Archive
Book Review: Nightmare at 20,000 Feet – Horror Stories by Richard Matheson
Summary:
Remember that monster on the wing of the airplane? William Shatner saw it on The Twilight Zone and Bart Simpson saw it too. “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” is just one of many classic horror stories by Richard Matheson that have insinuated themselves into our collective imagination.
Here are more than twenty of Matheson’s most memorable tales of fear and paranoia. Personally selected by Richard Matheson, the bestselling author of I Am Legend and What Dreams May Come, these and many other stories, more than demonstrate why he is rightfully regarded as one of the finest and most influential horror writers of our generation.
Review:
I picked this up because I remembered enjoying I Am Legend (although my review is only 3 stars, when I looked it up just now…) I also had familiarity with The Twilight Zone episode based on the first story in the collection. I individually rated each of the twenty stories then calculated the average to give the collection a rating.
I rated two stories 5 stars. “Mad House” (made me make shocked and thrilled faces) and “First Anniversary” (I called it timeless in my notes). The former is a very meta commentary on being a writer. The latter reminded me of Buffy in that who you’ve fallen in love with changes, only in this case it was the woman changing instead of the man.
There were quite a few stories that I found moderately engaging and enjoyed their historic vibe. Like “Disappearing Act,” whose whole idea is it’s someone’s personal notebook left in a cafe. Or “Crickets” whose idea is what if crickets’ chirps are really a form of Morse code?
But there are also two stories where, just, the entire structure idea is racist. One “The Children of Noah” involves the idea that a town’s inhabitants are all the descendants of a sea captain and his Pacific Islander bride. The racist part is that they’re dangerous BECAUSE of being part Pacific Islander. The story “Prey” is about a “Zuni” doll that’s inhabited by the spirit of a great warrior. The whole idea made me cringe. One story, “The Distributor” confused me so much that I’m still not sure what the overall point was. A character who I think is a bad guy uses the the n word and another racial slur, but it’s a little unclear to me if he was meant to be a bad guy.
There are also definitely outdated gender ideas here. The least offensive is that it’s oh so scary for teenage girls to wage war as witches in “Witch War.” The worst is “The Likeness of Julie.” Most of the story is from the perspective of a college undergrad male rapist. That’s bad enough. If you want to know how it manages to get worse, check out the spoiler paragraph below in brackets.
[The twist ending is that the college woman he rapes, Julie, in fact got inside his mind supernaturally and made him rape her. It’s the worst victim blaming I’ve seen in forever, and I honestly wanted to scrub my own brain out with soap. I’m suspicious that Matheson knew on some level how awful this story was, because the collection notes that he published it under the pseudonym of Logan Swanson in Alone by Night, which appears to have been some sort of anthology.]
So, there we have it. Some stories manage to be timeless. But definitely not all. Come into this collection prepared for a mixed bag.
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4 out of 5 stars
Length: 336 pages – average but on the longer side
Source: Purchased
Buy It (Amazon or Bookshop.org)
Book Review: I, Robot by Isaac Asimov (Series, #0.1) (Bottom of TBR Pile Challenge)
Summary:
This collection of short stories tells the history of the invention and gradual improvement of robots. The robots in this future must follow the 3 Laws of Robotics:
- A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
- A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
- A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
But following these laws doesn’t always have quite the outcome the inventors and managers of robots intended.
Review:
I wasn’t aware I, Robot
One thing I like about the world Asimov sets up is that unlike many scifi books featuring AI, the people in Asimov’s world are highly, intensely cautious of robots. They’re very concerned about robots taking jobs, killing humans, and even robbing humans of their autonomy. It sets up a conflict from the beginning and frankly presents the humans as just a bit more intelligent than in some AI scifi universes.
I was under the impression from pop culture that in I, Robot they think they’re protected by the Laws of Robotics but something happens so that the robots aren’t programmed with them any longer. That’s not what happens at all. What happens is much more complex. How the robots interpret the Laws and how the Laws work end up being much more complex and less straight-forward than the humans originally imagined, so much so that they have to have a robopsychologist to help them interpret what’s going on with the robots. This is really quite brilliant and is one of my favorite aspects of the book.
Unfortunately, the book can read a bit sexist sometimes, in spite of having a female protagonist through quite a bit of the book. (The robopsychologist is a woman). The book was first published in 1950, though, so when you think about the time period, the sexism is pretty minor, especially compared to having a female worldwide expert on robopsychology. The main time sexism comes up is when the leader of Europe is a woman and says some self-deprecating things about difficulty leading because she’s a woman. Yes, there is older scifi that avoids sexism pretty much entirely, but I am able to give this instance a bit of a pass considering the other strong portrayal of a woman in a leadership role. But be aware that at least one cringe-inducing sexist conversation does occur.
Overall, this piece of classic scifi stands the test of time extraordinarily well. Its film adaptations do not do it proper service at all. Come to this book expecting a collection of short stories exploring robopsychology, not an action flick about killer robots. Recommended to scifi fans.
4 out of 5 stars
Source: Harvard Books
Book Review: Chop Suey: A Cultural History of Chinese Food in the United States by Andrew Coe (Bottom of TBR Pile Challenge)
Summary:
American Chinese food is different from Chinese Chinese food. This is a well-known fact. Coe tells the history of how Chinese food came to America and changed and adapted to the cuisine we know today. Along the way, some of the stories of Chinese immigrants to America and Chinese-Americans are told as well.
Review:
I love food, and I love history, so a book telling the history of a specific cuisine totally appealed to me. Unfortunately, this book missed the mark for what could have been an enticing history of American style Chinese food. Instead, it gets hung up in the early history of both Chinese food in China and Chinese food in America in the 1800s then hops, skips, and jumps over how it changed through the 1900s up to present. While this information is interesting, it is not the history of American Chinese food it is presented as.
The main issue with the book is it spends almost 1/4 of its time exploring the history of Chinese food in China. While I learned some interesting facts, such as that tofu was invented in the Han Dynasty (page 80), this information is not necessary to convey how Chinese food came to America and changed. A much briefer introduction to where Chinese food was at before coming to America would have sufficed. The best part of the book is when it discusses Chinese food in America in the 1800s and explores how US-born Americans’ embracing of Chinese food or not depended on many factors such as the current rates of xenophobia, job markets, and prices. Viewing the history of the American west coast through the perspective of Chinese immigration and Chinese restaurants was truly fascinating. One of the more fascinating things that I learned in this section was a detail of the history of the racist perception of Asian men as not masculine. In that time period, when Chinese immigrants were competing with white Americans and Irish immigrants for railroad and other jobs, the backlash was that since Chinese men “didn’t need” to eat meat to work long hours they could afford to take a lower rate of pay. Articles attacked the Chinese diet as a sign that Chinese men are less masculine since they “don’t need” meat the way white American and Irish-American men do. One article title from this time period cited in the book is “Some Reasons for Chinese Exclusion. Meat vs. Rice. American Manhood against Asiatic Coolieism. Which Shall Survive?” by Samuel Gompers (page 141). As a vegetarian, I found it fascinating that the sexist perception of a less meat-centric diet (the Chinese did indeed eat meat, just less than American men), has both such a far-reaching history and was used to fuel xenophobia and racism against immigrant workers. It is clear to me after reading this that a large part of the work for vegetarians is to get rid of the faulty correlation between meat and masculinity. I could see fixing this having other positive outcomes as well, such as fighting against misperceptions of the masculinity of other cultures.
Unfortunately, the wonderful details found in the chapters on the 1800s gradually cease to exist as the book moves up through time. While the 1920s get some special attention, such as touching on the fact that Chinese restaurants survived Prohibition well because they had never served alcohol anyway (page 189), slowly these details fall away until we get nothing but the bare bones of how Chinese restaurants functioned and interacted with American history in the rest of the 20th century up to present. There is even one rather aggravating long aside exploring President Nixon’s visit to China. While his visit to China definitely gave a resurgence of interest in Chinese food in the US, it was again unnecessary to give such incredible details on Nixon’s visit. It could have been simply stated, instead, that Nixon visited China, bringing Chinese food to the forefront of American thought again and giving a resurgence of interest in Chinese cuisine. The book has a tendency to lollygag on topics that are not actually what the book is supposed to be about. While these topics can be interesting and Coe explores them well, they are not what the book supposedly is about. It would be better to present the book with a different title or edit the focus back to simply Chinese-American cuisine.
One other factor that made me enjoy the book less is that Coe shows a clear bias toward Chinese culture. There is nothing wrong with enjoying Chinese culture, but Coe says some things that if he had said them in reverse would be considered completely unacceptable to say. He frequently presents the Chinese people as more civilized, their way of doing things as more logical and simply better, and even scoffs at the level of advancement of European countries compared to China at one point (page 94). Lack of bias and simply presenting the facts is the strength of historical nonfiction works. It would have been nice to see that level of professionalism in this book, regardless of Coe’s personal views.
Overall then, while I learned some new facts about both Chinese-American cuisine and Chinese-American history, the book wanders significantly through Chinese history and Chinese cuisine as well. Interesting, but not what the title implies the book is about. Coe also shows some bias that should not be present in a history book. These are easily skimmed over, however, and thankfully do not come up very often. Recommended to those with an interest in both Chinese-American and Chinese history in addition to the history of American style Chinese cuisine, as all three are covered rather equally.
3 out of 5 stars
Source: Amazon
Book Review: The Department of Magic by Rod Kierkegaard, Jr.
Summary:
Di Angelo and Farah thought they were getting a typical, boring DC government job. But it turns out they have been assigned to the Department of Magic, and whether they like it or not, their horogaunt boss is having them face down demons, shifters, and more in repeated robberies to gather the pieces of George Washington in the hopes to bring him back to life to fight off the ancient Mexican gods who were stirred out of slumber by all the talk of the ancient Mayan prophecy of the end of the world in 2012.
Review:
I have not hated a book this much since finishing Anne Rice’s The Wolf Gift in February (review). On the plus side, this means you all get to enjoy an angry Amanda take-down style review. On the minus side, I had to suffer through this horrible thing. But this is what book reviewers do. We suffer through things and tell you about them so you don’t have to.
This book has a triple-whammy of awful. It has so many grammar and spelling mistakes that I can’t believe it ever made it through an editor (oh but it did!). The plot is confusing and ill-paced. Finally, and most importantly, it is so prejudiced I had to double-check that this wasn’t a pen-name for Ann Coulter. Too often I’ve made these assertions in the past but been unable to truly show them to you since it was a library book or some such. Enter: the kindle. But first let me quickly explain the plot/structure/pacing issues.
So Farah and Di Angelo aka Rocky are hired by this mysterious department in the US government. There is a lot that makes zero sense about the department. First, it appears to only consist of Rocky, Farah, and their boss Crawley (a horogaunt). Anyone who has worked in the US government *raises hand* knows that they do not underhire. They overhire. So this just makes the author look like he knows nothing about government.
Throughout the book, Farah and Rocky have this problem of carrying out covert operations for the department and almost getting arrested and wanted for murder and blah blah blah. Um, excuse me. This is the motherfuckin government. If they want George Washington’s sword they “borrow” it. If they can’t “borrow” it, they send in government agents and protect them from prosecution because, I reiterate, this is the motherfuckin government. A department that supposedly exists to keep America aligned with the goddess America and protected from demons and vampires and what-have-you that no one else knows about would probably be a Big Deal on the inside. So this plot point makes no sense.
Then there’s the pacing issues. The pacing goes up and down and up and down and the reader keeps prepping for a climax only to get none. I think you see the analogy I am going for here. And it sucks.
Moving right along, let’s get to just a few of the more egregious grammar, spelling, and other writing I caught in this *laughs hysterically* edited book.
rung off. (location 385)
Americans hang up. No one in this book is British. The narrator is not British. This is stupid.
He could feel her hot breath, fetid as a zoo animal’s gorged on fresh meat. (location 752)
This is a bad analogy, as any high school student can tell you, because the vast majority of people don’t KNOW what a zoo animal’s breath smells like. An analogy is supposed to help a reader connect an unknown thing to a known thing.
Kabbala (location 858)
This is not how you spell Kabbalah.
Then she pulled both of their caps off and bit him on the mouth. (location 1889)
No, this is not a scene between one of our heroes and a demon. This is supposed to be Farah romantically kissing Rocky. Was that the image you got from that? Didn’t think so.
The most terrifying form devils or demons can take. No one has lived to describe them. (location 1889)
This comes from the federal book on beasts and demons that our heroes read and start every chapter with an excerpt from. Question. If no one has ever lived to describe these demons then a) how do you know they exist and b) how the hell are you describing them in this book?!
Her face was beautiful, appearing radiantly soft-cheeked and virginal in one instant, a rotting grinning skull, a death-mask in the next. (location 3922)
If you are writing a sentence comparing something from one instant to the next, you can’t compare three things! Two. Two is your limit.
Ok, but obviously I wouldn’t hate a book this hard for bad plot and some (ok a lot of) writing problems. I’d give advice and encouragement. The hating on the book comes from the prejudice hitting me left and right. It was like running the obstacle course in Wipe-Out! I can’t and won’t support or recommend a book to someone else as not for me but maybe for them when it’s this painfully prejudiced throughout. Let’s begin, shall we?
Look, hon, you know you’ve got zero will-power. Honestly you’re like a lesbian. You go out with this guy a couple times, you’ll move in together on your third date. I see him all day, every day. I don’t want him underfoot when I come home too. Plus he’s too poor for you. (location 741)
Oh look! Homophobia! The sad part is you can tell that Kierkegaard thinks he’s being funny when he’s just flat-out offensive. To top off this delightful bit of dialogue, we’ve got classism. And I feel I should mention the man they are talking about is an Iraq War vet. But he’s poor. And clearly that is what matters in dating. Homophobia is not quite this blatant throughout the rest of the book, although we do have a *delightful* scene in which Bobbi (a girl) shows up to seduce Rocky, who she thinks is gay, since Farah spread a rumor that Rocky is gay to keep her fiancee from being upset that she’s working with a man. Yeah. That happened.
There is more blatant classism, though.
Baltimore is the blue-collar ugly step-sister of the white-collar Washington DC metropolitan area. (location 1250)
Noooo, comparing hardworking people with blue collar jobs to the ugly stepsisters in Cinderella is not offensive at all.
*sighs*
Also, pretty much every demon “disguises” themself as a homeless person. This means almost every homeless person our heroes run into is a demon. Seriously.
And what about women?
The reason I’m so into Nineteenth Century romantic literature, I guess, is because I love anything that reminds me of growing up with my mom and my sisters and gets me inside women’s heads. (location 1214)
Yes! Let’s just go ahead and say that Jane fucking Austen represents every woman’s head everywhere in the 21st century. That’s just awesome.
Speaking of women, I will say this. Farah is the more talented of the duo in climbing, which is nice. However, she and every other woman are presented as shallow and obsessed with fashion. Also, a baby is born, and Farah turns overnight into a doting mother-figure when she was a sorority-sister type girl mere hours before. Meanwhile, the actual mother fails at parenting, and the only explanation for this utter lack of ability with babies is that she is a vampire.
I’m not sure what the precise word is for it….xenophobia perhaps? But Kierkegaard makes it abundantly clear that only Protestants have the whole religion thing right.
White or “good” magic, he told her, already had a name. It was called “prayer.” And even prayer, unless directly addressed to God the Creator, is in essence a Luciferian transaction, because it relies on the intercession of intermediaries, such as saints or boddhis, and inevitably involved some sort of quid pro quo. (location 1545)
Speaking of religion, no hateful book would be complete without some anti-semitism tossed in there, would it?
Freemasons–A Lucifer-worshipping conspiracy cult dedicated to Zionist one-world government, heirs of the Christ-murdering Pharisees and the Knights Templar. (location 1596)
Christ. Murdering. Pharisees. He actually went there. And not only are they the Christ killers but! They also secretly run the world through a Satan-worshipping secret organization!
I would have thrown the book across the room at this point, but it was on my kindle, and I love my kindle.
And finally. To round it all out. We’ve got some good, old-fashioned American racism.
First we have the black man who spoke entirely normally until this sentence:
You got any questions you need to axe me, you know where I live. (location 1193)
Then we have the Asian-American man who can’t pronounce his own name:
There they consecutively picked up a squat red-faced Asian named Robert, which he pronounced as “Robot,” and a noisy and vituperative older black man in a water-sodden daishiki named Walkie-Talkie. (location 3225)
Beyond these blatant examples there’s the fact that every person of color is either actually a demon in disguise or working for the seedy underground of some sort of organization. The exception to this is Farah, who is Lebanese-American, but Kierkegaard takes extreme care to point out that she is NOT Muslim. She’s one of the Christian Lebanese-Americans. She also basically acts just like a white sorority girl but with an exotic look!!
See? See? I just. *sighs* The only people who might not be horribly offended by this book are the type of people I don’t really want to recommend books to anyway, except to be like “Here, read this book that might make you realize what a douchebag you are being, like say some classics of black literature or books on how hard it is to be gay in an evangelical family or maybe read about the real history of the Bible.” You see my point.
The only people who would enjoy this book are people who have this same prejudiced world-view against basically everyone who isn’t a white, straight, Protestant, American male. So, I guess, if that’s you, have at it? But it’s riddled with spelling, grammar, and plot problems, so you won’t enjoy it anyway. So hah.
1 out of 5 stars
Source: Netgalley
Book Review: To ‘Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors After the Civil War by Tera W. Hunter (The Real Help Reading Project)
Summary:
Hunter examines the lives of southern black women, particularly southern domestic workers, by narrowing her focus in on the development of the city of Atlanta after the Civil War. Since many ex-slaves moved to Atlanta and then migrated again north during the Great Migration decades later, this makes for an excellent focal point for the topic. By examining black women’s lives in Atlanta both in and out of their employer’s homes, she is able to dissect the roles of race, class, and gender in the elite’s attempts to maintain dominance in America.
Review:
I’ve said throughout the project that the nonfiction books have come up a bit short for me. Although they’ve contained valuable information, they haven’t been the most readable. Nonfiction can tell a story too, and Hunter does exactly that. She explores so much more than just the women’s lives in relation to their employers. Atlanta truly comes to life as we see the women commute to work via bicycle so as to avoid racist trolley lines and kick up their heels on the interracial Decatur Street after dark. We also get to see the empowering role of secret societies in black women’s lives, as well as reclamation of performing in black face and the terrifying resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan. It is impossible not to be moved and outraged by the tale of these women’s struggles. The book addresses three issues: classism, racism, and sexism.
In spite of Americans being told repeatedly that the American Dream is available to all if you work hard enough, Hunter quickly shows how the poor are fighting a losing battle and on top of it are demonized by the wealthy. For instance, the use of debt to keep the poor enslaved:
Poor women often borrowed money in meager amounts, less than one dollar at a time, amassed running accounts for several months or years, and repaid ever-accumulating interest in small installments. Many moneylenders were usurious. It was common for borrowers to pay 250 to 3500 percent interest on small sums, which exacerbated poverty with interminable debt. Fannie Holman, a washerwoman, borrowed between $60 and $90 over a two- or three-year period. Though she would repay over $1,000, the creditor applied it to defray the interest but not the principal of the loan. (page 134)
Similarly, upper class employers’ attempts to control every aspect of their employee’s lives, claiming a right over their bodies:
Dance halls were a menace, declared Proctor, because “the servant class tried to work all day and dance all night.” He warned employers that household laborers would not perform well if they used their leisure unproductively—dancing instead of resting in preparation for the next day of work. (page 179)
Hunter via maps and clear explanations demonstrates how the wealthy acquired the highest land in Atlanta most conveniently near shopping and such, while the poor and blacks were forced into the lowest land that, in addition, sewage was dumped into. These conditions combined with the poor housing provided by slumlords made a perfect scenario for disease, and yet the poor were blamed for the outbreak of tuberculosis in the city and even accused of exposing wealthy whites to it:
Tuberculosis signified more than a purely physiological condition. The disease became a medium for “framing” tensions in labor and race relations, with the rhetoric cloaked in scientific and medical legitimacy. (page 187)
Of course, the fact that black workers were poor was no coincidence. The entire city conspired since the Civil War to make black Americans poor and keep them that way. The wealthy whites, and in a lot of cases the poor whites, wanted black people out of sight and out of mind unless they were actively in service to them
Jim Crow and domestic labor thus represented contradictory desires among urban whites striving to distance themselves from an “inferior race,” but dependent on the very same people they despised to perform the most intimate labor in their homes. (page 105)
Segregation was not a system imposed entirely from above; it also helped to advance the interests of white workers, who were able to gain status from their position in the social hierarchy above all blacks. (page 119)
Jim Crow parks were designed not simply to put white urbanites closer to nature, but also to give them moments of reprieve and distance from blacks in order to channel racial friction in “wholesome” directions. (page 147)
Of course, on top of having their fight for the right over their own bodies and lives depicted by the ruling white class as them being uppity servants and uppity blacks, women had the additional injustice of having their femininity and womanhood called into question.
Like the defiant women in Galveston, strikers in Atlanta showed little attachment to prevailing middle-class conventions of femininity. As they did on other occasions, working-class women used street fights to settle disputes that jeopardized their unity and engaged in militant resistance. (page 89)
The moral implications of women consuming intoxicating substances troubled many middle-class blacks and whites. Women not only evaded laws prohibiting them from entering saloons, they frequented bar room “annexes,” they drank alcohol in alleys and streets, and they sold beer from their homes. (page 165)
I usually don’t quote this much, but the whole book is just so good. The three-way injustices faced by black working class women is palpable throughout. Facing one alone would be daunting enough, but facing three feels terrifyingly insurmountable even just reading about it, let alone living it. And yet some black domestic workers did pull through in spite of the odds and do great things. Women like Carrie Steele.
Former slave Carrie Steele, a stewardess and cook at the train station, volunteered her time as a probation officer for children in trouble with the law. This experience and her childhood as an orphan inspired her to start an orphanage in 1890. She believed that many of the children she came in contact with had fallen on hard times because they had no families to take care of them. Steele raised money to purchase four acres of land and the orphans’ first home by selling her own house, writing and selling her autobiography, and soliciting funds from generous individuals, black and white. By 1898 the Steele orphanage consisted of a brick building, hospital, and schoolhouse, and more than two hundred children had passed through its portals since its founding. (page 142)
Inspirational. Humbling. Awe-inspiring. Words that describe both Carrie Steele’s life and the book as a whole. Read it.
Source: Public Library
Discussion Questions:
- Why do you think Decatur Street was allowed to continue in spite of being the only known location in Atlanta where the races mingled?
- Hunter values the dance halls for the role of letting off steam and embracing black culture they played in black Americans’ lives. How do you feel about them?
- In spite of viewing black Americans as “unclean,” white Atlantans persisted in sending their laundry out to black homes to be washed. Why do you think people were able to hold onto such illogical dichotomies?
- Given the depiction of of everything stacked against them, do you view drug dealers, bootleggers, prostitutes, etc… differently now than you did before?
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This work by Amanda Nevius is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
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