disappeared village.
Hrm. Just . . . not quite. A book all about clashing paradigms – alien science with religious natural philosophy, narrative history with theoretical physics, the short modern mystery novella with the slow medieval tale of aliens and the Plague. And it just never came together in that elusive way we call 'gelling.' Lots of neat cosmological metaphors, some pretty writing, but ultimately just bits and pieces instead of a working whole.
Still, the historical research is pretty cool, and I was both discomforted and interested in the bedrock literalness of medieval religiosity – the aliens want to go home to the stars, so of course the answer is to save them. But in terms of a book, if it's scifi does the Middle Ages, I prefer Connie Willis's Doomsday Book.
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08:53 pm - Apotemnophilia
 Apotemnophilia: Information, Questions, Answers, and Recommendations About Self-demand Amputation by Gregg M. Furth
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
A short book on the etiology and presentation of what is now called Body Integrity Identity Disorder, a condition analogous to Gender Identity Disorder where a person feels that their real and proper body is not the one they have, but one missing a specific limb. Thus self-demand surgical amputation of healthy limbs, and occasionally just self-amputation full-stop.
Disappointingly poorly written as a technical matter. Twice as long and half as informative as some of the medical journal articles I've been reading, though I will give them credit for the extensive reproduction of comments and subjective impressions from BIID patients that you really can't get in the medical literature.
Also, the primary author is a Jungian, and I am really, really not, so there's that. You start going on at me about psychic archetypes, and I'll nod along, sure, because I have a literature degree and I appreciate a good narrative as much as the next girl. But in the pragmatics of neuropsychological research? You've got me for about two pages, then we're done.
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October 22nd, 2009
11:40 pm - Liar by Justine Larbalestier
 Liar by Justine Larbalestier
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This is difficult. Hard to talk about without ruining anything, and also hard to really describe as an experience, let alone rate. This is a book about a seventeen-year-old black girl who is dating someone else's boyfriend, until he is brutally murdered. She's also a liar – whether pathological to the point where she believes her own lies or merely compulsive, it remains unclear to the very end.
Yeah, difficult, because there is a lot of really great stuff here. The three movement structure with successive layers of more "truth" is built perfectly. The writing is vivid and complicated, with this lovely scattershot thematic arc of binaries mixed – Micah's race, her sexuality, her gender for a while, truth and lies, and, well, spoiler. This is a book that lies about its genre, and makes it work.
But the very success of the unreliable narrator means that I, for one, didn't get what I usually think I want from a book. You can't ever love a narrator you can't trust, and this book jerks you around from page one. In a good way – creepily and frighteningly and complexly – but there it is all the same. So I admire this book from a craft standpoint, and I keep thinking about it, but yeah. Difficult.
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October 20th, 2009
11:08 pm - Fire Lover
 Fire Lover: A True Story by Joseph Wambaugh
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
Two or three times a year I temporarily lose my memory and let my perennial fascination with profiling steer me down the dark, dark road of true crime. It's amazing that I can forget how [exploitative of violence/sexist/racist/judgmental/badly written:] [delete as applicable:] true crime can be, but two or three times a year I'm like oh my God, WTF, what am I doing.
This one wasn't that bad – it was just kind of boring, with a few off-tone rants about the propensity evidence rules in criminal trials, which, granted, look utterly insane to a non-lawyer. (And, uh, you know, to some of us lawyers too). Not an ounce of interesting psychological analysis to be found, except of the shallow/reductionist variety, surprise surprise.
Right, now I'm good for the next six months, hopefully.
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October 18th, 2009
03:41 pm - Unseen Academicals by Terry Pratchett
 Unseen Academicals by Terry Pratchett
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Discworld. Unseen University gets a football team, a university cook gets a chance to be repeatedly awesome, and an abused child just gets a chance.
I was looking forward to this book because hi, Discworld. And it was a pleasure to read, sure. But it's sort of like he took all the bits of a really great Discworld book – an extremely smart heroine, an absurd cultural artifact, people with something to prove – and assembled the whole thing, but then forgot to, I don't know, strike the match. There are a number of hilarious or wonderful or sad moments here, but there's no real unifying spark. It's still a very good book by generalized standards of 'things I want to read,' but judging against Pratchett himself . . . no, just not quite.
That, and okay, I just don't give a damn about football. I give an anti-damn, actually.
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01:34 pm - Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson
 Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Yowza. A story about a World War II cryptographer, a marine, a Japanese engineer, and fifty years later a software entrepreneur whose work turns out to depend on all of theirs.
Tremendously long and convoluted, with a plot that, well. See, it's quite silly in places, particularly the end, but that really doesn't matter because the point of this book is not the plot. This is one of those books where you just hang on and enjoy the journey through 1100 pages of math, and phreaking, and structural engineering, and military tactics, and academia, and electronic currencies, and I could go on. The whole thing is delivered in that straight-faced absurdist style Stephenson can do until the cows come home. What I'm saying is it's a ridiculous, enormous, wandery book with no real oomph to the through line and a lot of extra baggage, but I enjoyed the hell out of every page. Even the ones that hurt to read, and there were a few of those. The shameless glee with which this book flings itself down and just rolls around in its own piles of geekiness is infectious, and the way it's sad and hilarious and tragic just adds spice.
Ooh. That was nice. A big commitment, but yeah, that was nice.
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October 15th, 2009
08:20 pm - The Colorado Kid by Stephen King
 The Colorado Kid by Stephen King
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
A sad, quietly edgy novella. Two aging newspapermen (off the coast of Maine, naturally) tell their young intern the story of a dead body found on the beach 25 years ago, and the weird, unsatisfying investigation.
Pretty, and full of the Maine accents and manners King has single-handedly endeared to the rest of America. It's a story about when there's not a story, no "through line," as one of the characters puts it. A story about how to take a mystery with no answer and fit it onto the page. It's a bit too pointedly meta about the whole thing, but it's a lovely little read for a cold fall day anyway.
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October 7th, 2009
12:03 am - How Doctors Think
 How Doctors Think by Jerome Groopman
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Survey of errors in doctor decision-making, with no surprises for anyone who knows anything about cognition. Light on data, heavy on anecdotes and interviews. Doctors make mistakes, misread tests, prefer diagnoses peculiar to their specialties. Basically, duh.
I'm being slightly snide here because I'm annoyed by how completely Groopman fails to talk about the effect of actual medical bias. I mean, most of this book is about the psychological dynamics of doctor/patient relationships, but completely fails to talk about the way patient physical disability, race, and gender can effect care? Hint: it's a lot.
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October 6th, 2009
11:48 pm - Better Than Well: American Medicine Meets the American Dream
 Better Than Well: American Medicine Meets the American Dream by Carl Elliott
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Bioethicist talks about "enhancement technologies," which apparently boils down to popular psychopharmacology with occasional side trips into artificial voices and body modification. Profoundly rambley and not what I was expecting, but enjoyable enough in an eclectic sort of way. Still, he didn't say anything about drugs I hadn't heard before, he just had more interesting stories about urban planning and the history of fugue states and *hand gestures* I don't even know what.
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September 29th, 2009
03:16 pm - The Mermaids Singing, The Wire in the Blood
 The Mermaids Singing by Val McDermid
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
The books on which Wire in the Blood is based. British clinical psychologist teams up with copper to profile serial killers. All expected elements present and accounted for – hostile police brass, sexual "tension," personal issues.
Yawn. And that's pretty impressive, considering books featuring a maladjusted trouble-magnet who does criminal profiling are a huge weakness of mine. But I don't think my emotional needle so much as quivered, except for occasional flickers of annoyed disgust at the violence, which has that smug, gloating feel you get with over-the-top torture scenes that serve no narrative end except to . . . be torture.
That, and I'm supposed to be interested in a criminal profiler who gives the unsubs personalizing nicknames, has deep emo pain about gazing into the abyss, and forgets to profile the unsub's race? I think not.
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01:21 pm - Little Brother by Cory Doctorow
 Little Brother by Cory Doctorow
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Marcus, geeky high school student, is rounded up by Homeland Security after a terrorist attack on San Francisco. Three of his friends are taken in with him, but only two come out. Marcus vows revenge, armed with a hacked xbox and a classically seventeen-year-old understanding of the Constitution.
Pure geek revenge fantasy, mixed with real fear under the clenching hand of a very near-future police state. It's viscerally satisfying because what's done to Marcus is awful, but he's angry and he's smart as all hell, and he just won't roll over. I have a huge emotional kink for the intersection of counterculture and political revolution, and this hit it just right. It's a book that makes you proud to be a geek.
Unfortunately, the book suffers on its terms. It's written for young adults, which is part of the point – "never trust anyone over 25." But Marcus's debates about the Constitution are tragically, agonizingly high school. Much better to let his actions speak for themselves, as reckless and brilliant as they are.
And my other problem is that this book only delivered the one punch, and didn't follow through with two. It was very effective at arguing that security measures aren't security when they just invade everyone's privacy and don't work. It doesn't follow through and argue that security and privacy aren't antithetical. Mouthing rights rhetoric doesn't get you anywhere there – that sort of discourse fails completely when you have a competing rights scenario like safety/freedom. Far more effective and complex to deconstruct the dichotomy, but that didn't happen here.
Available for free download here
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September 27th, 2009
10:47 pm - Monstrous Regiment by Terry Pratchett
 Monstrous Regiment by Terry Pratchett
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Discworld. Innkeeper's daughter cuts off her hair and joins the army to save her brother and her inheritance and, eventually, her entire crazy country.
Oh, yes, I loved this one. I mean, Discworld does cross-dressing, of course it's awesome. It's also scary in places, and sewn with a few nasty little bites of what people can do to each other – can do to young girls, mostly. Not the deepest book he ever wrote, partly because Polly is kind of his standard-issue girl protagonist: she's whip-smart, determined, and clear-eyed. But he defaults to that type because that type works, so there's that.
And in the background there's Vimes, stomping around being cranky because when two drunks fight, you just bang their heads together until they quit, so what's he supposed to do here, bang two countries together? Well, naturally.
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September 22nd, 2009
05:20 pm - No Pity: People with Disabilities Forging a New Civil Rights Movement
 No Pity : People with Disabilities Forging a New Civil Rights Movement by Joseph P. Shapiro
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Hrm. Two not entirely compatible responses here. On the one hand, I want to tell everyone to read this book, because seriously, everyone should read this book. The history of the disability movement is essentially invisible to most Americans, and that's a shame on multiple levels. This book is extremely successful as historical account, from the first stirrings of community consciousness at Berkeley to the sputtering of civil disobedience, the twenty-five day takeover of the San Francisco Federal Building (orchestrated by a friend and mentor of mine, by the way), the Gallaudet student . . . revolt is the best word, the deinstitutionalization movement. You want drama, you want romance, it's all here, and most people have no idea.
However. This book was written by an able-bodied reporter, and, well, it shows. The author devoted years to it, and became a strong community ally, mind you, but this book is pitched at the average able-bodied American to educate on disability issues. So it ducks a lot of complication, and a lot of the nuance of disability experience is compressed into sound bites. See the section on the deaf community's splintered reaction to childhood implantation of cochlear implants for example – the capsule summary of 'we can cure you at birth!' versus 'you kill my culture!' is essentialist and a bit thin.
So this book is extremely valuable as a survey introduction, and an exercise in consciousness raising. And for that alone, I praise it. But its utility is limited. An excellent place to start and a terrible place to stop, is what I'm saying. Just looking down the reviews on the Goodreads page makes that abundantly clear.
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September 19th, 2009
05:06 pm - Disability Bioethics
 Disability Bioethics: Moral Bodies, Moral Difference by Jackie Leach Scully
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Argues that bioethics to this point has approached issues relevant to disability – genetic screening of embryos, refusing cochlear implants, etc. – without adequately addressing how the normative project of ethics can be squared with non-normative experiences of disability. That bioethics has been approaching disability from the perspective of the able-bodied frame of reference, which in my experience is completely true. She advocates for greater empirical and experiential work on ethics and disability, and suggests some fascinating ways that atypical somatic experiences can inform a person's subjective moral understandings, and thus a person's ethical beliefs about medical care.
Short but dense. I wouldn't recommend it for a newcomer to disability theory, certainly, as it's much richer with a contextual background. I was particularly interested in the chapter deconstructing narratives of disability in memoir and literature, and the brief but penetrating discussion of the enormously negative mainstream responses to chosen disability (disabled parents who choose not to prevent the birth of a disabled child, etc.). Smart and disturbing, and very helpful in my current thinking.
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04:18 pm - Gardens of the Moon by Steven Erikson
 Gardens of the Moon by Steven Erikson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Epic fantasy with a map. And a dramatis personae. And a glossary. Assassins, wizards, gods, and soldiers clash over one of the few remaining free cities, as the imperial forces advance.
All right, I suppose. I'm not overtaken with any of the foaming fervor of some of this series' hardcore fans, but then again I suspect its real strength lies in the complexity achieved over ten books. Because this was a pretty good epic fantasy, with complicated politics and destinies at stake and great powers moving, but the ideas far outshine the writing. The most obvious comparison is to George R.R. Martin, and Erikson makes a decent standing there, but his dialogue is overdramatic in places, his characters a bit too hastily drawn, and his prose perceptibly wobbly. And ultimately, I'm not running out right this second for the next book, though I will get to it.
I could see myself really getting into this a few books down the road, though, with the bigger tapestry unfolding. We'll see.
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September 18th, 2009
01:33 pm - Swallowdale by Arthur Ransome
 Swallowdale by Arthur Ransome
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
More 1930's kids camping/sailing/pirating adventures, this time with a shipwreck! And a cave! And a daring escape!
I think one of the things that's most charming about these books is that they're so detailed. It's not just, 'the Swallows made camp,' it's a five-page explanation of how their tents work, and how they built a fire, and how they made a broom from brush. The educational value is faded with time, but the charm hasn't.
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