The Marvel mythology of Captain America (as I remember it from my years of comic reading) goes like this: During World War 2, scientists came up with something called the "Super-Soldier Serum", which could turn a sickly or ordinary man into a hero with super-strength, agility, speed, reflexes, and if not invulnerability, certainly a healthy share of toughness and resistance to sickness. Both the Allies and the Nazis were working on such a program; the Allies were slightly ahead. Steve Rogers, a young man who'd been turned away from military service because he was too scrawny/weak, was given the opportunity to test the Super-Soldier Serum. It worked, and he became Captain America, an icon of American patriotism.
It goes without saying that Steve Rogers was white, blond, and blue-eyed.
In 2003, Robert Morales (writer) and Kyle Baker (artist) put out Truth: Red, White, and Black, a story that adds a prequel to the Captain America mythology. The scientists were anything but infallible; they didn't create a serum and hit a home run out of the park on their first try. Instead, for years leading up to Rogers's successful experience with the Super-Soldier Serum, there were military experiments on black soldiers -- many of which were horrific failures, resulting in gruesome deaths. In the end, only a handful of soldiers survived the experiment, and that handful was quietly pressed into service, forced to carry out suicide missions, treated poorly, faced with relentless racism even from their fellow soldiers. Years later, even Captain America himself doesn't know the story of "the black Captain America" -- but when he discovers it, he goes looking for more information. And he's not going to let a forgetful, ungrateful government stand in his way.
Needless to say, comic fandom threw fits when this story was first announced. Comic fans are sticklers for their version of continuity, unable to tolerate it when something reboots or retcons a series. When one of their heroes turns out not to be a hero, they freak out and insist that he redeem himself. When one of their villains tries to seek redemption, comic fandom tends to resist it. Death, which ought to be the ultimate continuity-breaker (or continuity-definer, even) is treated as a mere inconvenience; living characters should stay living.
And a black Captain America wasn't in any continuity they'd ever dreamt of.
Never mind the likelihood that exactly that sort of experiment would happen; in real life, medical experiments on black people and black soldiers were absolutely fact, especially in the 1940s. Never mind the fact that the cover-up is exactly what would have happened -- even in the 1960s, popular black musicians were forced to put white people on the covers of their albums so they'd sell, because no one wanted black people to be visible. No one wanted black people to be heroes.
Much of the furor surrounding the original series boils down to the fact that in 2003, some people still weren't looking for that.
But Truth: Red, White, And Black is one of the most powerful, moving series I've ever gotten my hands on. It was reprinted as a trade paperback and has apparently just been re-released as a hardcover. You can probably also find it -- all seven issues of it -- in comic shops around the country. And it's well worth the read. This isn't just an adventure story about black men who got to play hero -- this is a well-written, well-researched, focused and driven story about the circumstances which made those men agree to serve in the military (in some cases, they were very much not volunteers), the lengths to which they had to go to survive both in the military in general and as part of the experiment, what the experiment did to them, and what happened to them years later.
It's a story that doesn't back off from the harsh reality of what it was like to be black in America in the 1940s, and it faces the ugly truth that many of the people who are heroes to the black community today are people the rest of the country has never heard of -- partly due to the fact that people who aren't black often go their whole lives completely unaware of the stories that inspire the black community, and partly due to the fact that there's a long-standing tradition of keeping heroes, and the definition thereof, in the hands of the people with the money and the power. And in the 1940s -- well, we all know who that wasn't.
There are historical events in this series I'd never heard of, and one place to read up on that history is Footnote Comics, which goes into detail about blacks in the military both before and during World War 2, human experimentation and informed consent (there's a link to Tuskeegee, which I had heard of), and Red Summer, which was shocking to me both because of the violence involved and because I had never so much as dreamed that such a time had existed. Reading about it in Truth was the first time I'd heard of it -- but there was no doubt in my mind, even for a minute, that it had taken place. The story is respectful, detailed, and well-told. If I had kids, it's one I'd absolutely read to them and use as a jumping-off platform for discussion and independent research.
Reviews of this story run from people like me, who think it's an amazing piece of writing that brings a valuable piece of history into the Marvel Universe, to people who hated it before they even read it, to people who, even while complimenting it, seem incapable of accepting it as part of the Marvel mythology. (In the Marvel universe, Truth is just that. It's canon. Calling it a "What If" story, even while giving it a five-star review, smacks to me of someone who doesn't even realize that phrasing it that way questions whether the events of the series really happened, someone who doesn't realize they're dismissing the story as no more real than "What If Spider-Man Had Eight Arms?" It is impossible to be respectful to black characters in the Marvel universe while still suggesting that it's up for debate whether their contributions really happened -- but that five-star reviewer probably doesn't even realize she did that.
If there's any complaint I'd like to make about the series -- and this is one I'm not alone in making -- it's that Kyle Baker's artwork is exceedingly "cartoony", with all character images exaggerated for effect. Black characters are given enormous lips and jutting chins; white characters end up looking like the short, stumpy villain sidekicks in Disney movies. I'm pathetically grateful that Baker didn't draw any Asian characters, despite this series taking place in World War 2, because I really, really did not want to see Japanese or Japanese-Americans depicted with those awful slanted eyes and front teeth that jut past the bottoms of their chins. I would have loved to see these characters drawn by an artist who was adhering to realism, partly because I think it would have been a better fit for the story, and partly because the horror of some of the incidents is downplayed enormously by the cartoony look of the artwork. I think the series loses a great deal of impact by having artwork that doesn't appear to take it seriously.
The best thing I can say for the art is that, while I'm continually frustrated with comic book artists who rely on their colorists to differentiate between white and black characters (I love Gary Frank, for instance, but if there were no color overlays on his books, you'd never know who was white and who was black -- and black characters with predominantly European features just bug me, in the same way it bugs me to see Asian characters who have teeny squinty eyes, stupendously bright yellow skin, but European facial features and body shapes -- you'd be amazed how many Asian characters in comics clock in at 5'8" and above), certainly that isn't a problem in this series. But I'm not sure that caricatures of black characters are really what I was hoping for.
I really read this series as a prequel to the one I was extremely excited about, The Crew -- a 2003 series written by Christopher Priest starring one of my all-time favorite comics characters, James Rhodes. I'm so glad I read Truth, though. The World War 2 era is one where my knowledge of African-American history really fails, particularly in light of how much I do know about the experiences of a completely different American minority in that era (during WW2, my grandparents were in the Japanese-American internment camps), but every new story about life in the 1940s for any other race is a revelation to me, and one I'm grateful to have learned about, no matter how hard the story might have been to hear.
This has been, by far, the best thing I've read this year. Maybe the best thing I've read in more than a year. I highly recommend it.
Tags: comics, historical, people of color, reading
If there's a theme running through the Chuck Palahniuk books I've read for, it's the search for identity through extreme and really unusual measures -- or sometimes really mundane measures that are exploited for completely different reasons. In this book, Victor Mancini has spent his life trying to interpret and remember the "facts" his insane mother has been telling him any time she gets a chance, and as an adult, he's become a sex addict and someone who tries to give people a moment of glory through saving his life (which, incidentally, nets him a pretty steady income). However, if his mom's the ultimate in unreliable narrators, how can he find his identity through her? And if everything he tells his would-be rescuers is a lie, is that providing anyone with anything?
I wouldn't call it the best of the Palahniuk books I've read, but I definitely don't feel like I've wasted my time with it, and I'll certainly be looking out for more.
Tags: chuck palahniuk, identity search, reading
I have, on and off, pondered what it would be like to have my own flock of cute, adorable, woolly sheep. I've always known it would be rather a more serious undertaking than having a dog or a cat (a herbivorous ruminant just isn't the kind of animal you can housebreak), but I never quite knew exactly what it would be like. This book gives amazing detail on the life of a beginning shepherd, going through the details of how to pick the breed of sheep, how to set up your pasture for sheep, what to do when sheep get sick, routine maintenance that can be done to keep sheep healthy, and big events like lambing, shearing, and (gulp) slaughter.
While I don't think I'll be getting my own sheep anytime soon, this is a great reference to have if you're even not-so-seriously pondering it -- or if you happen to love sheep (the book is FULL of cute, adorable, wonderful pictures of sheep). I definitely love sheep, and I'm very happy to have read this book!
Tags: reading, yay sheep!
Oh, wow, the failboat has arrived at the dock, and its pilot today is Christie Ridgway.
Christie Ridgway is the author of three books I thought were chock-full of potential: the "Malibu & Ewe" series, How To Knit A Wild Bikini, Unravel Me, and some upcoming book whose title I have already forgotten and don't care to look up again.
I got as far as page 11 of HTKAWB before I ran into this:
His last chef had worked out great. Sandy was businesslike, quiet, and a lesbian to boot. When she'd recommended her friend Nikki, Jay had assumed--which reminded him of one of his grandfather's favorite old saws, "Assume makes an ass out of u and me"--that she'd be of the same sexual persuasion.
But after studying the woman on his doorstep... well, to put it bluntly, this leggy darling was no dyke.
OH HELL NO. I'm not interested in continuing with this. I'm not interested in reading any story in which the leading man -- the so-called "romantic hero" -- would think this shit. I'm not interested in any author who thinks it's cool for her romantic heros to think this shit. Give me a '70s romance with a "no! don't! stop!... no, don't stop!" rape scene any day over this, because I do not read books to get in-your-face homophobia.
And what the hell does that mean, "this leggy darling was no dyke"? I'm sorry, I didn't realize that attractive, freckled women who wear their hair in pigtails and look younger than they are can't possibly be gay! (Has anyone told Willow Rosenberg?)
Near as I can tell, friend Sandy never shows up in the actual book. Gee, what a surprise! The author, who thinks homophobia is a cool trait for her hero, didn't want to actually include a "dyke" as a supporting character? Wow, color me shocked.
Amazon.com also has a review which points out that there is no knitting content in this book -- a passing mention of a knitting shop and that's it. The rest, the reviewer says, is explicit sex.
Hey, I'm totally up for explicit sex. I have no problem with explicit sex. But let me share a NSFW tidbit I found while thumbing through looking to see if Sandy ever showed up:
It takes a lot for me to stop reading a book mid-read, effectively declaring that I've wasted my time reading the first part of a book and am damned if I'm going to waste any more. This is the first one I've run into along those lines this year, and holy damn, it's bad.
The book in question is Slayer Slang: A Buffy The Vampire Slayer Lexicon by Michael Adams. Looking at the back cover flap, I am dismayed to discover that Mr. Adams is, or was at the time, a professor of English, the chair of the English department at his college, and a published author of other books on the English language.
What, were they really hard-up for professors over at Albright College? Do English professors who enter Reading, PA spontaneously combust 87% of the time? If the quality of his teaching is anything like the quality of his writing, and the quality of his syllabi approaches the organizational quality of his chapters, I can't imagine anybody matriculating from the English department at Albright College with better than a high-school reading equivalency.
I myself matriculated from Indiana University with a bachelor's degree in English, and apart from the occasional substitute professor, I have no complaints about any of the many fine faculty who oversaw my education there. I came away with extremely high standards for essay-grade writing (and let me be quick to point out that these reviews do not qualify as essay-grade or above), a tendency to outline my exam answers (the back pages of my college blue books are full of game plans for my writing), and a desire to see nonfiction writing actually advance a theory or narrative rather than simply vomiting up whatever random factoids occur to the author in whatever random order they may occur.
This book? Fails miserably on that last point, and perhaps even more importantly, rather than presenting an in-context view of Buffy's language and syntax based both on Joss Whedon's unique writing and speaking style and on the pop-culture references that surround and shape Buffy the Vampire Slayer, only points out pop-culture references that are too obvious to miss, or which the author clearly has some knowledge of. There's no hint that the author did even a half-second's research into other popular science fiction and fantasy literature, for instance, and apparently he somehow lived under a rock, completely missing out on such formative girl groups as the Marvelettes or the Ronettes (only able to come up with "majorette" as a reference Willow might have been drawing on when she attempted, unsuccessfully, to coin the term "Slayerette"). Adams is happy to point at Rush references or quote Lisa Loeb, but if the man's ever so much as heard of Motown, there's no evidence in this book.
I was willing to deal with the tunnel vision Adams brings to the pop culture of Buffy--it was a bit of a surprise to hear that J.K. Rowling had co-revived the term "bezoar" along with Buffy when a bezoar and its illustration featured prominently in an issue of the immensely popular comic/graphic novel collection Sandman, by Neil Gaiman, just a few years previous, for instance--but the crappy organization really started to wear then by page 30 or so. There's no sense that Adams is building to any kind of point, no suggestion that all his observations on Buffyspeak are in any kind of order. Quite frankly, most of the first 30 pages read like filler (there's even a page that's taken up almost entirely by a footnote comprised of, I am not kidding, the table of contents for not just one but two other books about Buffy), as if he'd written a Buffy dictionary but could only sell it if he included 120 pages of so-called linguistic analysis of Buffy The Vampire Slayer. Personally, I think he should have stuck with the dictionary. The 125 pages that precede the Buffy lexicon are meandering, random pieces of meaningless noise, with no insight toward what makes Buffyspeak interesting or important, and frequent failures, misses, and mistakes when it comes to pop culture references.
Don't waste your time on this. You're not going to learn anything from it. My only regret is that stabbing a stake into this book wouldn't dust it (and let's face it: if it did, I'd owe the library some change, which the book certainly isn't worth). I hope that if this book turned up in early-seasons Giles's library, he'd recognize it for the piece of crap it is and toss it in with the recycling.
Tags: buffyverse, reading, rejected
Most diet books are full of crap. They tend to preach the idea that dieting is a difficult-to-impossible task one can only accomplish by following weird, random eating habits that make no sense and are miserable to carry out.
The Automatic Diet by Charles Platkin is the only book I've ever run across that actually works from the idea that dieting is not that complicated. The bedrock principle he's working with is "eat less, move more", and his book gives some guidance and suggestions about how to do it. Platkin's approach is empowerment-based, not willpower-based, which I also think is a step up from most diet books. He's big on taking responsibility for actions and taking control of eating habits rather than looking for a fad diet that promises a quick fix and an easy way to lose weight. I am in total agreement with him on this point, so I pretty much think he's on the right track.
The book is called The Automatic Diet because Platkin's goal is to get the reader to figure out what his or her eating habits are, followed by changes that make sense and are acceptable. There's no "If you're a Libra, you should eat nothing but melon," and thank God for that, because I'm a Libra and I hate melon. If I'd been starting the eat-less-move-more plan off all by myself, Platkin's book would have been really helpful, since there are all kinds of suggestions on how to save calories and a whole lot of eye-opening statistics on how many calories there are in common foods. There is never any sort of "you can never have butter again" in the book--for people who aren't willing to give up foods, or trade them in for lower-calorie versions of the same, Platkin suggests having less of them and having them less often, which is totally acceptable as far as I'm concerned.
All in all, it's the sanest diet book I've ever seen (and while I don't read many, I have checked them out at the library before), and I would definitely recommend it.
This is one I picked up for a class that I ended up being unable to take due to scheduling. It's short and sweet, and full of information about Deaf culture (note the capital D).
Books about Deaf culture are often very defensive in tone. To hearing people, Deaf people are "disabled", "disadvantaged", missing an integral part of a hearing person's life. To Deaf people, they're just people--people who have their own distinct language and culture. And both the language and the culture have been downplayed, belittled, and criticized, for as long as they've been around.
This would be a great place to start for anyone who hasn't read a bunch of books on Deaf culture; you'll get to find out a number of things that might surprise you about the Deaf community. But for someone who's read several books on Deaf culture already, it seems like it doesn't have a lot of depth to it, it's preaching to the choir, and it leaves out a lot of really interesting details. It seems like it was written for hearing people, as a way of getting a Deaf foot in the door, so to speak. I'd only recommend it to people who need to get started reading about Deaf culture.
Tags: deaf culture, reading
Well, here we are at the fourth and final book in the Velvet series. Was it any better than the first three?
Aughn. No.
In fanfiction, there's this style of writing that comes from a bunch of fen being really invested in a particular couple in the fandom--say, John and Rodney from Stargate: Atlantis--and instead of the author working to set up their relationship when they get together for the first time, one character will just swoop in and start doing sexual/physical/whatever things to the other.
Most people in fandom will just swoon and say, "Oh, how awesome, John knew that Rodney always wanted to be with him, they were MEANT to be together," etc., etc., and they don't mind that jumping-the-gun sense at all.
It doesn't work for me.
I like John and Rodney as much as the next person, but if I'm reading a story that purports to be about how two people fall in love and start a relationship, I want to hear about the falling-in-love process and the relationship process, not "and then the next day, after lunch, John spontaneously planted a hot one on Rodney while everyone cheered in the background." Written like that, it makes it sound more like the pouncing person is stalking the pounce-ee, or like the pounce-ee doesn't have any choice in the matter. It's not what I'd call good writing, though it has its share of devotees. (My guess is these are mostly people who haven't yet given up on the myth of mindreading, that someday their partner, or dream partner, will simply swoop in and give them everything they want without them even having to know they want it in the first place.)
Well, apparently that trope exists in romance novels, too, because this book is basically that trope in spades. Elizabeth Chatworth (we all saw that one coming) is kidnapped, stripped naked, rolled up in a carpet, and delivered to Miles Montgomery, the Montgomery brother who has the reputation for being a rake (the common rumor is that he made a deal with the devil and can now seduce any woman he wants, and that he has a hundred bastards to prove it).
Miles's reputation is slightly undeserved, but what does he do? He doesn't give Elizabeth clothes and send her home. No! Of course not. Instead, he keeps her with him, repeatedly lies to her and manipulates her, and eventually seduces her and convinces her "not to be afraid of men anymore".
ARE YOU KIDDING ME.
I think what's particularly awful about it is that Elizabeth doesn't start out the book behaving like someone suffering from PTSD and anxiety, as she does later in the book. At first, when she's dropped into a tent knowing full well she's naked and in the lair of her family's sworn enemy, she grabs a blanket and throws it over herself as best she can, and then she defends herself with an axe, which I think is completely justifiable and in no way symptomatic of mental trauma. Naturally, Miles doesn't see it that way, and so he begins Elizabeth's "retraining".
Cue the stalker-y, icky feeling. Miles turns out to be right, but there's no earthly reason he should have had any suspicion that Elizabeth's behavior is indicative of a fear of men--hell, one of the most vicious people in the feud is female! But because he does turn out to be right in the long run, I don't think we're supposed to feel that he's being a scary control freak. He's just trying to take care of her, even though she doesn't know, at first, that she needs it.
The whole book is like that, and all of Miles's tricks and schemes to get Elizabeth over her "fear of men" are manipulative, weasely, horrible things that read like nothing so much as brainwashing and Stockholm Syndrome to me. There are only three things that make this book better than the others:
1.) Elizabeth never goes through the Deveraux Moment Of Realization. She doesn't have one moment of realizing that Miles has been right about everything and she's been wrong about everything. She decides for herself that she wants to take Miles up on his offer to help her start to recover from her PTSD.
2.) There's been a definite trend in these four books toward women having more power in terms of initiating the sexual relationship. In book 1, we had a '70s-cliché "hero has to rape the heroine to prove his virility" scene. In book 2, the marriage was arranged, and the heroine, realistically, had no choice--but she did choose to have sex with the hero. In book 3, the heroine was interested before the hero came on to her, and she responded enthusiastically when he did. Now, in book 4, she actually initiates the sexual phase of their relationship. It's a neat progression, and you almost have to wonder if she was easing her publisher into the idea that women could make those decisions instead of men.
3.) At the end of the book, when the feud between the Montgomerys and Chatworths is solved once and for all, we get a fabulous section of the book devoted to all four of the Montgomery women working together and saving their collective husbands' asses. We finally get to see the women being powerful, competent, and confident in their abilities, and they all work through their issues and fears in order to do it. That is pretty fabulous.
And that rounds out the Deveraux books for now! I'm not sure how long it'll be before I get back to them, but I'm sure I'll get to some of them eventually. (Next on the list, I'm really curious about The Taming and The Conquest. I'm mostly intrigued by The Conquest, which is about a girl who's been disguised as a boy to keep her safe for the past several years, and if I remember right, the guy who falls in love with her is a sworn enemy or something. However, I would like to read The Taming first, so we'll see how that goes.)
Tags: historical, jude deveraux, reading, romance