| NOV
2016
AUDIO BOOK REVIEWS
by Jonathan Lowe
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If
you can’t stomach Stephen King’s IT (in a
new audiobook production, and a remake movie next year),
try UTOPIA IS CREEPY by Nicholas Carr, a great collection
of essays by the Pulitzer Prize finalist from his blog
Rough Type and elsewhere. The subjects are wide, including
social media, advertising, corporate spying, computers,
and artificial intelligence. As everyone knows, Facebook,
Twitter, and Instagram represent but the surface tension
of a Googlized public which more often prefers to live
online rather than in real life. The internet and endless
new television shows have taken over our culture, and
these provide an alternate world in which we validate
our identity by sharing likes and posts, gain an ego boost,
and…get dumber and more anxious? That wasn’t
part of the deal, but studies have shown that depression
is prevalent among those whose life is lived online the
most. Real reading is being reduced to one-liners on Twitter.
Entire election campaigns are now run there, with slogans
substituting for actually reading biographies of the principals,
written by professionals or even independents. On Youtube
one person’s opinion is as good as another’s,
and you can be shouted down for introducing logic or the
scientific method. What happens when the dumbing down
is complete? Something creepy, and far from Utopia. Interestingly,
Carr also talks about self driving cars: in Silicon Valley
one of the fav pastimes is driving race cars on private
tracks, while they engineer hands-free cars for us. The
motive is to drive us to distraction by limiting the time
we "waste" NOT on our devices (even in traffic.)
Any time reading or contemplating things is lost to them,
too, and their profit depends on our surfing the web as
much as possible, "leaving crumbs of data along the
way." The "information superhighway" can
replace the real one with self-driving vehicles. Narrated
by voice actor and fourth-degree black belt Steve Menasche,
the ever-engaging audiobook shows that “resistance
is never futile,” although mere “likes”
are, like, meaningless. Science may win in the end, but
only if a new Dark Age can be avoided, with its static
culture and burning of books (or any people with new ideas.)
So listening to audiobooks beats frustration or Top 40,
and also can become your own resistance. A must-hear.
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| A
GAMBLER’S ANATOMY by Jonathan Lethem:
With all the craziness in the news, one often needs
an escape. If culture is becoming dumber due to not
reading, books provide information you can’t get
on TV—not even on PBS. When too many young people
either take selfies or watch TV sports and McNews, we
all lose in the long run. (I watch NOVA, but rarely
learn much since it must be dumbed down for those who
don’t read science books like the recent debunking
of TIME TRAVEL by James Gleick, THE CRASH DETECTIVES
(about why planes crash, and the role of human error,)
or THE FIX (about solving global warming
with new ideas and technology.) There are biographies
that bring us closer to those who have changed the world
for the better, and inspire new thoughts (not just more
stats in some record book.) A Gambler’s
Anatomy is narrated by Mark Deakins, an award
winner. In it, handsome, impeccably dressed Bruno Alexander
travels the world, winning large sums of money from
amateur “whales” who think they can challenge
his peerless acumen at backgammon. Fronted by his pasty,
vampiric manager—Edgar Falk—Bruno arrives
in Berlin after a troubling run of bad luck in Singapore.
Perhaps it was the chance encounter with his crass childhood
acquaintance Keith Stolarsky and his smoldering girlfriend
Tira Harpaz. Or perhaps it was the emergence of a blot
that distorts his vision so he has to look at the board
sideways. Things don’t go much better in Berlin.
Bruno’s flirtation with Madchen, the striking
blonde he meets on the ferry, is inconclusive; the game
at the unsettling Herr Kohler’s mansion goes awry
as his blot grows worse; he passes out and is sent to
the local hospital, where he is given an extremely depressing
diagnosis. Having run through Falk’s money, Bruno
turns to Stolarsky, who, for reasons of his own, agrees
to fly Bruno to Berkeley, and to pay for the experimental
surgery that might save his life. Berkeley, where Bruno
discovered his psychic abilities, and to which he vowed
never to return. Amidst the patchouli flashbacks and
Anarchist gambits of the local scene, between Tira’s
come-ons and Keith’s machinations, Bruno confronts
two existential questions: Is the gambler being played
by life? And what if you’re telepathic, but it
doesn’t do you any good?
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Finally,
there is MARS: Our Future on the Red Planet by
Leonard David, narrated by Andrew Reilly. This
is a National Geographic miniseries made into an official
companion audiobook, three and a half hours on audio describing
NASA’s plans and considerations in undertaking a
mission to our nearest possibly habitable world (although
Matt Damon didn’t have much luck.) While some scientists
argue that we aren’t “there yet” in
terms of technology (to be planning a Mars mission), others
do want to go sooner rather than later (who knows when
funding to NASA may dry up.) In an anti-science political
environment it is difficult to imagine it would even happen,
which is why NASA has gone on the offensive in capturing
the public’s imagination with documentaries and
pop science shows. This companion book describes the difficulties
being encountered by scientists in fighting radiation,
weightlessness, medical and psychological factors, equipment
for life support, physics, food, and the scientific experiments
they hope to conduct. Many robot missions have been to
Mars, even from India and (soon) Dubai. Why go there with
humans, other than for bragging purposes? “Hands”
say the authors. Human hands operated by human minds actually
working on the planet are the most needed tools. This
is particularly useful for drilling operations, which
robots have not done well. Surface water is nearly non-existent
on Mars, and life improbable on the surface due to harsh
conditions, but subsurface water is suspected for several
reasons. And there is an abundant mineral that could be
heated to release water. NASA is hoping to reach Mars
with astronauts sometime in the next 25 years, if current
technology improvements continue on track. Narrator Reilly
is a skilled and listenable reader, a multilingual drama
teacher who has traveled widely. Author David is an award-winning
contributor to space related sites, and co-authored Buzz
Aldrin’s biography. |
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