CALL FOR PATRON REVIEWS FOR OUR READING CIRCLE

I have despaired lately of convincing folks individually to write for our Reading Circle blog. So here comes a full fledged campaign to get those of you with a gift for gab to write up a short, long, serious, funny, bemused review of a book or film that struck you are arresting, intelligent, engrossing, etc. and send it to Jo Tavener @swiss1800@gmail.com, our new Swissvale public account. Until then, I will just have to poache reviews with all the necessary attribution. Of course, these reviews reflect what strikes my momentary fancy. If you would like to broaden the scope of the Circle, please contribute!

The Author Speaks

An Angel With Whiskers
Interview with David Dosa, M.D., author of 'Making Rounds With Oscar: The Extraordinary Gift of an Ordinary Cat'by: Carol Kaufmann from:AARP Bulletin,6/10/10

A resident pet at Steere House, Oscar provides comfort and distraction to patients and families at a time when they need both. — Courtesy Kelley & Hall Book Publicity.

From the outside, Steere House looks normal enough. The spacious three-story facility houses a nursing home and rehabilitation center in downtown Providence, R.I., right off Interstate 95. On the third floor, the Safe Haven Advanced Care unit has 41 rooms reserved for patients who have dementia. Nothing appears odd about the wing, until you get to know one of the house pets: a sweet-faced gray and white tabby named Oscar.

Oscar was adopted by the nursing home when he was a kitten and passed his first year rather uneventfully, playing with fellow feline adoptee, Maya, or entertaining himself out of the public eye. But shortly before his first birthday, he began visiting patients during their final hours. He’d take up a vigil on the beds, waiting quietly until the patient had passed away.

The nursing home employees soon began to realize he was the first “staffer” to know a patient was about to die. They took Oscar’s visits as a cue to notify the family and make final preparations. David Dosa, M.D., a Steere House geriatrician who treats the dementia patients and researches the illness at Brown University, wrote an essay about Oscar for the New England Journal of Medicine. The piece made international headlines—and propelled Oscar into unusual stardom.
Dosa then launched his own personal investigation to learn about the effect Oscar had on the people around him—namely the patient’s families. He relays what he found out in his new book, Making Rounds With Oscar. He spoke with the AARP Bulletin about it.

Q. Before you met Oscar, were you a cat person?
A. Absolutely not. I had had some bad experiences with cats growing up and that colored my perception of them and their importance.
Q. So what motivated you to investigate the Oscar effect?
A. I wanted to get a sense of what the families thought about having this cat sit at the bedside while their loved ones passed on. When I wrote the essay on Oscar, there was a fair amount of publicity. It was geared toward “if Oscar’s on your bed, you’re dead.” He was depicted as the grim reaper of cats.
Q. But you saw Oscar’s services in a different light?
A. We were seeing a cat that was providing families with a great deal of distraction—and comfort.
Q. In his five years living at Steere House, has he missed a death?
A. He’s been right most of the time. We’ve estimated that it’s over 60 at this point.
Q. You’re a scientist. Have you heard of a satisfactory explanation why Oscar does this?
A. What makes the most sense to me is he’s perceiving a smell or a pheromone. We know that when cells are in starvation states or in their final stages, they release ketones, which are sweet-smelling chemicals. Doctors are actually taught to smell them on the breaths of diabetics to determine if their sugars are really high. We also know ketones are released during hunger strikes or when people are at the end of one.
Q. But even if he does tune in to a smell, and “knows” when death is near, what makes him stay by the patient’s side?
A. I’ve interviewed a lot of people for this book, but Oscar wasn’t talking, so ultimately your guess is as good as mine.
Q. But what’s your guess?
A. I do think animals have an empathic relationship with people and Oscar is the resident pet for 41 patients on this unit. He seems to know when he’s needed. If he’s responding to a smell, that might be, but there’s something more to it because he doesn’t leave until the undertakers come.
Q. Have you heard of any other animal like him?
A. He’s not alone. That’s been one of the most rewarding things about writing this book. I heard from lots of people around the world that they have animal experiences that rival Oscar’s story. You need only listen to hospice workers who go into homes to care for people at the end of life and ask them how they know when someone is close to passing. Lots of times they’ll point to the pets. When the cat or dog starts to mill around, that’s often when hospice workers know someone might be near death.
Q. You made a huge effort to visit with the families who had lost their loved one with Oscar by their side.
A. It was a journey for me. My wife’s mother has been diagnosed with dementia herself, so we’re going through the caregiver-sandwich generation situation ourselves. We entered this process thinking I knew everything there was to know about this disease. I’ve been taking care of patients with dementia and cognitive impairments for many years now. But listening to patients’ families talk about caregiving, it’s opened my eyes to what it all means.
Q. Maybe that was part of Oscar’s plan.
A. That’s very possible.
Q. What kind of impact does Oscar have on family members at the end of their loved one’s life?
A. He’s a great source of companionship to most, whether they were cat people or not. He was a distraction for them. It’s a very lonely journey that family members take with their loved ones in the cases of end-stage dementia. Having Oscar there was a great comfort. They were able to leave at night knowing that their loved one wouldn’t die alone if that happened to be the night.
Q. Do all families welcome Oscar?
A. Some have asked us not to have Oscar on the floor. Initially, we thought we’d just close the door to that room and they’d be fine. But Oscar gets pretty upset if he’s not allowed into a room.
Q. What does he do?
A. He’s been known to pace backward and forward in front of a room and even gone into the room next door and try to scratch his way through the walls. These days, if a family asks to have him not there, we have to take him off the unit.
Q. What has he taught you?
A. What he has to teach all of us is that just being present, being there and validating a life, is so important, even if it’s at the end.
Q. You also write about dementia’s “middle stages” and how hard they are for families.
A. These stages are all about making the difficult decisions and letting go. There’s the difficulty of seeing a loved one who has lost what constituted themselves, their very essence. Family members try to maintain the status quo as much as possible, but that’s not how you cope with someone who has memory impairment and is constantly changing.
Q. What else is so tough?
A. There’s also often guilt for having to move a family member into a nursing home, or guilt of not spending enough time with a loved one going through these stages. There’s even guilt of not wanting to spend time with that particular person because you don’t want to see what this disease is doing.
You can learn to love the person as the disease takes hold, but he or she is different from the person who took you fishing as a child or taught you how to read or listened to your problems while you grew up.
Q. What’s the hardest part of your job?
A. Other than the paperwork?
Q. Paperwork aside.
A. I get so much out of working with older patients. It’s like working with completed canvases, appreciating what someone did with their life. That to me is so much more important than taking care of a child that is a blank state. Working with families can sometimes be challenging in the current care environment. There’s a lot of things I’d like to do as a provider that I’m not able to do because our health care system isn’t set up to allow me to care for patients in the various stages of dementia.
Q. What would you like to be able to do?
A. If I know someone is going to fall and get hurt, I can’t order physical therapy because you can’t order treatment until the patient breaks a hip. Our health care system doesn’t provide reimbursement for the family discussions that they need to hold with patients during those stages. That’s difficult.
Q. Is our health care system supportive of people with dementia?
A. Our health care system is designed around acute care. If you have a problem, go to the hospital, they’ll fix you. But we’re a nation of people suffering from chronic diseases. We’re not a nation that dies anymore from infectious diseases or heart attacks. We die from congestive heart failure, from dementia, from chronic obstructive pulmonary diseases. But our health care system isn’t set up for that. Unless we reformulate our health care system to be one that can cope with chronic medical conditions, we’re doomed to fail.
Q. Are animals helpful to older people?
A. Animals in nursing homes are critically important, and good research shows that the presence of animals reduces depression or agitation among patients, even ones who aren’t communicative or have dementia. There’s good data to suggest that among healthier older adults, pets reduce heart disease and hypertension and depression, so there’s every reason for older adults to have animals. They’re very healthy.
Q. Are you a cat person now?
A. I’ve become much more of a cat person. I’ve learned to appreciate what they do. When I do rounds on the unit, Oscar will come seek me out. We’ve become buddies.

Carol Kaufmann is a contributing editor at the AARP Bulletin.

Another Take on "The Sparrow."

"THE SPARROW" by Mary Doria Russell reviewed by Bill Galbraith

INTRODUCTION
This review is written in two parts. In the first part, I have taken care not to reveal the plot, which would spoil the reading of the book - I give only as much as is told to the reader very early on, in the Prologue and first chapter, and then only in general terms. I will just say that the ending is dark and shocking, but the book is very powervul, and to my mind extremely worth reading. It is a fascinating novel, and clearly the author is highly intelligent.
The second part of my Review is clearly marked with a SPOILER ALERT, and should not be read if you have not yet read the book, but intend to. This part has become rather long - sorry! - but I found much of interest, mostly of science.
There is a sequel called "Children of God", which I have not read yet, but I have heard that is not as good as "The Sparrow".

GENRE
The book falls into a very specific and select genre - that of Roman Catholic Science Fiction. The closest to it in theme is James Blish's "A Case of Conscience", in that both are concerned with moral problems arising from contact with alien intelligent life on another planet, though I would rank "The Sparrow" as superior. Others in the genre are C.S. Lewis's trilogy, "Out of the Silent Planet", "Perlandra", and "That Hideous Strength", the first two of which are set on other worlds. The several Charles Williams novels that I have read are set on Earth, as is Walter M. Miller's "A Canticle for Leibowitz" and Shamus Frazer's "Blow, Blow Your Trumpets", which is set before Noah's flood, which I read 60 years ago and have not seen since. One could include C.S. Lewis's seven "Narnia" books, though these are intended for children. I do not include J.R.R Tolkien's trilogy "The Lord of the Rings" in this genre, since they are not specifically Catholic, though of course Tolkien, Lewis, and Williams were closely connected in their informal club "The Inklings".
The genre may be subdivided according to whether the supernatural aspects are overt or covert. In the Lewis trilogy, William's books and Frazer's one, there are definite supernatural characters - angels and demons - or in some of Williams's, just magical events. In Russel's, Blish's and Miller's books, there are no overt supernatural persons or events, and the emphasis is on the convictions, doubts and concerns of the people involved.

STRUCTURE
The construction of "The Sparrow" is unusual and interesting. There is an alternation - not exact - between chapters relating events before the discovery of an alien, intelligent race, and chapters about the aftermath of a manned expedition to their planet, organized by the jesuits, whihc turned into a total disaster, with only one survivor, who is in a highly disturbed state. The two groups of chapeters are separated by about 40 years. The first group descrives the people involved, going into considerable detail into their antecedents, characters, and relationships. Gradually they reveal the discovery of the alien race, the decision to mount a jesuit expedition, teh arrival on teh alien planet, the events as they transpire, and the changing relationship of the humans among themselves and with the aliens. The second group of chapters, interspersed among the first group, tell os other events on the alien planet, as they are slwoly and with great difficulty extraced from the reluctant and bitter survivor. thus the reader gradually discovers what actually ahppened.

CHARACTERS
The human characters and their relationships among themsevles are well develped, and they change with time,. both on Eartha dn on the alien planet. This is unusual in science fiction, in which too often the characters are cardboard, and only the events matter. Though the expedition is Jesuit inspired, not all the crew are Catholic -- as well as several Jesuit priests, there are a happily married couple, an atheist, a homosexual and so on. And of course there are the aliens. The book could be read in a superficial way, but it really requires the ability to put oneself into other people's mind sets, including ones foreign to oneself, as this brings out the richness of the treatment.

!!! SPOILER ALERT !!!

TRAVEL
In a sense, the method of travel to the alien planet is unimportant to the plot, except for the time dilation, see below. But it "adds verisimilitude" (W.S. Gilbert), I find it interesting in its own right, and it is commendably well stated in the book -- did the author consult with a physicist, work it out herself, or just pull the numbers out of a hat? I hoped to include a section on the mathematics of interstellar travel, but so far I have become bogged down in it -- perhaps later, but don't hold your breath.
The information given in chapter 11 is that the crew travel in a large, rocky, second hand mining asteroid, equipped with living quarters and thrust generators. They mine its rock on the way and use it as rocket ejecta (the material thrown backwards by a rocket to provide forward thrust) -- presumably powered atomically, though this is not stated. The thrust is kept constant at one Earth gravity by shipboard standard "day," two gravities by "night." The crew feel normal Earth gravity by day, higher to save time when asleep, and only have to cope with weightlessness at the beginning, middle and end of the journey. The distance to the alien system is 4.3 light years, and they reach a peak velocity of 93% of the speed of light at half way, where the ship is turned round and decelerated in exactly the same way. Because of relativity, the time taken, from the viewpoint of the crew, is only six or seven months, while for observers on Earth, it takes 17 years. The return takes the same, plus about six years on the alien planet. So on Sandoz's return, he has aged 7 years, and the whole of the rest of the world is 40 years older.
The figures look convincing, but I have not been able to come up with the same numbers. The first difficulty is relativistic time dilation -- time for the travellers is quite different to their colleagues on Earth, because of the high speed involved, and on return, they will be much younger than their contemporaries. Secondly, how fast is the fuel used (which depends on the attainable ejection velocity of the rocket exhaust). Thirdly, how big must the asteroid be, as it is necessary that there should be sufficient fuel for the return trip. Fourthly, it is required to keep a constant acceleration, for the comfort of the crew, and since fuel is continually being burnt, decreasing the total mass of the ship, the actual thrust, and hence the rate of fuel burning, has to steadily decrease. These four factors interact in ways that I find very confusing.
In the book, it is stated that a very large asteroid is required, to provide sufficient fuel for the journey there and back, but I believe this to be wrong. A larger asteroid has more mass, requires more thrust to accelerate it, and therefore burns more fuel. I think the fraction F of the mass of the asteroid burnt on the whole trip would be a constant, whatever the size of the asteroid. The remaining fraction (1-F) is the payload, ie the crew, living quarters, machinery, thrust generators, and any remaining part of the asteroid itself -- everything that comes back to Earth orbit. Certainly the payload must be sufficient for the needs of the crew, and this puts a lower limit to the initial size of the asteroid.

FINDING A PLANET
I was very pleased that when the travelers reached the alien star system, they didn't simply go to the planet, they had to hunt for it. Most people have no idea of the sheer emptiness of space. One sometimes sees a diagram showing the Sun and the eight planets (not Pluto any more) in their relative sizes and appearances, and this is correct. However, it never states that the distances between them are drawn to a completely different scale, as it would be impossible to draw the distances and diameters to the same scale and have a readable picture, and I think this confuses people. The planets are not really arranged tidily in a line, but are scattered at all angles from the Sun, though approximately in a plane. Also, in most Science Fiction films, there are planets all over the place, practically bumping into each other. So see the next Section for a more accurate model.
To find a tiny planet in a huge space around a star, the crew, on arrival, had to use standard astronomical practice by taking many pairs of pictures of exactly the same star fields, a few days apart. Stars and planets all equally appear as mere dots. Each pair is loaded into a Flicker Comparator, an optical device which superimposes the pair exactly, and then flickers rapidly between them. The stars do not appear to move, being very far away, but anything that appears to jitter back and forth, showing that it is moving, is probably a planet or an asteroid. This must be continued for all star fields until the required planet is found. It was commendable to find this attention to realistic detail in a science fiction novel.

MODEL SOLAR SYSTEM
So let us imagine a properly scaled model of our Solar System, in which the Sun is shrunk to the size of a netball, diameter 9 inches. Here is an approximate description, using familiar objects, and if interested, you can check the numbers in the table below. The length of a tennis court away from the Sun is the Earth, the size of the glass pinhead on a dressmaker's pin. The width of a playing card from it is the Moon, its diameter the width of the shaft of the same pin. A bit more than the length of a football field from the Sun is the huge planet Jupiter, two thirds the size of a ping pong ball. Half a mile from the Sun is the farthest out planet Neptune, the size of a pea. We will not bother with the other five planets. The nearest star is Proxima Centauri, 4,000 miles away in our model, the distance from New York to Rome.
And this is all just our little corner near the edge of our Galaxy. Even on the tiny scale we are using, the diameter of the Galaxy is still about the same as the real distance from Earth to Sun, and it contains about 100 billion suns. On average, galaxies are about 30 times this diameter apart, and there are about 100 billion of them. The distance to the furthest visible galaxy is nearly 20 billion light years, or 17 trillion miles -- quite impossible to model even on our tiny scale. There is an awful lot of extremely empty space out there!

TABLE FOR PREVIOUS SECTION
If you are not familiar with Exponent notation, which I shall use for its convenience and compactness, for instance "E13" means "multiplied by 10 to the 13th power" or "multiplied by 10¹³" or "multiplied by 10,000,000,000,000" or "multiplied by 10 trillion." "E0" means not multiplied by any tens, so 5.0 and 5.0E0 means exactly the same thing, five. But "E-3" means divided by 1000, and so on. For convenience in calculation, I use "m" for meters, "s" for seconds, "ly" for light years, but also show results in more familiar units. There are some minor discrepancies in the given measurements from different sources, both on the Web and elsewhere, and some measurements are my own, but great accuracy is not needed for the present purpose. And if you are very picky and actually go through the calculations, you may find some very minor rounding errors, as I only used 4 significant digits.

SCALING [OK]
Sun diam = 1.391E9 m
Netball diam 9 ins = 2.290E-1m
Scaling factor, Sun to Netball = divide by 6.074E9
Speed of light = 2.998E8 m/s
Year = 3.156E7 s
Light years to meters = multiply by 9.462E15 m
Meters to inches = multiply by 39.37
Meters to feet = multiply by 3.281
Meters to miles = divide by 1609

MEASUREMENTS, m	SCALED, m	OTHER UNITS	OBJECT
Sun diam = 1.391E9	2.290E-1	9.016E0 in	Netball (9 in)
Earth distance (AU) = 1.496E11	2.463E1	81 ft	Tennis court (78 ft)
Earth diam = 1.276E7	2.101E-3	0.0827 in, 1/12 in	Glass pinhead (0.1 in)
Moon from Earth = 3.844E8	6.329E-2	2.492 in	Playing card width (2.5 in)
Moon diam = 3.476E6	5.723E-4	0.0225 in, >1/45 in	Pin shaft (0.02 mm)
Jupiter distance = 7.78E11	1.281E2	420 ft, 140 yd	Football field (360 ft)
Jupiter diam = 1.436E8	2.364E-2	0.931 in	Ping pong ball (1.5 in)
Neptune distance = 4.495E12	7.400E2	2428 ft, 809 yd	Mile, 5280 ft, 1760 yd
Neptune diam = 4.970E7	8.182E-3	0.322 in, @1/3 in	Pea (@3/8 in)

FURTHER
Nearest star, Proxima Centauri = 4.242 light years = 4.014E16 m = 6.608E6 m scaled = 4107 miles = @ New York to Rome
Stars in our Galaxy = 1.0E11 = 100 billion
Diam of our Galaxy = 1.0E5 ly = 9.462E20 m = 1.558E11 m scaled = 97 million miles = about our real distance to Sun
Distance between galaxies = 3.0E6 ly = 2.839E22 m = 4.674E12 m scaled = 3 billion miles
Galaxies in Universe = 1.0E11 = 100 billion
Most distant object seen = 1.8E10 ly = 1.703E26 m = 2.804E16 m scaled = 17 trillion miles

HUMANOID ALIENS.
I would object that the two intelligent varieties of aliens - the Runa and the Jana'ata - are too human, as I mentioned briefly in my review of the film "Avatar". All the differences from us are really trivial - hair covering and tail, and a few other minor ones. We evolved through naked molecules, protozoa, multicells, chordates, fish, amphibia, reptilia, mammalia, primates to humans. This involved a huge number of chance events - big ones like climate changes, continental drift, other predatory and game species evolving at the same time, and small ones such as which individuals happened to breed, travel, or be killed. The chances of the same sequence being followed on another planet are extremely remote. If we ever discover intelligent, alien life, and it turns out to be humanoid, exceedingly unlikely in my opinion, then I should regard this as the most convincing argument yet for the existence of God.
A side note - the reason that the Jana'ata regard humans as sexually interesting is that the sparse hair and the absense of a tail make them seem "extra nude" and unprotected.

INTELLIGENT ALIENS.
One might make some very tentative guesses as to what an intelligent alien might be like. It is frustrating for a biologist that we have only one sample of life itself (all living things, plants and animals, evolved from one start, and therefore do not count as separate examples), and one of intelligent life, and one cannot make statistical predictions from one sample. Even one other case - say something like primitive bacteria on Mars - would add enormously to our understanding.
Would they even need to be a Carbon/Oxygen life form like us - a silicon life form has been suggested as a possibility, and there might be other types of organization we haven't thought of. It would probably need to allow great complexity, as does the organic chemistry of Carbon. Something working like a complex brain would presumably need a huge number of separate elements, comparable to our neurones, each of which could not be smaller than some limit to avoid random noise error, so the alien could not be smaller than some size - my personal guess would be not smaller than a small dog, though it could be huge. The alien would not have become intelligent without complex sense organs to perceive and model the world around it, though the organs might be very different from ours. Some of the organs would be long-range, like our eyes, though not necessarily in the same wavelengths, depending on the radiation from their sun. They would have ability to manipulate their environment - hands, tentacles, claws or something quite different - because without them they would not develop such a full understanding of their world. They would probably be social like chimpanzees and not solitary like bears, as social interaction would surely help along the development of intelligence. I do not think that much more can be guessed.

CONVERGENT EVOLUTION
The two intelligent species of alien - the herbivorous Runa and the carnivorous Jana'ata - are very similar in appearance, and can be mistaken for each other. The differences are limited to the Jana'ata's possession of teeth adapted to killing and eating meat (the Runa), three fingered hands with large sharp claws, and prehensile feet. The Runa have long, slender, agile hands with five fingers, both the outer ones opposable. These differences can easily be concealed at will, particularly by Supaari VaGayjur. Also, the Runa are highly social, the Jana'ata less so, which would be expected.
The species must be rather far apart in evolution, as the change from herbivore to carnivore is not a small one, requiring differences in the digestive system as well as the outer ones described above. The contention in the book is that this is convergent evolution, enabling the predator to approach the vegetarians closely and secretly to grab stragglers, and thus has positive survival value. I do not find this very convincing, as I know of no large Earth carnivore which does this - perhaps in the insect world. In fish, the convergence is more due to the hydrodynamic requirements of speed. However, once much of the convergence had taken place, and the Jana'ata had achieved intelligence, it is more believable that they might, by selective breeding of the Runa, make them more like themselves, more intelligent so that they could speak and more dexterous in the hands, so that they would be able to work for the Jana'ata. Breeding is rigidly controlled in both species by the Jana'ata, preserving the carnivore to herbivore population ratio and a survivable 4 percent.

HANDS.
Human hands appear to have three bones in each finger, and two in the thumb. In fact there is another bone in every finger and thumb, extending right back to the wrist, but fleshed together to form the palm. This is why a skeleton's hand looks so long fingered - the palm has gone. And almost all the whole of the hand is controlled by muscles in the forearm, acting through tendons - about the only exception is the adductor muscle of the thumb, that opposes it.
The extraordinary operation ordered by Supaari the Jana'ata was to eliminate the palm by separating all the fingers down to the wrist. This was done to the last two expedition members, Alan Pace and Emilio Sandoz, and Pace did not survive it. Sandoz returned to Earth, and sugery and prosthetics were attempted with only partial success. Because of the muscles in the forearm, he would have had some movement in the mutilated hands. Supaari had several reasons for this apparently pointless and cruel order. It made Sandoz's hands, hanging in a long droop, look to Jana'ata eyes more "elegant", more like the slender, long, capable hands of the Runa. This in turn suggested his subservient status as being more related to the herbivorous, domesticated race. At the same time it made him actually subservient and helpless, and less of a threat. Remember that on their very first encounter, Supaari made a swift, lethal attack, and was amazed when the much smaller Sandoz managed to defeat him, using street fighter technique.

RELIGION.
There are four Jesuit priests on the expedition, a married couple one of whom is a flat out athiest, and two others. They are a tightly knit group, get on well together, but freely argue amongst themselves, and their changing relationships and opinions are well described. The aim of the expedition is both scientific and religious - the Jesuits wish to determine whether the aliens are in a state of grace, fallen, saved, atheistic, or what. The main character and last survivor Sandoz is one of the priests. At first, the expedition comes together, arrives at the alien planet, meets the Runa, and all goes so well that he feels forced into regarding it as divinely managed. By the time he returns to Earth, mutilated and bitter, all has gone. All his seven companions are dead, he has rejected a girl he really loves in favour of his celibate vows, the expedition is a disaster, the beautiful music that lured them there has no high purpose, he has accidently killed the little Runa girl to whom he was deeply attached, just as he was about to be rescued, and there was clearly no divine management. He has completely lost his faith, and all his work and sacrifices have been for nothing, so his bitterness is hardly surprising.
The book is so cleverly written that I was unsure as to the religious opinions of the author, but have now read that she converted to Judaism. She clearly understands not just the opinions, but also the deep feelings, of both atheists and of Jesuits, and also of homosexuals. All the eight travellers and other characters are believable and well described.

AVATAR - A FILM REVIEW BY BILL GALBRAITH

3-D
I assume that the 3-D spectacles used polarization, rather than the more primitive red/blue or red/green coloured lenses. I was interested to see if the polars were one side vertical and the other horizontal, or the opposite diagonals. But even in the cinema I detected that they were much more subtle than that--they were circularly polarized in opposite directions, though I have not yet figured which is clockwise and which anticlockwise, or how they achieved circular polarization with thin lenses.
The actual 3-D was very effective, and though the actors did not continuously throw things at you, thing such as the delicate "jellyfish," water drops or bits of ash did occasionally drift right past one's face, and sometimes other things such as furniture came close to one.

STORY
The actual story is fairly banal -- "Advanced, evil, materialist civilization oppresses noble indigenous race but is defeated." But it is quite well acted, and the main characters had strong personalities, not cardboard as in many SF movies -- particularly the nasty Colonel, and the even worse chief civilian contractor.

IMAGINATION
Commendable -- it is clear that a great deal of thought went into the film - it is good to see an intelligent SF film, not just "space opera." Many of the alien scenes were extremely beautiful, particularly the "jellyfish," the spiral plants which contracted downward fast when touched (based on tube worms, scaled up), the glade of blue flowers, the hanging, glowing tendrils of the "holy place," the Trees, etc. The animals also were very well done - the hammer headed "rhinos," beaked "horses," shiny "wolves," hugh "hyenas," little spinning lizards, and of course the two sorts of flying "dragons," Also the human machines were convincing --the war machines, bulldozers, and the 3-D displays in the control room. The "Hanging Mountains" were spectacular, but they were the one thing which stood out as being against the laws of physics, as opposed in just being permissibly improbable.

COMPUTER GRAPHICS
Clearly there was a great deal of computer graphic work in the film, but how much? I assume that almost the whole thing was CG, except for the human beings, when they were not being avatars. I think the avatars and the humanoid aliens had to be done the same way as Gollum in Lord of the Rings -- real actors in blue suits with lights all over them to get the right motions, and then CG modeled aliens copying the motions. It is possible that the human machines were non-CG model work, and perhaps the more distant panoramas, and views of the Tree. Anyway, it was very seamlessly put together, which must have been difficult. It is interesting that the makers of earlier films that Shrek and Lord of the Rings were eager to tell us about their technical achievements - "Look how clever we are!" but James Cameron seems to be more sophisticated in wanting us to concentrate on the film, not the technique. He is almost shy about it.

LEGS
I think I am right in saying that all the animals listed in "Imagination" are hexapods - they have six legs. On our Earth, all the vertebrates that descended from the fish that came out of the sea and onto land -- the amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals -- are tetrapods, with four legs, sometimes greatly modified. Birds and bats have two legs and two wings which are modified legs. Whales have front flippers and a vestigial hip joint. Even snakes have a vestigial hip joint, though nothing is left of the shoulder. Humans and apes have two legs and two arms. Similarly, on the Avatar planet, the land animals have six legs and the two sorts of flying dragons have two pairs of wings and two legs. But the indigenous people are humanoid, with two legs and two arms -- they are quadrupeds, apparently the only ones on the planet. This is the second big impossibility, as severe as the "Hanging Mountains," but this time against the laws of biology and evolution.

AVATARS
How did the humans get the avatar bodies? Did they use bodies of real aliens and modify them, in which case were they abducted illegally? Or did they build them biologically from the ground up, a fearsome task? Since Jake's Avatar could only be used by himself, due to the death of his identical twin brother, who had identifical genetics, and for whim it was specially made, I assume it must have been the latter. The big weakness of the idea is that the human and his Avatar can never be awake simultaneously. And the Avatar body may at any moment suddenly become unwakeably unconscious if anyone tampers with the "pod" in which the human lies.

MARINES
The crippled hero Jake is an ex-marine, and early in the film says, "Once a Marine, always a Marine" - ie., their behaviour and way of thinking is burned into them. When he is first awakened in his Atavar body, the doctors and medical technicians tell him to take it slow so that he can adjust, and they can check him out. Instead, he ignores them, rips out the various sensors and tubes, crashes violently out of the place, breaking the atmospheric seal to the danger fo his colleagues, and runs into the forest, of which he knows nothing except that is very dangerous. Surely, this is totally un-Marine behaviour. Of course, to a crippled man, it would be an exceedly exhilarating experience to find oneself whole, and as a bonus to have a bigger, stronger, more agile body than the human one. Even so...

SUPPLIES
In the battle scenes, Jake in his Avatar body seems well supplied with human weapons - hand grenades and automatic rifle. Where did he get them, as he never, in his Avatar form, went back to the human base, nor to the small base set up by his friends and by himself in his human body. Did I miss something?


COMMENT BY JO TAVENER

Jo Tavener said...
I would like to make a few comments with regard to this interesting review of AVATAR. What is so wonderful about the 3-D here is that it works dramatically. Not only does it give the viewer a wonderful experience of exploring a new planet, but it gives us without words the experience that Jake has in his avatar body. The joy, the beauty, the sensuality of the world seen new and afresh provides the context in which Jake changes from a crippled, thwarted and angry marine into the planet's hero who saves the day and helps the aliens defeat the colonization of the occupiers. The fact that Jake is a Marine-- independent, tough and with a mission that gives him back his life (literally), makes him even more dangerous to his former culture.

What I especially liked with the representation of the "advanced, evil, materialistic, colonizing civilization." One doesn't have to look very far to find the perfect model for the enemy -- what many in the world still sees as the "ugly American." Consider the fact that we have our army in almost every country, that we spend more that the rest of the world put together for our military and our wars, that we leave countries devastated after we occupy them -- Vietman, Cambodia, Iraq, Afganistan... When the colonel gets in his machine body, his giant grotesque form saunters forth with all the arrogance I see in Blackwater mercinaries. I also like the civilian contractor -- Halliburton anyone?

I also accept the fact the Jack cannot be awake as a human when he is in his avatar body. Taking on the logic somewhat of films like Three Faces of Eve, the one can be aware of the other but the two are different personalities with different ego structures, and here even different bodily processes. The film seems to be saying you can't be in the two places at the same time. You can't be in two bodies at the same time.

What a wonderful experience to step out of yourself and be able to walk in the shoes of another -- to be able to see the world from an entirely different perspective. How wonderful it must be for a character like Jake to come alive again with a strong and agile body in a new and beautiful world. What a wonderful opportunity to have the ability to help preserve such a world.

Some criticism from the left takes the form of saying that this uses the old and tried frame of "white man's burden." Only a white hero -- or here advanced civilized man -- can save the poor naive natives. While that may seem correct, it does not fit the facts of the story. Jake choses to leave his body and his world behind. He choses to become an alien and live that life with all its beauties and fragilities. To start anew in a lovely world and warm people who understand that it takes a village -- who would not jump at such a chance. I know I would!

March 23, 2010 2:02 PM

More than SciFi: The Sparrow, by Mary Doria Russell

If you are seeking an action story, do not read this book.

If you are seeking a story in which good and evil are clearly deliniated, when good is rewarded and evil is punished, do not read this book.

If you are seeking a book in which discussions of ideas & morals, means and ends, are as much as part of the story as some very likeable characters, make The Sparrow your next read.

The plot: a few years from now, an astronomer discovers a planet in a nearby solar system which is inhabited--deduced by radio transmissions of music. While the world governments dither over what to do, the Vatican quietly launches its own ship, with a crew of eight--4 priests and 4 laypeople; or 5 believers and 3 skeptics; or 7 current/former Christians and 1 Jew; or a leader/an astronomer/a doctor/an engineer, a linguist/a computer whiz/a gardener/a musicologist. The mission of the mixed group is to make peaceful contact, for an exchange of knowledge. Period. They are not traveling 17 light years to either convert/enslave the natives, or to amass wealth, or to establish a power base. Their motives are pure. The results are horrific.

The book opens after the only survivor has arrived back on earth, barely alive after being tortured, and accused of having become both a prostitute and a child-murderer. The Vatican is receiving very bad press over this horrible, misunderstood situation, and its leaders (and the reader) has to extract the true story from Father Emilio, bit by painful bit. "It's all true, I suppose,..."but it's all wrong." Once you've met George, Anne, D.W., Emilio, Sophia & Jimmy, you will be unable to drop this book, unable to stop until you discover what horrors these good, mature, selfless, likeable people unintentially precipitated, both for themselves and for the natives of Rakhat.

The Sparrow is a fine choice for a book discussion group. Is it possible for peoples to not make mistakes in communication, when their cultures hold different beliefs, values, and practices? We all view the world through our backgrounds--when one culture contains taken-for-granted elements that can't be imagined by another culture, whose fault is it when misunderstandings occur? Were the tragedies unavoidable?

[There is sequel, The Children of God. You will probably feel compelled to read it, but it suffers by comparison with the original.]

Review of The Shack

The Shack, by William P. Young, Wayne Jacobson and Brad Cummings

“A bad book owes to many trees/a forest of apologies.” J. Patrick Lewis

A currently popular book is The Shack. It is a religious polemic pretending to be a novel. It has sold a lot of copies (though fewer than Harry Potter, with its theme of self-sacrifice). But C. S. Lewis once humbly noted that sales of his popular book, The Screwtape Letters, didn’t automatically guarantee that people were reading it. The Shack is being compared to Pilgrim’s Progress, a religious allegory from the 17th century. In the 28th century novel Hyperion, a sarcastic editor refers to the Pilgrim’s Progress effect—i.e., a book that people felt obligated to purchase, even though they never read it. Christopher Morley’s irrepressible bookseller Roger Mifflin (The Haunted Bookshop) remarked, “…there is no such thing, abstractly, as a ‘good’ book. A book is ‘good’ only when it meets some human hunger or refutes some human error. A book that is good for me would very likely be punk for you.” The possibility exists that The Shack will speak to some people, but that many more will follow Dorothy Parker’s recommendation for a bad book, “…not to be tossed aside lightly, but to be thrown with great force.”

But let’s pretend that it is a novel. The major characters are Mack, a middle-aged father, grieving the death of his six year old daughter at the hands of a psychopath; God the Parent (an African American woman named Papa—who later assumes the appearance of a man—who speaks like Gone With the Wind’s Mammy, albeit with standard grammar); Jesus (a Middle Eastern man who denounces organized religion); and the Holy Spirit (an Asian woman, alias Elouisa or Sarayu). Three years after the murder, they all spend a few days together at the murder site, so that Mack can come to terms with his loss.They have a lot of chatty, heart to heart conversations, while eating Papa’s home-cooked meals; walking on water with Jesus; confronting Sophia, the physical representation of Wisdom, in a cave; and having lots of other fun, summer-camp experiences. We are told, over and over, that Mack is suffering The Great Sadness (italics are the authors’). Their chummy conversations would not be out of place at a neighborhood barbecue. Even when Mack is supposed to be crying out his pain, his suffering appears to be slighter than actors on TV commercials complaining of indigestion. The reader knows that a terrible wrong has been done to a child, and that he should be appalled, but somehow this book is leeched of all authentic emotion.

One of the best criterions of fiction is Coleridge’s “willing suspension of disbelief”. My disbelief never left the ground. I couldn’t swallow the reality of any of these characters; I couldn’t feel their pain. [There are two recent, superb novels about missing children that are much more intense. Try reading Case Histories, by Kate Atkinson, or In the Woods, by Tana French.]

Another test of a fiction’s worth is the Jillsy Sloper standard (from The World According to Garp): you read “to find out what happens”. I choked my way through the entire book (my book club will be discussing it soon), and found that surprise! Mack learns to trust God, and to accept that while God cannot stop evil, he can use it to promote good, and that Missy is happy in heaven with Jesus. What original ideas! The characters are contrivances, the plot is appalling, and the prose is dreadful. It’s nearly as nauseating as The Bridges of Madison Country.

None of this disparagement is meant to cast doubt on the existence of God. But there are so many fine novels in which breathing characters deal with God, faith, loss, pain, hope, forgiveness, acceptance, redemption—why read this tedious, maudlin mess?

One of the best novels that incorporates religious faith without preaching is Heidi, a book that can be read at age 10 or age 90. Heidi’s unswerving faith in an always-listening God, who can turn evil into good, is shown to be true by the actions of the characters. [Be sure to read the original, and not a dumbed-down adaptation.]

For real pain over the loss of a child, guilt & forgiveness, read In This House of Brede—I’ve read it many times, and still tear up. For self-inflicted guilt & redemption, try Saint Maybe, and watch 19 year old Ian take on the responsibility for his brother’s kids, after having maybe accidentally killed their parents. (Ian is helped by The Church of the Second Chance—there’s never been a better name for a church.) For a sense of religion shaping a community, try The River Midnight, set in a late 19th century Polish shtetl, and watch God work through the rabbi, the midwife, the butcher, the thief.

If The Shack is not a novel, it could be shelved in the nonfiction, religious section, next to (the more imaginative and readable classic), The Screwtape Letters. Or it could be found beside the thoughtful, painful When Bad Things Happen to Good People. Why isn’t it? Maybe it’s because the trinity of authors are very modest, or because they can hope for greater sales if their work is labeled fiction, or because they have no theological degrees at all. What can one make of the character Jesus’ hard judgment that organized religion is one of the three great evils in the world (along with government and economics), unless the authors are unattached to any mainstream church.

There is a fair amount of pseudo-theological gobbledygook, like this sentence: “If the female had been created first, there would have been no circle of relationship, and thus no possibility of a fully equal face-to-face relationship between the male and the female.” This is merely irritating.

But then here is this head-scratcher: the character Jesus says: “Those who love me come from every system that exists. They were Buddhists or Mormons, Baptists or Muslims, Democrats, Republicans and many who don’t vote or are not part of any Sunday morning or religious institutions. I have followers who were murders and many who were self-righteous. Some are bankers and bookies, Americans and Iraqis, Jews and Palestinians. I have no desire to make them Christian, but I do want to join them in their transformation into sons and daughters of my Papa, into my brothers and sisters, into my Beloved.” (chapter 12) But Papa says: “Like I said, everything is about him. Creation and history are all about Jesus. He is the very center of our purpose and in him we are now fully human, so our purpose and your destiny are forever linked. You might say that we have put all our eggs in the one human basket. There is no plan B.” (chapter 13) Does no one else find these two statements inconsistent? Do the authors believe that all religions are valid, or only one?

Some of the “comfort” offered isn’t comforting. Sarayu says, “A child is protected because she is loved, not because she has a right to be protected.” And Jesus assures Mack that he had been with Missy throughout her kidnapping, torture and murder. If this is a novel, with a fictional character called Jesus, do you find it comforting, or sadistic, that he held the hand of a child who was being sliced and diced? And if this is a novel, does it make sense that a god (under any name) who is capable of producing good from evil, waits until numerous little girls were murdered, so that He could first have his healing chat with Mack, and only then let Mack find Missy’s body, with the clues that the authorities need to arrest the psychopath? Does anyone find this idea of God consoling? (Is God planning a week-end for all the other children’s parents?) The book of Job is more honest: terrible things happen; God is inscrutable; deal with it by faith. Religions can demand your faith in the ultimate good; novels earn it. This pious non-novel, despite all of the laudatory praise heaped on the front pages, does not deserve its acclaim. It was written on a word processor, not on stone tablets.

Another best-selling book, a true novel, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, show the faith, courage, & self-sacrifice of its people as they try to fix their broken world as much as possible. One of the most direct characters says, “Reading good books spoils you for reading bad ones.” Maybe that’s why I gagged on The Shack.

Reviewed by Bonnie Egli, Swissvale Library