Reviews and Comments

I've actually met the author in Portsmouth, the city in which the book is set, and bought the book for that reason. I was disappointed. They say "show, don't tell," but there's an awful lot of telling goes on — long passages where the heroine informs us of things she's done, but we don't live them with her.

The narrative starts with a female police officer (female, of Indian extraction, lesbian, anger issues) finding her fiancee murdered. I would have expected, over the course of the book, to have learned a lot about the murdered fiancee, and to have relived moments the couple had had together. But none of that happens. This lack of psychological reality was a major hindrance to my enjoyment.

Nevertheless, there's a lot of creativity here. The plot (involving interdimensional ports and conspiracies) has a great deal of promise. I enjoyed the settings in Portsmouth, which is a town I know well. I'm not interested enough to continue with the other books in the series, though.

I absolutely loved The Finest Fire. I had the great privilege to be in a writers' group with Lisa (she's Annelisa when authoring) for a number of years, and heard her read many of the chapters out loud. So I already knew much of the story. But to immerse myself in the finished work has been a very special experience. The characters are very relatable and remind me of people I know in New Hampshire, which is where the book is set. It's essentially a book about people bruised by life coming together and creating family, interwoven with the story of a very damaged young man who's not fortunate enough to find, and perhaps not capable of creating, the warm connections with others that the other characters find so affirming. So it's a rich book: there's warmth and a happy ending, but with tragedy interspersed. Lisa's storytelling is very visual, and I kept thinking that The Finest Fire would make a terrific TV show. I hope that happens some day, so that the author's wonderful storytelling can be brought to a wider audience. The storytelling is also very emotional. I had a lump in my throat many times, felt genuine tension, and at times almost wept with joy. Brava, Lisa! What a wonderful accomplishment! And I hope you're working on the next one!

Gessen expanded a New York Review article, "Autocracy: Rules for Survival," into a very detailed account of the first three years of Trump's first term in office. She outlines the many ways in which Trump violated ethical, democratic, and constitutional norms, and the way the congress and the media were unable to adequately handle what was unfolding. The book was published before the Jan 6 insurrection, and so it's not a complete overview of Trump's crimes and misdemeanors, but because our minds are so easily overwhelmed by Trump's "flood the zone with shit" antics, we tend to forget what happened, and so it acts as a useful reminder.

Unfortunately Surviving Autocracy is less useful as a guide to, individually, surviving autocracy. And that's unfortunate, because now we're in Trump's second presidency and things are much worse. We now effectively have a dictator — a ruler who makes and interprets the law himself (abnegating the judicial branch of government) and who sets and controls spending (making congress redundant), who establishes absolute loyalty through purges and intimidation, and who is threatening to mis-use the law to punish his enemies while freely committing crimes himself. We need more guidance on how we survive all that, and the book is lacking in that department.

Gessen eviscerates the mainstream media for its inability to name what's happening. Outlets like the NYT pride themselves on their lack of bias, but are then unable to call a lie a lie or a coup a coup. They thus normalize what's going on, and in doing so contribute to the problem of growing autocracy. Gessen suggests that reporters have to learn to report from a point of view rather than pretending they are impartial reporters. This is useful, but reading the book and its recommendations I was left feeling that all I was getting was a more informed picture of what's going wrong. And all I can do is to observe it all, helplessly.

Timothy Snyder's "On Tyranny" goes into less depth but is more of a practical guide, showing how we can indeed "Survive Autocracy." I'd recommend reading that instead.

I encountered the TV show, The Expanse, before discovering it was originally a book series. I'm glad I experienced the two formats in that order. Reading the book was in some way a replay of the TV show, since I pictured and heard the actors as I read.

If you haven't come across either, Leviathan Wakes is the first in a monumental space opera series, set centuries in the future, where humans have colonized most of the solar system, where Mars is a space-faring power that exists in an uneasy and unstable tension with an overcrowded Earth, and where the "Belters" (the inhabitants of the asteroid belt and the moons of the outer planets, are resentful at how they're taken for granted and exploited by the two planets.

A powerful corporation's attempts to weaponize an alien organism destabilizes an already unstable solar system.

This massive canvas is the backdrop for following a rag-tag crew that have commandeered a salvaged top-notch Martian military vessel. This gives the book its personal touch. The novel is has an excellent balance of the personal and the political/military.

The book has the advantage of going into more depth about the characters' motivations than the TV series could, clarifying some aspects of the show that struck me as rather random.

This is an excellent read, and I've already started on Caliban's War, the second in the series.