notanotherbookreview

Is "Happily Ever After" a destination, a phantom or beside the point of life?  Carla Malden's My Two and Only  (Rare Bird Books)and Ashley Griffin's The Spindle   (Oaklea Books) address this question from points of view human and otherworldly.  Carla Malden's novel is a deceptively quiet book about adults in Los Angeles' middle class, distanced from the media drumbeats of apocalypse--climate disaster, homelessness, nuclear war. (There is no mention of AI).  The environment, business are topics but the real concern is family--what makes one?  How do you keep the heart, that most essential pulse of people's lives, beating when your most essential human dies?  Dysfunction here is less about psychology, than the crucial adjustment a human being makes when their "One and Only" dies. When it happens in an accident both everyday and strange, it leaves much to the imagination. For twelve years Charlotte lives with the "what ifs." Yet she's ...

  Where does fact meet fantasy in a history of the information age, and in a fantasy novel of  magical systems? Fancy Bear Goes Phishing:The Dark History of the Information Age in Five Extraordinary Hacks by Scott J. Shapiro (Macmillan) confirmed my suspicions that the online world is more chaotic and dangerous than I expected. What happened to computer science, once a visionary frontier of knowledge? In the beginning academia and the defense industry fostered the new area.  The idea was thinking machines would enable human advancement and make our nation safer. With unique access to talent and technology, computer science departments were galvanized for an exciting future. So where did the hackers come in? Author Shapiro (Professor of Law and Philosophy at Yale and Director of the Yale Center for Law and Philosophy, as well as Yale's Cyber Security Lab) explains how "hacker" was once a complimentary term, meaning a rare creative thinker able to write code to make somethi...

Other Places, Other Times by Robert Wexelblatt  (Pelekinesis)  is a collection of twenty-six short historical fictions. Thirteen of the stories are about Chen Hsi-wei, an imaginary peasant-poet of the Sui period, circa 600 C.E. As a boy, he  served the emperor and turned down material rewards for an education. He became a poet (though nobility found an educated peasant as implausible as a flying pig), Hsi-wei travelled the empire making verses, along with straw sandals for customers.  He often set up a sign for sandals in marketplaces, before looking for a corner to sleep in an inn or stable.  Often Hsi-wei's curiosity about people and places led him to incongruous events and mysteries. The poem,  The Madness of Nowa   sums up a strange murder he resolved for a skeptical magistrate. At a seasonal festival, a chance meeting inspired rare insight about time, nature and men. U nknown truths, injustices, fateful sorrow inspired poems.  After some year...

What did the Founders intend for a future United States? While no historian, I began reading biographies in lock-down for insight into our fractious nation. It's oddly comforting to learn of similar divisions in colonial times--a political split between the east and north (which wanted a strong Fed) and the south and west(which wanted power invested primarily in the States). During the Continental Congress, some representatives were more interested in keeping their British trading partner than war. After winning independence, there were rebellions against government authority. The Whiskey rebellion (against a tax) had to be quelled in-person by Washington and Hamilton with troops. I wondered if the optimism and unity of post WW2  America, when I grew up, was a historic aberration--result of a boom economy built on war production. Perhaps factional discord is the norm? Is our time more dire--can the center hold against the assaults on democratic ideals?  Can anything solid...

S PECIAL EXHIBITION  Colonial Firefighting & The American Revolution   Closes  8/13  at New York City Fire Museum, 278 Spring Street, New York.  www.nycfiremuseum.org  and www.savingnewyork.com.   News 12  interview with Exhibition originator; Bruce Twickler,  GothamToGo   and   FireRescue1 . C elebration of fire fighting!   The untold story of a group of volunteers, the colonial FDNY, that stood between New York and disaster during years of rampant arson, wars for North America, and the American Revolution.   1000 copies of The Art of Saving New York  gifted to the first viewers of this Special Exhibition.  THE FIRE DEPARTMENT SAVING THE EXCHANGE The FDNY at the Exchange The FDNY rallied at the inception of the fire to save the Exchange, a large covered market with a second story meeting hall, located in the middle of lower Broad Street. They stopped the initial blaze from destroying the building even t...