I first started listening to NPR during the opening days of the Gulf War.
Our local NPR station, KPCC, abandoned its regular programming and had
war news on most of the time. It was like CNN, only I could listen to it
in the car. The normal programming returned over the next few days, and I
made some pleasant discoveries. Bailey White, an occasional
commentator for All Things Considered, was chief among them.

I believe the first spot I heard detailed Bailey’s discovery of how to
teach first-graders to read: maritime disaster. Teach a kid that a book
can tell him something horrible, and you’ve won the battle. And then
there was the bit about Bailey’s mama and roadkill recipes; and the story
about the Evil Bed in the guest room.

I don’t listen to NPR much any more, and I haven’t heard Bailey’s voice
in years. But I happened to open Mama Makes Up Her Mind the
yesterday (a friend returned it to us), and got hooked all over again.
It’s a book of short sketches, two or three or five or six pages long, a
form that is never completely satisfying in book form; it’s like trying
to satiate yourself on carrots and iceberg lettuce. And some of the
sketches aren’t nearly as interesting the second time around, like when
Bailey’s mama saw the flock of bicyclists from the bathtub on the back
porch.

But then there’s “Midnight Cowboy”, and “Dead on the Road”, and “The Bed”,
and “Scary Movies”, and “Memorizing Trollope”, and “Maritime Disaster”,
and “The Dance of the Chicken Feet”–oh, there’s more than enough here to
be worth the price of admission.

What happens when the Empress of a good bit of the known galaxy treats
her third son like a mushroom (e.g., keeps him in the dark and, well, you
get the idea) from his childhood until he grows to adulthood because he
resembles his treacherous father a little too much? You get Prince Roger
MacClintock, good-looking, bored, possibly disloyal, unskilled (except at
a few things he genuinely likes) because he’s never been trusted to do
anything important.

You get Prince Roger MacClintock, possible tool of the Empress’s enemies.
You get Prince Roger MacClintock, obnoxious, ill-tempered, and petulant,
the burden of the Bronze Battalion of the Empress’ Own Regiment. They’ll
keep him alive, die for him if necessary, but that doesn’t mean they need
to respect hiim–and they don’t.

And then the ship that’s taking Prince Roger and his bodyguard to show
the flag on a remote planet is sabotaged. Prince and bodyguard have no
choice but to land on Marduk, an extremely unpleasant place with only one
starport where they can find a ship back home. And because that starport
has just been taken by the forces of the neighboring star empire, they
have to land in secret halfway around the planet or risk getting blown
out of the sky.

This is a war novel, of the sort for which both David Weber
and John Ringo are already known; it’s also a coming-of-age
novel. Bravo Company is going
to have to do considerable fighting to get the Prince safely home; but
the Prince is going to have to pull his weight and earn the respect of
his troops. Roger’s growth through the novel adds some needed depth to
what would otherwise be a fairly shallow (if exciting) science fiction
adventure.

I feel kind of like Deb English felt last month: I’m not at all sure that
this is a good book, but gosh I had fun reading it.

March Upcountry takes Roger and the gang half the way home;
the story is continued in March to the Sea, which is now out
in hardback (I think). I’ll wait for the paperback, but I’ll definitely
buy it when it comes out.

Oh, and my thanks go to my brother Chuck, who passed this one along
to me.

I had to come up for a breath of air after reading Stowe so I searched
around on the bookshelf for a likely looking mystery. The David Small
“Rabbi” series have been around for quite a while and, my friend the
local bookstore owner had recommended them to me a while back so I
thought, what the hey, I’ll give this one a try. Rabbi and detective are
two words I normally don’t associate in the same thought so if detectives
have a “gimmick” and they usually do, then this sounded at least unique.

Rabbi Small is a young rabbinical scholar serving as Rabbi to a small
congregation in Barnard Crossings, a small town in Massachusetts. The
synagogue is fairly new and serves Orthodox, Reform and Conservative
believers, giving Rabbi Small a thin line to tread when dealing with the
politics of the congregation. On the eve of Yom Kippur, a man is found
dead in his garage of carbon monoxide poisoning. His wife, a Gentile,
wants him buried in the Jewish cemetery with Jewish rights since he had
been raised a Jew. The police have ruled it accidental death due to the
alcohol content of his blood, but the insurance company comes sniffing
around making noises about suicide and the suicide clause in his policy.
And if he had killed himself, his burial in the Jewish cemetery would
make the rest of the land “unclean” which really ticks off an elderly
Orthodox Jew who’s wife is buried there and who is also about to donate a
pile of money for a new chapel addition to the synagogue. It gets much
more convoluted and complex from there but the upshot is that Rabbi Small
must figure out if it was suicide, accidental death or murder. And he
uses Talmudic logic to work his way thru the puzzle.

I whipped right thru this one. The reading is easy and the story moves
along fast enough to keep the pages turning without losing any detail in
the process. I found the details about the Jewish faith and customs to be
interesting as well and was amused to find that Synagogue politics and
Church politics, as depicted by Trollope, are not all that different. I
may have to look for more of these to keep on hand when I need a good,
light book.

Back in the days when I read rec.arts.sf.written (the USENET science
fiction news Starship Troopers would trigger a
major battle of words. One can (a little unfairly) state the political
philosophy of the book in one sentence: only those who have shown that
they are willing to put their nation’s good before their own good through
military service should be entrusted with the right to vote.

This led to endless discussion as to whether Heinlein was right or wrong,
and little of it was to the point, which is this: Heinlein wanted to
write a coming-of-age story about a spoiled rich kid who learns
discipline, maturity, and responsibility through military service. He
needed a world in which such a kid might reasonably choose to enlist
without being drafted, and without the threat of war (the war begins
after Johnny Rico enlists) and so he needed a carrot to entice Johnny and
his peers into taking the oath. In Johnny’s case he provides two:
the franchise, and a beautiful young lady of Johnny’s acquaintance who chooses
to enlist at the same time (she eventually becomes a pilot). Callow
youth that Johnny is, it’s the desire to impress the girl that really
does the trick.

All else follows from that. Having created this world, Heinlein needed
to justify it–to provide verysmellitude as Michael Cantrip would say–
and he does this through the courses in “History and Moral Philosophy”
that Johnny is made to take. Heinlein was fascinated by ethics, and he
loved to play with ideas. To find out what he really thought about these
matters, one would have to look elsewhere.

But although the ethical side is interesting (and, in some cases,
compelling), it’s not the heart of the book. This is a boot camp story;
it’s a trial by fire story; it’s an adventure story. It’s the story of a
kid getting over himself and getting on with the job–“getting shut of
doing things rather more or less”. Plus it’s got some
really cool gadgets. Powered armor has become a stock prop these days,
but I was blown away by the idea when I first read it. So what’s not
to like?

This is the story of an ordeal–a tale in which physical endurance
against the harsh elements and wild beasts is key. Man against his
environment. And the thing about ordeal stories is that it takes
endurance to read them. I’ve always liked Cherryh’s books, but I’ve
always had to be in the right mood.

The main character, Marak Trin Tain, is a great warrior. His world, a
desert planet settled by humans in the distant past, is but sparsely
populated. There are the tribes, nomads who live in the deep desert; the
villages, each centered around its spring; and the holy city of Oburan,
where dwells the Ila and her ministers amid riches of water. The Ila,
somehow, is immortal; she is apparently one of the “first descended” to
this planet, and she has made it and its people in her image.

Until recently, Marak Trin Tain has been leading his father’s men in
rebellion against the Ila. The rebellion failed, and to buy peace his
father has sold him to the Ila. He is taken to Oburan with one thought
in his heart: to kill the Ila. He doesn’t manage it, of course; it would
be a short book if he did. Instead, she sends him to seek out the source
of the Madness that has come upon many of the people of the Ila’s
world–a madness that has come upon Marak himself, and which draws him to
the east.

And then the ordeal begins.

Cherryh has crafted an interesting world with a unique history, and a
unique premise–at least, I’ve not encountered it before. A culture
which possesses the secrets of both nanotechnology and genetics may well
use them to make war. And the fiercest battles may not take place across
nations or continents, but instead within the confines of a single human
body.

I was in the right mood; I liked it. And it’s the beginning of a series
(though it stands alone perfectly well), so I’m looking forward to the
next book.

This is one of those books that everyone knows about and has heard of
but no one actually reads anymore. It was so wildly popular in its day
that the reputation and ripoffs of the book have become the accepted
story line and the text itself is hardly known. And it’s the book that
supposedly started the Civil War, even though it was published in 1852,
years before the actual conflict began. Which is unfortunate, because
it’s a good story with exciting passages, interesting characters and plot
twists that you just can’t believe are happening. The scene where Eliza
escapes the slave hunters by jumping from ice floe to ice floe over the
Ohio river, clutching her baby, is so dramatic I had to put the book down
for a while. And the final scene with Uncle Tom is so sad it was
unbelievable that it was actually happening. What amazes me is that I
was able to get a degree in literature from a major university and was
never required to read it in a single course. What a pity.

The basic story is about Uncle Tom, a deeply religious black slave who is
sold away from his wife and young children when his owner falls into
debt. Uncle Tom is not a shambling, “aw shucks massa” character but
rather a Christ figure whose horrible fate is caused by the accepted
institutions and laws of the land. He’s a young, intelligent man with
more conscience and grace than any of the white people in the book.

That’s what I never realized about the book. Stowe is writing a book for
and about white people and their own rationalizations that allowed
slavery to continue and even be politically tolerated by the non-slave
holding North. Uncle Tom and the other black characters in the book are a
mirror that reflected back on the white readers their own prejudices.
They are archetypes, not real people. Over time the image has changed and
“Uncle Tom” has denigrated to an epithet. If it is keeping people from
the book, that is a shame.