Dellarigg
AV Clubber
This is a public service announcement - with guitars
Posts: 7,602
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Post by Dellarigg on Sept 7, 2024 9:49:45 GMT -5
Rage, Richard Bachman/Stephen King
I was never hugely enamoured of the Bachman novels when they were published omnibusly, not even everyone's favourite The Long Walk, and don't revisit them often. So I can't say how long it is since I last read the first of them, the now sulphurous and withdrawn Rage (originally published under the much better title Getting It On). It's about a school shooting, though a fairly decorous one by today's standards - only two are gunned down, both of them teachers, and a mere handgun is wielded, not an assault rifle.
It's told directly from the head of the shooter, and King does a fairly good job of capturing this youth's cracked and disaffected voice, but all in all it's a bit of a slog. My copy comes in at 130 pages, and it took me nearly three days to get through it. As with Blaze (dropped in favour of 'Salem's Lot but later repackaged as a 'lost' Bachman novel), the best bits are the flashbacks to youthful indignities, though that's not to say these flashbacks do a good enough job in motivating the present action.
Amusingly, there's a reference early on to crime writer Donald Westlake's pseudonym Richard Parker. King says in the intro that he got letters from day one asking if he was Bachman, so I entertained myself trying to work out if I would've pegged this as a King book if I'd been given it with the cover ripped off. I like to think I would've, but I've kidded myself on bigger issues than this, so who knows.
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Post by Jean-Luc Lemur on Sept 10, 2024 13:00:03 GMT -5
Despite having a huge backlog of other stuff, I still added in something new with the very quick read BART: The Dramatic History of the Bay Area Rapid Transit System by former agency spokesman Michael C. Healy, who had the benefit of being there from a relatively early stage and is able to supply a lot of granular detail. It’s an excellent overview of the political, financial, technological, organizational, and public relations experimentss and struggles that eventually got the system to work, fast-moving drama until about 1980 and highly recommended if you’re interested in (and supportive of) American urban transit investment in the mid-twentieth century. BART was the prototype, pre-Great Society (planning even started before than a lot of European transit modernization and expansion programs), funded almost entirely locally. It had the most direct local fights, the hardest R&D process, to the benefit of America if to the frustration of the Bay Area. BART’s, particularly first-employee-and-eventual-general-mananger Bill Stokes’s, political canny makes it a really fun read (there’s also a bit of mythbusting—it’s often said that Marin County shortsightedly left BART but BART asked them to leave, fearing its electorate was less supportive of the systems than the county supervisors and that they’d drag down elections to approve bond issues). After around 1980, though, BART is more built out and basically established as part of the Bay Area. The narrative thrust is gone and the story’s more anecdotal. Some of the anecdotes are good, like the story of the bungling the millionth BART rider award, but many are pretty boring. I also know from conversations with Bay Area transit activist that BART’s political savvy is much less endearing once it went from underdog to behemoth. The seeds planted early on about future political conflicts extending BART never materialize (Jerry Brown arguing for a BART extension to SFO shortly after signing a bill requiring extensions on the other side of the bay first, leading him to ask “was that a good bill?”). When they come, though, the politics are limited to talk from the Senate Appropriations Committee or the BART board but otherwise treated as faits accomplis. The SFO extension’s more interesting, as there are more players and we get a first taste of the mutual agency obstructionism (the provisions for a future BART station were blocked as a means of political scent-marking). BART would later be a participant in this, though, not enough discussion of the wisdom of extensions deep into exurban Contra Costa and Alameda counties (apart from some stuff about BART having to foray into land development), nor much of the wisdom of extending to San Jose. It’s a story of conflict between agencies and politicians’ egos for federal funds rather than a more straightforward BART-vs.-the-world, and it’s also one where BART ends up more a villain. It’s not a focus but Healy goes a bit into public safety, like BART’s initial attempts at a softer approach law enforcement (to the point of putting transit police in powder blue blazers), but in some ways his discussion of the shooting of Oscar Grant demonstrates how Healy’s too close to BART to write a good history post-1980 like nothing else, though his recollections of being a public spokesman during a situation with constantly-updated facts—facts implicating his agency (and by extension him) more and more—is interesting and well-told.
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Post by Mrs David Tennant on Sept 15, 2024 20:02:18 GMT -5
I recently listened to Journey to the Center of the Earth (which was one of my favorite books when I was young) and I didn't remember what a whiny-butt the narrator is! He's constantly swooning and whimpering "we're all going to die!". Spoiler: they didn't.
It's such a ridiculous book but I still like it a lot.
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