Short Book Reviews #4

Lurid fiction and controversial nonfiction

Fiction

Lady Justice

by C. J. Henderson (Author), Wendi Lee (Author), Bill Sienkiewicz (Artist), Michael Netzer (Artist)

(A graphic novel series focused on the spirit of justice, represented as a blindfolded woman carrying a set of scales and wrapped in chains, who appears to women who’ve been wronged or otherwise witnesses to grave injustice, empowering them to right the scales however they see fit.)

Brief note: the graphic novel is advertised as Neil Gaiman’s Lady Justice, as the character was originally his idea; that being said, it isn’t written by him. I find the prominence of his name on the title ironic, given recent events.

Lurid, sexual, and hyperviolent, Lady Justice is much of the best and worst of graphic novels embodied in a series of vignettes. If you want to see stacked women wearing midriff-bearing clothes or sporting suspiciously deep cleavage deal out violence to reprehensible men, look no further.

Each story in Lady Justice follows the same pattern: bad thing happens, woman is blessed by the Spirit of Justice to right the wrongs, violence, The End. It’s simple and titillating and satisfying, the best kind of fast-food burger and fries. The gorgeous art makes up for any shortcomings in the writing.

Contains: attempted sexual violence, successful murder, like a lot of successful murder, allusions to BDSM imagery, scantily clad women, death.

Swamp Thing

by Alan Moore (Author), Stephen Bissette (Illustrator), John Totleben (Illustrator), Rick Veitch (Illustrator)

(A series of graphic novels centering around a plant elemental who lives in the Louisiana bayou, thinking he’s a man. Widely hailed as one of the great series of graphic novels, Swamp Thing is beautifully illustrated and superbly written.)

I’ve only read the first five issues, but whew - I can see what all the hype is about. Swamp Thing follows Alec Holland, a man who was burned to death and whose consciousness was copied into vegetable matter, making him a plant elemental. Set in the DC universe, the comics follow Alec as he discovers who and what he is, fights everything from demons to vampires to Batman, and falls in love.

The illustrations were spectacular, so much so that I actually took note of how detailed and vibrant the coloring was. The stories are well-told, weaving characters in and out of larger narratives as the Swamp Thing follows John Constantine around or battles villains-of-the-week.

If you’re at all into comic books or DC, this is your jam.

Contains: psychedelic sweet potatoes, Batman, The Great War Between Light And Dark, John Constantine being an asshole, underwater vampires, The Parliament of Trees, sex, musings on the nature of personhood and identity, a very anti-nuclear message Which Is Objectively Wrong, and The Green.

Something Wicked This Way Comes

by Ray Bradbury

(An evil carnival arrives to an average American town, and two ten-year-old boys are the only ones who can do something about it.)

Cooger and Dark’s Carnival has come to town, and nothing will ever be the same again for Will Calloway and Jim Nightshade, best friends growing up in the American heartland circa 1960.

Preceded by ill omens and marked by mystery, the carnival poses many attractions: a carousel that bends time around its turns, a mirror maze in which one can lose their mind, and an assortment of freaks that may or may not be those who previously ventured too deep into the circus.

I found Something Wicked This Way Comes to be an excellent, if sometimes hard to get through, novel. Bradbury’s prose, especially his imagery, is vivid to the point of failure, describing the physical world in ways I could hardly keep up with or imagine. His characters, especially Jim Nightshade, Mr. Dark, and Will’s dad, are described with loving detail and a deep understanding of the currents that run beneath the human condition.

The novel isn’t quite a thriller, although it was at times thrilling, and didn’t quite horrify me, although it is meant to be a horror story. Perhaps I’m jaded from watching too many horror movies, or perhaps what was horrifying seventy years ago is merely macabre today. Either way, it was very much worth the read.

Contains: luridly described tattoos, an old gypsy woman, meditations on the nature of good and evil, growing up, an evil balloon, the terrors of middle age, Mr. Electrico.

Treasure Island

by Robert Louis Stevenson

(An adaptation of the Disney film Treasure Planet, set in the late 1800s instead of the future and without all the anthropomorphic animals and robots. Or something like that.)

Jim Hawkins is an adventurous lad, and an adventure he has. When an old pirate dies and leaves him in possession of a map to buried treasure, Jim embarks on a quest to find it with a hyper-competent doctor, squire, and captain. Unfortunately, most of the rest of the crew is made of pirates who are after the treasure themselves, led by the irascible and charismatic Long John Silver.

This is the quintessential adventure story, complete with fighting and death and strategy and British people upholding the honor of their monarchy no matter the conditions they find themselves in. I found it to be a delightful read, especially compared to the stuffier stuff from the same era.

Contains: Long John Silver telling people The May Lay To That, Jim doing stupid irresponsible things that wind up saving the crew, Ben Dunn wanting cheese after being marooned for years (as one does), life-or-death fights, and more nautical terminology than you can weigh an anchor at.

Skulduggery Pleasant

by Derek Land

(A YA novel about a young girl and her adventures with a skeleton detective. Light, fun, quick.)

Stephanie’s rich uncle just died, and she inherited everything. Including, as it turns out, his friendship with the elemental-magic-wielding skeleton Skulduggery Pleasant, who partners up with the girl to solve her uncle’s death and save the world.

This isn’t a complicated book; it’s a fun YA romp that trends on the younger side of things. The banter between Stephanie and Skulduggery is delightfully British in its riposte, the villain is adequately villainous, and the magic suitably magical.

Contains: A skeleton in a wig, a terrible lemon-colored car, evil plots, disposable minions, useless institutions, and a protagonist so full of pluck it’s a wonder she has eyebrows left by the end.

There Is No Antimemetics Division

by qntm

I just opened the document one morning and this heading was here, which is strange, because I’ve never read a book by that name.

Nonfiction

How The World Really Works

by Vaclav Smil

(An examination of how our civilization works from a ground-up approach, focusing on how we generate and deploy various forms of energy. A useful reality check for those too focused on clean energy, although much weaker on non-climate-change subjects.)

What materials can modern civilization actually not do without? We call the modern era the Information Age, and it’s built on silicon - but we don’t need silicon to have a functioning society. After all, there was little enough silicon in the 1950s, and people got along just fine then. So what’re the actual requirements?

Smil identifies four materials, that he calls the four pillars of civilization: ammonia, plastic, cement, and steel. Ammonia is used for fertilizer; without it agriculture could only feed around half of the world’s population, given the current land dedicated to farming. Plastic is used in basically everything; without it we’d have to go back to using bone and clay for general-purpose objects, and there isn’t enough of either. Cement and steel form the basis of our roads and cities, providing the structural underpinnings of our built environment; without them population density and transportation networks won’t work.

Smil’s big thesis is that these four pillars - and the systems they enable, that make modern civilization possible - all depend on fossil fuels, and there’s no easy way to replace that dependence. ‘Electrify everything’ doesn’t help create ammonia, which requires fossil fuels as part of the chemical feedstock. ‘Reduce, reuse, recycle’ won’t provide the tar that makes asphalt work, or power the kilns that make cement.

Strong in energy science and climate change and weak elsewhere, even though it was written during COVID, How the World Really Works is a useful counterbalance to alarmist and sensational rhetoric.

Contains: lots of facts but almost no graphs, the history of cement, a long digression on the nature of energy, and a robust defense of modern civilization based on the energy deployed on behalf of each individual.

Why Not Capitalism?

By Jason Brennan

(A long essay, published as a paperback, refuting the essay Why Not Socialism by G.A.Cohen.)

Socialism is attractive to a lot of people, and much blood and ink has been spilled over whether or not Socialism or Capitalism is the better economic system. Brennan argues persuasively that advocates of socialism often pull a bait and switch: they compare capitalism under real-world conditions to socialism under Utopian conditions, where people are all morally perfect and always do the right thing for the right reason.

When we compare real-world capitalism to real-world socialism at the scale of nations, real-world capitalism wins both economically and morally. Brennan’s argument is that, when we compare capitalism and socialism under equally ideal Utopian conditions, where everyone is morally perfect and does the right thing for the right reasons, capitalism still wins.

One of my biggest takeaways from the book is that I finally have a good definition for capitalism and socialism. Capitalism simply means that property is privately owned (that is, by individuals). Socialism simply means that property is collectively owned (which in practice means that some subset of the population, like a council or bureaucracy, is empowered to decide how it is allocated).

Contains: references to Mickey Mouse, references to atrocities committed under capitalism and socialism, philosophical meanderings

Land is a Big Deal

by Lars Doucet

(An argument for the taxation of land and how that fixes everything.)

The book format of a long series of posts that can be found here, this was the original work that converted me to Georgism. Humorously written, meticulously researched, and carefully constructed, Land is a Big Deal makes Henry George’s arguments about why land ownership should be taxed heavily in the modern era, setting up and knocking down each possible counter-argument as it goes.

I’ve talked about Georgism elsewhere, but the basic gist is that a) nobody put literal physical space on the planet there, so no one should profit from it at the expense of others, and b) economically, preventing this kind of monopoly will solve many problems with society at the root.

I believe both claims are true, and highly encourage you to read it. This is the theory that squares the claims of capitalism and socialism - land should be (effectively) publicly owned (technically it’s still privately owned and the profit is taxed away, but it basically amounts to the same thing) while everything else should be privately owned.

Contains: charts, graphs, an overuse of the phrase ‘By George’, empirical argumentation.

The Jew Is Not My Enemy

by Tarek Fatah

(A book written by a Muslim, for Muslims and non-Muslims alike, about the origins of Islamic antisemitism. Written around 2010. Oh, the times they aren’t a-changing.)

After some semi-recent events, I decided it was finally time for me to become a little more educated on the subject of Israel, Palestine, and the history of the peoples and religions involved. Not because I wanted to - it’s hard reading, and doesn’t appeal to me personally - but because for a while it was suddenly all anyone was talking about (until the Next Thing happened, and everyone moved on).

Fatah is a devout Muslim who takes a look at the history and origins of Muslim antisemitism, finding (and I’m doing a ridiculous amount of summation here) that a lot of it is owed to a combination of a) the influence of good old-fashioned European Christian antisemitism, b) the antisemitism of a few popular commentators on the Quran hundreds of years ago, and c) politically-motivated religious power-grabs attempting to unite Muslims by giving them an evil enemy to fight.

He painstakingly shows that there’s no actual justification in the Quran as written for hating Jews in particular, and that there has been peace between Muslim and Jew for hundreds of years of history.

I might’ve been most moved by the epilogue, in which Fatah was recounting taking a picture with a Jewish Holocaust survivor at Auschwitz. Fatah explains that, while there were Muslims who were allies of the Nazis, there were also Muslims who died in the death camps.

The unfortunate thing about this book is that the people who need it probably never will, and the people who read it probably didn’t need to. In any case, I got a lot out of it.

Contains: references to Nazis and the Holocaust, direct quotes from the Quran and the Hadith, lots and lots of names I had trouble keeping straight in my head, and the distinct sense that the main obstacle facing Muslims today is their own prejudices and hatreds.