Rachel Manija Brown's Blog, page 29
May 12, 2023
Killer Show: The Station Nightclub Fire, America’s Deadliest Rock Concert, by John Barylick
A well-written, meticulous, and absolutely infuriating account of how a series of greedy, reckless, and criminally negligent decisions by multiple people led to the deaths of 100 people in a nightclub fire.
It was caused by the nightclub owners using a type of foam described by one person as "solid gasoline" as soundproofing and allowing pyrotechnics by a man who had no idea what he was doing, and the fire inspector repeatedly ignoring multiple blatant fire safety issues and issuing a permit allowing them to cram the club with more people than was safe. There were some legal consequences but nowhere near what was deserved; the fire inspector, who in my opinion was the single most culpable person given that ensuring fire safety was his literal job, was never charged. Neither were the two bouncers who physically blocked people from leaving via the stage exit while the nightclub was on fire.
It's a heartbreaking, enraging story that Barylick carefully and clearly lays out. He gets into the human aspect of the story, with many portraits of the people who lived through a horrific trauma or died an awful death when they just wanted to have some fun for a night. He paints an absolutely damning portrait of the corruption within the fire department that allowed the fire inspector to basically take bribes, plus the equally corrupt business practices of the awful nightclub owners who stiffed people as a matter of course.
He also traces the unexpected origin of that fucking foam. A man who lived next to the nightclub kept making noise complaints (understandably!) The nightclub owner visited him to try to pacify him, and they ended up discussing soundproofing. The neighbor said he worked for a company that made packing foam that might be used as soundproofing, and the nightclub owner bought it from him, presumably in the hope that the money would shut him up. The foam was not supposed to be used as soundproofing, which the neighbor probably could have guessed and the company that made it definitely knew.
The man who set off the pyrotechnics was the only one, out of everyone culpable, who showed any genuine remorse. He pled guilty against his lawyer's advice and served four years in prison.
There have been a number of improvements in fire safety in nightclubs and similar venues since then, most importantly sprinklers. But deadly fires still do happen, generally in overcrowded spaces cluttered with flammable material and without sprinklers or clearly marked and accessible exits. The Ghost Ship fire in Oakland, which killed 36 people, not only met all those criteria but occurred in a space not zoned for entertainment or residential use at all.
Barylick concludes with these brutal paragraphs:
( Read more... )
[image error] [image error]
comments
It was caused by the nightclub owners using a type of foam described by one person as "solid gasoline" as soundproofing and allowing pyrotechnics by a man who had no idea what he was doing, and the fire inspector repeatedly ignoring multiple blatant fire safety issues and issuing a permit allowing them to cram the club with more people than was safe. There were some legal consequences but nowhere near what was deserved; the fire inspector, who in my opinion was the single most culpable person given that ensuring fire safety was his literal job, was never charged. Neither were the two bouncers who physically blocked people from leaving via the stage exit while the nightclub was on fire.
It's a heartbreaking, enraging story that Barylick carefully and clearly lays out. He gets into the human aspect of the story, with many portraits of the people who lived through a horrific trauma or died an awful death when they just wanted to have some fun for a night. He paints an absolutely damning portrait of the corruption within the fire department that allowed the fire inspector to basically take bribes, plus the equally corrupt business practices of the awful nightclub owners who stiffed people as a matter of course.
He also traces the unexpected origin of that fucking foam. A man who lived next to the nightclub kept making noise complaints (understandably!) The nightclub owner visited him to try to pacify him, and they ended up discussing soundproofing. The neighbor said he worked for a company that made packing foam that might be used as soundproofing, and the nightclub owner bought it from him, presumably in the hope that the money would shut him up. The foam was not supposed to be used as soundproofing, which the neighbor probably could have guessed and the company that made it definitely knew.
The man who set off the pyrotechnics was the only one, out of everyone culpable, who showed any genuine remorse. He pled guilty against his lawyer's advice and served four years in prison.
There have been a number of improvements in fire safety in nightclubs and similar venues since then, most importantly sprinklers. But deadly fires still do happen, generally in overcrowded spaces cluttered with flammable material and without sprinklers or clearly marked and accessible exits. The Ghost Ship fire in Oakland, which killed 36 people, not only met all those criteria but occurred in a space not zoned for entertainment or residential use at all.
Barylick concludes with these brutal paragraphs:
( Read more... )
[image error] [image error]
comments
May 10, 2023
Dear Summer of Horror creator...
Thank you for creating for me! If you have any questions, please check with the mods. I am a very easy recipient and will be delighted with whatever you make for me. I have no special requirements beyond what's specifically stated in my DNWs. I'm fine with all POVs (i.e., first, second, third), tenses, ratings, etc. I love stories of all lengths.
Don't worry about whether you're hitting the selected sub-genres exactly, or straying into sub-genres I didn't request. They're there as inspiration, not as limits. You have full permission to choose horror types other than the ones I requested or to broadly interpret the ones I did request, so long as you don't hit a DNW.
Similarly, I don't care if a story has sex or not. Whatever suits the story is fine. Likewise, I will say if I ship characters, but I won't be disappointed if a pairing is & rather than /, or ambiguous.
I would enjoy any art treats for any fandoms if any of my prompts inspire you visually. I would adore a Lisa Frank-style monster or ghost for any canon I requested that has monsters or ghosts; I like scary/creepy monsters/ghosts as well as adorable monsters/ghosts. Ghost monsters are also good. I love Tarot cards and Art Nouveau and characters mirroring each other in some way and art that's symbolic/iconic rather than representational, like guns and roses and an iconic saying for Dark Tower instead of the characters. I also like character art.
I love h/c and I think it would go well with horror for most of the canons I'm requesting.
I love evil houses and eerie locations; feel free to send any characters to the Overlook Hotel, the Marsten House, Hell House, the House from House of Leaves, the stair place from House of Stairs, the cube from Cube, Mid-World, Salem's Lot, the Shimmer, etc.
On that note, I am generally open to crossovers and fusions with other horror canons I know - if you're not sure, just ask via the mods.
My AO3 name is Edonohana.
The cuts are extremely spoilery for Little Eve and Freeze Tag.
( General DNWs )
( Cass Neary Series - Elizabeth Hand )
( Crossover Fandom - Stephen King books )
( Dark Tower - Stephen King )
( Freeze Tag - Caroline Cooney )
( Little Eve - Catriona Ward )
( Misery - Stephen King )
( The Stand - Stephen King )
( True Detective )
comments
Don't worry about whether you're hitting the selected sub-genres exactly, or straying into sub-genres I didn't request. They're there as inspiration, not as limits. You have full permission to choose horror types other than the ones I requested or to broadly interpret the ones I did request, so long as you don't hit a DNW.
Similarly, I don't care if a story has sex or not. Whatever suits the story is fine. Likewise, I will say if I ship characters, but I won't be disappointed if a pairing is & rather than /, or ambiguous.
I would enjoy any art treats for any fandoms if any of my prompts inspire you visually. I would adore a Lisa Frank-style monster or ghost for any canon I requested that has monsters or ghosts; I like scary/creepy monsters/ghosts as well as adorable monsters/ghosts. Ghost monsters are also good. I love Tarot cards and Art Nouveau and characters mirroring each other in some way and art that's symbolic/iconic rather than representational, like guns and roses and an iconic saying for Dark Tower instead of the characters. I also like character art.
I love h/c and I think it would go well with horror for most of the canons I'm requesting.
I love evil houses and eerie locations; feel free to send any characters to the Overlook Hotel, the Marsten House, Hell House, the House from House of Leaves, the stair place from House of Stairs, the cube from Cube, Mid-World, Salem's Lot, the Shimmer, etc.
On that note, I am generally open to crossovers and fusions with other horror canons I know - if you're not sure, just ask via the mods.
My AO3 name is Edonohana.
The cuts are extremely spoilery for Little Eve and Freeze Tag.
( General DNWs )
( Cass Neary Series - Elizabeth Hand )
( Crossover Fandom - Stephen King books )
( Dark Tower - Stephen King )
( Freeze Tag - Caroline Cooney )
( Little Eve - Catriona Ward )
( Misery - Stephen King )
( The Stand - Stephen King )
( True Detective )
comments
May 9, 2023
4:50 From Paddington AKA What Mrs. McGillicuddy Saw! by Agatha Christie
This one starts with a banger of an opening - an old lady traveling on a train sees a murder take place on a different train traveling on parallel tracks - and then turns into a delightful comedy-drama starring one of Christie's most memorable and likable characters, the housekeeper-entrepreneur Lucy Eyelesbarrow.
Miss Marple, who is friends with Mrs. McGillicuddy (the murder witness), needs someone to stay in a household that's near where she thinks the body was dumped and search for it, but she's gotten too old and frail to do the legwork herself. Enter Lucy, a brilliant businesswoman who has gotten rich and even somewhat famous by being England's greatest short-term housekeeper.
Lucy, who loves her work, is intrigued by this unusual assignment and gets herself hired on to do some housekeeping (officially) and search for the body (unofficially). She promptly gets entangled in the affairs of the household, where she receives proposals of extremely varying nature from literally every male person in it, from becoming the second wife of the crotchety and very elderly father to joining the business of the prim married son to running off to be a criminal with the no-good son, to, via the delightful young son of the boyish former fighter pilot, becoming his step-mother!
The actual mystery, after the excellent opening, becomes almost a subplot (and is not one of Christie's best), because the real meat of the story is following Lucy on a job that is both typical and very unusual. Lucy is marvelous and I wish Christie had made her a series regular; this is one of my very favorite Christies even though the mystery's solution isn't the most interesting.
A particularly fun element is that it's a peculiar sort of romcom with an absurd number of men for Lucy to choose from, but no guarantee that she'll choose any of them. Miss Marple points out very early that it would take a very special sort of man to match with Lucy, given her strong personality and that she's clearly not planning to stop working.
Lucy's suitors are a hilariously motley crew, but she has two (and a possible stealth third) who seem like real possibilities. One is Cedric, a cynical artist living in Spain, with whom Lucy enjoys bickering. The other is Bryan, the fighter pilot who never found anything to match his wartime adventures and whose emotional development was arrested at about age twelve. Neither of them seem good enough for Lucy - Cedric is too full of himself and Bryan needs a mommy, not a wife - though Bryan does have the benefit of a terrific young son. Who she chooses, if any of them, is left open at the end, but...
( Read more... )
Christie Scale: I don't recall anything offensive. Some characters express mild sexism, but it's clearly their opinions and not the author's.
Next up: The Mirror Crack'd From Side To Side.
[image error] [image error]
comments
Miss Marple, who is friends with Mrs. McGillicuddy (the murder witness), needs someone to stay in a household that's near where she thinks the body was dumped and search for it, but she's gotten too old and frail to do the legwork herself. Enter Lucy, a brilliant businesswoman who has gotten rich and even somewhat famous by being England's greatest short-term housekeeper.
Lucy, who loves her work, is intrigued by this unusual assignment and gets herself hired on to do some housekeeping (officially) and search for the body (unofficially). She promptly gets entangled in the affairs of the household, where she receives proposals of extremely varying nature from literally every male person in it, from becoming the second wife of the crotchety and very elderly father to joining the business of the prim married son to running off to be a criminal with the no-good son, to, via the delightful young son of the boyish former fighter pilot, becoming his step-mother!
The actual mystery, after the excellent opening, becomes almost a subplot (and is not one of Christie's best), because the real meat of the story is following Lucy on a job that is both typical and very unusual. Lucy is marvelous and I wish Christie had made her a series regular; this is one of my very favorite Christies even though the mystery's solution isn't the most interesting.
A particularly fun element is that it's a peculiar sort of romcom with an absurd number of men for Lucy to choose from, but no guarantee that she'll choose any of them. Miss Marple points out very early that it would take a very special sort of man to match with Lucy, given her strong personality and that she's clearly not planning to stop working.
Lucy's suitors are a hilariously motley crew, but she has two (and a possible stealth third) who seem like real possibilities. One is Cedric, a cynical artist living in Spain, with whom Lucy enjoys bickering. The other is Bryan, the fighter pilot who never found anything to match his wartime adventures and whose emotional development was arrested at about age twelve. Neither of them seem good enough for Lucy - Cedric is too full of himself and Bryan needs a mommy, not a wife - though Bryan does have the benefit of a terrific young son. Who she chooses, if any of them, is left open at the end, but...
( Read more... )
Christie Scale: I don't recall anything offensive. Some characters express mild sexism, but it's clearly their opinions and not the author's.
Next up: The Mirror Crack'd From Side To Side.
[image error] [image error]
comments
May 8, 2023
Mummy, by Caroline Cooney
Emlyn had a bad streak.
She was well aware of it and kept it contained. Others might yearn to be the hero and save the world or save the baby. Emlyn yearned to be a brilliant thief.
Another excellent example of Cooney's trademark "take a cliche or uninspired or easy-to-do-badly premise and make it much better than it needs to be." In this case, the actual premise is "high school students steal a mummy from a museum as a prank," but I strongly suspect that her publisher just asked for a thriller called Mummy and a cover with a mummy.
I will note up-front, since I forlornly held out hope for quite some time that the mummy would rise at some point, that the mummy does not rise. There are some very borderline maybe-fantasy elements in which Emlyn may get some glimpses of life in ancient Egypt, but she might just have a vivid imagination.
Mummy is a heist novel with a noir sensibility. About one-third of it is the theft of the mummy, a beautifully worked out sequence of nailbiting suspense, and there's several other, shorter, heist-style action sequences that are also very well-done. But Cooney doesn't settle for just writing a heist novel where the characters are modern teenagers who don't do anything real teenagers couldn't do - which is an unusual and impressive feat by itself.
There's also Emlyn, the protagonist. She's a fascinating, unusual protagonist, very competent and smart in some ways but with some very big blind spots. She loves the idea of stealing and lying and elaborate plots, but for all her criminal ambitions, she's one of the few characters in the book with an actual moral compass. Because she wants to have illegal adventures, she's thought a lot about morality and takes the idea of good and bad seriously; she thinks she's the clever villain, but she has a tragically naive idea of what badness is. She's been so focused on her own potential for wrongdoing that she's completely forgotten that other people might want to do bad things too, and, unlike her, might not care at all that they're wrong...
The book melds a heist novel with the sort of coming of age story that's largely about disillusionment with a character study. It also takes the idea of mummies and goes in possibly the most unexpected direction with it, focusing largely on issues of respect and disrespect for the dead. When it turns out that society really hasn't moved on from tomb-robbing and destroying priceless artifacts for money and cheap thrills, the focus is less on the value of history than on respect for the actual person that artifact once was.
[image error] [image error]
comments
She was well aware of it and kept it contained. Others might yearn to be the hero and save the world or save the baby. Emlyn yearned to be a brilliant thief.
Another excellent example of Cooney's trademark "take a cliche or uninspired or easy-to-do-badly premise and make it much better than it needs to be." In this case, the actual premise is "high school students steal a mummy from a museum as a prank," but I strongly suspect that her publisher just asked for a thriller called Mummy and a cover with a mummy.
I will note up-front, since I forlornly held out hope for quite some time that the mummy would rise at some point, that the mummy does not rise. There are some very borderline maybe-fantasy elements in which Emlyn may get some glimpses of life in ancient Egypt, but she might just have a vivid imagination.
Mummy is a heist novel with a noir sensibility. About one-third of it is the theft of the mummy, a beautifully worked out sequence of nailbiting suspense, and there's several other, shorter, heist-style action sequences that are also very well-done. But Cooney doesn't settle for just writing a heist novel where the characters are modern teenagers who don't do anything real teenagers couldn't do - which is an unusual and impressive feat by itself.
There's also Emlyn, the protagonist. She's a fascinating, unusual protagonist, very competent and smart in some ways but with some very big blind spots. She loves the idea of stealing and lying and elaborate plots, but for all her criminal ambitions, she's one of the few characters in the book with an actual moral compass. Because she wants to have illegal adventures, she's thought a lot about morality and takes the idea of good and bad seriously; she thinks she's the clever villain, but she has a tragically naive idea of what badness is. She's been so focused on her own potential for wrongdoing that she's completely forgotten that other people might want to do bad things too, and, unlike her, might not care at all that they're wrong...
The book melds a heist novel with the sort of coming of age story that's largely about disillusionment with a character study. It also takes the idea of mummies and goes in possibly the most unexpected direction with it, focusing largely on issues of respect and disrespect for the dead. When it turns out that society really hasn't moved on from tomb-robbing and destroying priceless artifacts for money and cheap thrills, the focus is less on the value of history than on respect for the actual person that artifact once was.
[image error] [image error]
comments
May 4, 2023
Snowpocalypse: The Reckoning
It's snowing! In honor of that, here's how things are going two months post-snowpocalypse.
Car
Pro: AAA was very pleasant to deal with, reimbursed me for the car that was destroyed, and will pay for the damages to the other car.
Con: The destroyed car is still parked on the street in front of my house. The tow company AAA wants me to use keeps not showing up. Someone put a note on the windshield asking to buy it for parts. I can't sell it or get rid of it, as it's now owned by AAA.
Other car still not repaired due to delays in getting AAA's permission to do the repair transferred from LA to Crestline.
House
Insurance just denied my claim for the rain gutters getting ripped off, as they say it's within my deductible. WE'LL SEE. I will now go ahead and try to hire someone to fix that. In Crestline. lolsob.
Have not yet submitted a claim for the tree that fell on my shed. They're going to love how long it's been between when the damage occurred and when I submitted a claim.
FEMA
Pro: We are now eligible for individual grants!
Pro: FEMA has set up a center in Crestline. Everyone working there is extremely nice.
Con: This is the process for getting a FEMA grant.
1. You must get a letter from your insurance company denying your claim. Your contract stating that certain things aren't covered doesn't count. So to have a chance of getting my plumbing covered, I either need to make a claim with my insurance even though they already refused to let me do so as it's not covered at all and then have them deny it, or get them to write me a letter saying it's so not covered that they won't even let me make a claim.
2. You must apply for a loan with FEMA. Yes, even if you already paid for repairs as I did. Yes, even if you don't want a loan as it has interest and so will actually cost you money to get.
3. FEMA must deny the loan.
4. IF FEMA denies the loan, THEN you can apply for a grant with FEMA. Which they may or may not approve.
It took me three hours at the FEMA center to figure this all out. Also, in order to do any of this, FEMA must send a text to your cell phone which you have ten minutes to respond to. They set up their center in a cell service dead zone so the parking lot was full of people running around waving their cell phones in the air desperately trying to receive a text.
comments
Car
Pro: AAA was very pleasant to deal with, reimbursed me for the car that was destroyed, and will pay for the damages to the other car.
Con: The destroyed car is still parked on the street in front of my house. The tow company AAA wants me to use keeps not showing up. Someone put a note on the windshield asking to buy it for parts. I can't sell it or get rid of it, as it's now owned by AAA.
Other car still not repaired due to delays in getting AAA's permission to do the repair transferred from LA to Crestline.
House
Insurance just denied my claim for the rain gutters getting ripped off, as they say it's within my deductible. WE'LL SEE. I will now go ahead and try to hire someone to fix that. In Crestline. lolsob.
Have not yet submitted a claim for the tree that fell on my shed. They're going to love how long it's been between when the damage occurred and when I submitted a claim.
FEMA
Pro: We are now eligible for individual grants!
Pro: FEMA has set up a center in Crestline. Everyone working there is extremely nice.
Con: This is the process for getting a FEMA grant.
1. You must get a letter from your insurance company denying your claim. Your contract stating that certain things aren't covered doesn't count. So to have a chance of getting my plumbing covered, I either need to make a claim with my insurance even though they already refused to let me do so as it's not covered at all and then have them deny it, or get them to write me a letter saying it's so not covered that they won't even let me make a claim.
2. You must apply for a loan with FEMA. Yes, even if you already paid for repairs as I did. Yes, even if you don't want a loan as it has interest and so will actually cost you money to get.
3. FEMA must deny the loan.
4. IF FEMA denies the loan, THEN you can apply for a grant with FEMA. Which they may or may not approve.
It took me three hours at the FEMA center to figure this all out. Also, in order to do any of this, FEMA must send a text to your cell phone which you have ten minutes to respond to. They set up their center in a cell service dead zone so the parking lot was full of people running around waving their cell phones in the air desperately trying to receive a text.
comments
The ABC Murders, by Agatha Christie
Hercule Poirot gets involved in the sort of case he normally doesn't handle - a series of semi-random murders by an alphabet-obsessed serial killer. His involvement is because the serial killer sends him taunting letters teasing the location of the murder that he hasn't yet committed, forcing Poirot and the police to scramble to prevent a murder when all they know is the town, the day, and the alphabet letter the victim's name begins with.
One of the interesting aspects is that when it was written and published (1936) profiling serial killers was apparently just starting to become a thing, and we get to see Poirot working with a series of police detectives to do so.
( Read more... )
This is a fun book with a very clever plot and some nice Hastings-Poirot banter, but lacking in memorable characters. It's not a particular favorite of mine, but I did enjoy revisiting it.
[image error] [image error]
comments
One of the interesting aspects is that when it was written and published (1936) profiling serial killers was apparently just starting to become a thing, and we get to see Poirot working with a series of police detectives to do so.
( Read more... )
This is a fun book with a very clever plot and some nice Hastings-Poirot banter, but lacking in memorable characters. It's not a particular favorite of mine, but I did enjoy revisiting it.
[image error] [image error]
comments
May 3, 2023
Legends and Lattes: A Novel of High Fantasy and Low Stakes, by Travis Baldree
A trad-published D&D coffeeshop AU in which an orc mercenary, Viv, retires from adventuring and opens a coffeeshop. That's it, that's the book.
For a fantasy novel, there's a surprising lack of fantasy. Viv being an orc only means that she's big and strong and people assume she's a brute. There's no orc culture or anything else that would make her different from being a big tough human warrior in a world with gender equality. Her staff is of various D&D races and classes, but in a way that's similar to her being an orc - we only get a tiny bit of physical description of how they're different from being human, and otherwise they act exactly like modern humans. The coffeeshop serves iced coffee, hot coffee, lattes, cinnamon buns, chocolate croissants, and biscotti.
Given that this is a fantasy world which is basically modern America with window dressing, I'd have wanted something more Terry Pratchett-esque, where it has some commentary on the society that it really is. This isn't that, though it does have some mild commentary on not judging by appearances.
It's very cute and cozy. I liked it but I didn't love it. It's in a genre I enjoy - a book centered around the process of creating something rather than centered around conflict - but for me, it was just slightly skewed from being a book I'd have loved. It hit a sort of uncanny valley for me in that it was too similar to our real world to provide the fantasy-genre pleasure of exploring what a coffeeshop in a D&D world would be like, but its similarity to our world didn't reveal anything about our own world.
I'd have been much more interested if it really got into the fantasy aspect, serving food and drink that you can't get at Starbucks, having to deal with genuinely different cultures, maybe having some races be allergic to others' delicacies, etc. Diane Duane's Star Trek novels do that sort of thing extremely well. But it clearly wasn't what Baldree was interested in.
This was a smash hit so there's clearly an eager market for cozy, process-based fantasy. Good! I'm sure I'll love some of what's written as a result of this book making the big leagues.
[image error] [image error]
comments
For a fantasy novel, there's a surprising lack of fantasy. Viv being an orc only means that she's big and strong and people assume she's a brute. There's no orc culture or anything else that would make her different from being a big tough human warrior in a world with gender equality. Her staff is of various D&D races and classes, but in a way that's similar to her being an orc - we only get a tiny bit of physical description of how they're different from being human, and otherwise they act exactly like modern humans. The coffeeshop serves iced coffee, hot coffee, lattes, cinnamon buns, chocolate croissants, and biscotti.
Given that this is a fantasy world which is basically modern America with window dressing, I'd have wanted something more Terry Pratchett-esque, where it has some commentary on the society that it really is. This isn't that, though it does have some mild commentary on not judging by appearances.
It's very cute and cozy. I liked it but I didn't love it. It's in a genre I enjoy - a book centered around the process of creating something rather than centered around conflict - but for me, it was just slightly skewed from being a book I'd have loved. It hit a sort of uncanny valley for me in that it was too similar to our real world to provide the fantasy-genre pleasure of exploring what a coffeeshop in a D&D world would be like, but its similarity to our world didn't reveal anything about our own world.
I'd have been much more interested if it really got into the fantasy aspect, serving food and drink that you can't get at Starbucks, having to deal with genuinely different cultures, maybe having some races be allergic to others' delicacies, etc. Diane Duane's Star Trek novels do that sort of thing extremely well. But it clearly wasn't what Baldree was interested in.
This was a smash hit so there's clearly an eager market for cozy, process-based fantasy. Good! I'm sure I'll love some of what's written as a result of this book making the big leagues.
[image error] [image error]
comments
May 2, 2023
The Truth About Mary Rose, by Marilyn Sachs
Mary Rose, a ten-year-old girl in the 1960s, was named after her mother's younger sister Mary Rose, who died saving her baby brother and others in her tenement from a fire when she was only ten. Living Mary Rose is obsessed with her heroic namesake and really wants to learn more about her, but her family is oddly close-mouthed about her...
By itself, The Truth About Mary Rose is a minor but nicely written book about the perils of hero worship, the impossibility of ever learning the truth about a person you never met and who's now dead, and how when it comes to something as complex as a human being, there isn't going to be one truth anyway.
However, it's not a single book, but part of a series. In that context, its themes are much more startling and powerful. It's the last in a series written in the 1960s/1970s about kids in the Bronx in the 1940s. They weren't favorites of mine, but I liked the period details and that some of the kids were Jewish. I only read a couple of them, the ones involving the bully Veronica Ganz, who ends up making friends with her nemesis Peter Wedemeyer. From book to book, you see the kids from different perspectives. I picked up this book, which I'd never heard of before, because I was curious to see how little Mary Rose, Veronica's baby sister, looked from her own perspective. Guess I'll never know!
The heroine of The Truth About Mary Rose is Veronica Ganz's daughter. Veronica became a dentist and married a Latino artist. It was very startling to find that her sister Mary Rose, a minor character in the Veronica books, died in a fire a few months after the last of the Veronica books - and she comes across very differently in The Truth About Mary Rose than she did through Veronica's eyes. All else aside, it's shocking that this very ordinary little sister, who from Veronica's perspective is sometimes bratty and sometimes cute and often not paid attention to but always present, died unexpectedly and then was remembered as a saint or a villain, depending on who recalled her.
( Read more... )
[image error] [image error]
comments
By itself, The Truth About Mary Rose is a minor but nicely written book about the perils of hero worship, the impossibility of ever learning the truth about a person you never met and who's now dead, and how when it comes to something as complex as a human being, there isn't going to be one truth anyway.
However, it's not a single book, but part of a series. In that context, its themes are much more startling and powerful. It's the last in a series written in the 1960s/1970s about kids in the Bronx in the 1940s. They weren't favorites of mine, but I liked the period details and that some of the kids were Jewish. I only read a couple of them, the ones involving the bully Veronica Ganz, who ends up making friends with her nemesis Peter Wedemeyer. From book to book, you see the kids from different perspectives. I picked up this book, which I'd never heard of before, because I was curious to see how little Mary Rose, Veronica's baby sister, looked from her own perspective. Guess I'll never know!
The heroine of The Truth About Mary Rose is Veronica Ganz's daughter. Veronica became a dentist and married a Latino artist. It was very startling to find that her sister Mary Rose, a minor character in the Veronica books, died in a fire a few months after the last of the Veronica books - and she comes across very differently in The Truth About Mary Rose than she did through Veronica's eyes. All else aside, it's shocking that this very ordinary little sister, who from Veronica's perspective is sometimes bratty and sometimes cute and often not paid attention to but always present, died unexpectedly and then was remembered as a saint or a villain, depending on who recalled her.
( Read more... )
[image error] [image error]
comments
May 1, 2023
Silence for the Dead, by Simone St. James
In 1919, a young woman named Kitty Weekes falsifies her credentials to get a job as a nurse at Portis House, a mental hospital for shellshocked WWI veterans. It's extremely remote, there's a never-seen Patient Sixteen lurking somewhere, and the plumbing makes spooky noises. Or is it a ghost...?
I loved this setup. Unfortunately, I did not love the book. Kitty is amazingly unlikable but not, I think, on purpose. She forges her resume because she's fleeing an abusive home situation, but it doesn't occur to her until halfway through the book that getting a job as a nurse of all things could harm or kill her unsuspecting patients. She got the idea because a former housemate was a nurse so it's not like she has no idea of what a nurse does.
She's so desperate for the job that she breaks the law to get it and is absolutely determined to stay no matter what, and she supposedly has a long history of forging her way into jobs and faking her background, but once she gets there, she seems to have no clue as to how to not make herself seem incredibly suspicious. She asks obviously stupid and ignorant questions when she could have stayed quiet or asked subtler ones, she argues with everyone for no reason including with people who can make life very difficult for her, she barges into places she's not allowed to go without even attempting to cover her tracks, and she generally makes herself incredibly conspicuous. In short, she is too stupid to live.
I was most interested in Patient Sixteen, who I was hoping would turn out to be the subject of terrible experiments. (Alas, no.) His actual identity is an interesting idea, but like other elements of the book that sound good but aren't, it's clumsily done and then not much is made of it. He and Kitty proceed to have an amazingly chemistry-less romance.
Spoilers!
( Read more... )
Are any of St. James' other books better? I was under the impression she's considered a good writer but this book was unimpressive.
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I loved this setup. Unfortunately, I did not love the book. Kitty is amazingly unlikable but not, I think, on purpose. She forges her resume because she's fleeing an abusive home situation, but it doesn't occur to her until halfway through the book that getting a job as a nurse of all things could harm or kill her unsuspecting patients. She got the idea because a former housemate was a nurse so it's not like she has no idea of what a nurse does.
She's so desperate for the job that she breaks the law to get it and is absolutely determined to stay no matter what, and she supposedly has a long history of forging her way into jobs and faking her background, but once she gets there, she seems to have no clue as to how to not make herself seem incredibly suspicious. She asks obviously stupid and ignorant questions when she could have stayed quiet or asked subtler ones, she argues with everyone for no reason including with people who can make life very difficult for her, she barges into places she's not allowed to go without even attempting to cover her tracks, and she generally makes herself incredibly conspicuous. In short, she is too stupid to live.
I was most interested in Patient Sixteen, who I was hoping would turn out to be the subject of terrible experiments. (Alas, no.) His actual identity is an interesting idea, but like other elements of the book that sound good but aren't, it's clumsily done and then not much is made of it. He and Kitty proceed to have an amazingly chemistry-less romance.
Spoilers!
( Read more... )
Are any of St. James' other books better? I was under the impression she's considered a good writer but this book was unimpressive.
[image error] [image error]
comments
April 27, 2023
Black Box Down
My new favorite nonfiction podcast! Each episode is a deep dive into an incident (ie, crash, averted crash, accident, etc) in aviation. Gus is very knowledgeable (and a student pilot), and Chris asks intelligent questions, and they have a knack for both clear explanations and finding fascinating details. A bunch of the incidents are ones I either hadn't heard of before or didn't know much about, so this is worth listening too even if you know a fair amount about plane crashes.
Plane crash analyses fascinate me because I like in-depth investigations of what went wrong with an eye toward preventing it from happening in the future. They're strangely cheering because aviation is one of the few industries that is legitimately interested in stopping fatal accidents from happening again, as opposed to covering them up and getting legislation passed that indemnifies them if more people die.
They also interest me because when I was a stage manager, one of my duties was ensuring the safety of everyone involved in the production, audience included, and as far as that went, the buck stopped with me. So I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what could possibly go wrong and what could be done to prevent it. It's a little-known fact that the stage manager has the right and responsibility to halt or refuse to start a show if there's a known danger. I only did that once but it was always in my mind. Of course plays are less dangerous than airplanes but very serious incidents have occurred (mostly fires) so the whole field of accident prevention and analysis is of great interest to me.
Serious civilian aviation incidents tend to involve multiple factors going wrong, because there's enough layers of precautions that, at least in modern times, it's very unusual for any single factor short of a military strike to take down a plane. That both makes for complex and interesting analysis, and is comforting because you know it takes really a lot of things going wrong to kill you on a plane.
Here's some of my favorite episodes so far.
The Gimli Glider. A plane runs out of fuel at 41,000 feet. Their first episode, and it's a good one, with their trademark use of details no one would believe if they weren't true. No one dies.
Things go very wrong on a small, elderly Alaskan plane. Even more stranger than fiction details. This one is so cinematic that the hosts go on an extended riff on Con Air (my personal nominee for the stupidest movie ever made). Very fun, no one dies.
People Sucked Out of Airplanes. What it says on the tin. The second story in particular is truly bizarre. One death.
The Tenerife Disaster. The deadliest civilian aviation accident in history. Fascinating analysis of what went wrong and the steps taken to ensure it never happens again. Some survivors, amazingly.
Hijacker causes crash that breaks the sound barrier. Fascinating story with lots of interesting historical and investigative details about a hijacking by a guy trying hard to get the title of Worst Person in the World. Everyone dies.
All the episodes I've listened to have been good to excellent.
Black Box Down on Audible
[image error] [image error]
comments
Plane crash analyses fascinate me because I like in-depth investigations of what went wrong with an eye toward preventing it from happening in the future. They're strangely cheering because aviation is one of the few industries that is legitimately interested in stopping fatal accidents from happening again, as opposed to covering them up and getting legislation passed that indemnifies them if more people die.
They also interest me because when I was a stage manager, one of my duties was ensuring the safety of everyone involved in the production, audience included, and as far as that went, the buck stopped with me. So I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what could possibly go wrong and what could be done to prevent it. It's a little-known fact that the stage manager has the right and responsibility to halt or refuse to start a show if there's a known danger. I only did that once but it was always in my mind. Of course plays are less dangerous than airplanes but very serious incidents have occurred (mostly fires) so the whole field of accident prevention and analysis is of great interest to me.
Serious civilian aviation incidents tend to involve multiple factors going wrong, because there's enough layers of precautions that, at least in modern times, it's very unusual for any single factor short of a military strike to take down a plane. That both makes for complex and interesting analysis, and is comforting because you know it takes really a lot of things going wrong to kill you on a plane.
Here's some of my favorite episodes so far.
The Gimli Glider. A plane runs out of fuel at 41,000 feet. Their first episode, and it's a good one, with their trademark use of details no one would believe if they weren't true. No one dies.
Things go very wrong on a small, elderly Alaskan plane. Even more stranger than fiction details. This one is so cinematic that the hosts go on an extended riff on Con Air (my personal nominee for the stupidest movie ever made). Very fun, no one dies.
People Sucked Out of Airplanes. What it says on the tin. The second story in particular is truly bizarre. One death.
The Tenerife Disaster. The deadliest civilian aviation accident in history. Fascinating analysis of what went wrong and the steps taken to ensure it never happens again. Some survivors, amazingly.
Hijacker causes crash that breaks the sound barrier. Fascinating story with lots of interesting historical and investigative details about a hijacking by a guy trying hard to get the title of Worst Person in the World. Everyone dies.
All the episodes I've listened to have been good to excellent.
Black Box Down on Audible
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comments
