A Ray Bradbury World: Hanging On by Our Book Covers

 

Ray Bradbury created a world in "Fahrenheit 451" where the hope of the world devolved down to people wandering in the woods reciting great works of literature. All the books these curators of man's greatest thoughts were reciting had been burned. Bradbury, of course, like all science fiction writers of his era, had not imagined books existing on the internet, as zeros and ones, downloadable from the air. 

But his point remains: Books and the ideas and records they embody remain among the last best hopes of man.

Of course, one of the most insoluble problems relating to books is not that there are none left, all having been burned, but that there are so many that really important books are not burned but simply smothered among the 500,00 to 1 million books published each year in the US alone. 

Which is why the NY Times Book Review is so important. And The New Yorker and other publications which point the way to those needles in the haystack worth the time.

After 17 years of this blog, the Phantom has decided to add his opinions to the pile.

Forthwith:

1. "Motherland" by Julia Ioffe

    Ioffe pulls off a neat trick by opening with both a personal history of her family, told unsentimentally, and a volley of numbers and statistics that far from numbing the reader, propel the reader into a dystopia of a dysfunctional society. "A 1908 study found that 25% of forty-five year old Russian peasant women had ten or more pregnancies one-fourth of which ended in miscarriages." And "A not atypical example of a fifty-five year old woman who had been married for thirty-five years  and had been pregnant twenty-four times. Two children had lived."

Women went off to work in the factories leaving their infants in the care of toddlers already at home. The death rate among children in Russia at this time is unknowable.

The life of the Russian woman, whether peasant or aristocrat, was that of a prisoner of first Tsarist ownership by males, then Communist dictates. 

Prostitution and venereal disease were widespread, beyond endemic to epidemic. 

The Russian women who pushed for change and got it are astonishing, and Ioffe is up to the task.

2. "Embracing Defeat"  by John Dower

What was it like to be a Japanese civilian living in Japan when the war ended? 

What were these people like? What did they believe in? Well, whatever they believed in, collectively and individually, for many those beliefs collapsed as American soldiers arrived to begin the occupation.

Dower shows a photograph of five children who look to be about six or seven years old, playing "Prostitute Pick Up" where the boy, with his arm around a girl presents her to three other girls with a "Want to meet my sister?" which was one of the new English phrases Japanese children learned first along with, "Got Chocolate?" which they used on American GI's passing by in their Jeeps. "Jeep" was another word they all knew. There was a whole generation of Japanese girls who began their 15th year in the arms of American soldiers.

The devastation before the dropping of the atomic bombs is not well known today in the US, but Curtis LeMay, who directed the Army Air Force bombing strategy, was to incinerate cities with napalm rather than trying to target factories and armament plants, which were integrated into residential areas and small and dispersed.  On a single night of fire bombing in and around Tokyo, 100,000 people were incinerated.

The Japanese had been indoctrinated to believe the Americans would rape and murder their way through Japan but they were flabbergasted by the American occupation troops.

3. "Dark Continent" by Mark Mazower

Mazower's basic argument is that fascism did not overwhelm democracy, but democracy crumbled, like the dinosaurs, and out of the rubble, the fascists inherited the German earth, with a different concept: Borders were not important; borders were creations of corrupt Versailles treaty government officials. All that mattered was the kinship of race and the German race, whether living in Poland, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Estonia, Latvia or Ukraine, had to be united and had to flourish for the sake of mankind and civilization. Worked for them. Until it didn't.

4. "Vaccinated" by Paul Offit

This is an ode to Maurice Hilleman, who, as Dr. Offit demonstrates, was the driving force behind many if not most of the vaccines we used right up until COVID when the mRNA technology allowed for a leap forward. Along the way, Offit convincingly asserts vaccines have saved more lives than antibiotics, anti cancer agents combined. Offit knows how to write, and if he does not have quite the verve of Ioffe, he surely knows how to hook a reader and keep the hook set deeply.

CODA:

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/MXkwvc0TYeg