Second Genesis

Second Genesis by Jeffrey Anderson

Penguin, July 2006
massmarket paperback, 371 pages

ISBN-13: 9780515141986

recommended

Synopsis from backcover:

Survival is instinct. So is fear.

In a private compound deep in the jungles of the Amazon rain forest, a team of scientists, expert in stem cell engineering, is playing God. With unnerving success. Among them, young biologist Jamie Kendrick is grappling with the implications of the lab's creation - a genetically altered chimpanzee, as intelligent, as soulful, and as sentient as man. It reads. It writes. It reasons. And like man, it hunts.

My thoughts:

Second Genesis was entertaining escapism. It would be a great airplane book. I'll be the first to say that the writing is uneven and illogical jumps seem to take place in the story. The ending is rather abrupt and inconclusive. I thought Anderson did a nice job trying to show the Dr. Frankenstein-like recklessness and arrogance in the scientists secretive genetic modifications of the chimps and addressing the morality and ethics involved in the existence of a human-created sentient creature. While parts of the book are quite intriguing, other parts are lacking.
Recommended - for summer reading fun

Quotes:
Jamie left the commons, kicking a tree root with her boot, and walked toward her research station, built a half mile deeper into the forest.... She had built the entire structure herself 120 feet up on an emergent evergreen tree. It was a fifteen-foot platform lashed in the crook of three sturdy branches. The structure gave her excellent visibility over the lower canopy of the rain forest, including a view of the banks of the Rio Vicioso as it infiltrated the rain forest to join with the Amazon River ten miles downstream. pg. 11

A fence? She looked again. What was a fence doing in the middle of the amazon Jungle?

She picked herself up and limped toward the structure. It wasn't just a fence, but a massive barrier thirty feet high with five feet of barbs at the top that looked as thought they had been lifted out of San Quentin." pg. 13

Slowly, gingerly, the creature emerged from the tree. She completely lost her breath. It was definitely an ape. Anything that big was an Old World Primate.... There was nothing that large in the New World. pg. 16

On the ground, in large block letters facing her, upside down to the chimp, was written, WHO AM I pg. 19

He finally looked her in the eyes, resolutely. "I might consider a limited partnership. I could bring you on as a consulting scientist, and if I see evidence that you can be a team player, have something to offer, your role will expand. I can offer you a small stipend, an office. But this has to be with one condition: this experiment is strictly confidential." pg. 35

And from the acknowledgments:

My editor, Natalee Rosenstein, deserves all credit for turning the manuscript into a beautiful finished project. For all my readers who love a great story but do not spend pleasant nights recapitulating the mathematics of perturbation theory in population strategy spaces for zero-sum games, Natalee is your champion."

Knowing

Knowing

2009; PG-13

Director: Alex Proyas

Cast: Nicolas Cage, Rose Byrne, Chandler Canterbury, Ben Mendelsohn

All Movie Guide: A time capsule containing a cryptic message about the coming apocalypse sends a concerned father on a race to prevent the horrific events from unfolding as predicted in this sci-fi thriller...

We enjoyed Knowing. No spoilers here if you haven't seen the film.

The Children's Blizzard

The Children's Blizzard by David Laskin

HarperCollins, November 2004

hardcover, 307 pages
ISBN-13: 9780060520755
nonfiction

very highly recommended, reread

Synopsis from cover:

January 12, 1888, began as an unseasonably warm morning across Nebraska, the Dakotas, and Minnesota, the weather so mild that children walked to school without coats and gloves. But that afternoon, without warning, the atmosphere suddenly, violently changed. One moment the air was calm; the next the sky exploded in a raging chaos of horizontal snow and hurricane-force winds. Temperatures plunged as an unprecedented cold front ripped through the center of the continent.

By Friday morning, January 13, some five hundred people lay dead on the drifted prairie, many of them children who had perished on their way home from country schools. In a few terrifying hours, the hopes of the pioneers had been blasted by the bitter realities of their harsh environment. Recent immigrants from Germany, Norway, Denmark, and the Ukraine learned that their free homestead was not a paradise but a hard, unforgiving place governed by natural forces they neither understood nor controlled.

With the storm as its dramatic, heartbreaking focal point, The Children's Blizzard captures this pivotal moment in American history by tracing the stories of five families who were forever changed that day. Drawing on family interviews and memoirs, as well as hundreds of contemporary accounts, David Laskin creates an intimate picture of the men, women, and children who made choices they would regret as long as they lived. Here too is a meticulous account of the evolution of the storm and the vain struggle of government forecasters to track its progress.

The blizzard of January 12, 1888, is still remembered on the prairie. Children fled that day while their teachers screamed into the relentless roar. Husbands staggered into the blinding wind in search of wives. Fathers collapsed while trying to drag their children to safety. In telling the story of this meteorological catastrophe, the deadliest blizzard ever to hit the prairie states, David Laskin has produced a masterful portrait of a tragic crucible in the settlement of the American heartland.

My thoughts:

The Children's Blizzard is another one of my favorite non-fiction books. It's also another book for weather geeks. This time the weather disaster is the January 12, 1888 blizzard that hit the Great Plains. Since this occurred just 12 years before the Galveston Hurricane, there was present in the national Weather Service infighting, jealousy, and control of information, and another disaster happened without any clear warning sent to the public. Arguably, in this case, even if the storm had been correctly predicted and the information passed on, very few of the people in the vast region the storm hit would have received any notification or warning. Laskin includes information about the immigrants in the region and history on the government's weather service. I thought Laskin, another good writer, did a commendable job in setting the tone and the historical context. while leading up to the blizzard and its aftermath.

One of the reasons The Children's Blizzard is a favorite of mine is that I basically know the area of the country in which the blizzard occurred. I recognize the names of towns and can place them not only on a map but can "see" the land surrounding them. My paternal grandparents were Swedish settlers in Nebraska. I also know how quickly the weather can change in the area. I went to college in the Great Plains and vividly recall one day in early Spring where we woke up to warm, short sleeved shirt and shorts weather. Early in the afternoon the weather suddenly began to change, temperatures quickly dropped and we had a huge blizzard that night. Even today you hear stories about motorists thoughtlessly driving into a blizzard and getting stranded in their vehicles. With all our advances in weather forecasting and weather radar, people still need to understand that a natural disaster can occur. They need to take warnings seriously and have a healthy respect for how quickly weather can change rather than assigning blame every where but at themselves. Reread, Very Highly Recommended - one of the best

Summer Lovin' challenge

Quotes:

On January 12, 1888, a blizzard broke over the center of the North American continent. Out of nowhere, a soot gray cloud appeared over the northwest horizon. The air grew still for a long, eerie measure, then the sky began to roar and a wall of ice dust blasted the prairie. opening

Chance is always a silent partner in disaster. Bad luck, bad timing, the wrong choice at a crucial moment, and the door is inexorably shut and barred. The tragedy of the January 12 blizzard was that the bad timing extended across a region and cut through the shared experiences of an entire population. The storm hit the most thickly settled sections of Nebraska and Dakota Territory at the worst possible moment-late in the morning or early in the afternoon on the first mild day in several weeks, a day when children had raced to school with no coats or gloves and farmers were far from home doing chores they had put off during the long siege of cold. pg. 2

One of the many tragedies of that day was the failure of the weather forecasters, a failure compounded of faulty science, primitive technology, human error, narrow-mindedness, and sheer ignorance. America in 1888 had the benefit of an established, well-funded, nationwide weather service attached to the Army and headed by a charismatic general-yet the top priority on any given day was not weather, but political infighting. Forecasters-"indications officers," as they were styled then-insisted their forecasts were correct 83.7 percent of the time for the next twenty-four hours, but they were forbidden to use the word tornado in any prediction; they believed that America's major coastal cities were immune to hurricanes; they relied more on geometry and cartography than on physics in tracking storms; they lacked the means and, for the most part, the desire to pursue meteorological research. pg. 4

Many of the "great storms and waves of intense heat or intense cold" escaped them altogether-or were mentioned in their daily "indications" too late, too vaguely, too timidly to do anyone any good. When it came to "great disasters," they knew far less than they thought knew. pg. 5

The blizzard of January 12, 1888, known as "the Schoolchildren's Blizzard" because so many of the victims were children caught out on their way home from school, became a marker in the lives of the settlers, the watershed event that separated before and after. The number of deaths-estimated at between 250 and 500 -was small compared to that of the Johnstown Flood that wiped out an entire industrial town in western Pennsylvania the following year or the Galveston hurricane of 1900 that left more than eight thousand dead. But it was traumatic enough that it left an indelible bruise on the consciousness of the region. The pioneers were by and large a taciturn lot, reserved and sober Germans and Scandinavians who rarely put their thoughts or feelings down on paper, and when they did avoided hyperbole at all costs. Yet their accounts of the blizzard of 1888 are shot through with amazement, awe, disbelief. pg. 6-7

What follows is the story of this storm and some of the individuals whose lives were forever changed by it. Parents who lost children. Children who lost parents. Fathers who died with their coats and their arms wrapped around their sons. Sisters who lay side by side with their faces frozen to the ground. Teachers who locked the schoolhouse doors to keep their students safe inside or led them to shelter-or to death-when the roofs blew off their one-room schoolhouses. Here, too, is the story of the Army officer paid by his government to predict the evolution of the storm and warn people of its approach. In a sense it is a book about multiple and often fatal collisions - collisions between ordinary people going about their daily lives and the immense unfathomable disturbances of weather. pg. 7

Today a "surprise" storm that killed over two hundred people would instigate a fierce outcry in the press, vigorous official hand-wringing, and a flood of reports by every government agency remotely involved, starting with the National Weather Service. But in the Gilded Age, blame for the suffering attendant on an act of God was left unassigned. Hardly anyone believed that government agencies had either the expertise or the obligation to forestall disaster... pg. 254

Isaac's Storm

Isaac's Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History

by Erik Larson
Random House, August 1999
hardcover, 324 pages, including notes, sources, index
ISBN-13: 9780609602331
nonfiction

reread, very highly recommended - one of the best

Synopsis from the publisher:

September 8, 1900, began innocently in the seaside town of Galveston, Texas. Even Isaac Cline, resident meteorologist for the U.S. Weather Bureau failed to grasp the true meaning of the strange deep-sea swells and peculiar winds that greeted the city that morning. Mere hours later, Galveston found itself submerged in a monster hurricane that completely destroyed the town and killed over six thousand people in what remains the greatest natural disaster in American history-and Isaac Cline found himself the victim of a devastating personal tragedy.

Using Cline's own telegrams, letters, and reports, the testimony of scores of survivors, and our latest understanding of the science of hurricanes, Erik Larson builds a chronicle of one man's heroic struggle and fatal miscalculation in the face of a storm of unimaginable magnitude. Riveting, powerful, and unbearably suspenseful, Isaac's Storm is the story of what can happen when human arrogance meets the great uncontrollable force of nature.

My thoughts

Both Wonder Boy (my adult son) and I would put Erik Larson's Isaac's Storm on our lists of top nonfiction books that everyone should read. We often refer to it in conversations. Not only is it about the devastating hurricane that hit Galveston in 1900, but all of the mistakes made that prevented any prediction of a hurricane. It's a brief history of weather forecasting. It's about how hubris and ambition can sometimes prevent accurate gathering of data. It's about how the combination of personalities in the right place allowed the existence of an hurricane to be basically ignored until it made landfall and wiped out an entire city. It's about the deception and misinformation some people perpetrated in order to cover up their errors in the aftermath. It is a nonfiction book with a story so compelling that it reads like fiction. It's a book any weather geek or disaster freak will love.

Now that I've established that I love this book, let me also add that Erik Larson is a good writer. Often in nonfiction books a case can be made that there are "boring" parts, sections of the book that move too slowly, especially when compared to a fiction book. It's a difficult balance to pass along accurate information, historically or technically, while keeping the book itself satisfying and interesting. In Isaac's Storm Erik Larsen was pitch-perfect. Isaac's Storm is Very Highly Recommended - one of the best

(Summer Lovin' Challenge)

Quotes:

September 8, 1900
Throughout the night of Friday, September 7, 1900, Isaac Monroe Cline found himself waking to a persistent sense of something gone wrong. opening

Upon first meeting Isaac, men found him to be modest and self-effacing, but those who came to know him well saw a hardness and confidence that verged on conceit. pg. 4

...Isaac was aware of himself and how he moved through the day, and saw himself as something bigger than a mere recorder of rainfall and temperature. He was a scientist, not some farmer who gauged the weather by aches in a rheumatoid knee. Isaac personally had encountered and explained some of the strangest atmospheric phenomena a weatherman could ever hope to experience, but also had read the works of the most celebrated meteorologists and physical geographers of the nineteenth century, men like Henry Piddington, Matthew Fontaine Maury, William Redfield, and James Espy, and he had followed their celebrated hunt for the Law of Storms. He believed deeply that he understood it all. pg. 4-5

They talked about the weather. A familiar dynamic emerged. Joseph, as the younger brother and junior employee eager to prove himself, made the case too strongly that something peculiar was happening and that Washington must be informed. Isaac, ever confident, told Joseph to get some sleep, that he would take over and assess the situation and if necessary telegraph his findings to headquarters. pg. 10

Where critics most faulted Galveston was for its lack of geophysical presence. The city occupied a long, narrow island....Its highest point, on Broadway, was 8.7 feet above sealevel; its average altitude was half that, so low that with each one-foot increase in tide, the city lost a thousand feet of beach. pg. 12

Many years later he [Isaac] would write, "If we had known then what we know now of these swells, and the tides they create, we would have known earlier the terrors of the storm which these swells...told us in unerring language was coming." pg. 14

He had stumbled into the deadliest storm ever to target America. Within the next twenty-four hours, eight thousand men, women, and children in the city of Galveston would lose their lives. The city itself would lose its future> Isaac would suffer an unbearable loss. And he would wonder always if some of the blame did not belong to him.

This is the story of Isaac and his time in America, the last turning of the centuries, when the hubris of men led them to believe they could disregard even nature itself." pg. 16

Moore and officials of the bureau's West Indies hurricane service had long been openly disdainful of the Cubans. It was an attitude, however, that seemed to mask a deeper fear that Cuba's own meteorologists might in fact be better at predicting hurricanes than the bureau...

Through Dunwoody, Moore persuaded the War Department to ban from Cuba's government owned telegraph lines all cables about the weather....

It was an absurd action. Cuba's meteorologists had pioneered the art of hurricane prediction... pg. 102

[Clara] Barton was accused of withholding clothing....and of squandering money...The Palmetto Post.... called her a vulture. None of it fazed her. The same thing occurred at every disaster she attended. "It is," she wrote, "an unfortunate trait in the human character to assail or asperse others engaged in the performance of humanitarian acts." pg. 256

The Birds

The Birds
1963
Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Cast: Rod Taylor, Tippi Hedren, Jessica Tandy, Suzanne Pleshette



My Friend Amy's The Summer of Hitchcock




The first time I saw The Birds it terrified me much more than Psycho.

What are the chances I'd ever be checking into a run down motel off the beaten path where I'd meet a disturbed mamma's boy? Not good.

What are the chances I'd ever see birds all flocking together in great numbers on telephone wires or a school jungle gym, for example? Almost every blessed day.

That is what is so terrifying. You see birds "innocently" hanging out in a flock daily. By the time I watched Psycho for the first time, I knew there was a terrifying shower scene, but even knowing the birds are going to attack doesn't really prepare you for the reality. It's the flocking, the grouping. We expect to see flocks of birds and we normally ignore them. We know birds hang around in gangs, but how can we tell if or when these gangs might decide to turn to the dark side? I think The Birds, although it does have some blood and gore, is another good example of the story also helping to create the suspense and horror more than the actual blood.

My nephew, Movie Dude, often talks about remaking old classic movies (or even not so old or classic movies). Looking at the movie today and knowing about the many advances made in special effects, I'll admit that the bird attacks don't always look very real. What I'm afraid of in any remake, however, is that the blood, gore, and special effects will be the main emphasis, thus losing all that delicious suspense. Suspense, like in the scene where Tippi is sitting outside the school and every time the camera angle includes the jungle gym behind her... more birds. I feel the terror when the kids are running down the street. I'm not sure if more blood or realistic bird attacks would be an improvement. I've always found the birds terrifying enough just as Hitchcock filmed it.

Germs

Germs: Biological Weapons and America's Secret War

by Judith Miller, William Broad, Stephen Engelberg

Simon & Schuster, September 2001

hardcover, 384 pages (including notes, bibliography, index)

ISBN-13: 9780684871585

nonfiction

very highly recommended

Synopsis

In this groundbreaking work of investigative journalism, Judith Miller, Stephen Engelberg, and William Broad of The New York Times uncover the truth about biological weapons and show why bio-warfare and bio-terrorism are fast becoming our worst national nightmare.

Among the startling revelations in Germs:

* How the CIA secretly built and tested a model of a Soviet-designed germ bomb, alarming some officials who felt the work pushed to the limits of what is permitted by the global treaty banning germ arms.
* How the Pentagon embarked on a secret effort to make a superbug.
* Details about the Soviet Union's massive hidden program to produce biological weapons, including new charges that germs were tested on humans.
* How Moscow's scientists made an untraceable germ that instructs the body to destroy itself.
* The Pentagon's chaotic efforts to improvise defenses against Iraq's biological weapons during the 1991 Persian Gulf War.
* How a religious cult in Oregon in the 1980s sickened hundreds of Americans in a bio-terrorism attack that the government played down to avoid panic and copycat strikes.
* Plans by the U.S. military in the 1960s to attack Cuba with germ weapons.

My Thoughts:

Germs relates frightening information about biological weapons not only today but in recent historical context and clearly shows why this threat continues to justify attention today. Since this book was released in Sept. 2001, we know we are, or were, taking terrorist attacks seriously, but perhaps we are failing to continue to stress the mass chaos biological weapons would cause. Much of the information found in this book is available in other books too so it's easily documented. There has been some discrediting of author Miller since the publication, but none of that deals with the biological weapons programs the Soviets were working on which are covered extensively here. The bottom line is really that we need to be vigilant in seriously considering the threat of biological weapons today. very highly recommended

Quotes:

In December 1997, six years after the Persian Gulf War, the Pentagon announced that it had decided to vaccinate its 2.4 million soldiers and reservists against anthrax. opening

We quickly learned that the anthrax decision was part of a much larger government effort to combat what officials believed was a growing danger from germ weapons. pg. 13

By the end of the outbreak, almost a thousand people had reported symptoms to their doctors or the hospital; 751 were confirmed to have salmonella, making it the largest outbreak in Oregon's history. pg. 19-20

More than a year would pass after the outbreak before Oregonians learned that Rajneeshees had poisoned the town. pg. 23

Such progress had a price, of course. Painstakingly, the germ-development program at Fort Detrick had tested prospective germ weapons on nearly a thousand American soldiers, in sealed chambers and the wilds of the Utah desert. Reaching beyond the military, it had exposed prisoners at the Ohio State Penitentiary, where volunteers were carefully monitored. Clandestinely, it also sprayed American cities with mild germs to investigate the likely impact of deadly pathogens. pg. 35

Germs and warfare are old allies. More than two millennia ago, Scythian archers dipped arrowheads in manure and rotting corpses to increase the deadliness of their weapons. Tatars in the fourteenth century hurled dead bodies foul with plague over the walls of enemy cities. British soldiers during the French and Indian War gave unfriendly tribes blankets sown with smallpox. The Germans in World War I spread glanders, a disease of horses, among the mounts of rival cavalries. The Japanese in World War II dropped fleas infected with plague on Chinese cities, killing hundreds and perhaps thousands of people.

Despite occasional grim successes, germ weapons have never played decisive roles in warfare or terrorism. Unintended infection is another matter. pg. 37-38

"We used to think about the Chinese and the Russians. And if we had known what they were really doing, we would have worked harder." pg. 65

Douglas J. Feith, a senior Pentagon official, told the House Intelligence Committee in August 1986 that Soviet scientists had begun rearranging germs to develop "new means of biological warfare." pg. 82

Graveyard

In the different areas of the country I have lived in as a child and adult, children have always played special games of tag under various names. The children always think that everyone knows their game of tag by the name they have given it. For us, for a time while living in Omaha, Nebraska, that game of tag was called Graveyard.

Graveyard was always played at night during the summer. It required running around our house, starting and ending in the light at the front of the house. The person who was “it” would be in the unlit, dark backyard, lurking, waiting to tag the kids running around the house. This would be the graveyard part of our game. Once tagged you would have to sit on the back step, under the swing set, or whatever area we had designated as the graveyard.

This was a noisy game. Knowing from walking my dogs how deadly quiet my current neighborhood is at night, I wonder why the neighbors put up with Graveyard. Of course, many of them would have had kids participating, but this was a late night game that could not start before 9:30 and normally closer to 10. It “had” to be played during the summer and in the dark. We would have been allowed to play it for at least half an hour. Running around in the dark almost guarantees screaming will be involved. I have a feeling that if my husband, the Snack King, and I decided to whoop it up now and make as much noise as we did back then, we’d get the police called on us for disturbing the peace.

Graveyard was also a game that was ripe for participants to incur injuries. Honestly, a game that requires children to run around a house in the dark almost screams “Be prepared for pain. You will trip and fall, or crash into someone else.” Even now my sister, Hipee (high powered executive) recalls it as being a fun game, as do I. But then I also remember crashing into people and tripping.

Now my brother, ED (El Dictator), was often “it”. I think ED enjoyed running up tagging people and scaring them in the dark. Much like Killer Tricycles, being it during Graveyard put ED in a position of power and control, only this time it was over many neighborhood kids. I seem to recall ED enjoyed doing some pretty vigorous tagging too – more of a smack-down time. Perhaps this is what made Graveyard a fun, daring game because we were really afraid of ED catching and painfully tagging us.

I don’t know if our younger siblings, sister Whiy (whiny) and later PB (pretty boy) ever really experienced a vigorous, serious game of tag played with many people. Of course, by the time they would have been ready to learn Graveyard, we were older. Additionally, in the neighborhood we were living in at that time there definitely would have been complaints over the late night noise.

I guess we could still try to introduce Graveyard to them at some family reunion, but I don’t know how that would work out. For the game to be fun we’d need a lot of participants. Everyone would have to play. I know the much younger PB, along with all our children, could run circles around the rest of us. And although Hipee and I might give it a go and do our best, Whiy would likely try to beg out of the game. Of course, ED’s getting old now and we could probably all relatively easily escape his clutches. Unless someone yells, “Coffee!” or “Peanut butter balls!” I don’t think he even runs anymore. It sort of makes playing Graveyard pointless, once the thrill of victory and agony of defeat have been eliminated…. Unless, of course, we were holding the coffee or peanut butter balls and ED had to chase us to get them. Hmmmm… thinking, thinking….