Book Review:  How to Kill a Language: Power, Resistance, and the Race to Save Our Words by Sophia Smith Galer

Posted on September 5, 2026 by John Walters

I cannot say, despite my decades of worldwide wanderings, that I have become any sort of language virtuoso. I would pick up the local languages the best I could while passing through, and due to prolonged stays in the appropriate locales, I learned the basics of reading and speaking Bengali, Italian, and Greek (although my bilingual sons have a good chuckle at my Greek pronunciation). I also would pick up smatterings of tongues, as best I could, probably at least a dozen of them, as I passed through various lands. But I have never been adept at any but English.

One of my sons, who uses large language models to study the environmental impact of global warming, is convinced that a key to truly understanding Arctic landscapes lies in how indigenous peoples perceive their environments, and he believes that a key to finding this out is the preservation and study of the local languages. In this fascinating book, Galer emphasizes that rapidly disappearing regional languages are integral not only to perceptions of environments, but also to knowledge, culture, and sense of identity. As she states in the introduction: “Languages aren’t dictionaries, but encyclopedias, containing entire worlds of often irreplaceable information.” She goes on to say that “language diversity is one of our most potent weapons against the diminishment of deep knowledge, the homogenization of culture, the erasure of history, and even some of our health crises. And yet it has never been more imperiled.”

What follows are ten case histories from around the world of important languages that presently are or in the past have been in danger of extinction – what she refers to as linguicide. For instance, she delves into the ancestral language of her grandparents in Italy, which is fast disappearing due to emigration; the Ukrainian language, which is endangered through Russia’s occupation; Ladino, a Judeo-Spanish language spoken by Jews who immigrated to Thessaloniki, Greece, from Spain, but which became all but extinct due to the annihilation of most of its speakers in the Nazi death camps; the Kurdish language, which is in danger because of the lack of a homeland for its speakers. One particularly intriguing chapter concerns Hebrew, which escaped extinction because of its status as a holy language (similar, the author states, to Sanskrit and Latin, spiritual languages that are no longer widely spoken), and its revival as the official language of modern-day Israel. Another compelling chapter deals with the languages in Ghana, Africa, that are being eradicated because of people having to abandon their homelands because of climate change. Concerning the loss of these languages, she writes that “across herbal medicines, childbirth, and farming, countless practices exist that have been found to do everything from improve the nutrient yield of a crop to prevent the overkilling of game, thus ensuring there will always be enough food to go around – and all of these practices would have only been communicated through local languages.”

Besides emphasizing the value of local and regional languages, even those with a limited number of speakers, Galer extols the value of bilingualism, or better yet, multilingualism. She warns that there is “a pervasive myth” told to parents that multiple languages early on will confuse children, and that learning more than one language might delay their speech development. She states that “early bilingualism is not only fine,” but also grants children many multilingual benefits. This is certainly true with my sons, who grew up speaking mainly English at home but were surrounded by Greek speakers and Greek culture and attended Greek public schools. The danger, Galer says, is that the language may be lost in subsequent generations, which recalls the ending of the film My Big Fat Greek Wedding. Her daughter complains about having to go to Greek school instead of playing with her friends, and the mother emphasizes the importance of the language and adds, “But you can marry anyone you want.”

I have to admit that in this book, the linguistic explanations occasionally get technical and difficult to understand; the author also quotes directly from the languages she analyses, usually in their own alphabets. It is worth persisting, however, through these sections and gleaning what you can, because most of the book is touching, heartfelt, deeply personal, and vitally important.

We will close with an observation by the author concerning Italian fine wines: “If it is true that a wine will taste differently because the grapes face south on a mountainside, or have slightly more minerality in the soil than exactly the same grapes twenty-five kilometers away, why do we assume that language may not alter so rapidly, too?” How to Kill a Language is, in fact, a love letter to languages, extinct, ancestral, and modern, whether obscure or widespread, and a proclamation of the inestimable value they hold for human knowledge and culture.

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Book Review:  Miracles of Life: Shanghai to Shepperton, an Autobiography by J.G. Ballard

Posted on August 29, 2026 by John Walters

I first became acquainted with the stories of J.G. Ballard in the early 1970s during my first infatuation with science fiction, specifically with the cutting-edge literary work referred to as the New Wave. Back then, his shorter works appeared mainly in British publications such as New Worlds magazine, but they also showed up in award and best-of-the-year anthologies, which is where I found them. Although at the time he was not as well known as other American New Wave writers such as Ursula Le Guin, Harlan Ellison, Roger Zelazny, and Samuel Delaney, he was well-respected for the erudite quality of his work, especially after the stories in his surrealistic experimental novel The Atrocity Exhibition began to appear. He became internationally famous, though, when his autobiographical novel Empire of the Sun was published in the mid-eighties and soon afterwards Spielberg made a movie out of it.

Part One of Miracles of Life, which takes up almost half the book, is about Ballard’s early years in China. He was born in Shanghai in 1930 and raised in an elite, vibrant, and wealthy expatriate community. As he matured, he had a great deal of independence, cycling around Shanghai on his own and meeting all sorts of idiosyncratic characters. However, as World War II approached, Japan invaded China. For a time the expats were left alone, but they were eventually rounded up and placed in an internment camp called the Lunghua Civilian Assembly Center. Ballard, his parents, and his sister lived all together in a tiny dorm room in a compound surrounded by barbed wire fencing. In the beginning, security was loose, and Ballard would take off for the city from time to time to see what he could see. Despite being a refugee in a world war, Ballard describes his time at the camp as mainly joyful; he made many friends and had many adventures. After the Americans intervened in the war, and especially after the atomic bombing of the Japanese mainland, the Japanese left, and Ballard and his mother and sister relocated to England.

Part Two concerns Ballard’s college years, his marriage, and of course his growth as a writer. Ballard says that he began writing as a child, “perhaps as a response to the greater tension I sensed among the adults around me.” “I was always a keen storyteller, and enjoyed school essays when there was a free choice and I could describe some important event, real or imaginary.” Later, when he moved to England, he became fascinated with surrealism and psychoanalysis, interests that heavily influenced his writing.

His wife died of pneumonia in 1964, and afterwards Ballard raised his three children as a single father. I am fully in agreement with him as he states that “the years I spent as the parent of my young children were the richest and happiest I have ever known.” And “my children were at the center of my life, circled at a distance by my writing.” So it was with me as well when my kids were young.

One thing I would like to have seen Ballard explore more in depth is his experiences as a writer: how he formulated ideas for his books, the process of writing them, and the aftermath. These topics are touched on but only briefly and not in depth. He does mention Doubleday’s pulping of the entire first printing of The Atrocity Exhibition after the publisher happened to come across one of its more radical stories, and the controversy surrounding his novel Crash and the subsequent film. His big break, of course, was when Empire of the Sun became an international best seller and Spielberg’s film became a hit.

The last chapter of the autobiography, which is only a single page long, offers a clue as to why the second half of the book does not have the depth of detail of the first half. Ballard explains that he was diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer and he was receiving treatment for it. Only after the cancer diagnosis did he begin working on the autobiography. It seems that in the end he ran short of time.

Ballard’s patient, kind, magnanimous, intelligent, expressive voice makes Miracles of Life a joy to read. He was a profoundly influential writer. Indeed, the word “Ballardian” has entered the lexicon. The Wiktionary defines this as “of or pertaining to the fictional milieu of J.G. Ballard; typically, focusing on surreal violence as inherent in modernity.”

*     *     *

I had never seen the film Empire of the Sun, and I decided that it would provide fitting closure to watch it. In Miracles of Life, Ballard explains that he decided to fictionalize his experience in China and to take his parents out of the equation so that he could focus on the boy, his younger self, and his reactions to the war and occupation. The tone of the movie is much darker than Ballard’s autobiography; in the book, as I mentioned above, the young Ballard is joyful much of the time despite his circumstances, while in the film, lost and alone, he faces one crisis after another. It must be said, though, that the movie is superbly produced and directed, and twelve-year-old Christian Bale as Ballard, who is in virtually every scene, is amazing.

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Book Review:  Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino

Posted on August 22, 2026 by John Walters

I don’t know how this book managed to avoid my radar for all this time. After all, I am a big fan of the surrealistic fantasies of Jorge Luis Borges. In fact, Invisible Cities reminds me of some of the more abstract pieces by Borges than those of any other writer. It is labeled as a novel, but it is not really a novel, at least not in the conventional sense of the term. It consists of a series of dialogs between Kublai Khan and Marco Polo about cities that may or may not exist in Khan’s realm. Polo’s descriptions of the cities are seldom realistic. Instead, after Polo delineates the main attributes of each city, he then presents details that call into question the city’s reality, or makes the city seem to be the opposite of the reader’s initial impression, or hints at all but indiscernible hidden depths that can be glimpsed but not explored. Whether the cities actually exist or not appears to be less important than the conclusions Kublai Khan draws from the descriptions.

As I said, this work reminds me of Borges. However, the best of Borges’s work, despite its slippages into the surreal, always has characters that anchor the story in humankind, while Invisible Cities seems content to remain in abstraction. While reading this I was also reminded of “Kubla Khan” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, one of my favorite poems, which beautifully captures the elegance and majestic drama of Khan’s empire.

In the book, Marco Polo is Khan’s employee, his ambassador, but the two seem to have a very special relationship. Khan craves Polo’s stories, almost as if he requires them for self-justification. Although Khan and Polo are the only two characters, each city is presented as unique, with a personality of its own; the vignettes describe the cities almost as if they were human characters, each one starkly different from the last, and each one idiosyncratic to the extreme.

One peculiarity, and an indication that Calvino does not intend for the thirteenth century historical setting to be taken seriously, is that the descriptions of the cities often contain modern props such as postcards, skyscrapers, steamboats, radio antennae, and so on, and these insertions are not explained or questioned; it is as if Khan and Polo have access to the whole of history as they carry on their intellectual exchange. And at one point Khan mentions that there is one city that Polo never speaks of: his native city, Venice. To which Polo replies, “Every time I say something about a city I am saying something about Venice.”

The cities are grouped into categories such as “Cities and Memory,” “Cities and Desire,” “Cities and Signs,” “Trading Cities,” “Cities and the Dead,” and so on. One city called Adelma (the cities all have women’s names) appears to be populated with dead people, and by the end of his vignette Polo questions whether he himself is in fact alive or dead. He observes that “you reach a moment in life when, among the people you have known, the dead outnumber the living. And the mind refuses to accept more faces, more expressions; on every new face you encounter, it prints the old forms, for each one it finds the most suitable mask.” The book is full of such profundities.

Overall, Invisible Cities left me mystified, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. While contemplating writing this review, I felt concerned that I might not be able to explain it, but really, I don’t have to explain it. Read it for yourself and draw your own conclusions.

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Book Review:  Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mount Everest Disaster by Jon Krakauer

Posted on August 15, 2026 by John Walters

Into Thin Air is a first-person account of a climbing expedition that went horrifically wrong. Krakauer, a journalist, was hired by Outside, an adventure magazine, to join a mountain climbing team whose purpose was to attain the summit of Mount Everest in May 1996. He recounts his journey to Nepal, his hike to Everest Base Camp, his climb to higher altitudes, and his successful ascent to the summit. At the same time, he familiarizes readers with his companions, a host of climbers of diverse nationalities from his and other concurrent expeditions. In fact, there are so many relevant characters in the narrative that it is sometimes difficult to keep track of them, especially since Krakauer alternates between using the first names and the last names of the major players. For the most part, all is well during the weeks of preparation and acclimatization, as they ascend from primary camps to camps at higher altitudes, but the day of the climb turns disastrous when a storm with gale-force winds sweeps the top of the mountain. Although Krakauer himself makes it off the peak successfully, numerous men and women in his and other expeditions do not. In all, eight climbers die in the blizzard-like conditions.

Krakauer was an experienced mountaineer, but he had never attempted to climb at such a high altitude before. His account of the journey and the resultant tragedy is visceral in its intensity. What began as high adventure became a relentless catastrophe for all involved. In gut-wrenching detail we learn the perils of attempting to survive at that altitude. In the face of temperatures far below zero where the lack of oxygen can render climbers imbecilic and sluggish, most of those who could still function responded heroically, but there was a lot of confusion, garbled communications, missed rendezvous, and so on. Krakauer explains that in the aftermath of the disaster there was much controversy about some of the decisions the guides and clients made, and also about his take of what happened in the narrative he shared in his magazine article.

This account works as a rousing tale of adventure; as I read, however, I had mixed feelings about the motivations of the characters. After all, I’ve never had the urge to climb mountains, or at least to climb with the sole purpose of attaining the summits of formidable peaks. I’ve hiked through the Olympic Range in Washington State, and I’ve followed unmarked trails into the Himalayan Mountains alone without maps or guide, but I’ve never felt compelled to climb to the top of a mountain just because it is there. The vast majority of the people on this planet, in fact, share this indifference. For a time, therefore, as I was reading, I wondered how to approach this story. Without this motivation, what was the point? I found it difficult to empathize with people who would risk their lives for such a nebulous distinction. But then I realized that we are all mountain climbers in a metaphorical sense; however, instead of climbing physical mountains we reach for other goals that are just as difficult and dangerous to attain. And our efforts do not always lead to success. Often they end in confusion and despair. Into Thin Air, therefore, becomes a parable of striving for near-impossible goals.

Ultimately, the measure of your courage is not whether or not you reach the top, but how you react when faced with human tragedy along the way. Do you stop to assist, or do you continue onward toward your objective, ignoring the needs around you? In the end, it is not so important who makes it to the top of the mountain. A victory won at the expense of others is a hollow victory; in fact, it is a defeat. All of us have different goals in life, and many of us pursue those goals as avidly as mountain climbers attempting to summit Everest. But we should never lose sight of the fact that the decisions we make along the way are just as important, and often even more important, than reaching the end of the line.

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Book Review:  In Other Words by Jhumpa Lahiri

Posted on August 8, 2026 by John Walters

I picked up this book from the library a few years ago but returned it without reading it after realizing that Lahiri had written it in Italian but someone else then translated it into English. I decided to give it another try after I recently wrote an essay called “Language Learning on the Road,” which caused me to consider the value of not just learning a language but immersing oneself in it.

The main reason I initially objected to the book was the high regard I had for Lahiri as an English-language writer. I first became acquainted with her work when I was living in Greece, teaching English and raising a family. I would frequently check out books from the English-language library of the private high school to which my eldest son had obtained a scholarship. On one of my visits, a librarian approached me, put a copy of Lahiri’s Pulitzer Prize-winning short story collection, Interpreter of Maladies, into my hand, and told me, “I think you’ll like this.” Like it? I loved it. I was blown away by its brilliance. It deals with the juxtaposition and clash of Bengali and American cultures, a theme that Lahiri continued to explore in her subsequent three books: The Namesake, Unaccustomed Earth, and The Lowlands.

The Bengali-American experience particularly resonated with me because I lived in Bangladesh and in West Bengal for several years. For awhile I even studied the Bengali language at Dhaka University, and two of my sons were born in Bangladesh, one in Dhaka and one in Chittagong. I was such a fan of Lahiri’s writing that I would do something I did for almost no other authors: purchase the expensive hardcover editions as soon as they were available so I could read them as quickly as possible.

And so I was skeptical when I first came across In Other Words. I wondered: How could a writer who wrote as brilliantly in one language as Lahiri did suddenly switch to another, effectively having to start again from scratch? This book itself provides the answer.

In Other Words has a most unusual format: the Italian original and the English translation are presented on the left and right-hand sides of the pages. Most English readers might see this as a waste of space, but it is of interest to me because, well, I lived in Italy for several years too. Another of my sons was born there. I learned to communicate fairly well in Italian, and though I haven’t practiced it in over thirty years, I enjoyed comparing snippets of the Italian and English texts.

The book consists of short, simple, but heartfelt essays. Most of them are explanations of why Lahiri decided to uproot herself from New York and move with her family to Rome, Italy, adopting a new country and a new language. She describes herself as a person with three languages, none of which completely satisfied her. Her first language, which she grew up with as a child, was Bengali. When she started school in the States, she had to switch to English, which was difficult at first, but when she began to write in it as a young woman, she met with astounding success. Italian, as an adopted language, allowed her to escape her uncertain linguistic past and plunge forward into a grand experiment.

She explains that when it came to translating In Other Words into English, she found the experience exceedingly difficult. She says: “I was reluctant to move back and forth between the two. My impulse at the time was to protect my Italian.” She addresses the concern I had when I first picked up the book: “If I mention that I’m writing in a new language these days, many people react negatively.” And: “A transformation, especially one that is deliberately sought, is often perceived as something disloyal, threatening.”

*     *     *

After further contemplation, I realize that Lahiri’s experiment in groping for significance with Italian is another nail in the coffin for the use of AI in creative partnership. Creativity in the arts is, after all, a deeply human experience. An AI can analyze all the artwork in the known universe and yet still be incapable of individual creativity. All it can do is be an ultra-sophisticated copycat. On the other hand, Lahiri’s is a profoundly emotional journey.

And she expresses kinship with my own quest as a perennial nomad when she writes: “Those who don’t belong to any specific place can’t, in fact, return anywhere. The concepts of exile and return imply a point of origin, a homeland. Without a homeland and without a true mother tongue, I wander the world, even at my desk.” This reminds me of what I wrote at the conclusion of my continent-traversing memoir World Without Pain: The Story of a Search: “Perhaps the journey itself, the search, was the point of it all. But if it was then there was no end, no goal, no destination. One could not arrive; one could not rest, except intermittently. And home? I couldn’t go home again. Home was an abstraction from which one commenced a particular phase of the journey, not an absolute.”

Lahiri explains that part of her sense of dislocation in Italy had to do with her appearance. Although she spoke fluent Italian, she did not look Italian; as a result, people she encountered, especially shopkeepers, would attempt to speak with her in English, or would address her husband, who looked more Italian than she did. I empathize. When I wandered the Middle East and South Asia, my appearance starkly differentiated me from local people. Circumstances constantly reminded me that I was a stranger in a strange land. And yet when I returned to the country of my birth, the sense of dislocation did not abate. I still felt like an anomaly, an outlier, because after decades of world travel my perspective was so different from that of the people around me.

In conclusion, I have to say that ultimately it is the writer’s choice concerning what to say and how to say it. This is as it should be. Lahiri felt compelled to immerse herself in Italian, and the questioning of this choice, by readers or critics or whoever the hell else objects is ridiculous. It is her call, not theirs. In retrospect, after reading In Other Words, I would say she made the right call. It is a profound meditation on writing, language, culture, and identity. Highly recommended.

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Book Review:  Turn Right at Machu Picchu: Rediscovering the Lost City One Step at a Time by Mark Adams

Posted on August 1, 2026 by John Walters

This book is not simply a travelogue set in Peru. It is an attempt to follow in the footsteps of the legendary explorer Hiram Bingham III, who supposedly discovered Machu Picchu in 1911. In his literary quest, Adams alternates between his own forays into the Peruvian wilderness with an eccentric Australian guide named John Leivers; Bingham’s expeditionary adventures as related in his books, especially the famous Lost City of the Incas; the fraud accusations and legal attempts to extract artifacts Bingham appropriated for Yale back to Peru; and the accounts of other explorers and discoverers of lost Inca relics and cities. Adams keeps it all moving with frequent humor and a lighthearted style.

The late nineteenth and early twentieth century was an era of discovery, and explorers who established a claim to fame by going where no one had gone before, such as the North and South Poles, were adulated as heroes. Bingham made several journeys to South America and rediscovered several important Inca ruins, but though he may not have been the first foreigner to the site, he is best known as the man who brought the jungle-overgrown city of Machu Picchu into the public eye. He also helped to popularize archeology. In fact, Adams delves into Bingham’s influence in the crafting of certain fictional characters that became famous in popular culture. First came a B-movie in 1954 called Secrets of the Incas, starring Charlton Heston. Later, in 1981, the world was introduced to the archeologist-adventurer Indiana Jones in The Raiders of the Lost Ark.

In Turn Right at Machu Picchu, Adams’s travel partner Leivers, an accomplished explorer who spends most of his time in the wilderness, seems more of an Indy type than Adams, who comes across as a man out of his element, an editor plucked from behind his desk and deposited unprepared into a Peruvian jungle. Together they experience one misadventure after another, and along the way, the historical facts that Adams compiles make some of the crazy stuff in the Indy movies seem a little less crazy – or at least more plausible.

What sets this book apart from other travelogues is its depth and scope. In alternating between his story and Bingham’s, Adams gives the tale historical perspective – so that it becomes much more than just a narrative of a collection of misfits stumbling through the jungle.

Nowadays, of course, Machu Picchu is one of South America’s most prominent tourist attractions; thousands of people visit it daily. Still, despite the crowds that he and Leivers had to contend with at the site, Adams manages to evoke a sense of wonder as he describes this amazing complex of ruins set high on a ridge between two mountains. This sense of mystic wonder goes far beyond its historical roots. It reminds us that the fantasy worlds we read of or watch in films actually existed, albeit in other forms, in times past, and that the world, and by extension the universe, is still a place of mystery and wonder and excitement and complexity.

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Book Review:  Finding My Way: A Memoir by Malala Yousafzai

Posted on July 25, 2026 by John Walters

In parts of Finding My Way, Malala sounds like a typical young woman attempting to fit in, have fun, and enjoy new experiences during her college days at Oxford University. However, there is nothing typical about Malala at all. She was born in the Swat Valley in northern Pakistan, and despite the conservatism of the local culture, from an early age she became a fervent advocate for the education of girls and young women. When she was only fifteen, she was shot in the face by a Taliban assassin, lapsed into a coma for almost two weeks, and woke up in a hospital in Birmingham, England. As she recovered from her injuries, as an exile in England she continued to speak up for the rights of girls under repressive regimes, and at the age of seventeen she received the Nobel Peace Prize for her efforts; she was the youngest person ever to win a Nobel Prize. This was followed by meetings with world leaders as she traveled internationally to advocate for her cause. This background is covered extensively in the memoir I Am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban.

Finding My Way begins in England, and most of it takes place during her years studying at Oxford University. As I alluded to above, though, it was impossible for her to completely blend in with the other college students. For one thing, she had two bodyguards assigned to her on a twenty-four-hour basis. Even when she lived in a college dorm, they slept in the room next door; for another, despite her heavy study schedule she traveled extensively to continue her advocacy for education. Because she was an international icon, everything she did made its way onto social media in text and photos, and if any of her activities were judged to be even remotely improper, her accounts would be inundated with abusive comments. She also developed PTSD from the shooting incident, which caused devastating nightmares and severe anxiety attacks.

Out of deference to her parents and apprehension of the rabid online community, she did not date, but she did gain a circle of friends with whom she went out for meals, attended parties, and engaged in a variety of other activities. She eventually met a young Pakistani man to whom she became engaged and then married.

All of this is told in an intimate, elegant style that draws readers in as confidants. One chapter might deal with college pranks, but then in the next Malala might be in New York having facial surgery to restore feeling to the nerves damaged by the Taliban bullet, meeting world leaders at an educational conference, or undergoing trauma brought on by memories of the gunman shooting her.

In a touching chapter near the end of the book, she travels with her new husband to Shangla, in the mountains of Pakistan, to visit a school for girls that the Malala Fund had founded but she had never seen. She writes: “I wanted the school to be a place where students didn’t feel the limitations of the outside world, where they could dream of the future and believe in themselves. I also wanted to see that the deficiencies in my own education, the things lacking for most Pakistani girls, were remedied here.” This is the heart of the book and what sets Malala apart from typical college students: she has devoted her life – indeed, has put her life on the line – to advocate for the rights of others. This fervent dedication continually illuminates her words. Read Finding My Way; you’ll see what I mean.

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Book Review:  Take Me to Your Leader: Perspectives on Your First Alien Encounter by Neil deGrasse Tyson

Posted on July 18, 2026 by John Walters

As a writer who frequently delves into the genres of science fiction and fantasy, I have, in the past, conjured up various types of aliens as story characters. Depending upon the specific parameters and requirements of the tales, I have attempted to make them as realistic as possible, or at least explain them well enough so that readers would be able to accomplish the willing suspension of disbelief that is necessary for consuming and enjoying fiction. However, I’m not a scientist, let alone an astrophysicist. Beyond high school classes, the only science I have learned is from books that I picked up and read on my own. It is helpful, therefore, to have some rudimentary guidelines from someone familiar with the basic details of how the universe is put together.

Tyson expresses his interest in the subject when he declares in the book’s very first sentence: “Ever since childhood I’ve wanted to be abducted by aliens.” What follows is an overview of what aliens might be like if they really do exist out there – based on what we know of basic irrefutable universal truths. Don’t worry: there are not many actual equations or complicated explanations; Tyson keeps his arguments cloaked in terms a layperson would understand. He discusses what aliens might look like to us, what we might look like to aliens with various types of senses apart from the ones we possess, what forms alien technology could possibly take, what powers aliens might have that we don’t, and what evidence there really is that aliens are out there.

Take Me to Your Leader remains lighthearted throughout. To illustrate the concepts he is explaining, Tyson draws numerous examples from popular culture: Star Wars, Star Trek, the DC universe, the Marvel universe, the Alien movies, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, The War of the Worlds, The Twilight Zone, The Simpsons, The Flintstones, and many others. These pop culture references not only provide examples with which most people are familiar, but it is also great fun to find out if various superhero abilities and technological capabilities we read about in novels or watch on movie screens are actually scientifically valid. You might be surprised about what can and cannot be accomplished for real (at least theoretically) in this vast intricate universe of ours.

It is a short book, easy to read, and, as I mentioned, Tyson invariably keeps things on the light side. Those of you with scientific training probably know most of this already, but you may nevertheless enjoy reading about how the principles you have learned are correctly or incorrectly utilized in popular books and films. As for me, I am familiar with the basic concepts Tyson discusses, although perhaps not the details. And I don’t really care, when I am reading science fiction and fantasy, whether the author conforms to all the rules. I’ll put up with a lot of deviation from reality for the sake of a good story. The main pleasure for me while reading this book is the trip down nostalgia lane, the recollections of growing up reading and watching the fantastic stories that Tyson uses as examples.

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Book Review:  Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters by Annie Dillard

Posted on July 11, 2026 by John Walters

I first encountered Annie Dillard while raising a family in Greece. I started with Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and then moved on to Holy the Firm, The Writing Life, and Teaching a Stone to Talk. I liked her blend of descriptions of forays into the outdoors or travel to distant lands juxtaposed with incidents from her life, philosophical observations, and occasional surrealistic flights of fancy. What provoked me to reread this book was a personal reflection on old age: how it seems to speed up time. Days, weeks, months, seasons, and years go by much quicker, in my perception, than they used to. And this insight caused me to recall a passage I once read in a Dillard essay in which she is vacationing with a nine-year-old child near a river, and the child riding a bike up and down a hill made her realize that when you are young, life appears to stretch on endlessly, like an uphill slope, and milestones take forever to achieve. When you are older, though, it is as if you are cycling downhill: the ride goes faster and faster until it is over. It turns out that this essay, “Aces and Eights,” is the last one in the book, and the section I was looking for takes up but a few paragraphs. Still, it contrasts the outlooks of young and old effectively. She describes the impatience and boredom of youth and then adds: “But momentum propels you over the crest. Imperceptibly, you start down. When do the days start to blur and then, breaking your heart, the seasons?” This is what I read Annie Dillard to discover: the transition from the simple to the sublime.

I did not only read the final essay, though; to warm up to it I read the rest of the book first. Some pieces initiate with walks near her home on an island in Puget Sound, while others take place in remote locations such as the Galapagos Islands and the Arctic and Antarctic. One of the longer essays, “An Expedition to the Pole,” mixes descriptions of attending a Catholic mass and the tragic history of polar exploration. It closes with a comedic dreamlike sequence involving Dillard, famous polar explorers, a bevy of clowns, a priest, and Jesus Christ himself. Most of the essays do not veer this far astray from reality, but several of them involve a connection or comparison between seemingly disparate subjects.

Dillard has a clear, clean writing style that is elegant but easy to follow. Reading her essays is like undertaking a journey that begins in familiar territory but then gets stranger and stranger the farther you get away from home. If you have never read Dillard before, you might want to start with the classic, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1975. But her other books, including Teaching a Stone to Talk, are well worth reading too, for their cadenced prose and insightful commentary on the natural world, travel, creativity, philosophy, and spirituality.

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A Summertime Gift for My Blog Followers

Posted on July 8, 2026 by John Walters

As a summer gift to readers, I have enrolled digital editions of some of my books and stories in the Smashwords Summer/Winter Sale, which runs through the month of July. (It is called the Summer/Winter Sale because it is summer in the northern hemisphere and winter in the southern hemisphere.) Complete books are half price, marked down from $3.99 to $1.99. Short stories are available to download for free. Take advantage of this sale to stock up on some great reading material.

The complete listing of discounted or free books is here. The available books include:

Road Signs: Tales of the Surreal and Fantastic

When a hitchhiker returning from an extended trip abroad in the early 1970s crosses the United States, he plunges into a dark, surrealistic, frightening landscape from which there seems to be no escape.

After a worldwide plague has decimated their city, four children searching for sustenance enter a seemingly deserted mansion, only to find out that its owner, a madman seeking the alchemical secret to immortality, has modeled it after an elaborate ancient torture chamber.

In the aftermath of the official cancellation of Medicare, Social Security, and other government welfare programs, a destitute senior is relegated to an internment camp for old folks. There he discovers that all is not as it seems, and the recalcitrant elders have some tricks up their sleeves that they can use to deal with the pitiless system that has banished them from its midst.

In these and other provocative, mind-bending tales you’ll find alternative realities, future battlefields, enraged poltergeists, mythological mischief-makers, and freedom fighters on a far planet.

A Glimpse of the Cosmic Dance and Other Stories

In a world whose inhabitants routinely visit famous historical events, two jaded road-weary tourists take a holiday in an isolated retrograde enclave where time travel is forbidden.

Humankind is plunged into chaos as the recently deceased reappear and take up residency in their former homes.

As the result of an expensive technique that restores their youthful vigor, wealthy old people gallivant from place to place adventure-seeking and partying. However, their newfound energy comes at a terrible cost.

In these and other tales you’ll find heart-pounding excitement, deadly perils, baffling perplexities, complex conundrums, dread mysteries, deceptive hallucinations, fantasy landscapes, far planets, distant futures, evil menaces, and unlikely heroes.

Silent Interviews and Other Tales of the Telepathic Guild

Long have the clandestine members of the Telepathic Guild assisted individuals, corporations, and governments by means of their unique skills. Guild Home functions as a headquarters and a refuge, and its strict regulations foster unity and discipline.

In this linked series of stories, a guild member falls in love with an outsider and is faced with a life-changing decision; a group of young people rebel against the guild’s stringent rules; a famous sports star discovers he is telepathic and must choose between his wealth and celebrity status and a chance to change the world; a renegade telepath establishes affinity with a wolf pack in the arctic wastes; a talented telepathic detective attempts to solve a brutal murder at a chaotic science fiction convention.

These and other tales explore the fascinating, enigmatic, and often dangerous lives of those who have sacrificed everything to join the guild and use their extraordinary abilities for the betterment of humankind.

Thoughts from the Aerie: Memoirs and Essays

After living abroad for thirty-five years in India, Bangladesh, Italy, Greece, and other countries, John Walters returned to his home country, the United States, with his sons. When the youngest moved out, he found himself alone in a fourth floor apartment with a spectacular view. He dubbed his new home the aerie.

For some people solitude can be devastating, but for others it can provide a unique opportunity to maximize the creative experience. These scintillating and captivating essays trace the roots of artistic destiny, follow the intricate patterns of past relationships, and offer fascinating observations about writing, travel, literature, perseverance amidst adversity, optimism during a pandemic, and other topics.

Reviews and Reflections on Books, Literature, and Writing: Volume Four

From the author’s introduction:

Picture a book as a gateway to a new land and a book review as a tantalizing glimpse of it, a brief travel memoir of someone who has been there and come back. A large part of what makes life so thrilling is our appreciation of the interpretations of experiences that we find in books. So sit back in your favorite chair or couch or lie down on your bed or chaise lounge and dive in. Allow these reviews to assist you in your own literary explorations by guiding you to new worlds of imagination and adventure.

The stories available for free include some of my personal favorites such as “The Hospice,” “Sink or Swim,” and “Memory Shack.”

So head on over to Smashwords and pick up some thrilling and thoughtful books, short stories, memoirs, and essays at deep discounts and even free.

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