The Shadow Rising
by Robert Jordan
I probably finished this one about a month and a half ago, but I’ve been working on a blog at work, and whenever I tried to start this post I felt a pang of guilt about the jobby job stuff that I hadn’t finished. Then I got caught up with The West Wing, then with the Nationals, and going away every weekend, so reading/blogging just kind of disappeared from my routine. That’s kind of my bad.
Anyway, all that’s done with, for now, so let’s get back to books.
The Shadow Rising picks up where The Dragon Reborn left off. Everyone’s chilling in the Stone of Tear, Rand is the Dragon Reborn, there’s a bunch of Aiel all over the place- seemingly a good situation all around. The crew hangs out in the castle until Rand decides to go do his own thing with the Aiel, at which point everyone splits up. Lots of stuff happens. It’s cool.
Good points: There’s lots of action. Whichever group of characters the narrator and reader are following, stuff is almost guaranteed to be going down, with rare exception. There’s maybe half a dozen major action scenes, if I’m remembering correctly, and they’re all unique in every way. For example, without giving too much away, one scene might involve a character kicking the ever-loving shit out of everyone with magic, one might involve a 
huge battle involving hundreds of combatants on each side, and one might basically consist of a duel between two important characters. Like I said, stuff happens.
Another cool thing about this one is that the story gets vastly deeper and more complicated. The first couple of books basically pit good guys against bad guys. (That might be an oversimplification: the hero’s temptation to abandon the noble path almost always defines the hero’s narrative, even if we generally assume that our heroes will remain good. Plus, Jordan always remembered to throw a few ‘wild card’ characters in there as well, just to make things interesting.) Shadow definitely cranks up the complexity, to the point where entire institutions become untrustworthy, and characters that you just knew were untrustworthy start pulling their weight. Of course, there’s still the occasional dude who shows up, just waiting to be called out for being a bad guy, who basically gets away with it till the end. Yea, I’m talking about you, character-whose-name-I-won’t-mention.
But that’s definitely the exception. On the whole, I’d say real character growth is one of the strong points of this novel. While our heroes have been growing since book one, I really noticed and enjoyed watching that change happen here. Mat, especially, continues to mature from a whiny kid into kind of an awesome but still pretty whiny kid.
Lastly- and if it seems that I liked this book, I did- I liked the way Jordan was able to handle having so many narrative strands going on at the same time, and having separate groups of characters interacting with the world as it was collapsing and changing around them. I know, I know, the characters had been split up before, but in the second book, the characters all split up with express purposes, and didn’t stray much from those purposes. In the third, all the characters end up hurtling back towards Tear for the climax, which looked, to this reader, to be a very much planned close to that three-book segment of the series. The fourth book spits the characters back out of Tear, and manages to keep all of their storylines interesting, even those that I’d previously found boring.
Bad points: Just one thing here, really. This isn’t the only book in the series to have this problem so far, but there are some dream/magic sequences that I consider overly indulgent. Obviously, this is fantasy, so I don’t think these sequences are unexpected. At times it just seemed a bit much, especially when it just felt like random shit happening for no apparent reason.
I guess I’d also say it seemed a little long, but, and I’ve been saying this for every book in the series, I don’t know where the cuts could be made. Considering how much I liked the book, it seems a bit hypocritical to turn around and say it was too long. Let’s just say it took me many Metro rides to get through.
Overall, I’d say it’s the best book in the series- so far.
Filed under: Fantasy, Fiction, Reviews | 1 Comment
We all know and love the genius that is Lil Wayne. He owned the radio in 2008, and he hasn’t let up since. He took up guitar and skateboarding. He got a few more tattoos. He brought us Nicki Minaj, Drake, and of course Tyga. The man’s unstoppable.
Admittedly, he’s had his fair share of legal trouble as well
I think it’s time, however, the we took a deep dive (to borrow a phrase from Chuck Todd) into some of his more clever work. French Montana’s ‘Pop That’ is one of my favorite rap songs of the past year or so; even Rick Ross, whom I despise, drops a nice verse on there. For those of you who haven’t heard this collaboration from Montana, Ross, Drake, and Wayne, please do yourself a favor and check it out right now:
Now, before we get into Wayne’s verse, I want to answer a few questions you may have about the video, or about these rappers, or about hip hop in general.
Continue reading ‘Analyzing Lil Wayne’s Verse on French Montana’s ‘Pop That’’
Filed under: Reviews, Song reviews | 1 Comment
The Dragon Reborn
by Robert Jordan
I’m reading too much Wheel of Time, and I know that you don’t care about it, so I will try to be brief. Since I’m not going to recommend you randomly read the third book in a series of fourteen, feel free to skip over this review; if you’re interested, start with book one. There also might be light spoilers.
Since we (mostly Rand but I’d like to think I helped) found the Horn in The Great Hunt, 
Rand is openly the Dragon Reborn (which has kind of a nice ring to it don’t you think?) and he’s trying to figure out what to do next. For the most part his answer seems to be “not much,” which is fine, because he’s not the focus of this book.
Yes, that’s right, the book is named after Rand, but he’s only in it for about ten pages. I didn’t mind this so much, since he spent the last book whining about how he didn’t want to be the Dragon, whining about who his father was, and whining about pretty much everything else going on. Ok, it wasn’t all whining; at times he kinda kicked ass. But it’s also nice to ignore him for once and see how the world is turning around him.
What’s happening is that Mat’s back, finally. He snatched up the wrong dagger in book one and was in a pretty bad mood till book three, in which he seemed to be in a serious dagger coma, not unlike the Taco Bell coma that you may be more familiar with. Anyway, they get him off enchiladas- I mean they separate him from the dagger, and he’s back, and he spends the rest of the book gambling and melting girls’ hearts with his devil-may-care attitude. He’s just so dreamy. He definitely became my favorite character in Dragon.
Other things happen, too. Mat finds Thom. Perrin meets a fly honey, but he doesn’t hit on her because he’s still upset about kind of being a wolf. The girls do something too, mostly involving Egwene arguing with Nynaeve and Elayne trying to squash it. Theirs has the makings of an interesting storyline, but it never really amounts to much, like The Walking Dead. They make negative progress in what’s built up to be an important quest, and I’m really not looking forward to following that particular plot element in later books.
Basically everyone’s racing towards Tear and nobody knows why, but it gets pretty exciting towards the end. I was told by one Wheel reader that you could basically stop after the first three books, and I guess I can see how the first three are kind of a trilogy. Nothing’s really settled though, so I’m going to keep reading.
Question: Has Robert Jordan come to dominate the world that Tolkien began to reveal? Answer: Possibly.
Filed under: Fantasy, Fiction, Reviews | 1 Comment
It’s Even Worse Than It Looks
by Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein
“One of the two major parties, the Republican Party, has become an insurgent outlier–ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”
If you could read that sentence without getting mad, you might consider hearing what Mann and Ornstein have to say. Otherwise, this book will probably just anger you. In other words, Spoiler Alert: the Republicans take a lot of shit in this one.
The basic argument here is that our political process is incredibly dysfunctional; this can be seen primarily in the way Congress handles (or is unable to handle) its business. The authors blame two factors, one of which is the disconnect between our political system and our political parties; the Democratic and Republican parties are ideologically unified but are forced to govern under a system that gives great power to the minority. The other is the aforementioned polarization, labelled ‘asymmetric polarization’ by those who believe that the Republican Party has ideologically consolidated far from the mainstream.
The first example given is the debt ceiling debate, in which what had been a formality suddenly became a crisis that nearly mandated a default on our sovereign debt, downgrading our credit as a result. The Republicans in Congress would not agree to raise the debt limit unless serious budget concessions were made by the Obama Administration. 
This bit of hostage taking nearly resulted in disaster, but the Republicans didn’t seem ashamed. On the contrary, Republican Senate Leader Mitch McConnell stated after the crisis, “We’ll be doing it all over.” If you’ve been paying attention over the last month or so, yes, it’s happening again.
The authors also explore the filibuster, which has been abused by both parties when they have been in minorities in the Senate. The filibuster developed over the years as a tool for members of the minority to voice their vehement objection to a bill, as the southern Dixiecrats used it trying to stall civil rights legislation in the 1960′s. By now the filibuster has become almost synonymous with the Senate itself in the minds of voters, though Mann and Ornstein accurately point out that the filibuster is neither in the Constitution nor a permanent rule of the Senate. The use of the filibuster has degraded to the point that a single member can hold up legislation or appointments for days, shutting down the business of the Senate and often forcing the Majority Leader to simply give up on certain items of the Senate’s agenda.
I have to say, as a Democrat, it’s not hard for me to see the Republicans as the party of obstruction when, right now, they’re preparing for another debt ceiling negotiation that will inevitably become a debt ceiling crisis. Whatever sympathy I had for John Boehner as one of the weakest Speakers of the House in recent history evaporates when he laments that President Obama wants to “annihilate the Republican Party,” seemingly forgetting that Majority Leader McConnell had previously said the Republicans’ top priority was to make Obama a one-term president. That being said, the Republicans didn’t invent obstruction, and blaming them for our system’s inadequacies, while satisfying, is kind of a waste of time.
But regardless of who’s at fault, Mann and Ornstein paint a pretty bleak picture. Most of the time, any lament to the intractability of our democratic process comes with a ray of sunshine; there’s really none to be found in this book. Legislative remedies are offered, but given the book’s insistence that our legislative process has been corrupted, these seem like a long shot at best. The authors dismiss the possibility that our process will right itself, as many optimists believe.
There are no quick fixes, but the authors do outline some long-term goals for reform, and it’s not the Republican plan to divide up electoral votes (of large blue states) by Congressional district. Sidebar: it’s bad enough that the Republicans are behaving like the sorest losers in history, adapting to a loss not by trying to get better but by changing the rules so that they’re more likely to win, as if democracy was some perverse electoral version of Calvinball. But when they’re trying to do it in Virginia, blatantly disenfranchising the clear majority in my state that had the audacity to twice vote for Barack Obama after voting Republican for forty years, it really doesn’t incline me towards thinking that Republicans have anything in their plans that would make me, y’know, actually want to vote for them.
It’s much funnier when it’s not about your civil rights
Back to the not-so-quick fixes. According to the authors, with me in agreement, we need campaign finance reform. Money isn’t speech, and the legal fiction that allows the wealthy and powerful to divert huge sums of money towards getting their candidates elected boggles the mind. And yes, instant runoff voting will help elect a candidate that the majority of a district’s voters will actually be able to support while allowing voters to vote their conscience. The authors also reiterate that the Senate needs to be seriously reformed, as Majority Leader Harry Reid nearly accomplished last month.
The most interesting fix I read was mandatory voting, to which every American, myself included, has an almost visceral revulsion. We don’t like being told that anything is mandatory. However, Mann and Ornstein make the argument that the most informed voters, the most likely voters, and the most partisan voters are by and large the same group. This means that Democratic candidates only need to play to Democratic voters, and ditto for the Republicans, since those in the middle are more difficult to court and are unlikely to vote anyway. If we had mandatory voting, with a nominal fine, candidates might find that the electorate would become significantly more moderate overnight.
Anyway, It’s Even Worse is bleak about our government, to the point of being upsetting, but its second half offers real goals for the future. Remember, the GOP kind of takes a beating in these pages. Republicans, you’ve been warned.
Filed under: Non-fiction, Reviews | Leave a Comment
Drift
by Rachel Maddow
Drift details the slowly and steadily changing relationship between the American people and the wars we fight. Rachel Maddow describes how throughout most of our history the United States has had a small standing Army and has been reluctant to go to war. When we did go to war, the whole nation was involved, and the government was, for the most part, held accountable. Maddow insists that the way the military and the executive are currently structured, American society is almost completely insulated from the wars in which our government engages. 
She leads readers down the path from the Abrams Doctrine, in which the nation could not go to war without disrupting the lives of most Americans, through increasing deference to executive authority, to today, when the U.S. has more private contractors in war zones than military personnel, the president can authorize drone strikes with no oversight, and the military budget continues to balloon.
Perhaps you’re thinking that this topic- quite an important one, I’d say- requires a more extensive and scholarly approach than Maddow can offer. Well, that’s certainly fair, but I think that wouldn’t really be her style. If you’ve ever seen her show on MSNBC, you know she pays careful attention to balancing entertainment and information. Drift is something of an extension of that format, in that it’s both smart and well-written. I think she’s certainly up to the challenge of a scholarly tome, but chose to write a book that’s accessible to a wider audience.
You also might be wondering whether Maddow is biased, and what that means for her audience. She certainly has a point of view, and most would call her a liberal, but that doesn’t mean shes not fair. In fact, while it’s easy to write her off as a partisan talking head, I find that she doesn’t jump to conclusions lightly, and she works hard to understand rather than demonize opponents.
Of course, there are exceptions to every rule. I started reading because I’m a fan of Maddow, and didn’t know what to expect beyond a broad-based criticism of our foreign policy. I found that it pretty quickly identified Ronald Reagan as one of the villains in the story of how we’re losing connection to our military. Sure, she basically kicks it all off with Lyndon Johnson, and doesn’t spare any president up to and including Barack Obama, but you can tell that she’s got a special place in her heart for Reagan. She seems to think of him as an ambitious, shallow, dimwitted opportunist, and does not hold back in her criticism of that administrations handling of Lebanon, Grenada, and especially the Iran-Contra affair. 
Now, I didn’t grow up during the Reagan era; the only Reagan related event that I can even remember is his death about a decade ago, so it’s difficult for me to judge the merits of his presidency. Maddow doesn’t hold back though.
However we got here, though, Drift makes a pretty compelling argument that the situation has become unacceptable. Maddow clearly cares deeply about our military, and seems personally affronted by the way that presidents have been using military power in our name. Actually, I really liked how personal these issues are to Maddow. She never forgets that we’re a democracy, and that to some extent we have collectively allowed this situation to develop. We elect both the president and the Congress, and should be holding our representatives to a higher standard. By reminding the audience that we are complicit in the ‘unmooring’ of our nation’s military, Maddow’s narrative may serve as a wake-up call that we need to take better care of our democracy. I personally doubt that’s going to happen anytime soon, but we shall see.
I’m also really glad that Maddow offers alternatives, instead of simply complaining. I’m so sick of reading foreign policy criticism without offering solutions, and I read parts of Drift with trepidation: is she going to go beyond saying that Grenada was a clusterfuck? Where does she think our military should be involved, and who should make those decisions? Maddow isn’t afraid to take a stand on the issues, and to me that’s a breath of fresh air. In fact, Maddow addresses this foreign policy cowardice at points in Drift, noting that oftentimes the legislature is afraid to take a stand on the use of force until they’re sure we’ve been successful- or not. This simply puts more authority in the hands of the president, making for a state of perpetual armed conflict. By taking a stand, Maddow signals that in a democracy, we have a duty to make our voices heard, especially where war is concerned.
Rachel Maddow effectively and accessibly makes the case that we’ve given too much war-making power to the executive, but that if we all take our responsibilities more seriously, we just might be able to reverse this trend.
Filed under: Foreign policy, Non-fiction, Reviews | Leave a Comment
