Martin's Booklog

The Shock Doctrine – Naomi Klein

Published on September 17, 2009

Cover of the Shock Doctrine

The Shock Doctrine
Naomi Klein
558 pages, including index
Published in 2007

Snow Crash was supposed to be a satire, but late in The Shock Doctrine Naomi Klein describes what’s going on in the United States right now that sounds quite a lot like the future Neal Stephenson portrayed in his novel. There’s a hollowed out federal government with all its core functions, especially warfare outsourced, while rich suburbs are seceding from their own cities to become commercialised, privatised towns with security by Blackwater mercenaries to leave the rest of America to rot away as surplus to requirements. The most shocking example that of New Orleans after Katrina, Disneyfied for the rich white tourists, its original, Black population dispersed all over the US, their neighbourhoods bulldozed to make way for more tourist attractions. All this, according to Klein, the logical end result of thirty years of disaster capitalism, pionered in the Latin American dictatorships of the seventies, matured in Eastern Europe in the late eighties/early nineties and reaching its zenith in Iraq in 2003 and New Orleans in 2005.

The Shock Doctrine is Naomi Klein’s second big book about capitalism and globalisation, after No Logo. Both are critical exposes, but The Shock Doctrine is much angrier than No Logo ever was, more brutal, more pessimistic as well. Gone is the fascination and excitement that globalisation still had in the earlier book, when like a lot of anti-globalisation activists Naomi Klein could still admire the energy of it, even if fully aware of the horrendous costs its transformation of the world brought with it. It was the same kind of horrified fascination Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels showed for an earlier phase of globalisation, in the Communist Manifesto. In The Shock Doctrine this fascination has disappeared, replaced by disillusionment and anger.

Heat – George Monbiot

Published on September 4, 2009

Cover of Heat

Heat
George Monbiot
277 pages including index
published in 2006

Thanks to the climate change camp in London held this past week, global warming is back on the news agenda again. Despite the rear guard action fought by the Exxon-Mobile sponsored climate change denial groups, the media has sort of accepted the reality of it over the past two years, but as Alex Harrowell fulminates against, it’s largely treated as a consumerist, lifestyle issue:

As with most British media green pushes, there’s little sign of any interest in anything physical or lasting. Not an inch of rockwool. Everything is about changing your behaviour, and specifically micro-behaviour what you buy, or turning off lights, not how you work or where you live or how society works. Worse, it’s a demand for entirely free-floating behavioural change — nobody seems to be suggesting any way of monitoring or measuring the change, or any incentives. This isn’t going to work. And, again, it’s all consumer guff.

This is not something you can accuse George Monbiot of doing here. In Heat: How to Stop the Planet Burning he quickly dismisses consumer driven solutions like the 10:10 campaign in the introduction. The entire point of the book is that we cannot solve the problem of climate change with lifestyle choices, but only through solutions that apply to everybody, not everybody else, as he puts it. He starts with the assumption that the only way to migate the consequences of global warming, as we cannot prevent it anymore, is to keep runaway climate change from happening and that can only happen if we can keep global temperatures from rising more than 2 degrees celsius (above pre-industrial levels) in 2030. If not, major ecosystems begin collapsing as the ability to absorb excess carbon dioxide is exhausted. To keep this rise from happening we can’t just switch incandencent lightbulbs for LEDs, we need to cut 90 percent of our CO2 output. The challenge Monbiot sets himself in Heat is to show that we can do this without giving up our post-industrial lifestyles, by taking the United Kingdom as his test subject and looking at various aspepcts of our lives to see how CO2 output can be reduced in them. It is not a complete blueprint for change of course and you may not necessarily agree with all his solutions, but it is a genuine attempt at putting together a national plan of action that could be implemented relatively quickly and doesn’t require all of us to piss in hayboxes.

The Grain Kings – Keith Roberts

Published on August 16, 2009

Cover of The Grain Kings

The Grain Kings
Keith Roberts
208 pages
published in 1976

Nothing says seventies science fiction as much as a Fossian cover like this, slapped by Panther and Pan on every book they published regardless of contents. Big, blocky machinery, preferably some sort of spaceship, with brigh colours and no human figures: that’s science fiction and you don’t need anything more. For once, the cover is even justified, showing one of the huge grain combine harvesters from the title story of this collection. Course, you’ll still be disappointed if you get this expecting the sort of cool, clinical, techno-driven stories the cover suggests; Keith Roberts isn’t that kind of writer.

Keith Roberts debuted as a writer in 1964 in New Worlds, involved with, but not a part of, the New Wave. Partially this was due to his personality as he allegedly was quite a difficult character to work with, getting into fights with his editors and publishers. But it was also because he was less interested in the two main obsessions of the New Wave, death & entropy and sex & taboos. Nevertheless if you like Brian Aldiss or Christoper Priest changes are you’ll like Roberts as well. Roberts was more than just a writer; during the sixties he worked both as an editor for the British magazine Science Fantasy/SF Impulse, as well as its artistic director, designing most of the covers for it, as well as for several issues of New Worlds. A shame he didn’t get the chance to design the cover of this book, as the impressionist look he used in his own designs would’ve been much more suited for it. Keith Roberts has always been somewhat of a cult author, best known for his second novel Pavane, a classic alternative history story and one out of two of his books still in print today (the other one is The Furies).

Pompeii – The Life of a Roman Town – Mary Beard

Published on July 12, 2009

Cover of Pompeii - The Life of a Roman Town

Pompeii – The Life of a Roman Town
Mary Beard
360 pages including index
published in 2008

We think we know Pompeii. An ordinary Roman town like so many others in 79 CE, made extraordinary because it was overwhelmed without warning by the eruption of the Vesuvius, through its death granting us a rare glimpse of what daily life in the Roman Empire really was like. Under a metres thick layer of volcanic ashes Pompeii laid hidden for centuries, only discovered in the eighteenth century, its secrets kept intact, preserved by the very disaster that caused the death of the city. With the slow and careful excavation of the city those secrets are unlocked, giving up definitive answers to all kind of questions about how the Romans lived. This is the view of Pompeii that countless books, magazine articles and television specials have given us. Unfortunately, as Mary Beard explains in Pompeii – The Life of a Roman Town, it’s wrong.

Or at least, not entirely accurate. As she explains, Pompeii wasn’t overwhelmed by an unforeseen catastrophe, as most likely its inhabitants had had at least several days warning before the actual eruption. Quite a few of them therefore had already left the town when it got buried, while many of the dead found under the lava had been overtaken in their flight, or while having sought shelter nearby or within the city itself. What’s more, the city wasn’t immediately abandonded after the disaster either, as all through the city evidence has been found of people coming back to their houses or businesses to rescue possessions – as well as of plunderers looking for easy riches. What’s more, once Pompeii was rediscovered, obviously things gut dug up, damaged, disappeared or just altered through being exposed to the elements again. All of which means that what we can see in Pompeii now is not entirely the city that the inhabitants would’ve known in 79 CE, that if we dig up a largely empty villa it doesn’t necessarily mean the Romans were great minimalists…

In Search of Planet Vulcan – Richard Baum and William Sheehan

Published on July 11, 2009

In Search of Planet Vulcan
Richard Baum & William Sheehan
310 pages including index
published in 1997

The classic idea of the universe was that it was geocentric: the Earth in the centre, with the planets, moon and the sun circling around it and the fixed stars as background. Over the centuries that central idea had to be modified with increasingly complex epicycles as the theory had to be adjusted to observational evidence. It was only in the sixteenth century that Copernicus, Kepler and Bruno challenged this Ptolemaic model and replaced it with the truth: that all the planets, including Earth revolved around the Sun. Copernicus was the first to propose this, Bruno would die at the stake for his advocacy but it was Kepler who figured out how the planets revolved and what governed their orbits. more than half a century later Isaac Newton formulated his laws of gravity, joining Kepler’s laws with more mundane events on Earth, finally providing a complete model of the workings of the Solar System. From then on, any planetary orbit could be calculated with the right observations and the use of Kepler’s and Newton’s laws.

except for one. The orbit of Mercury remained, as the subtitle of Baum and Sheehan’s book has it, “the ghost in Newton’s clockwork universe”. Time and again, no matter how carefully the observations were made and how intricate the calculations were, the two just would not line up. Even the best astronomers in the world, with the best observations could not make Mercury’s orbit confirm to what it should be according to Newtonian physics. It wasn’t until Einstein reformulated the laws of gravity that the reason why became clear. Newton’s laws break down near massive objects like the Sun and although “good enough” for most situations, Mercury’s orbit was just too close to the Sun and Newtonian physics just wasn’t accurate enough. Of course, until Einstein found the real answer, astronomers sought for other explenations for Mercury’s wrong orbit — and the most likely candidate was an undiscovered planet even closer to the Sun: Vulcan.