First Watch, by Dale Lucas

Today I'm looking at First Watch, the first book in a series titled Fifth Ward by Dale Lucas. This series is set in the city of Yenara, a massive fantasy city along the lines of Ankh-Morpork. I kind of made that comparison in my head because the book focuses on the watch wardens of the city. However the characters in this book are nothing like Sam Vimes and his own City Watch. The watch wardens of Yenara are largely another gang. This is reinforced by how the watches are set up. The city of Yenara is divided into five wards, with each ward having its own watch. The prefects of every ward are jealously defensive of their territory and will fight members of other wards that come into their territory. In addition, the majority of crime in Yenara is handled through a fine system, and everyone is in on the rampant graft. So this is definitely a darker fantasy.

The book focuses on the character of Rem, a former nobleman who decided to leave home and take his chances in the big city. Unfortunately this resulted in Rem getting into a major bar fight and waking up in the dungeons of the Fifth Ward. Through talent and a good dose of luck Rem manages to get himself recruited as the newest member of the Fifth Ward Watch. Rem is soon paired up with Torval, a dwarf whose partner has gone missing and is less than thrilled that he's been assigned a rookie to babysit. But Rem and Torval soon discover that Torval's former partner's been murdered, and he may have gotten himself into something much bigger and more dangerous than even Torval could have expected.

I'll have to admit, I have pretty mixed feelings on this book. As a fantasy cop mystery book I think Lucas does a pretty good job and managed to keep the story interesting throughout. I honestly think my biggest problem is that the book isn't the City Watch books from Discworld, and Rem, Torval, and the whole system are nothing like Sam Vimes and his crew. And I guess it's really not fair for me to say this book is bad just because it isn't Discworld. Lucas is doing his own thing and creating his own story.

On the other hand, the characters are supposed to be police, and Rem and Torval seem pretty okay with the whole concept of torturing people. On top of this, we see Torval being a good, honest family man who cares about his sister and three children. To go to Discworld again, it reminds me a lot of the bit in Small Gods where Pratchett said that even the worst and most terrible tortures could be casually inflicted by otherwise good an honest people who are just doing this for a paycheck. Ultimately I'm left conflicted about these characters, and I'm not certain if I can really get behind them. Maybe it's just because I like Discworld so much.

So really, that's my biggest criticism, it's not Discworld and Rem and Torval are in many ways dirty cops, so I'm not sure how much I can get behind them. That being said, it's not a terrible book so it might be worth your time to check out and see for yourself what you think.

- Kalpar

Dreadnought, by Robert K. Massie

Today I'm looking at a book about relations between Britain and Germany from the formation of the German Empire in 1871 to the outbreak of World War I in 1914. I originally thought based on the title that this book would focus more on the development of the dreadnought battleship and the naval policies that put diplomatic strain between Germany and Britain and eventually put the two nations at war. Massie goes into considerable detail in his book, but I'm left wondering if the amount of detail is a little too much, and it's no surprise that this book is over nine hundred pages long. Massie's definitely done his research but I think there's a lot of material that could have been excised from this particular book without sacrificing a lot.

The H.M.S. Dreadnought was a battleship that brought about a revolution in naval warfare and tactical thinking, spawning an entire class of battleship named after it and descendants, the superdreadnoughts. There hadn't been a major naval conflict since the Napoleonic wars but naval technology saw considerable improvements. In 1806 the two and three decked ships of the line with muzzle-loading cannons were the mainstays of navies across the globe. The advent of steel armor, breech-loading artillery, and steam power meant ships had gone through radical changes. But because of this gradual evolution of ship design there was one key problem. Battleships had an armament consisting of guns in different sizes. In addition to complicating ammunition supplies, this meant that accurate ranging of the ship's weapons were difficult if not impossible. The splashes from the different caliber guns would be at different ranges so it would be nearly impossible for a gunnery officer on a battleship to determine where his shells had landed. As artillery increased in its accuracy and range, the importance of accurately and reliably aiming broadsides became a matter of life and death.

The solution was the all big-gun battleship, carrying massive broadsides of heavy guns in one caliber. With improvements in fire control a battleship could fire a devastating broadside accurately and repeatedly into an enemy ship. The release of the dreadnought launched a new arms race among the Great Powers. The ship with heavier guns could fire at a longer range, sometimes safely from beyond the range of enemy ships with lighter guns. In addition a certain amount of prestige was attached to having a fleet of large, powerful battleships. As Germany accelerated its building program of battleships, Britain grew increasingly concerned for their own safety and gradually British interests aligned with those of France, rather than where they had traditionally been with Germany.

This is just a very brief overview, of course, and the book goes into a great many other subjects, such as Kaiser Wilhelm II's personality and strange love-hate relationship with Britain which added further problems to existing relationships between the two powers. And Massie goes into a great amount of detail about those problems. I think the biggest thing Massie could have done was reduce the overall scope of his book. The reason I say this is that Massie goes back to Victoria and Albert and their many children, of whom their eldest daughter, Victoria, married Crown Prince Friedrich of Prussia, and later Crown Prince of the united German Empire and the tragically short-reigned emperor Friedrich III. Friedrich's own fondness for England and English customs is used to explain Wilhelm II's psyche and his strange relationship with the nation. I think Massie simply went too far back to make his history concise.

Another issue I noticed was that Massie included detailed biographies of every important figure that factored into the historical narrative somehow. While I can understand talking about, for example, Jackie Fisher, the admiral who was responsible for modernizing the British Navy and developing the H.M.S. Dreadnought, I think detailed biographies of other figures could be skipped or at least heavily reduced, such as Philip Eulenberg who was accused of homosexuality in Germany and at the time caused a considerable scandal. Massie fails to place it into the larger context and how it would have an effect on the naval arms race. Every major government official involved, from Bulow to Holstein to Caprivi to Asquith to Roseberry to Grey gets their own biography chapter which bloats the length of the book out far beyond what I think it needed.

Another criticism I have is for a book titled Dreadnought, the ships themselves don't seem to be as large as the diplomatic relations between nations about them. There's a chapter about their development which goes with Jacky Fisher, and there is a chapter about the Naval Scare, but significantly more of the book is spent on people's biographies and diplomatic exchanges rather than the ships. Maybe this will be talked about more in Massie's other book, Castles of Steel, but there's very little commentary on the dreadnoughts. And Massie doesn't even talk about the Battle of Jutland, the only major dreadnought engagement in history, stopping his narrative with the declaration of war in 1914.

Overall this book is very detailed and it shows that Massie has done considerable research into this subject, but this book is far more about the personalities and diplomacy than about the ships themselves. If you're looking for a more military-focused history, then this book is not going to serve you well. But if you're just looking for a ton of nineteenth and early twentieth century history, especially with Britain and Germany, then this is definitely worth your time.

- Kalpar

Empire of the Summer of Moon, by S.C. Gwynne

Today I'm looking at another book about Comanche history, Empire of the Summer Moon, by S.C. Gwynne. Some of my long-time readers may remember a lifetime ago when I looked at another book, Comanche Empire, and while I quibbled over the use of the term ''empire'' for what appeared to be a band of similar nomadic ethnic groups that exerted military and economic control over a vast geographic area, but I thought that Hamalainen did a pretty good job with their arguments. In Empire of the Summer Moon, however, Gwynne uses outdated methodology that reveals an underlying racist ideology which brings his whole work into question. The focus on Quanah Parker, who some people might suggest was a collaborator, further leads me to suspect this book isn't worth the effort of reading.

I know that in the last paragraph I made some pretty serious charges, but I think this is entirely justified by Gwynne's use of the terms ''primitive'' and ''civilized''. Without going into a huge lecture, basically the social sciences (history, sociology, anthropology, etc.) basically avoid using the terms primitive and civilized to describe people, societies, nations, etc. This is because the terms primitive and civilized, especially in how they were used in the nineteenth century to justify colonization and imperialism, come with inherent moral baggage. Civilization is good, primitiveness is bad and needs to be countered with the force of civilization. We're even at a point where using simple and complex to describe societies is debated because a society that appears simple may in fact be rather complex, depending on how one wishes to use the term.

At multiple points through the book, Gwynne uses the terms primitive to describe the Comanche people and pits them in conflict with white civilization. I remember two specific examples that stuck out for me. First was when Gwynne briefly talked about Comanche language he said that despite its primitive nature, it had extremely detailed descriptions of horses, such as a yellow horses with black hair and a black tail, a horse with red ears, a horse with white ears, and so on. To which I reply, of course the Comanche don't have words for concepts like plumbing or income tax. They're a nomadic hunting culture where horses are central to their way of life. Where their language is going to get precise and sophisticated is with horses, not with concepts they have no use for. Comanche language can be complex without necessarily talking about abstract ideas.

Another example is when Gwynne talks about the Comanche response to diseases such as cholera, smallpox, and syphilis which they had no previous experience dealing with. He dismisses their traditional medicine as ''primitive'' which would have had no effect on the underlying disease. Again, this is an assumption that native people are automatically primitive and white people are somehow advanced. I would like to point out by our modern standards at the time the Comanche were dealing with these illnesses, the 1850's, Western medicine was equally primitive, or perhaps even more harmful. The Comanche may not have been able to do anything about syphilis, but at least they weren't treating it with mercury pills.

On top of this, Gwynne seems to get invested in the idea of the Comanche as a warrior people. I will admit that the Comanche were extremely well trained as mounted archers, but considering their livelihood was hunting the American bison, it makes sense that they would get very, very good at mounted archery just as a matter of survival. Gwynne seems to take especial pleasure in describing the torture, murder, abduction, and rape carried out by Comanches against white settlers. While this is certainly a thing that happened, I find it frustrating when Gwynne literally glosses over the Sand Creek Massacre by merely saying that ''what happened is too terrible to speak about in detail''. To go into detail about Comanche atrocities while largely ignoring the extensive, systemic, and documented atrocities as part of the genocidal campaign of the American government does a great injustice to the cause of Native American history to merely pass over this. Coupled with his usage of the terms primitive and civilized leads me to think there is a far more racial bias in Gwynne's work.

All of this leaves me to look somewhat askance and Quanah Parker's inclusion in the book. As Gwynne depicts it, Parker seems the most responsible for encouraging the Comanche to settle on a reservation and adopt white ways of life. Because of the racial overtones in Gwynne's work, and the positive light in which Parker is depicted, I almost come to the conclusion that Parker was a collaborator with the white government in betraying his people. I don't know what the current Comanche people think about Parker, but Gwynne certainly leaves me with doubts.

Overall I would not recommend this book. Gwynne's mythology is flawed and he uses racial tones within his writing. Considering this book was written in the last ten years, that raises some serious red flags for me. If you're looking for a book about the Comanche, I would definitely go with Comanche Empire instead.

- Kalpar

Boneshaker, by Cherie Priest

Today I'm looking at the first book in a series of steampunk books by Cherie Priest, Boneshaker, which I've heard is her most famous novel. At least to the point within the steampunk community that Boneshaker is often remembered as her fist novel when Priest had actually written other books prior to this one. (This is at least what Priest said anyway.) Overall I'd say this book is okay, but it leaves me with a lot of questions, at least one of which I think needs a serious answer.

The book is set in an alternate history United States about 1876 or so. Right before the American Civil War began, gold was discovered in Russian Alaska and the Klondike Gold Rush began. Seattle, located on the western coast and an ideal launching point for prospectors, boomed with the growth of the gold trade in the Klondike. Until the incident with the Boneshaker.

See, the biggest problem was most of the gold in the Klondike was inaccessible to miners. (Have you read a Jack London story? Don't, the lesson is Alaska is a dangerous place and will kill you.)  So the Russian government held a contest for the design of a machine to make mining the goldfields practicable. The winning submission was presented by Dr. Levi Blue of Seattle who at the behest of the Russians launched a test of his Boneshaker Drill. The result of the test was a significant portion of downtown Seattle was destroyed and a source of deadly Blight Gas, which kills everyone and turns some of those exposed to it into zombies, made the city uninhabitable. The residents of Seattle responded by building a wall two hundred feet high around the old city, containing the Blight and the shambling monsters.

Our main characters are Briar Wilks, widow of the late, unlamented Dr. Blue, and her son Ezekiel. Zeke is convinced that all rumors that his father's use of the Boneshaker was intentional are false, and is determined to prove that what happened to render Seattle uninhabitable was an accident. To do this, Zeke goes under the wall into old Seattle searching for scraps of evidence left behind. Briar knows that inside the wall is a deadly place that her sixteen year old son can't hope to survive, so she goes in to rescue her son herself.

Plot wise, I don't know if I really enjoyed this story. Despite the setting, it felt like a ''two characters trying to find each other'' sort of story, with at least a few incidents where the characters paths potentially could cross but don't until we get to the climax of the story. I mean, it's good that Briar is looking to rescue her darn kid from his stupid and potentially deadly situation, but for whatever reason I couldn't find myself getting emotionally invested in them as characters.

I will leave aside, for the time being, the question as to how the Civil War has been going on for about sixteen years. It's at least implied within the book that there are at least a few reasons why the war could be extended as long, including airships, a southern railroad, and British intervention. At this point I will forego my usual historian rant about the larger economic, social, and political factors which make such an outcome unlikely to say the least.

My biggest question for this book is why the heck people still live in Seattle anymore. The survivors create a settlement outside the wall called Outskirts, and there's still some trading activity, but it was stated that most of the trade has dried up when the most accessible of the gold was depleted in the Klondike rush. Now, cities have grown up around booms and then continued having grown into viable communities, but mining rushes have also produced numerous ghost towns that dot the American West. With the town infrastructure and the trade gone, I'm not sure why people would stay in Seattle. I mean, they have to boil all of their water because Blight Gas still escapes the Wall and even rainwater can't be trusted to be potable, which sounds like it's better to just abandon the place entirely than keep trying. Maybe the amount of trade was bigger than I gleaned from the book, Briar does visit an airship port, but I'm not certain.

The only real resource of note anymore is the Blight itself, which is useful for creating a drug referred to as lemonsap, but that's about it. And most of the Blight collected and processed for lemonsap is done by criminal organizations operating inside the wall. So why anybody would continue to live outside is puzzling to me.

Otherwise the book is okay. I have reason to hope that the later books would build on the foundation and maybe go to more interesting places and more interesting adventures. But because I didn't really emotionally connect with either Briar or Zeke I couldn't get as invested in their personal story as Priest might hope.

- Kalpar

The Road to Jonestown: Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple, by Jeff Gunn

Today I'm looking at a pretty serious book which examines the life of Jim Jones and his infamous organization the Peoples Temple. Jim Jones began as a preacher in the 1950's, promoting Christian Socialism and railing against racial and economic injustice. However Jones has become inextricably linked with the mass suicide of him and some nine hundred followers, including three hundred children, in Guyana. How nine hundred people could be convinced to collectively commit suicide remains a distressing puzzle. The debate over Jim Jones for the past forty years has left many wondering where Jim Jones went bad but Guinn's book leaves us with the impression that there was always something not quite right with Jones, perhaps some form of sociopathy, the result is a very dark story that shows people can do the right thing, but very often for the wrong reasons.

The biggest thing that struck me about this biography was the history of Jim Jones from his early childhood. Guinn amasses a large amount of evidence, including Jones's fascination with Hitler, that Jones was always a little bit off. And keep in mind, this is back during World War II when everyone else is solidly behind the Allied cause, Jones has a strange fascination with Hitler and his followers. Perhaps it's only with the benefit of hindsight that we see the numerous red flags, but it creates a long and concerning pattern of behavior over decades.

Even in his work as a church, there is evidence that Jones was doing it not for the help of other people or for the glory of god, but for the glory of Jim Jones. Jones tackled issues such as poverty and racism, but even in the earliest days it seemed to be for his own benefit rather than the benefit of his culture. For example, Jones would frequently ''poach'' members of different congregations by lobbying on behalf of newcomers, writing letters to local government, the local power board, speaking with local shop owners and convincing them to integrate. Jones manages to do good, but it seems to me that his motivation to do good was because it promoted Jim Jones.

As time this got even worse and perhaps more blatant as Jones moved his congregation from Indiana to California. Cut off from friends and family, Jones extorted even larger sums of money from his followers and had them sign over personal possessions to be sold for the good of the Peoples Temple. True, some of this money went to a variety of programs including college tuition for children who were part of the Peoples Temple, feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, traditional Christian charity. But millions of dollars disappeared into personal accounts, some of which the government has never been able to recover.

The result is a book that shows a series of gradual increases until a mass suicide becomes the logical conclusion for Jones and some of his most dedicated followers. Many resisted, some hid, some escaped, but the result was three hundred dead children, killed out of fear that they were about to be kidnapped by the CIA.

Guinn does extensive research and provides exhaustive evidence, but the story is hard to read, to say the least. It's a long story and with the inevitable conclusion it all takes a very dark and sinister turn. I'd only read this book if you were really interested, and I'd suggest interspersing it with something light as well.

- Kalpar

God, A Human History, by Reza Aslan

A long time ago, but not in a galaxy far far away, I was a college freshman taking comparative theology. Among the books we read was a history of Islam titled No god But God by Reza Aslan. I remembered rather liking the book and when I found another book from the same author, I thought it was worth taking the time to check it out. Rather than dealing solely with Islam, this book looks at the history of religion in a broader context going back into the stone age and ending with the monotheism of Islam. This book is rather short for tackling such a broad subject and I'm left wondering what other resources are available for additional research, but as an introductory book I think Aslan does a pretty good job.

The issue with debating the theology of stone age humans is that the work is mostly conjecture from the fragments of archaeological evidence that we've found. We know that there are cave paintings throughout the world including discs, handprints, and animals. We can make guesses as to the significance of those paintings and what they might have meant to stone age humans,why they made those paintings, and how they understood the world. But ultimately the best we can do is make educated guesses.

As Aslan manages to get to recorded history he moves onto firmer ground, although again because this book is so darn short I feel like there was a lot more subject matter that Aslan could have talked about but he provided such a short overview that it felt incomplete. Aslan also makes arguments that are so broad and vague that it's difficult to contradict them by their own generality. The stuff that I thought was most interesting though, was Aslan's revelation of theological research showing monotheism only developed in Judaism after the Babylonian exile. Aslan states that there is evidence that Judaism actually practiced a polytheistic system with at least two deities, Elohim and YHWH. It was only after the Babylonian exile that Elohim and YHWH were merged into a single deity, the only deity. Needless to say, multiple books can be written about this subject so for Aslan to talk about it in just one chapter feels a little inadequate.

Aslan also throws in a chapter about early Christian schisms, again another book-length subject, before finally getting to Islam. The result is a tantalizing glimpse at deeper theological subjects showing how difficult the concept of monotheism can be for people to accept. I'd actually be interested in a full-length book from Aslan about just that subject but for an introductory book I think Aslan does a pretty good job.

Overall I think this book is worth checking out. Specifically the information that I didn't know about Judaism and Christianity was tantalizing and I'd have appreciated resource to check out more. (There actually may be more in the physical book but as with most of my books at this point I listened to an audiobook.) But if you're interested in the history of theology in a very general sense this book is a good choice.

- Kalpar

American Pain, by John Temple

Today I'm looking at a book that explores the industry of pill mills that cropped up in recent decades in the United States, with the most flagrant examples being ''pain clinics'' in Florida. The biggest and most profitable of these was American Pain, run by Chris George, a college drop-out, convicted felon with Nazi tattoos. The pain clinics that George operated took in thousands of dollars in cash every day, deposited in garbage cans because regular tills were inadequate for the sheer quantity. Large groups of people from Appalachia would make marathon drives from out of state to purchase supplies of powerful narcotics, and make the trip back in a month. And amazingly the entire thing existed within the realm of legality due to lax laws and weak regulation.

Ordinarily you would not think that a convicted felon in his mid-twenties, whose main experience is house construction, would be able to get involved in anything resembling the medical field. Chris George got his start by selling diet pills and steroids, but a doctor got him started in the field of opioid painkillers. George merely had to rent a location, and provide the start-up money to produce something resembling a walk-in clinic. The doctor would provide their DEA license which enabled George to make purchases of oxycodone and other drugs from wholesalers and the doctor would write the prescriptions. The pain clinic could then fill the purchases in-house under the ''supervision'' of the physician. George wasn't certain that the idea would really take off, but was willing to give it a try. As patients continued coming in, packing the waiting room and stretching the line outside into the tiny parking lot, George realized they were onto something. From there the business grew by leaps and bounds until George's clinic was processing hundreds of patients in a single day, and bringing in hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue each day as well.

Why this happened is because of a multitude of reasons, which created a perfect storm situation that allowed George and his cadre to grow absurdly wealthy on something that was (technically) legal. The first was the increase in the availability of opioids starting in the late 1990s. Prior to that period opioids were largely restricted to patients who most likely weren't going to live long enough for addiction to become an issue. However, starting in the 1990s drug manufacturers began aggressively campaigning for increased sales of opioid painkillers through a variety of methods. This included advertising campaigns with fallacious information about how new opioids were safe and non-addictive if taken ''as prescribed'', dubious or downright illegal efforts by drug representatives to encourage physicians to prescribe opioids, and lobbying of the DEA to increase annual quotas of controlled substances. (Go ahead and put a pin in that last part. We're going to come back to it later.)

In addition, Florida had fairly lax regulations regarding pain clinics and opioid prescriptions. Basically anybody who could fill out a business registration form could start up a pain clinic, regardless of their background. And any doctor, so long as they had a valid DEA license, could order and prescribe opioid painkillers. The doctors did not even have to be pain specialists, they just had to have a valid license. There were various ways that doctors could trip automatic alerts and cause increased scrutiny from the DEA and other police agencies, but generally as long as a doctor didn't prescribe more than 240 30mg doses per patient per 28 day period, they could fly under the radar.

George even went to the effort of making it appear they were a legitimate medical facility. MRI reports were required before treatment, mounds of paperwork including a pain management contract were created, and patients with obvious track marks or forged paperwork were turned away, just to give the organization a veneer of legitimacy. But it was at most a paper shield to cover everyone's ass. People could tell that this was drug-dealing, plain and simple. The fact that patients would start shooting ground-up pills in the parking lot was proof enough of that. Eventually the police did end George's operation and new legislation made setting up a pill mill more difficult, but the fact that they operated for two years in the wide open, with multiple imitators and competitors, shows how dangerously lax the regulatory environment was.

Okay, so to return to the issue of the DEA and quotas, this was my biggest takeaway from the book. Every year the various drug manufacturers submit requests to the DEA for quotas on how much of controlled substances, such as amphetamines, opioids, and other drugs, they can produce in a year. Now, the public doesn't know how much opioids a specific manufacturer is allowed to produce in a year, but the DEA does release its total for the industry as a whole. In the past 25 years, the total quota for opioids has increased dramatically. In the past ten years it's at least doubled. In the past 25, it's increased by a factor of 42. Yes. 42. For every kilogram of opioids produced in 1993, there are 42 being produced today. The question isn't how we ended up with an opioid epidemic in the United States. We're so awash in pills nowadays that the more apt question is how couldn't we?

And yet, there's something the DEA could have done. Back in the 1970s when there was concern that amphetamines were being abused, the DEA drastically cut national quotas for the drugs and severely curtailing supply. When the supply dried up, the market for amphetamines dried up as well. At any point in the past decade when people started expressing concerns about the abuse of prescription painkillers the DEA could have drastically curtailed the quotas and dried up the supply of opioids. Instead, year after year, the DEA has obligingly raised the quotas meaning, year after year, we end up with an even greater supply of opioids. If we were serious about ending the opioid epidemic in the United States we could cut the supply off at the source, and it wouldn't cost us anything we weren't already spending.

I think this book is definitely worth reading. If nothing else it reveals the core problems surrounding our current opioid crisis, an overly plentiful supply of drugs and lax regulations regarding them. I definitely recommend giving this book a read for that, as well as the true crime aspects of the story involving the American Pain clinic.

- Kalpar

The Changeling, by Victor La Valle

Today I'm looking at a novel by Victor La Valle that is only loosely, loosely defined as fantasy and even then I'm not sure if it counts. This book is mundane for basically three-quarters of its total length and when magic is finally inserted in the last fourth of the book it left me wondering if what they'd encountered actually was magic or if it was a hallucination shared by the characters. That's honestly my biggest frustration with this novel, it's classified as a ''fantasy'' novel, but it's so freaking mundane that I don't think it's worth the effort if you're a big fantasy fan.

I'm actually going to do something that I usually avoid in my reviews and include the blurb from the back of the book for this story. I remember being intrigued by the blurb when I looked at this on the library's website so this was a major reason I bothered with this book in the first place:

''Apollo Kagwa has had strange dreams that have haunted him since childhood. An antiquarian book dealer with a business called Improbabilia, he is just beginning to settle into his new life as a committed and involved father, unlike his own father who abandoned him, when his wife Emma begins acting strange. Disconnected and uninterested in their new baby boy, Emma at first seems to be exhibiting all the signs of post-partum depression, but it quickly becomes clear that her troubles go far beyond that. Before Apollo can do anything to help, Emma commits a horrific act—beyond any parent’s comprehension—and vanishes, seemingly into thin air. Thus begins Apollo’s odyssey through a world he only thought he understood to find a wife and child who are nothing like he’d imagined. His quest begins when he meets a mysterious stranger who claims to have information about Emma’s whereabouts. Apollo then begins a journey that takes him to a forgotten island in the East River of New York City, a graveyard full of secrets, a forest in Queens where immigrant legends still live, and finally back to a place he thought he had lost forever. This dizzying tale is ultimately a story about family and the unfathomable secrets of the people we love.''

Okay, so this plot summary literally, literally, describes the entire book. The major twist, Emma's horrific act, doesn't happen until about halfway into the book. And as I said, we have no evidence that magic is real until the last quarter of the book, and even then the evidence seems pretty scanty. I'm basically left thinking that perhaps this is supposed to be an entirely mundane story and the magic is how the characters understand things. That does leave a large plot hole or leaves us with the conclusion that Apollo and Emma when insane at the end of the book and they just hallucinated the ending. I'm not sure which is more possible.

This book also reminds me of a more ''literary'' novel and I say that because Apollo, the main character, is a rare book dealer and his wife, Emma, is a librarian. Authors by definition are people who enjoy books, that's why they write them. But inevitably whenever somebody wants to write a ''serious'' book it's almost guaranteed that the main character will be a writer or librarian or somebody somehow connected with books. Which would be fine, but I get the impression that Apollo doesn't really care about books. We're told that he's a consistent reader which is how he gets into the used book trade, but after that he seems to just trade in books for the money, rather than for love of books themselves.

I'm also left with multiple questions about this book. There's the character Kinder Garten who is the main antagonist of the book, except we're not given much to understand about him. Why does he go by the alias Kinder Garten? What the hell is his ideology, if any? The character is a consistent liar so we don't know what coming out out of his mouth is true. This gets even more confusing when we get to the end of the book and he's talking with people who use the words ''beta cuck'' and another one mentions white men's natural birth rights. Is he an alt-righter or isn't he? Was La Valle including these just to make the book topical and play well with critical audiences? Who are the Wise Ones? Like how did they come to be, and where and how do people find them? There are just a lot of these questions and I'm left grasping for ideas.

The result is a book that in my opinion isn't all that great. If it was trying to convince me it was a fantasy novel, it did a really bad job and left me thinking there wasn't any fantasy involved at all. This book felt like it was trying really hard to get an award of some sort. If you like the more literary sorts of novels then this book might be enjoyable for you, but this wasn't really my cup of tea.

- Kalpar

America is Going to Kill Refugees

America is going to kill refugees.

I earnestly hope that what I say isn't going to be true. I hope that in two or three months time people can look back and say, ''Well Kalpar was wrong and he worried over nothing.'' And if I get a bunch of people telling me how wrong that statement was, I'll gladly accept the criticism. But right now I am seriously afraid that America is going to kill refugees.

If you don't know, and I can't blame you if you haven't been watching the news, there is currently a caravan of refugees fleeing the crime and violence of Central America. This caravan numbers in the thousands, moving for mutual protection, and is working its way through Mexico towards the U.S. border. In response, the United States government, under the administration of DJT, has sent some 5,000 soldiers to the border and DJT is speaking of plans to send upwards of 15,000 troops to the border. As a fascist and pathological liar, backed by a pack of Quislings, DJT and the Republican Party have boldly claimed that refugee caravan consists of Islamic terrorists, gang members, thugs, with absolutely no evidence. In fact, some right-wing pundits have gone so far as to claim that the refugees will bring diseases to the United States including smallpox, which would be downright amazing considering smallpox was declared eradicated by the WHO in 1980.

On top of all this yesterday there was an off-the-cuff comment, something very easy to miss but which may prove deathly important. DJT made a statement that U.S. troops should consider rocks thrown by refugees to be firearms. What this will actually mean for U.S. troops is still unclear, and it looks like the actual use of firearms is going to be limited. BUT that doesn't mean things can get changed or even confused in the intervening weeks until the caravan actually arrives at the U.S. border. And that doesn't leave out the possibility of a horrible, awful mistake.

Let me tell you a story. A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away I was a Boy Scout earning a variety of merit badges including the rifle-shooting merit badge. As part of this merit badge we were required to hit a certain number of shots within the space of a quarter. The rangemaster would have us all get set up on the range, tell us to load one cartridge into our .22 rifles, and then wait for permission to fire. Inevitably, someone would fire their rifle before being given permission. I can't say how often this happened, but it happened more than once.

Now you're probably saying, ''But Kalpar! That isn't the same situation at all! You've never even been in the military!'' And that's basically my point. It wasn't the same situation as what's going on at the border at all. A Scout rifle range is fairly low-risk, low-stakes, and if the rangemaster is doing their job right, nobody's going to get hurt or killed. Troops on a border is an entirely different situation whatsoever. All it will take is one accidentally discharged firearm for the situation at the border to turn into a massacre.

There are good arguments that this nightmare situation, of U.S. troops firing on unarmed refugees, will not come to pass. The U.S. military is highly trained, they understand the rules of engagement, and there are rules in place to limit deployment of firearms to U.S. troops in situations such as these. A significant number of the troops being sent to the border, after all, are engineers who are setting up razor wire and other obstacles. And hopefully these safeguards will be enough to prevent something awful from happening.

But in an era where so many other safeguards and institutional precautions seem to keep failing. In an era where people are outright calling these refugees criminals and...well, vermin, in an era where concentration camps are being set up for children torn away from their parents, in an era where DJT thinks he can overturn the Constitution through executive order, I'm not so sure. In an ideal situation we assume everything works as it should and also assume the best of people. But I'm truly afraid there is too much of an opportunity for something to fail somewhere.

- Kalpar

Democracy in Chains, by Nancy MacLean

Today I'm looking at another rather concerning book about the history of politics in the United States and how we got into the seemingly interminable mess that we now find ourselves. MacLean dug into archives from multiple universities and discovered what can only be called a conspiracy, spanning decades, and inspired by the ideological work of at least one man, James McGill Buchanan. This book is mostly a biography of Buchanan and his professional life until his break with the Koch brothers, forcing him into retirement. While I think it may be a stretch to say that Buchanan alone was responsible for the development of the radical right, I think it's fair to say that he was one of multiple influential figures who helped to shape the ideology of the modern right.

MacLean traces the origins of the modern right wing back to a key event in American history,  Brown v. Board of Education, in 1954. Many southerners resisted this decision, and the fight for integration continued for many years, and is in many ways still ongoing. However, the overt resistance in places such as Arkansas and Mississippi were not as appealing to border regions such as Virginia. The wealthy, elite ruling classes of Virginia maintained control through systems such as poll taxes, literacy tests, and extreme gerrymandering to ensure their continued dominance of their respective states, without any challenge from ordinary people. Effectively, an oligarchy in all but name. The federal decision to force integration of public schools under the Fourteenth Amendment promised additional federal changes to existing power structures within the states, breaking the chokehold of the oligarchs. The oligarchs needed a method to resist, without bringing overt attention to their objectives Buchanan managed to provide a solution. Privatize the schools. If there are no public schools, then there can be no discrimination. Private schools can refuse blacks admittance, and the burden of taxes for public education can be removed in favor of people who desire education actually paying for it. And in fact, that's what Virginia did in Prince Edward County for five years, despite massive local protest. The state government overruled local school boards and closed all the public schools, leaving black children without education for five vital years.

Buchanan and many of his compatriots were committed to an ideology that sought to return the United States back to an era of absolute economic freedom, resembling the Gilded Age more than anything else. No minimum wage, no right to organize, and no government regulation. Buchanan and his allies in fact want to go even further, disdaining corporate welfare systems such as health insurance and pension plans provided through employers. If people want health insurance or retirement money, they'll have to do it themselves. The government should exist only to protect private property and to repress the masses.

Yes, that's actually an important aspect of their entire ideology, repressing the masses. See, here's the biggest paradox that Buchanan and his ilk discovered when trying to promote their ideology. It's actually unpopular among the majority of people. For the most part, people like having clean air and water, good schools for children, old age insurance, and a number of other government programs that have to be supported by taxes. As libertarians discovered in the 1950's and 1960's, coming out directly and stating a desire to return to Gilded Age laissez faire did not go over well with really any focus group at all. The solution for Buchanan and their wealthy supporters was to impose their system of economic ''freedom'' on the majority through a combination of voter suppression and outright deceit, gradually dismantling the U.S. support net and regulatory systems until the network is completely destroyed.

This is perhaps the most galling and aggravating thing about libertarian intellectuals is their absolute and total lack of any morality or concern for political freedoms, which becomes apparent in much of their writing. MacLean includes an example of one member of Buchanan's cadre who stated that if their program was successful, many Americans would have to live in slums like the favela in Rio de Janeiro, casually stating that the air and water might not be what Americans are used to, but they'd have to adapt. It's social Darwinism pure and simple, the poor are poor because of some sort of inherent failing or weakness. If they're willing to work hard, tighten their belts, and raise themselves by their bootstraps, they can get ahead through rough individualism. If they're not willing to put in the work, then nobody else should have to carry them. This cruel callousness fits perfectly with their nineteenth century ideology. So long as they're fine, the rest of the world can go straight to hell for all they care.

The picture that emerges is highly disturbing. A small cadre of the ultra-rich and their lackeys, working to simultaneously undermine support for social welfare and regulatory programs while disenfranchising the very masses that they seek to exploit. The rise of the radical right, funded by ultra-wealthy backers, has thrown the future of American democracy in doubt. We are in the midst of a class war, started by the upper classes, and they are in the process of winning because they have convinced a significant percentage of the lower classes that the class war is in their own best interest. It is only through organization and education that we'll be able to fight back against the upper classes and ensure the future of social democracy.

- Kalpar