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4) Death by Black Hole by Neil DeGrasse Tyson


Anybody who's come across Tyson in any of his many roles probably doesn't need much convincing to read this book. He's one of the best around today at explaining complicated scientific ideas with clarity. And he has wit and a sense of humor, so his explanations don't sacrifice interest for clarity and correctness.

This volume is a collection of essays originally written for Nature magazine and edited slightly for cohesiveness within the context of the compilation. The essays are short, most no longer than 6 pages, and they're breezy and often amazingly thorough. They're full of beautiful astrophysical discoveries, made practical and relevant to an ordinary reader without cheating or cheapening out on the science.

And they're funny, full of pop culture jokes and, well, physicist jokes that I found funny. He's not Feynman funny, but he knows how to make this stuff lighthearted, though I suppose one might think that laughing at the fact that if one entered a black hole their molecules would be torn apart by tidal forces is kind of odd.

I found the few times he descended into peevishness a bit offputting. He's famously involved with the Pluto demotion not because of any discovery he made, but because he wanted to be involved. It's clear that any public misconception of scientific discovery isn't merely a problem to be fixed for him, but something which sticks in his craw and bugs him until he can try to fix it. He comes across at times like someone who can't accept figurative language.

And I found the final section of the essays, his essays on science and religion, frustrating. They were full of misstatements, misunderstandings, broad generalizations, and an apparently deep-seated conviction that science and religion are at war and have always been at war. Which, look, is not at all true. I hate to make appeals to Dinesh D'Souza, but he does a fantastic job of taking down a lot of Tyson's claims about Galileo in What's So Great About God?.

Tyson's language suggests that he thinks the world consists of two types of people: scientists and people who think the Bible is literally true in all aspects and is the only guide for life. Ignoring the fact that even the Biblical literalists can't agree on what the Bible literally means, this is profoundly and offensively dismissive to the millions of people of faith who have found a place for science in their world because it is not at all at odds with their religion, BECAUSE their religion guides them to seek truth in the world.

And it's stupid because it's so easy to come up with counterexamples to his claim that religion has never offered real truth about the world that science didn't, so easy that Tyson mentions some counterexamples earlier in his book, like the Arab astronomers who developed a meaningful astronomy built around the astrolabe in order to know when to pray and where to face. Their discovery speaks of a religious need to inhabit the world that really exists instead of the world decreed in some holy text, but Tyson doesn't credit them for this.


But despite my objections to this final section, I highly recommend the collection. The rest of it is great.


tags: a:tyson neil degrasse, science/medicine, african-american, physics

Catching up: Hernandez, Butler, O'Leary, Ye, Cherrington, Mootoo

[zeborah]

(A lightly-edited dump of my Goodreads reviews.)

Suckerpunch by Hernandez, David
Hooked me in at the start but the way events followed each other more realistically than determined by a story shape didn't quite work for me. (There was a story shape, it was just more in the gaps between the events.

Dawn (Xenogenesis, #1) by Butler, Octavia E.
So many consent issues... Very good: it's got the claustrophobia, the every-exit-is-a-deadend feel, that I'd normally associate with horror, but manages to retain an optimism about it. The aliens are convincinly alien, and the frustration of their refusal to listen is steadfast without becoming unbelievable.

Straight - A novel in the Irish-Maori tradition by O'Leary, Michael
Straight is the second book in the trilogy; I came to it without having read the first, but felt it stood alone well enough that I had no trouble following the plot. Unfortunately that plot -- the protagonist discovering his father may have been a Nazi, then getting blackmailed and kidnapped by Nazis -- was way too melodramatic for me to take seriously. The prose (especially the dialogue) clunked badly for me, too. I did like the motif of dreamland vs reality vs realism though: that played out well.

My Name Is Number 4 by Ye, Ting-xing
Most disasters bring people and communities together; it seems as if the Cultural Revolution was designed to tear them apart. But this book shows that the struggle to survive and to keep relationships alive is always worth making. --Excuse shallow triteness; reading this book in the aftermath of earthquake I have deeper thoughts on disasters and communities but verbalising is harder especially for fear of simplifying. It was a good book anyway.

People-faces, The by Cherrington, Lisa
This is mostly Nikki's story, of how she's affected by her brother's mental illness and her journey in understanding it - caught between Māori and Pākehā models of understanding - and her journey alongside that of getting to know herself and her strengths. Her grandmother tells her that the dolphin Tepuhi is her guardian, but her grandmother is demonstrably not infallible and with the repeated point that Joshua is of the sea while Nikki is of the land, I think the book bears out that the real/more effective guardian for her is the pīwaiwaka.

Her brother's story is told in the gaps between, and completes the book.

Despite the focus on Nikki and Joshua, we get to see various other points of view, showing the further impact on the rest of their family and their motivations. Some of the point of view shifts are a bit clunky, for example when we get a single scene from the Pākehā doctor's point of view, or just a couple from Nikki's boyfriend.

But this is well-told; the author (of Ngāti Hine) is a clinical psychologist and has worked in Māori mental health services, and the emotions of the story ring very true to me.

Cereus Blooms at Night: A Novel by Mootoo, Shani
This was a fantastic read but at times a very hard one; serious trigger warnings for child abuse (verbal, physical, sexual).

It begins as a beautifully sweet story about racial and sexual and gender identity; about family separations made by force or by choice, and about forbidden liaisons both healthy and unhealthy. Set in the country of Lantanacamara, colonised by the Shivering Northern Wetlands -- more an open code than fantasy countries -- the story focuses on three generations of locals, straight and gay, cis and trans, more and less inculturated by Wetlandish education. The narrator begins by disclaiming any significant role in the story; instantly I want to know more about him, and (though he was right that this is more Mala's story) I was not disappointed.

The main story, switching among its several timelines, grows darker and winds tighter with perfect pacing. Revelations are neither too delayed nor too forced. And as it heads towards the catastrophe we've foreseen, through horror worse than we could have imagined at the start, so it brings us towards its equally inevitable -- and no less satisfying -- eucatastrophe.

Bless Me, Ultima - Rudolfo Anaya

[ms-mmelissa.livejournal.com]

I’m a total book snob, not only in regards to content, but in regard to book quality. This is the reason I have multiple (beautiful!) editions of Jane Eyre, and why I am such a sucker for Penguin and their amazing design aesthetic. All this to say that I was totally peeved when I bought the hardcover edition of Rudolf Anaya’s “Bless Me, Ultima” the novel that not only launched his career, but the entire genre of chicano literature. The book basically looks like someone took a cheap paperback cover and laminated it over two pieces of cardboard.  Hideous. I was prepared to hate the novel based on this alone, but once I started I found myself being drawn in by the voice of the uncertain narrator, the young Antonio Marez. Though the book was published in the early 70’s its set just after the Second World War in a small Spanish speaking community in New Mexico by the llano river.

Tony, the youngest child, lives there with his two older sisters and his parents. His mother and father, while extremely loving, also come from two different cultures. His Marez side (his father’s people) are cowboys and adventurers, while his Luna side (his mother’s people) are farmers. Each parent has clear ideas of which path they want their son to follow and what they would like him to do when he grows up.  The contrast causes a lot of conflict within Tony; he respects and loves each option and can’t bring himself to choose. This is where the titular Ultima comes in. Ultima is a curandera (sort of like a wise woman) who has nowhere else to go, and Tony’s family take her in out of respect for her and her magic. From the start Ultima and Tony strongly connect with Ultima demonstrating that what he thinks of as conflicts or not always so, and that even things that seem separate are strongly connected.

My one criticism of the book would have to be that Anaya does not push this theme of duality strongly enough. There are some hints in the book that Ultima may not be the sainted character she seems to be. It is left deliberately vague whether or not she passes a test proving that she is not a witch. Additionally one of her main conflicts is with a man who insists that she is a witch who is killing his daughters. From the perspective of Tony, our protagonist, it is the man who is in fact the evil one, and he and his daughters are witches that curse the whole village. I find it interesting though that the language Ultima uses to denounce the man and his daughters, is strikingly similar to the language he uses to denounce her. It is possible to imagine the flip side of the book, one in which Ultima really is evil and has cursed the daughters for no reason.

The complaint is somewhat moot though, because Anaya deliberately tries to keep things simple. The language for instance is fairly plain, but gives forth some amazingly beautiful descriptions of the llano river that Tony loves so much. And since the book is a work of magical realism the simplicity of language only emphasizes the fairy tale like quality of the novel.