Worth Reading: Unwind by Neal Shusterman

Unwind by Neal Shusterman

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


There's a summer reading flow chart making the rounds online, in which Unwind is listed under "pro-life." I think that misstates the premise of the book and does it a disservice by (potentially) driving off certain readers.

The actual premise is that the two sides on the abortion debate have become so entrenched in their position that the only compromise possible is a ridiculous Solomonic one, in which no babies can be aborted, but at a certain age children can be given up to become organ donors--all their organs are used when the child is "unwound" so that all of him or her "lives" in other people's bodies. Shusterman, like any good science fiction writer, explores the wide range of consequences:
Babies can be dropped on doorsteps and if you find one, you must keep it--leading parents who find an unwanted baby on their doorstep to surreptitiously move it to someone else's doorstep.
A religious cult raises one child in each family specifically to be unwound, a position of honor in the family.
There's an underground resistance that smuggles kids away who are escaping their unwinding.

Shusterman follows a boy whose family is sending him to be unwound--his shock and pain at his parents doing this, his fear and helplessness, and eventually his escape. He meets a boy who was to be unwound as his family's sacrifice and who struggles to return to his unwinding, and a girl who was raised as a ward of the state and was not quite good enough a musician not to be unwound.

Their stories, and those of the other kids they meet, are intense and involving, and the world in which the story takes place is well drawn and eerily plausible. This is a great book for fans of the Hunger Games series--strong, well-drawn characters fighting for their lives, in a world that demands we look a little more closely at our own. Don't let the facile and inaccurate label on the internet flow chart put you off--this is a compelling read no matter what your position on abortion.



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The Real History of the Reagan Administration

(Nod to author Alan Axelrod, author of the Real History series, which has so far not taken on the Reagan years.)

This weekend there has been a great deal of rewriting history in re the Reagan administration. There is nothing wrong with admiring the man or his administration, as long as what you're admiring is what actually happened.

Let's look at a few facts:

• The highest postwar unemployment rate was during the Reagan administration, at 9.7 % in 1982. (It matched 2010's 9.6% in 1983.)
• Federal spending nearly doubled, from $590.9 billion in 1980 to $1.064 trillion in 1988, with an accompanying increase in debt from $711.9 billion (1980) to $2.052 trillion (1988).
• Reagan raised taxes 11 times during his administration.

So those who deify Reagan's fiscal record had best realize they are supporting high unemployment, vast increases in spending and debt, and raising taxes to cover it all.

Rather than look at the Reagan era through the rose-colored glasses of the "morning in America" ad campaign and his warm public persona, how about considering why those things happened during an administration that ostensibly wanted to decrease government and taxation? Rather than laud a myth-shrouded icon, how about analyzing why Reagan actually failed? There's a lot more opportunity in that for learning how to solve our problems than there is in rewriting history to make believe the problems didn't happen.

Nothing Can Convey the Horror More Effectively Than the Actual Horror

In America, our movies can be as violent as possible, but real violence is sanitized for our protection. Our peace of mind. Things in real life that are violent--like, oh, war, for one--should upset our peace of mind, because if they don't, we continue to live in a land of make-believe where the only threats to our safety we fear are the ones that are manipulated for the benefit of others and control over us. In reality, we are most of us pretty safe and comfortable. Do we appreciate that?

Wonkette took a break from the snark today to give some very graphic perspective. All over the news today we are seeing reaction shots from the assassination of Benazir Bhutto and the associated deaths of a number of her followers--photos of angst, ash, maybe a little blood. Wonkette posted the graphic, horrifying, uncropped photos of the carnage.

[T]he news tonight will likely focus on the implications for us as a country and on the campaign and blah blah blah, yes, it’s all really important. But, also, a lot of regular people died today, too. Some of them were poor, some were old, and they died taking advantage of their (current) right of free assembly, which most of us probably take for granted. They died and were horrifically injured participating in the political process of their country, even knowing that in the end it might not make any difference because they might still end up under the thumb of a dictator. And every single person in the pictures below is brown, and likely all of them are Muslim. These are the people that some people would like to send back “to their caves”, these are some of the people we mock as poor cab drivers or accuse of taking “our” jobs or simply overlook even when they are in front of us. They had families and lives and probably jobs when they left their houses this morning to see a political candidate speak who probably half-suspected she wouldn’t make it to the election alive but ran anyway. And it makes all the backstabbing and machinations of our candidates trying to plant stupid rumors about drug use and out-of-wedlock babies and all the rest of it seem that much more nauseating and petty to me today.

If nothing else, the photos will make it clear why the number of dead has been given as anywhere from 12 to 20; counting the dead is not a simple matter when they are blown to bits. These dozen or two dozen, added to the hundred-plus killed in an earlier attempt on Bhutto's life. Nothing like that happened in Iowa today.

A few days ago, my friend Laurie Kahn died (suddenly, but not through violence) so she's been much on my mind. Laurie was a great and vocal champion of civil liberties. She often expressed frustration that Americans could so easily sit by and let their hard-won freedoms be taken away. As a nation, the U.S. touts itself as the great champion of democracy. Yet many of us have, as Laurie said, let fear govern us and given up freedoms in return for that peace of mind I mentioned. Meantime, in Pakistan, people want their freedom badly enough that thousands of them went out to campaign for it, knowing full well that someone's gunning for them and scores before them have been blown up for doing just what they're doing. They knew that they could come to the horrific end you saw if you clicked through the photos (go ahead, do it now if you haven't), but they went anyway. They were regular people who didn't shrug off responsibility for their rights as someone more important's job, they didn't stay home and cower in fear. We don't face these kind of risks in the exercise of our rights. We have our peace of mind. If we want to be the real champions of democracy, we will honor the sacrifice of the people in Pakistan, help them in their fight for their rights, and above all treat our own rights and our own democracy with more of the respect it deserves.

The Plot-Driven Society

The new season of 24 is under way. 24 is an odd phenomenon: although it is simplistic, nonsensical, and frequently riddled with notions that anybody outside of the Bush White House and Fox News would reject (torture: fine and good as long as the good guys do it; nuclear blasts: not really a threat if they don't happen in town), it is addictive.

It's the ticking clock. It pops up at commercial breaks and assorted other intervals. And the quick cuts between various story lines. Everything moves plenty fast so there's no time or incentive to stop and think about it.

Same is true of John Grisham's novels (or at least the two I managed to read): cardboard characters and plot holes big enough to fly a 747 through whizz past in a frenzy of page-turning.

This is what writer types call plot-driven fiction: events so fast and furious that mere niceties like character development, theme, or even reason and sense may be left by the wayside. The best authors of plot-driven fiction don't neglect those other aspects, but it seems that those things must slow them down just enough, because the 24s and The Firms of this world tend to be more popular. It's popcorn for the mind, and it races right through you without wasting any time being digested.

Fine if that's what entertains you. The problem is when it infects more critical aspects of our lives.

Someone (I've forgotten who, or where) said that the candidacies of John Kerry and Al Gore were both doomed by their use of subordinate clauses. (Both campaigns had other problems than their sentence structure, IMO, but that's beside the point for this discussion.) Why follow a complex sentence--a complex thought--when it is so much easier to grasp a simple declarative sentence, especially one that expresses a simple, unnuanced, black-and-white concept?

Keep throwing new images at people, new sound bytes or new threats, and they will tend to follow along with them like a 24 plotline. No time to stop and go back and reexamine the foundation of the notion, the background of the story, the meaning of it all, whether an argument holds together under close examination.

Some people can handle large quantities of stimuli and critically assess them all (I think first of my friend and Clarion classmate Cory Doctorow), but most people are sufficiently wrapped up in the minutiae of daily living--that ticking clock is the limited number of hours in the day to accomplish work, family, household, and personal responsibilities--that it just flows through them without stopping for analysis. And so we have become the plot-driven society.

Notice too that in 24 you get a lot of ineffectual and/or corrupt leaders? Probably not a coincidence. For 24 the plots depend on it; while here in the plot-driven society it's just a side effect. When candidates' cases are made in snippets and 30-second ads, and analysis of their positions and arguments is left to talking heads whose ratings depend on being just as catchy and concise, the niceties of substance can easily slip past unexamined. A plot-driven culture will select for the candidate who can survive best in that environment--who keeps his arguments concise and easy to grab onto, and doesn't slow us down or overcomplicate our already overfull lives.

If that's the society we want to be, then so be it.

But I am one of those dinosaurs who, while enjoying a page-turner now and again as a sweet treat, prefers substance. I enjoy a book or film or TV show I can sink my teeth into, with some substance and subtext, the kind of thing you get something new from on repeated reading or watching. (Rob is currently reading Finnegans Wake in one of his classes, which is just about the pinnacle of substantial reading, and may well exceed my ability to stick with it. More power to those who do.) And I would like to be able to vote for candidates whose entire worldviews are not summarizable in a sentence, who understand that issues are complex and demonstrate their willingness to grapple with those complexities. But in a plot-driven society, even the candidates who may fit that bill are compelled to hide their substance behind repetition of easily digestible metaphors and catch phrases in order to compete.

And we as a nation are the poorer for it.