My daughter Lauren's book "Amelia's Journey to Find Family" was featured in a review in the Lancaster Newspapers today.
She published the book this summer after caring for a 14-year-old rescue Labrador Retriever named Amelia for the last year of her life. I wrote about Lauren's book and her love for dogs in a post in June last year.
If you want a copy of the book, you can order it here.
It's wonderful to see Lauren share her love of dogs in this way.
Her Dad is very proud!
That's the future of America according to the Canadian author Stephen Marche. By some definitions, the level of violence and political dysfunction in America is already at a point we are close to a civil war.
In the book Stephen Marche uses information he learned from military and political experts to make scenarios of how America could fall into civil war.
The first scenario he calls "The Bridge." Federal inspectors close a bridge between two rural counties. Protestors occupy the bridge, tear down the roadblocks, and defy the federal government to close the bridge. A sheriff in one of the counties becomes the spokesperson for the protesters. Soon he is on Fox News every day giving updates from the frontlines.
Eventually the Army moves in. After months of delay, the military attacks the bridge. The sheriff is arrested and charged with treason and becomes a hero to Fox News.
In the aftermath of the fight, the President comes to town for a "listening tour." An unemployed white kid living in mom's attic and dreaming of being a hero shoots the President when she makes a surprise visit to a Jamba Juice. He becomes a bigger hero than Kyle Rittenhouse.
From there the local terrorist war becomes national. Attacks, counter attacks become daily life in America.
Marche then speculates on how the US will break into pieces since we are ungovernable. One part will be Texas, by itself. Another part will be the Pacific Coast. Then the northeast and midwest will be the land still called the USA. The South and the West will form a nation with the most land area, no abortions at all anywhere, unlimited gun rights, and an economy that will crater immediately without all the tax money they get from the rich states. South Carolina, for example, gets $7.50 from the federal government for every dollar it pays in taxes.
Marche says he has some hope at the end, but he sounds like a manager who who talks for about 20 minutes about her worst employee then says, "I know she's a good person inside." The message of the rest of the book: move to a blue state or live in Gilead.
(In past years I have written an essay about the books I read in the previous year. As my list of books gets longer and my memory shorter, I decided to write about the books as I read them rather than 2000+ words at the end of the year.)
In November I visited the Institute Curie near the Sorbonne in Paris. This book was on the shelf in the tiny bookstore inside the small museum. I read kids books in French to keep some level of reading comprehension. This graphic novel gave me a chance to practice French and to remember what I learned about the life of this remarkable scientist.
I learned a lot about Marie Sklodowska-Curie's life because more than half the book is about her childhood in Poland and struggles to get to France to study physics. When I read about her previously, it was about her research and life-saving work in World War One.
After I finished the book, I looked up how many people have won Nobel Prizes: 962 laureates earning a total of 603 prizes (as of 2020). Just 59 laureates are women and Marie Curie is the first.
Just four laureates have received two Nobel Prizes:
Linus Pauling won a chemistry prize and a peace prize.
John Bardeen won the Nobel twice in physics.
Frederick Sanger won two chemistry prizes.
Marie Sklodowska-Curie won the Nobel Prize in physics and in chemistry: the only person to be awarded to Nobel Prizes in two different fields. She is extraordinary, even among the short list of multiple Nobel laureates.
If you read French at all, the book is fun to read and not difficult.
The summary on Goodreads:
Cette biographie de Marie Curie (1867-1934) retrace les principales étapes de son existence : son enfance en Pologne, sa scolarité studieuse et ses études supérieures, son arrivée à Paris, sa rencontre avec Pierre Curie, ses recherches sur le radium et ses découvertes sur les rayons X, l'obtention de ses prix Nobel en 1903 et 1911 et son engagement pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale.
But graphic novel is the category according to Wikipedia, so I will go with it:
A graphic novel is a book made up of comics content. Although the word "novel" normally refers to long fictional works, the term "graphic novel" is applied broadly and includes fiction, non-fiction, and anthologized work. It is, at least in the United States, typically distinct from the term "comic book", which is generally used for comics periodicals and trade paperbacks.
Before I read Unflattening, I heard Nick Sousanis talk about how his book came to be and what he was trying to do with his use of graphics. I loved hearing him talk about how our eyes follow images and graphical cues and how he used that knowledge to create the book.
I liked this review by comicsgrid.com
Over eight chapters, Unflattening follows an anonymous, sleepwalking figure as they step out of a regimented life and take flight to explore new worlds. Sousanis draws the imagery of these worlds from TV, movies, the classical canon of art, and scientific diagrams. Unflattening embraces visual references from Paleolithic cave prints to James Bond films, and verbal ones from Bruno Latour to Wallace Stevens. The protagonist bears at one time Hermes’ sandals and at others wings of its own; it is incarnated as a Pinocchio-like puppet confounded by a centipede’s existential challenge, ‘Who are you?’, before finally being reborn as a child reminiscent of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). The comic’s final image is of that newborn’s eye opening to see the world as if for the first time.
In the course of this journey, Sousanis dethrones the primacy of the word in a kind of Copernican revolution. He argues that image is not mere illustration, subordinate to words, but an equal partner and component in thinking. He explores stereoscopic vision and the principles of astronomical observation as metaphors in order to define ‘unflattening’ as ‘a simultaneous engagement of multiple vantage points from which to engender new ways of seeing.’ (Sousanis 2015: 32).
An extended sequence takes us through the world of Edwin Abbott’s Flatland, in which two-dimensional ‘A. Square’ encounters a three-dimensional sphere who exposes him to previously unimagined perspectives. We need each other’s points of view, Sousanis tells us, to avoid become constrained in set modes of thinking and blinkered perspectives, just as A. Square must be enlightened by his encounter with the sphere. Words and images together free us from the limitations presented by either the purely visual or purely verbal.
And here are a few pages.
I hesitated to read the book for a long time, but now I am reading two other graphic novels (both biographies of scientists). Unflattening will take your mind places it has never been before.
Enjoy!
My books of 2021:
From the beginning of my military service nearly 50 years ago, until the last my last day in the Army in May 2016, I attended dozens of change of command ceremonies. After the flag is passed the new and out-going commanders often make a speech. Probably one in three of those speeches made a sincere nod to the American tradition of the peaceful transfer of power.
For the mostly conservative officers taking or relinquishing authority, they linked themselves to a 200-plus year American tradition--a hallmark of American exceptionalism.
But that ended one year ago today when the 45th President sent a mob to overturn the election he just lost. The coup d'etat was mere minutes from success. Hundreds of Trump supporters were screaming to kill Mike Pence. If they had managed to stop the vote, the election could have been thrown into the House of Representatives. That is the last possible place in which a disputed election can be decided according to the Constitution.
With one vote per state, Trump would have taken the election.
All of my adult life I had an implicit belief in progress in America: more rights for more people. The racist rednecks would recede, I believed.
With Trump's nomination and election, my belief cracked. After Charlottesville it was shattered. With January 6, it was gone. The end of democracy was only a matter of when.
America no longer has a tradition of the peaceful transfer of power. I voted for Joe Biden and hoped normal order could be restored in America. One year later, the democratic party is fighting about infrastructure and social programs and has done nothing to fix the electoral count act or secure voting. The Republicans are running MAGA candidates all over the country to get control of election counting. How much does voting really matter if the Republicans are in charge of counting.
In 2016, 63 million Americans voted for a failed casino owner who played a business man on a game show. In 2020, 74 million Americans watched a lying buffoon for four years and said they would like four more. The people who claim most publicly to be followers of Jesus (Love your neighbor; Love your enemies; turn the other cheek) worship Trump much more fervently than they follow anything Christ ever said or did. I have read and re-read the New Testament. Few people who have ever lived are less like Jesus than Donald Trump.
January 6, 2021, was a dress rehearsal. The command performance is three years away. In 2025, there will be no need for a mob to attack. The criminals will be in the building. They will use the power entrusted to them by the Constitution to end democracy.
The Roman poet Horace fought to preserve the Republic during the Civil War after Julius Caesar took power and was murdered. The Republicans lost. Horace was wounded and lost everything. When he recovered, he knew the Republic was gone, so he made peace with his circumstances and became a poet, living the best life he could.
Here is a picture of 61 books I hope to read, have already started reading, or plan to re-read in the year ahead.
Some are already in progress:
Game of Thrones Book 5.
Jon Meacham's biography of Thomas Jefferson.
Civilization by Niall Ferguson.
And at least three books by Hannah Arendt.
Happy New Year!
Blindness reached out and grabbed me from the first page. A very ordinary scene of cars waiting for a traffic introduces the horror to c...
