Book Review:  Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

Posted on December 6, 2025 by John Walters

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is a children’s book, isn’t it? Then how came I to review it on this blog, which is devoted to literary works for adults? Not by the usual pathways, I assure you. In fact, renewed interest in Alice’s adventures was ignited in me by means of the song “White Rabbit,” which is written by Grace Slick and performed by her and the rock group Jefferson Airplane. It came about because the phrase “feed your head,” which is the song’s climax, came to me as I was writing about a perennial nomad staying on the move mentally, if not physically, by visiting local museums and reading lots of books. A bit of online research turned up a recent article in which Grace Slick explains that though the song definitely deals with the experience of taking psychedelics, “feed your head” also refers to the act of reading.

In my younger years, I took a variety of types of psychedelics in a number of places around the world, the most notable being an LSD trip in which a companion and I wandered up into the Himalayan foothills surrounding Kathmandu, Nepal. I have also done extensive reading in the science fiction and fantasy genres. My objective in reading Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was to find out if it was really written for children or if it has nuances that will absorb the attention of adults as well. I wanted to know what Carroll really had in mind when he wrote it.

A brief online perusal of several articles, including one by the BBC News, seems to indicate that there is no evidence that Carroll used drugs, even though opium, laudanum, and other now-forbidden substances were legal back then. As any writer will tell you, though, you don’t need drugs to take off on incredible flights of fancy. By all accounts, Carroll wrote the book simply as an entertainment. However, when I read it I realized that it contains many more nuances and complexities than are usually found in children’s tales. Carroll was a mathematician, and there is a fair amount of number play in the text. There is also pun after pun after pun, some of which children would be oblivious to, and a lot of word-play, such as the famous example: “Curiouser and curiouser!” cried Alice (she was so much surprised, that for the moment she quite forgot how to speak good English). There are perplexing poems and idiosyncratic characters such as talking animals, an animate deck of cards, and a Queen of Hearts with a penchant for decapitating anyone who annoys her. Alice traverses this alternate universe with courtesy, intelligence, equanimity, and courage.

In short, I greatly enjoyed reading about Alice’s adventures. If the book was originally intended for children, I think that Carroll’s wit and intelligence and acumen and gift for storytelling made it so much more. Many modern fantasies have turned to repetitious epic patterns that have rendered them somewhat cliché, whereas Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, although published way back in 1865, to me was like a breath of literary fresh air. As for the psychedelic references, those seem to have been tacked on (brilliantly, I might add, in the case of “White Rabbit”) by the counterculture of the 1960s. In the book, unlike in the song, the dormouse does not say “Feed your head.” In fact, the dormouse is the epitome of laziness, always falling asleep no matter what is going on around. (Come to think of it, that’s how a lot of people react to drug intake too.)

In conclusion, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is a dazzling, ingenious, well-written, and entertaining book. Its effectiveness does not rely on supposed hidden allusions. It is brilliant enough on its own.

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Book Review:  Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It by Cory Doctorow

Posted on November 29, 2025 by John Walters

Lest anyone should conclude that the title of this book is merely a blatant foul-mouthed outcry for reader attention, Doctorow states in the acknowledgement section that “in late 2023, the American Dialect Society named enshittification their Word of the Year.” He then goes on to list some of the festivals, podcasts, and talk shows at which he was subsequently asked to speak on the topic. Doctorow, besides being a popular science fiction writer, is also a leading tech activist. Enshittification builds on ideas he proposed in his recent book The Internet Con, but ultimately goes far beyond it. In short, the largest internet companies, as well as auto manufacturers and many others, have ruthlessly eliminated competition to establish monopolies and cartels that they rule over unopposed, and they have taken advantage of their powerful positions to invade your privacy and degrade the quality of their products so that they might squeeze you for more and more profits.

To make the situation clear, Doctorow begins with a series of chapters detailing case studies of some of the worst offenders: Facebook, Amazon, iPhone, and Twitter. These examples are all horror stories of extreme and deliberate enshittification – in other words, reducing value to customers and businesses. He then delves into an equally horrific explanation (which he calls “the epidemiology”) of how things got this bad. As he convincingly explains: “All our tech businesses are turning awful, all at once, and they’re not dying. We remain trapped in their rotting corpses, unable to escape.” Hyperbole? Not at all. It is a mere statement of fact. That’s what makes this book so scary: because it is so true.

Establishing aggressive monopolies is a key to the success of the largest tech companies. Doctorow provides numerous examples of their misdeeds, but one of the most blatant, egregious, and well-documented instances is the deliberate decision of Google to dumb-down search results. If the results are less effective, this causes people to search again multiple times, and this in turn makes more money for Google through its sponsored advertising. For a more obvious personal example, I need only look at my feed on Facebook. It used to be that when my relatives and friends would post content, I would be able to scroll through and read these posts. Nowadays, though, my feed is inundated with advertisements and so-called “boosted” content – that is, content that someone has paid a lot of money to shove before my eyes whether I want to see it or not. As for the content I have logged on to view – the content that connects me with my loved ones – it is hopelessly buried in this – let’s face it: there is no word that better describes it: shit.

One of the favorite tactics of these “purveyors of cloud-based products” is what Doctorow calls “bait and switch.” These tech companies monitor every keystroke you make, and when they find out what facets of their services are most valuable to you, they “remove that feature from the product’s basic tier and reclassify it as an upcharged add-on.” And don’t think that you will be able to upgrade again in a one-time purchase; no, they’ll charge you rent for that upgrade for as long as you want to use it. If certain programs are desperately needed, you may have no choice. As Doctorow states: “Enshittification is what happens when the executives calculate that they can force you to go along with their schemes.”

The vile stench of evil, all too prevalent in American corporations nowadays, makes this uncomfortable reading. Nevertheless, it is vitally important to see how things are and how they got this way; otherwise, how are we going to have a chance to change it all? And Doctorow does offer some possible solutions, although none of them are easy. He affirms that we can have a new, good internet if we “restore the four forces that discipline technology firms.” These are competition, regulation, interoperability, and tech worker power. Antitrust legislation enables competition, and Doctorow explains the status of such legislation around the world, including in the United States. Regulation, of course, puts the greed of massive corporations in check. Interoperability enables us to own and repair our devices rather than have to be forced to go to company-approved repairers at bloated prices whenever anything goes wrong. As Doctorow demonstrates by example, tech workers used to be idealistic and hold tech executives and boards in check; now, however, tech workers who misbehave are being fired by the hundreds of thousands.

I have summarized a few basic ideas from this book, but these are merely examples. Before we can change things, we have to know how bad they have become. And they have become much, much worse than we could have imagined. Tech executives see us as chumps, nothing more. They want to extract as much value as they can from us and then toss us aside. The only way we can make things better is to first of all understand what is going on. Doctorow provides excellent explanations of the current state of affairs. This is essential reading for all of us. Highly recommended.

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Book Review:  Roads: Driving America’s Great Highways by Larry McMurtry

Posted on November 22, 2025 by John Walters

Larry McMurtry is best known for his award-winning novels and screenplays, but he also wrote several memoirs. Roads tells of a series of trips he made by car in 1999. By way of explanation he says: “I wanted to drive the American roads at the century’s end, to look at the country again, from border to border and beach to beach.” And: “Other than curiosity, there’s no particular reason for these travels – just the old desire to be on the move.” He writes that his “aim in recording these journeys is simple: to describe the roads as I find them and supplement current impressions with memories of earlier travels along some of the same routes.” And: “My method, to the extent that I have one, is modeled on rereading; I want to reread some of these roads as I might a book.”

McMurtry undertakes his journeys in an unusual way. When most people take a road trip by car, they use a vehicle that they own; McMurtry, however, flies to whatever point from which he wants to begin, rents a car, stays in high-quality hotels or motels en route, and either returns to his hometown or drives to whatever place he chooses to end his journey at and flies back from there. This is, of course, a method of travel that only the affluent would be able to afford, even accounting for the fact that airline flights, rental cars, gasoline, hotels, and so on were much cheaper back at the end of the 1900s.

In this way, McMurtry drives from Minnesota to Oklahoma, Florida to Louisiana, Maryland to Colorado, California to Texas, Washington D.C. to Texas, Washington State to Nebraska, and so on. Don’t think of this as a travelogue, though, in the conventional sense. He sometimes describes the landscapes he sees along the way, but that is not his main intention. Instead, he wants to “have a look at the literature that had come out of the states I passed through.” He was not only a writer, but also an antiquarian bookstore owner, and as he passes locales, he launches into stories of writers associated with those places or book-buying adventures he had there. It’s like taking a long drive with an exceptionally literate friend and listening to him reminisce along the way. But because of his bookselling background, he is aware of obscure local travel authors from all of these places, and he is able to draw upon this knowledge to provide fascinating glimpses into the literary scenes in various parts of the country.

Because McMurtry finds such genuine satisfaction and fulfillment in his journeys, he is able to pass on these emotions to his readers. Near the end he sums up his feelings thusly: “Being alone in a car is to be protected for a time from the pressures of day-to-day life; it’s like being in one’s own time machine, in which the mind can rove ahead to the future or scan the past.” For the perennial nomad who enjoys roaming the country, the world, and the entire cosmos through literature, this book is an excellent vehicle for enjoying a vicarious journey with an extremely knowledgeable and erudite companion.

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An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s by Doris Kearns Goodwin; Part Two

Posted on November 19, 2025 by John Walters

As history, backed up by Dick Goodwin’s documentation, points out, John F. Kennedy was in the midst of overseeing many profound societal changes when he was assassinated, and Johnson, on assuming the presidency, became determined to see these initiatives through to completion. According to Goodwin, who knew him well and worked closely with him, Johnson was sincere in his desire to improve the lives of the poor and the working class and to assist Black people and other minorities in obtaining equal rights. As part of an initiative called the Great Society, he pushed through legislation such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Civil Rights Act of 1968, which focused on housing discrimination. In addition, the Food Stamp Program, Medicare, and Medicaid were all initiated in 1964 and 1965 due to his efforts. In 1964, he was elected to the presidency by an unprecedented landslide.

Alas, though: Johnson’s reputation became irreparably tarnished by the escalation of the Vietnam War during his presidency. In fact, it was opposition to the war that finally led Goodwin to leave the White House. He wanted his friend Robert Kennedy to make a run for president, but when Kennedy hesitated, Goodwin allied himself with the budding campaign of Eugene McCarthy, assisting McCarthy in getting his campaign off the ground. However, when Kennedy opted in, Goodwin returned to him. It appeared as if Kennedy was going to win the Democratic nomination, but then he, like his brother, was assassinated by a gunman.

Another major player in this drama was Martin Luther King, Jr. He worked closely with Johnson during the victories of the Great Society, but he broke with the president over the issue of the Vietnam War. When King was shot and killed, shortly before Kennedy’s murder, rioting broke out around the country; it was difficult to quell the grief and anger.

All of these events are explained from an insider’s perspective as Doris and Richard Goodwin go through his papers, notes, journal entries, newspaper clippings, and so on – and add to the historical accounts with personal reminiscences. After their careers in politics, both Doris and Richard went on to become teachers and writers, but the heart of this book is their involvement in the history-defining activities of the sixties. For me, reading it was like hopping aboard a time machine back to that era and reliving events that shaped my own life, the country, and the world. I realized as I read that the government-induced violence and polarization of the present are not unique. Every historical period has its heroes and its villains, and in the case of politicians these are often the same people depending upon the decisions they make and the actions they take in the context of their times. Johnson was first adulated for his efforts to improve the lives of downtrodden Americans and then excoriated for his continual escalation of the Vietnam War effort. As a result, he has a mixed legacy. John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and Robert Kennedy’s lives were cut short before they could fulfill their potential. So it goes. That the country was able to pull itself out of the quagmire of the Vietnam War and the resultant internal disunity gives me hope that we might somehow be able to recover from the present chaos once again.

In a perfect world, reflecting on the mistakes of the past would help us not make those mistakes again. Of course, this world is far from perfect, but we should not forget the struggles of the past, for though in them there is great tragedy and grief, there is also great nobility and heroism. The author herself says it best in the epilogue: “We are clearly in the midst of a profound ‘testing time’ today, and at such times, I have long argued, the study of history is crucial to provide perspective, warning, counsel, and even comfort. At a moment when the guidance of history is most needed, however, history itself is under attack, its relevance in school curriculums questioned.” And concerning the subject matter of this book, she adds: “Too often, memories of assassination, violence, and social turmoil have obscured the greatest illumination of the Sixties, the spark of communal idealism and belief that kindled social justice and love for a more inclusive vision of America.” I wrote of this recently, in fact, in my essay “During Times like These,” in which I balance the chaos and violence of the sixties with the humanistic revival that took place as an inevitable reaction. I wrote: “This internal awakening, which swept across the country and around the world, was like a bright shining light in the midst of the deep darkness of government-imposed violence. And this light inspired artistic representations in music, literature, film, and other mediums. It made the era special not only because of its crass horrific ignorance and violence, but also because of the awakening of the best in humankind, the brotherhood and sisterhood of all of us, the willingness to esteem others, regardless of their idiosyncratic characteristics, as beloved equals, and to assist those in need. Beneath the ubiquitous barbarity in the daily news ran an undercurrent of countercultural tranquility and harmony. I remember it well. It made the sixties and seventies special. It united those of good will.”

In closing, not many people have had the advantage of a close-up look at crucial historical events like the author of this book and her husband. This makes it a document of inestimable value that holds important clues for our collective way forward.

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Book Review:  An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s by Doris Kearns Goodwin; Part One

Posted on November 15, 2025 by John Walters

The third time’s the charm. On three different occasions I checked this book out of the library. The first two times I returned it without reading it. I was tempted by it, as I am by all things having to do with the sixties, but ultimately other books caught my attention more. This time, though I decided to plunge in fifty pages or so and get a feel for the text. I’m glad I did. I thought, at first, that it was a compilation of personal diary accounts from the era, or something like that, but it is something entirely different. Additionally, the “love story” in the title is a misnomer. It’s true that the frame around which the story takes place is the marriage of Doris Goodwin to Richard Goodwin and the two of them reminiscing about the sixties fifty years after the fact, but the heart of it concerns the tumultuous politics of the era, in which the two were involved: Doris briefly at the end of the decade, but Richard intimately as advisor and speechwriter to John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Eugene McCarthy, and Robert Kennedy.

Back before the internet and personal computers, people kept their documents on paper, and the impetus of this tale is the transfer of about three hundred boxes full of Richard’s documents and memorabilia concerning his political work in the 1960s from storage to their home. He and Doris decide to go through the documents together to form a clear picture of what happened back then. What follows is a fascinating in-depth look at events that shaped the decade from the perspective of someone with a front-row seat.

I grew up in the sixties. I clearly remember the day in class (I was in sixth grade I think) that the school principal entered the room and paused the lesson to inform us that President Kennedy had just been shot while in a motorcade in Texas. I also remember, as a young teen, becoming more and more apprehensive as under President Johnson’s watch the Vietnam War kept escalating, the draft was initiated, and there was a significant possibility that when I came of age I might be called up and sent to fight in Southeast Asia.

Doris Goodwin served for a time at the White House under President Johnson near the end of the decade, but the book is mainly about the career of Dick Goodwin. After a stint in the military, he returned to the States with a “self-appointed mission: to do whatever work he could to close the gap between our national ideals and the reality of our everyday lives.” With this in mind, he went to Harvard Law School, graduating at the top of his class and then clerking for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter. Early on as a lawyer, he investigated the national quiz show scandals, which became famous through Robert Redford’s award-nominated film Quiz Show.

And then, in 1959, Goodwin joined Senator John F. Kennedy’s speechwriting staff. He wrote some of Kennedy’s most famous speeches as he campaigned for and won the presidency. During his time with Kennedy, he became close friends with Jacqueline Kennedy and Robert Kennedy.

There are many touching stories of dedication and service. One of these is the enthusiasm for the Peace Corps amidst America’s youth. When Kennedy initiated the Peace Corps, it struck a chord in the hearts of the young and elevated the country’s standing in the eyes of the rest of the world. As I read about this, I wondered if the same commitment might be found in this modern era if a suitable program was available. But the world has changed, of course. The author points out that “unlike today, the Sixties were still a time when a candidate’s word represented a commitment to a prescribed course of action. What one said mattered. If one reneged on that word, a future time of reckoning would be waiting.” That’s not to say that things always went smoothly. As this glimpse into the inner workings of power demonstrates, the way forward generally lurched from one crisis to the next.

(To be continued…)

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Book Review:  Positive Obsession: The Life and Times of Octavia E. Butler by Susana M. Morris

Posted on November 8, 2025 by John Walters

From the mid-1970s until 2012 I lived overseas in Europe, the Indian Subcontinent, Southeast Asia, and New Zealand, and this kept me out of touch with much of what was happening in my homeland of the United States. Besides the presidencies of Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush, I also missed observing the stellar careers of luminaries of the science fiction and fantasy field such as Octavia E. Butler. I only discovered Butler’s works when I returned to live once again in the States. The first work I read by her, in an anthology I happened to pick up, was the amazing Hugo Award-winning short story “Speech Sounds.”

In fact, Butler was the first Black woman to make a career out of writing science fiction. When she began writing and submitting in the 1970s, the field was mainly dominated by white male writers. As Morris brings out, though, in this fascinating book, Butler not only had talent but persistence; the positive obsession of the title was an all-but overwhelming desire to write, a focus that began early, when she was still a child, and continued throughout her life. Her dedication paid off as she found publishers for her novels and stories, won multiple awards, and became the first science fiction writer to be awarded a MacArthur Fellowship, also known as a MacArthur Genius Grant.

This book is partially a biography and partially an analysis of Butler’s writings. I found the biographical elements most absorbing. I could have done with less comprehensive summaries of the plots of Butler’s novels. I would have preferred just a few teasers; I’d rather get the details by reading the novels themselves. Otherwise, though, the story of Butler’s obsession with writing deeply resonates with me. I can’t say I can relate to everything she went through; after all, I’m not a woman and I’m not Black. But I felt great empathy as I read of her struggles with loneliness and her fascination with writing. I share her positive obsession with writing. I too experienced (and still experience) the discouragement of rejections while attempting to establish myself as a published author. I concur with her realization that “the most important thing I do every day is to write, to work on my novels and stories. They are my love and my work, my fortune, my life…” And now that my kids have grown and gone, as an empty-nester, I sympathize with her heart cry: “My pen and my paper, they comfort me – at least a little. They allow me to scream into utter silence. They focus my thoughts, they permit me to act when no other action is possible.”

The stark difference between us as artists, of course, is that Butler became a famous award-winning writer, while I am as yet unknown. However, this story of Butler’s life brings out that if you are a dedicated writer, whether you are popular and fiscally successful or not, you don’t wait for some sort of ethereal inspiration; you sit down and write every day. Your waking thoughts are consumed with writing. It is your writing that gives your life purpose and focus.

I am truly thankful that I have had a chance to get to know Butler, at least somewhat, through this book. She spent her last years in Seattle, and I might have had a chance to meet her after I moved back to the area, but her life was tragically cut short when she fell outside her home and died in 2006 at the age of fifty-eight. At least she left us the legacy of her words, which are still in print and continue to be popular to this day. I highly recommend this biography of an exceptionally dedicated and talented writer.

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Navigation (Part One)

Posted on November 5, 2025 by John Walters

This week in my newsletter The Perennial Nomad: For Those Who Wander with Intent I explore the complications of crossing borders during international journeys.

Perennial nomads are citizens of the world and recognize that national borders come and go according to historical exigencies. However, no matter what country you are from, if you want to travel internationally you must navigate the systems of the world: political, social, cultural, and sometimes religious. One of the most vexing can be the political. This involves obtaining passports, visas, vaccinations, and so on. Sometimes accomplishing this takes a fair amount of determination.

Click on this link to read the rest.

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Book Review:  Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism by Sarah Wynn-Williams

Posted on November 1, 2025 by John Walters

This powerful expose is written by a former Facebook executive, a New Zealand national who for several years worked on government relations and global policy for the ubiquitous social network. The title comes from the novel The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald: “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy – they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.” When this book came out, Facebook tried to suppress it, which in fact only increased its sales.

My family first began using Facebook, to a limited extent, while the kids were growing up in Greece; through it I was able to connect to my siblings overseas. It became more important when I moved to the States with some of my sons and then they began to scatter all over the country. We used Messenger to keep in touch by text and sometimes via video links. At the same time, the Facebook news feeds on my personal page rapidly deteriorated into advertisements and promotional material, until nowadays I get five to ten items of irrelevant crap for every update from friends or relatives. Still, if you can ignore the floodtide of bullshit, the network provides a valuable service in making it easier for loved ones to communicate with one another.

Wynn-Williams was working for the New Zealand government in Washington, D.C. when she became attracted to Facebook. She writes: “After years of looking for things that would change the world, I thought I’d found the biggest one going.” And: “What do you do when you see a revolution is coming? I decide I will stop at nothing to be part of it.” At the beginning she states that “the work feels important. Like Facebook is a force for good in the world.” Despite the seeming indifference of her overseers to anything other than growth and profit, for a long time she continues to feel this idealism. To spur corporate growth, she travels around the world trying to promote Facebook internationally. She goes, for instance, to Vietnam, Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, Columbia, Canada, Singapore, and has a particularly wild and somewhat dangerous journey to Burma.

Through it all, to keep Facebook growing, the company is faced with one moral compromise after another with foreign governments, all of which the top executives are willing to make as long as growth and profit are not impeded. In fact, top Facebook management figures seem to have no regard or respect for anyone else – even heads of state. Their selfishness and narcissism is well nigh unbelievable. For example, Zuckerberg himself is unwilling to wake up earlier than usual even for urgent meetings with leaders of countries. Growing users and ad revenues and maintaining Facebook’s monopoly is everything; anything else can be compromised – even politics.

A series of events disillusions the author enough so that she determines that she’ll have to leave. For example, the leadership is indifferent when an employee in another country ends up in jail due to company policy. After Wynn-Williams almost dies during a difficult childbirth, when she returns to work the atmosphere has become even more ominous. International political involvement has increased, but it mainly consists of enabling dangerous and incendiary politicians for profit, “to sign up more users.” In addition, she continues to be sexually harassed by her immediate superior. Eventually, when she tries to get away from him by transferring to another department, she is instead fired. In the end she writes: “Now I’m consumed by the worst of it. The grief and sorrow of it. How Facebook is helping some of the worst people in the world do terrible things.” Of her former employers she writes: “They could’ve tried to fix these things and still been insanely rich and powerful.”

This is a gripping memoir that tells some tragic truths about one of the world’s largest companies. One of the saddest parts, though, is that these horrific things are not even surprising. We expect such moral turpitude from major corporations these days. It’s just business, they claim, and we fall for this delusion.

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Book Review:  Brave the Wild River: The Untold Story of Two Women Who Mapped the Botany of the Grand Canyon by Melissa L. Sevigny

Posted on October 25, 2025 by John Walters

I finished this book with a profound sense of satisfaction. It is not only a gripping travel adventure, but it also gives a clear picture of the all-pervasive misogyny during the era in which the story takes place. It’s hard to believe, when we consider what women have accomplished in modern times, that less than one hundred years ago the ubiquitous notion was that “a woman’s place was in the home” and that they were too delicate for anything but housewifely activities. When in 1938 botanists Elzada Clover and Lois Jotter proposed to undertake an expedition down the Colorado River to study its plant life, though, they faced intense opposition due to such pervasive attitudes. The six hundred-plus mile route through the Grand Canyon to Lake Mead was beset with perilous rapids, and only a few expeditions, composed solely of men, had successfully made it all the way through. Undaunted, the women undertook the forty-three-day journey with four male teammates in three boats, enduring numerous hardships as they collected plant specimens and took copious notes along the way. The trip became a media sensation; at each stopover point they were met by national news crews that would interview them, film them, and often ask them rude and demeaning questions.

Nowadays dams have subdued the worst of the white water, but back then the Colorado was largely untamed and considered by many the most dangerous river in the world. Besides the treacherous rapids, there were risks of heat stroke, hypothermia, exhaustion, storms, landslides, flash floods, rattlesnakes, and a multitude of other perils. If the travelers became stranded, they might starve to death, as in many places it was impossible to climb out of the canyon back to civilization. They all had to rely on each other, as well as on their courage, tenacity, skills, and sometimes sheer luck.

Clover and Jotter were true pioneers in establishing the place of women in scientific endeavors. However, as the author points out: “The same challenges that Clover and Jotter confronted decades ago remain barriers for women in the sciences today.” They receive, on average, significantly smaller salaries than men and are able to publish fewer papers than their male counterparts. It is an ongoing struggle. As for the Colorado, Sevigny states that “many questions remain for the river’s management.” The overriding considerations have to do with the balance between human usage and protection of its ecosystems.

While reading this exciting book, I couldn’t help but remember a river journey I almost made during my travels on the Indian Subcontinent. During my first trip east, after traversing the Khyber Pass between Afghanistan and Pakistan, on a train ride from Peshawar to Rawalpindi I met another traveler, a Norwegian, and we concocted a scheme to get hold of some sort of boat in Multan in central Pakistan and travel down the Indus River to Karachi. It was a ridiculous and foolhardy idea, which we realized as soon as we reached Multan. (We eventually continued onward by train.) But for a brief time we envisioned ourselves as river tramps.

Clover and Jotter, though, fulfilled their vision, became national heroes, and furthered the cause of science, and this exciting book tells their true story. Recommended.

I’m a professional writer; I make my living by my words.  I’m happy to share these essays with you, but at the same time, financial support makes the words possible.  If you’d like to become a patron of the arts and support my work, buy a few of my available books or available stories. To send a one-time or recurring donation, click here. You can also donate via my Patreon account. Thanks!

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Book Review:  People Like Us: A Novel by Jason Mott

Posted on October 18, 2025 by John Walters

Right at the beginning of this enigmatic, sometimes funny, sometimes tragic, mystifying, and surreal book, the author states that it is at least partially based on fact, but “to keep the lawyers cooling their heels,” the “whole thing has been fitted with a fiction overcoat.” He emphasizes that if he is pressed on the issue, he would swear that he “made it all up. Even if it really happened.” This reminded me of another book that I read a few years ago called I Love You but I’ve Chosen Darkness, in which the autobiographical elements create verisimilitude for the more flamboyant, obviously fictional parts.

The narrator of People Like Us is a novelist who has recently won what he refers to as “The Big One,” the National Book Award, just as the real author, Jason Mott, won the 2021 National Book Award for his novel Hell of a Book. I have not read Hell of a Book, but after reading a short summary, I realize that People Like Us seems to be a sort of sequel to it, using the same structure and some of the same characters. Like its predecessor, People Like Us alternates its primary narration with third-person accounts of a character named Soot who is also an author and a doppelganger of the narrator. Soot’s story, though, is suffused with tragedy, full of school shootings and divorce and suicide, while the first-person narrator, although he is pursued by a psychotic surrealistic character named Rufus who is trying to kill him, and although he has become paranoid and carries a loaded gun wherever he goes, has a more light-hearted tone – or at least he adopts a light-hearted tone to cover the overwhelming angst he continually feels. After winning “The Big One,” the narrator is invited on a European book tour by a French billionaire. In his story, he blocks out the billionaire’s real name (for legal purposes, he claims) and calls him Frenchie. He also nicknames other major characters: Frenchie’s bodyguard becomes the Goon, and Frenchie’s secretary becomes the Kid.

Frenchie is so wealthy that money is completely irrelevant to him, and he offers to support the narrator in a lavish lifestyle, in other words with so much cash that he’d want for nothing, so that he can spend his full time writing without having to worry about his financial well-being. There’s only one catch: he can never return to the States. He must live in permanent exile. Considering the horror stories in the Soot sections of the story, this would seem to be a no-brainer; after all, the United States has become, for the narrator as well as for Soot, a hellhole full of traumatic memories. There is one scene in Paris in which famous Black expatriate writers, over drinks and snacks, extol on how great they feel after leaving the United States behind. In response to this, the Kid (who is an American expatriate) has a fit and runs off into the darkness screaming in perplexity, wondering why they don’t all instead return to the States and try to fix it.

Throughout both story threads are surrealistic elements. For instance, some memories are so graphic that they are referred to as time travel; in addition, the narrator has visions of things that may or may not really be there, and one of the characters, a woman named Kelly, can hear the narrator’s thoughts as if through telepathy. There is also the question of the title. Who does he mean when he refers to “people like us”? He comes back to this conundrum over and over in alternate renderings; besides “people like us” he points out “someone like me,” “people like you,” “not like you,” and so on. Each time the phrases are used, they seem to refer to different groups. For example: writers who have won major awards; writers in general; all creative people; Black people; famous Black people; Black writers; displaced people without homelands; everyone. The phrase continues to shape-shift all the way to the final paragraphs of the last page, and the plot (which, remember, may or may not be true) continues to twist until the end. All in all, People Like Us is an entertaining, albeit somewhat depressing, read; I’ll leave it to you to draw your own conclusions about its denouement.

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