This is the true story of an average young woman living in Oregon with her mother, who, spurred by her mother's cancer diagnosis, embarks on a journey of self-discovery. They drive cross-country to Iowa, looking for the house where they lived in a commune, and where the author was born twenty years previously. The book is half present-day travleoguie and half reminiscence, by Cain and her mother, of life in early 70's America; a life of living on odd jobs whenever possible, getting caught by the FBI as a draft dodger and being sentenced to community service; and a frequently changing cast of housemates. Cain and her mother reach the town and find people still living there that they knew back then. Her mother returns to Oregon and Cain stays behind in Iowa, reconnecting with herself.
I wasn't just pleasantly surprised by this book, I was pleasantly shocked. This book is excellent. It's not just an eloquent and moving portrayal of one person's childhood, it also explores two of the most talked about generations in American history.
Wizards of Media Oz: Behind the Curtain of Mainstream News, Norman Solomon and Jeff Cohen, Common Courage Press, 1997
Conglomerates and The Media, Erik Barnouw (ed.), The New Press, 1997
Camelot 30K, Robert L. Forward, Tor Books, 1993
Allergic to the Twentieth Century, Peter Radetsky, Little, Brown and Co, 1997
Memoirs of a Spacewoman, Naomi Mitchison, Berkley Books, 1962
Mathemagics, Margaret Ball, Baen Books, 1996
Minstrels, Michael Hemmingson, Permeable Press, 1997
Am I Thin Enough Yet?:The Cult of Thinness and the Commercialization of Identity, Sharlene Hesse-Biber, Oxford University Press, 1996
Portrait of the Walrus by a Young Artist, Laurie Foos, Coffee House Press, 1997
In Dubious Battle, John Steinbeck, Bantam Books, 1936
Chicks in Chainmail, Esther Friesner (ed.), Baen Books, 1995
The Trinity Vector, Steve Perry, Ace Books, 1996
A Girl's Guide to Taking Over The World: Writings From The Girl Zine Revolution, Karen Green and Tristan Taormino (ed.), St. Martin's Griffin, 1997
Capitalism vs Capitalism: How America's Obsession With Individual Achievement and Short-Term Profit Has Led It To The Brink of Collapse, Michel Albert, Four Walls Eight Windows Press, 1993
Promised Land, Karel Schoeman, Summit Books, 1978
Pretending The Bed is a Raft, Nanci Kincaid, Algonquin Books, 1997
Here is another collection of syndicated newspaper columns from Solomon and Cohen, both associated with the media watch group FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting). In it, they explore a whole host of contemporary political and media issues.
The conservative Heritage Foundation is the most widely quoted think tank in the US media, not because they do such good work, but because they are masters at giving the press what it wants. To bolster claims of a "liberal media", conservatives usually point to a slight Democratic leaning on the part of reporters' personal preferences. But, if a reporter consistently quotes from conservatives in their stories, isn't that more important than their personal choices? Politicians go on and on about how big government is destroying America; big media and big corporations, on the other hand, seem to be good and lead to more choices for the public.
Each subject in this book is given only a couple of pages, so there isn't much chance for details. As an introduction to these issues, however, this book is first-rate and is highly recommended.
This is a group of essays on the effects of mergers and conglomerates on the dissemination of news and information. The main point is that the push for corporate profits has become so great that all of contemporary culture, from TV news to newspapers to movies to book publishing, has been dumbed down to the lowest common denominator, and beyond. Ratings points, and not offending large advertisers, are more important than journalistic integrity.
The Person of the Week segment Friday nights on ABC News is nothing more than a ratings gimmick, because consultants found a ratings drop at that time as people got ready for the weekend. In the publishing industry, which seems to publish only mega best-sellers, weight loss books, or, again, lowest common denominator books, some serious non-fiction books that are getting published are without footnotes or indexes; supposedly, readers are afraid of them.
For those who feel that popular media are not serving their wants and needs, this book gives the details. Rare are the books that deserve a round of applause; this book deserves a round of applause.
This is a science fiction story about an international manned mission sent to the Oort Cloud (an immense cloud of comets surrounding our solar system, but far beyond Pluto) to investigate signs of life found by earlier unmanned probes. They find an intelligent civilization, with cities, of beings who look like prawns, called keracks. The question for the humans is to find the power source for the civilization, with the only natural light being ambient starlight. The 30K in the title refers to degrees Kelvin, a measure of temperature. Water freezes at 273K.
The humans learn a lot of interesting things about the keracks with the help of Merlene, a kerack wizard from the city of Camalor, including the fact that the city is sitting on a self-created time bomb.
For those who like lots of science with their fiction, Robert Forward is one of the best in the field, and this book is no exception. For everyone else, this book can be skipped.
Are you allergic to more than just dust, pollen or animal fur? Do perfumes or common cleaning solvents make you ill? Radetsky has compiled many case histories of people from all over the country who suffer from Multiple Chemical Sensitivity, or MCS. While the media tends to focus on the extreme cases, those who live in foil-lined trailers, Radetsky looks at those who are forced to make radical changes in their lives. He also explores the various theories as to the cause of MCS, and visits those few doctors willing to treat it, and not dismiss it as unimportant.
MCS sufferers are up against a lot of opposition, according to Radetsky. It ranges from a medical establishment less than convinced that it is real, to a chemical industry using its influence to muddy the waters in Washington, to a veterans Administration who doesn't want to spend the money necessary to actually treat the thousands of sufferers of Gulf War Syndrome.
To those who suffer from MCS, or know someone who does, this book is a Must Read (it also has many addresses in the back of the book). It is also a Must Read for those who are skeptical on the matter; it may just change some minds.
These are the memoirs of a woman who becomes an intergalactic explorer and communicator with alien species in the far future. It's an exciting profession, but a major drawback is that the distances involved require the crew to be in stasis while in transit. It leads to what's called time blackout, where the subjective period of time for the explorer is much less than the time elapsed back on earth.
Between expeditions, Mary, the woman, has children by several different males. Before going on the next expedition, mothers are expected to stay on earth for at least a year of what's called "stabilization."
Mary meets some interesting beings while exploring. She mediates between a race of innocent caterpillars being telepathically bullied with feelings of shame and unworthiness by a race of butterflies. Among her fellow explorers are Martians who can become either sex, and communicate using sex organs. One of Mary's children comes about through such "communication."
This is a case of a story with some interesting pieces being covered up by very dry, emotional writing (as, I guess, is customary in memoirs).
This is the fantasy story of Riva Konneva, a woman from the hills of a sword-and-sorcery called Dazau, who wants to give her daughter a good education. She commutes between there and the Planet of the Paper Pushers (present-day Austin, Texas) where her daughter, Salla, is in sixth grade in a local elementary school.
First, Riva is told that Salla is to be taken out of the school's gifted program and put in the emotionally disturbed class because she shows too much initiative. Salla's father, a wizard, shows up from Dazau with regaining custody on his mind, and ingratiates himself with a local fundamentalist preacher. He causes, using some Dazau magic, a large number of science fiction and romance books (which the preacher considers filth, to disappear from a local bookstore. The books don't just disappear; they travel to Dazau and their main characters come to life.
Salla and a couple of friends travel to Dazau, where math has magical powers, and get into big trouble, requiring rescue by Riva and Dennis, a math teacher at Salla's school, with whom Riva and Salla are living.
Personally, some of the characters were drawn a little too extreme, and it's full of science fiction "in" jokes, where a little goes a long way. This book is in that large gray area of just pretty good.
Albert, an American, has flown to Paris to declare his love for Veronique, whom he met in the US the year before. He gets involved with a terrorist group, and kills one of its members under less than clear circumstances. Albert says it was self-defense; Veronique doesn't agree.
The authorities offer Albert a choice; the elctric chair for murder, or get a miniature TV camera implanted in his left eye (which he lost in the fight). From the outside, it looks like a normal eye; the intention is to get the terrorists, once and for all, and to satisfy the ever-growing hunger among European TV watchers for Reality TV. Veronique is not told about this.
It turns into a tale of hackers, assassins, illicit sex, terrorists, and Veronique joining a goth-synth rock band. While the mebers play a simple melody in the background, Veronique, the lead singer, makes up the words as she goes along.
This is a really good, very easy to read avant-pop story that's just 90's enough and just weird enough to appeal to most anyone.
This book is about the lengths to which many young women, from all parts of society, will go in an effort to be thin. Everyday, women are given the message that the shape of their bodies is more important than the person inside, and that their only worth as a person is their ability to catch a man.
Skipping the usual psychological explanations for eating disorders, the author points the finger directly at the social, cultural and political forces profiting from women's disastisfaction with their bodies. It ranges from the assertion that the more time women spend worrying about their looks, the less time they'll spend on political activism or getting involved in their child's education to women's magazines full of models full of famine victims. Check out the infomercials on weekend cable TV, the vast majority advertise diet plans or exercise machines.
This is a powerful, first-rate piece of writing. It's very readable, and includes a section on what women can do to get away from the Cult of Thinness.
This is the story of Frances, the teenage daughter of a famous eccentric sculptor who does all his work sealed away in the basement of their Connecticut home wearing only torn briefs. One day he is found dead of dehydration.
Just before her eighteenth birthday, Frances' mother marries a man who owns three bowling alleys in Florida, a man Frances calls "the Kingpin". She tries to lure Frances into the safety of middle class life of pizza and bowling, and away from art and the dementia that took her husband.
Frances is not happy. One day, she and Bessie, their black housekeeper, visit an aquarium where they watch two walruses copulating. Frances can not stop thinking about them. She sees them everywhere, including in her bedroom. Increasingly afraid, the two women take to the open road to escape the walruses, but they are close behind, and gaining.
This book gets increasingly strange as it progresses. It's also fresh, comic, original, and really good.
It's picking time in a valley of apple orchards in depression-era California. The migrant workers who are there have been told by the growers that their per-basket wages are to undergo a 25 percent cut. The generalized discontent is helped along into a full-fledged strike by a pair of Communist Party labor activists, Mac, a veteran organizer, and Jim, a new member who has been stepped on onre too many times by the system and wants to fight back. The valley is tightly controlled by the apple growers, but the strikers do get help from a smaller grower and his son, who pay dearly for their help. The authorities keep an extremely close eye on the strikers, ready to break up the strike at the slightest excuse.
Is "classic" too strong a word? Not in this case. Steinbeck does an excellent job at putting the reader among common people who are simply trying to earn enough to stay alive, and ask little more than to be treated with respect. Even though this is fiction, it's a very good choice for history classes because of the way it shows that the right to strike in theory and in practice are two very different things.
This is a group of fantasy stories about women who don't dress or act like male wish-fulfillment fantasies and who can take care of themselves quite nicely without men around. Among the stories are: an attempt to tax bronze bras because they aren't a "necessity", the wives of a king are trained to be a pretty good palace guard, a present day "road rage" story, a female warrior captures the kidnappers of the king's son, with some unintended shapechanging along the way, a woman whose daughter is in a contemporary elementary school gets corralled into taking a bunch of fourth graders on a field trip to her workplace, a medieval world where mathematics has magical powers, and the story of Hillary Clinton in Valhalla.
Get past the sexist-sounding title, which the editor admits is her fault, and this is a group of really good stories about women who don't have to wear chain-mail bikinis or be sorceresses to get some respect. Well worth the reader's time.
This is a science fiction novel that spends most of its time as a very good near future suspense thriller.
Miranda Moon, pagan priestess, comes into possession of a featureless talking silver brick. It truthfully answers nearly any question put to it, except where it comes from, questions like What are tomorrow's Lotto numbers? to Does Heaven really exist? Miranda calls on Huey Long, ex-military and professional courier, to deliver it to her faith's central temple, and let them worry about it. Several people who Really Want the brick get in his way, including henchmen for a shadwoy government intelligence type who plans to use it for his own ends, and a Baptist preacher working with the Jesuits, who plans to bury it permanently (its answer to the question on Heaven was negative).
Long, Moon and her two teenage daughters take the brick's advice and go on the run. Meantime, two other equal parts of the brick appear, one landing each in the hands of the intelligence operative and the preacher. Each piece of the brick tells its owner the exact location of the other pieces, leading to the final confrontation.
Looking at the elements of a good suspense novel, like intrigue, violence, blood, a bit of sex, and wondering who of the main characters won't be around at the end, this book really delivers. It's worth reading.
This is another book looking at the "zine revolution," recently discovered by the mainstream media. Green and Taormino concentrate less on the graphics and more on the writing; as well they should, because this bok is full of honest, forthright, even painful, writing by girls and young women from all social classes and all parts of the country. To quote from one zine called Girl Power,"Sometimes paper is the only thing that will listen to you."
Included are excerpts from over 100 different zines (with addresses in the back of the book) on subjects from friends to body image to politics to parents and family to gossip to sex.
Even if this was packaged as an average anthology of girl writing, with all zine references removed, it would still be highly recommended; the writing is that good. It's especially recommended for any girl or young woman who thinks that nobody can understand what she's thinking or felling; someone in this book has been there.
The subtitle gives the main idea behind this book. Albert,a high-level French businessman, looked at post-Reagan America and found huge deficits, high unemployment, a banking system that can best be described as very ill, a country where the focus is on individual achievement and where long-term business planning is next quarter. Albert then looked at Europe (minus England) and Japan and found societies much more focused on group achievement and collective consensus. In these countries, there is more emphasis on making use of all members of society, whether or not they go to college, and of making sure no one gets left behind.
A person would think that the European "Rhine model" system would be on the rise and the American "supply side" system would be less popular around the world. Just the opposite is true.
One doesn't have to be an economist to "get" this book. It's very easy to read and is another voice saying that supply side economics is not necessarily all its cracked up to be.
Set in the indeterminate present, this takes place in a South Africa where whites have totally lost control of the country, leading to the undefined "troubles", forcing all whites who could leave permanently to do so. Those that remain are increasingly bitter and suspicious of strangers, and still have no idea how they lost the country.
George, member of a family who did leave, returns to South Africa because his grandmother has died, and he must dispose of the abandoned family estate. He runs into some neighbors, who, when they realize he is a relative, practically force him to spend his visit with them. At the same time, they are suspicious of George for asking too many questions and resentful because his family could leave while they couldn't, and also so happy for the arrival of an outsider that his visit is treated as a major stop-the-presses Event. Several parties are planned in George's honor so that all the aunts and cousins and neighbors in the area can meet him.
I can easily understand why Schoeman didn't get into just what caused the whites to flee, in what has been called a South African 1984. otherwise the book would never have been published in his homeland of South Africa. On the other hand, I was waiting for the story to get interesting, to make me want to keep reading. Up until the last few pages, I was still waiting.Main Page
This is a group of stories about women and their (occasionally difficult) relationships with men. The one exception is about a male Thoreau scholar reluctant to leave the uncomfortable comfort of his wife for one of his female students. Another story is about the education and character-strengthening of the wife of a losing small-town football coach. Also included is the story of Norma June, a cosmetics addict who is aching to be noticed by the male next-door neighbor fooling around with her daughter. Another story is about a trio of women driving through a Colorado winter to pick up the ashes of the husband of one of the women who died in an auto accident.
All of these stories are moving, well done, and full of characters who could easily be a neighbor or relative anywhere. The title story, abou t young wife and mother with terminal cancer who works through a list of Things To Do Before Death, actually reaches the rarefied atmosphere of Wow.
