It's a magical world

Gopnik, Adam. Angels and Ages: A Short Book about Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009.

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This year marked the bicentennial of Darwin and Lincoln's birthdays (they were born in the same year, a coincidence upon which Adam Gopnik constructs an impressive edifice that is a gem of a book), and in celebration of these two figures--one a naturalist, the other a president--Gopnik offers a nuanced, persuasive, wonderfully well-read meditation on the impact on us of their actions and their ideas.

Gopnik has been a staff writer for The New Yorker for the past 23 years, and he succeeds quite well in keeping the tone of his book at about the level of an essay in that magazine (too well, really; I could have done with a more expansive bibliography, since I recognized Gopnik adapting material from more writers than he cited explicitly). Part of his skill is that he's read the right books, not only by and about Darwin and Lincoln but about literature and history in general. He has a genius for summing things up in a witty turn of phrase that gets right to the heart of the matter. It's a brief book, and I shall try to honor that by keeping this review short as well. I can only say that I'd recommend it to any one interested in either man, since Gopnik succeeds in explicating some bit of the meaning of life out of the life of each.

First off, some Dreamwidth-related news: I have granted all active mutual friends access to my DW journal via OpenID (so, yourusername.livejournal.com). Of course my DW and LJ accounts are mirrors, but this enables you to comment on my DW posts in your LJ guise, once you create your OpenID.

That said, I will have some (not sure how many) DW invite codes to hand out on April 30, when Dreamwidth enters open beta. If any one would like an invite code, please leave a comment to this entry or message me.

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Rubinstein, Julian. Ballad of the Whiskey Robber. New York: Little, Brown and Co., 2004.

I'd heard good things about this book upon its original publication, and I managed to score a copy for $3.99 as part of Borders' ongoing "let's sell all our stock in a futile attempt to stave off bankruptcy though it was our stock that made us better than B&N" sale. Semi-annual my foot. At any rate, Rubinstein, a reporter at large, recounts the dozen-year saga of modern Hungary's most notorious thief, Attila Ambrus, epithet "the Whiskey Robber" due to his habit of knocking off banks, post offices and travel agencies while more or less completely sloshed. Rubinstein is a hugely entertaining writer--I laughed out loud at multiple points in his book, which isn't something that happens often--though his strength is at least partly his pitch-perfect timing of pithy phrases, even cliches. It's sort of like sitting down in a bar with a friend who tells good stories. I've actually been to Hungary, and spent a few days in Budapest, which gave the story an addtional resonance for me: while the action the book recounts was ended by the time of my visit, it's certainly a cogent reminder of all the realities tourists almost never know exist in countries they visit, let alone see. I think anyone can sympathize with modern Hungary's tribulation-filled transition to capitalism and democracy, as well as with the transparent way the Hungarian elites went easy on themselves and came down hard on outsiders to the system.

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Troll's Eye View: A Book of Villainous Tales. Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, eds. New York: Viking, 2009.

My library came through for me with this book, and while the fact that it's aimed at "middle readers" means that it's rather slight, the star-studded cast of authors overall delivers. Among others, Peter S. Beagle, Delia Sherman, Garth Nix, Ellen Kushner, Neil Gaiman, Catherynne M. Valente (yuki_onna) and Kelly Link turned in excellent efforts. If I had to pick one favorite story, I'd say Link's "The Cinderella Game" and Sherman's "Wizard's Apprentice" were my favorites, because they both completely inverted the distinction between heroes and villains: in these stories, everyone is both.

Or, Abraham Lincoln: Cooler Than You Since 1809.

Miller, WIlliam Lee. Lincoln's Virtues: An Ethical Biography. New York: Viking, 2002.

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I received this book as part of being given my high school's Phi Beta Kappa Award my senior year, and lo these six years later I finally cracked it open and read it...and boy am I glad I did. There have been many, many, many books written on our sixteenth president, but I daresay this one is one of the best, probably precisely because it looks at Lincoln's entire life from the perspective of his ethics. We don't talk about ethics, virtues or morals much anymore (and when we do we only speak of "morals," which personally I hate; you will hear me speak of ethics, though not knowledgably), but all these concepts were alive and well in Lincoln's time, and comparing his ethics and his ideas about ethics and principles in politics to his fellows' is fascinating. To put it briefly, he may well have been the best man ever to occupy the office of President: while the Founding Fathers did well, Abraham Lincoln did right.

( Abraham Lincoln was the Great Emancipator. )

All right, first of all, I'd just like to take 30 seconds to point out that all the indignation of the past forty-eight hours over Blago's sole power to appoint President-elect Obama's replacement in the Senate has been brought to you by...the Progressive movement. That's right, folks, until those wonderful teetotallers showed up advocating prohibition, silver, and popular election for Senators, governers appointed whoever the hell they wanted to the Senate, and the Senate sat them, unless it didn't, and those Senators stayed in office in perpetuity. So when people whine about Caroline Kennedy as a potential Hillary replacement, or call the governor of Delaware appointing a longtime Biden aide to, essentially, a caretaker two-year term so that Beau Biden can run for the Democratic nomination "tacky," I find all the hand-wringing and pontification to be irritatingly ignorant of history. The new New York senator will face two elections in the next four years, in particular, and Delaware and Illinois' replacements will also be up for election in 2010. So these people will be forced to prove their mettle in short order, and they will take their appointments knowing that. This is why the Founders distrusted the Mobility.

In other news, I finished Tom LaMarre's Uncovering Heian Japan this morning. I'm not sure if this is the book Frenchy described as "difficult," I found it wonderfully complex and well-considered, but not difficult to understand. In fact, LaMarre does an excellent job of making the Heian order seem comprehensible--whereas the attitude of people like Ivan Morris, for one, is way more "yes, those silly Heian aristos, all they did was lay around and write poetry and talk about mappo." Which we already know is partly crap. At any rate, LaMarre returns poetry to its central place in the Heian world, and does an excellent job explicating how that world worked (through poetry). Now I want to track down a copy of his book about Japanese cinema. And I will be first to pre-order his new book on anime from the U of M Press.

Spike and I took the train to Philly to see "Let The Right One In"--the other vampire movie--this afternoon. It's been a while since I've seen a foreign film (unless you count Japanese movies), and midway through I caught myself thinking, "Ah, yes, charmingly like anime in its refusal to explain almost everything!" In brief, the story follows bullied Oskar and mysterious Eli, both apparently 12 years old, in the suburbs of Stockholm in the 1980s. It snows a lot in Sweden, which seems fitting for the story, and the laconic deliberation with which it unfolds. It was particularly interesting to see vampirism displaced onto the female half of the couple, and to see her caught at such an impossible age as 12, with all the implications of that number for various harsh realities. The movie skated perilously close to camp at times (in showing the experience of one vampire victim in particular), but all in all it was quite excellent. I would venture to say, though, that it comes no closer to explicating the vampire's undying appeal than "Twilight," or any other incarnation of the mythos. Another movie mini-trope of 2008: half-melted faces of hospital patients (if "The Dark Knight" had stuck closer to canon, they'd both be because of acid, too); for my money the patient in here looked more horrific (though not more shocking).

The more things change in Greece, it seems, the more they stay the same. Four years ago when I was in that benighted country along with olewyvern  and several others, the students were rioting against the government's attempts to make a Greek diploma worth more than the paper it was printed on by tightening up the university standards and curriculum. Now anarchists, students, workers and everyone are rioting because they can't get a job and their education is useless. I wish I could say my emotions were more enlightened than "A plague on both your houses!" But Greece remains one of the countries that I dislike based on personal experience, and I just can't quite muster the enthusiasm to wish them well. I do wonder, though, if this year's Olaf interim will go through.

I also read an excellent short story by Garth Nix in B&N tonight, "Old Friends." Designer coffee as libations for summoning! Tree people! Genius!