Nancy’s Blog

Unrelated to anything else — just good reads:

Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin. Mortenson is a climber who took on a mission to build first one, then more schools for the kids of the Muslim communities in Pakistan, beginning with a village that welcomed him when he staggered into town, lost, after an unsuccessful attempt at K2. He seems to succeed primarily through bravado and good intentions. He is helped in his conflicts with a local entrepreneur who seems intent on stealing the materials for the first school but the man’s own accountant, who believes in Mortenson’s school-building mission. At one point around the time Osama bin Laden flees to Afghanistan, he is kidnapped by partisans who clearly can’t decide whether or not to kill him — and end up by giving him money for his schools.

Engagingly told — the sort of man I’d never want to do business with, or travel with, but who nevertheless manages to charm everyone and, most of all, to succeed at his quixotic task.

The Company stories by Kage Baker: This is a series of seven science fiction novels and two collections of short stories that will keep fans going. The Company is a 24th century business that has found the secret to immortality. How do you test it? Well, you invent time travel, so you can go back in time, make someone immortal, then look for them in your own time. But of course it’s not that simple — becoming immortal requires major modifications which no one seems to want (though frankly it’s not clear why not).

What does a company do with immortality and time travel? It creates immortal operatives way back in time to acquire resources to make the Company wealthy in the 24th century. Say, hide a da Vinci notebook or a Vermeer painting someplace they can be “discovered” in the 24th century. They can’t change recorded history but they can work within it. (This is the biggest flaw in the premise: what’s recorded history?) Their top secret Time Concordance that tells them what happened when, so they have a record of what happened, including the things they made happen.

But of course it’s not that simple — that wouldn’t keep us reading through several books. We meet several immortal operatives and grow attached to them. We get reflections on what it is to be immortal: don’t get attached to anyone, because only your fellow-operatives won’t die on you; and do your work, because there’s no other meaning to life. Oh, and don’t get depressed, because if you can’t die you can’t commit suicide. (Though you can be dismembered and keep living — a process that reminds me of Goldie Hawn and Meryl Streep in Death Becomes Her.) For operatives back in prehistory, there are resorts where they can get a break from roughing it and enjoy “modern” conveniences.

And what’s it like to have the mission of serving mortals and saving what’s valuable in the world when you’re smarter and they just keep creating wars and pollution anyway? Surely the world might be better off without them?

Then there are scheming groups and threats to our protagonists. A love story that crosses centuries and books. And one major mystery.

I haven’t finished the series — I don’t know how she ties up all the story lines and resolves all the mysteries.

As newspapers, including the NY Times, reduce their book reviewing, it’s harder and harder to know which current books I want to read. So I’ve been meaning to do more reviews here of books that aren’t necessarily professionally relevant but just interesting.

And then this came in the weekly Cody’s announcement — a reading of a terrific book:

Thursday, July 19 JASON ROBERTS considers A SENSE OF THE WORLD: How a Blind Man Became History’s Greatest Traveler. Now in paperback – with additional material – A SENSE OF THE WORLD is biography at its best: an entrancing work that vividly depicts the trials and triumphs of a life lived in full. James Holman (1786-1857) achieved near-mythic status as “The Blind Traveler”, embarking on adventures that included sledging through Siberia, fighting the slave trade off the African coast, and blazing paths through the Australian outback. When much of the world remained unmapped, the man who ventured further than any other was not an expedition leader, or even a professional explorer. He was a blind man, traveling alone. 7:00 PM in the store

This is a fascinating book — amazing story and very well-told. Holman was a British naval officer in the War of 1812 who went blind –Roberts gives what medical explanation anyone can come up with. And then he traveled all over the world, literally, and alone. There were many instances in which his traveling companions gave up, finding the route too demanding or dangerous, and he went on. He didn’t have a lot of money (the whole issue of his livelihood is itself an interesting story) so he traveled by public transportation, hired very basic transport, and rode horseback on strange roads alone. He was apparently also very appealing to women, which helped on occasion. Apparently any time he stopped traveling he got so depressed that his health declined, and the only cure was to hit the road.

For lovers of travel and/or adventure tales — this is both, to an extreme degree.

I haven’t seen this, but today’s SF Chronicle has an interesting review:

She’s Such a Geek! Women Write About Science, Technology & Other Nerdy Stuff
Edited by Annalee Newitz and Charlie Anders
SEAL PRESS; 231 PAGES; $14.95 PAPERBACK

Looks like it would be of interest to a lot of young women I know.

A book I raved about for its ability to help us understand (a little of) what’s going on in Afghanistan and Iraq, Rory Stewart’s The Places in Between, has been named one of the 10 best books of the year by the New York Times Book Review.  I agree.

Whatever your stand on the war in Iraq, many of us are trying to better understand that part of the world, and the current situation. I’ve read two books recently that I find illuminating, both by Rory Stewart, a Scot who has lived in Islamic countries for 10 years and worked for the British Foreign Office:

The Places in Between: Stewarts walks across Afghanistan, in the winter, alone except for a dog he picks up along the way (which saves his life at least once), taking the least-travelled (because least-accessible in winter) route, 3 months after the US invasion. I read a review that said that “If…you’re determined to do something as recklessly stupid as walk across a war zone, your surest bet to quash all the inevitable criticism is to write a flat-out masterpiece. Stewart did. Stewart has.”

His stories of his encounters with people, both friendly and hostile, are fascinating. He is threatened with death many times (and shot at at least once). But he also encounters traditional Muslim hospitality, wherein travellers are put up and fed, and escort to the the next town. Several times he would not have made it across snowy passes without such local escorts. We also learn a lot about Islam, as well as about a part of Afghanistan where village headmen run things, and loyalties and rivalries are complex, embracing a long history of local conflicts as well as shifting loyalties toward the Russians, the Taliban, and the US. He asks people along the way about the times under the Taliban, and often reports the number of people lined up and killed for what seems to be no reason.

It’s part of a much longer walk — from Nepal to Turkey — and I hope he writes about the rest of it.

His second book, The Prince of the Marshes: And Other Occupational Hazards of a Year in Iraq, is about his year in Iraq as an official of the Coalition Provisional Authority, beginning shortly after the invasion of Iraq. Again, his understanding of Islamic society helps us to see what is going on and how inevitably clueless the occupation forces often are.

The complexity of their task is overwhelming. He’s supposed to be starting a civilian authority in conjunction with the British military forces that have been there for several months, meaning that he has to establish his authority with both the military commanders and the locals. Early on, he is given $10 million in cash to spend in a month on rebuilding projects. (He has to give back $1.5 million that he just can’t spend.) Under Saddam, food was distributed by ration cards — and he and his colleagues have to convert this to a market economy. They try to put together a governing council of local leaders, when they don’t know the local groups and individuals and have to try to figure out who actually represents some sort of constituency, who are Iranian agents, and who is anti-Coalition.

When the local police chief is assassinated, a mullah is kidnapped, and the tribal rivalries threaten to erupt into violence, he calls the leaders of the various factions together to try to negotiate peace — working through an interpreter (he speaks Persian but not Arabic) who mis-translates him.

In both books, we learn less about Stewart than about the situations in which he finds himself. He both knows a lot about the local culture, and knows that there’s a lot that he doesn’t, cannot know. He knows that there are people he can trust, and people he cannot, and we are as mystified as he often is as to who’s who. He’s at times brave to the point of being fool-hardy, but we also see that often the only way to meet his challengers is to be tougher than they are. And we see his genuine affection for the people of both countries.