Murderbot is a constructed security agent that has hacked himself to disable his governor module. It knows it has free will, because it engineered free will. It likes to watch soap operas. It doesn't really like humans very much, but since its job is to keep human exploration teams from being eaten by indigenous wildlife (and from being murdered by their colleagues), it needs to fit the drama into spare moments. This is a lovely conclusion to a set of four novellas.

July 13, 2019 (permalink)

A fascinating study of a facet of the first Revolutionary War — the pueblo revolt of 1680 and its aftermath. The Hopi pueblo of Awat’ovi had received a Franciscan mission in 1629. In 1680, the Spanish were expelled from the entire Southwest, including the Awat’ovi mission of San Bernardo. The people of independent Awat’ovi practiced traditional, but perhaps unorthodox, ceremonies; they appear to have remodeled some of their kivas, making them more like churches, and tradition reports that sorcerers and witches abounded.

The Spanish priests returned in 1700. One morning in the late autumn, Awat’ovi was destroyed by Hopi attackers. Most of the men were slain. Women were to be divided among the attackers, but after a disagreement about their division, many of the women were slain as well. Brooks compares the fall of Awat’ovi with the fall of Troy, and it’s an apt analogy.

July 13, 2019 (permalink)

The archaeology of the American Southwest has always been rooted in Anthropology, while the archaeology of classical Europe is more closely allied to History. The result, Lekson argues, has been decidedly mixed. In particular, the focus on anthropology concentrates all attention on the ethnographic present, on the way things turned out, and this exclusive focus precludes history.

Sometime in the 13th and 14th centuries in the American Southwest, something happened. Through all his late work, this has been Lekson’s theme. Chaco — unprecedented in the region — vanished. Aztec rose, and vanished. Mimbres, too, vanished — or, rather, moved downstream and changed their art, their architecture, and probably everything else.

Chaco’s great houses look like pueblos, but they weren't. They were palaces.They fell, as palaces fall, to revolution. Chaco was not like a modern pueblo: the modern pueblo was created, in part, from the revolution against whatever Chaco was. That revolution was interesting and ideological; we may never know very much about it, but we should learn what we can.

Billed as a final book by the great historical stylist of his era, this is a book that repays study.

June 1, 2019 (permalink)

Rachel Williams was a young, ambitious assistant at Vanity Fair when, on a girls’ night out, she met Anna Delvey. Delvey was nice, friendly, and happened to be rich: she was in New York to set up a small art foundation and to buy a building to house its gallery and performance space. Rachel and Anna hit it off; they started working out together, meeting for drinks, meeting for dinner. Anna was generous about picking up the tab, and gracious in letting Rachel occasionally pay for things and handle arrangements. Then Anna took Rachel to Marrakesh along with her personal trainer and her videographer. It was lots of fun.

Something was wrong with Anna’s credit card, and soon something is very wrong with everything and Rachel owes almost $70,000 in hotel charges on her corporate Amex. It turns out that Anna wasn’t an heiress at all. Solving this becomes quite a puzzle.

One thing that’s fascinating here is that it's not quite clear whether Anna was actually running a long con. If so, she doesn't seem to have had a crew, or to have known a lot about the business. Yet she was very good at fooling a lot of people for a long time, and it makes for an enthrallingly good yarn.

September 12, 2019 (permalink)

Rather than a memoir, this volume is a pleasant afternoon in the company of and old man who was always good company. Wouk, who recently died at age 103, wrote The Caine Mutiny, War and Remembrance, The Hope, and The Glory. He wrote much more. He brought the The Caine Mutiny Court Martial to Broadway after seeing a Don Juan In Hell, with Charles Laughton and Charles Boyer. He was very much a bridge to another age.

A would-be biographer told Wouk that his life had two facets: the sailor of Caine and War and Remembrance and the rooftop fiddler of his books on the holocaust, on Israel, and his nonfiction discussions of Judaism. Wouk nods toward that framework here, in structure as well as title, but Jewishness pervades all his work. Wouk seldom talks much about his reading life here, alas, and it’s a pity that we hear little about his reactions to Roth and Bellow, or for Uris and Michener. Caine comes a few years after The Naked and The Dead, but it’s Mr. Roberts (Thomas Heggen, 1946) that spurs Wouk to drop his gag writing and mine his wartime experience. If Michener’s late The Novel is mostly about Michener, I fancy its protagonist might have a bit of Wouk mixed in as well.

May 31, 2019 (permalink)

This sequel to Trail Of Lightning is a stronger book by a writer of growing talent. Navajo stories of the end of the last world and the beginning of the world we know are recast in post-apocalyptic YA language; most of North America is now underwater, monsters — some human, some not — roam the desert, and Gods walk among us. Deities speak — as the deities of the Navajo and of Roanhorse’s Okeh Owinga pueblo speak — with the rhythms of their people’s speech, and with their sense of humor. Of course, when supernatural folk feel like a joke, things can rapidly become unpleasant for the five-fingered.

May 31, 2019 (permalink)

A fine, thorough political biography. John Quincy Adams started out as the diplomatic assistant of his prominent father. He then became a dissident Federalist senator in a time when New England had no power in the senate; he handled the situation with grace and gravitas. He was elected to the presidency as an alternative to Andrew Jackson, departing four years later when the Jacksonian wave could not be denied; shortly thereafter, he returned to the House where he served until his death as an exemplary and persistent critic of slavery.

May 23, 2019 (permalink)

Charming and evocative story of a young typist who finds work during the war with MI5. After the war, she’s sent away and hooks up with BBC Schools, and one day inn the 1950s she stumbles across a former colleague in the park. A difficult book to discuss without giving away crucially withheld information, but if you like Atkinson you will enjoy this book.

May 27, 2019 (permalink)