Justice League Unlimited: Jam Packed Action - Volume 1 by Stan Berkowitz and J. M. DeMatteis

Rating - 2: not worth reading (skip it)

If you have an eight-year-old son who really likes the Justice League Unlimited cartoon and you are going on a long car trip, it would be worthwhile to check this out from a library. Even in the ideal target audience, there are going to be few cases where this is worth buying. It places no demands on the reader but gives very little in return for time spent.

This is a graphic novel adaptation of two episodes of Justice League Unlimited, illustrated with screen captures. Basically, it is frames of the cartoon arranged with word bubbles. The two episodes are "Initiation" (Green Arrow joins the Justice League) and "For the Man Who Has Everything" (Superman's birthday with Mongul).

Even for what it is, this is not a strong example. The episodes selected are pretty random, clearly related to something larger but with no indication of what that is. If you do not already know the characters, this will provide little help (conveniently, most of the characters are core DC heroes that most people will know, but a reference to J'onn will miss most people). The stories themselves are not compelling. They are exceedingly simplistic versions of stories that have been done many times before, and I would be surprised if even the TV series gave such a superficial treatment. You can do better in 50 pages (each). Also, "For the Man Who Has Everything" is a variation on a story that has been so many times that you need to do it really well or not at all.

The art is generally good, since the series has a strong but simple style. The frames selected and their arrangement could use work in some cases. The fight scenes can be difficult to follow, particularly the opening one.

The character sketches in the episodes are good (as transferred to book form). Green Arrow has few lines but they are perfectly in-line with the normal role for his character (see Identiy Crisis). Supergirl uses indirect characterization well, as does Captain Atom. I am not familiar with how JLU uses those characters nor with that Green Lantern, but you get a good sense of who they are.

If you have already seen the episodes presented (as I have not), this is probably easier to follow. For an adult, that probably also makes the book worthless. For a child who embraces repetition of a familiar story, that is good. I still have trouble seeing anyone getting $8 of use from this book. If your local library does not have it, check interlibrary loan or just get something better.

Amazon link

Don't Think of an Elephant! by George Lakoff

Rating - 1: not worth considering (burn it)

If I were to write a book on how the Democratic Party could fail to retake either house of Congress in a mid-term election against an unpopular Republican President, it would look a lot like Don't Think of an Elephant! Conveniently, the head of the Democratic National Committee has embraced the book, so we will soon test how well that works.

George Lakoff is a linguist who studies metaphors. Many people who focus on one subject believe that the world can be best understood through that frame, to the point that it is the primary explanation for most human activity. In Mr. Lakoff's case, the specific frame is that of "frames," using language in a metaphorical scheme that supports your point. Republicans have taken over most of the country through a better framing of issues.

One can see how this would be a comforting message after a decade of political losses. There is nothing wrong with you, this is just a communication issue. Once you get through to people, they will want you to run the country.

Take his first example, "tax relief." Mr. Lakoff says that this is Republican framing that depicts taxes as an affliction to be cured, and Democrats lose when the debate is phrased in those terms. You see, the reality is that people are being tricked out of paying the taxes they long to pay. Being allowed to keep your money is a "reward." Taxes are responsible for all "private" success stories in America, including the banks, internet (thank you Al Gore!), and communications systems, as well as breakthroughs in science and medicine. Private industry is parasitic on the taxpayers. "There are no self-made men!"

In case it sounds like I am exaggerating anything here for effect, I am not. I am not even cherry-picking examples from the book.

Mr. Lakoff encourages Democrats to go on a long-term campaign of telling the public that taxes are good things that people should want to pay. "People know how to spend their money better than the government," is specifically cited as a misguided notion; instead, people should recognize that the government is a better innovator and investor than the private sector. Just look at the track record!

So the goal is to reframe issues into successful messages like that, ones that make your ideas sound like common sense.

Remember that the point is not to revise your ideas or consider whether anything has been misguided, unsuccessful, or wrong. After all, people do not vote on the basis of policies (so stop talking about them). Instead, you want to get the debate phrased in terms of your metaphors. It would be a drastic mistake to move to the right or try to fight conservatives on their own terms. For example, consider President Clinton. He ran as a New Democrat, a centrist who "took [Republicans'] language and used their words to describe" programs he wanted to pass. He was elected President twice and passed welfare reform that Mr. Lakoff believes was a tremendous progressive success. He cites that as an example of how you want to speak to the political center in your side's terms rather than your opponents'. Maybe it made more sense at the time.

Turning that around, when you reframe things in liberal terms, Democrats win. Take the current Republican President: he ran as a "compassionate conservative" who spoke about "Clear Skies" and "No Child Left Behind." Now, he and his party control the Presidency, most governorships, both houses of Congress, and the majority of state legislatures, along with an increasingly conservative Supreme Court. One can see how the Democratic National Committee would want even more of the political debate to follow this path.

[edit] There are similar issues with the central idea of the book, the paired frames of the "strict father" and "nurturant parent." You intuitively note the asymmetry, and attempts to argue that one side is gender-neutral while the other is patriarchal instead comes off as being afraid of seeming feminine. Go ahead, call Republicans the "Daddy party" and say that freeing the slaves was a victory over their ideology. When you refuse to own the remaining "Mommy party" slot for fear of its implications, you instead let Republicans define your frame in the public's mind. That has been the far less desirable "nanny state," which worries about whether we need to outlaw smoking on private property or eating fast food while "Daddy" is off fighting the terrorists. Besides piling weakness on weakness, it also means that the only ways he can conceive of government is as a parent, which means that voters are children who need to be lead and protected (from themselves and each other). It is bad politics to admit publicly that you believe in infantilizing the electorate. [/edit]

The book calls itself "the definitive handbook for understanding how conservatives think [and] what their moral values really are..." Mr. Lakoff perhaps could have found a Republican in Berkeley at some point, because replacing incomprehension with miscomprehension is not a big step forward. Take the example of abortion: Mr. Lakoff explains that conservatives oppose it because they believe that women should suffer through pregnancy and childbirth if they have illicit sex. There are people who are "genuinely pro-life" under the belief that life starts at conception, rights of the child, etc., but all of those people are progressives, usually Catholics. (Again, if you think I am caricaturing things, check page 85 and tell me that is an unfair presentation of the argument.)

Similarly, Republicans want "immoral or negligent corporations or professionals" to be "free to harm the public in unlimited ways in the course of making money." This is not presented as a side effect or a trade-off: it is what he sees as the true goal. Similarly, the goal of school vouchers is primarily to keep poor children out of "the better private and religious schools" (1. as opposed to how it is now...; 2. what?).

There are many points on which Mr. Lakoff does give a fair presentation of opposition views, usually in the briefer descriptions. When more detail arises, problems arise. Similarly, he gives a good breakdown of the different, often conflicting factions that make up the Republican coalition; he then ignores that to give a single monolithic description of "what conservatives want." When you say that libertarians want to "impose" limited government on people, the verb is not doing the work you want it to in that sentence.

There is a helpful section on "how to respond to conservatives." The #1 is "show respect." As an example of that, it would be rude to say that Republicans beat their children, but it is fair to repeatedly say that they impose painful physical punishment on them. You should politely point out that Republicans are lying about their goals (page 118, if you are checking me for exaggerations). Also on the note of lying, it could be improper to say that the President betrayed the country, but it is perfectly fine to set up a syllogism whose major premise is that it would be an act of betrayal to lead the country to war under false pretenses. If I can cite another example from page 118, it is also sufficiently respectful to refer to female soldiers being "raped...by a self-righteous conservative." "Avoid cheap shots," he advises, because "We win with a civil discourse and respectful cooperative conversation."

I will conclude with the note that you may want to put your fund-raising pitch further from your claim that your research institute is the only place doing the sort of activity that the Democratic Party needs to win. Page 27 reads pretty clearly that you want at least $4-7 million (and ideally $30 million) a year, guaranteed with no fundraising worries, "no strings attached," for thirty to forty years. I do credit careful language for maintaining the technically "non-partisan" position of said institute; I did not notice a time when Mr. Lakoff used "Democrat" where he legally needed to use "progressive."

There is a great deal of repetition in each chapter, so if you feel the need to read it, you should jump ship after chapter one. It is the best-written part of the book, anyway.

Amazon link

Post-election update:

As far as I can tell, no one in any competitive race used the Lakoff approach. Democrats consistently took the opposite approach, competing on Republican issues with the message that Republicans failed at them, largely Iraq. We have a cohort of pro-life Democratic hawks coming in. So we have not tested the Lakoff approach yet, but its exact opposite seems to work pretty well.

5 Minutes And 42 Seconds by T. J. Williams

Rating - 1: not worth considering (burn it)

Coarse and tawdry, yet tedious. I abandoned it 15% of the way through, with no sympathetic or interesting characters having demonstrated their existence. I am told that there is an emerging sub-genre of "ghetto-lit," so hopefully this is not its best representative. On the other hand, if "BET meets Lifetime" sounds like what you are looking for, consider this a strong endorsement.

Amazon link

Update: a link discussing the phenomenon of MSM as is prominent in the book.

Hugging the Rock by Susan Taylor Brown

Rating - 3: worth reading once (borrow it from a library)

I found it sufficiently touching, but I became a huge sap at some point so don't listen to me.

In a story told in verse, a girl's bipolar mother abandons the family. She feels abandoned and isolated from her father, the titular rock. She gradually comes to terms with life and who her mother is.

There is not a lot here, really. It is a short book, somewhere on the order of a half-hour of reading. This is an advantage for its benefit-cost ratio in terms of time spent, although it may raise questions about dollars spent.

The mother's problem is clear from the beginning, although the narrator avoids it. That grates. It arrives very suddenly and explicitly late in the book. You didn't notice? That grates. The turns are sudden, which is also one of the poems, which you could reflect upon for an obvious reading below the surface.

The strength of the book comes from effectively expressing emotion. That works best around the middle 50%. It works well enough to make the book worth reading. The successes come in pangs and sharp doses, amidst the narrator's dull ache.

The story immediately evokes Walk Two Moons, which is a better book that aims to do something slightly different. This is not the best story in verse you will read in your life, and you could live comfortably without having read it, but it is worth reading.

The bottom line, though, is that the book gives back more than you put into it. It succeeds in what it tries to do, and you need not invest a lot of time and effort to get the value from the book.

I am keeping my copy, and I will probably re-read parts of it.

Amazon link

The Nine Billion Names of God by Arthur C. Clarke

Rating - 2.5: parts of it are worth reading once (borrow it from a library)

Reviewing a collection of essays and short stories lends itself to being either very short or very long, depending on if you want to be encyclopedic through the stories or just hit the broad themes. For me, this is erring on the short side.

This is Arthur C. Clarke's collection of his favorite short stories (by him) as of the time the book was published. It has about two dozen stories.

The stories in this collection generally have very good endings. This is to say that many of them are somewhat weak with a good twist at the end. Others have a compelling concept that pushes the story forward, and this concept drives the narrative for its own expository purposes, sometimes at cross-purposes to what makes a good story. Those complaints out of the way...

"The Nine Billion Names of God," "Rescue Party," and "Before Eden" are decent stories with strong endings. "The Star" is in this vein as well as being an excellent story, possibly the best in the collection.

"No Morning After," "The Wall of Darkness," and "The Possessed" are the concept stories, an idea with a bit of story to go with it. "Superiority" is much the same, although a very good story to boot. "Transience" has less story, more concept, but a great expression of a sense of reality and the universe, transcending life.

"Hide and Seek," "Out of the Sun," "Death and the Senator," and "A Walk in the Dark" are the other stories that I mark as very worth reading. I will also note "Patent Pending," which would fall in the previous category of concept stories except that it recognized as far back as 1953 that the internet is for porn.

"Dog Star" gives us some characterization, a relative rarity in early science fiction, particularly short stories. "The Reluctant Orchid" will be recognized as a variant "Little Shop of Horrors" story.

I believe that The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke has all of these stories, and more, and is much more easily available these days. I will recommend that collection at a 3.5, although I have not read all of it.

Amazon link

Amazon link to The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke

Tome of Battle by Richard Baker, Matthew Sernett, and Frank Brunner

Rating - 4: useful for any campaign (buy it)

Gaming book: Dungeons and Dragons, 3.5 Edition.

Odd Girl Out by Rachel Simmons

Rating - 4: worth reading multiple times (buy it)

This is one of those Important Books. You get held to a higher standard when you are consciously being Important. Odd Girl Out clears the bar. Every woman I know who has read this has recognized herself or someone she knew in every single item in the book.

Odd Girl Out is another book where the subtitle says it all: "The Hidden Culture of Aggression in Girls." Since direct conflict is not part of being a "nice girl," aggression is expressed indirectly and socially through the sort of carefully concealed abuse that is obvious to the victim but under the radar of teachers and parents. Ms. Simmons displays a war where the weapons are betrayal, deceit, and isolation.

Just to be clear, this is a good book for men to read, too. Hey guys, this is what happens when you are not looking. If you want to understand the way that women speak and interact, few things will give you insight like this. If you want to know what your daughter is about to go through, here you go.

I find the book most valuable in its descriptive aspects. Nothing here is strictly unknown, by which I mean that if I asked you about any particular incident or way that girls interact, you could say, "Oh yeah, I know that." The value comes from pointing out all those things that are only obvious upon reflection and putting them all together in a way that displays them as a coherent topic rather than a series of isolated issues. What happened to you or your daughter was not just something that happened, but rather one example of a larger pattern that receives little official notice.

Does it go a little too far? Yes, but then when you average that with "not noticed at all" (times the number of people who will read the book), odds are against your going too far. Yes, Ms. Simmons explicitly says that "I don't want to be your friend anymore" is a form of aggression and/or bullying, as is just not telling someone when you want to stop being friends. Yes, she says that keeping secrets is bullying as is revealing secrets, and having no one to tell your secrets is a problem, too. Yes, she explicitly calls for regulation against alliance-building. No, having one page of "sometime it isn't bullying" after 250 pages of "silence is aggression" does not balance the scales.

Part of the problem there is what she calls a lack of language or vocabulary for discussing female aggression. Treating this properly will probably involve creating some jargon or technical terms, just because words like "aggression" and "bullying" already have connotations that make them work imperfectly. Ms. Simmons alternately describes aggression as something to be expressed and something to be avoided and in a few places confuses (by my definitions) being aggressive and being assertive. With any luck, she has worked out a bit more of the necessary language in the follow-up book or at her institute. The core of the message is solid, but poor individual expressions or fringe examples can make it look like dismissable extremism.

So some notable bits:

Male aggression creates clear winners and losers without necessarily creating enmity; now that the pecking order is established, we can proceed with our lives. With female aggression, the enmity is the point. It would not really hurt if she could move on after you started hurting her.

Male aggression is usually individual. Female aggression is social. For boys, the point is to win alone, man-to-man. For girls, the point is to build a coalition; once everyone is on your side, you have won, whatever the merits of the case.

Combining those two, who is the odd girl out varies from day to day. Someone can be isolated from the group and persecuted for a week or two, then it is someone else's turn. No one knows how we pick who is on top and who is completely out this week. Which peccadillo is to be attacked this time, since we have a store of them built up from the past decade?

I found the story of Erin and Michelle most notable, because it parallels perfectly the standard story in which the schoolyard bully gets what is coming to him. The kids he has been pushing around stand up to him, and he gets pushed around; the ending of Back to the Future, for example. It is a triumphant moment where the oppressed become the winners. In Odd Girl Out, it happens with female aggression; the former bully is described in sympathetic terms as a victim, and the rebels are now bullies not victors. It demonstrates both the differences between the genders' perspectives and the important point that the story of Odd Girl out has no winners, only degrees of losing. If you want to get the entire book in ten pages, flip to "Erin and Michelle: Two Faces in the Mirror?" in chapter 3.

The text does bear the unfortunate hallmarks of a degree in women's studies. I mean, the movie made from the book was on Lifetime. If you know them, you probably know how to read past them. If not, you probably will consider them as stylistic oddities.

On the whole, worth reading, and recommended for anyone of either sex, adolescent or older.

Author's website
Amazon link