Tuned Out
Uzimaki
Boots on the Ground
"From the Tideless Sea"
The New Americans
What's What
The Way Things Work
Tuned Out, by David T.Z. Mindich
Here is an author concerned by the youth's lack of enthusiasm for politics. We, on the other hand, are surprised and heartened by it. Mindich writes that political participation was greater among young people in the sixties; we don't doubt it. It would be well, we agree, for public school students to be taught the mechanics of their government, the use of public services and some knowledge of foreign peoples. But this is not what Mindich has in mind.
At one point, Mindich characterizes the tendency of journalists to indulge sensationalism as a struggle between "need and want". Mindich balances his own "need and want" by including cartoons and a photograph of a woman in her brassiere.
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Uzumaki, by Junji Ito
This is a Japanese graphic novel in the horror genre, telling the story of a coastal town cursed by spirals. The story is harshly violent and grotesque, to the point of black humor. It is inventive and episodic, having little atmosphere but accumulating many permutations of the central image. The reader is given whirlpools, dust devils, snails, the cochlea of the inner ear, fingerprints and a curled lock of hair, all as objects of horror. The story is vaguely Lovecraftian, but rambunctious and, in some of the early episodes, mildly pedantic.
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Boots on the Ground: A Month with the 82nd Airborne in the Battle for Iraq, by Karl Zinmeister
This book is descriptive of the author's observations of the early part of the war and a criticism of war reporting. The descriptions are in no way systematic, but comprise a journal of his days there with vignettes of soldiers in preparation as well as in combat. Perhaps most interesting are the details of the weaponry and vehicles used, the provisions for command, soldiers and reporters, and the preparations for attacks. There are also colorful sketches of individual soldiers. Here is a passage from chapter four:
We uncovered a little surprise this morning. I had just sat down for a breakfast of chicken and salsa (in the land of MREs, every meal is dinner) when some older guys decided that what looked like a buried wheel and hubcap, located maybe eight feet from me, was possibly an antitank mine. A Humvee was parked just short of it, and the guys had been stumbling over it all night in the dark on their way to pee. This morning, Cory O'Connor, who was in high school in Rhode Island ten months ago, actually jumped up and down on top of it. Curiosity, I guess.
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"From the Tideless Sea" pts. 1 & 2, William Hope Hodgson
These stories, similar in substance and effect to The Boats of the Glen Carrig, form part of Hodgson's cycle of Sargasso Sea stories, the best known of which are probably "The Voice in the Night" and "The Derelict". Until reading these stories, we knew nothing of the Sargasso Sea. The entry in my desk dictionary reads
SARGASSO SEA, oval area of the N Atlantic, of special interest as the spawning ground of American eels, many of whose offspring drift across the Atlantic to form the European eel population. Bounded E by the Canaries Current, S by the N Equatorial Current, W and N by the Gulf Stream, it contains large masses of Sargassum weed.
My encyclopedia plays up the presence of the weed, pointing out that this alga is kept afloat by small grape-like gas-filled sacs, that the weed is so prevalent that it was once supposed by seamen to comprise an even more substantial body from which a ship, if it became entangled, could scarcely hope to escape. It was rumored to support many other forms of life, whether plant, algae, animal or still stranger intermediate forms. Between the danger of the weed's acquisitive grasp and the horrors supposed to lurk on this floating continent, some sailors were not reluctant to suggest that the Sargasso comprised a veritable graveyard of ships, both modern and ancient.
In part one of "From the Tideless Sea", the captain of a ship drifting near the weed descries a ship overgrown by Sargassum and surmounted by an unidentifiable superstructure. A little more inspection discovers a tarred barrel floating nearby. Opening the barrel, the captain discovers an oilskin; opening this discovers a second oilskin; and opening the second reveals a third. Within the third oilskin is a bundle of tarred canvas, and within, a tin cylinder. Inside the cylinder is a final strip of oilskin which conceals a roll of papers that describes the fate of the ship Homebird. This roll of papers contains the account that comprises the bulk of part one. In part two, the reader learns that three more messages were subsequently sent but never find, but that a fifth was recovered, its account forming the continuation. Here is the opening of the first message:
I am writing this in the saloon of the sailing ship, Homebird, and writing with but little hope of human eye ever seeing that which I write; for we are in the heart of the dread Sargasso Sea--the Tideless Sea of the North Atlantic. From the stump of our mizzen mast, one may see, spread out to the far horizon, an interminable waste of weed--a treacherous, silent vastitude of slime and hideousness!
Having survived a storm, the Homebird is locked fast amidst the weed. Several members of the crew attempt to carry out an anchor in a boat, by which to tow the ship from the weed. But they are lost by unknown causes, only their screams and empty boat returning to warn of beasts among the weeds. The captain is injured in the storm and remains in bed. Other members of the crew are lost to an attack of giant octopi. The passengers are reduced to three, who survive in their stranded condition through these and other dangers.
Similar scenarios are more thoroughly developed in Boats of the Glen Carrig and more intensely depicted in "Derelict" and "Voice in the Night", but the "Tideless Sea" stories are still good examples of his work. Hodgson may be better known for his House on the Borderland, but the sea in general and the Sargasso in particular is the milieu that belongs to him, just as ancient New England belonged to Lovecraft. For anyone with the slightest interest in early 20th century horror and fantasy, he can do little better than to read the stories recommended above.
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The New Americans, Michael Barone
This book argues that America's unassimilated populations pose less a challenge than many think. Barone suggests that today's Asians resemble yesterday's Jews; today's Latinos, yesterday's Italians; and blacks, the earlier wave of Irish. In the case of blacks and Irish, he points out similar troubles with bigotry and fatherlessness; in that of Asians and Jews, academic and entrepreneurial success; among Latinos and Italians, strong family ties and a distrust of or disinterest in politics.
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What's What, Ed. by Reginald Bragonier, Jr. and David Fisher
This is the first of two complementary books (see the notice following) that describe the identification and function of objects, books that any writer at least should make some effort to obtain. In What's What, the reader is presented with 500 pages of illustrations of objects ranging from chairs to pocket watches to airplanes, with labels of the various parts of each. For example, we find an entry for cat with a brief description and the various parts of the cat respectively labeled: eye, break, forehead, nose leather, whisker pad, whiskers/vibrissae/feelers, etc. It's true that many of the labels are obvious while others are too obscure to be of any use. But many are otherwise, such as in the entries for cockpit, mortar and bazooka, and various entries for clothes.
The book is divided into 13 parts: The Earth, Living Things; Shelters and Structures; Transportation; Communications; Personal Items; The Home; Sports and Recreation; Arts and Crafts; Machinery, Tools and Weapons; Uniforms, Costumes and Ceremonial Attire; Signs and Symbols; Tombstone and Coffin. Transportation is subdivided to Automobile; Public Transportation; Carriers; Emergency Vehicles; Public Service Vehicles; Cycles; Recreational Vehicles; Carriages; Boats and Ships; Aircraft; Spacecraft. Spacecraft is further divided into Space Shuttle; Launch Pad; Flight Deck; Lunar Lander; Lunar Buggy; Flight Suit.
While one may resort to this book on occasions when hung up over the name of a particular object or part, we would be disingenuous not to admit that much of the pleasure of a book like this is in simple browsing, in taking at so many glances the many objects ordinary to life. Published in 1981, some objects were not listed or else appear in an outdated form. The entry for computer on page 429 pictures 5 1/2" disk drives and mentions magnetic tape among the recording formats. It is possible that younger readers will not recognize, although they might guess the meaning of, some of the terms used: arithmetic and logic unit and memory unit. On the preceding page is a photograph of a punch card.
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The Way Things Work
As well as we can make out from the copyright page, this book is an adaptation of a British edition entitled The Universal Encyclopedia of Machines or how things work, edited by C. van Amerongen, M.Sc., itself a translation of the original German edition entitled Wie funktionert das? First published in 1963, it must, as the book reviewed above, lack explanations of many objects now common, but is useful and interesting nonetheless.
Running to nearly 600 pages, it begins with Distillation and ends with Rockets, but the topics are nearly universal, including articles on Speed of a Camera Lens, Enamel and X-ray Apparatus and Radiology. Diagrams are voluminously provided, together with an index.
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