the book nook
Trial By Fire: A Devastating Tragedy, 100 Lives Lost, and A 15-Year Search for TruthScott James
2020
Trial By Fire: A Devastating Tragedy, 100 Lives Lost, and A 15-Year Search for Truth
by Scott James
The Station nightclub fire is one of those grim events that has always stuck with me, probaby because of the video footage and because of how outrageously horrible it was. The only other event on its tier is the recent Itaewon Crush, and to a lesser degree the Sewol Ferry disaster. You can see how it happened, imagine yourself in it, and know very likely you wouldn't get out.
Probably part of it is how random it is. There's a certain awareness of danger in things like workplace disasters, but in the case of The Station it's an innocent everyday fun event in a small community venue that in less than 100 seconds (really less than 1 second) flips into an inescapable deathtrap that ravages hundreds of families and rewrites national legislature.
So when another book comes out about it of course I'm all over that.
- If you've never heard about this fire, a rundown: in 2003 in Rhode Island, a small nightclub called The Station with chiefly local working-class clientele stages an indoor concert headlining the band Great White.
Formerly popular enough to fill whole stadiums in the 80s, Great White's star has long diminished but its sense for spectacle has not. The band brings illegally undeclared pyrotechnics into the state, specifically 15x15 gerbs, for their set.
Meanwhile in the years prior, the brothers who own the nightclub, Micheal and Jeffery Derderian, have been getting noise complaints. They risk to lose their venue licence if these go unheeded. On the advice of a neighbour who works for American Foam, they have thus installed foam on the walls and ceiling around the stage as a noise retardant — polyurethane foam, which is as flammable as gasoline.
Multiple years pass with the foam on the walls, during which the building shockingly passes all its fire safety inspections.
We return to Great White. At the start of their set, sparks from the gerbs strike the walls and ignite the polyurethane foam. Flames quickly spread to a block of equally flammable polyethylene foam, installed behind the stage as a noise retardant by the club's previous owner, which produces a horrendous mix of toxic gasses and shoots the fire to ferocious temperatures.
People scramble to escape the rapidly growing fire. With a crowd of hundreds congested in the small venue, and only two exits available to the public, most rush to the front door by which they entered. The hall between the stage and the front door has a slight downwards incline. Someone trips, and a human crush occurs.
Within 90 seconds, with over 40 souls stuck in the hall and over 90 in the building in total, the building reaches flashover and the fate of anyone inside is essentially sealed.
- It's not the best book about this fire. I'll say off the bat. John Barylick's "Killer Show" is basically superior at giving information about the fire itself, and has an interesting story about how the legal case was built afterwards to wrench as much compensation as possible out of as many parties as possible for the victims. and it's better written. but that's a whole other thing
- This book is more about defending the Derderian brothers. The Derderians recieved extremely strong censure after the fire and were the #1 party, or #2 after Great White frontman Jack Russel, of whom the public demanded severe legal punishments that never really got to a 'satiating' degree because for how horrific of a catastrophe the fire was, its causes were overwhelmingly banal. By that I mean it was a 'paperwork' tragedy where people futzed paperwork, didn't do paperwork, ignored paperwork, and with enough people all along the chain doing that it culminated into an actual disaster. negligence or manslaughter, not something you could book an individual guy with life in prison for.
- Author is a personal friend of the Derderians, to that end.
- Ignoring the bias though, there are some points made that if true do make the Derderians feel way less culpable than they're generally accused of being; like 'they specified noise insulating foam in their purchase order, which they assumed would be flame retardant, but got different foam,' or 'they didn't give permission for the pyro', or 'he didn't look for the money till', or 'the club only had ~250 people, not ~460', but it's kinda all a he-said-she-said thing. Leigitimately felt at points that I was reading something in the same breed of an adoptables community drama post.
- I do get the impression the Derderians get singled out a bit much though, but also that it's been 20 years and it's kinda... okay on principle time doesn't change truth, and if the brothers really were falsely accused somewhere it's better that's known, but it feels kinda weird to bring up their purported innocence given that, as far as legal ramifications go it's all passed now.
- That neither Jack Russel or the fire inspector got scrutinised legally does suck.
- What is interesting about the Derderians' side is hearing about the aftermath and the conditions in prison—kinda wish it was more direct like that the whole way. Like the Derderian perspective is given all through the book but you can feel the filter of the author defending them on it, except for this one specific section.
- The stories of Gina and Phil are both interesting and nice to hear. Book does a good job of presenting these. Glad they were both able to regain a place of, relatively speaking normalcy afterward. Ending with the memorial was also nice.
Trapped: The 1909 Cherry Mine DisasterKaren Tintori
2002
Trapped: The 1909 Cherry Mine Disaster
by Karen Tintori
This is a great little book about an obscure mine disaster in rural Illinois that tickles my jimmies. I feel grim to call myself a connoisseur of this type of 'disaster' material but I also have to admit that I go looking for topics like this. And I'm glad I do because this was really interesting.
- in calling it an 'obscure' mine disaster, the reality is at the time (and even now) it was huge and directly responsible for a lot the USA's worker's compensation laws. It's kind of faded into history though and isn't talked about in the 'Youtube circuit' like similar cases are, which makes finding out about it feel a bit special.
- So the gist: this cutting-edge coal mine boasting unparalleled fire safety precautions, and general safety precautions, catches alight when the electrical lighting malfunctions and reverts everything to kerosene lamps. Kerosene oil drips onto a cartload of hay a worker is transporting deeper into the mine to feed the mine's working mules, and by some undiscerned ignition source, catches fire. The fire is left unaddressed for several minutes, until a combination of the tunnels' wooden support beams, and unfortunate positioning in the draft of the mine's ventilation shaft, fans it into an inferno that proceeds to burn for six months — with 500 workers stuck inside.
- The amount of coal this mine is sitting on is nuts, and given that it closed operations only a couple decades after this incident, it's probably mostly still there.
- That mules lived and worked in these mines also is nuts. It makes sense but I wasn't expecting it. Sounds pretty horrible to have to be cleaning up after that/catering for that/sharing space with that down in those cramped conditions, too. REALLY doesn't help when there's a fire.
- It was neat to learn about early 20th century mining operations and the ecosystem of these rural mining towns, disaster aside. The degree to which the communities around these mines depended on them is really apparent.
- Really well written. It takes a moment to start up, but after explaining the structure of the mine and the disaster begins, it gets extremely intense with extremely good detail and suspenseful dedication given the survivors/families' stories, and what they were doing moment-by-moment in the mine. Author is a survivor's descendant who had great sources.
- The entire situation with the kids being forced by the eager to keep working even though he knows there's a fire, and smoke is wafting through the tunnels, instead of escaping, is gutwrenching.
- The young man who is instructed by his boss to stay by the mules, and dutifully does so, instead of escaping, is also gutwrenching.
- That it takes a while for anyone to 'really' respond to the fire is like... I can 'understand' it on one hand, if workers had become accustomed to fires as generally not being serious, but it's also like, if it had been taken seriously as soon as it became 'generally known' that it was happening, I think this incident would've had a very good survival rate.
- The whole thing with the cart getting stuck halfway in the shaft to level 3 where a hose is ready, then being too hot to move, and then getting stuck before it can get to the hose on level 2, sucks SO BAD.
- Everything involving the fan also sucks so bad. Like every time they touched it something horrible happened. It spreads the fire, it spreads the smoke, it blows up and almost burns the escape shaft, it spreads the BLACK DAMP...
- That black damp is a menace. There's a 'sort-of' interesting thing going on with this fire, in that there's two levels of the mine that are relatively separated, and the fire itself is on the upper, second level. So the fire itself should be mostly isolated to the second level and the areas above it, like on the shafts, which is what we see. Which means the miners on the third level shouldn't be at risk of the fire, per se, but from the smoke... except that smoke also generally doesn't descend. In natural circumstances you'd expect it to rise up the shafts and for the miners on the third level to be 'not-so' affected.
But it's a mine, right, so it has to be ventilated, which means there's an air current being pumped in that is feeding the fire. So to stop the fire you have to cut off that current. Which is what they decide to do. But when you cut off the current, the miners don't have air. There's groups of tens and hundreds on the second and third level who manage to get away from the immediate area of the smoke and fire, and hold out for days/weeks, but suffocate to death because there isn't air. That is harrowing.
- It's a mercy that that one guy (name escapes me and I can't find it) thought to, and managed to get the explosives out. Lowkey mvp.
- All the rescuers who went back down into the mine, MULTIPLE TIMES, to get people out WHILE IT'S STILL BURNING are highkey mvps. Norberg stands out especially.
- Their fate on the elevator run though is gutting. Utterly gutting. Things get spicy against Rosenjack but I'm glad he and Howe got out.
- Feel bad for Cowley. Awful decision to have to make.
- The repair for the electronics coming in a couple days afterward makes a great final gutpunch.
The Screwtape LettersC. S. Lewis
1942
The Screwtape Letters
by C. S. Lewis
back with more Lewis. I'm sitting on his oeuvre (how come music has 'discography' but with books we have to get french?? are we eating them? NYUM.) with it at the top of my backlog, so i anticipate some more oncoming Lewis.
Screwtape is a memey book, and a whimsical one in its presentation/concept. anyone interested in reading/creative writing will eventually bump into it and go 'huh that's a pretty neat idea' and then get yanked into a funny wall of keen apologetics. it's also a quick read on top of that. Lewis acknowledges both these points at the end; you could go on and on and on with the Screwtape 'formula' for ages, but since it is the viewpoint of a demon it's a matter of taste to cut it short.
so the story itself.
- what stands out most to me about this book is how polite, or 'tame', Screwtape feels in his general diction and presentation — contrasted with Lewis mentioning later that his mindset was almost torturous to write because of how cruel it is. which isn't to say Screwtape is not cruel, or that he isn't saying horrendous things, because he is, but that the current moral climate of the world is so absolutely dismal that i can hop onto whatever social media and instantly find viciousness that makes this presentation of a demon look like a puppy. an upstanding puppy. i've also desensitized myself to some pretty awful stuff given the type of horrible subject matter I use and vulgarity of half my characters.
- that being said i know that if i REALLY went hard on poppy she'd put me in a nasty mindset in a way that isn't fun without being overtly 'vulgar', so maybe it's something similar
- anyways, so the fundamental draw of this book is the lessons to take away of what vices look like that might not immediately spring to mind as vices, and the strange angles at which they can butt into the lives of people who already think they're doing 'fine'; there are places I felt called out on, but overall the lessons (despite being most of the book, and consistently cogent) kinda flew by me. i found myself reading with my appeal more being the meta-narrative/comedy going on of Wormwood progressively losing his 'patient', Screwtape growing more desperate to find advisable avenues of corruption, and the 'patient's life overall becoming happier. You can see the distinct structure of it in the worldly concerns -> entry into religion&relationships -> consummation of faith into loving marriage 'big' progression.
- a lot of the points he makes through Screwtape, he also makes more directly in Mere Christianity, which might be why Screwtape's presentation of them feels a bit 'woo' to me. The biggest one that did stick though is probably the point that God wants Saints. While the demonic forces mostly just care about distracting people into stupid, useless, banal, etc conflicts or fixations (and REAL big sins just being the bonus!) (though in heart all of this stuff is idolatry) God is pushing to have devotees who are paragons, in a way that teems even (especially) through a life's least showy moments. the entire section talking about possession of time, and that 'if Jesus appeared to him and gave him an assignment of service for even one day, he'd do it enthusiastically, and be relieved if that service was something as 'minor' as listening to a tedious person talk, and would be relieved to the point of dismay if instructed to also have free time that day, but begrudges this very principle even though the assignment is ALREADY LIKE THAT EVERY DAY' is rough, dude.
Christianity is a hard religion. It's both really 'easy' and hard. There's really nothing like it.
- his description of two people trying to mind-read each other on the basis of being 'unselfish' (rather than positive compassionate, and being direct in their own preferences) and just aggravating each other in the attempt is totally right.
- his note on humour as a veneer to get away with being awful is also correct. most of the time when people joke about something TMI or obnoxious, it's not a joke, they're just testing how far they can push bringing it up without being rejected (while having 'it's just a joke!' as a shield for that rejection. rather the lack of rebuke will reinforce it was a 'funny' thing to keep doing more)
- the dichotomy of 'don't let this person experience any hardship and he'll become worthless' to 'let this man convince himself lame sophistry is fun' is a really good one. it's true I've seen both sides of it. they both suck. former melts the ego into overreaction/extreme dependence when things start to go wrong; latter ties the ego into talking about the most boring insipid waffle as though it's great and getting way over-attached since your own chips are all in it.
- the big turning point of Wormwood really starting to lose the 'patient' being the 'patient' just going on a nice peaceful walk alone around his home in nature, and genuinely enjoying a book, is A+.
- Screwtape's revulsion at the patient's homely nice girl Christian girlfriend is really funny lol
- Lewis venerates Love and pleasure a lot, in all its forms, in an extremely genuine way. the equation of the 'patient' becoming more faithful being concurrent with him becoming a loving partner to his girlfriend/wife isn't coincidental; Lewis is being conscious of marriage as a divine sacrament and loving relationships (between man and God, or a man and God, first, then man with man) as the core of Christianity; there's a certain equivalency being presented in a person's ability to love others with their ability to truly love God, and vice versa. It's not in-your-face but it is really beautiful.
- Screwtape Proposes a Toast is biting and very interesting, moreso than the main text for me, because it carries this air of extreme doom and urging on behalf of Lewis. You can sense Lewis can feel things are poised to swoop into a moral downturn, and he is completely right, on every avenue that he presents it. I can't imagine he recognized the impact of the computer, or social media, on cult-worship of pop figures and subsumation of individuals to various idols, and agglomeration of individual peoples into their social 'scenes', would take the basic principle he's talking about and magnify it THIS MUCH. Moreover he absolutely could feel the impending doom of envy, celebrated as morally just, by the enforced equivalency of two things that are not equivalent; 'let them make mud-pies and call it modelling'—let them make pornographic fanfiction and call it Dante. Low standards aren't a good thing to celebrate. It means your self-esteem is low, maybe justifiably, but maybe not.
What's that quote from Dune?
“For the others, we can say that Muad’Dib
learned rapidly because his first training was in
how to learn. And the first lesson of all was the
basic trust that he could learn. It is so shocking to find out how many people do not believe that they can learn, and how many more believe learning to be difficult.” It's a pertinent thing here.
- and the last thing to mention is this sorrowful note Lewis has talking about how the right, or really way this book should be written, is to also present the perspective of an angel aiding the 'patient's guardian angel, but, despite being able to write loads and loads of Screwtape, being unable to envision what an angelic corrospondence of such a nature would be, or what character voice it'd have or what it'd sound like. he's right, I can't imagine what that would be either, but it's a rather poignant/bittersweet thing that's just sitting there.
The Worst Journey in the WorldApsley Cherry-Garrard
1922
The Worst Journey in the World
by Apsley Cherry-Garrard
the previously-mentioned and massively hefty book about Robert Scott's doomed 1910 expedition to the south pole. this is an interesting book, and one that's been sitting around in my backlog for ages as one of the 'momma whales' in the disaster/survival historical nonfiction 'canon', but the truth is it's not really about any disaster much as the entire legend left behind of this expedition and of Robert Falcon Scott, which is and will likely always be synonymous with the Antarctic. It's much more like an epitaph carved on a bedrock of determined adventure, and a very heartfelt and personally gritty one at that.
- This is a fat book. It begins with a really long, and really technical description of the sociopolitical climate of Antarctic travel, meaning to give the reader context, but kind of hard to grasp and a big filter to 'just jumping in' to it. You do need to have maps and google earth open to make sense of all the descriptions and nautical coordinates. But in a nutshell: nobody has yet gone inland or comprehensively surveyed the Antarctic continent, being barred from doing so by harsh mountains around its rim.
The most thoroughly interested party to breach into Antarctica, and ultimately score the first traverse of the south pole, is that of the British explorer Robert Falcon Scott. He has discovered an entry point into the Antarctic continent through the McMurdo Sound in a previous voyage across 1901-1904. Scott's friend on this voyage, Ernest Shackleton, has returned to Antarctica in his own voyage across 1907-1909 to attempt for the pole, coming close (to 88 S), but ultimately turning around due to bad conditions. Taking lessons from Shackleton's attempt, it is now 1910 and Scott is determined to try for the pole while surveying the region for science.
He will not be alone in this effort. Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen reveals shockingly that he will not be going to the Arctic this year, as forethought, but to the Antarctic, and also trying for the world first of the pole. The race is now on. The events and misadventures of Scott's party over 1910-1913 season compose the content of this book.
- book is told from the perspective of author Apsley Cherry-Garrard, who has a fantastic name btw, a fresh and young member of the crew who is for the first seeing the Antarctic. One thing to say about Cherry is that he noticably isn't an author and isn't trying to edit things to be 'narrative' so much as comprehensive, factual, and technical, with the book itself largely only being written because the mythos around the expedition had ballooned in england and there really, really needed to be full account of it. large sections are excerpts of diary enties and there is not a single space where a detail is missed or a 'pertinent' perspective isn't given for things from which Cherry was personally absent.
The effect of this is somewhat repetitive, but also very intimate. You very much sense how closely Cherry feels for his companions, which becomes your closeness for them, and his terrible awe toward the Antarctic, which becomes your terrible awe toward the Antarctic. but not too mawkishly sentimental, kinda can't be when you're literally dying.
- Overall attitude of the party is extremely British. you have people falling into crevasses like it's a casual thing and animals collapsing and constant frostbite and the summary in the diary at the end of the day is like, 'Weather was good! Had a few falls. Lunch was delightful, very good pemmican. Blizzard outside but we are cozy in the tent. Tomorrow we hope to push the sledge 20 miles.'
- takes a little while to get to the antarctic because even that process is a bit of an adventure. bro, they almost sink just getting there. the amount of stuff they are carrying is so fat and they really needed a bigger ship for this. im actually mind-blown the ship could hold all this junk; you have tons of coal, tons of food, the building supplies for a whole hut, a piano, tents, the scientific gear, sledges, and oh yeah just a freaking BARN OF DOGS AND PONIES. THAT HAVE TO SIT ON THE DECK CUZ THERE'S NO ROOM.
- they just build a hut. that's so nuts to me. like they come off the boat with a massive hut on board already 90% built and just slap it down on a random beach beside Mt Erebus and its apparently a god-tier warm cozy hut that just works. still there too.
- massive pony death
- ponies just don't belong in the antarctic. thats my scholarly opinion, as neither a knower of ponies or of grueling frost adventures
- interesting thing I didn't really think about but was a big deal was how the sea around Ross Island, where they're camped, freezes and melts across the summer and winter, and thus limits or expands the area they're able to travel in certain seasons. (and accordingly makes their timing by necessity really really precise). this sea- and 'pack' ice is a huge deal that screws with the team's relief boat being able to access them, almost gets them killed from being too shallow like five hundred times (they have to cross it to get between their camp and the inland antarctic), actually does get them killed because they lose ponies to it that could've been food, and facilitates the INSANE winter journey to cape crozier that is like. i'm glad it happened just to say it happened but nobody should ever try that again.
- another big thing you don't think about but is huge is the wind. they're constantly talking about the wind, and it's the wind that affects the quality of how the snow and ice forms. i understand now the 'seventy words for snow' meme, it's because you really do need to differentiate between snow of these different qualities; soft snow, crusty snow, hard-packed snow, crystalline snow, sastrugi, snow on a pressure ridge... and apparently they ALL screw with sledges in their own different ways.
- antarctica is way more colourful than i expected. you get constant mentions of how beautiful the sky is with auroras, parhelions, parselunes, the mountains, haloes in the snow, and all kind of colours reflected softly in the snow
- antarctica is also way more rocky than i expected. cherry addresses this. it's cuz the wind blows the snow away in predictable paths. he also mentions that you actually don't get very snowed up in blizzards because the wind blows the snow off of you before it can settle
- it is also interestingly warmer inside these blizzards than outside of them, by magnitudes of over thirty, forty degrees sometimes. i have no idea how this works but it's really consistent.
- OKAY so the logistics of antarctic travel. you can't just go to the south pole. you have to set up depots, which are like little resupply caches of food and stuff, in advance. cuz its 1.4km distance and you dont want to be lugging all your nums the whole way when you can drop some off and pick it up on the return journey. and is generally smart to have around when you're in the area. the process of setting up these depots was about 80% of the journey and it was horrible, since it leads to them getting into so much drama with finangling ponies and HAULING SLEDGES BY HAND for MONTHS, ON END through BLIZZARDS IN ANTARCTICA. AEUGH. and you consistently get them talking about how the sledge isn't pulling well, the sledge fell in a crevasse, so-and-so cut his hand on the sledge, the sledge broke down, cherry mega-frostbites his hand because he touches the sledge for one second bare-handed. its the image of the bloody sledge to me more than anything that emphasizes the hellishness of doing such a journey because you NEED to bring it.
- the entire episode with Cherry and his return group from the first depot journey getting stuck on the melting sea ice with their ponies is nightmare fuel and 5000x so when there's orcas who want to eat the ponies and can destroy the ice floe. i'm amazed they survived that.
- okay the cape crozier journey.
dude. dude.
- did you think going to the south pole is the worst journey in the world. NO. its not. the south pole is pleb business you do in the summer. the WORST journey is going the 100km hop skip and jump over to cape crozier. IN ANTARCTIC WINTER.
- what does that mean callie, it means WINDS: GALE FORCE 11. TEMPERATURES: -77C. VISIBILITY: PERPETUAL NIGHT. APSLEY CHERRY-GARRARD: WEARS GLASSES. SLEDGES: 2 OF THEM. RELAY PULLED. BY HAND. OVER SNOW THE CONSISTENCY OF SAND! TENT? MISSING. AND CREVASSES? YES. WHY? WHY DO IT??? penguin eggs :)
- actually amazed they did not die. like by all rights they should've. went into the book knowing it was a 'doomed expedition' and thought cherry was the only one who would survive this so when they all made it was like 'dude'. you have this really intense thing going on where just all their clothes and all their gear and their sleeping bags are frozen; any liquid that seeps into anything freezes, and because the blizzards are weirdly warm they melt the ice and saturate everything with liquid that afterwards freezes. and then they actually get to cape crozier which btw is extremely treacherous terrain with massive cliffs and crevasses in the middle of a wind tunnel, and by like an actual miracle they find a random hole they can slide down to get to the penguin colony. and almost die getting out again.
- behaviour of the mules refusing to eat is really weird, sad, and interesting
- massive clutch from atkinson, lashley, and crean being able to save lt evans. and almost dying on the stupid sea ice again. atkinson in general steps up and manages a lot over that last winter.
- the assured optimism everyone has for scott's success is in retrospect crushing.
- though called a 'doomed expedition', the doom only affects the polar party itself, that is the team of 5 that scott (self included) brings to the pole. sadly (it's sad in any case, but especially) two of these are cherry's companions who survived the dante-must-die level cape crozier sidequest, and scott is persistently spoken of as the leader, and another guy was the master of the ponies who make up so much of the drama of this book — so it's all people you really feel like you know and have seen in these make-or-break positions of extreme responsibility, and succeeding, with quiet courage to face crisis and a stiff upper lip. You can kinda tell why Scott picked these people, because they really are salt of the earth. and theres seaman evans
- i feel bad for seaman evans but switching plans to take him was not a good move
- random skua gull appearing in the middle of nowhere, starved, 1000km inland, was absolutely an omen. i'm just saying
- the ultimate fate of the polar party, while depressingly tragic, especially as you can see through the diary entries they're realising how grim things are, is one of those ones where it's like. in the sense of a historical moment, it feels like it's perfect; would the legend of this group have persisted so long if it hadn't ended how it ended? and i think, probably not. amundsen did reach the pole first in the end, but nobody really even cares because scott's journey, with all the hardships and determination to bring back new information about this forbidding frontier, captures the imagination a lot more.
- you can't help but respect scott for keeping his composure, even knowing things are doomed, and thinking about the fate of his party, all to the end
- cherry is right that the dedication to do more than just rush to the pole got them. that they were so close to the depot before getting stuck is also crushing.
- comes with pictures, photos and illustrations by one of the men on the polar/cape crozier journey, Wilson. he's a really good artist and having them included makes the whole thing feel even more personal.
This book is available for free through Project Gutenberg.
Antarctic Penguins: A Study of Their Social HabitsDr. George Murray Levick
1914
Antarctic Penguins: A Study of Their Social Habits
by Dr. George Murray Levick
cute little book about adelie penguins, as observed across their spring mating season to their depature in early autumn at antarctica's cape adare over the 1911-1912 season. the author Levick was the zoologist on Robert Scott's doomed 1910 expedition to the south pole, though he wasn't part of the team posted to go toward the pole (hence why he's up here chilling with penguins), and suffered his own share of trouble, but that's not the subject here the subject is THE PENGUINS
- it's very informative! levick clearly enjoyed observing the penguins and thoroughly investigated every odd or remarkable thing that they did both for scientific interest and personal interest, so there's meticulous detail put into logging their habits and behaviours that a documentary would likely skim over. being so old it's one of the first serious logs into adelie penguin behaviours too, so historically it has primary-source prestige on all today's adelie penguin facts
- despite that, it's very approachably (well) written and easy to read. levick anthromorphises the penguins with distinct emotions, expressions, and attitudes and how their particular quirks or actions remind him of various types of people, partially as illustration, but partially because it's evidently accurate to what the penguin is doing, and the effect of this is a persistent air of a man who is extremely excited and enraptured to tell you everything cool he's discovered about penguin society
- you get glimpses into the conditions of antarctica itself and what it's like to live camping there for such a long period too, which is compelling in its own right
- just overall charming book about a charming subject
- levick love friend penguin
- OH YEAH and it has pictures! levick brought a camera, so you get a bunch of cute photos of the penguins too. some of the earliest if not the earliest pictures taken of these little guys
I found this book because it was referenced in Apsley Cherry-Garrard's "The Worst Journey in The World", a fat nut I've been meaning to gobble for ages, and it made a nice breezy reprieve from the heavier reading there. i liked this a lot and appreciate how it's highly technical while also very sentimental on the writer's part, can't scientific journalism please go back to that?
This book is available for free through Project Gutenberg.
That Hideous StrengthC. S. Lewis
1945
That Hideous Strength
by C. S. Lewis
finishing off lewis' space triology a little quicker than expected. i think having the update feed makes me more inspired to do things just so that it's not sitting bare for too long lol. so the book:
kind of what to expect/the natural conclusion of what the other two books have built up! so nothing too shocking or that bucks expectation personally, but delivers what it does do and gets to its point very well
- the insipid conniving drollness of the NICE was portrayed really well and in general was/is prophetic. satan operating through a horrible hideous jumble of conceited overeducated brown-nosers who have barely any idea what they're doing or what their ultimate aim is at any moment outside of personal interests, yeah, sounds accurate
- owing to that though the book is kinda hard to get excited about for the sheer wall of awful hideous tedium and oppressive obfuscation strangling you (and mark) any time the focus shifts to the NICE. again I really like how it is portrayed and the horrible frustrating quirks of the various characters do become charming in their own way but they're also all so awful it's like, 'man, i know they'll lose eventually but can they be rattled a bit more in the meantime?'
- feels obvious or 'yeah duh' given present times but the 'WE GOTTA KILL EVERYTHING DESTROY NATURE REPLACE IT WITH TECH TAKE OVER THE GOVT CONTROL THE MEDIA HAVE IMMORTALITY UNIFY EVERYONE INTO DEMON HIVEMIND AND THEN EUGENICS UNTIL ONLY THE PRIME HELL DEMON IS LEFT' thing is pretty impressive how well he hit it given it's 1945. kinda shouldn't be overlooked how much he got the 'itinerary' right. its not even very dramatic about it since its dressed up in all that stupid genteel high-society language but yeah that's what's going on
- visual of the head being kept 'alive' (but not really) is pretty nasty, kinda wish someone else (mark even maybe) got also made into a hell-head but that's just my gory predilictions speaking
- a little bummed that we didn't really get to see the bent eldila do much too 'dramatic' or 'upfront' so much as just seeing their lackeys bumble around, given that the head was available to do things/speak
- usage of merlin/heavy lean into arthurian legend is interesting, but felt like stakes dropped a lot once he kinda randomly met Ransom (their dialogue was pretty cool though) and the rest of the book is just 'cleaning up', since the battle's won by that point. lewis is drawing inspiration from tolkien on the idea of bringing myths into serious and real relevance in modern conflicts, but you see i'm a human supremicist and am of the belief that all those creatures in the myths were just evil and we should be thanking God they're not walking around like old merlin here much less solving any problems. though as far as lewis' merlin goes, yeah he's pretty cool.
- but on that point since lewis' merlin is devoutly Christian it really begs the question if there was ever a chance the NICE could corrupt him, and thus that the conflict had any 'real' stakes at all. you get flashes of merlin being 'ambiently' malevolent in how he wants to use his sorcery and his influence makes the animals violent, so it's a suggestion that the threat is there, but given the first thing he does is ask Ransom's credentials as a Christian/arthurian scholar and the NICE officials are AGGRESSIVELY clueless on how to even recognize him it's hard to imagine merlin not discerning they're loser satanists and going 'lol you suck'. so outside of meeting ransom to confer merlin with god-powers it's kinda like, this whole thing would've blown up in on itself (by the grace of God) either way once merlin came into the picture. i do think lewis' idea of evil imploding on itself is basically right but not that it's like... incompetent about using people so much as being parasitic and entering into a death-spiral once there's no hosts
- tbh would've been better if NICE's goal with merlin was to just kill him. maybe too vain for that but. doesnt that track with the NICE trying to destroy all the myth/wonder of the world and replacing it with their tech larping
- that being said, lewis being lewis, the solution to the problem being the heroes just chillaxing in their fort while God aligns things is pretty cool to watch. like you can see the NICE's downfall is already watertight from the moment weston left earth, and the 'random' 'coincidences' is just things behind the scenes moving. so the real 'conflict' is what moral line the mcs fall on and how they eventually get there, which is really more of a treatise on why conforming to worldly ways/successes/goals sucks & why living by faith is more genuine on top of being not evil
- allusion to mark and jane being able to solve the conflict if they just fixed their marriage and boinked earlier (but missed the chance) was cool and naturally a compelling 'oooh' moment
- temptation of mark in the cell was very cool, same with Frost's hell-conditioning room
- bill the blizzard's dialogue with mark at the NICE was great
- maggs is cute
- ending was funny, from the point of the animals being released onward.
- i get the point lewis is going for with jane and the marriage dynamics thing, but felt her character was a bit weak/wobbly on that aspect and that he didn't quite nail it here. felt he executed it better in perelandra even though it's kinda a bigger/more important focus here. weird to me also that ransom divulged the eldila to jane even though he was initially resistant to it owing to mark being compromised by NICE (i thought lewis was going for a 'let no man divide what God has made whole' thing, where by the nature of mark becoming corrupted and jane being his wife she'd also be vulnerable to corruption and hence not fully trustworthy), but it worked out so whatevs.
overall really robust and really heady book dealing with a lot (a lot) of intricate ideas executed flawlessly on the bedrock of 'God's got this, we just need to be in the right position on the chessboard and sit tight'. but personally since the ideas here are kind of... well to me they're conventional, like i see people going 'woah merlin in a sci-fi story and the academic elites are in league with satan?' BRO DUH? your sci-fi doesn't have merlin? do you even constellations? bro are you... a sci-fi transhumanist materialist? EWWWWWWWWw. i'm spoiled being used to Christian sci-fi and it usually does have fantastic things happening since myths and miracles are canon in Christianity and Christianity's canon is life. so of course you get crazy blends
that being the case for me reading, I really miss the awesome creativity of lewis' worlds in malacandra and perelandra, and while objectively this one is the most 'important' and 'essay-able' i'd say, my favourite in the trilogy is the bright and fantastical perelandra. i have this lingering tension that wasn't quite resolved by the end of the book (similar to Out Of The Silent Planet) even though i think the ending presented was the right ending for what the book is.
PerelandraC. S. Lewis
1943
Perelandra
by C. S. Lewis
part 2 of Lewis' space trilology once again proving that spiritual/christian sci fi/fantasy btfos everything else
- really nice follow up to Out of the Silent Planet. OotSP I'm one of those people who actually really liked that the climax was just a conversation, but I did feel a bit pent-up waiting for a bloody conflict that never came between the inhabitants there and Ransom; feels like Perelandra delivered on that tension while remaining consistent in the theology of the non-earth worlds all being functionally good and uncorrupt, and so keeping the fundamental message that the brutal nature of earth is the 'weird' one.
- the landing on perelandra and depictions of the life/scenery/nature there is genuinely beautiful and fantastic. absolutely 10/10 bullseyes what its going for and for me is probs the strongest draw of the book, because 'what its going for' is a REALLY hard thing to depict; a state of unspoiled innocence and sensual but uncorrupt beauty. genuinely had a yearning to want to be there and experience some of these things. also just really creative and whimsical in a way that's more frequent in these older fantasy books but by now is really rare and hard to find. (like the fruits, the little kangaroo beasts, the dragons just chillin', the singing beast, the dwarf tendril trees full of bumblebee-sized mice, the way the moving islands work, the toads falling out of the trees, the bubble fields, the sky and sea interplay, how friendly and bursting with life everything is, the VISUALS are crazy)
- made me actually think 'wow i wish i wrote more about beautiful things like this instead of constant hell trauma all the time'. sorry guys ive invested a lot in babying my messed-up sickos
- depiction of the demon that torments Perelandra is really, really well done; childish and conniving, limited but malevolent, stupid but intelligent. its arguments on 'evolution' are also ones ive heard people actually make so Lewis is either being extremely prescient there or he's heard those arguments too
- depicts demons as agglomerates so that's a demonology A+ too
- the reveal of the mutilated frog was genuinely one of the most upsetting things ive read in fiction. kind of bumming that the subsequent damages inflicted on the wildlife are less shocking because they're all as evil but that's kinda how it goes once you crack the bottle on 'this pure land is not pure anymore' (and really works to up the stakes and establish the inconceivable threat this demon is posing by just TALKING)
- genuinely funny that the resolution to the demon problem is Jesus going 'bro, just punch him, I put you here to punch him.' i mean theres more going on in that sequence but yeah lol
- caves sequence was pretty cool too and tickled my high-tension deadly adventure jimmies
- all the dialogue in the central portion of the book between Ransom, the Queen, and eventually the demon is really really good. lewis (obviously) is strong in his theology and really underlines there the importance of obedience to God as a holy virtue, which is central in Christianity but that kind of gets... not quite dismissed but it's not 'attractive', hes good at depicting why it's truly attractive by this presenting alt-Eden in the question 'say WHAT IF the original sin thing didn't happen?'
- Lewis' vision of the eldila and how they function/interact with mortals is extremely compelling in general and makes me excited for book 3 to see what earth's 'bent' eldila look like in action, beyond the preview we got in our antagonist here
- ive seen people pooh on Lewis' conlanging for not being detailed enough but I like it and think it's fun/evocative/compelling (he knew what he did when he called them eldila lol)
good stuff