A Winter Read

Image of Antartica is from NSIDC

The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Le Guin
New York : Ace Books, 2000, c1969.
304 p. ; 21 cm.

It's been a brutal winter in the Midwest, so this was an excellent book to finish out winter with, and welcome in spring.  Le Guin's masterpiece is set on the planet Gethen - nicknamed "Winter" by the first visitors from earth.  The novel is told from the viewpoint of Genly Ai  - an envoy from earth, who is sent alone to the planet to try and persuade its humanoid dwellers to join the Ekumen - a loose confederation of eighty-plus planets peopled by other human species.

The great twist of Le Guin's novel is that on Winter the humans have no gender until they enter estrus - and the gender that emerges during the 5-7 period of "kemmer" is not set for an individual but is dynamic and requires a partner to fully proceed.  Le Guin uses this lack of fixed gender to explore many political, social and cultural concepts that could play out in such a gender free - and non monogamous culture.  Imagine a world in which individuals might be both a mother and father and in which there was a bond with "kemmer" partners, but not usually a lifelong bond.  Le Guin's spins out her story of Gethen with its two competing "nations" - Karhide and Orgoryen - with skill and creativity, and her storytelling seems effortless and completely believable.

The novel is exciting, interesting, contemplative, and wonderfully satisfying.   I would definitely recommend it to any student who likes science fiction, and would recommend it to any student looking for a really intelligent but fun to read novel.

The Sad Tower

The Proud Tower by Barbara Tuchman
New York, Macmillan [1966]
xv, 528 p. illus., ports. 25 cm.

Barbara Tuchman intrigues me.  A woman who made her mark with several classic histories back in the 1960s when it must have been a daunting task to be a woman trying to get scholarly work published in the field of European history.  Not only did she get published, but is recognized for - not one - but several classic volumes of history such as A Distant Mirror, The Guns of August, and this book, The Proud Tower.  Every May as I've conducted the inventory of our collection, I've seen The Proud Tower, and thought, "I'm going to read that." In this 100th anniversary year of the start of WWI, I've finally gotten around to reading it.  It is a magnificent read, but probably one that would swamp most high school students.  I greatly enjoy history - and European history - but I have to admit that it was a long, dense - though enjoyable - read.

The Proud Tower is subtitled, A Portrait of the World Before the War: 1890-1914, and though, I'd call it a portrait of the Anglo-European-Slavic world, it is a monumental history.  Tuchman surveys the great political and cultural trends that defined the end of the 19th century and the run up to WWI: the declining power of the British aristocracy, the rise of naked US imperialism, Anarchism, Socialism, music, philosophy, and militarism.

I'm glad I read it, especially since I hope to read at least one of the new WWI books that have come out recently.  I can't say that I'd recommend it to just any high school student interested in history.  But if a student is a European history aficionado, or just looking for a rich book on Europe before the "Great War" then I'll definitely think of Tuchman's masterpiece.

A Tough One

Inexcusable by Chris Lynch
New York : Atheneum Books for Young Readers, c2005.
165 p. ; 22 cm.

I nearly didn't post on this book, mainly because it's getting a bit old (2005), but it was such a powerful and tough little book that I had to write up a review.  I've wanted to read the book since my son read it years ago, and I'm glad that I finally did.  Inexcusable is the story of a date rape and is written from the point of view of Kier Sarafian, the perpetrator, who relentlessly tries to excuse and justify his deed.  The book moves right along, and - with it's strong character development, nice sports angle, and dramatic relationship crises - should appeal to both young men and women.  

The novel received a lot of praise when it came out, including being a National Book Award finalist. And after reading it, I can see why.  The strength of Lynch's book, as pointed out by reviewers, is his ability to keep the book from being an easy "black and white" case of good guy / bad guy.  Instead  Lynch gives us a character study of the kind of "good guy" whose charm, recklessness, immaturity, arrogance and self-denial are, in fact, the very components of a self-centered and self-serving sexual user and potential rapist.

By telling the novel from the point of view of the accused, Lynch is able to explore the blurred morality of a perpetrator who refuses to accept that he has done anything wrong.  In this way he is able to draw the reader into the same moral questions around consent, manipulation, and violation.  Students who read it will have to wrestle with how reliable a narrator Kier is and just how much of a "good guy" is he.  The book would be a great book for sparking discussions and would pair well with Laurie Halse Anderson's Speak.