Literature

Amy got Eddy reading Michael Crickton books.  Every time he comes in the kitchen, he picks up his Kindle and reads.

  He’s a very fast reader and reads a book in two or three days.  When he was in school, he tested close to 100% comprehension.

Amy was surprised he liked them.  She says they are pretty sophisticated books.  I have never even heard of him so I checked him out on the Internet.

John Michael Crichton, MD (October 23, 1942 – November 4, 2008) was an American best-selling author, physician, producer, director, and screenwriter, best known for his work in the science fiction, medical fiction, and thriller genres.. His books have sold over 200 million copies worldwide, and many have been adapted into films. In 1994 Crichton became the only creative artist ever to have works simultaneously charting at No. 1 in US television, film, and book sales (with ER, Jurassic Park, and Disclosure, respectively).

His literary works are usually based on the action genre and heavily feature technology. His novels epitomize the techno-thriller genre of literature, often exploring technology and failures of human interaction with it, especially resulting in catastrophes with biotechnology. Many of his future history novels have medical or scientific underpinnings, reflecting his medical training and science background. He was the author of, among others,  The Andromeda Strain, Jurassic Park, Congo, Travels, Sphere, Rising Sun, Disclosure, The Lost World, Airframe, Timeline, Prey, State of Fear, Next (the final book published before his death), Pirate Latitudes (published November 24, 2009), and a final unfinished techno-thriller, Micro, which was published in November 2011.

I know Ed read Timeline because I found it on the Kindle for him.

In 1999, Crichton published Timeline, a science fiction novel which tells the story of a team of historians and archaeologists studying a site in the Dordogne region of France, where the medieval towns of Castelgard and La Roque stood. They time travel back to 1357 to uncover some startling truths. The novel, which continues Crichton's long history of combining technical details and action in his books, addresses quantum physics and time travel directly and received a warm welcome from medieval scholars, who praised his depiction of the challenges in studying the Middle Ages.

He also read Sphere - The novel follows Norman Johnson as a psychologist who is engaged by the United States Navy to join a team of scientists assembled by the U.S. Government to examine an enormous spacecraft discovered on the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. The depth of coral covering the craft suggests that it has been lying there for over 300 years and so could only be of alien origin.

The novel begins as a science fiction story, but quickly transforms into a psychological thriller, ultimately exploring the nature of the human imagination.  

Who would have guessed?

My brother, Jerry, loaned me a book he said he had really enjoyed.  I enjoy it too but even though it is extremely interesting, I’ve been reading it for six months and I am barely half-way through.  I only read when I go to bed at night and it’s always too late.  This passage last night caught my attention:

Sacagawea informed him that the expedition’s camp was precisely on the spot where the Shoshones had been camped five years ago when a raiding party of Hidatsas discovered them.  The Shoshones had retreated three miles upriver and hidden in a wood.  But the Hidatsas had found and routed them, killing four men, four women, and a number of boys, and making prisoners of four boys and all the remaining women, including Sacagawea.

“I cannot discover that she shews any immotion of sorrow in recollecting this event,” Lewis concluded his journal entry relating Sacagawea’s story, “or of joy in being again restored to her native country; if she has enough to eat, and a few trinkets to wear I believe she would be perfectly content anywhere.”

“One wonders,” Stephen E. Ambrose, the author of the book Undaunted Courage, writes, “if Lewis was comparing Sacagawea with the young black female slaves he had known, or with white women of his own class.  One wonders too how the man who could be so observant about so many things, including the feelings and point of view of his men, could be so unobservant about Sacagawea’s situation.  A slave, one of only two in the party, she was also the only Indian, the only mother, the only woman, the only teen-aged person.  Small wonder she kept such a tight grip on her emotions.”  Pg 259-60.

I think even Stephen Ambrose missed the point.  I think the sole reason she was discounted was because she was a woman.  Tragic.