The Drowned Cities (Ship Breaker, #2)

#825
Title: The Drowned Cities (Ship Breaker, #2)
Author: Paolo Bacigalupi
Publisher: Little, Brown
Year: 2012
437 pages

Audiobook.

Good world-building, lots of action, strong female main character. There's a lot of covert commentary on civil war, child soldiers, and the difficulty of imposing peace. It certainly resonates with Vietnam and many African conflicts. The narrative is picaresque in that the plot advances because adventures happen, not because of character growth or change. As in Ship Breaker, the story ends with the hope of an escape. Less here of the caloriemen, though much more of the half-men. Tool is arguably the real protagonist.

Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America

#824
Title: Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America
Author: Robert Whitaker
Publisher: Crown
Year: 2010
416 pages

Audiobook.

Whitaker makes some good arguments that are worth considering, but confuses the picture considerably by cherry-picking the data, leaps of logic, using his case studies and comments to make unreasonably extreme arguments (the words "always," "none," and "every" are always good indicators of this), and even ending by insulting anyone who disagrees with him. It's a shame, because though many of his concerns are probably valid, he undoes his utility by presenting his case in an unreliable manner.

From Africa: New Francophone Stories

#823
Title: From Africa: New Francophone Stories
Author: Adele King
Publisher: UNP--Bison Books
Year:2004
150 pages

A collection of short stories from French-speaking Africans or ex-pat Africans in Europe. I found it interesting to read but the stories didn't grab me. The introduction was quite worthwhile, but many of the stories had more gratuitous misogyny than I'm interested in reading.

Love and Death in the Kingdom of Swaziland

#822
Title: Love and Death in the Kingdom of Swaziland
Author: Glenn Alan Cheney
Publisher: New London Librarium
Year:2012
88 pages

This report from Swaziland gives an overview of the terrible conditions in the countryside and the obstacles faced by a religious organization providing care, particularly HIV/AIDS care. I found the depiction of the Swazi off-putting and unsympathetic, which I imagine reflects the nuns' and author's frustration as they try to change traditional behaviors. I didn't get a good sense of how the author came to be in Swaziland.

Lavinia

#821
Title: Lavinia
Author: Ursula K. Le Guin
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Year: 2008
288 pages

Audiobook & paper.

Its careful language shows it to be Le Guin's, but really, I'm not used to quite so much plot from her. It's an interesting stretch and I enjoyed how she pulled it off. It's not so much that Lavinia knows herself to be a fictional character a la, say, some of the characters in The Inkheart Trilogy. Rather, she recognizes that as a person whose story is told by someone else, she becomes fictionalized, her own details subsumed in someone else's needs for the shape of a story and a plot.

The section of the book up to Aeneas's death was excellent, and the section after was good enough, and perhaps I feel the difference because until that point I was comparing Lavinia's story to the story Virgil tells. I'm reminded of other Le Guin stories in which women are best able to tell their own stories after they've ceased to be the objects of male fantasy.

A Short History of Africa (6th Ed.)

#820
Title: A Short History of Africa (6th Ed.)

Author:  Roland Anthony Oliver & J. D. Fage
Publisher: Penguin
Year:1990
336 pages

Audiobook.

A useful overview, especially until around the end of the 1800s, but the tone and focus are sometimes shockingly mushy and bland when describing events that were, by all other accounts, quite horrific. Do read with King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa and The Challenge for Africa for balance. This is the white-bread version of the seizing and exploitation of Africa.

Saturday Is for Funerals

#819
Title: Saturday Is for Funerals
Author: Unity Dow & Max Essex
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Year: 2011
218 pages

Dow provides the anecdotes, which Essex then unpacks and explains. This is a great way to hang a lot of (sometimes repetitive) facts about HIV on vivid, personal stories. A nice model for teaching.