Train to Pakistan, by Khushwant Singh

Partition of the British Indian empire in 1947 into India and Pakistan is the setting for this tale. Muslim, Sikh and Hindu live peacefully side by side in villages throughout the empire prior to Partition (just as Christians, Jews and Muslims lived peacefully side by side throughout the Middle East for hundreds of years and Americans of diverse faiths and cultures live together peacefully in current day United States). During Partition, this balance is disrupted as people of differing religions are moved to their new countries by the new governments. Millions of people were killed. This is a tale of one such village in Punjab. I think diversity makes a society strong and living among people who are different from you keeps them familiar and less threatening in their "otherness." When we segregate into homogeneous groups and put up walls, people who are different from us become even more unfamiliar. These homogeneous groups lose capacity for open and tolerant thinking; they worry among themselves about things not worrisome and become afraid. Bad things come of this. This is a cautionary tale for Americans (and the French and British, too)  - the rise of populist/nationalist groups and the rhetoric surrounding the election of Trump as President augur things similar. America is better than this.

Marrow, by Robert Reed

Everything in this story is a little too large (or long) to fully imagine. By the end, though, I had a fairer grasp of its scope. I suppose that by the time humanity has developed the expertise to explore other regions of the galaxy (without the aid of space/time warping devices), it will also have evolved the ability to extend its lifespan - I guess it would need to - for traveling around the galaxy at a not insignificant fraction of the speed of light would, nevertheless, take hundreds of thousands of years. Against this backdrop place a spaceship the size of Jupiter with rockets larger than moons, fuel tanks the size of small planets and a hidden world deep within its core the size of Mars. The masters (not the builders) of the ship are humans who can live nearly forever. The most interesting part of this story is what happens as a society evolves and the role of religion/belief systems in shaping it. The wonder of the story is in the size of everything and, to a degree, how the ship is maintained. What's missing, for me, is how humans evolve in terms of their thinking, what distracts them from the tedium of life (if it is, indeed, tedious), their moral grounding and philosophy when one lives for hundreds of thousands of years. What continues to provide them pleasure? Intellectual stimulation? In the end, a reason to keep living? These ideas are noticeably absent. Short of this, it was a really cool read.

By the way, I've been reading Asimov's Foundation series (more than halfway through). Hence my absence in the blogosphere.

In the Kingdom of Ice, by Hampton Sides

This is the story of the USS Jeannette, the U.S. Navy boat which in 1879 carried 33 men north to find the North Pole. Two years on a ship trapped in arctic ice followed by a 1000 mile journey by foot and small boat to the Siberian coast and then winter sets in, again. This is a survival story that rivals, even eclipses in some ways, the Shackleton story (see earlier post from 2014, as brief as it was). I particularly enjoyed the non-expedition narrative - life in the mid to late 19th century in the U.S., other expeditions and the romance of adventure (why this was deemed so important in the public and government's eyes), current state of knowledge regarding Earth's geography - many thought that there was an open sea at the North Pole which was surrounded by an "annulus" of ice (a fairly ludicrous thought in retrospect especially given the nascent stages of the Industrial Revolution), and the exploits of Bennett, the owner of the New York Herald newspaper (the paper of the day) which financed the entire expedition. This is a rapid and engrossing read. Truly worth my time (and thanks to my colleagues who told me to read it).

City on Fire, by Garth Risk Hallberg

This is clearly an ambitious novel and I dove in with enthusiasm, even trying to figure a way to bring it with me on a trip to the Caribbean. I hadn't yet started using a Kindle. The book is 900 pages long and a brick in weight. I settled for Azimov for my trip instead (Foundation) and found myself the other night looking longingly at Azimov's Foundation and Empire as I struggled down the homestretch of Hallberg's novel. The last 100 pages including the night of the blackout moved like molasses at forty degrees. Perhaps this was me (I?) and the filter through which the book was experienced. Perhaps I tired of the writing style. Or maybe the plot slowed and the musings of the characters and narrator were not enough to sustain me. Maybe I didn't have the energy. Maybe because of the weirdly placed large and rare words sprinkled regularly throughout the text, seemingly incongruent with the words around them? They were not frequent enough to have me keep a dictionary at my side (for example like reading Christopher Hitchens). In many ways I feel similarly about this book as I do about Tartt's Goldfinch - long and well written in places but ponderous at times and ends clunkily.

Brave Genius, by Sean B. Carroll

One of my colleagues recommended this to me on the recommendation of her son (a pathology resident at the same institution as the author). This is the tale of two French Nobel prize winners (Albert Camus, literature and Jacques Monod, physiology or medicine) who were friends and who also served in the French resistance during World War 2. The first half of the book is about France during the war and the resistance; the second half of the book is about the postwar restoration of French society and the conflict between Communism and Western societies. While both are interesting, the battles that followed the war, both with weapons (e.g. Hungary) and in science (Lysenko), and how these guys, and others, slowed the influence of communism and non-rationalist ideas, are the treasures of this book. The positive influence these men had on their country and the world during the decades after the war is astounding (not to mention the crazy things they did as members of the French resistance). It's remarkable that I've read Camus, indeed one of his novels (The Plague) is one of the best books I've read and one of only a few I've read more than once, yet I didn't know a lick about his personal life. I've studied genetics as part of my medical training and learned about Monod's work in school, and didn't have an inkling about the extraordinary life he led outside the laboratory. This is a great read - something for many people here (World War 2, France, philosophy, science).