Monday, February 27, 2012

Ender's Game

I re-read this classic with the new intro from Orson Scott Card. I loved this introduction. It is worth finding this edition in a book store or library just to read it. If you have not read Ender's Game, please do yourself a favor and read it. It is a great book. In addition, a movie is coming out in 2013 and I believe in reading a book before it becomes imprinted on you in the form of a movie.


Some excerpts from the introduction:


"Because never in my entire childhood did I feel like a child. I felt like a person all along - the same person that I am today. I never felt that I spoke childishly. I never felt that my emotions and desires were somehow less real than adult emotions and desires." Intro


"Why else do we read fiction, anyway? Not to be impressed by somebody's dazzling language - or at least I hope that's not our reason. I think that most of us, anyway, read these stories that we know are not 'true' because we're hungry for another kind of truth: The mythic truth about human  nature in general, the particular truth about those life-communities that define our own identity, and the most specific truth of all: our own self-story. Fiction, because it is not about somebody who actually lived in the real world, always has the possibility of being about our self." Intro


"This is the essence of the transaction between storyteller and audience. The 'true' story is not the one that exists in my mind; it is certainly not the written words on the bound paper that you hold in your hands. The story in my mind is nothing but a hope; the text of the story is the tool I created in order to try to make that hope a reality. The story itself, the true story, is the one that the audience members create in their minds, guided and shaped by my test, but then transformed, elucidated, expanded, edited, and clarified by their own experience, their own desires, their own hopes and fears.


The story of Ender's Game is not this book, though it has that title emblazoned on it. The story is the one that you and I will construct together in your memory. If the story means anything to you at all, then when you remember it afterward, think of it, not as something I created, but rather as something that we made together."


Introduction to Ender's Game
Orson Scott Card
Greensboro, North Carolina
March 1991


Book 5

Wednesday, February 22, 2012

A Stolen Life

By Jaycee Dugard


While this story is painful, it is an important one to listen to. This is the story of a girl who was abducted as an eleven year old girl and kept captive until she was discovered at age twenty-nine. When discovered, she had two small children of her own. 


She writes in her own words what she experienced over that time period and the fear and distorted love she came to accept as a part of reality. And after her freedom, she describes the painful healing and recovery she and her family has to go through to deal with their pasts and move forward into their new future. 


She is brave to write and share her story, courageous to have lived through this painful ordeal and admirable to move past it for her own sake and that of her family.


Book 7

Saturday, February 18, 2012

Gulag: A History

By Anne Applebaum


Pulitzer prize winner in 2004, this book details the treacherous history of the gulags. Gulags which at the authors best estimate about 18 million people passed through. Gulags which were still functioning into the 1980's. A system which helped to hold together the charades of the Soviet Union and of justice. 


The concentration camp themselves were packed with pests and disease. The overcrowding only made these two problems worse. Food rations were based upon how close you got to your work "norms" - unattainable goals set in an arbitrary way. The less you worked, the closer to starvation you became and then, of course, the less you could work. Not to mention tortures and mass executions that "seemed to take place almost at random" to which "many prisoners recall feeling terrified by the prospect of arbitrary death." Pg 24


Only a small fraction of the gulag prisoners were criminals. In the earlier years, most came into the system from the great charade of collectivization. "Within an incredibly short period of time, rural commissars forced millions of peasants to give up their small landholdings and to join collective farms, often expelling them from land their families and tilled for centuries." Pg 46 The result was, among, other things famine. Now it was a crime to steal extra grains from the ground after the wheat had been tilled or for having an extra bedroom in your home. Most of these "crimes" were not tried and landed the "criminal" a 10-year sentence. Later these "crimes" were increased to include an offhanded joke about Stalin or a misinterpreted statement of complaint.


If there was starvation in the general population, in particular during WWII, then starvation in the camps was even worse. "In the hungrier camps, in the hungrier years, bread took on an almost sacred status. . . While camp thieves stole almost everything else with impunity . . the theft of bread was considered particularly heinous and unforgivable." Pg. 213


Don't forget these camps were in extreme cold temperatures as well. Keeping warm was a major undertaking which was literally a matter of life and death.


"The relationship between Soviet propaganda and Soviet reality was always a strange one: the factory is barely functioning in the shops there is nothing to buy, old ladies cannot afford to heat their apartments, yet in the streets outside, banners proclaim the 'triumph of socialism' and the 'heroic achievements of the Soviet motherland.'" Pg 237


"[Women] formed powerful friendships, and helped one another in ways that male prisoners did not." And yet, different perceptions exist. "Among male ex-prisoners the opposite point of view prevails: that women deteriorated, morally, more rapidly than men. Thanks to their sex they had special opportunities to obtain a better work classification, an easier job, and with it superior status in the camps. As a result, they became disoriented, losing their bearings in the harsh world of the camps." Pg. 308


"Of the many absurdities found in camp life, perhaps the strangest was also one of the most mundane: the camp doctor.  . . . Like guardian angles, medical personnel had the power to pluck inmates out of the cold, to deposit them in clean camp hospitals, where they might be fed and nursed back to life." Pg 369


"So bizarre did Gustav Herling find this contrast between the murderous conditions of camp life, and the efforts which camp doctors invested in reviving the prisoners whose health had been duly destroyed, he concluded that a 'hospital cult' must exist in the Soviet Union." Pg. 372


"The low numbers set on those 'allowed' to be sick meant that doctors were under terrible, conflicting pressures. They could be censured, or even sentenced, if too many sick prisoners died, having been refused access to the camp hospital." Pg 373


Yet there was a doctor shortage so many qualified doctors found themselves working side by side completely untrained medical personnel giving injections, treating wounds and sometimes performing surgery.


In her chapter titled "Strategies of Survival," Applebaum explores ways prisoners kept themselves alive. Of course there were ways to manipulate work, try to get work respice from the hospital and finding ways to get jobs closer to food sources. But there were other ways as well. "If some prisoners - perhaps the vast majority of prisoners - managed to stay alive through manipulating the rules of the camp to their advantage, there were also some who built upon what Tzveten Todorov, in his book on concentration camp morality, has called the 'ordinary virtues': caring and friendship, dignity and the life of the mind." Pg 380 Some of these include forming networks of like minded individuals, friendship, respect, exercise routines, hygiene routines and intellectual discipline.


"If escape from the camp were impossible in the folk memory of most survivors, rebellion was unthinkable. The caricature of the downtrodden, defeated, and dehumanized zek, desperate to collaborate with the authorities . . . And it may well be that, throughout much of the Gulag's history, this image was not far off the mark. The system of internal spying and informers did make prisoners suspicious of one another. The finding inevitability of the work and the dominance of the thieves-in-law (criminal element) did make it difficult for other prisoners to think of organized opposition. The humiliating experience of interrogation, prison and deportation had robbed many of the will to live, let alone the will to oppose the authorities." Pg. 401


"If the Soviet Union's elite were to accept that the portrait of Ivan Denisovich was authentic, that meant admitting that innocent people had endured pointless suffering. If the camps had really been stupid and wasteful and tragic, that meant that the Soviet Union was also stupid and wasteful and tragic too. It was difficult, and it would remain difficult, for any Soviet citizen, whether a member of the elite or a simple peasant, to accept that their lives and been governed by a set of lies." Pg. 525


In the 1970's the psychiatric establishment of the Soviet Union created a new psychological classification, applied to those enemies of the state or dissidents. The classification was "sluggish schizophrenia" or "creeping schizophrenia" which "a characteristic feature of overvalued ideas is the patients conviction of his own rectitude, an obsession with asserting his trampled 'rights,' and the significance of these feelings for the patients personality."


In her conclusion, titled "Memory," Applebaum makes some insightful and moving insights into the importance of remembering the Gulag's. She also explores why this may not have happened in Russia given the complexity of the dissolution of the Soviet state. 


"To put it bluntly, former communists have a clear interest in concealing the past: it tarnishes them, undermines them, hurts their claims to be carrying out 'reforms' even when they had nothing to do with the past crimes." Pg 571


"This matters: the failure to acknowledge or repent or discuss the history of the communist past weighs like a stone on many of the nations of post-communist Europe." Pg. 571


"For if we forget the Gulag, sooner or later we will find it hard to understand our own history too. Why did we fight the Cold War after all? 


. . . If we do not try harder to remember the history of the other half of the European continent, the history of the other twentieth-century totalitarian regime, in the end it is we in the West who will not understand our pst, we who will not know how our world came to be the way it is.


And not only our own particular past. FOr if we go on forgetting half of Europe's history, some of what we know about mankind itself will be distorted. Every one of the twentieth-century's mass tragedies was unique: the Gulag, the Holocaust, the Armenian massacre, the Nanking massacre, the Cultural Revolution, the Cambodian revolution, the Bosnian wars, among many others. Every one of these event had different historical, philosophical, and cultural, origins, every one arose in particular local circumstances which will never be repeated. Only our ability to debase and destroy and dehumanize our fellow men has been - and will be- repeated again and again: our transformation of our neighbors into 'enemies', our reduction of our opponents to lice and vermin or poisonous weeds, our reinvention of our victims as lower, lesser, or evil beings, worthy only of incarceration or expulsion or death.

The more we are able to understand how different societies have transformed thier neighbors and fellow citizens from people into objects, the more we know of the specific circumstances which led to each episode of mass torture and mass murder, the better we will understand the darker side of our own human nature. This book was not written 'so that it will never happen again' as the cliche would have it. This book was written because it most certainly will happen again. Totalitarian philosophies have had, and will continue to have, a profound appeal to many millions of people. Destruction of the 'objective enemy' as Hannah Arendt once put it, remains a fundamental object of many dictatorships. We need to know why - and each story, each memoir, each document in the history of the Gulag is a piece of the puzzle, a part of the explanation. Without them, we will wake up one day and realize that we do not know who we are." Pgs 576 - 577


These last few paragraphs sum up my own life mission to understand, catalog suffering in hopes of stopping future destruction.


Book 6

Wednesday, February 15, 2012

Mortal Instruments Series

 City of Ashes and City of Glass


Cassandra Clare


Book 2 and 3 of the Mortal Instrument Series delivers an exciting, unpredictable YA story. This series is imaginative and draws you into a unique coming of age story. 


Book 3 and 4