Marshall (movie) and Young Thurgood (book)

Young Thurgood: The Making of a Supreme Court Justice by Larry S. Gibson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I didn't know much about Thurgood Marshall outside what everyone learns in history class: civil rights hero, argued Brown v. Board of Education, later Supreme Court justice. At the local library, I came across a couple of ways to rectify my ignorance: the 2017 movie Marshall, and the book Young Thurgood by Larry Gibson. The book fills in much of the backstory that led to those great things, covering the first 35 or so years of his life. The movie is a dramatization of a rape case that took place in 1940, pretty much right after the time covered by the book. I read the book first, then watched the movie.

There's a lot packed into Young Thurgood about Marshall's early life, but two major themes stood out for me. First, Thurgood Marshall had an incredible work ethic. He was constantly busy with activities, whether those took the form of work or education or community service. Second, Marshall had a true belief in the importance of civil rights activism and put that above his own welfare. This is most clearly demonstrated in the way that he repeatedly took civil rights cases over more lucrative law practice options, despite his own tenuous financial position.

Beyond the details of Marshall's life, the other theme that struck me in reading Young Thurgood was just how pervasive racism was in the early 20th century. Everything from lesser pay to school restrictions to lynchings...reading example after example really drives home how bad things were only a century ago. We've still got plenty of work to do on this front, but it's also striking how much things have changed. And Thurgood Marshall had a large role in making those changes.

Young Thurgood isn't a novel; there's a lot of fairly dry recounting of history to get through. There's not a lot of excitement in the documentation of individual incidents, but taken as a whole, the book does a fine job of painting a picture of Marshall and the early 20th century.

The movie Marshall, on the other hand, struck me as very much the opposite - very entertaining, but light on the historical accuracy. It strikes me as extremely unlikely that Marshall would have been quite so high-handed with Sam Friedman as is shown in the film, for instance. Making Friedman carry his bags, really? Being cavalier about little things like changing radio stations or sending Friedman into the mud? It works for setting the Marshall-in-charge dynamic for the film, but I highly doubt the accuracy. But that's not surprising, in a film that's largely about showing Thurgood Marshall as a civil rights superhero. He deserves the acclaim, exaggerated or not. And I enjoyed catching references to many of the people that I'd just read about in the book.

I'm never going to be a Thurgood Marshall expert, but I feel like I know a little more now about the man and his work. Time well spent.

Street Freaks by Terry Brooks

Street Freaks by Terry Brooks
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I feel like I've read this book before. Not in the "it's been so long I forgot about it" way, but in the "I've read something similar so many times that it all feels familiar" sense.

World-building: future cyberpunk. Lots of people with genetic modifications or cyborg parts, robots, and replicants...er, I mean synths. Giant corporations with immense power, conspiring with corrupt governments. Massive economic and social inequality. Environmental collapse, natural resources running out. It's not exactly like the Shadowrun or Blade Runner worlds, but it's close enough that I didn't get any real sense of discovering something new.

Plot: Kid with no clue narrowly escapes powerful forces to hook up with a rebellious group, eventually figures out what's going on and fights back. How many times have we seen this one? And in this particular case, the evil scheme plot device and bad guy behind it are so incredibly obvious from the fairly early chapters that it makes the characters look dumb for not seeing it.

Main Character: Ash, a naive kid at the center of something big, forced to come of age quickly. Spends his time learning about friendship, love, and how crappy the world can be. The plot of countless books, movies, and just about any other media form you care to name. Feels generic.

Style: supposed to be suspenseful. I say "supposed to" because once you recognize the archetype of the story, how much suspense can there really be? Ash isn't going to get killed off. You know he'll have some bad stuff happen, but it'll all work out in the end.

Now, I'm not saying that Brooks has completely failed with Street Freaks. He's a fine author who knows how to write; I didn't throw it down in disgust or anything. But I didn't feel like this book did anything special to set it apart from a ton of others in a similar genre, and it certainly didn't hide things well enough to engender any suspense. I'd much rather be reading sci-fi that's either attempting to break at least a little new ground, or pulls off a surprise. Street Freaks does neither.

Confessions of a Rogue Nuclear Regulator by Gregory B. Jaczko

Confessions of a Rogue Nuclear Regulator by Gregory B. Jaczko
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Pretty much every rational person has a healthy fear of nuclear weapons. Massively destructive and terrible long-term consequences. Nuclear power comes from the same dangerous forces, but we rely on technology and design to keep those forces in check. Jaczko makes the case in Confessions of a Rogue Nuclear Regulator that the system designed to keep nuclear power safe just isn't working.

Before I get into the main points of the book, let me first say that Jaczko has done a fine job of keeping a potentially dry subject entertaining. He includes plenty of personal anecdotes and first-hand descriptions of some pretty tense situations around events we're all familiar with - Three Mile Island, the Fukushima Daiichi disaster - as well as some near-misses that may not be as familiar - fire at Browns Ferry in Tennessee, flooding at the Fort Calhoun plant along the Missouri river. And he makes no bones about his own personal failings, either, especially his often adversarial and confrontational personal style. It's not a page-turner thriller novel, but the book is well written and kept me engaged throughout.

Jaczko makes two main points about the current state of nuclear power:

First, because the forces involved are so powerful, it's impossible to make nuclear power completely safe. We can develop elaborate safety measures that will reduce the risk to extremely low levels, but that risk is always there. This means safety measures have to be redundant, cover every known risk, be constantly updated against new risks, and strictly enforced. If you don't do those things, the risk very quickly becomes unacceptable. This is a pretty straightforward point and I don't think anyone would argue with it, though the definitely of exactly what is "acceptable" can be debated.

Second, none of that is happening as it should, because the regulatory system in place to ensure nuclear power safety is ineffective. In the current political environment, not just in the US but all around the world, putting a truly effective nuclear power regulatory system is simply not possible. This is a much more contentious point, but I think Jaczko makes a strong case. He cites repeated examples where regulators have been unable to enforce existing rules, or put into place important new rules, due to interference and delay by nuclear power providers. Those obstructions are enabled by political cover from officials who are beholden to the nuclear power industry. This is an example of regulatory capture: through political and economic influence, the nuclear power providers have taken control of the very processes meant to ensure that their product is safe.

The logical conclusion from those two points is that nuclear power should be eliminated, and that is in fact the position Jaczko takes. "Nuclear power is a failed technology"...no equivocation there. That is a very strong denouncement from a former head of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The argument isn't that human beings are unable to use nuclear power safely - while the risk is never zero, it can be reduced to acceptable levels. Rather, the constant pushback against updating and enforcing regulations required to maintain those low levels of risk means nuclear power won't be made safe. The issue isn't that we can't, it's that we won't.

I've long considered nuclear power to be a worthwhile alternative in the search to find alternatives to fossil fuels, but after reading this book I've changed my mind. Until we can either drastically improve technology to lower risk, or effectively address the regulatory capture concerns that Jaczko raises, nuclear power should be off the table. I don't see how the former is possible economically, or the latter politically. There are other clean alternatives, and though those have their own issues, they don't carry the same extreme risks as nuclear power.

The Librarians (TNT TV show)

For a good long while, Hulu has been recommending The Librarians to me. I finally decided to take it up on the offer.

The premise of The Librarians is that magic is real but hidden, and there's a secret Library that holds powerful magic apart from the world so it can't cause havoc. A Librarian is chosen to watch over the collection, go out and retrieve magical artifacts from the wild, and generally stop Bad Things from happening. Magic was on the decline for a long time, allowing technology to come to the fore, but recently has made a resurgence. The Library has multiple Librarians for the first time in centuries, and a Guardian chosen to keep watch over all of them. Weekly adventures ensue!

That all sounds fairly generic and derivative, and this is fact the case. Hidden practitioners of magic in the modern world can be found all over fantasy literature/media. A team of heroes having to learn to work together while saving the world is even more common. But those are familiar tropes for a reason...do them well, and the result is really entertaining. And The Librarians pulls it off.

Mostly this is a adventure-of-the-week series. Each of the four seasons has a Big Bad villain to defeat, but they don't show up every week, and outside the start and end of the season they play a minor role. There's all the usual magical plot suspects - hauntings, regular people gone power-mad, evil masterminds taking towns captive, etc. Villains are often literary or mythical figures, playing off stories we're all familiar with. Again, we see this stuff all the time for a reason...it works when it's implemented well. There were a few episodes where even I had a hard time suspending belief, but for the most part things held together well enough.

Where The Librarians really shines, in my opinion, is the characters (and the actors who portray them, all excellent performances). Initially, the Librarian Flynn and his newly appointed (and very skeptical) Guardian Eve Baird are chasing down an evil mastermind. They're rapidly joined by three other Librarians, each of which have both significant abilities and character flaws, and the immortal Library caretaker Jenkins. Before long, Flynn goes off on his own - he reminds me of The Doctor from Doctor Who, incredibly clever and capable but ridiculously flighty - and the core team of Baird with three inexperienced Librarians and Jenkins is formed.

Every formulaic weekly episode is made entertaining largely by the way that those five characters (six on the occasions that Flynn comes back for a while) interact with each other and the villains. Stone finding historical clues, Jones circumventing security systems, Cassandra doing some crazy math in her head, and Baird keeping them all in line. There's a lot of character growth over the seasons and more than a few surprises along the way. Not too crazy with the surprises, though...it's a family show, after all, and nothing too terribly upsetting happens.

I had a lot of fun watching The Librarians, though I'm glad it ended when it did. By the time the finale rolled around, I felt the characters had changed enough that they were having trouble maintaining the team dynamic that made it so entertaining. The show wrapped up before that key component could degenerate too far, and in my opinion that worked out very well.

Folding Beijing by Hao Jingfang

Folding Beijing by Hao Jingfang
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Folding Beijing makes no effort to obscure its theme of economic inequality taken to an extreme position. A entire city of millions of people, engineered to share space among three populations. The privileged First World has the lion's share of time and the lowest population density; the Third World is overcrowded with little time for anything but drudgery; with a Second World somewhere in the middle.

The protagonist Lao Dao visits all three worlds during the story. This novelette is short enough that there's no need to recap the plot in a review; almost as quick to just read it yourself! Besides, much more important than the plot is the attitudes of the people involved.

Those we meet in the Third World are either resigned to their place in life, or in Lao Dao's case, doing everything possible to give his child a chance at a better future. In the Second World, they aspire to advancement into the First World. And in the First World, they take privilege for granted, rarely if ever considering the plight of those who serve to support their lifestyle. Well, rarely except when making sure to keep the masses busy so they have no time to consider another way of life.

More than the story itself, what I really enjoyed about Folding Beijing is how it shines a light on the upper/middle/lower class structure of society. It's taken to an extreme, of course, but it's not difficult to map the motivations of the various characters onto the way we see people acting in our own society today. Read it for an opportunity to recognize how society can stratify; and hopefully it prompts us to consider alternatives.

The Robotech Novels by Jack McKinney

Robotech may have started in television animation, but what really made me a fan was the series of novels written by "Jack McKinney" in the late 1980s.

Robotech is pure space opera which is heavy on a "love conquers all" theme. There's some lip service paid to how people end up out in space or flying planes that turn into giant robots, but the real reason is effectively "magic." Magic in the form of "protoculture" in the case of Robotech, a substance that does strange things to people's minds as well as enabling crazy technological advances. Perhaps "protoculture" even has an awareness and agenda of its own. I've labeled this post science fiction because that's how Robotech is categorized when you go looking for the books or videos, but don't be fooled - it's an epic fantasy, with all the romance/tragedy/adventure that implies.

That's not to say, however, that Robotech uses mystical "protoculture" solely to manufacture happy endings. The initial alien attack against humanity doesn't end with humans beating back the assault. Not all the star-crossed lovers get a perfect happy ending. Earth is in pretty bad shape, humans and aliens have to learn to live together, and later on the planet ends up conquered by yet another alien race. People die, lots of them, including a few that the reader knows pretty well. By the time the series wraps up with The End of the Circle there has been plenty of good news, but the journey is certainly not all roses and rainbows.

The Robotech novels are roughly divided into four sections: the Macross Saga, the Sentinels, the war with the Robotech Masters, and the Invid Invasion. Three of those correspond to the three seasons of the television series; the fourth, the Sentinels, was going to be a sequel television series but never made it to air. Then you have three novels that fill in gaps between the four major parts, and The End of the Circle that takes the story beyond the various TV series timelines to wrap it all up. (That last is specific to the novels, since the animation went another way with Robotech: The Shadow Chronicles. I much prefer the story of the novels to the animation.) If that sounds like a lot of reading, you're right: 21 books in all. Though many are fairly short as novels go, that's still a whole lot of words. A reader has to really enjoy the universe and characters to make it all the way through that kind of verbiage.

Those three "fill in the gaps" novels were new to me, as they were written after the rest. By the time those three came out, I'd already finished the rest of the series, and at the time I never even looked for additions. Of course, that was 25 years ago, so my memory of the details is hazy at best. I'd been thinking about re-reading the series, curious as to whether I would still enjoy it a couple of decades later. When I saw the books were available on Amazon for the Kindle, that gave me the excuse I was looking for to read the whole series in chronological order. (Well, all but one were e-books. For arcane reasons of publication rights, The Masters' Gambit is only available in dead-tree format, and out of print to boot. Had to order that one from a used book store, and it cost nearly as much as the entire rest of the series combined!)

Those quotation marks around the author's name up above are there because there was no actual Jack McKinney - the name is a pseudonym used by American authors James Luceno and Brian Daley. I had no idea of this when I first read the books, of course. As a sci-fi obsessed teenager, I didn't much care where the stories came from!

Novelization of television is a tricky thing. You have to describe in words what people simply absorb by watching, while still capturing whatever tension and emotion the sound and visuals evoke. You also get the opportunity to expand on things that didn't make it on screen for whatever reason (often time or budget constraints). And you need to find a way to explain some of the more absurd things that happen; on screen it might go by quickly, but in writing there's always time to stop and say "wait a minute, they did what?" (Inasmuch as explanations are possible...some of the scripting was just too absurd to really explain.) No one is perfect, but I think the authors did an outstanding job on all those fronts in these novels. I read them before I'd watched the television series. When I finally did see some of it (never did watch the entire thing), I mostly felt underwhelmed, because I felt I knew so much more from the books than what was shown on screen. This is particularly true in the character motivations and internal struggles. There are a lot of insecurities that are explicitly laid out in the novels which humanize the characters - Rick in particular - that didn't really come across on screen.

Those characters are key to the Robotech franchise, at least for me. Don't get me wrong, it's not like the latest type of giant robot or the fate of invading alien armies do nothing for me...wouldn't be reading this series otherwise. But honestly, I cared at least as much (maybe more) about what happened to Rick Hunter or Dana Sterling or Scott Bernard as those big-picture questions. Unlike a lot of stories that started as cartoons, these characters have some depth and history as you work your way through the series. I especially appreciate that some pretty important people die off - the whole series basically takes place during wartime, and not everyone makes it through. Losing some people along the way gives those who remain that much more depth.

I should also mention Macross here, since Robotech and Macross are two offshoots of the same initial story. They have transforming space fighters and giant fortresses in common, and of course the original series characters. However, they go very different directions past that. Robotech focuses on the power of protoculture (a tangible thing derived from weird plants), the various factions and races fighting over it, and how it changes everyone and everything it touches. Macross treats protoculture as a concept based on ancient civilizations, and power largely comes from heroes finding strength within (often by singing). In my opinion, Robotech is the better story, but you really need to read the novels to get that story. Based on all the watching I've done, I'd rate Macross as the better anime series. So if you're looking for something to watch, go with Macross; for something to read, pick Robotech.

Having now read the Robotech novels twice, I feel qualified to say that the series ages well. The first time around, my teenage self was mostly interested in the giant battles and major events directing the epic sweep of history through the series. During this second reading as an adult, I found myself much more interested in the individuals at the heart of the story, and how the authors tied together the various phases of the story into a coherent whole. Regardless of where you are in life, the series is certainly aimed at a niche audience that loves epic fantastic adventure, futuristic mecha battles, and romantic underdog victories. If you fit that description, then you'll get plenty of enjoyment out of the Robotech novels.

Bury What We Cannot Take by Kirstin Chen

Bury What We Cannot Take by Kirstin Chen
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

What a depressing view of human nature is shown in Bury What We Cannot Take, and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Bury What We Cannot Take is set in late 1950s China, under Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communist Party. The Ong family, who were well-to-do business owners in pre-Communist society, find they've waited too long to leave. Split by the closed Chinese border, they try to reunite in Hong Kong, but must find a way to convince the Communist Party to let them go. It does not go smoothly.

I'm no expert on the history involved here, but I know the basics. The China depicted in this novel is extremely harsh, practically unlivable for anyone not connected to the Communist Party. Which from everything I've read seems pretty accurate, though the timing may be slightly off. The book takes place before the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s, but there's a lot of elements in the book that seem taken from that era. Chen says in her Acknowledgements section that she's used history where it fits the story, so I suspect she knew exactly what parts may have been out of place but chose to go with the better story. Which I have no problem with, it certainly worked for me.

The back cover of the dust jacket has some quotes that include "beautifully written", "suspenseful", "engrossing historical fiction"...all true. But I think they missed a very important descriptive point, which is that all the main characters are kind of jerks. Well, maybe not San San. But I didn't like any of the others, who professed great love for family and concern for those around them, then failed to act accordingly.

Which is where that "depressing view of human nature" part comes in. The family made some really bad choices, particularly the father and son. Though they may have struggled through some of the consequences, it's clear there's plenty still to process. There's no fairy tale happy ending here, at least in terms of the personal relationships and emotional impact on the entire family.

Jerks or not, I very much enjoyed reading Bury What We Cannot Take and everything is has to say about family, culture, and the human tendency to make terrible choices. I think most anyone would enjoy this one.