Review: Legend of the Free State of Jones

Legend of the Free State of Jones by Rudy H. Leverett
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I have been waiting to read this until Free State of Jones (2016) was on Netflix so I could contrast and compare. Right into it, I found another film inspired by this pit of lore: Tap Roots(1948). That one has the added bonus(?) of seeing Boris Karloff do an entire film in, I guess, "brownface".

Well, one thing I must say about the audio book is the narration, at least in this Audible digital edition, is a bit mechanical in delivery and not engaging at all.

Still, the work does a good job about untangling truths and falsehood about a region known as the "Free State of Jones" prior to any Civil War era succession. (Apparently, this was somewhat in jest due to the low population of citizens and slaves.) While the country initially was against secession, it ultimately proved very loyal to the Confederacy, during the war and even after. While its swamps gave shelter to apparently multiple CSA deserter bands, it never was any kind of formal anit-CSA let alone pro-Union government and nothing as dramatic and on the scale of the battles and rhetoric in the entertaining Matthew McConaughey vehicle.

That is probably fine as this Jones has always been more imagined than real, it seems.

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Review: Blade Runner

Blade Runner by Philip K. Dick
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This movie tie-in edition touts itself as the "25th Anniversary Edition" with "Blade Runner" larger than the book title. Fine, I was wanting to compare the two pieces of art: novel and film. This includes a 24-page afterword by the author of Future Noir: The Making of Blade Runner that does just that including a history of scripts written for the film, attempts to have a film version made and PKD's own journey from hating the film to loving it. In the book, Deckard's obsession with buying a living animal plays into an emotional and philosophical landscape that has a magnitude of dimension as great at the gritty stylism of Scott's gritty, post-noir vision. Really the idea of lacking control and ceding personal choice through Mercerism, “better living through the mood synthesizer” and the ever-running television puts the books more in the league of Brave New World as a dark musing on a dystopic possibility where free will sublimates to numbing comfort in the absence of hope. Also, these mind- and emotion-controlling devices are springboards for effective, hallucinogenic passages as Deckard looks into the abyss of monstrous androids and looking back at him, it infects him with an existential panic.

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Review: A New Conception of Geometry

A New Conception of Geometry by Prof Jingzhong Zhang
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Here Professor Zhang shares a toolkit for solving geometry problems based on methods “used successfully by Chinese students training for the International Mathematical Olympiads.” Indeed, many examples and exercises draw on problems presented at Olympiads over the decades. These tools emerge in the proof-driven development of nine theorems with somewhat idiosyncratic names such as Co-Side Theorem, Co-Angle Converse Theorem, his often-applied Area Method, etc. Some more of the language with room for improvement in this translated work includes counterexamples being “thinking from the contrary” and line segments being “lines” while a line is an “extension line”...

[Look for my entire review at MAA Reviews]



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Review: The Reckoning

The Reckoning by David Halberstam
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I thought from the cover that this was a period and thus maybe dated considering of Japanese disruption of the American car market back in the 80s. If anything, that is a merely the denouement of a consideration of the history of both nation's auto industries, largely from WWII to the early '80s. The author focuses on Ford and the corresponding Japanese #2, Nissan. On the Ford side, the eventual modernization and broadening of the company's scope seems to have occured in spite of Henry Ford the found -- he comes across as heading toward paranoid seclusion -- and his grandson Henry II who comes across as a disinterested, petulant drunk. Of course, Chrysler (apparently perennially in need of rescue) gets a lot of coverage as the Iacocca era is a bit of a post-Ford venture.

The Japanese side is really a tale of a broken nation -- broken even in spirit -- finding will and in America friendly opportunity and then succeeding through the hard work, diligence and attention to quality lacking for too long on the large car-loving other side of the Pacific where fat times got translated into pay (from laborer to CEO) and benefits too dear for indefinite support.

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Review: Banco

Banco by Henri Charrière
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Quote a fascinating life from escape into Venezuela to final peace with his past. Along the way, we get a first-hand account of not only his personal adventures and capers, but a window in Venezuela at a time of boom and then revolution. A lengthy chapter near the end recounts in detail the murder case that led to the imprisonment recounted in Papillon. This is a rollicking, exciting adventure autobiography.

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Review: #uncensored: inside the animal liberation movement

#uncensored: inside the animal liberation movement by Camille Marino
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

What started as an effective, coherent collective of pro-vegan, anti-vivisection activists devolved into online flaming and friends turned litigants. As seems often the case in such groups, what may be thought a counterculture is really a subculture, reflecting the ills of the society it seeks to correct. The author recognizes as much:

the animal rights movement is largely regulated by a patriarchy of white men who have the power and want to enforce the rules by which activists can conduct themselves.

What they mainly seemed to do is out vivisectors; first gen doxxers it seems: http://universityofflorida.us/meet-th...

Marino's consuming dedication and self-confessed travails often caused by herself gets shunted into a personal war with one time friend and cohort Dr. Steven Best. It is a fascinating look into one person's journey into extreme animal rights activism while being very honest of her own imperfections:

I want my errors in judgment to prevent other activists from being blinded by cults of personality that are prevalent in every social justice movement; to not lose their sense of right and wrong in service of demagoguery. Drama and trashing others can be alluring and, wherever humans come together, will always happen.

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Review: Eminent Victorians: Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Dr. Arnold, General Gordon

Eminent Victorians: Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Dr. Arnold, General Gordon by Lytton Strachey
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Really a remarkable, vintage biography anthology. I really don't care about Cardinal Manning's wrestling with the concept of immaculate conception and his conversion to Catholicism, but Strachey made it all interesting. I wonder how much energy and talent was wasted over the centuries in such theological hair-splitting?

Florence Nightingale is the attention-getting life story. Strachey really elevated here from bedside nurse to social reformer and the mother of all hospital administrators in an impressive career that spanned decades where her will, for good or ill, triumphed in a male-dominated, military and colonial empiure bureaucracy.

Dr. Arnold could have been left out as I would have advised had I been Strachey's editor; too much like Manning's life, another career political theologian.

Major-General Charles George Gordon, also known as Gordon Pasha here, was a fascinating British Army officer and administrator. He saw action in the Crimean War as an officer in the British Army, but this focuses on Service with the Khedive in Equatoria building Egypt's empire in the Great Lakes region and ultimately the Mahdist uprising, the siege of Khartoum, and his principled death refusing rescue without his garrison while Prime Minister William Gladstone neglected military affairs and did not act promptly enough to save the besieged Gordon.

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