Mind Changer, James White (365 Books, Day 264)

Yesterday's review, due to twenty-two hours in an airport without wireless.

This is yet another of James White's Sector General novels, which are quickly becoming some of my most reliable comfort reads. This one is not, of course, as good as The Genocidal Healer, but it's quite good, especially if you've read previous works in the series.

The Chief Psychologist of Sector General, O'Mara, bears the responsibility for the mental and emotional well-being of the many extremely intelligent and highly-strung minds of the thousands of staff and patients at the galaxy's largest multi-species hospital. He has appeared in the background of several of the other books being very good at his job. He is also renowned as one of the most abrasive, difficult to work with, and generally blunt people in the entire medical service.

This is O'Mara's book, the one about his life (in flashback, from close to his arrival at Sector General), his non-public personality, and the things he has really devoted himself to. Unsurprisingly, he is a good and devoted and dutiful and intelligent man-- but the details are not, quite, what one might expect.

I found this, as with all of White, a pleasant read about people who mean well and are very bright solving interesting intellectual problems with the best resources at their disposal. I found it slightly more emotionally involving than other White, though it will probably read best if you know O'Mara as a background character already and know his staff. In short, this is just a consistently pleasant, bright, readable, cheerful set of books, with one bona fide Really Good One, and I look forward contentedly to more of them.

Mind Changer, James White (365 Books, Day 264)

Yesterday's review, due to twenty-two hours in an airport without wireless.

This is yet another of James White's Sector General novels, which are quickly becoming some of my most reliable comfort reads. This one is not, of course, as good as The Genocidal Healer, but it's quite good, especially if you've read previous works in the series.

The Chief Psychologist of Sector General, O'Mara, bears the responsibility for the mental and emotional well-being of the many extremely intelligent and highly-strung minds of the thousands of staff and patients at the galaxy's largest multi-species hospital. He has appeared in the background of several of the other books being very good at his job. He is also renowned as one of the most abrasive, difficult to work with, and generally blunt people in the entire medical service.

This is O'Mara's book, the one about his life (in flashback, from close to his arrival at Sector General), his non-public personality, and the things he has really devoted himself to. Unsurprisingly, he is a good and devoted and dutiful and intelligent man-- but the details are not, quite, what one might expect.

I found this, as with all of White, a pleasant read about people who mean well and are very bright solving interesting intellectual problems with the best resources at their disposal. I found it slightly more emotionally involving than other White, though it will probably read best if you know O'Mara as a background character already and know his staff. In short, this is just a consistently pleasant, bright, readable, cheerful set of books, with one bona fide Really Good One, and I look forward contentedly to more of them.

You can comment here or at the Dreamwidth crosspost. There are comments over there.

Impressions Dubai, no author given (365 Books, Day 265)

Today's review. One hundred days left!

B. recently spent a few weeks in Dubai and brought back this photo book. It is really very interesting. It shows Spots Of Note For Tourists in Dubai, in that classic tourist-photograph style in which there aren't any people present except the ones who are wearing Picturesque Local Clothing. There is even an attempt to try to make a camel look photogenic. All of the photos are bright, glossy, and captioned in a way that says what is in the photo without actually describing it-- a caption will say that this is Bab Al Shams, and not say whether that is a building, a district, a restaurant, a place of worship, or a street name. There is no other context given. No map. No discussion of neighborhoods. No discussion of how the places in the picture physically relate to one another. No pictures that include both the city and any of the countryside around and outside it; nothing that gives placement in the landscape.

And the cumulative effect is of a total distancing of the city depicted from reality. It looks like a crazy CGI fantasy, focussed on the impersonalities of glass, chrome, the lights of a freeway at night, the neon rims of skyscrapers. It is a portrait of a city with the human removed from it, even though one knows that the photographer has only gone into the mall before it opened, only shooed the people out of the angle of the lens in the mosque. Landmarks one might have seen before, such as the Burj al Arab (the famous hotel shaped like a boat) and the Burj Kalifa, the tallest building in the world, are even more odd as spots of familiarity in a sea of riotous architecture.

I ventured to B. that the city must look different with people in it, and he said drily that the book does not depict the eighty percent of the population who are Pakistani migrant workers. Or, indeed, any office workers, cab drivers, secretaries, etc., etc., etc. of any ethnicity. Or indeed anyone who does not work in a Heritage Village.

As an advertisement for Dubai, this book is a vaunting of a specific kind of modernity: strength through architecture. As a reading experience, more than half the book would make an absolutely lovely cover for a new edition of Neuromancer.

You can probably get photobooks of this general sort for most of the major cities in the world at this point, I should think. I wonder if they are all this surrealist?

Impressions Dubai, no author given (365 Books, Day 265)

Today's review. One hundred days left!

B. recently spent a few weeks in Dubai and brought back this photo book. It is really very interesting. It shows Spots Of Note For Tourists in Dubai, in that classic tourist-photograph style in which there aren't any people present except the ones who are wearing Picturesque Local Clothing. There is even an attempt to try to make a camel look photogenic. All of the photos are bright, glossy, and captioned in a way that says what is in the photo without actually describing it-- a caption will say that this is Bab Al Shams, and not say whether that is a building, a district, a restaurant, a place of worship, or a street name. There is no other context given. No map. No discussion of neighborhoods. No discussion of how the places in the picture physically relate to one another. No pictures that include both the city and any of the countryside around and outside it; nothing that gives placement in the landscape.

And the cumulative effect is of a total distancing of the city depicted from reality. It looks like a crazy CGI fantasy, focussed on the impersonalities of glass, chrome, the lights of a freeway at night, the neon rims of skyscrapers. It is a portrait of a city with the human removed from it, even though one knows that the photographer has only gone into the mall before it opened, only shooed the people out of the angle of the lens in the mosque. Landmarks one might have seen before, such as the Burj al Arab (the famous hotel shaped like a boat) and the Burj Kalifa, the tallest building in the world, are even more odd as spots of familiarity in a sea of riotous architecture.

I ventured to B. that the city must look different with people in it, and he said drily that the book does not depict the eighty percent of the population who are Pakistani migrant workers. Or, indeed, any office workers, cab drivers, secretaries, etc., etc., etc. of any ethnicity. Or indeed anyone who does not work in a Heritage Village.

As an advertisement for Dubai, this book is a vaunting of a specific kind of modernity: strength through architecture. As a reading experience, more than half the book would make an absolutely lovely cover for a new edition of Neuromancer.

You can probably get photobooks of this general sort for most of the major cities in the world at this point, I should think. I wonder if they are all this surrealist?

You can comment here or at the Dreamwidth crosspost. There are comments over there.