BURNING BUTTERFLY
by Yvonne Vera
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
$12
Yvonne Vera's novels are concerned with the effect of colonialism on the women of her native land, Zimbabwe. She writes in the preface of Opening Spaces, an anthology of African women writers: "A woman must have an imagination that is plain stubborn, that can invent new gods and banish ineffectual ones." Vera's first novel, Nehanda, did just this. The myth of Nehanda is the tragic tale of a female spirit medium who last surfaced as the leader of the uprising against the British in the late 1800s. She was subsequently caught, hung, and then burned.
The myth of Nehanda is loosely retold in Vera's poetic new novel, Butterfly Burning. The setting is a black township outside Bulawayo in the late 1940s, just after the end of WWII. The story revolves around Phephelaphi, a woman whose parents, she's led to believe, have been killed by white policemen. She meets and lives with a man named Fumbatha who builds the white man's city. She wishes to become a nurse and Fumbatha forbids it. Using their relationship and the myth of Nehanda as the vehicle, Vera is able to critique not only the dialectic of the Africans and the colonialists, but the dialectic of female and male Africans as well.
What makes this critique so heartfelt is not just the tragic plot but the prose that sings of the dislocation. When in chapter eight the men take the train into the city to look for work, one can hear the train in the repetitions of the prose. When Phephelaphi and Fumbatha meet, one can hear a song of god being born. And as they part, one can hear the cries of a continent as their burned ashes float and flutter in the wind. KREG HASEGAWA
DID ADAM AND EVE HAVE NAVELS? DISCOURSES ON REFLEXOLOGY, NUMEROLOGY, URINE THERAPY, AND OTHER DUBIOUS SUBJECTS
by Martin Gardner
(W.W. Norton & Company)
$26.95
Martin Gardner is no friend of the irrational. He is disdainful of pseudoscientists, occultists, religious fundamentalists, proponents of alternative medicines, New Age devotees, and basically anyone else who stands in the way of Science and Reason's attempt to lead us to a brighter tomorrow.
His book Did Adam and Eve Have Navels? is a collection of articles written for The Skeptical Inquirer, in which he debunks a host of myths and misconceptions--some laughable, others culturally entrenched. Gardner uses wry humor and his decades of experience as a "debunker" to expose the realities of such subjects as Earth-destroying comets, Freudian dream theory, cannibalism, Carlos Castaneda, the Heaven's Gate cult, Thomas Edison's paranormalist tendencies, and numerology. In most cases he is quick to attack the fallacies inherent in his topics, but in others he merely intends to dispel misconceptions that have grown out of otherwise sound, rational thought, as in his chapter on the religious views of Charles Darwin and Stephen Jay Gould.
If there is a thesis to be derived from this anthology, it is that nothing outside the scope of rational thought and empiricism should be taken too seriously. But ultimately, in assessing the attempts of some physicists to construct an all-encompassing, all-answering Theory of Everything (TOE) in the final chapter, Gardner makes his most powerful concession: that the universe is too vast and wondrous to ever be completely fathomed by humankind. And it is here that the agnostic Gardner finds a place for "religion"--not a system of beliefs and practices in the normal sense of the word, but rather the acknowledgment of awe that the universe will always inspire, the eternally looming question: Why? KRIS ADAMS
LOST AND FOUND
CITY COME A WALKIN'
by John Shirley
(Four Walls/Eight Windows)
$13.95
John Shirley put the punk in cyberpunk. He was the first carrier of the virus, both shaman and totem to the likes of William Gibson and Bruce Sterling. In 1980, when City Come a Walkin' was first published, Shirley was fronting punk bands in Portland; writing was just his day job.
Set in San Francisco in 2008, City Come a Walkin' is the story of Stuart Cole, the aging owner of Club Anesthesia. All he wants out of life is to run his club, but the Mafia and the government have teamed up to digitally control all monetary transactions and unionize the vice industry, using vigilantes to strong-arm any opposition. Enter City, a brutal, amoral avatar of San Francisco's overmind, who enslaves Cole in the fight against the forces of technocratic fascism, turning him into a pawn in a chess game whose stakes are the future.
Aside from its place in the history of cyberpunk, City Come a Walkin' is a wild ride, blending a distinctively American version of magical realism with the underground culture's resistance to the encroachments of the string-pullers in suits. City is punk rock's answer to the death of God, a Zeitgeist given form and cut loose to wreak havoc on the forces of evil. More than anything, City Come a Walkin' is a rock and roll gesture in literary form, a middle finger raised in the face of fascism's dream of total control. It's like going to a good punk show where the music and the electricity wash everything away and anything is possible. DALLAS TAYLOR
