Bill Chaisson (Author of Of a Feather)

Bill Chaisson rated a book really liked it Fluke: Or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings by Christopher Moore (Goodreads Author)	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
Christopher Moore has an oddly British sense of humor for an American, and that is all right with me. Fluke begins as an academic farce without much in the way of science fiction elements until about a third of the way into the story. In a short afte ...more
Feb 17, 2026 11:39AM · like · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of Fluke by Christopher Moore. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — Fluke by Christopher Moore <iframe sandbox id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
Bill Chaisson is currently reading The Story of Earth: The First 4.5 Billion Years, from Stardust to Living Planet by Robert M. Hazen	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
Feb 16, 2026 03:07PM · like · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of The Story of Earth by Robert M. Hazen. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — The Story of Earth by Robert M. Hazen <iframe sandbox id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
Bill Chaisson rated a book really liked it Fluke: Or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings by Christopher Moore (Goodreads Author)	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
Christopher Moore has an oddly British sense of humor for an American, and that is all right with me. Fluke begins as an academic farce without much in the way of science fiction elements until about a third of the way into the story. In a short afte ...more
Feb 16, 2026 02:18PM · like · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of Fluke by Christopher Moore. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — Fluke by Christopher Moore <iframe sandbox id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
Bill Chaisson rated a book liked it Crazy Rich Asians (Crazy Rich Asians, #1) by Kevin Kwan (Goodreads Author)	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
What a capably plotted and often funny book to be written in such uneven prose. Even though the book is over 500 pages long, it goes quickly because Kevin Kwan is adept at pacing and comes up with some outrageous plot twists. It feels strange to be b ...more
Feb 13, 2026 09:05PM · like · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of Crazy Rich Asians by Kevin Kwan. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — Crazy Rich Asians by Kevin Kwan <iframe sandbox id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
Bill Chaisson is currently reading Fluke: Or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings by Christopher Moore (Goodreads Author)	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
Feb 08, 2026 02:20PM · like · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of Fluke by Christopher Moore. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — Fluke by Christopher Moore <iframe sandbox id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
Bill Chaisson rated a book liked it Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
It took me a long time to read this book. I put it down and picked it up again repeatedly. I have no doubt that it is an important book and I can't complain that the prose is "too academic," which is to say prolix and jargon-ridden, because it isn't. ...more
Feb 08, 2026 09:35AM · like · see review
Bill Chaisson rated a book really liked it Equal Rites (Discworld, #3; Witches, #1) by Terry Pratchett	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
Terry Pratchett must have been a very sweet man. At least you're given that impression by his Discworld books. These books are by most measures a satire of the fantasy genre and yet it is a satire of the gentlest kind. Even when he decides to be blat ...more
Feb 01, 2026 03:12PM · like · see review
Bill Chaisson rated a book it was amazing The Guts by Roddy Doyle	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
The Guts is deceptive. On the surface it is one long chuckle, even though it is about a middle-aged Jimmy Rabbitte, he of The Commitments, struggling with cancer of the bowel. But it's funny because Jimmy is still a rascal, a talker, a joker, a man j ...more
Jan 25, 2026 06:43PM · like · see review
Bill Chaisson rated a book really liked it The Gales of November: The Untold Story of the Edmund Fitzgerald by John U. Bacon	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
This is an odd book in the sense that it is written like a horror story, but it about a tragedy. The voyages of the ore freighters from the west end of Lake Superior to west end of Lake Erie take three days. The Edmund Fitzgerald completed less than ...more
Jan 22, 2026 06:55AM · like · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of The Gales of November by John U. Bacon. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — The Gales of November by John U. Bacon <iframe sandbox id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
Bill Chaisson rated a book really liked it Ancillary Justice (Imperial Radch, #1) by Ann Leckie (Goodreads Author)	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
Ann Leckie has a lot on her mind. The world of the Radch is complex and, frankly, progressive and reactionary at the same time. Through the first 50 pages or so of Ancillary Justice you just have to trust her as she baffles you with pronouns, places, ...more
Jan 13, 2026 12:34PM · like · see review

Bill Chaisson rated a book really liked it

Fluke: Or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings
by Christopher Moore (Goodreads Author)

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Christopher Moore has an oddly British sense of humor for an American, and that is all right with me. Fluke begins as an academic farce without much in the way of science fiction elements until about a third of the way into the story. In a short afte Christopher Moore has an oddly British sense of humor for an American, and that is all right with me. Fluke begins as an academic farce without much in the way of science fiction elements until about a third of the way into the story. In a short afterword in which he tries to clarify what is fact and what is fiction as regards the science in the book, Moore claims that the neurosis and unhealthy competition among the whale researchers at Lahaina is entirely from his imagination, but I don't believe him. Pretty much all the scientists that I know are either neurotic, competitive or both.

Most of the novel takes place on Maui and Moore is both funny and convincing in his descriptions of both the place, the people who live there, and the people who visit. Much of the comedy is derived from interactions among the scientists, the sponsors of the science—which range from the U.S. Navy to an eccentric old woman who lives on the rim of the volcano—the black-coral divers, surfers, and tourists.

The four main characters are members of the research team led by Nate Quinn, a fiftysomething cetacean biologist. His righthand man is Clay Demodocus, an underwater photographer and videographer. They hire Amy Earhart as a research assistant without checking her references, which proves to complicate their lives. Finally, Kona—who has a long fake Hawaiian name but is really Prescott Applebaum from New Jersey—is a stoner surfer who is for some reason hired as a second research assistant.

Moore builds a believable camaraderie among these people, centering it on the friendship between Nate and Clay and growing the roles of Amy and Kona at a reasonable rate. Amy is attractive and smart, while Kona is attractive and initially just stoned. While Amy occasionally uses turns of phrase that are nearly a hundred years old, Kona speaks in an annoying mixture of Rastafarian, surfer slang, and stoner imagery. Nate is relatively recently divorced from his third wife, who— uncomfortably—is a fellow cetacean biologist in Lahaina and now a lesbian. He is, of course, falling for Amy but managing to preserve his professional reserve. Clay is in long-term relationship with Clair, a local schoolteacher who is also a real pistol.

It is difficult to write anything about the plot because so much of the charm of this book is derived from the surprises that Moore expertly foreshadows and then reveals with enough of a twist to make them funny and enough originality for the reader to not see exactly what's coming next until it happens.

In terms of a theme, Moore is concerned about the tension between genes and memes. While evolution proceeds through the slow modification of genomes, culture evolves through the rapid transmission of information via language and imagery. Much rides on the fact that whales, the ancestors of which evolved on land, were the first intelligent biota to return to the oceans and begin to build and maintain a culture through memes via their complex songs. This is a wonderful conceit, and Moore takes it one step further by having Nate discover that the killing of whales is a further development to which the protector of all life does not take kindly. The form of this protector is a pretty original part of the plot.

Plot aside, Moore is worth reading for his take on human nature. Nate Quinn is a complicated man with complicated thoughts and emotions. Moore gets a lot of laughs out of letting the reader know Nate's thoughts before he says something. Part of Nate's charm is that he often says exactly what he is thinking.

This book was published in 2002, now quite a long time ago in the history of public relations between (among) the sexes. Moore is fairly progressive on this topic, although he doesn't quite pass the Bechdel test, and it is at least not embarrassing to read about Nate's attraction to Amy or hers to him, not to mention Clay and Clair's affection for one another. The author does however take a couple potshots at militant lesbianism.

One of the more enjoyable characters in the book is Kona. A complete waste case when he is first brought on board, he turns out to have the kind of skills that you would expect in not just an upper middle-class guy from New Jersey but also the rather holist view of reality enjoyed by a stoner surfer in a roomful of biologists a little more wed to reductionism. ...more

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The Story of Earth: The First 4.5 Billion Years, from Stardust to Living Planet
by Robert M. Hazen

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Fluke: Or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings
by Christopher Moore (Goodreads Author)

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Christopher Moore has an oddly British sense of humor for an American, and that is all right with me. Fluke begins as an academic farce without much in the way of science fiction elements until about a third of the way into the story. In a short afte Christopher Moore has an oddly British sense of humor for an American, and that is all right with me. Fluke begins as an academic farce without much in the way of science fiction elements until about a third of the way into the story. In a short afterword in which he tries to clarify what is fact and what is fiction as regards the science in the book, Moore claims that the neurosis and unhealthy competition among the whale researchers at Lahaina is entirely from his imagination, but I don't believe him. Pretty much all the scientists that I know are either neurotic, competitive or both.

Most of the novel takes place on Maui and Moore is both funny and convincing in his descriptions of both the place, the people who live there, and the people who visit. Much of the comedy is derived from interactions among the scientists, the sponsors of the science—which range from the U.S. Navy to an eccentric old woman who lives on the rim of the volcano—the black-coral divers, surfers, and tourists.

The four main characters are members of the research team led by Nate Quinn, a fiftysomething cetacean biologist. His righthand man is Clay Demodocus, an underwater photographer and videographer. They hire Amy Earhart as a research assistant without checking her references, which proves to complicate their lives. Finally, Kona—who has a long fake Hawaiian name but is really Prescott Applebaum from New Jersey—is a stoner surfer who is for some reason hired as a second research assistant.

Moore builds a believable camaraderie among these people, centering it on the friendship between Nate and Clay and growing the roles of Amy and Kona at a reasonable rate. Amy is attractive and smart, while Kona is attractive and initially just stoned. While Amy occasionally uses turns of phrase that are nearly a hundred years old, Kona speaks in an annoying mixture of Rastafarian, surfer slang, and stoner imagery. Nate is relatively recently divorced from his third wife, who— uncomfortably—is a fellow cetacean biologist in Lahaina and now a lesbian. He is, of course, falling for Amy but managing to preserve his professional reserve. Clay is in long-term relationship with Clair, a local schoolteacher who is also a real pistol.

It is difficult to write anything about the plot because so much of the charm of this book is derived from the surprises that Moore expertly foreshadows and then reveals with enough of a twist to make them funny and enough originality for the reader to not see exactly what's coming next until it happens.

In terms of a theme, Moore is concerned about the tension between genes and memes. While evolution proceeds through the slow modification of genomes, culture evolves through the rapid transmission of information via language and imagery. Much rides on the fact that whales, the ancestors of which evolved on land, were the first intelligent biota to return to the oceans and begin to build and maintain a culture through memes via their complex songs. This is a wonderful conceit, and Moore takes it one step further by having Nate discover that the killing of whales is a further development to which the protector of all life does not take kindly. The form of this protector is a pretty original part of the plot.

Plot aside, Moore is worth reading for his take on human nature. Nate Quinn is a complicated man with complicated thoughts and emotions. Moore gets a lot of laughs out of letting the reader know Nate's thoughts before he says something. Part of Nate's charm is that he often says exactly what he is thinking.

This book was published in 2002, now quite a long time ago in the history of public relations between (among) the sexes. Moore is fairly progressive on this topic, although he doesn't quite pass the Bechdel test, and it is at least not embarrassing to read about Nate's attraction to Amy or hers to him, not to mention Clay and Clair's affection for one another. The author does however take a couple potshots at militant lesbianism.

One of the more enjoyable characters in the book is Kona. A complete waste case when he is first brought on board, he turns out to have the kind of skills that you would expect in not just an upper middle-class guy from New Jersey but also the rather holist view of reality enjoyed by a stoner surfer in a roomful of biologists a little more wed to reductionism. ...more

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Crazy Rich Asians (Crazy Rich Asians, #1)
by Kevin Kwan (Goodreads Author)

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What a capably plotted and often funny book to be written in such uneven prose. Even though the book is over 500 pages long, it goes quickly because Kevin Kwan is adept at pacing and comes up with some outrageous plot twists. It feels strange to be b What a capably plotted and often funny book to be written in such uneven prose. Even though the book is over 500 pages long, it goes quickly because Kevin Kwan is adept at pacing and comes up with some outrageous plot twists. It feels strange to be breezing along through a detailed description of a place, a person, or a situation and then to be stopped dead by some pedestrian dialog that needs to be explained with "Colin pleaded" or "Wye Mun huffed."

Kwan lived in Singapore only until about age 11 and these characters are more inspired by his father's memories than his own. Still, I don't doubt they are accurate and Kwan's attitude toward his "crazy rich Asians" is somewhat ambivalent. He drops dozens of designer label names per paragraph, most of which meant nothing to me, but seem to mean something to him, even though most of the people doing the dropping are quite awful. Awful to each other. More awful to people they look down on. And frankly awful to the planet in their enormous conspicuous consumption habits.

The center of the story is ostensibly Nick and Rachel. Nick is a "crazy rich Asian" who is in denial about it and Rachel is an American-Chinese raised in more humble circumstances. They journey to Singapore to attend the wedding of Nick's best friend Colin, and Nick does not warn Rachel in any way about what he is plunging her into. Even before she arrives she is assumed to be a gold-digger and is treated horribly by several of the women in Nick's extended family.

Nick, his cousin Astrid and a few other family members are in the process of trying to be decent normal people, but Kwan is adept at demonstrating that they have a lot to learn. Their insulated and privileged upbringing has distorted their ideas about what constitutes a normal life and they have little idea what normal people think of them and the way they live.

This might have been a better book if it was 300 pages long instead of 500 and the plot remained focused on Nick and Rachel. Instead, Kwan develops a subplot about Astrid's marriage and devotes whole chapters to spending time with members of Nick's family who are more caricatures than characters. We also go along on a bachelor party expedition that again simply shows how out of touch with reality these people are.

I finished Crazy Rich Asians not really knowing what I had learned about crazy rich Asians. How much of this is exaggeration for comic effect and how much of it is actual reporting. I am afraid that I didn't really get a clear picture of what Singapore is actually like because we spend a lot of time just moving from home to hotel to mansion to resort and don't get a feeling for the place in a coherent way. Maybe this doesn't matter, since the book is really a drawing room comedy, so having it unfold at a series of dinners, parties, and shopping trips may be sort of the point.

As much as these people talk about having a sense of place, they don't really spend much time outside of their private world. And one gets the feeling that world is the same whether it is in Paris, London, New York, Singapore or Hong Kong. And again, Kwan is ambivalent about the quality of this world. He seems fascinated by it, sometimes morbidly and sometimes rather innocently. I was bored to tears by it. But the book is redeemed by Rachel's integrity. I rather wished Kwan let you spend more time with her and dwelled less on a bunch of deluded idiots whom he seemed to dislike and who have very little interesting to say, so said it over and over in marginally different ways. ...more

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Fluke: Or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings
by Christopher Moore (Goodreads Author)

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Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
by Jared Diamond

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It took me a long time to read this book. I put it down and picked it up again repeatedly. I have no doubt that it is an important book and I can't complain that the prose is "too academic," which is to say prolix and jargon-ridden, because it isn't. It took me a long time to read this book. I put it down and picked it up again repeatedly. I have no doubt that it is an important book and I can't complain that the prose is "too academic," which is to say prolix and jargon-ridden, because it isn't. Jared Diamond is a writer of clear, unadorned English. My chief complaint is the programmatic nature of his writing; the book is filled with phrases like "as I outlined in the previous chapter" and "as we shall see later in this chapter." This and the stunning amount of repetition got to me and dimmed my appreciation of. his message.

His message is that physical geography and ecology are more important to the evolution of human society than the supposedly varying nature of the people that comprise a society. Generally speaking, he is supplying an antidote to racism, a very elaborate and well reasoned one. I strongly suspect that the name Guns, Germs & Steel was supplied by an editor because what the book is really about is food production and germs, which doesn't have the same alliterative frisson nor does it create a compelling image. Nevertheless, that is the actual crux of his argument/thesis.

The entire premise of Guns, Germs & Steel is supposedly based on a question that a New Guinean colleague of Diamond's asked, "Why did Europeans take over our country instead of we New Guineans taking over your country?" In his Part 1 Diamond runs through three examples of societies wherein geography had a clear influence on how history played out. Then, in Part 2 he dives into food production. The so-called "Neolithic revolution" did not come to all human societies. While a few adopted agriculture, the lion's share of them remained hunter-gatherers for much of the last 12,000 years.

Diamond takes one factor at a time. He looks at the wild plants that were available and their potential for being domesticated. He looks at the wild animals and judges them by the same criteria. He looks at geography: rainfall, seasonality, scale of barriers to dispersal. He considers region after region and essentially scores them with respect to their potential for developing a more complex society, one where not everyone has to be concerned with looking for food all the time.

Part 3 was most surprising to me. I didn't know that so many diseases originated in other species and then jumped to humans because of our continued and closed proximity to said animals. That is, agricultural societies tend to be disease-ridden but also the people in them tend to develop resistance to said diseases. When these people from more complex socieities encounter people from less complex socieites with few or no domestic animals, they tend to wreak havoc on them with their germs, even before the guns and steel are deployed.

Part 4 is a tour through the five inhabited continents. Diamond applies the criteria that he painstakingly introduced in Parts 2 and 3 to historical examples in "Greater Australia," East Asia, Polynesia, the Americas, and Africa. This is where the repetition gets a little irritating because he does not integrate the geographic and agricultural etc. factors together so much as present them all again in much the same words as we have already met them before. For people who have a hard time remembering details in non-fiction books, this will not be a demerit. I found myself reading topic sentences of paragraphs and muttering "yada, yada, yada" as I moved down the page.

Again, this does not take way from the importance of his message nor my belief that he is onto something. It is just that as a writer he is no John McPhee or Peter Matthiesen, which I acknowledge is a very high bar indeed. I have categorized Guns, Germs & Steel as a "science" book because Diamond, whose real job is to be an evolutionary biologist, makes the argument that history should be a science. He sees no reason why the techniques and strictures of the historical sciences should not be deployed by historians. He doesn't say it, but the entire book does nothing but do that for 400+ pages. ...more

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Equal Rites (Discworld, #3; Witches, #1)
by Terry Pratchett

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Terry Pratchett must have been a very sweet man. At least you're given that impression by his Discworld books. These books are by most measures a satire of the fantasy genre and yet it is a satire of the gentlest kind. Even when he decides to be blat Terry Pratchett must have been a very sweet man. At least you're given that impression by his Discworld books. These books are by most measures a satire of the fantasy genre and yet it is a satire of the gentlest kind. Even when he decides to be blatantly topical, in Equal Rites he address the topic of male chauvinism, Pratchett makes male privilege seem vaguely ridiculous rather than a savage assault on the other gender.

The story begins with a wizard, Drum Billet, reaching the end of his life and wishing to pass along his staff. He "blesses" the eighth "son" of an eighth son only to find out in his dying moments that the baby is a girl. So begins the saga of Eskarina, the girl who decided to become a wizard. She is instead placed under the tutelage of the local witch, Granny Weatherwax, who has little regard for wizards or their type of magic.

Pratchett is downright interesting in distinguishing witch magic versus wizard magic, using it basically as a synecdoche for the differences between how men and women approach the world. Witches feel the world is fine the way it is and use magic to help things move along in a natural way. Wizards are constantly changing the world and rather heedless about the collateral effects. There is more to it than that, but you get the idea.

Pratchett humor is very British. He is constantly deploying turns of phrases, expressions and conventional fantasy set-ups and turning them on their ear or examining them in an hilariously literal way. At one point Esk has a dream in which she is denied entry through a set of magical gates, which snigger at her when her magic fails to open them. Pratchett has her being more upset by the sniggering than by the demonic laughter that she expected to hear.

He also throws in little parables on the side of the main narrative that are downright absurdist, like the ants who live in the floors of the wizard university who, under the influence of the magic that pervades the place, have adopted tool-using and built an advanced civilization in the walls, which has discovered the secret of life. Unfortunately it is made of stolen sugar and is dissolved in a flood.

If this book has a weakness, it is that Pratchett can't seem to decide who he likes more, Esk or Granny. Because Esk is only 8 years old and Granny is an, erm, mature woman, the witch is easier to make interesting. Esk is required to be wise quite beyond her years in order to hold her own in this story. Granny, on the other hand, seems to grow younger and more relaxed as the narrative unfolds. Travel broadens the mind, they say, and in Granny's case it proves to be an effective chill pill too.

The universe of Discworld is a delight. Its physics make no sense as physics but they are wonderful as magic. Even the air is thicker because it is filled with magic, causing sunsets and sunrises to be long and beautiful. The geography expands as necessary, limited only by the circular edge of the world. The creatures that live there a mix of the familiar, the mythical and the entirely made up by the author. In other words, this is an immersive experience with its own consistent and coherent logic that is, incidentally, very silly. ...more

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The Guts
by Roddy Doyle

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The Guts is deceptive. On the surface it is one long chuckle, even though it is about a middle-aged Jimmy Rabbitte, he of The Commitments, struggling with cancer of the bowel. But it's funny because Jimmy is still a rascal, a talker, a joker, a man j The Guts is deceptive. On the surface it is one long chuckle, even though it is about a middle-aged Jimmy Rabbitte, he of The Commitments, struggling with cancer of the bowel. But it's funny because Jimmy is still a rascal, a talker, a joker, a man just bursting with ideas for making a pound while keeping his integrity intact. But beneath the surface Roddy Doyle is pondering the mystery of being a mortal human and there is nothing like a cancer scare to make you ask some hard questions. He does not really find that many answers.

Jimmy Rabbitte is not a saint. He is a good father to his four children, generally speaking. He loves his wife, but he does stray (blame it on being freaked out by the cancer and chemo). He is hard working, but he is not above subterfuge to make it all keep flying. In other words, he is a chip off the old block. (Jimmy Sr. is only a minor character in this Rabbitte tale.)

Doyle has a wonderful ear for the Irish vernacular of working-class Dublin and pages of this book consist solely of repartée between two or more parties and much of it consists of people giving each other shite. Which is delightful. I have read reviews by people who were upset by the coarse language. If you are that incontrovertibly bourgeois then don't read Roddy Doyle's Barrytown books. I spoke the American version of this patois right through my adolescence and can fall into it again at the drop of hat. Part of the point of these books is depicting improper people living lives that are as emotionally complex as those of proper people.

Jimmy Rabbitte is a very clever man but he is not a philosopher. Doyle is adroit at showing you how Jimmy struggles to think seriously about serious issues; he manages to get right up to the edge of them, teeter uncomfortably and fall back, having peered into the abyss, caught a glimpse of some truths, and then fallen back on his trusty black sense of humor. In other words, he is like most of us when faced with the possibility of death, with the certainty of death of an old friend, with the struggle to understand the complex love that he feels for his wife.

Jimmy is a doer more than a thinker. He mostly does good deeds. He reaches out to his long-lost brother Les to tell him about the hereditary cancer he's got. He reignites a friendship with one of the Commitments, who has terminal cancer. He drags his oldest son into a scheme to fabricate an Irish song ostensibly from 1932. His whole business model (cooked up with his wife Aoife) is based on helping the musicians of their youth make a few bucks in the present day. Jimmy's mere presence or having him intersect your life seems to improve it or at least make it more interesting. As Jimmy would say, "Good man." ...more

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The Gales of November: The Untold Story of the Edmund Fitzgerald
by John U. Bacon

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This is an odd book in the sense that it is written like a horror story, but it about a tragedy. The voyages of the ore freighters from the west end of Lake Superior to west end of Lake Erie take three days. The Edmund Fitzgerald completed less than This is an odd book in the sense that it is written like a horror story, but it about a tragedy. The voyages of the ore freighters from the west end of Lake Superior to west end of Lake Erie take three days. The Edmund Fitzgerald completed less than half of the voyage on its final run in November 1975. Gordon Lightfoot told the story in 5 minutes with about 500 words. John U. Bacon expands the story to make it into a book about an entire era of Great Lakes shipping.

The story is a tragedy because the wreck did not have to happen. The Edmund Fitzgerald was only 18 years old and these ships ordinarily haul ore for decades. The difficulty that Bacon has is to reconstruct the events leading up to the wreck while balancing inevitability with respect for the dead. He succeeds in treading this narrow path by making sure the reader knows as much as posssible about the context—historical, cultural, social, technological—in which this final voyage took place.

The horror story aspect of it all is in the way Bacon chooses to focus on parts of the history that don't seem particularly relevant at first. In a horror story you will always have a character who continually leaves his keys in the lock of the front door and has to go back and get them after he puts the groceries down on the kitchen counter. This, of course, always proves to be his undoing; this is how he gets killed.

For example, Bacon spends a few chapters describing how the Edmund Fitzgerald was built. The insurance company that built it ironically used untested methods—modular construction, welds instead of rivets—with the aim of making the ship, then the biggest ever built for the lakes, extremely flexible to withstand the punishment of the inevitable gales of November.

Another example: Bacon dwells on the personality of the captain, Ernest McSorley, who is of unimpeachable character, extremely capable, and a respected leader of men. But, like many men of his era he is macho, competitive, and leans more heavily on self-confidence than data. As a counter example, Bacon spends some time describing the personality of the captain of the ship that was making the voyage in tandem with the Edmund Fitzgerald in November 1975. While the captain of the Arthur M. Anderson is as capable as McSorley, he is also a braggart, which does not endear him to his men. Similarly, the captain of the Edmund Fitzgerald before McSorley was a showboat who liked to read to the people on shore through the PA as the ship traveled down the narrow St. Mary's River to Lake Huron.

This book captures the mood of the 1970s in the United States well. There is a clear generation gap between the older crew, most of whom are World War II vets and grew up during the Depression, and the young sailors, who were growing up during the most prosperous period in the history of humanity in a culture that emphasized "self-actualization." While these men had their differences, they also seem a world away from our contemporary society with their shared machismo, hard drinking, and complete comfort in living in an entirely male milieu.

John U. Bacon is a former journalist and he writes like one. The prose is a little pumped up with adjectives and the tone is often sentimental. He also structures his narrative as if expects his reader to remember perhaps 60 to 70% of what has gone before; he repeats information regularly. This can be annoying until you admit that you have> forgotten that fact or that relationship. There were 29 men aboard that night and Bacon tells all of their stories; it is a lot to keep track of. Especially since he includes the stories of people who could have been on board but, through various circumstances, were not. He uses these men as sources to reconstruct the shipboard culture of the Edmund Fitzgerald, specifically, and Great Lakes freighters in general.

The Edmund Fitzgerald went down when I was a sophomore in high school, but I don't remember hearing about it until Gordon Lightfoot's song hit the radio the following year. It was briefly a national news story—the AP picked it up and Newsweek ran a short piece—but it resonated in the Great Lakes region far longer. Bacon is very good at bringing you into the regional culture of the upper Midwest. These are stoic people and being on the lakes was a dangerous business. It the culture's very horror of drama and the awfulness of the event that make this such a dramatic story, and Bacon tells it well. ...more

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Ancillary Justice (Imperial Radch, #1)
by Ann Leckie (Goodreads Author)

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Ann Leckie has a lot on her mind. The world of the Radch is complex and, frankly, progressive and reactionary at the same time. Through the first 50 pages or so of Ancillary Justice you just have to trust her as she baffles you with pronouns, places, Ann Leckie has a lot on her mind. The world of the Radch is complex and, frankly, progressive and reactionary at the same time. Through the first 50 pages or so of Ancillary Justice you just have to trust her as she baffles you with pronouns, places, and chronology. Eventually though, you settle into a regular pattern of leaping back and forth 20 years between the events that set the protagonist in motion and the "present" during which she is pursing her form of justice.

The Radch is an empire that spans multiple galaxies and until 20 years before the time that the book opens, it was constantly expanding. It did this in part in order to hoover up resources, but also because the Radchaai believe themselves to be superior beings in charge of a superior civilization. I'm sure any resemblance to the wave of colonialism that began during the Age of Discovery on Earth is purely coincidental.

An interesting feature of Radchaai society is its complete disinterest in gender. Everyone is referred to as "she" and it is only when "Breq," as the protagonist calls himself through much of the book, encounters other cultures does it become apparent that there are at least two genders among the Radchaai (from other peoples' point of view). For example, the lost Radchaai captain that Breq rescues is referred to as "she" until the doctor who treats her wounds identifies her as most definitely a "he." If a character is never encountered during the narrative outside of Radch setting, then you just don't know what gender they are and it is implied that it just doesn't matter.

The other theme that Leckie explores is the idea of identity, principally the relationship between individuality and being part of something bigger than yourself. The "hero" of this book is an ancillary, which turns out to be something a bit off to the side of being human, and they operated in the past as an integrated part of the artificial intelligence that runs the Radchaai space ships. In the "present" they are singular and feeling the poorer for it. Leckie is eloquent on this topic and achieves this by essentially taking something that we usually think of metaphorically and presenting it as literal. An old science-fiction trick that is deployed to good effect here.

Another interesting aspect of Ancillary Justice is that although it has a space opera setting, the mood of the narrative is too personal, too interior, and too serious to actually feel like a space opera. Instead Leckie works hard to develop characters that we come to know very well and moreover we get to watch them grow and change. This is particularly true of Seivarden, the Radchaai captain that Breq rescues in the opening pages. Initially a spoiled, sullen drug addict, Seivarden faces down her/his demons and comes to be an ally rather than a burden.

Leckie's depiction of power--exercised by both individuals and the state--is fascinating. There is, it turns out, special peril involved in an empire in which the emperor has cloned herself in order to rule more effectively. The ranks of the Radch military are traditionally determined by social class, but during the 20 years depicted here that is breaking down and the consequences for the empire are not at all clear (this is a trilogy, after all), but the consequences for one officer and the ancillary who serves her are what drive the plot of Ancillary Justice.

The breadth is large in this debut novel. Leckie must have been mulling over this world for years. Alien empires remain at the periphery of the story in this volume, but they exert much influence on the plot. And by "alien" I mean "non-human" as the Radchaai are human albeit with a lot of software implants added. The aliens are depicted as quite completely "other," which I found refreshing, as in so much sci-fi they only seem to look different but act just like humans. And again there are political overtones here. The human Radchaai are driven to do quite awful things in response to unacknowledged fears of "the other." And yet Leckie never really condemns nor excuses them. She seems only interested in trying to explain how the human mind works. ...more

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