Clearing some of the backlog

Posted by Sari

The backlog of read but unreviewed books just keeps growing and gives me angst, so here are few to make me feel marginally better:

Dane Kennedy: A Highly Civilized Man

 You may remember I was hankering after this earlier, after reading Brody’s bio. And good thing I did; this is the way cultural history should be written. A Highly Civilized Man is an excellent biography of Burton, or rather an examination of the Victorian world view and it’s relationship with “the other” using Burton as a focal point. Kennedy examines Burton’s life chronologically through the roles he assumed and iterests he held through his life from “the gypsy” to “the explorer” and from “the racist” to “the sexologist”.

 As is said earlier, Burton’s life-long efforts to reinvent himself, to shock the establishment and at the same time want its acceptance, marks him not only as a man at odds with values of the time, but also as a man who also reflects and brings those values in focus. Kennedy, I think, manages very well to situate Burton’s ravenous hunger for places and people and his mischievous desire to shock the society in its historical context and illuminates both the ways in which Burton negotiates and renegotiates his relationship with the Empire and Britain but also how his contemporaries on larger scale were trying to contain and comprehed this vast empire of “other” they ruled.

Castle Waiting

Castle Waiting was a comic published independently by the author, Linda Medley. After a long hiatus she is now continuing the story with Fantagraphics as publisher. They have collected all previous Castle Waiting stories into a book-size volume. Medley’s style of drawing is such that the smaller size does not diminish the effect, and the book as a physical thing is a nice object. As far as contents go, Castle Waiting pretty much lives up to its name. The Castle of the Sleeping Beauty has become a refuge for all sorts of people from antropomorphic animals to bearded nuns. They pass time in every day chores of the Castle and telling each other stories of their lives. It is a quiet, funny and engaging comic about small things that turn out to be pretty big.

Cory Doctorow: Little Brother

Little Brother is a didactic novel, an angry impressive and tech-savvy diatrabe against the way "the war on terror" has narrowed the privacy and freedom of citizens without being the least bit effective. It is a story of a terrorist attack on San Francisco and how a bunch of teenagers playing an ARG near abouts are picked up by Homeland Security. Scared shitless but also angry, one of the kids, Marcus starts an underground movement against the government.

Little Brother is a page turner, it is scary and even though you want to think it is absurdly impossible, you read things like this and  this  and think again.  I do, however think that the didactic nature of the novel does  it disservice at times - the technoexposition and the civic lessons can get a bit tedious. Even so, defenitely worth the Hype. Go read an excellent review by Finncon guest of honor Farah Mendlesohn here.

Via Making Light I also learn that Little Brother has made it to the NY Times Bestseller list, not too shabby for a book you can legally download for free...

Tim Jael: Stanley

Apparently, after a polar phase, I am now into exploration of the sources of the Nile. First Burton, now Stanley. Of all the great imperialistic explorers in 19^th –century Africa, Stanley has by far the worst reputation. Not only are his actions on both his great trans-African journey and his Emin Pasha relief expedition harshly criticized, he is also seen as the principal partner of King Leopold and thus responsible for the atrocities and the immense tragedy of Belgian Congo at the turn of the century.

Tim Jael, who has also written the definitive biography of Livingstone, has had access to a number of documents unavailable to earlier biographers, including Stanley's original diaries and his private correspondence, and bases his revisionistic work on these new sources. Jael’s Stanley is deeply insecure man with a shady youth, but he argues convincingly against the Kurtz-like dark and destructive force that has been the standard interpretation. Stanley that emerges here is a thoroughly human character, a man whose life was shaped by his childhood and the lies he told of his origin, and who ironically destroyed his own reputation by creating the myth of the saintly Livingstone, a myth agains which his own actions were always mirrored.