It just makes a fella tired

kw: book reviews, short stories, rejects

I gave up in disgust after puzzling my way through one story, picking my way through two more, and playing hopscotch through the book looking for a story about someone who isn't a loser. These stories aren't just about losers, they are about banal, venal, sometimes-almost-criminal, too-apathetic-to-be-evil-but-they-would-if-they-could losers. I prefer to spend time with those who do better than that.

I can't say I learned nothing from this author: I learned I do have the gumption to discard a book rather than slavishly read every word regardless, which was my more youthful practice. I think I've grown.

Oh, by the way: Demons in the Spring by Joe Meno.

Another for the circular file

kw: book reviews, fantasy, rejects

The book is Killing With the Edge of the Moon, by A. A. Attanasio. I guess I should have known better. It was too long since the last time I tried to read from this author. After reading partway through the Prelude, I flipped to the back cover to see the publisher's review (I seldom look at them). Once I saw the term "demonic fairy tale" I put the book aside.

Darkness inside me, I have a-plenty. I don't need a dose of someone else's.

Some stories don't belong in print.

kw: book reviews, fiction, anthologies, rejects

The title story in The Human Fly and Other Stories by T. C. Moore is edgy, but at least entertaining. The second and third are edgier, and go nowhere. By the fourth story, the author has crossed the bounds of decency, and a quick peek of later ones indicates he never makes it back.

One of the few books I'm sorry I ever cracked open.

Fantastic Voyage redux

kw: book reviews, opinion, rejects

I checked out Fantastic Voyage: Live long enough to live forever by Ray Kurzweil and Terry Grossman. I perused the table of contents, read scattered items here and there, but didn't go further. The writing is done well enough, but most of the info is old hat. So is the notion that unlimited lifespan is just around the corner. Somebody-or-other makes such promises—and gains enough publicity to make a bit of a splash—about once a generation.

As has been said before, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Of the latter, sadly, there is next to none. Again, I haven't looked at a great deal of the book. But I have perused enough to get this impression: The main claim is based on extrapolating the trend of average life expectancy since the 1880s or so.

I am sure we've all heard, "In 1900 people lived less than forty years; now they live to about eighty." There are so many fallacies in these fourteen words I can only touch the most egregious. The average life expectancy at birth in 1900 was (depending on your source) somewhere between 35 and 40 years. However, infant mortality was so high, that if you dig, you can find out the following, all for 1900:

• Average life expectancy for five-year-olds was about sixty.
• Average life expectancy for twenty-year-olds was above seventy.
• There were a few hundred-year-olds around, but nobody known was older than 115.

I'll just mention that one of my ancestors, Peregrine White, born aboard the Mayflower in 1621, lived to be 99. But only 1/3 of white children born in the Plymouth colony in the 1620s lived to adulthood.

The situation is this: advances in public health since the American Civil War have greatly reduced "early death", but haven't made much of a dent in the outer boundary, the maximum life span. In fact, in the whole Twentieth Century, only two people are known to have lived more than 118 years, and neither was American: a Japanese monk, and a saucy French woman (who claimed she tried to seduce Vincent Van Gogh).

All that said, Kurzweil and Grossman's book has plenty of useful advice about proper diet and exercise. It has a major section on the need for mega-vitamin doses "for most people," claiming nearly all of us have one or more defective digestive enzymes. I dunno. Some vitamins are toxic, especially the B complex, so you have to do a lot of research before you go on a mega-regimen. That's all I'll say on that.

A final note: What does Kurzweil have to do with this anyway? He is one of the great inventors of our time. Does that qualify him to have medical authority? Not at all. I think he's a name that can get the book past the editors at Rodale. Dr. Grossman has been working longevity research a long time. But the results he reports simply don't support the claims the book makes. I sure wish they did!