Book Reports...

Props to all my friends who lent me books to bring back with me to Buenos Aires. You have all greatly contributed to my mental wellbeing here. It's funny because I hardly read novels when in the US, but I'm reading a lot here now that I have a good collection. Actually, I need to slow down, I'm going to finish them all too soon. Here's a bit of what I have read so far with a few comments:

Harry Potter 1 & 2: Okay, okay, I got over my somewhat snobbish attitude toward things that are massively popular and borrowed these books from Dennis and Viv. And, yes, they are very fun reads—fast paced and light reading. They actually remind me a bit of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series, also from a British writer. The Potter books have a similar wacky creativity at times, and they also often do funny takes on the adventure genre standards, witches, wizards, ghosts, goblins, etc.

"The Hot Zone" by Richard Preston: Thanks a lot Ed, this book scared the shit out of me. Basically a nonfiction account of the worst viruses in the world—Ebola probably been the one that most of us are familiar with—and how one was brought to a suburb outside of Washington D.C. I started reading this book at about 11pm one night. I couldn't put it down until I had gotten through the first 300 pages or so of it and it was almost 5 in the morning.... The graphic retellings of what happened to some of the people who contracted these viruses are enough to make you never want to leave your house again.

The author makes a point at the very end about how he thinks that these viruses might end up being the earth's way of controlling the destruction that mankind has wrought on the planet, sort of balancing things out again by wiping out millions of us someday. An interesting Darwinian sort of take on things. One interesting observation that he makes is that in some ways the horrible killing power of these viruses has worked against their ability spread. Basically, they kill too quickly, not giving their host enough time to spread the virus effectively (many of these viruses kill their host within a week). This actually is why the AIDS virus has been a much more effective (sorry to use terms like that) killer, even though it is releatively difficult to transmit it—the infected host can transmit the virus for years before he or she even shows any symptoms of having it.

"Blindness" by José Saramago: (Thanks to Viv on this one.) This book had such a great premise—that an unexplained "white blindness" begins with one man and starts spreading like, well, a virus throughout a whole country. But, it didn't really live up to its promise for me. I wanted it to and I kept thinking that it was going to be a bit deeper. I had that feeling that maybe I was missing something, some more profound meaning—but, maybe I was looking for that just because the author had won a Nobel Prize.

There were times when the storytelling was strong, but for me at least they didn't match some of the raves that I have read in reviews since finishing the book. The one thing I found interesting was Saramago's breaking of gramattical conventions: he didn't place dialogue in quotes, and often ran sentences together with commas instead of separating them with periods. It was sort of distracting at first, but it started to work pretty well for me. It was especially effective when a group of people were talking rapidly and cutting into each other's conversations.


"Stupid White Men" by Michael Moore: In an perfect world, people with progressive ideals wouldn't be assholes. For those of you that don't know, Moore is a big jerk. I have quite a bit of anecdotal evidence from people I believe and trust. BUT, he is also an extremely effective media activist in the fight for justice and dignity in our country.

More of us on the progressive side of the fight need to pay attention and learn from his communication style both in his movies and books. Sure, his movies and his books tend to be on the disorganized side and tend to feature himself too much (Farenheit 9/11 thankfully tones that down), but he still has a communication style that is accessible beyond academic and leftist circles. Of course, a lot of grassroots organizers already know how to do that when talking one on one with people, but we need more of us transfering those skills to broader debates and larger means of communication.

Oh, the book? It didn't really have much information that I didn't know, but the strongest thing about it was Moore remindinig us (me) to stay angry about some of these things that had already slipped into the "resignation" part of my brain. You know, things like the 2000 election being stolen by George Bush with the complicity of the Supreme Court. More than Bush becoming president—which obviously has been bad enough—the real damage is that which was done to our democracy.