Book Thoughts: "Guadalcanal Diary" by Richard Tregaskis

I haven't read a ton about WW II, and most of what I have read to this point has been about the war in Europe. I'd recommend this book as a good starting place for folks interested in the Pacific war, though I suppose some that are more well read on the subject might disagree.

Richard Tregaskis was a war correspondent for INS when he landed on Guadalcanal with the US Marines in August, 1942. He stayed on "That f*cking Island," as the Marines called it, for the next seven weeks and witnessed most of the pivotal action in the battle to secure Guadalcanal and it's strategically important airfield.

Tregaskis explores many episodes of the Guadalcanal Campaign in great detail, including the initial landing, securing the airfield, expeditions to villages on Guadal and the neighboring islands where Japanese forces were holed up, a Japanese counter invasion that attempted to push the lines back across the Tenaru River, and the climactic Battle of Bloody Ridge. It's all there, and it puts you right in the middle of the action.

Tregaskis was an historian as well as a journalist, and this lends not only a very well written and detailed account of his time on the island, but one gets the feeling that Tregaskis knew he was in the middle of history unfolding and was documenting it as best as he could. The narrative is both emotional at times, and at other times very clinical. One thing is sure however, when you're done reading this book, you'll feel like you were right alongside him witnessing the Marines in action on Guadalcanal.

Book Thoughts: "The Strain," by Del Toro and Hogan

This is, without a doubt, the creepiest, scariest, most horrific book I have ever read. I mean that in a very good way. This novel will literally make the hair on your neck stand up.

Del Toro and Hogan use their wild imaginations to put a scientific explanation behind the vampire legends. In their world, vampires are actually made through a parasitic virus that takes over the human form. The virus is brought to New York City on an international flight from Germany. Despite the efforts of our heroes: two CDC doctors, an professor who happens to be a holocaust survivor, and a Rambo like exterminator, the vampire virus spreads through Manhattan in just a few days, leading to a final encounter worthy of inclusion in any "Castlevania" game.

Despite putting a science behind vampirism, the legends are still there. There's silver bullets, silver swords, beheadings, crosses, holy water, and garlic. Some of these work, others don't. The authors also incorporate the Stoker traits of vampires not crossing moving water and frying in the sun. Ultimately the story is very imaginative and the characters leap off the page at you from the get go. One of my favorite reads in a long time.

If you just loved Twilight, you'll probably hate this book. It's destined to cure you of your love of vampires. These vamps aren't beautiful and charming, they're horrifying, scary, and out for your blood!

Book Thoughts: "The Confession" by John Grisham

Let me start out by saying this: being a huge Grisham fan, I think this is the best book he's written, and probably the most important. I think it must have taken a lot of courage for Grisham to write a book like this and put it out there in a climate as polarized as ours is right now, but it's a voice that deserves to be heard on an issue that is as important as life and death.

The main characters are a Lutheran Minister and a convicted sex offender. Odd pairing? Absolutely. However, the foil between the two is great and the trip through the minister's head and his thoughts as the story progresses is fascinating. The sex offender, just out on parole and dying with a brain tumor, limps into the pastor's office one morning and confesses to the rape and murder of a 17 year old Texas girl. The police in Texas arrested and convicted another man in the case, based totally off of a coerced confession. In this fascinating tale, the minister and the sex offender race against time and the well oiled Texas Capital punishment system to stop the pending execution of the innocent man, only 4 days away.

The story will leave you breathless, and at times it was so poignant that it drove me to tears.

Many of you will not like the slant this book takes. Grisham's own views on the death penalty, already widely known, are laid out crystal clear, and this will bother some people. He leaves you no wiggle room at all. In fact, if you are a die hard supporter of the death penalty, this book is likely to make you severely uncomfortable. He also paints our public officials in a very unpleasant light, particularly prosecutors and DAs, who have the sole authority in our system to determine who gets charged for what crime and how severe the charges will be. It is a position of awesome power. Others that he chastises along the way are politicians who go totally off of pole numbers, crooked cops who care more for convictions than truth, and right wing cable and AM radio talking heads who care more for their hair style and ratings than for the truth.

This book will confront you with a question: Do you think the Unites States has ever executed an innocent man or woman? If you don't think we have, you might want to do more research into the topic, because I promise you we have. With all the executions carried out over the years, no reasonable person would suggest that we've never killed the wrong guy. If you do think we've executed an innocent person or two, how does that make you feel? An innocent person being dead while a killer walks the streets? How many innocent people should have to die to maintain our system of capital punishment? Should we look the other way?

This book will ask all of these questions and more.

Book thoughts: "Mockingjay" by Suzanne Collins.

For this book, take all of the themes explored in the first two, all of the action, and ratchet it up about ten notches. All in all, a very astonishing and complex book. Brutal is also a good word.

The book brings a completion to the Hunger Games trilogy, and the story of Katniss Everdeen and the rebellion of the outlying districts against the power of The Capital. All I can say is, if you're looking for a "happy ending" you might not find it, depending on your definition of "happy ending." I will say though, that ending totally fits the themes developed through the books.

The allusions to the Roman Empire and it's epic excess and indulgence in violence are continued. Collins also exposes the horrors of war, so that even someone who thinks the undertaking of their war is just would have to sit up and look at the consequences.

Finally, the book provides a powerful message that despite who you think might be standing up for what's good and right, be careful, because most people also have their own agenda that they are promoting right along side these "moral views."

In the end, the whole series was thought provoking and I think everybody in America today should give it a read. These should become some of the most influential books of our time.

I'll be posting some more thoughts on this later.

Spirit Day 2010--Gay bullying.

Time I did something else with my blog again except write about books. The issue of gay bullying and suicide is of particular interest to me for three reasons. First, growing up in the midst of a very conservative culture, I've heard the things people say about gay people and gay teens. Second, with my background in mental health, I want to see us pursue remedies for these kids, I want to see them get help. Finally, with my background in forensics, I've seen these suicide scenes first hand. I've seen what the families go through, I've seen what the investigators go through. It is all very sad and unnerving.

So what is this all about, and why all the attention being paid to it now? Well, you'd have to be living under a rock to have escaped mention of the recent story involving the gay student from Rutgers who committed suicide after his roommate put a hidden camera in his dorm room and broadcast his private moments on the internet. That coupled with several high profile stories involving teen suicide in general has focused attention on the issue.

Lets cut to the chase here. It's difficult to be a teenager, period. We've all been there, some had it worse than others. Personally, I had it pretty easy. I would get negative reactions once in awhile because my religion was different than that of most of the local population here in Utah, but it was never severe enough to call bullying. However, I did get to feel what it was like to be different than everybody else, and I even had a choice as to what faith to follow.

Presuming most of the folks who read this are straight, I'd like to ask you to put yourself in position of a gay or lesbian teenager these days. Put aside your religious beliefs on whether homosexuality is right, wrong, or whatever. That isn't the point here. For these kids, it's not something they really chose to do. Period. Believe what you want, but a great many of these kids don't feel that way. So how do they cope with the situation. Well, they can go ahead and come out, and risk the ridicule of their peers, which is surely heavy. I'm sure homosexuality is better accepted today than it was when I was a kid, but it's far from generally accepted. In the teenage years driven by hormones, there are definite consequences to coming out, and even the most staunch religious person can see that.

What if they decide not to risk it? So they keep this all pent up inside their heads. Maybe they think something like: "If I can just get through High School, it will get better." Hopefully it will, but these kids that keep this pent up inside them have to deal with it everyday of their lives. Everyday they go out into their social circles and have to deny who they really are. Hopefully, many kids will find someone they can trust to help them out and talk to them. However, what if they do talk, and someone finds out? Can you imagine the chagrin? It's one thing to encourage kids not to be ashamed of who they are, but to put the idea into practice is hard enough when you're an adult, let alone as a teenager.

I don't think it would be real difficult to think why these kids choose the permanent way out.

So what do we do about it? First, we all need to check our "moral compass" at the door sometimes. Yes, in the USA, you have every right to believe that homosexuality is wrong. Many of you do, and you have your reasons. I don't, and I have mine. Again, that's not what this is about though. Yes, you have the right to your belief. However, you don't have the right to treat other people like dirt because of your belief. You don't have the right to be hurtful to other human beings, or allow your kids to be hurtful to others.

We would all be better off if we stopped considering the divisions between us as humans. Like it or not, whether Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Atheist, or whatever...whether we're white, black, or whatever color...whether you're straight, gay, bisexual, transgender...we are all HUMAN BEINGS. We all deserve the right to live our lives and love who we love. We deserve the right to be free from ridicule about who we are. We are all, every single one of us, worthy of love.

Look around next time you're at work or out and about. Look over a large group of people and I pretty much guarantee at least one of them will be gay, and you won't know it. Most likely someone in your church is gay. Someone in your own family might even be gay. Shouldn't we all just be kind to each other?

If you are a Christian, I'd remind you of this: The words of Jesus as recorded in the Bible don't really waste anytime on homosexuality, but he does some up his ministry and law by citing two commandments:

"Love the Lord with all your heart, and the second is like it, Love your neighbor as you love yourself."

Can't we set aside the big list of things the ancient book says you're not supposed to do for a little while and just see each other as worth while human beings in the here and now? There's another thought in that book that people lose sight of. "Judge not, lest you be also judged." If there is a god, face it, he made gay people, so if there's going be someone to sit in judgment, let it be him.

In the meantime, let's try to make this world a better place for everybody.

It will get better.

Book Thoughts: "The Hunger Games," by Suzanne Collins

I've had a couple of people prodding me to read this series, and I thought the premise sounded interesting so I gave it a shot.

Glad I did.

At the risk of perhaps reading too much into the book, I think it could really work on several levels. On the surface, it's a young adult book that reads quickly like a young adult book, along the lines of Harry Potter. It's the story of a young girl, Katniss, who finds herself thrust into a gladiator like reality show setting in a future North America, where the government has collapsed and power has been consolidated into a single Capital city that rules the outlying districts with an iron fist. Katniss is unwittingly paired with a boy from her district, who serves as a great foil for Katniss and her somewhat "Survivorman" like character. The book doesn't contain a ton of characterization, instead opting for pace and movement in the story, but the eventual pairing of these two almost polar opposite characters is a master stroke, creating a lot of tension and a lot of genuinely touching moments throughout the story.

On to some of the perhaps more latent themes. The book is awash with appropriate allusions to the Roman Empire: games, spears, gold, excess, ruthless violence, imperial rule, even the names of many characters smack of Rome. It's a nice touch that does a good job adding atmosphere to the story.

Which begs this question: Seeing how the story takes place in a future version of our country, does Collins see us heading that way, toward Rome? Is the book a commentary on our society's thirst for "reality" competitions, in which emotions are laid bare for all to see and direct inter-personal conflict is encouraged for entertainment value? Is it a comment on the climate of fear instilled in us over the last 10 years from our government? Does the story have something to say about the overwhelming tsunami of violence that our culture often immerses us in? Watch a hockey game, and the crowd cheers when a fight breaks out. An auto race, heck, everybody loves a fireball like crash. We overdose on evening crime dramas and cop shows, where the only way to raise the ratings bar is to try to shock the audience even more.

I think the story does have something to say about these issues, and it's a fascinating analysis to think through. In the end, part of the beauty of Literature is that each reader can decide for his or herself. However, I would like to say that even though this is a "young adult" book, the themes explored here are varied and deep. Loss, love, abandonment, fueled by characters that have actual rational thought behind them, unlike the useless waste of trees and ink that is the horrid angsty teen sob story bathed in lust called the "Twilight Saga." The Hunger Games has much more to offer any reader, young or old.

I look forward to the next two books sitting on my shelf.

Book Thoughts: "The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution" by Richard Dawkins

Another first rate book from Richard Dawkins. Some fans of "The God Delusion" might be a bit taken aback by this book, as Dawkins doesn't plunge into the issue of whether there is a God or not for the most part. However his wit and his pen are as sharp as ever, as he minces no words for advocates of "Intelligent Design" theory. In particular, Dawkins laments the fact that in certain places in the world, the obviously false "theory" on the origins of life is being taught more and more in schools.

To that end, Dawkins seeks to lay out the best evidence he can for the Theory of Evolution, by Natural Selection. He spends the opening of the book defining "theory." In this case, the "theory" of evolution is only a theory in the same sense as the "heliocentric theory of the solar system" or the "germ theory of disease." Nobody really argues with these other "theories."

Throughout the book, Dawkins takes an entire chapter to discuss different types of evidence for evolution. These include, but are not limited to: comparative biology, molecular genetics, the fossil record, geological distribution and barriers, embryology, and anatomy. He also spends a chapter on "evolutionary clocks" explaining and defending how scientists have arrived at the current estimation of the age of the earth at 4.6 billion years, as opposed to six to ten thousand years, as suggested by creationists.

If you actually read through the book, I don't see how you could argue with what much of Dawkins brings up. When there are weak points in his arguments, he generally addresses them to the satisfaction of any reader with as much as a high school science education.

All in all, the book is enjoyable and not dry at all. It has several sections with beautiful color plates that supplement the narrative really well. Dawkins doesn't necessarily assume that the reader has a high school science education, but a rudimentary knowledge of biology, chemistry, and physics will greatly enhance the book.

In the end, it's a pretty much unimpeachable case for the validity of Darwinian evolution. Sorry, Kirk Cameron.