The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas

The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

As I read this book, through all the thoughts it provoked and emotions it evoked, one stood out: perspective makes so much difference. The Hate U Give shares a perspective that everyone needs to understand.

Anyone who pays attention to recent books has heard of The Hate U Give since it's won numerous awards over the last year or so. That's how it got on my to-read list, and I can confidently say that Angie Thomas deserves every last one of those awards and more.

The Hate U Give tells the story of Starr, a black teenage girl who is witness to the shooting of her black friend by a white cop. It's fiction, but unfolds pretty much like innumerable real-world news stories. Media coverage slanted against the victim, police looking for excuses more than facts, district attorney unable or unwilling to push through indictments, violent protests in reaction...it's all happened in the news recently, repeatedly. What you don't see in the news is how it looks to a girl who lives in the world where the victim lived, who was there for the crime, and who lived through the aftermath. Thomas brings that perspective to life.

Beyond the commentary on current events, Thomas explores all kinds of aspects of Starr's life and that of her friends and family. Complicated family relationships, teenage angst over school and the opposite sex, living with gang violence, annoying younger siblings, fear of the police, sneaker fashion...everything from the profound to the banal is part of the story. It all works together to help the reader understand Starr's actions and feelings.

I'm a white man from the suburbs, with basically no common frame of reference with Starr. The Hate U Give let me see the world from her point of view. That kind of empathy isn't easy to create, and Thomas deserves a ton of credit for doing a masterful job at it.

Perhaps the hardest part of reading this book was seeing myself in the story. Starr's boyfriend Chris, who is white and comes from a privileged background, struggles to understand how she feels about all kinds of things, from food to the lack of justice for her friend. Some of that is the usual teenage battle-of-the-sexes confusion but much of it is his lack of knowledge about Starr's culture. I've been there. The media coverage focuses on the victim's drug connections, making it seem that he deserved his fate. I've been guilty of thinking that way when a similar news story comes to my attention. This kind of thing happened throughout the book, giving me reason to think about my own instinctive reactions and what bias they hold.

I said above that everyone needs to understand the perspective in this book. I'm glad that The Hate U Give is so popular, since that spreads its message more widely. I hope it reaches people who, like me, normally wouldn't think that this is their kind of story. Because empathy for the people outside of our own experience important to all of us.

True Places by Sonja Yoerg

True Places by Sonja Yoerg
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

True Places is a well-written novel of self discovery in a modern suburban American family. I'm just not the target audience.

I picked up True Places when Amazon gave us Prime members an opportunity to grab one of its best 2018 books. I knew going in that the contemporary fiction genre isn't exactly my style, but I like to branch out every once in a while and it fit nicely into a sort of book club I'm doing with some online friends.

The story in the novel revolves around Suzanne, a middle-aged suburban mother of two with what appears to be a perfect life; and Iris, a lost teenage girl who has lived her whole life off the grid. Suzanne's ideal life is only skin-deep, subordinating her own needs and desires to those of her family. Helping Iris is a catalyst that prompts Suzanne to examine her own life and begin to find her own place.

Yoerg does a fine job of implementing that summary. Her characters have depth, each with significant strengths and weaknesses. The writing style is easy to understand - I particularly like the use of short chapters, often changing from one viewpoint character to another, keeping the reader appraised of what's going on in the heads of each.

So why isn't this book for me? I found it to be formulaic and, well, kind of boring. The "mom who over-invests in family and has no self-worth of her own" isn't exactly a new character, nor is the idea of what is basically a mid-life crisis. Iris' situation is interesting at first, but rapidly turns into "wild girl gets civilized" without any significant surprises. Honestly, I was kind of hoping she'd do something completely crazy and unexpected just to spice things up. No such luck.

I still liked True Places, don't get me wrong...I'm not saying it's a bad book. It's a fine example of a contemporary novel that makes some pretty pointed commentary on the necessity of living your own life, rather than trying to build your life as nothing but support for others. But I've heard all that before, and the same story told again is still the same story, well-written or no.

The Dream: A Podcast about MLM

Multi-Level Marketing (MLM). Pyramid scheme. Independent sales associates and business owners. We've all heard of these "opportunities," often from someone offering to help you get involved. The Dream is a podcast series about shedding light on what's really going on in these systems.

Full disclosure right up front - I used to work for Amway, which is a multi-level marketing business. In the IT department, not the marketing part, but you can't work in any capacity at Amway without being aware of the business model. I'm pretty sure I signed something at some point that prevents me from talking about any details of how they operate, and I don't really want to do so anyway, but I can certainly talk about my own reactions and feelings as I learned how the business works. More on this later.

The Dream starts off in its first episode with an incredibly obvious scam. No product selling, no fig leaf of running a business. Just people paying money to attend feel-good "airplane" sessions, after which you could recruit more people to attend your own sessions where you are the "pilot." Straight up Ponzi scheme, which eventually collapsed as they all do.

Then the hosts move on to the real subject in later episodes - the more complex and nuanced businesses that add all the trappings of sales and marketing to the same basic idea. Buy in with time and/or money - usually lots of money - then recruit more people to do the same, who in turn do their own recruiting. The resulting structure is where you get the term pyramid scheme, though you really don't want to use that word around anyone involved in such a business. It's a running joke around town near the Amway headquarters that no one says "the P-word" and I suspect it's the same with all the big MLM companies.

I've made it through the first 7 episodes of the podcast (of 11, at the time I write this) and most of them spend a lot of time on the people at the bottom of the pile. The vast majority of folks who get involved, do the initial buy-in, and never go much further. Usually they can't get started on the recruiting part, which is the case when one of the producers joins an MLM business to try it out. Or maybe they do find some recruits, but find it hard to sustain the constant product sales flow - the subject of an interview with an ex-Mary Kay representative. Those people never make significant gains in the system, and often end up in quite a bit of debt from the attempt.

So why do people do it? The Dream talks about quite a few different reasons, from psychology to secrecy to intentionally misleading promises. The idea of a way to make it big appeals to people who don't have great financial prospects, and it doesn't have to be a sure thing. You only need to look at the success of lotteries for proof, so it's not much of a stretch to realize why the idea of recruiting and selling for big bucks is appealing. In some cases, the camaraderie and social aspect of the organization are more important than the financial rewards (Mary Kay is an example of this), at least until you start actually losing significant sums. The MLM companies generally are very secretive about their financials and the success rates, so it's easy to think that you have a good chance to succeed, in spite of the reality of huge failure rates for new recruits. And the marketing from those companies can be extremely misleading, and in fact the worst excesses are outlawed here in the USA. There were some big court battles in the 1970s, and one entire episode is devoted to how those took down some companies (Holiday Magic, Koscot Interplanetary) but left others standing (Amway).

The Dream is clearly well researched and the host and producers have done a lot of legwork, which I greatly appreciate. The execution isn't the greatest podcast I've ever heard - some of the musical scoring is pretty jarring, and host Jane Marie's style doesn't particularly appeal to me. But the content is well worth the occasional less-than-ideal section of listening.

Listening to this podcast has made me do some introspection on my own thinking back when I worked at Amway. I knew it was an MLM business, and that the business model was bad for the majority of people who got into it. I'd been approached myself several times for various similar "opportunities" and always turned it down, being a (mostly) logical and mathematical thinker. The numbers simply didn't add up. So why did I decide it was OK to work for the company, effectively enabling further expansion of a model I wouldn't get involved with for myself?

The short answer is denial. I put aside the negatives and didn't think about what was happening to the "business owners" who bought in but never recouped their investment. I was certainly kept busy enough with the day-to-day of the job that it was easy not to look at the bigger picture. And the fact that incoming information almost entirely focused on the successes helped in this thought process. Just walking through the Amway headquarters, you see pictures of the successful owners, and employee newsletters and the like spotlighted those successes. On the rare occasions that I popped my head up from the minutia of my IT projects, it was easy to think only of the benefits accruing to the few, and not consider the masses that weren't making it big. And I'm confident that this is how the majority of people who work for these MLM companies think, having been there myself.

So why isn't the government stopping MLM businesses from taking advantage of people? Government regulation can help to curb the worst excesses, but it can't completely stamp out MLM, at least not if you want to maintain some kind of free market system. Plus you need a lot of political will to go after highly profitable businesses, and that's in pretty short supply. The business model is alive and well pretty much everywhere in the world, at varying levels of freedom in how they market the business. The biggest growth is in developing countries, where the promise of hitting it big is especially appealing, and government regulation is minimal anyhow.

So if not the government, is there a solution? I think the only real solution is getting people into an economic and social state where they don't need the MLM. The Dream makes it pretty clear that the vast majority of people who are recruited into the MLM business model do it because they feel like it's the best alternative available. If you can't get necessities like housing and food and education and health care, or if affording those necessities leaves you nothing for leisure or saving, then you're pretty susceptible to the siren song of owning a business that can really take off financially. Put people in a situation where they already have the means to live comfortably and safely, and you remove much of the appeal of the MLM model. Remove the appeal, and it collapses due to lack of new recruits.

We're nowhere near making that kind of just and equitable society available to everyone in the developed world, much less the billions of people in the still-developing economic areas. Which means that MLM companies will continue to exist, and those who recognize them for what they are need to educate others so they can avoid the pitfalls. That's what The Dream is doing, and I commend them for it.

The Jean le Flambeur trilogy by Hannu Rajaniemi

Fair warning: if you like to understand all the words and want to have a good idea of what's going on at all times when you read a novel, Hannu Rajaniemi may not be the author for you. But if you can put up with some uncertainty (actually, a ton of it) while the story unfolds, this trilogy has a lot of entertainment to share.

The Quantum Thief, The Fractal Prince, and The Casual Angel follow gentleman thief Jean le Flambeur through various adventures in a far-future solar system with wildly advanced quantum technology. People's minds are regularly electronically uploaded, duplicated, modified, stolen, and enslaved. Bodies can be changed with little more difficulty than changing one's clothes, as long as you can afford it. Various groups live in just about every part of the solar system, from the planets to asteroids to the Oort Cloud to moon-sized spaceships.

The books follow Jean and friends through adventures all over the Solar System, from Mars to Earth to Saturn and many points between. Jean is a self-described master thief, and so it's not surprising that a lot of the story revolves around pilfering stuff from under the noses of its owners. The larger plot involves the fate of society in the entire system, so it isn't just about stealing shiny objects, though there's plenty of that in service of the end goals. And there's no shortage of action along the way, either. Each of the books has multiple passages that read like descriptions of the craziest special effects in sci-fi movie battle scenes, and I mean that as a compliment...it's fun to envision actually seeing all of what Rajaniemi has written.

Through all this, Rajaniemi doesn't do a lot of hand-holding. New terms get thrown at the reader with minimal explanation. There's plenty of weird happenings that don't make sense until much later when the reader has more information. As I said earlier, you have to put up with quite a bit of uncertainty. But I felt that by the end of each book, Rajaniemi had done a reasonable job of clarifying what had happened and why.

As far as the science aspect of sci-fi goes, Rajaniemi has gone far enough out into the future that much of what he describes seems like magic. Clarke's third law applies here: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." There's a good amount of explanation scattered throughout the trilogy, much of it involving quantum effects or nanotech, which to my layperson's mind seems plausible. And Rajaniemi certainly does a fine job with the descriptions, unsurprising since he has a doctorate in physics. But it's so far ahead of anything that exists in today's world that there's really no way to know how feasible any of it is, so it's easiest to just suspend disbelief and accept the premise without worrying about how it works.

My favorite part of the world building isn't the technology anyhow, but rather the social orders. The Oubliette is a whole society built around taking privacy to the extreme. Innumerable mind-copies of a few original Founders created the Sobornost society made up almost entirely of themselves. The few who still live on Earth fight against corruption by rogue "wildcode" technology that tries to corrupt mind and body. And my personal favorite, the zoku collective that gamifies everything, using points and levels and "entanglement" bonding to both keep score and organize their efforts. Given the changes wrought by technology and shifting environments, I thought the social and political structures that Rajaniemi describes are plausible and certainly the ideas are thought-provoking.

If my previous warnings about complexity and uncertainty haven't turned you off already, then you're probably going to enjoy the trilogy. I certainly did.