Amazon in Iowa, The French Dispatch movie, Strange Love by Ann Aguirre, Cilka's Journey by Heather Morris, and To be Taught, If Fortunate by Becky Chambers

I've been meaning to post reviews all week, I've just either been too sick and tired or unmotivated to do so...I've also been caught up in watching some TV series and Netflix shows and of course the new season of Star Trek Picard on CBS All Access. I'd like to point out that as a show that you have to pay to download, stream and watch on your computer, I think it should be ad free, but no, the greedy people at CBS are squeezing Star Trek fans for every dime they can wring from them, so if you want a no-ads version you have to pay extra each month, which is, frankly, highway robbery. Anyway, here's some tidbits and three book reviews.

I'm a native of Iowa, and I'd always hoped that as my home state is always behind in popular culture that they'd escape the ravages of big, soulless corporations like Walmart and Amazon. Alas, no, the big river of Jeff Bezo's billions has made its way to a warehouse in sleepy little Bondurant, where my younger brother Kevin used to go to smoke weed with his best slacker buddy John. Of course the local republican senator is thrilled to sell his town into slavery, because he will doubtless get a lot of campaign money from Bezos and Co, especially when he provides tax breaks for Amazons billion dollar business. So sad. 

Amazon in Iowa, The Rise of the Amazon Empire

Amazon plans to open its first Iowa fulfillment center http://www.shelf-awareness.com/ct/uz3642037Biz43340753 in Bondurant later this year. At the new 645,000-square-foot facility, "employees will work alongside Amazon robotics to pick, pack and ship small items to customers such as books, electronics and toys," the company said.

Alicia Boler Davis, Amazon's v-p of global customer fulfillment, noted that the "site will help us continue to serve customers with great delivery options and we appreciate the strong support from local and state leaders."

Calling the announcement "jet-fuel for Iowa's future," State Senator Zach Nunn (R.-Bondurant) commented: "Bondurant's partnership with Amazon's fulfillment center will spark growth for Main Street entrepreneurs, builds on Iowa's high standard of living, and will improve hometown quality of life for families across Iowa."

Next Tuesday, February 18, PBS Frontline will air the two-hour documentary Amazon Empire: The Rise and Reign of Jeff Bezos http://www.shelf-awareness.com/ct/uz3642037Biz43340754. Noting that Bezos "is not only one of the richest men in the world, he has built a business empire that is without precedent in the history of American capitalism," Frontline said the film explores how his "power to shape everything from the future of work to the future of commerce to the future of technology is unrivaled. As politicians and regulators around the world start to consider the global impact of Amazon--and how to rein in Bezos' power--Frontline investigates how he executed a plan to build one of the most influential economic and cultural forces in the world."

 I've always enjoyed the peek into the lives of New Yorkers provided by New Yorker magazine. So I'm looking forward to this movie, which sounds fascinating.

Movies: The French Dispatch

Searchlight Pictures has shared a first look at Wes Anderson's upcoming film The French Dispatch http://www.shelf-awareness.com/ct/uz3642037Biz43340797, "about the doings of a fictional weekly magazine that looks an awful lot like--and was, in fact, inspired by--the New Yorker," which featured several photos (some also appearing on IndieWire http://www.shelf-awareness.com/ct/uz3642037Biz43340798) from the highly anticipated movie.  The editor and writers, as well as the stories it publishes--three of which are dramatized in the film--are also loosely inspired by the real magazine. Not coincidentally, Anderson "has been a New Yorker devotee since he was a teenager, and has even amassed a vast collection of bound volumes of the magazine, going back to the 1940s."

The cast includes Bill Murray as Arthur Howitzer, Jr., the French Dispatch's editor (inspired by Harold Ross), Owen Wilson as Herbsaint Sazerac, "a writer whose low-life beat mirrors Joseph Mitchell's," Elisabeth Moss, Tilda Swinton, Fisher Stevens, Griffin Dunne, Adrien Brody, Lois Smith, Henry Winkler and Bob Balaban.

The movie's New Yorker cartoon-inspired first poster "is like a Where's Wally for the American filmmaker's most reliable contributors," Yahoo noted, adding that other cast members highlighted on the poster include Timothée Chalamet, Jeffrey Wright, Benicio Del Toro, Léa Seydoux, Lyna Khoudri, Stephen Park and Mathieu Amalric. The French Dispatch hits theaters August 28.

Strange Love by Ann Aguirre is a science fiction romance hybrid that appears to have been self published by Aguirre. I've read at least 4 of her other science fiction novels that were published by traditional publishers, so I knew that Aguirre, unlike most self published authors, knows how to write and is an experienced storyteller. Here's the blurb:

He's awkward. He's adorable. He's alien as hell.
Zylar of Kith B'alak is a four-time loser in the annual Choosing. If he fails to find a nest guardian this time, he'll lose his chance to have a mate for all time. Desperation drives him to try a matching service but due to a freak solar flare and a severely malfunctioning ship AI, things go way off course. This 'human being' is not the Tiralan match he was looking for.

She's frazzled. She's fierce. She's from St. Louis.
Beryl Bowman's mother always said she'd never get married. She should have added a rider about the husband being human. Who would have ever thought that working at the Sunshine Angel daycare center would offer such interstellar prestige? She doesn't know what the hell's going on, but a new life awaits on Barath Colony, where she can have any alien bachelor she wants.

They agree to join the Choosing together, but love is about to get seriously strange.

 

Zylar and Beryl's romance is certainly strange and unusual, but that said, the love scenes are not as weird or laughable as one might assume. Though the discussion of lubrication and fluids tends to go on and on, the actual sexual exchanges between the two protagonists are blush-worthy and intimate and hot, which surprised me as a reader. I also liked that there was a warrior "fight for your right to marry and have children" element to the book, because heroines who can't do anything but be blond and bouncy and petite and dumb as a box of hair make me ill. The focus on females being able to care for a clutch of eggs/infants was a bit of a turn off, as science fiction pointing to traditional roles for women seems to be a waste of a good venue for hopeful feminist futures to me. That said, the females in the book have a great deal of independence and agency, and there is even a satisfying takedown of a rich alien dude-bro who is a complete jerk. Note to those who loathe typos, there were three instances of words in the wrong place and missing words in this book that are jarring. But on the whole, the copy is clean and the plot zippy. I'd give it an A- and recommend it to anyone who enjoys wild romantic relationships in a science fiction setting.

Cilka's Journey by Heather Morris is a sequel to the blockbuster bestseller The Tattooist of Auschwitz, which I read with my book group last year. This book takes place after Auschwitz has been liberated by the Russian army, and some women (and men) are convicted (without trial) of being collaborators with the Nazis, because in this case Cilka was surviving by having sex (actually being raped) with German soldiers. Like Tattooist, this book is based on the real lives of concentration camp survivors who wanted to tell Morris what really happened to them during the war. Here's the blurb:

From the author of the multi-million copy bestseller The Tattooist of Auschwitz comes a new novel based on a riveting true story of love and resilience.

Her beauty saved her — and condemned her.

Cilka is just sixteen years old when she is taken to Auschwitz-Birkenau Concentration Camp in 1942, where the commandant immediately notices how beautiful she is. Forcibly separated from the other women prisoners, Cilka learns quickly that power, even unwillingly taken, equals survival.
When the war is over and the camp is liberated, freedom is not granted to Cilka: She is charged as a collaborator for sleeping with the enemy and sent to a Siberian prison camp. But did she really have a choice? And where do the lines of morality lie for Cilka, who was send to Auschwitz when she was still a child?
In Siberia, Cilka faces challenges both new and horribly familiar, including the unwanted attention of the guards. But when she meets a kind female doctor, Cilka is taken under her wing and begins to tend to the ill in the camp, struggling to care for them under brutal conditions.
Confronting death and terror daily, Cilka discovers a strength she never knew she had. And when she begins to tentatively form bonds and relationships in this harsh, new reality, Cilka finds that despite everything that has happened to her, there is room in her heart for love.
From child to woman, from woman to healer, Cilka's journey illuminates the resilience of the human spirit—and the will we have to survive.

It has always amazed me to read about women and children who faced extraordinary odds and horrific daily reminders of death to come out of these brutal death camps and grow up, or get healthy and get married and carry on lives full of good things after all the trauma they experienced. I don't think I could keep from going mad in that kind of place, surrounded by grim horror and death. This is good time to remind readers that this is not a lighthearted or easy book to read. It's painful and full of ugliness, sickness, unfairness, brutality, rape, and death. I cried many times reading the book, and I had to stop and put the book down and calm my nausea by remembering that the events in the book all happened 75 years ago, and almost everyone who was in Auschwitz and was liberated in 1945 is dead by now, unless they were a child at the time. So be warned that you might, like me, have to take a break during and after reading it, though it does have a happy ending. It made me feel as if my enduring the pain of Crohns and Sjogrens and Arthritis and Asthma/Allergies is really not as brave as I think it is. Still, I learned about the prisoners in Soviet gulags after the war, and I felt that this character's life had depth and meaning. I'd give this book an A, and recommend it to those who think Holocaust stories are overly hyped or romanticized. 

To Be Taught, If Fortunate by Becky Chambers is a science fiction novella by the author of the excellent The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, which I enjoyed (and several others that I didn't enjoy.) Here's the blurb:

A stand-alone science fiction novella from the award-winning, bestselling, critically-acclaimed author of the Wayfarer series.
At the turn of the twenty-second century, scientists make a breakthrough in human spaceflight. Through a revolutionary method known as somaforming, astronauts can survive in hostile environments off Earth using synthetic biological supplementations. They can produce antifreeze in subzero temperatures, absorb radiation and convert it for food, and conveniently adjust to the pull of different gravitational forces. With the fragility of the body no longer a limiting factor, human beings are at last able to journey to neighboring exoplanets long known to harbor life.
A team of these explorers, Ariadne O’Neill and her three crewmates, are hard at work in a planetary system fifteen light-years from Sol, on a mission to ecologically survey four habitable worlds. But as Ariadne shifts through both form and time, the culture back on Earth has also been transformed. Faced with the possibility of returning to a planet that has forgotten those who have left, Ariadne begins to chronicle the story of the wonders and dangers of her mission, in the hope that someone back home might still be listening.

 Be warned that there is a great deal of technical jargon, lots of technical scientific detail and other boring things that can make a couple of paragraphs feel like 10 pages if you're not a space science nerd. Also know that the four characters in the book are in a polyamorous relationship, meaning that the protagonist, Ariadne, is sleeping with both guys and the other woman on the team in a loose rotation. So if that kind of sexuality bothers you, this isn't the novella for you. All that said, I found the internal and external explorations in this book fascinating. The bodily modifications that they all undertake to be able to go down to the planet's surfaces were interesting and the loss of contact with earth kept the tension in the plot high. I can't say much without spoiling everything, but overall, I liked this short book. I'd give it a B+ and recommend it to space science/astronaut nerds who like books about exploring alien worlds.