Bob's Books

Why this book:  My wife read this and was really impressed – she rarely gushes about a book,  but she gushed about this one, and when she gushes, I listen and try to read the book. She bought copies for many of her friends. So I put it in my cue and listened to it. Glad I did. 

Summary in 3 Sentences:  This is the story of three brothers, all in the Navy and at different places working for different organizations during WW2 in the Pacific.  One brother was working in FDR’s White House, one was on the Enterprise and a third was in the Philippines  and became a Prisoner of War. The author is the daughter of one of these brothers,had acces to all their correspondence, and creates a unique lens through which to view the war in the Pacific through these three individuals – who were like the Forest Gumps of the Pacific War – it seems one of them was wherever many of the most important events took place, and we experience those events through their eyes.  Much of the story is about the efforts of two of the brothers to find their youngest brother who was a prisoner of the Japanese, while we also experience the brutal conditions of his captivity – as bad or worse than concentration camp victims in the Holocaust. 

My Impressions: Loved this book. It was a great ride through an important and tumultuous time in American History.  The author gives us a well researched history of certain aspects of the War in the Pacific through the eyes of three brothers, each a naval officer but participating in, experiencing and contributing to our victory from very different positions. Through their eyes I learned about important aspects of the war with which I’d been previously unfamiliar. 

It begins with the story of a well-to-do family in New Jersey with two brothers from their mother’s first marriage, and one from her second, all three attending the Naval Academy, two of them graduating with commissions – the third leaving, beginning a second career, but getting commissioned at the outset of the War.   One brother Bill is involved with intelligence in Washington DC and gets called upon to create and run FDR’s famous Map Room which kept track of what US military forces were doing around the world.  The other brother Benny became a weapons officer stationed on the USS Enterprise Aircraft Carrier which happened to be outside of but approaching Pearl Harbor when the Japanese attacked on 7 December 1941  The third and youngest brother Bart was a supply officer stationed in the Philippines when the Japanese attacked Manila right after they hit Pearl Harbor. . 

This third brother Bart is wounded in the Japanese attack on Manila and was in the hospital and eventually taken prisoner by the Japanese when they occupied Manila.   With his capture, the trajectories of the lives of these three brothers during the war take off – and Sally Mott Freeman’s story bounces from one to the other, providing different but complimentary perspectives on how the war affected differnt people in the Navy, supporting the war effort in different but unique roles.  She was able to use her extensive access to family letters and  diaries and her research into naval archives to create a fascinating, you-are-there narrative.

Bill and Benny are very engaged in playing their key roles in the war, and the author describes their persspectives and experiences with depth and feeling.   Bill sees the war from the macro strategic perspective in FDR’s white house,  and from his key position, interacts with key leaders in the US government and our allies.  We get Benny’s perspective on board the USS Enterprise as a weapons/gunnery officer returning the day after Japan’s attack to a burning and devastated Pearl Harbor, and then we are with him in the Navy’s reaction to that attack with Enterprise involved in the launching of the Doolittle raid on Tokyo, then the Battle of Midway and eventually Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa.  

Eventually after several years, the two brothers essentially trade places.  Benny is burned out from being in constant battle in the Pacific and requests shore duty to recover, and so is sent back to the East Coast.  Bill requests a break from the 80-90 hour weeks of staff work in Washington, and his request is granted to join the naval war at the front.  Soon after Bill arrives, Admiral Kelly Turner, one of the key admirals in the Pacific Fleet requested Bill as an Aide de Camp where he serves out the remainder of the war.  From Bill’s perspective with Adm Turner,  again we see the war from a unique and strategic perspective. Bill was the author’s father and so she personally heard many of the perspectives he shared about the Pacific war from that perspective. Her father remained in the Navy after the war and eventually became head of the Navy’s JAG corps. 

But much of the book was about younger brother Bart and the experience and plight of the Japanese held PoWs in the Philippines. The Japanese were notoriously cruel to allied prisoners, in part due to their belief based on the code of Bushido for which it is the height of dishonor to surrender or to be captured alive. Accordingly the Japanese treated allied PoWs as  dishonored and less than human. Bart was moved to several different Pow camps, while Bill and Benny constantly  sought to find out first, if he was alive, and  second where he might be, in case a rescue may have been possible. 

Important players  in the book were the mother and father of the three brothers -especialy their mother Helen.   Bill and Benny were her sons by her first marriage; Bart was her son by her then current husband, was her youngest and favorite. In her constant efforts to learn the fate of her son, she represented the many thousands of mothers who helplessly waited for news of their sons at war. But Helen did not passively wait for word – she constantly wrote letters to congressmen, imploring them to do more, including President Roosevelt and senior Navy staff.  She was involved in whatever efforts she could to provide support to soldiers and sailors on the front. Her pressure on Bill and Benny to do more to find and perhaps help their younger brother added to their own war stress as well as their anxiety for the well being of younger brother Bart. 

This is the story of a unique family, written by the daughter of one of the principle players in the family drama. But it is also a very human look at the Naval war in the Pacific through the lives of Benny, Bill, Bart and Helen Mott.   Sally Mott Freeman has not written a dispassionate history of the naval war in the Pacific, but in writing about her family’s participation in that war, has put a very human face and dimension to this war that is slowly fading  from memory, as those who fought it are rapidly passing away. 

I have thanked my wife for so strongly urging me to read this book. I highly  recommend it. 

Why this book: I’d read and really enjoyed Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto and had read a couple of good reviews of this book. I listened to it on audible.

Summary in 4 Sentences: Told in first person from a mature woman in her late 50s spending time with all three of her grown daughters who had to leave school/work during the pandemic to return home to the cherry farm in Michigan where they’d grown up.    As they all work together on the farm, the daughters are eager to learn about their mother’s (our protagonist) past when she had had an affair with a man who’d become an A-list  famous movie star.  In Tom Lake, she shares with the reader what she shares with her daughters, as well as what she doesn’t share with her daughters, and her perspectives on life looking back on that exciting and romantic period, how she views her daughters and her life now – her marriage to a man who she loves and is solid but not nearly as exciting as her former lover.  It is a meditation on life from a wise woman looking back on her decisions, her life, and her very different relationships with her daughters.

My Impressions: Not my normal fare, and some would call this a “chick” book,  given that the protagonist and most of the key characters are women, and it deals largely with a woman’s life and perspectives – men play a supporting role in the book.  But I not only thoroughly enjoyed Tom Lake,  but also  very much appreciated the perspectives this book gave me on women, their wisdom, priorities and values, coming  from this very admirable main character.   

This is Lara Wilson’s story, about her growing up and becoming a young actress in her 20s playing Emily in a performance of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, in a fictional theater in Michigan known as Tom Lake.  During this period she has a passionate romantic tryst with the male lead in the play. The story goes back-and-forth between her youthful experiences in Tom Lake to the “present” day, when she is a married empty-nester in her late 50s, living with her husband on their farm in Michigan, telling her story to her grown daughters who are eager to hear about their mothers romantic adventures.   The audible is read by Meryl Streep who does a remarkable job, convincingly embodying in her voice the woman she is representing.  

The Our Town story is a constant sub-theme in the book – Patchett writes it almost assuming her readers are familiar with the story.  And Tom Lake has it’s analagous themes to those in Our Town – the joys of family and community, the joys and pains of life and romantic love from the perspective of a young girl. Our Town won the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1938. 

Tom Lake is also a coming of age novel, but later in life.  We learn how Lara gains maturity from the joys and trauma of  her romantic experiences as a budding young actress, to then choosing to leave that world behind and opt for a more stable and simpler life, living on and working a cherry farm in upstate Michigan with her husband, raising three girls. 

The setting of the novel is later Lara’s life, during the pandemic when her three daughters return home to spend the COVID shut-down on the cherry farm they grew up on with family, and the whole family is once again together, working the farm – because Covid restrictions don’t allow the normal seasonal laborers to be there.   During their work, the daughters begin inquiring about their mother’s earlier life and they want to know more about an affair she had had with another actor who subsequently became one of the top and most famous male actors in America. Think Brad Pitt or Tom Cruise. .  

In Tom Lake, Lara is her telling us her story, and we read what she tells her daughters, what she’s thinking as she tells her story and she shares with us what she doesn’t or won’t tell her daughters. She shares why she leaves some parts out,  and how each of her daughters reacts very differently to different parts of her story.  We are inside her head, and we come to see how she regards and relates differently to each of the daughters, who are indeed very different. And most importantly, we see how 30+ years of life and maturity change her perspective on what was so urgent to her as a young woman.

And just when I thought I’d figured out the story and it’s trajectory, Patchett throws in some surprises that catch me a bit off guard, even decades after the tumultuous passionate romance between Lara and Duke.

I really enjoyed the characters in the novel – all seemed legitimate and realistic:

• Lara Nelson – She is the best developed of the characters; the entire story is told from her perspective and we see it all through her eyes.  An intelligent woman with a wisdom and maturity that has come through some tough lessons learned in her youth, some of which she relates to her daughters, and what she doesn’t tell them, she tells us. 
• Peter Duke – the extremely charming, gifted, talented, narcissistic and self-serving male heart throb of Lara’s youth.  I couldn’t help but like him – nor could Lara resist, nor could most women – but he was a slave to his charm and talent, and his seeming ability to get whatever he wanted.
• The three daughters: Emily Maisie, Nel who loved and bickered with each other and played off of each other in getting their mother to tell her story. Emily is hard-core and pragmatic, but has some baggage with her mother, and will take over the farm; Maize is on her way to becoming a veterinarian, and Nel wants to be an actress and can’t believer her mother walked away from the opportunities she had in Hollywood. .  
• Sebastian Duke:  Peter’s brother who protected Peter (from himself and his sometimes excessive exuberance, also talented and good looking, but a truly nice guy, selflessly helping others – the counterpoint to Peter’s self-absorption. 
• Joe Nelson: Lara’s husband, who during Lara’s tryst with Peter Duke, had been the director of the play Our Town, and then had the role of stage manager in the play.   Joe was a quiet, solid, mature, admirable, and ultimately stabilizing presence in the novel.  

Some key themes that I saw. 

Love – the fiery passion of youthful, hormone-driven infatuation contrasts with the steady flame of a more “mature”  persistent love, companionship and partnership of long term marriage – to include paternal love for children. This book also touches on the regrets and painful residue of a broken heart – how the wounds of disappointed love can heal over time, as we get older,  but not completely.

All that glitters is not gold – especially in Hollywood.  Lara spent some time in the limelight in Hollywood as a supporting actress in a movie which did pretty well.  She ultimately didn’t like the Hollywood scene, and was able to see through the hype, manipulation and marketing behind much of tinseltown.  We see in Duke and a couple of others in the book,  that the glamour of Hollywood can draw people driven by a yearning need for the power and attention that comes with stardom.  Through Lara we get insights into the pathology behind much of the pursuit of fame and celebrity that drives Hollywood.

The joys and challenges of living on a farm, and the attachment that farmers and their families have to the land that their forefathers cleared and worked. And to small communities where people take care of each other.  Lara’s exciting and romantic past is regularly contrasted with her love of the simple stability and peacefulness of life in a rural community, with close connections to and inter-dependency with people in that small community. 

The simple beauty of nature is juxtaposed against the fast paced urban, impersonal and anonymous life in the cities where Lara has works – LA and New York.  She often returns to the theme of the simple and therapeutic beauty of nature. 

This book won’t appeal to everyone – it is a quiet book without a lot of excitement or drama.  But I thought it was a great story, very well told which shares wisdom and insights from an admirable mature woman.   I recommend it to thoughtful readers who don’t necessarily need a Bourne Identity type of drama in their reading. 

I”d recommend a couple of other reviews of Ann Patchett’s  Tom Lake:  The New Yorker  review.   New York Times review,  The Washington Examiner  review  

Why this book: Selected by my literature reading group. Pulitzer prize winner for literature for 2023. Also we had read (I twice)  Kingslover’s book The Poisonwood Bible and loved it.

Summary in 3 Sentences: A novel written in the first person  retrospective from a young man who has grown up among the rural poor of Appalachia in western Virginia, looking back on his  life from his boyhood living in a trailer with his drug addicted mother through teenag years and young adulthood.  He shares with us the abuse he’d taken from his mother’s boyfriend then husband, then uncertainty and emotional trauma as a foster child, then as a runaway, and finally as a teenager in High School, who’s fallen into the same pattern of drug addiction and self-defeating behavior that is the norm in his community.  All the while, we see that he has a good heart, and a maturity of perspective that belies his bad decisions and the bad luck he’s experienced,  and there is always an undercurrent of hope and the possibility of redemption throughout the novel.  

My Impressions:    Not only a good read, it is also powerful and (at least to me) authentic exposure of  a part of life in America that I have never personally seen nor experienced.  It is a “bildungs roman” – a coming of age novel taking place in the 1990s and early 2000s in economically disadvantaged and backward part of western Virginia (Jonesville in Lee County – a real place).  From the perspective of this one rather precocious young man, we learn about life in a part of America that is largely forgotten or ignored by mainstream media and the state and federal bureaucracy.  

Demon Copperhead is the nickname given to Damon Fields who has had few positive adult role models  – most adults he knows have little money, little faith in the future or in the state, many are alcoholic and making a living in the gray or shadowy parts of the economy.   They fieel dismissed and disenfranchised by the more well-to-do parts of American society, and feel left on their own to get by and find whatever fun or satisfaction they can.  Demon loses his mother and is put into a series of foster homes, of people who accept foster children simply for the money the state gives them.  Demon is exploited, made to do excruciating work on a tobacco farm, is emotionally and physically abused, and given very little of what a child needs to grow and flourish. But he learns to survive and learns a lot of resilience.  

We learn about how ineffective the DSS (Departmetn of Social Services) can be in under resources parts of our country to monitor and support foster children and others who are adrift in society – underpaid, overworked social workers are not held accountable by their underpaid, under qualified and overworked supervisors, who are also not held accountable in a system which is more focused on meeting minimum standards, less on effective action, and does not reward success or creative solutions. Even those individuals who try hard are stymied by too much work, too little pay, few incentives to work hard, an initiative-stifling bureaucracy, poor leadership, and an extremely difficult job.

Demon does have some adult supporters and mentors,  but they are not family or parents  – his adult supporters can only encourage him, but there is no one who he trusts or who has authority to hold him accountable. So he falls prey to the connivers and exploiters and low-lifes that look for vulnerable youth to support their own self-serving and corrupt agendas.

Eventually Demon becomes a teenager, gets involved with girls, sex, alcohol and drugs, high school shenanigans – all of which divert him from a path that would take him out of this cycle of failure and despair, and away from opportunities to grow and prosper.  An important factor in his bad behavior is that he doesn’t believe he can break out of the cycle that most of the youth he knows is in  – no one he knows has, and it is so easy to fall prey to all the incentives and opportunities he experiences take him the other way.  All along the way, he sees and becomes familiar with sexual exploitation, violence, suicide, drug overdoses – and the many tragedies that are commonplace in the world he inhabits,  but are much less common in the schools and upbringings of the middle and upper classes of society.

But there is redemption.  Demon does experience love from his neigbbors and two of his teachers who are there for him when he begins to realize that he is going over a cliff. He has a few close friends who retain faith in him, in spite of his  bad judgment and series of bad decisions.    Eventually the light begins to come on and when he is at one of his lowest points, he makes a fateful and difficult decision to try to take a step in a new direction.  

One of the important themes of the book is how the medical establishment encouraged use of and ultimately addiction to oxycontin, calling it a wonder drug against pain, and not addictive.  Demon becomes addicted after a football injury and then slides into the underworld and blackmarket of oxy-junkies bargaining and trading and dealing in illicit oxycontin and fentanyl.  As hard as he tries to free himself, his physicl pain, the addictive qualities of the drug,  and his environment conspire against him.

Another important theme of the book is how the rural poor, the people of the so called “red neck” culture of the Appalachians are disrespected,  disregarded and disenfranchised by much of America.  Demon sees how the poverty and underachievement of today is the result of decades of coal barons readily exploiting local miners, how they bought up property at fire-sale prices, undercut safety and social services and any other obligations to support the miners that might detract from their exorbitant profits.  Demon has a gift for drawing and has some success creating a syndicated cartoon which satirizes the way the wealthy exploit the poor and how the rest of America looks down upon rural and poor Appalachian culture.

There is also a tribute to rural living, the connection with nature, the simple joy and pleasures of the quiet and serenity of the outdoors, in contrast to the hectic urban environment of Nashville and Chattanooga where Demon also spends some time. and even Atlanta, where he went to rescue a friend who’d been seduced there with drugs and other threats.  These urban centers of activity and ambition are contrasted with the comfort and peace that Demon feels in the outdoors in nature. 

The trajectory of the book is explicitly modeled on Dickens’ David Copperfield. In reading a review of that book, I realize that Kingsolver unashamedly uses names for some of the characters in David Copperfield in Demon Copperhead. And given that David Copperfield had a hopeful ending, I knew that somehow Copperhead would too.   Though not a classic “happy ending” it is hopeful and I liked the way she concluded the book.

One of he things that impressed me about the book is the language that she used – sexual, profane, politically incorrect – representing the way I would imagine young people in that part of rural Virginia actually speak.  We read language somewhat different from how young people in urban environments speak,  and very clever expressions and metaphors which I hadn’t heard before. Kingsolver also does a good job of being the voice of a rowdy and randy young man – which surprised me from a middle aged woman.  She certainly got help from young men to create that credible voice.  

Why this book:  January 2024 selection  by my SEAL book club, in part because one of our members knows the author and was able to get him to join our discussion.

Summary in 3 Sentences:  Michael Scott Moore was kidnapped in 2012 and spent more that 2 1/2 years as hostage of Somali pirates who were demanding an exorbitant ransom payment. Not only do we learn of the boredom, frustration, discomfort,  uncertainty and fear associated with being a terrorist hostage,  but Moore also gives us background into the role of piracy in history, the history and culture of Somalia and what his experiences did to his personal values, and sense of himself and his place in the world. It is rich not only with details of his experience but also with his insights, and personal and spiritual growth that came from it. 

My Impressions:  Fascinating read about one man’s experience as a captive in a part of the world about which we read a lot, but know little.  He writes with a journalist’s flair for putting the reader in his shoes, and making his situation real and immediate.  

I have read a number of books by POWs and prisoners – among them and most notably, Stockdale’s In Love and War,  Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, and this one shares some qualities with those books – all of which include spiritual insights and reflections, suffering, fear and uncertainty, and an adversarial relationship with the captors.  But this one adds something different to that genre – Moore is a journalist with a flair for keeping his audience engaged, and also his captivity was part of a commercial venture – to make money for the captors.  He had a different relationship to his captors, and he had a different hope and expectation for release in the midst of suffering and uncertainty. 

In The Desert and the Sea, we experience with Moore, the months and years of uncertainty, changing news and prospects for recovery, frustration and anger with the lies, deception and even stupidity of his captors, as well as his fear and anxiety of what would come next, and whether he would survive. He also describes Somali culture and history, his relationship with his captors and his fellow captives, and there were many fellow captives  All were being held for ransom – this is a business in Somalia, as it has been in Mexico and other parts of the developing world – capturing citizens of first world nations and holding them for ransom. 

His description of his life before the capture, his childhood and his work as a journalist are all relevant to his experiences and reflections during his captivity.  While in captivity, several times he was beat up, physically abused,  his wrist was broken, he got malaria and only received the medical care that the captors believed would keep him alive long enough to get the ransom they were demanding.  They hoped and expected to get $20m for him in ransom, because in their minds, the US is a rich country and could afford it. They didn’t believe him when he told them that governments don’t as a matter of policy pay ransom.  His captors in general had very little understanding of the world outside their own domain. 

Through Moore, the pirates were able to get in touch with his mother, who was coached by the FBI about how to respond to their demands and phone calls.  His mother’s experiences during this period make up an important part of this book.  The pirates hired negotiators to help them get the money they were demanding, but their demands were way beyond what his friends and family could pay – it then  became a negotiation over price.

Moore  was held captive in various run down remote buildings in the Somali countryside, which he described variously as stinking cess-pools or filthy shit holes. He was fed the same basic beans and gruel, occasionally a bit of meat.  For part of his captivity he was kept on the Nahan3 a ship that the Somalis had captured and had anchored off the coast of Somalia, where he was one of many other  hostages, most of whom had been ship’s crew on various vessels that they had taken. His time on the ship was more tolerable, in that they had plenty of food, he made some friends with other hostages, and there were no mosquitos.  

Throughout his captivity the pirates were aware that US surveillance was looking for him.  During his captivity, there had been a successful rescue by Navy SEALs of Jessica Buchanan and Poul Thisted who had been taken hostage and held for ransom after working on a Danish humanitarian project in Somalia. During the rescue, the SEALs killed 9 Somali pirates.  The pirates holding Moore were aware of this and very afraid of a potential rescue attempt, and vowed to kill Moore immediately if one were attempted.  When they were aware of drones or surveillance aircraft, they hid him, while Moore himself did what he could to make himself visible to any such aircraft.

Ultimately a much lower ransom was paid and Moore was released, and he describes that process at the end of the book, as well as how his life changed afterward. He was able to reconnect with a number of the other hostages who had been able to attain their freedom.

A very engaging  and well-written book.  In addition to a fascinating story, it provides insights into Somalia culture, Somali pirate culture, his strong but occasionally flagging will to survive, his personal and spiritual struggle and growth during a period of suffering and uncertainty, and the squalid and anxious life that hostages for ransom face.  

I like and agree with Barnes and Noble’s short review: 
“A sort of Catch-22 meets Black Hawk Down, The Desert and the Sea is written with dark humor, candor, and a journalist’s clinical distance and eye for detail. Moore offers an intimate and otherwise inaccessible view of life as we cannot fathom it, brilliantly weaving his own experience as a hostage with the social, economic, religious, and political factors creating it.”

Why this book: Selected by my Sci Fi Reading Group – when I offered to bring in a friend of mine who is currently in Astronaut training with NASA to discuss it.

Summary in 3 Sentences: The book takes place during 24 hours within an International Space Station orbiting the earth – during which the space station orbits the earth 16 times.  We get the inner thoughts, experiences, impressions and perspectives from six astronauts – 2 women and 4 men, from Russia, UK, US, Japan. Italy. We get not only their impressions and perspectives, but also the author’s own thoughts about the significance of humans being in space, looking down from 250 miles, onto the earth where the rest of us live. 

My Impressions: Powerful and very much worth reading. It is short – about 200 small pages with large print, a 3, 4, or 5 hour read, but I read it in shorter intervals – and that is the way I believe it should be read it.  The book is divided into 16 chapters, each representing one of the orbits during the 24 hour period of the book.  But the chapters are not a chronological narrative of time. The sixteen chapters are simply a mechanism for the author to break up her story into various aspects of being in space and the stories and perspectives of the characters.  

Though it is a novel, it is also a meditation on being human, from the perspectives of six people from different parts of the world who are living together in a situation which is so very different from normal human life, that they can’t help but spending a considerable amount of time reflecting upon their own  humanity. There is also a cross-cultural dimension to their interactions, but the cultural differences seem trivial compared to the common humanity they share and the extensive training they’ve gone through to be there.   

They orbit the world and look down on different parts of it, 16 times a day, observing where they had lived, where their families are, countries with which their countries are either at war or experiencing significant tensions. Also with a direct view looking away from earth into the immensity of space, they are forced to confront the infinity of space, of the universe, of time, and the relative insignificance of their personal problems and the problems of earth within that unimaginable infinity.

They also have to adjust their basic human requirements to the dictates of near zero gravity in space – and this forces significant adjustments to the most basic of human needs:  sleep, eating, exercising, excretion, as well as privacy in a very confined space. In Orbital we learn about the nausea that most get during the first days in space, the challenges of adjusting to sleeping, moving, nearly all activities in a world in which there is no up or down. The author notes of one of the men:   “With the atrophying of the body, life doesn’t tug at him so much….he sleeps because he must, but his sleep is mostly tentative, not deep or robust as it is on earth. Everything in his body seems to lack commitment to the cause of its animal life, as if there’s a cooling of systems, an efficient running down of superfluous parts.” p 120 Without gravity, everything seems to slow down, and their sense of time is distorted because some how, it is tied to a  sense of space, which seems somehow to be tied to a sense of gravity. 

They think about why they are there – why THEY were selected from so many others, Why even try to live and thrive where one is not built or designed to live, much less thrive – why leave earth at all?   And thinking about the many chores and scientific experiments that they are running in space – couldn’t an AI robot do most, if not all of these tasks, perhaps better than they, and not have to deal with so many human needs and limitations?   Three of the astronauts had already been in the space station for nearly six months; three had arrived just a couple of months ago.  All were ambivalent about the prospect of leaving the simplicity and the “God’s eye view” of the earth, suspended in space.

They think about the discrepancies between what their training told them to expect and what they actually experienced in the space station, acknowledging that there’s no way to fully prepare for the dissonance between their lives on earth and their experience in a space station orbiting the earth 16 times in 24 hours.   When they look at earth, they see no borders (except the lights along the India Pakistan border,) cities and towns are visible only at night from the light they emit.   They come to prefer to view the earth during the day – “the humanless simplicity of land and sea,,” p106 where there are only patches of green, and brown, and white and many shades of blue of the various oceans and seas. 

This book entices the reader to imagine life in the confines of a small space, with a few other humans, traveling in space 250 miles above the earth.  In so doing, one may be able to distance oneself from the preoccupations and problems, that encumber our consciousness and our time here on earth.  And, I believe, that is the challenge Samantha Harvey presents to us in Orbital – to put ourselves in the environment she describes so well, and imagine ourselves apart from our earthly vanities and preoccupations, and more connected to the immense universe that surrounds us. 

Why this book: Selected by my Science Fiction Book Club

Summary in 3 Sentences: These are a series of stories told in an interview many decades in the future, with a woman at the end of her career as a robo-psychologist for company United States Robot, looking back at various incidents that have shaped the evolution of robots supporting humans.  Each of the stories presents a dilemma that those managing the robots had encountered, didn’t know how to deal with, and had to call on the the robo-psychologist to help solve the problem.  The problems all dealt with bridging the gap between how humans think and how they’d programmed the robots to “think.” 

My Impressions:  This book is actually a compilation of a number of different short stories, built into the framework of an interview with a woman, the first ever robo-psychologist at the end of her career in 2057 at the age of 88.  Note Azimov wrote this book in the 1940s and published it in 1950. so he was projecting the challenges of AI and robots nearly a century into the future.

Given that it was seven or eight individual stories loosely tied together through the interview with Susan Calvin, there was not a common plot, though there was a common theme.  The theme that was an issue in all the stories, was the challenge that humans will have learning to adapt to and live with the capabilities of highly intelligent robots programmed by humans.  The theme that was in most of the stories was the challenge that robot intelligence, what we now call AI, will have with ambiguous circumstances and having to make decisions between conflicting goods. 

Emphasized in the book and apparently a ground breaking perspective at the time, was Asimov’s three guiding principles for robots, in order of priority: 

1. Never intentionally harm a human being
2. Obey the orders of the human being who is the designated master
3. Preserve yourself, unless doing so will be at the expense of human beings. 

Also several of the stories were of robots that either misunderstood human direction and interpreted it in ways that humans did not foresee or imagine, or the human direction was more than it could process and it malfunctioned.  These are problems that current AI systems also face.   Two of the stories had robots that defied human guidance, and became autonomous, but eventually that was determined to be due to poor programming by humans. 

Asimov addresses anti-robot sentiments and resistance to what he perceived as inevitable AI/robot power and influence in future societies.  The first story has a very effective robot companion for a little girl, but mother is viscerally opposed to her child having a “relationship” with a machine, and insists that the robot leave the house. The little girl is devastated as the robot was her best friend and playmate. Later in the book, much of the good that robots are doing to reduce suffering and increase human flourishing is actively being undermined by the Society for Humanity which opposes AI robotic influence in world affairs and national economies.  The Society for Humanity was largely motivated by religious concerns about giving so much authority to logic and reason-based machines, vice faith in God and transcendent values. 

At the end of the book, and in the final stories, Asimov pretty clearly makes the case that AI and robots will be a positive force for humanity, and that human societies will eventually outsource to AI/robots much of what they currently assign to very imperfect and self-centered humans.   Steven Byerley, one of the final characters with whom Susan Calvin deals, the rough equivalent of the General Secretary of the UN and a very admirable character – it is unclear whether he is fully human, an android or a very human-like robot.  Susan (I believe) speaking for Asimov, didn’t believe it was important.  Susan, and I believe Asimov, believed that properly programed robots could lead human society better, and create more prosperity and less conflict than humans.  But Byerley’s judicious and well conceived policies to build cooperation and prosperity were being undermined surreptitiously by the Society for Humanity,  and there was a foreboding that much of the good that was being done, was being undone to promote one culture or nation group over another.  

Given when the book was written, there is a certain anachronism to the personalities and the people and how they interact, that sometimes seem quaint, but were at times for me, annoying.  But Asimov was writing for the people of the 1940s and 1950s, and our culture has changed.  I thought it a bit of a stretch how he gave his robots personalities, often with their own opinions and desires, when arguing with humans.  But  It is still amazing that Asimov foresaw so clearly 3/4 of a century ago, some of the challenges that we are facing today with AI and robot-human interface.  

ADDENDUM

At our discussion of this book several points were brought up that I thought worthy of note:

1. The human characters in the book were not particularly impressive – except for Steven Beyerley who it was not clear that he was indeed a human.  Not much real affection was shown between any of the humans in the book, or between robots or humans and robots, with the exception of the young girl with her robot playmate. That story seemed a precursort to Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro – a book this grop had read previously. 
2. The first law of robots – never to kill or harm a human being is ironic given the degree to which robots – or autonomous drones, and other military “robots” are designed specifically to kill human beings. When do Robtots get authority to make decisions that will result in lethal action – that is an issue that remains relevant.  I wrote an essay on that challenging issue 10 years ago: It is here/
3. It appeared that Byerley was a robotic clone of himself – the real Steve Byerley was severely injured in a car crash and the robot was taking care of him and representing him in public.   The question of longevity for the robotic clone arose – the biological Steven Byerley seemed fragile without long to live.  The (we believe) robotic clone may have had centuries left.  Issue not addressed, but left hanging in the novel.