Book Review: "Area 51", by Annie Jacobsen

Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base (Little, Brown and Company, 2011; 521 pages), by Annie Jacobsen, is a strange book. This starts with the fact that, in my local library at least, it is shelved with the UFO books, despite the fact that there is little about UFOs in the book, and what Ms. Jacobsen does have to say about the subject has nothing to do with extraterrestrials. I'm not sure what goes into the assigning of Dewey Decimal classifications to books, but if I were the one doing it, I'd be much more likely to put this book in with the books on espionage or the Cold War, with both topics given plenty of room in Ms. Jacobsen's book.

Most of the book, in fact, is given over to information Ms. Jacobsen gleaned from declassified documents about the legendary Nevada site that some claim the US government has still never admitted to maintaining, and from extensive interviews with those who worked there on various projects over the decades. And it's interesting stuff. Much of the work done there has had to do with the development of surveillance aircraft such as the U-2 and other high-altitude, high-speed spy planes. Ms. Jacobsen also writes about nuclear testing that was conducted in the area, which also includes the Nellis Air Force Range and the Nevada Test and Training Range, where numerous above-ground and underground tests of nuclear devices took place from the 1950s up until testing ended (maybe, according to Ms. Jacobsen) with the implementation of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty by President Clinton in 1993). There is some information, as well, about tests of thermonulears weapons in the Pacific in the 1950s, which were connected to Area 51 through pilots flying sampling planes that were tested at the secret base.

The book also details the decades-long disputes between the Central Intelligence Agency and the Air Force over who would control the base. While the two agencies cooperated very briefly during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1963, for the most part, they engaged in an ongoing competition at the highest levels of government over who would develop the latest-generation spy planes and therefore control activities at Area 51. The details Ms. Jacobsen includes show that even the most powerful men in the country, and in the world, are not above playing petty politics.

In Area 51, then, Ms. Jacobsen appears to paint a fairly straightforward history of activities at Area 51, told by the people who were there and who feel free to talk about their experiences now that the papers connected to the activities they participated in there have been declassified. At least, this is true up until the final chapter of the book. Then the tone of the book changes to one of conspiracy theorizing.

Near the beginning of the book, Ms. Jacobsen introduces the idea that the vehicle in the Roswell crash in July 1947 was not an extraterrestrial vehicle, as some UFO believers maintain, nor was it the weather balloon that the government has always used as a cover story for what happened there, but a Soviet experimental craft that was sent as an attempt at psychological warfare, trying to induce panic in the US population akin to that generated by the Orson Welles "War of the Worlds" radio broadcast in October 1938. That dramatization of H. G. Wells's science fiction novel about invaders from Mars had much of the country believing, for a few hours on the night before Halloween, that the Earth actually was under attack from outer space.

Then, in the final chapter of the book, Ms. Jacobsen includes information from an anonymous source (the only interviewee she does not identify by name) who claimed that the supposed "alien" bodies from the Roswell crash were actually children whose bodies had been altered to look like aliens. In his account, the bodies, including two that were alive but in comas, along with the craft they were in ended up at Area 51 in 1951, where they were experimented on by US scientists to try to "reverse-engineer" what was done to them. This anonymous sources claims, additionally, that the alterations were carried out by Nazi scientists who had ended up in the Soviet Union, just as some Nazi scientists were put to work in the United States after World War II, mostly in the development of the US space program. Even worse, the source claims, the US did not just attempt to figure out what had been done to the children from the crash, but also continued to carry out its own secret tests on US prisoners and handicapped children at Area 51. He further claims that these tests weren't even "the half of it", of what went on there, but refused to talk more to Ms. Jacobsen, claiming that she did not have a "need-to-know."

Frankly, it is as if the final chapter of the book is lifted from another book entirely and tacked on for, well, for who knows what purpose. And it has come in for criticism from some of those who cooperated with Ms. Jacobsen in the writing of the book, who have said they feel "betrayed" by her inclusion of that final chapter in the book. One of those men, radar expert T. D. Barnes, is quoted in an article at Huffington Post from August 7, 2011, as insisting that nothing like what the anonymous source claims ever took place at Area 51. However, Huffington Post writing Lee Speigel points out in the article there that the anonymous source claimed the experiments on the crash survivors too place in 1951, while Barnes did not arrive at Area 51 until 1968 and that, in any case, Barnes would not necessarily have known about such experiments even if they had taken place while he was there, especially if it was not directly connected to the work he was involved with. As Ms. Jacobsen points out several times in her book, Area 51 operates with a "need-to-know" culture in which someone working on a project does not even know about other aspects of that project unless it is determined by project supervisors that he needs to know about it.

Overall, Area 51 is an interesting book and, I think, well worth reading. However, it does raise some questions, even aside from the issue around the final chapter and the controversy surrounding it. The main question is, how can a reader ever really believe anything written about the CIA? Now, that sounds like a question that would come from the mind of a conspiracy theorist. I realize that. However, considering that the intelligence agency (and, quite likely other government agencies) has been known to spread disinformation (information that it portrays as being the truth, but which is not true) in order to hide what it has done, I think it is a valid question. Another issue concerns what that, and other government agencies, allows to be declassified and that which it does not.

As a case in point, there is a story in the book about a flier who was lost at sea during a nuclear test in the Pacific in 1952. His job was to fly in and out of the radioactive cloud after the bomb was detonated, sampling the air for the amount of radioactivity. For some reasons, some of the equipment on his plane failed during the flight and he couldn't locate the homing signal to get back to the base where he was to land. By the time he reacquired the signal, he ran out of fuel and was not able to get back to base. His plane crashed into the sea and neither it nor the pilot were ever recovered. When the documents relating to that series of tests were declassified in 1986, that pilot's name was redacted (blacked out) in all the reports. It took his family many Freedom of Information Act requests, which were repeatedly denied, until 2008 to convince the Air Force to tell them what had happened to him.

One is left wondering exactly why the government was not willing for so long, even after releasing the rest of the information about that series of tests, to simply let a family know what had become of their son, husband and father. But, if for no other reason, books like this are valuable to keep the questions coming, and to hold the government, even the clandestine services, at least somewhat responsible for the things they do and the money they spend without telling the American people, the Congress, and sometimes even the President of the United States what they are doing in their names. This is not to say that agencies like the CIA should have to tell everything, all the time. There are reasons that some things should be kept secret for some period of time. On the other hand, when the reason that things remain classified for decades is simply to keep an agency from being embarrassed or held accountable for events that went wrong, or for events such as tests that went as scheduled but put people, both in and outside of the government, at unacceptable risk for harm or death, a case can be made that such secrecy is an abuse of power.

Read the book, and make up your own mind.

Updates...

Since I'm procrastinating on starting the day's NaNo writing, I thought maybe this would be a good time to post an update on my progress since my last report, on Day Eight.

Day Nine saw me write 2,705 words, bringing my total word count to 20,597 words, but I took Day Ten off and recorded no word count. I felt kind of bad taking the day off, but I had an opportunity to spend a good part of the day at the library at Fresno State to do some research for a non-fiction project I'm working on (not much this month, but it's a long-term project, so the time off isn't a big handicap. I found some material that will be very valuable to the project, so I'm glad I went ahead and took the day to do that.

It was difficult getting back in the saddle, so to speak, on Day Eleven, but I managed to write 2,167 words, to bring my total to 22,764 words. I wasn't especially pleased with what I wrote on Day Eleven, but I was pleased that I wrote, and that the story moved forward just a bit, even if there will be major revisions in the next draft. That's a given, so not a problem at all. As one of my Facebook friends said about giving hints ("Spoilers, sweetie!) about what you write in a first draft, everything will change anyway, so it doesn't really matter.

Yesterday, Day Twelve, I wrote 4,023 words, by far my biggest one-day output, and my total now stands at 26,787 words. That means I'm halfway to the NaNoWriMo goal. It's a good feeling, especially considering that it isn't quite halfway through the month. I can see now that my first draft won't be finished by the end of the competition, but that doesn't really matter. The goal is to write 50,000 words in the month, not finish the draft in the month. So, since I wrapped up writing for the day late yesterday afternoon, I've been basking in the glow of being Halfway Done.

But, now it's time to cut out the back-slapping and get back to work. I'm not going to try to equal yesterday's output. I'll be happy if I can do what seems to be my usual output of around 2,000 words today. Heck, I'll be happy if I make the daily average of 1,666 words that it takes to win NaNo if one writes every single day.

One thing I do think is interesting is that I'm seeing, as I write, exactly where some of the changes will have to be made in the next draft. I'm starting to adjust my work as i write, so that the new work will be more in line with what I want the next draft to look like, especially in terms of the story's timeline. But I'm being very good, so far, and not trying to go back and fix things I've already written now. They'll still be there when I finish this draft and go back to do revisions. It's enough, right now, that I know the direction I want to go with the story and can see what I'll need to do in the next draft to point the beginning of the story more squarely in that direction. And, that I can see more clearly every day exactly what I'm going to need to do as this draft goes forward to get to where I want to be at the end of the story.

The bad thing is (and I don't think it's really bad, just more ambitious than I had really planned in the beginning), I'm pretty sure that there is going to be more than one book before the whole story gets told. Which means lots more work ahead. Good thing I love the process as much as I do.

It's NaNo month, or not much time for reading just now...

...So, I haven't been doing much reading. But, I took a break last night and this morning, and read Flash and Bones (Scribner, 2011; 278 pages), by Kathy Reichs.

This is a good book and a quick read, in which forensic anthropologyst Temperance Brennan solves several murders against the background of one of the biggest NASCAR races of the season. I won't say any more because I don't want to spoil the book for anyone. I'll just say, Go, find this book, and read it.

Now, I'm ready to get back to writing my NaNo entry. I've written 22,764 words so far, almost halfway to the competition goal of 50,000 words. My personal goal this weekend is to hit the halfway mark.

Review: "The Man Who Found Time"

I've mostly been reading for research lately, so I'm not doing that well with finishing any books. This explains the recent radio silence here.

However, I have just finished reading a book that I picked up for research purposes but then found so fascinating that I read it through. It is The Man Who Found Time: James Hutton and the Discovery of the Earth's Antiquity (Basic Books, 2003; 247 pages), by Jack Repcheck.

In one way, the title says it all. This is the story of how James Hutton, considered to be the "father of modern geology", figured out that the Earth isn't really 6,000 years old, which was the conventional wisdom among Western scholars when he was working in eghteenth century Scotland. While Hutton himself never ventured an estimate of the age of the Earth, his work opened the way for later scholars to figure the earth's actual age in years.

One of the interesting details of the book, in fact, was that the current estimate of 4.6 billion years as the Earth's age was not reached until 1956, the year I was born, really not all that long ago in the wider scheme of things.

But in other ways, the title of Repcheck's book falls far short of giving the reader a complete picture of what he or she will find in the book, since despite centering on Hutton and his theory of the Earth, there are plenty of other interesting subjects broached there. Repcheck gives us a tour of Edinburgh, where Hutton was born, attended university and did much of his work. But in addition, the reader is treated (and I mean that in the best way) to a brief explanation of the Highlander uprising of 1745 and 1746. The reader also gets an overview of the Scottish Enlightenment, during which an generation of Scotland's finest minds made huge strides in many areas of inquiry.

So, I arrived for the geology, as an important side note to my research into the history of anthropology and archaeology, and found a delightful sketch of a period of time that I knew very little about, in a place that often seems to get short shrift in conventional histories.

Reveiw: "The Palace", by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro

Chelsea Quinn writes, among other things, vampire novels. But these are vampire novels with a twist: her vampire, the Count Saint Germain, is the good guy. So, if you like your vampires menacing, cruel, and villainous, you probably want to give The Palace (St. Martin's Press, 1978; 376 pages) a miss. But, if you like good writing, a great story, well-researched historical backgrounds, and vampires that don't sparkle, you'll likely enjoy Yarbro's series of vampire novels, most of which feature the Count.

The Palace is the second in the series, which has grown to a number of volumes since she wrote the first installment, Hotel Transylvania, which is also very good. But The Palace, which is the second book in the series, is my favorite, and the one I've gone back to read most often since I discovered these novels quite by accident. I was at the library, and just cruising the fiction stacks and pulled it off the shelf and read that it is set in Renaissance Florence. I'm a huge Michelangelo geek, so that was enough to get me to check the book out of the library and give it a chance; the fact that it was a vampire story was of secondary importance to me.

The story begins as Saint Germain, who is a friend to Lorenzo de'Medici, the unofficial ruler of Florence, is building a palace in Florence. But Lorenzo the Magnificent's health is failing, and Girolamo Savonarola, a Dominican monk whose fire and brimstone preaching comes with a heavy dose of guilt and prophecy, is starting to hold sway over more and more of Florence's population. Savonarola has predicted both that Lorenzo will die, and when, and that the French will come and try to rule the city. When both predictions come true, Savonarola is on his way to several years as the de facto dictator of the city.

This development makes it more and more difficult for Saint Germain to live in Florence, because along with more and more rigorous religious laws, foreigners are less and less tolerated. Finally, after the sister of Sandro di Filipepi, known to the art world as Botticelli, with whom Saint Germain has had an ongoing liaison, confesses her sins in a way that implicates the Count in her debaucheries, Saint Germain must flee the city. He returns, posing as his own nephew, to rescue his student, Demetrice, who has come to live with Saint German after the death of Lorenzo and because of her ties to him has been accused of heresy.

It is worth reading The Palace for the wonderful writing and exciting story alone. But besides good storytelling and history that is impeccably researched and woven into the story without the huge passages of info-dumping that so many historical novels suffer from, Yarbro has inserted into the story a major subtext regarding the dangers of excessive and fanatic religious devotion. She explores, without sacrificing story or storytelling, the dangers that can come when religious fervor overtakes good sense and mixes with politics.

Savonarola is presented as a sort of a Renaissance version of a televangelist, preaching doom and gloom and prophesying the end of the world, or at least the end of Florence. He insists that any pleasure is vanity and offensive in the sight of God. He urges detailed confessions of sins, especially those of a sexual nature. He demands that the citizens of the city destroy anything that isn't strictly utilitarian, that they wear drab plain clothes, and that they attend church and strictly observe all feast days. If you are not familiar with the career of Savonarola, as I was not when I first read The Palace, Yarbro's portrayal of him threatens to read like an anachronistic parody. It is not.

Long after my first reading of The Palace, I wrote a paper and did a class presentation on the career of Savonarola. As part of my research for that project, I read translations of some of the sermons Savonarola gave in Florence during the period in which the novel takes place, and the words that Yarbro puts in his mouth sound very much like the records of his sermons read. There is no exaggeration there, as far as I can see; he really was that fanatic, that judgmental, that full of fervor.

It is a mark of Yarbro's skill as a researcher and a writer that she has managed to insert this subtext, this social criticism, into The Palace without making it read like an historical treatise or a propaganda piece on the dangers of fanaticism of any sort. It is all integral to the story.

I will warn you of one thing. If you do read The Palace, there is a strong possibility that you will find yourself looking for other books in the series. I've not liked all of Yarbor's Saint Germain books as much as I like The Palace, but I've not regretted the time I've spent reading any of them.

Review: "Weird California"

A couple of months ago, I read a book called Weird Hollywood and enjoyed it a lot. I picked it up at the library because I like reading about Southern California, since I was born there and because I like reading about, the, well, I suppose unusual is a good enough word for it.

I was also drawn to it because I remembered seeking another book, Weird California (Sterling Publishing Co., 2006), by Greg Bishop, Joe Oesterle, and Mike Marinacci, in a bookstore a few years ago. The covers were very similar, and I figured both were part of the same series. In paging through Weird California back then, I saw that a site just down the street from where my grandmother lived when I was growing up was in the book. So, after reading and enjoying Weird Hollywood, I decided to track Weird California down and read it as well.

I ended up having to request the book from the library because none of my local branches carried it. But, it finally came, and it ended up being my Labor Day weekend reading. It was perfect for that, nothing too deep, not much that was very serious, and entertaining throughout.

Of course, the first thing I did when I got my hands on the book was to look through it to see if I had remembered correctly about the Bottle Village down the street from my grandmother's house was really part of the book, and it was. That brought back memories of watching the woman who built the place, Mrs. Prisbrey, now known as Grandma Prisbrey, going back and forth to the dump in town to gather building materials for her work. To be honest, I think she was regarded as an eccentric back then by the people in the neighborhood, but that was a more live-and-let-live time in the United States. If she were building today what is considered folk art and has been featured in books and exhibits worldwide, there would have probably been people after her to tear it down because it was an "eyesore". And, in fact, there were once plans to tear the place down, and the Northridge earthquake in the early 1990s did a fair job of wrecking the place. But, it is now on the California and National Registers of Historic places and a preservation group owns the property and is making an effort to restore Bottle Village to its former glory.

But I digress. There is all sorts of weirdness in Weird California, from the expected hauntings, monsters, and UFO stories here. There are cults and murders and oddities of various kinds. There is a roll-call of cemeteries for people, for pets...and one for airplanes, in Mojave.

There are also other places I know besides the Bottle Village. There is Maze Stone, near Hemet, which as far as anyone knows is an example of Native American petroglyphs. There is Zzyzx, a defunct health spa out in the high desert near Baker. While I've never been there, the sign for Zyzzx Road, which leads to the site, was always a landmark we watched for on Interstate 15 during family trips to Las Vegas. There is a long section on Mount Shasta, which is reportedly the site of many odd occurrences, including UFO sightings and sightings (and mysterious disappearances) of supposed survivors of the lost continent of Lemura and of a race of Lizard People. Which all sounds very woo-woo'y. On the other hand, a couple of years ago I drove by Shasta on a trip to Oregon, and I have to say that the area gave me an uneasy feeling and I was glad to get past the area. Same for the supposed curse of Pacheco Pass. I've never seen or experienced anything odd the times I've traveled that road. On the other hand, it can be eerie and unsettling to drive through there at night.

Aside from the usual logical reasons for taking the stories in Weird California with a grain (or a full shaker) of salt is that there is one story there from a town I lived in for 28 years, a story of a ghost that haunts a stretch of road looking for her children after they were all killed in a car wreck in the area. The implication is that everyone in town knows the story and is spooked by the area. Except that, as long as I lived there, I never heard a word about it. Additionally, I drove past the road near where the haunting is supposed to take place on a regular basis for a couple of years on my way to school in Reedley, the next town over, and I never saw, heard, or felt anything strange. On the other hand, it seemed like some of the smaller roads down there in the river bottom seemed to have a habit of disappearing. I'd find an interesting stretch of road on drives in the area, and then not be able to find them again when I went back to look for them. So, you know, who knows.

It isn't actually required to believe in any of the odd things presented in Weird California in order to enjoy the book. Really. It's a fun journey through some of the out-of-the-way parts of the state, and a reminder of some of the weirdnesses that have become legendary parts of California culture.

Review: "Treasure Box" by Orson Scott Card

Treausre Box (HarperPaperbacks, 1996; 372 pages), by Orson Scott Card, tells the story of Quentin Fears (pronounced, it is pointed out more than once, as "fierce"), a software millionaire and recluse who turned his back on most of humanity after his sister was killed in an accident when he was a teenager. He has reached his thirties without ever having had a real relationship. Then he meets Madeleine, who appears to be the perfect woman. She is smart, beautiful and is as reclusive as he is.



It only takes a short time for them to marry, and then Madeline finally takes Quentin to meet the family that she has so far carefully kept him from meeting. They are an odd family, eccentric to the point of strangeness, living in a remote old house along the Hudson river. Madeleine has warned Quentin that she is "not herself" when she visits there, and it doesn't take him long to discover exactly how accurate that characterization is, and Quentin soon finds himself fighting to keep an ancient evil from being unleashed on the world.



Treasure Box isn't a bad book. But as I read there were things that bothered me about it, things that I couldn't quite put my finger on at first, and I was over halfway through the book before I realized what wasn't sitting right with me. What was wrong is that Card falls back on the old stereotype of women as manipulating their innocent, noble male victims. It doesn't just appear in the relationship between Quentin and Madeleine, but is hinted at in the relationship between Quentin's parents and stated more boldly in the relationship between Quentin's attorney and his wife, who is portrayed as cheating on the attorney while insisting that he is the one who is cheating.



I probably wouldn't have finished the book if it had become clear earlier exactly what Card was using the story to say about male-female relationships, but I kept reading in hopes that the subtext wasn't really what I was interpreting it to be. Yet, there it was, right up until the end of the story, with the added jab that the women who were manipulating Quentin were witches but the woman who he finds himself attracted to at the end of the story is not.



I don't know if Card did this consciously, or if such attitudes are so ingrained in him that he wasn't aware that he was dividing his female characters in the traditional bitch-whore/virgin dichotomy, with the whore presenting as virginal, literally in this case, in order to manipulate him before he saw through the deception. He is a man who holds very conservative values regarding family, and portrays his "good" characters as living out those values.



Despite the ideology lurking in the story, Treasure Box is a well-told tale, although I prefer a little more ambiguity in characters, and not the kind that was used here, where any contradictions in the characters' behavior was explained by their being "enthralled" by the witches rather than by the fact that few people are consistent in their behavior all the time.