War of Gifts

I sometimes bookmark ideas that I'd like to write about on my blog, saving the post but not publishing it, waiting for the time to spend to write the piece.

I'm sitting down to write this in December, but I bookmarked it at the end of August.

This is a book review of A War of Gifts, which is another book backfilling the Ender's Game series.

In this book, the story details a sideline of the time that Ender was in Battle School. It focuses on a child that was the son of a religious zeolot. He was in brought to the school, but wasn't part of the group. He refused to fight or make friends.

The boys start giving each other gifts in conjunction with Christmas. The gifts are forbidden, and the children get in trouble when the new son of a zealot rats them out.

I don't remember what I was thinking at the time I finished reading this story, but now it strikes me as unremarkable story. What would happen if religious views were surpressed? I'm not sure I remember how they reacted themselves.

It was in the Ender's Game series, so if you read them and liked them, it's more of the story, backfilling in the time of Battle School.

Paul of Dune

I read Dune by Frank Herbert sometime around the 7th grade. This classic science fiction is about a galactic empire in the far future, when man has long since stopped using computers, but has the ability to jump from planetary system to planetary system in the blink of an eye with huge Guild ships. The empire is brought to its knees by a young man that is the product of a 30 generation long breeding program that culminates in his ability to see the future. He comes to power from a desert planet named Dune, where the people are oppressed and the planet provides The Spice, a unique substance that extends life, helps Reverend Mother's connect with their past lives and sense the truth, and allows Guild Navigators to see through spacetime and move their massive ships into safe destinations in the blink of an eye. It also transforms the main character, Paul Atreides, into his full potential of being able to see the future.

Frank Herbert wrote the original series, which followed the life of Paul, and then his son and his favorite swordmaster Duncan Idaho (actually, a series of clones of Duncan, with memories of his past life) up to an confusing and incomplete fate.

After Frank Herbert died, his son Brian in a collaboration with Kevin Anderson, started writing more to the series. He completed prequels and a conclusion to the original series, as well as fill-in novels of the various main characters.

This book fills in a time gap between the original book Dune and the second book Dune Messiah. It answers questions about what he was thinking, how much of the future he saw, and how did he consolidate his power and direct his empire. Each backfilling novel answers more of the mysteries the original series was almost proud to leave behind.

As a young boy, I found Paul a compelling main character, because he was about my age, yet superior to most of the people around him in intellect and ability. As an older man, I still find the character compelling, as a conflicted man struggling to do what is right in a world that compromises his morals as well as his hopes and desires.

Oral History and The Lost City of Z

I just finished reading a book called Lost City of Z. This is a fascinating tale about an explorer named Percy Fawcett that disappeared into the Amazon in the late 1920s looking for a lost city that he believed was in the unexplored regions of the upper Amazon River.

The author attempts to find the trail and determine what happened to Fawcett. In the course of tracking his last known locations, he talked to an Indian that remembered a story about the explorer travelling through their village. His story was from three generations before and he remembered it because his parents and grandparents had come up with a story that sounded like a poem or a song.

In another part of the book, there is an account of another explorer's story of his travels. This story changed with each retelling. It makes you wonder how accurate stories are. We are conditioned to believe that true human history started when man started writing things down. Before that time, there was only oral history, which was subject to change and erosion as the generations passed.

However, it occurs to me that oral history must be good for some learning and provide a measure of continuity. Otherwise we'd all be stupid, inexperienced primitives trying to figure out basic survival skills with each new generation.

If you think about how older people tell their stories over and over, you realize that eventually you remember them yourselves. How many times have you heard the same story from your parents or grandparents until you think you could tell it yourself? This must be an ingrained way that humans pass on their history.

Religious history is the same way. It starts as an oral tradition, changing over time with each generation retelling the story. Still, something of the original story remains, only the exact details and origin of the story fade into history until the story becomes purely mythical, with it's factual origins lost in obscurity. The trick is to see if you can figure out what kernel of truth remains in the story after so many retellings, and what you can really learn from it.

The book had an interesting ending. Our poor lost explorer remained a mystery, but what he was looking for was found by a modern explorer that the author found in the jungle. The cities may not have been the huge sprawling metropolises that Fawcett imagined, and they were not from the 1600s or 1700s, as he hoped, but the true solved mystery is even more important and fascinating than what he imagined.

Historical Outlook

I recently completed listening to Dan Carlin's Hardcore History episodes called Ghosts of the Ostfront. This was a series of stories about the little known battles on the German Eastern Front against the Russians during WWII. I highly recommend the episodes, which depict brutal atrocities, describe unimaginable devastation, and fill in a whole previously unheard of chapter of an already colossal war.

While I was thinking about this and wondering what it would have been like to live through it. While talking about what it would have been like to be there with a friend, I made the comment that when you study history, you have the advantage of knowing how it is going to turn out. We often critize people in historical situations for not knowing better. You forget that they were living in their time and had no idea what their future was going to bring.

That is true for this time. We divide up our society along idealogical lines, convinced that we know what the future holds. We make decisions about climate change, the economy, politics, all controlled by people in the current time that think they can figure the future out.

I recently was surprised to learn that the saying "Those that do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it" was made by Santayana. OK, wait, I was surprised to learn that it was the Mexican General Santa Anna who captured the Alamo. When I found out that it was actually George Santayana, who I've never heard of, I was no longer surprised, just prized.

Fallen Founder

I just finished a book about Aaron Burr called Fallen Founder: The Life of Aaron Burr by Nancy Isenberg

I remembered that Aaron Burr had been Thomas Jefferson's Vice President, had run for President, and that he was discredited for trying to break off the Western U.S. to start a new nation. This was before I read the book, just the remnants of school and who knows where else we learn the little details that are in our head.

What really happened? Isenberg's book is written around the premise that there were different stories going around about Burr. The book is a staunch defense of Aaron Burr as a misunderstood figure from history who was smeared in the press by his opponents. Isenberg contends that this misrepresentation of the facts spread by Burr's enemy's has persisted until today.

Isenberg paints many of the politicians of the founders era as self interested, self promoting, and brutal at infighting. She describes the Federalist/Republican politicians attacking each other through the press and with backroom deals. She spends a great deal of time going over research she turned up that paints a completely different story.

For one thing, the common story about Alexander Hamilton is that he fought in a duel against Aaron Burr, who shot and killed him, thus ruining Burr's reputation. Isenberg's version is that Hamilton had some kind of obsession about Burr and would not leave him alone. She makes it sound as if Burr tried to avoid the confrontation as long as he could, but finally couldn't put it off. The other commonly held belief is that Hamilton honorably shot in the air, while Burr deliberately took aim. She claims that Hamilton couldn't see well and had the wrong eye glasses, which is why he missed. Another aspect she brings out is that both parties had written letters prior to the duel that would have been released had they lost. Burr's was supposedly noble and gracious and expressed regret about the disagreement with Hamilton and respect for Hamilton. Hamilton's supposedly continued to cast dispersions about Burr, basically continuing his taunts from beyond the grave.

Isenberg says that they continued to try to prosecute Burr, even though the duel took place in New Jersey, and there was no law against dueling in New Jersey, just in New York. They supposedly took row boats across the Hudson just to have the duel in a location where it was legal.

The next chapter in the history that is turned around and debunked in this book is the events leading up to and surrounding his treason trial. In this version of history, Burr is duped by a double agent named General James Wilkinson and painted as the force behind a movement to secede the western Louisiana territory away from the U.S. and set himself up as King. I'm still confused after reading the book exactly what happened. It sounds to me that Burr was interested in trying to get parts of Mexico to break off and form an independent territory (which later happened with Texas, and also is reminiscent of how the U.S. got into the Mexican-American War). It seems that Wilkinson was trying to frame Burr on the Louisiana conspiracy and was not able to make this charge stick.

However, while not convicted of treason, Burr was thoroughly discredited in the public eye. Thomas Jefferson apparently wanted to find some way of prosecuting Burr, to the point that he eventually left the country.

Sadly, Burr never did regain his reputation, and lost his family as well. It's a tragic story that paints a sympathetic picture of the man. The subtitle of the book could have been, "Why could they not just leave this man alone!?"

There were some other details in the book that I found interesting. Burr apparently was an advocate for women's rights and equality about a hundred years early. He also fought in the American Revolution, but was not on the Washington side of the Army and therefore, did not prevail politically when Washington later came to power. He supposedly assured that Jefferson won the 1800 election by stepping down and giving the election to Jefferson, even though he had as many electoral votes (supposedly, by the rules of that time, the Federalists would have been able to appoint their own man as President in the event of a tie). The last detail that I found to be very interesting is that Burr owned an estate called Richmond Hill in Manhattan that he was forced to sell to John Jacob Aster for $32,000. This was divided up into lots and became Greenwich Village in New York City, making Aster incredibly rich in the process.

I suppose that Isenberg did not convince me that everything said about Burr was false, but she did make me wonder how much of what we've been taught is history being written by the victors.

Magic Repair

I was walking down the road the other day, having just heard about people with heavy metal contamination, and thinking about how it would be great if you could figure out a way to remove the metals embedded deep in the flesh. I was thinking about how there were Star Trek next generation scenes where they used a medical tricorder to cure broken bones or heal scars.

If you're a Star Trek fanatic, you know how the original series showed people using transporters, and then the Next Generation series explained how transporter technology would be used in other ways. The transporter is supposed to break down matter and reassemble it in an identical pattern in another place. Replicator technology takes a lump of matter (I envision this would be the crew members waste products - you never hear them talking about going to the bathroom, but you figure they must) and reassembling it, but not in the same shape or configuration, but in a new configuration - say a cheeseburger. The holodeck supposedly creates scenes and characters using transporter technology. They had a group of small robots that used this trick to make whatever tool or gripping device they needed to perform maintenance tasks. What I am talking about mainly is the little devices that the doctor used to heal things. This is like a little wand, and you point it toward something on the body that's wrong and you rearrange the matter so that it's right.

I want on of these.

I was thinking about the scene in Star Man where Jeff Bridges plays an alien that brings a dead deer back to life on the hood of the hunter's car. That would be a huge job, because you'd have to reverse the decay that had set in as well as repair all the damage, restore the blood volume, and restart the heart and respiration. I was thinking about the limping deer and turkeys we have around our yard. With the special medical matter rearranging device, it would not be that hard to reach in and repair the bones and sinews to make them whole again. I saw a turtle that was hit by a car, and I thought that would be a nice project, too, putting the shell back together, closing all the ruptured blood vessels and reconnecting them and repairing all the muscles. I was also thinking about pollution contamination, how easy it would be to extract them or convert them. I also thought it would be good to remove mites, viruses, and bacteria that are infecting an animal (like a honeybee, for example).

While I was looking at the turtle with the crushed shell, I saw some eggs inside it. They were bright yellow. I remembered that you see yellow eggs in fish and grasshoppers, too. Why are eggs yellow? Maybe the yellow substance can be made into just about anything the organism needs, like the lump of matter they use in the Star Trek replicator as a base stock for whatever they need. Really, when you think about it, nature already does this transporter magic repair, it just does it really slowly. That's man for you, trying to hurry up a good thing.