books and books review – Page 89

Ammonite – Nicola Griffith

Published on March 8, 2008

Cover of Ammonite

Ammonite
Nicola Griffith
386 pages
published in 1993

Nicola Griffith is a writer I’ve heard a great deal of but so far had never read anything by. Ammonite was her first novel and immediately made a strong impression on publication, winning both the James Tiptree Award and the Lambda Award. As these awards confirm, Ammonite is a classic feminist science fiction novel, straight in the tradition of writers like Ursula Le Guin (Left Hand of Darkness), Joanna Russ (The Female Man) and Sheri Tepper (The Gate to Women’s Country).

The world created in Ammonite is also a classic feminist science fiction trope: that of a world without men. In this case, it’s the colony world of Jeep where an alien virus killed off all men and a large percentage of women, leaving the survivors to rebuilt their societies on a one gender basis. How they’ve managed to do so is the central mystery of Ammonite, which is partially a puzzle story and partially a leisurely planetary romance as our protagonist, anthropologist Marghe Taishan, travels the planet in search of answers. Marghe is working for SEC, the government agency that was set up to safeguard the interests of indigenes of rediscovered colony worlds like Jeep from exploitation by the Company, which has a monopoly on space exploration and which whom Marghe has some unpleasant history…

Orientalism – Edward Said

Published on March 5, 2008

Cover of Orientalism

Orientalism
Edward Said
396 pages including index
published in 1978

There are some books that I’m sort of ashamed to review, not because the books themselves are so bad but just because I should’ve read them years ago. Orientalism is one such book. Both it and its author are so often namechecked by leftwing bloggers that I felt a slight twinge of embarassement for only reading it now. Also, I don’t know how it is with you, but I’m often wary to read such widely acclaimed books anyway, as there’s something so “Rik the people’s poet” about reading Said, or Chomsky for that matter. It can look poseurish and nobody wants to come over as that.

Nevertheless, Orientalism is a genuinely important book, even now, thirty years after its first publication. It’s main argument — that Asia in general and the Middle East in particular have long been misrepresented in the west as “the Orient”, an exotic world filled with prejudices and cliches in order to serve imperialist goals in the region — may look a bit obvious now, not as radical as it was at first publication, but this is in great part because Orientalism laid out this argument so convincingly first. In fact it had such an impact, that even thirty years onwards there are still people trying to cut it down to size, as a quick Google search shows. It touched a nerve, perhaps not in the least because Said was an outsider to the academic orientalist tradition he was criticising.

Wehrmacht – Wolfram Wette

Published on March 4, 2008

Cover of Wehrmacht

Wehrmacht: History, Myth, Reality
Wolfram Wette
372 pages including index
published in 2002

One of the enduring myths of World War 2 is the idea that the crimes committed by nazi Germany were the work of a relatively small number of villains with the vast majority of the German population either being their victims or just trying to make the best of a bad situation or to do their duty to their country. More specially this myth lives on in the idea that while the Waffen SS was a criminal organisation responsible for uncounted numbers of warcrimes, the Wehrmacht, Germany’s most important military organisation, had relatively clean hands. With tens of millions of German men having served in the Wehrmacht during World War 2 it is no surprise that this myth came into being. Far easier to believe you were the innocent dupe of Hitler than to acknowledge that you may just be a fellow criminal. What’s strange is that this idea is believed not just in Germany, but throughout Western Europe and America. If like me you’re interested in military history, you sooner or later come across military enthusiasts extolling the martial virtues of the Wehrmacht, without much consideration of the context in which they fought.

Wehrmacht: History, Myth, Reality was written to explode this myth and explain how and why it came into being. Its author, Wolfram Wette, is a German historian who’s made his speciality in researching Germany’s history of militarism. Until 1995 he worked for the official German institute for military history research, where he worked on Germany’s official history of World War 2, which should lend considerable weight to this book. This is no firebrand outsider courting controversy with a perhaps overstated sensationalist thesis (as with Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners), but a distinguished senior historian attempting to put an generally accepted truth before the general
public.

Books read in February

Published on March 1, 2008

The Red Pavillion – Robert van Gulik.
A mock-historical detective story, based on an 18th century Chinese mystery novel starring Judge Dee, who was himself based on the historical Judge Dee and whom van Gulik appropriated for his series. You could call it orientalist, if not for the matter of factness with which the series treats its setting.

The Peoples of the Hills – Charles Burney & David Marshall Lang.
Worthy but slightly dull attempt to chronicle the early history of Armenia, Georgie, Eastern Turkey and the Caucasus by an archaeologist and a historian. The edition I read was from 2001, but this book was written in 1971, so it’s probably dated by now.

The Steep Approach to Garbadale – Iain Banks.
An enjoyable novel about a large sprawling Scottish family with a deep dark secret at its core, yes, somewhat like The Crows Road

The Jennifer Morgue – Charlie Stross.
The sequel to The Atrocity Archives, a fun spy romp mixed with geekery and high doses of Lovecraft.

The Earth: an Intimate History – Richard Fortey.
An excellent overview both of geological history of Earth and how geology developed as a science, told by one of the best writers of science books I know.

The Battle of Venezuela – Michael McCaughan.
An introductionary history of Hugo Chavez, the Boliverian Revolution he spearheads and the response he called forth against it. Slightly out of date, as it was written in 2004 but sharp, to the point and not too partisan.

The Wehrmacht: History, Myth, Reality – Wolfram Wette.
After the Second World War Germany was quick to embrace the myth that while they were on the wrong in the war, the Wehrmacht was just doing its duty, did it “with clean hands” and that it was Hitler, Himmler and the SS who were the villains, not the ordinary men serving in the army. This book explodes these myths.

Ammonite – Nicola Griffith.
Excellent science fiction novel by a writer I need to read much more of. Feminist in a very natural way.

Selling Hitler – Robert Harris.
Robert Harris on perhaps the biggest publishing fraud in history: the fake Hitler diaries.

1610: a Sundial in a Grave – Mary Gentle.
A cast iron bitch of a novel, as you should expect of Gentle: a mixture of history, science fiction, Hermetic magic, esoteric knowledge and kinky sex.

Rivers in Time – Peter D. Ward.
A non-fiction book examining the three major extinctions that shaped our world, as well as the fourth one currently going on. Interestingly enough, while the idea that we are currently in a mass extinction event is not new, Ward argues that actually much of it has already finished millennia
ago…

Slaughterhouse Five – Kurt Vonnegut.
I last read this when I was thirteen or fourteen or so, it still held up, though it does feel much more dated than something like Catch-22, an anti-war novel of similar vintage.

The Fall of Rome – Bryan Ward-Perkins

Published on February 3, 2008

Cover of The Fall of Rome

The Fall of Rome
Bryan Ward-Perkins
239 pages including index
published in 2005

When I was googling for some background information on Peter Heather’s The Fall of the Roman Empire, Bryan Ward-Perkins’ The Fall of Rome was mentioned the most alongside it in reviews. In those reviews The Fall of Rome was described as a much more agressively counter-revisionist attack, compared to Heather’s book, much more scathing in its rejection of the view that the fall of Rome was not that big a deal. Therefore I thought it would be interesting to read, to see what the more traditional view of Rome’s collapse would look like.

It turns out however that Ward-Perkins’ rhetoric here is actually stronger than his actual disagreement. He’s scathing about those historians who go too far in arguing that the transition from Roman Empire to the post-Roman, Germanic west was a relatively gentle affair, but his own
view isn’t quite the Gibbonesque tragedy of traditional history either. He argues that the transition period was violent, that there was a decline in civilisation, that the death of the western Roman Empire was a tragedy, but that this was far from the end of civilisation. But because Ward-Perkins spent much of this book arguing against the more rose-tinted views currently in vogue of the transistion from a Roman to a post-Roman world, his disagreements may seem bigger than they actually are.