Drift Continued

Having finished Rachel Maddow's Drift, I can say with all confidence that I was right to recommend it yesterday.

The first eight chapters of the book, which discuss the decisions and actions that led to us becoming "a nation 'at peace with being at war'" (Maddow, 2012, p. 246), are disturbing. But the final chapter, which discusses our nuclear weapons program - past and present, is downright horrifying. Funny too, but in that if-I-don't-laugh-I'll-cry way.

One would think that, having spent eight trillion dollars (that's a lot of zeroes) on our nuclear arsenal, the air force would take better care of it. Or at least be more careful with it. (Side note: The air force base in Minot, ND comes up quite a bit in the chapter. I've known such a base existed for almost a decade, but I had no idea that it housed a lot of our nukes. You see, Minot is also home to a call center for the insurance company I used to work for; every once in a while one of my contacts would leave because his or her spouse was transferred.) At least the 21st-century stories are funny in their ineptitude. (Although the fact that I'm using the word "inept" to describe the airmen who work with our nukes is chilling.) The stories from the Cold War are just scary. It is something of a miracle that we haven't unleashed nuclear annihilation unintentionally.

Maddow's not all doom and gloom, though. In the epilogue she proposes a to-do list of items that could walk the country back to a place that is more in line with the founders' intentions. Although she suggests that the items on her list are actionable, I am less sanguine. The thing I know for sure, though, is that nothing will get done if the public doesn't start paying attention and asking questions.

Maddow, R. (2012). Drift: The unmooring of American military power. Crown Publishers: New York.

Book Recommendation: Drift

I'm currently reading Rachel Maddow's Drift, which I've wanted to read since it was published earlier this year. I even bought a copy with an Amazon gift card I received for my birthday, but it languished on my bedside table while I re-read Jane Austen this summer and then read 24 YA books for my YA literature class. It's not a particularly sad book (unless you consider the systematic dissolution of every structural, legal, and legislative impediment to war in the United States to be sad), yet at one point I found myself with tears in my eyes.

I realized the culprit was the following sentence fragment: "...and thanks to public relations triumphs like the Bush administration sparing us the sight of the flag-draped caskets of dead American soldiers deplaning week after week at Dover Air Force Base...the American public has been delicately insulated from the actuality of our ongoing wars" (Maddow, 2012, pp. 206-207). More specifically, it was the vision Maddow conjured of dead American soldiers being flown into Dover AFB. It's a sad image, but that's not what struck such a chord with me. No, what moved me to tears was the connection I drew between Maddow's words and a fact I just learned about my late grandfather.

My paternal grandfather was career Navy; he's even buried in Arlington National Cemetery. He was a pilot. Later in his career he was a flight instructor, but he flew bombers in World War II and Korea. He mostly flew cargo planes during Vietnam. I've known all of this for years; what I just learned was that his cargo planes were flying in and out of Dover. According to my dad and aunt, he never told anyone that he was flying dead kids into Dover, but my grandmother could tell. How could she not? How could such an assignment not take a toll on anyone?

I'd never paid much thought to how those flag-draped caskets get to Dover AFB, but now I don't think I'm going to be able to see a picture of them without thinking about the flight crew that got them there.

I have not finished the book yet, but I feel very comfortable recommending it. Maddow makes her argument in a very compelling way. Some readers won't appreciate her argument, but I believe one of her goals in publishing the book is to inspire national debate about America's war-making capabilities.

Maddow, R. (2012). Drift: The unmooring of American military power. Crown Publishers: New York.

Coming Up: Book Recommendations

I've probably read more books in the past year than I had in any other year since I was a kid. In fact, if I'd read nothing but the 24 YA books I read for my YA Literature class, I'd probably still come out on top. After all, this lack of reading was the impetus for my New Year's Resolution to read every day. A resolution that, I'm happy to say, I have kept thus far. (In fact, it's the only one of the four that I've managed to keep.)

I've discovered a lot of great books this year while also re-reading some old favorites. It shouldn't be any real surprise, then, that I want to share some of the notable books with you. But not tonight. No, this project waits for another day.

Book Recommendations: The Uglies Series

As I indicated in my last post, I was completely entranced by the world Scott Westerfeld imagined in his Uglies series. I was so into it, in fact, that I read the entire four book series in 15 days. That's even more impressive when you consider that I was in grad school for more than half of that time, which meant that I couldn't just curl up with these books regardless of how much I wanted to.

The Uglies series takes place several hundred years from now. After humanity nearly destroyed the planet and itself by wantonly using up resources and being dependent on oil, it finally got its act together. Everyone lives in population-controlled cities (capped at one million people each) that are spread across the planet. Most consumer goods are made of plastic and recycled after use. A metallic grid under each city provides the magnetic power needed to allow the citizens' hoverboards and hovercars to fly.

These future people didn't just fix humanity's need to destroy the earth, though. They also ended prejudice. Every citizen undergoes a major operation at the age of 16 that allows him or her to fit the biological standard of beauty (symmetrical face, large eyes, full lips, clear skin, etc.). Since everyone eventually looks the same, there's no reason to hate other people for being different. In fact, the only real differentiation that happens in this society is along age lines: children are called littlies, 12-15 year olds are called uglies, once you turn 16 and have the surgery you join the new pretties, middle-aged people are called middle pretties, and the elderly are called crumblies.

The series was originally intended to be a trilogy: Uglies, Pretties, and Specials. The heroine of those three books is Tally Youngblood and the trilogy does a really good job of wrapping up Tally's story. At the start of Uglies, Tally is counting down the days to her 16th birthday so she can have the surgery and join her best friend Peris and all the other new pretties. She meets a girl named Shay, who just so happens to share her birthday. After they become friends, Shay tells Tally about a mysterious place called the Smoke; it's outside the city and the people who live there don't get the pretty surgery. It sounds horrible to Tally, but Shay is determined to run away to the Smoke. Tally refuses to leave with Shay but what happens next changes Tally's life and, eventually, Tally's world.

Like so many other dystopian sci-fi stories, the trilogy doesn't end with "and they all lived happily ever after," but it does have a hopeful ending. After having read Extras, I wish I'd ended with the original trilogy. Honestly, I wish Westerfeld had ended with the original trilogy. However, several years after writing Specials, he had an idea for a story in a world with a reputation economy. He realized he could set it in the world of Uglies several years after the end of Specials. It made a lot of sense.

I'm not saying that Extras is bad; it isn't. I just wish I'd bothered to look into it a bit before I started reading it. Had I realized that it really isn't a story about Tally, I probably wouldn't have read it. I think that was really my problem: I care deeply for Tally and several of the other characters of the original trilogy and Extras is about none of them. Sure, a bunch of them show up (eventually), but they are peripheral characters. Plus, I didn't really like Aya Fuse, the heroine of Extras. She was annoying and not Tally (and she didn't have enough redeeming features to cover up those two sins). There was also the weird sense of disorientation that came from reading a book set in a world that was not what I'd expected. (If that makes sense.)

In conclusion, I highly recommend the original trilogy of Uglies, Pretties, and Specials. However, I would probably wait a while to read Extras after finishing those three. For what it's worth, I want to buy paperback copies of the trilogy but have no intention of buying Extras.

Checking In

I have been remiss with this blog and I apologize. School and life and whatnot made me forget it even existed, but I'm glad I remembered it because I want to share a very brief story.

One of my friends lent me some YA books because I took a YA Literature course this semester. I've read four of the seven books so far, including the one I finished last night, Uglies by Scott Westerfeld. I knew that Uglies was the first in a series when I started it, but I had no idea how badly I would want to continue the series when I finished it. But, man oh man, I really want to continue Tally's story. (This is the same way I felt when I finished The Hunger Games in March.) I started writing a Facebook message to my friend this afternoon to ask if she had any of the other books in the series, Pretties, Specials, and Extras, but then I realized that I could look online to see if my local library had it. After all, borrowing it from my local library would be much cheaper and quicker than borrowing it from my friend a thousand miles away. So I looked online and not only were all three books available in the Hillsborough County Public Library Cooperative, they were all available at the Brandon Library. There was even at least one copy of each book sitting on the shelves! So I hopped in my car and drove to the library :)

I did try to talk myself out of going because I have final papers to write, but I'm glad I was unsuccessful. I now have the continuation of Tally's story sitting on my dining room table, just waiting for me to finish those papers and dive in. That's a pretty strong incentive.