Children of Memory is the final leg of the trilogy, but don’t let that dissuade you from grabbing it. This science fiction posits a universe with terraformed worlds out there, a failing earth, and arks of civilization journeying to establish colonies on the terraformed worlds. One such ark reaches its destination but the survivors feel guilt because the colony was never able to support more than a handful and there are thousands still in orbit waiting to be unfrozen. Those that made it seemingly have a tough hardscrabble agrarian life. But there are other evolved species out there filled with curiosity who are watching the colony develop and are hidden in plain sight despite a real existence as octopuses and spiders and the like. There’s also a colonist girl Laff who sees her grandfather’s ghost and chases it into the woods some 200 years after the shuttle landing.
The trick that Tchaikovsky plays is that the real story is not the colonists, but the alien brings watching them. And it is through them that he brings us to philosophical questions about what it means to be sentient and what it means to be real rather than artificial.
There are points where the story is quite confusing as the threads begin to separate, but hang in there. It will all come together in the end and make you think and wonder.
Priest of Crowns is the final thrilling installment of the War for the Rose Throne quartet. Don’t start here. Get the first book and read in chronological order because there are themes that McLean starts in the first book that are followed through to book four.
One of those themes is propaganda and manipulation. Tomas Piety begins his story as an ordinary soldier, orphan son of a bricklayer, stepping up his game as leader of the Pious Men in Ellingrad, eventually as one of the Queen’s Men, and then a Knight, and a member of the Council. But, as the story goes on, Piety goes from unquestioning believing in what he is told to realizing how many layers of manipulation the rulers have foisted upon the masses. The People are told whatever suits the ruling class and whatever will motivate them to fight and work and pay homage. The news is but a tool of the ruling class and the newsmen will only report what they are told to or face Ilse in the dungeons of the House of Law. As part of the ruling cabal, Piety explains with regard to the elected council: “We manipulated them in ways that ensured they never agreed to anything we didn’t want them to; they spent most of their days in endless arguments about things that usually didn’t even matter.”
Another theme that keeps resurfacing here is how the quest for power, perhaps in the beginning to do good, will corrupt absolutely until one becomes “as close to a devil walking as I ever wanted to see, a man made of razors and hate.” Anything can be logically justified for the greater good. In the end, though, the question becomes whether once you have power, what are you going to do with it, except use it to maintain power. Piety sees that the Queen’s Men are ultimately ruthless gangsters no different than the petty gangs back home.
And, Tomas Piety finds that the quest for power leaves one alone, friendless, not knowing if there is anyone you can trust. In the capital city, everyone is watched and even the watchers are watched. Fear, too, is so great that no one can be sure who is a conspirator and who is loyal. Even one’s closest friends cannot be trusted in such a system.
Perhaps what makes this novel (and indeed this series) so great, besides the dark, brooding, atmosphere, is that McLean doesn’t just give us swashbuckling swordsmen and assassins and crazed magic princesses, but takes us down the road of wondering what the war is all about, what the revolution is worth, and what difference it makes which power-mad elite we put in charge. The book is not just grim in mood and subject matter, but grim in outlook, ultimately asking us as the Who once did, whether “We Don’t Get Fooled Again” by corrupt leaders and their petty propaganda and manipulations.
If you are looking for sugar plum fairies, unicorns, and snuggle bears, you have come to the wrong place. The universe in the grim dark series, the War for the Rose Throne, is neither happy nor perfect. It is a tough, dark, miserable lot and nothing is ever simple and uncomplicated.
Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. In Priest of Gallows, we are taken into the belly of the beast, the capital city, Dannsburg, and learn how Machiavellian the city is and how like the French Revolution it can quickly become. Thomas Piety is summoned to the city and soon finds that it is a hotbed of deceit and underhandedness and, as a part of the secret society of Queen’s Men, he has a license to do whatever it takes to play out the will of the the Lord Chief Judiciar and Provost Marshal Dieter Vogel, the not-so invisible power behind the throne. And, Thomas Piety, he of ignoble birth, finds that what goes on beneath the surface in the capital city is a world run by gangster thugs, a populace prone to fall for whatever propaganda they are fed, backstabbing rather than loyalty, and no one is safe from arrest and torture. Indeed, Ilse can make anyone confess to anything at any time.
This, the third novel in the four-novel quartet, is not a book of war and battle though Piety fears war is coming and, having lived through its horrors, knows that war is the last thing this nation wants or needs and that they may not survive what is sure to be coming, particularly if they are at each other’s throats. One might hesitate though to call this a novel about palace intrigue as that makes one think of gentle battles and wits and costumed balls. What goes on in Dannburg where no one trusts another and everyone is watched at all times is no court wordplay. Rather, there is brutal work to be done. People must be taken care of. And Piety and Bloody Anne and the lot may not even be tough and ruthless enough to get it all done. This business of theirs, we are told, is ill-suited to saints.
Of course, what makes it all work is the brilliant narrative voice of Thomas Piety, at once rough, tumble, and bloody, but at some point decent enough to know that the backstabbing will only result in more turmoil and more distrust. Not only are the portraits of Piety drawn so well, but those around him are complex, multi-faceted characters, not the least of which is his wife in name, Ailsa, the Queen of Deceit. And, the portrait of Lord Vogel knows no peer in all of literature. Indeed, we are told “There was something about Lord Vogel, something made of razors and hate that had me feeling cold all the way to my boots.” Vogel was like the devil himself and there was nothing in his soulless eyes to ever change that conclusion.
The book is dark. It is grim. It takes the reader down a path circling into and descending into hell time and time again. And, each time the book takes us into that dark grim fateful path, it gets darker and grimmer. Which is but to say that it is perfect.
Tough Guy: The Life of Norman Mailer offers the reader an in-depth and meticulously researched portrait of a controversial writer. In some ways, it may prove to be too much detail and too much information for the casual reader. Rather than idolize Mailer as so many biographers due to their subjects, Bradford presents Mailer as he was, warts and all. Best known for his seminal works, the Naked and the Dead, the Armies of the Night, and the Executioner’s Song, Mailer wrote countless magazine pieces, often on current topics AB’s events, campaigned to New York City’s mayor, married six times, stabbed his wife nearly killing her, and engaged in all manner of drunken brawls. He was an American original, machismo and all.
Hate 2.0 is an autobiographical treatise chronicling Aaron Hadida’s path through life. Raised in a tough Toronto neighborhood, Morrocan Jew Hadida learned that the most important thing in a fight is to get in a few shots and not back down. His heroes were Meyer Lansky, Arnold Rothstein, and Bugsy Seigel, three prominent Jewish gangsters who never backed down.
Hadida developed a Morrocan crew in Toronto, offering protection to businesses as well as street prostitutes, one time using a little too much force and doing a stretch for assault, including time in solitary, never backing down from a fight. Upon release, Hadida used his street fighting skills to protect synagogues and Jewish activists.
The book is conveyed in 75 short (sometimes really short) chapters, roughly chronological, but sometimes simply seguing to ideas and concepts about Zionism and it’s centrality to Jewish culture.
Ben Freeman’s book, “Jewish Pride: Rebuilding a People,” is a history of antisemitism, a discussion of Jewish identity, showing that Jews are not simply a religious identity, but a ethnic nation that can trace its roots, both collectively and through DNA, thousands of years. Freeman reflects on his background as a gay man and how people of that community internalized hate against them and sees a parallel in how Jews have internalized the long history of hate against them. His solution is to advocate for Jewish Pride in Jewish history, culture, and diversity much as the LBTQ community found Pride marches and being out and proud as a solution to what they encountered in society.
Freeman views antisemitism as a problem of society, not as a Jewish problem and one that is not necessarily resolvable given how deeply embedded it is in Western culture. It is a problem that is further resurfacing on the Left where modern-day progressives are using antisemitic hate camouflaged as anti-Zionist hate to exclude Jews from progressive spaces. Thus, modern day Leftist Jews are defining themselves by the values of the non-Jewish, antisemitic world and misconstruing their own history and identity.
With regard to identity, Freeman points out that Jews in Western society often are mischaracterized as merely a religion or a race, both of which are inaccurate reflections of what it means to be Jewish, a community based both on a religion and nationhood (though exiled and dispersed from the physical ground of Israel for 2,000 years).
With regard to modern antisemitism, Freeman traces it to the Stalinist antisemitism which equated Israel with Nazism and replaced Jews with Zionists to give cover and code to antisemitism. By targeting a sovereign state and not an ethno-religious minority, the Soviets masked antizionism as a modern expression of antisemitism. Freeman points out that, despite originating in the Soviet Union, this antizionist antisemitism has creeped into the wider Lefist community. Indeed, he points out that the Left now argues that what Jews experience in exclusion on college campuses and in Left-wing organizations is not antisemitism and that this is a form of gaslighting (According to Wikipedia, Gaslighting is a colloquialism, loosely defined as manipulating someone so as to make them question their own reality.)
He points out that, despite appearing different to fit a specific context, antisemitic tropes still exist today, but are focused on demonising, deligitimatizing, and treating Israel with double standards. These are not simply normal accusations but equate Israel with being inherently evil, the same traditional antisemitic tropes that have existed against Jews for 2,000 years. And, many of these tropes can be traced to the Protocols of Zion, a work of fiction published in Russia in 1903. After the Holocaust, Freeman argues, it is no longer acceptable for broader society to openly denigrate Jews so antisemitism has taken the form of antizionism when Zionism is simply the return of a deeply oppressed people to their indigenous homeland.
Historically, Freeman argues that the roots of antisemitism can be traced back to the origins of Christianity, which defined itself originally as being not Jewish. Antisemitism became thus one of the building blocks of Western culture. As a result, Jews have often attempted to assimilate into broader culture, leaving their own identity behind. In America, immigrants often downplayed their Jewishness and identified themselves as a religious community, thinking it would guarantee freedom from the enduring antisemitism experienced in Europe.
However, assimilation has not ended antisemitism as the White Power groups frame Jews as the puppetmasters of the destruction of Western culture and the Left frames Jews as White oppressors even though Jews are not European, have a long history of oppression, and worldwide are often Middle Eastern or Ethiopian. Jews, he argues, have never been able to fully assimilate into Western society because of antisemitism and thus should not be viewed in the lens of critical race theory. Indeed, as a counter argument to the Left, Freeman argues that the idea of Jewish privilege is insulting to Jewish communities who experience antisemitism today and misunderstands the deadly violence directed at Jewish communities. Although much of the book is targeted toward leftwing antisemitism, Freeman does not ignore antisemitism on the right.
Freeman ends the book by presenting interviews with seven Jews who are from diverse backgrounds, many of whom one would not traditionally associate with Judiasm by looking at them. Among them are a non-religious Ashkenazi woman, a gay Mizrahi (middle eastern origin) man, an Ethiopian Jew, a part-Sephardic man from Central America, a Black American orthodox woman whose matrilineal lineage is Jewish, a trans man living in Australia, and a Chinese-American patrilineal Jew living in Israel. Freeman presents these seven as examples of diversity and Jewish pride. Though he does not present a seven–point plan for fighting antisemitism, he seems to argue that the best revenge is living well.
Those Crazy Books 