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Jemisin has a talent for characters you can care for and care about, and a smoothness to her writing that makes difficult ideas and abstract notions seem intuitive. All of that is on show here, and at a pace to get a story done before the world (our one) takes itself to pieces.

Its predecessor, The City We Became is a better book. It takes more time to develop the characters, their cares and arcs, though we barely get to see one of the most interesting ones (I won't go into too much detail in case you haven't read that one). We see them here, but mostly in small snatches of narrative and events rather than as a full point-of-view thread through the book. This is still a rollicking good read and a full, rich story, though. That the book isn't quite what it could have been is just made clear, partly by Jemisin's fluency and pace.

I get the feeling that's because Jemisin was in a rush - something she notes in the Acknowledgements at the end. What I had thought was a clear reaction to Trump and the white supremacy he allowed to push through from the depths all over the surface in The City We Became seems to have been more prescient, she was working out implications to come in the writing that were more clear everywhere by the time got through the publishing process. The real reaction was in this book, but the violence and crappiness of the world Trump unleashed seems to have been a bit much for both the story and the author (and who can blame her?).

While there are some superb stories and working out of key threads in this book, the disjoint between the humanity and the other-worldly machinations means that several key events gets a 'real-world shittiness' followed by a roll-for-random-Lovecraft-encounter feel it to. The weave isn't quite as tight was it was in the first, because there isn't time.

In the final third, there's a sprint finish which gets things done, and wraps things up, but the pace leaves some (by no means all!) of the humanity behind.

It's very cool, and very well worth it. And I really want to know what games Jemisin plays.

What was to be at trilogy is now a complete duology, and I cannot wait to see what she brings next.

"Female 'Samurai'

While 'samurai' is a strictly masculine term, the Japanese bushi class (the social class samurai came from) did feature women who received similar training in martial arts and strategy. These women were called “Onna-Bugeisha,” and they were known to participate in combat along with their male counterparts. Their weapon of choice was usually the naginata, a spear with a curved, sword-like blade that was versatile, yet relatively light.

Since historical texts offer relatively few accounts of these female warriors (the traditional role of a Japanese noblewoman was more of a homemaker), we used to assume they were just a tiny minority. However, recent research indicates that Japanese women participated in battles quite a lot more often than history books admit. When remains from the site of the Battle of Senbon Matsubaru in 1580 were DNA-tested, 35 out of 105 bodies were female. Research on other sites has yielded similar results."

An interesting illustrated book that look that three things we take for granted: the Internet, electricity and water. It shows the history of how we created the Internet and how we now harness it and electricity and water to power our modern society. But the book doesn't shy away from showing the damaging effects all three have had on parts of society (like the underprivileged and marginalized).

On the internet, the book shows that our desires to use it to gather information and to broadcast our thoughts (yes, I'm aware that this review is part of that desire) lead to huge resource requirements to store and transmit the information.

The discovery and harnessing of electricity, from the initial small groups to the huge modern conglomerates that generate and distribute electricity, have damaged the environment and people whose lands are now gone (flooded by electricity generating dams, for example).

Water has been misused since the beginning as a sewer and even today, much of the fresh water in the world is wasted.

But to close on a brighter note, the book's intent is to reveal just how much of how these things are used in the world are hidden from sight and, as a result, we are not aware of the damage they are doing. But now that we have a better idea of how they are used in the world, it is up to us to make better use of these systems, and the many others 'hidden systems' in the world.

Oh this was bad.

I was given this as a gift years ago and I would have stopped less than halfway through if it weren't. Decided to knock it off the list as a light non-fiction to finish out the summer, and while it was easy enough to get through it is a god-awful mess.

Biskind takes on all and sundry in a cocaine rush of allusions to pop-culture, whiplashing from modern superhero films to 50s B-movies, Westerns (old and some younger) to science fiction. The thesis on the cover of the book is that icons of pulp culture have 'made America great for extremism'. The book makes no clear statement of the same - there is no argument that representations in popular culture shapes or forms what is likely or easy for people to imagine as possible. Nor is there a clear argument that things work the other way, that popular political sentiments come to be expressed in pop culture. In theory that would leave space for real nuance - the relationship between pop culture material and politics is complex and bidirectional, a feedback loop of the imaginary.

Nope.

The book, from the first pages, is just a slew of 'here's a political reading of particular events in particular pop culture examples', where 'political reading' involves it being binned into one of three options - extreme left, extreme right, and centre. There are a few examples of quirky, insightful commentary on the material, but the anecdotes are so numerous, each given at most a couple of paragraphs of exposition before moving on, that it just becomes an avalanche of bits with very little whole to put them together.

It's like a 200+ page version of "Tell it to me in Star Wars" (https://youtu.be/H7V_Nz5IGHU?t=103), except what's being explained is already Curious George Goes to Congress.

Ultimately, I think Biskind is trying to get across that life and politics are bigger and more complex than can be captured in the broad brush strokes of a pop-culture movie, television show, or YA novel. The shallowness of his engagement with his raw materials, though, does both his material and his topic an injustice.

Not recommended.