All reviews copyright 1984-2009 Evelyn C. Leeper.
KICK ASS by Carl Hiaasen:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 02/07/2003]
Carl Hiaasen's KICK ASS is a collection of his columns about South Florida politics, and if we had all read this in early 2000, we would have just sawed the whole state off and let it float out to sea before the election--or at least not been surprised at how badly the whole thing was run there. The best line, though, is in regard to the story of how a lot of expensive homes fell apart during Hurricane Andrew, while the inexpensive homes built by Habitat for Humanity didn't lose so much as a shingle. When asked about this, Habitat for Humanity leader and former President Jimmy Carter said, "Well, we use nails in ours." (Apparently the expensive homes were merely stapled together. True.)
To order Kick Ass from amazon.com, click here.
THE COALWOOD WAY by Homer Hickam, Jr.:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 07/04/2003]
During our trip to Oklahoma, I read a lot of topical books. In West Virginia I read THE COALWOOD WAY by Homer Hickam, Jr., the third book in the "Coalwood" trilogy. The first two are ROCKET BOYS (made into the film OCTOBER SKY) and SKY OF STONE. THE COALWOOD WAY takes part of the period of ROCKET BOYS and expands upon it. While an authentic view of life in a coal town (and perhaps more authentic in that aspect than ROCKET BOYS), it isn't as enthralling as ROCKET BOYS. First of all, if you've read ROCKET BOYS, you know how a lot of things in THE COALWOOD WAY will turn out. And the other stories added made me feel as though the first book had been, if not censored, at least somewhat fictionalized by leaving out a lot of fairly important events. Of the three, it is the most disappointing.
To order The Coalwood Way from amazon.com, click here.
ROCKET BOYS by Homer H. Hickam, Jr.:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 03/21/2003]
Once again, my library discussion group chose a book I had read before: Homer H. Hickam, Jr.'s ROCKET BOYS (made into the anagrammatic movie OCTOBER SKY). This is the autobiographical story of how the author, a boy from a coal mining town where football was the only way anyone had ever gotten to college, won the National Science Fair and went on to become a genuine rocket scientist. Hickam has a very readable yet still evocative writing style as he describes life in a coal company town where even the minister is hired by the company. (He describes how they were at various times Methodist, Baptist, and Pentecostal, because those were the ministers hired. I guess dogma didn't count for much.)
What struck me this time was how so much depended on circumstance and chance. Had Hickam not had a supportive high school science teacher, he probably would have ended up mining coal. And if he hadn't had the friends he did, with the talents they had, he might still have ended up mining coal. But even more so, had he not been there in Coalwood, his friends would definitely have ended up mining coal. (Well, maybe not Quentin.)
This is now the first of a three-book triptych, the other two being SKY OF STONE (about his return to Coalwood as a miner one summer during college), and THE COALWOOD WAY, which I'm planning on reading during our trip through West Virginia this summer. (We may end up visiting Coalwood, time permitting, though it's not exactly on the beaten path.)
To order Rocket Boys from amazon.com, click here.
BLACK HOUSE by Patricia Highsmith:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 05/07/2004]
Patricia Highsmith's BLACK HOUSE is hard to read for a different reason--it is too unsettling. Highsmith is best known as the author of STRANGERS ON A TRAIN and the creator of Ripley (the talented one, not the Alien-fighter), but her best work may be in her short fiction, which I would describe as "tales of extreme un- ease" in which perfectly normal people end up killing someone without feeling any sense of guilt or remorse. I have to admit I stopped after two stories because they were *so* effective that they were making me feel very uneasy and uncomfortable.
To order Black House from amazon.com, click here.
SEABISCUIT by Laura Hillenbrand:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 12/19/2003]
The "general" discussion group read Laura Hillenbrand's SEABISCUIT, which I found almost impossible to read. I don't know if it was the style, or the fact that I don't know much about horse racing and got lost by technical terms, but I found that as soon as Hillenbrand started describing the actual racing, I got lost. The fact that I had seen the movie also meant that I kept overlaying that, including its actors, characterizations, etc., onto the book. Conclusion: always read the book *before* seeing the movie.
To order Seabiscuit from amazon.com, click here.
THE WOMAN AND THE APE by Peter Høeg:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 11/24/2006]
THE WOMAN AND THE APE by Peter Høeg, translated by Barbara Haveland (ISBN 0-374-29203-5) was chosen as the book for joint science fiction and general discussion groups meeting. (The general group meets the third Thursday of each month; the science fiction group meets the fourth Thursday. But in November the fourth Thursday is Thanksgiving, so we try to pick a science fiction book with general appeal. In 2004 it was THE EYRE AFFAIR by Jasper Fforde; in 2005 it was BRING THE JUBILEE by Ward Moore.)
Anyway, someone in the general group suggested THE WOMAN AND THE APE a few months ago, so we tagged it for the joint meeting. The premise is that someone has discovered "a highly developed anthropoid ape, the closest thing yet to a human being." Adam Burden names him Erasmus and brings him back to London, where Adam's wife Madelene falls in love with Erasmus, and helps him escape. This book reminds me of a lot of books with similar themes: HIS MONKEY WIFE by John Collier, YOU SHALL KNOW THEM by Vercors, or even DAISY, IN THE SUN by Connie Willis. THE WOMAN AND THE APE, though, has a strong emphasis on how the protagonist is not understood by her spouse, etc. Lest you think it is a "males-are-bad" thing, the spouse's sister and female secretary are no prizes either. It is just another level of "humans are bad."
There are more compound and complex sentences (one might even say run-on sentences) than I usually see in novels these days. (Example: "But the world has changed, now was the time to study, present and preserve, and he had said this with the gravity that comes from knowing that your family goes back seven hundred years, that you have had splendid ancestors and that you are yourself even better." I do not know if that is true in the original Danish, or whether that is an artifact of the translation.
Høeg has one of his characters claim, by the way, that London has more non-human animals per square mile than any other area of Great Britain, and more than "Mato Grosso in the dry season." I have no idea if this is true. I do know that this should not be read as a completely realistic novel--several plot points strain credulity beyond what would be expected in a science fiction novel. Whether it should be considered magical realism, or a fable, or what is not clear, but it is not strictly a classical science fiction novel.
To order The Woman and the Ape from amazon.com, click here.
HOLMES ON THE RANGE by Steve Hockensmith:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 02/13/2009]
I recently read HOLMES ON THE RANGE by Steve Hockensmith (ISBN-13 978-0-312-34780-2, ISBN-10 0-312-34780-4). This is a combination mystery-Western, but it does not have Sherlock Holmes in it. Rather, it has a cowboy who has read and become fascinated by Sherlock Holmes, and then finds himself in a real-life mystery on the ranch where he is working. The Watson character (narrator-cum-assistant) is his brother. I thought this was fairly well done, except for the gimmick that some of the characters in the book turn out to be related to characters in one of the Holmes stories. This "making Holmes real" gimmick rather than just letting a cowboy like Old Red be inspired by fictional stories may have seemed necessary to Hockensmith. And I realize that any Holmes pastiche that includes Sherlock Holmes himself does this of necessity. But somehow when the story is about someone inspired by the stories, the necessity of maintaining the "reality" of Holmes seems weaker and more contrived--at least to me.
To order Holmes on the Range from amazon.com, click here.
STRAVAGANZA: CITY OF MASKS by Mary Hoffman:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 03/07/2003]
The book that was most strongly put forward as alternate history was Mary Hoffman's STRAVAGANZA: CITY OF MASKS. Well, it does take place in an alternate Venice in a world in which Remus won out over Romulus rather than vice versa. But there is also travel between this world and our own by "stravagantes" using magical means. The protagonists are again teenagers, a few years older than those of "Warriors of Alavna", one from each world. And again we have the girl masquerading as a boy, though not for very long. It's basically a straight historical fantasy, reminiscent of Jack Vance, Michael Moorcock, or even Joan Vinge's SNOW QUEEN, and I would recommend it in that category. It's not as British as WARRIORS OF ALAVNA, but like that book, available only in Britain (and possibly Canada).
To order Stravaganza: City of Masks from amazon.com, click here.
FOLLYWOOD by Michael Hollister
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 04/18/2008]
FOLLYWOOD by Michael Hollister (ISBN-13 978-1-4208-5349-X, ISBN-10 1-4208-5349-X) shows a lot of research--in fact, that seems to be its main purpose. The book has three aspects:
But to do this, he has to re-write history to some extent. So when he reaches the climactic meeting of the Directors Guild, at which they are debating whether to require a loyalty oath, he has John Ford respond to Cecil DeMille's pushing of the oath by saying:
"I am a director of westerns. I am one of the founders of this Guild. I would like to state that I have been on Mr. Mankiewicz's side of the fight all through it. ... I don't agree with C. B. DeMille. I admire him. I don't like him, but I admire him, and without Mr. DeMille, your Guild is busted up."
What Ford actually said (according to all reports I have read), is:
"My name's John Ford. I make Westerns. I don't think there is anyone in the room who knows more about what the American public wants than Cecil B. De Mille. In that respect I admire him. But I don't like you, C. B. I don't like what you stand for and I don't like what you've been saying here tonight."
He also moved that De Mille resign from the board of directors-- hardly in keeping with what Hollister has him saying. [ http://anecdotage.com/index.php?aid=2487 and others]
And Hollister also left off what DeMille was doing that was the proximate cause--reading off the names of people he thought might be Communists with a Jewish accent to emphasize that they were all Jewish.
Now, I obviously have the view that blacklist et al was a bad thing, so I may be somewhat biased here, but it seems to me that Hollister is not playing fair here. He has Ford saying, in effect, that he admires DeMille (in this debate) even though he doesn't like him, when in fact what he said was that even though he admired DeMille (as a director), he did not like him. And he leaves off some important information about how the blacklist was carried out.
Maybe I am expecting too much from a self-published book. But what we have here are recycled anecdotes, unlikely film treatments (one suspects Hollister has a secret desire to be a film writer), and a very slanted presentation of a critical period in Hollywood (and national) history. Not recommended.
To order Follywood from amazon.com, click here.
TRESPASSERS ON THE ROOF OF THE WORLD: THE SECRET EXPLORATION OF TIBET by Peter Hopkirk:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 08/04/2006]
TRESPASSERS ON THE ROOF OF THE WORLD: THE SECRET EXPLORATION OF TIBET by Peter Hopkirk (ISBN 1-56836-050-9) is about the attempts of Westerners in get into Lhasa when not just Lhasa, but all of Tibet, was closed to foreigners. However, the most interesting stories are of non-Westerners, in specific the pundits from India. In the 1860s, several Indians who had been specially trained by the British were sent to try to penetrate into Tibet, get to Lhasa, and ascertain the situation vis-a-vis the Chinese and particularly the Russians. The story of how they were treated by the British is as depressing as their adventures are exciting. First, the British came close to completely undermining their efforts by publishing the details of their training and travels in the "Journal of the Royal Geographical Society" in 1868. Only the fact that no one in China happened to read the "Journal" prevented future trips from meeting with disaster. (And you thought security leaks were a new thing!) Second, when the pundits were finished, they got piddling amounts of money (or, if they were really lucky, small pensions) and a few (oral) words of thanks. William Rockhill observed, "If any British observer had done one third of Nain Singh [or others] accomplished, medals and decorations, lucrative offices and professional promotion, freedom of cities and every form of lionisation would have been his. As for those native explorers, a small pecuniary reward and obscurity are all to which they can look forward. . . . " Sir Richard Temple asked the question of why these pundits did it, and then gave his answer, "Not to those honours which afforded an honorable stimulus to British enterprise, but only this--his zeal for the department he served, his obedience to so good a superior as General Walker, his loyalty to the public service, his firm determination to do his duty according to his poor ability and, above all things, his reliance upon the British Government which he knew would reward him generously should he survive, and would take of his family should he perish." This sounds so condescending that it is even more depressing to realize that corporations now expect this of the employees, and deliver even less after years of service.
These people were followed by a series of considerably less competent (and less prepared) Europeans, including several who decided they were called to preach the Gospel in Lhasa. Petrus and Susie Rijnhart decided not only to go to Lhasa, but to take their newborn son with them. Only Susie survived--barely. Another explorer, Henry Savage Landor, seems to have done everything possible to antagonize the Tibetans he dealt with. Today's tourists may be obnoxious at times, but the sheer presumptuousness of some of these early explorers is amazing.
To order Trespassers on the Roof of the World from amazon.com, click here.
SHALOM, JAPAN by Shifra Horn:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 12/31/2004]
Shifra Horn's SHALOM, JAPAN (ISBN 1-57566-223-X) is a collection of essays about Japan by the wife of an Israeli diplomat who lived there for five years. The double translation (Japanese words into Hebrew and then into English) has resulted in some peculiar spellings (e.g., "Om Shinari-Kiu" rather than the more recognizable "Aum Shinrikyo"). Horn's comments are not always flattering, and many have complained about her stereotyping of the Japanese and her occasionally negative attitude. However, I found this collection valuable as providing an alternative viewpoint to the generally carefully diplomatic articles one usually sees, and Horn's negativity seems directed at societal mores that end up causing suicides or leaving the homeless to their fate rather than everything different. You may disagree with her at times, but she does give you food for thought.
To order Shalom, Japan from amazon.com, click here.
INTRODUCING FOUCAULT by Chris Horrocks and Zoran Jevtic:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 07/29/2005]
I found most of the "Introducing" books from Totem Books/Icon Books to be quite good, but recently I've run across a couple that seem to have a very different idea of what "introducing" means. For example, Chris Horrocks and Zoran Jevtic's INTRODUCING FOUCAULT (ISBN 1-84046-086-5) has statements like the following: "'Archaeology', as the investigation of that which renders necessary a certain form of thought, implies an excavation of unconsciously organized sediments of thought. Unlike a history of ideas, it doesn't assume that a knowledge accumulates towards any historical conclusion. Archaeology ignores individuals and their histories. It prefers to excavate impersonal structures of knowledge." (page 64) It does cover Foucault's life fairly thoroughly, but fails (I think) in explicating his philosophy to a beginner. (For one thing, it frequently compares and contrasts Foucault's ideas with those of Hegel or Heidegger, but assumes that the reader is already familiar with the latter. This book might be good for someone who has a strong background in philosophy, particularly 20th century French philosophy--but then again, those people might not need it.
To order Introducing Foucault from amazon.com, click here.
BARKER STREET REGULARS
by Susan Conant:
MURDER, MRS. HUDSON
by Sydney Hosier:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 12/05/2003]
A couple of books inspired by Sherlock Holmes are Susan Conant's BARKER STREET REGULARS and Sydney Hosier's MURDER, MRS. HUDSON. The former involves a murder, dogs, and Sherlock Holmes aficionados. The latter is the second book in a series that has Mrs. Hudson as the detective and would be okay except for the fact that Hosier has decided to give her a friend who can travel out of her body. This is presumably explained more in the first book of the series, but I'm not going out of my way to find it.
To order Barker Street Regulars from amazon.com, click here.
To order Murder, Mrs. Hudson from amazon.com, click here.
HEART OF LIGHT by Sarah A. Hoyt:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 06/06/2008]
A few weeks ago, I quoted the beginning of Jeffrey E. Barlough's BERTRAM OF BUTTER CROSS as an example of how a book can grab me in the first couple of paragraphs. HEART OF LIGHT by Sarah A. Hoyt (ISBN-13 978-0-553-58966-5, ISBN-10 0-553-58966-0) begins:
"What is wrong?" Emily asked.She sat, naked, on her bridal bed, the waves of her dark hair falling like a dusky veil over her golden shoulders and small breasts. Over it, wrapped around her, she clutched a multicolored flowered shawl, a legacy from her Indian grandmother.
Nigel, her husband of ten hours, stood at the foot of the bed, trying to arrange his blue dressing gown with shaking hands and only managing to twist it, so it hung askew and displayed a portion of his pale muscular chest.
Far from grabbing me, this overripe romance prose made me want to grab it--and hurl it across the room. However, this was a library book, and I did need to read it in my capacity as a member of the Sidewise Awards panel, so I "soldiered on." While the rest of the book was not this appallingly bad, it had a whole series of flaws. First, it seemed very much inspired by Naomi Novick's "Temeraire" series; set in what is basically our world in the 19th century, but with (Chinese) dragons and magic. (Hoyt sets her story in late Victorian times, while Novick sets hers in the Napoleonic Wars.) But everything in this book is far too similar to our timeline (more so than in "Temeraire"): Victoria is Queen, Albert is dead, there was a Chinese Gordon and Mahdists, and so on. This *can* work, but it requires a deft touch; Esther Friesner did it reasonable well with DRUID'S BLOOD, for example, but here it fails to convince me.
There is also far too much feminist preaching: every few chapters Emily muses on her condition as a wife who is under the legal control of her husband, who cannot do anything on her own, who envies the Masai woman who is independent (and how likely is that, one wonders?), and so on. And of course there is the obligatory display of racist attitudes by the Europeans (and how wrong they are).
Oh, and it is the first of a series. With no warning of this on the cover or the back cover. Only inside the front cover does one see "Look for Sarah A. Hoyt's next fantasy" and a picture of the cover of SOUL OF FIRE, clearly book two in the series. (And an excerpt of SOUL OF FIRE at the end of the book confirms this.) I've said before what I think of publishers who do this, and have not changed my opinion since then. Ptui!
To order Heart of Light from amazon.com, click here.
FEAR by L. Ron Hubbard:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 09/26/2003]
The "something old" was L. Ron Hubbard's FEAR. First published in 1940, it's a *lot* shorter than Hubbard's later work and, while not great, is certainly readable enough--and after sixty years, that's saying something. Basically, a professor finds he has lost four hours of his life and tries to discover what has happened. While it's billed as a horror novel, it is not (by today's standards) horrific, but it is a classic.
To order Fear from amazon.com, click here.
"Essays on Humanity" by Victor Hugo:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 05/16/2003]
Victor Hugo is best known for LES MISERABLES and NOTRE-DAME DE PARIS. I reviewed his TOILERS OF THE SEA here a few months ago (02/14/03), and now I've just read his "Essays on Humanity" (at least those printed in the Walter J. Black 1928 Hugo omnibus edition). His first, "Capital Punishment", is actually a companion piece to his fiction work "Last Days of a Condemned Man" from "Stories of Crime". Hugo presents a fairly strong case against capital punishment. (It is important to remember that capital punishment in France in Hugo's time was applied to more than just murderers, but Hugo is clear that he opposes all capital punishment.)
Of course, many of his arguments now seem a bit familiar. (For example, he disputes the notion that capital punishment serves as a warning to others.) Another familiar argument of Hugo's is that the condemned had been deprived of any chance by society to do other than become criminals.
Some of the arguments are no longer applicable. For example, he describes many botched executions on the guillotine, and gives them as reasons to abolish capital punishment. The only result was that eventually countries adopted different modes of execution, which in turn were also decried as barbaric.
Some of his arguments are a bit shaky. Against the argument that a prisoner sentenced to life imprisonment might escape, he says, "Keep watch more strictly! If you do not believe in the solidity of iron bars, how do you venture to have menageries? Let there be no executioner when the jailer can suffice." I guess Hugo hadn't read Dumas's THE COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO, or didn't realize that prisoners can bribe guards in a way that animals in a zoo can't.
Hugo preaches a return to the "gentle laws of Christ" and end with the declaration, "The Cross shall displace the Gibbet." While I know what he meant, I can't help but feel it is a poor phrasing, as if he wishes to replace hanging with crucifixion.
In another essay, "The Minds and the Masses", he talks at length about the necessity for education and culture for all, but the most striking quote is in regard to the opposition and hatred towards those who propose this, by quoting the early Christian philosopher Tertullian: "O Romans! we are just, kind, thinking, lettered, honest men. We meet to pray, and we love you because you are our brethren. We are gentle and peaceable like little children, and we wish for concord among men. Nevertheless, O Romans! if the Tiber overflows, or if the Nile does not, you cry, 'to the lions with the Christians!'"
These seem to be out of print, but http://gavroche.org/vhugo/ has some or all of them.
THE TOILERS OF THE SEA by Victor Hugo:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 02/14/2003]
Victor Hugo wrote three books as a triptych: LES MISERABLES (about humanity), NOTRE DAME DE PARIS (about religion), and THE TOILERS OF THE SEA (about nature). Of the three, the last is rarely read these days. But it is perhaps the most science fictional, since part of it has to do with sea monsters (though of the cephalapod variety rather than the saurian). I am not saying that one should read it *because* of this, however, but because it is Victor Hugo, and so far as I know he never wrote a bad book. At four hundred pages it's even slightly shorter than NOTRE DAME DE PARIS, and certainly shorter than the 1463-page LES MISERABLES. (I mention this because people are always saying they don't have time to read long books. They often say this while picking up Robert Jordan or Tom Clancy novels.)
To order The Toilers of the Sea from amazon.com, click here.
THE CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS AND THE REMAKING OF WORLD ORDER by Samuel P. Huntington:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 08/20/2004]
I am sure there is a lot to dispute in Samuel P. Huntington's THE CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS AND THE REMAKING OF WORLD ORDER (ISBN 0- 684-81164-2), but there is also a lot that seems to explain the world today. Huntington's premise is that now that the Cold War between "the West" and "Communism" is gone, the more basic conflicts between civilizations have re-emerged. Huntington sees the major civilizations of the world as Western, Latin American, African, Islamic, Sinic (Chinese), Hindu, Orthodox, Buddhist, and Japanese, and the conflicts as occurring between those civilizations, particularly at "fault lines" where they border, or in "cleft countries" or "torn countries". Huntington cites Carroll Quigley's seven stages of civilizayion (mixture, gestation, expansion, age of conflict, universal empire, decay, and invasion), and then attempts to demonstrate these with current and past civilizations. He then characterizes "Western civilization" as having the following characteristics: the Classical legacy, Catholicism and Protestantism, European languages, separation of spiritual and temporal authority, rule of law, social pluralism, representative bodies, and individualism. While one might debate some of these (in particular, the separation of authority seems to have varied over time), Huntington does show that these are ways to contrast Western civilization with others. For example, Japanese civilization traditionally devalues rather than values individualism, and Islamic civilization is based on the notion than temporal and spiritual authority are one.
Huntington supports his paradigm by observing how current conflicts play out in places like Yugoslavia, the Central Asian republics, the Ukraine, and so on. In Yugoslavia, Russia and other Orthodox countries sided with the (Orthodox) Serbs, the Islamic countries sides with the (Muslim) Bosnians, and the Catholic/Protestant West sided with the (Catholic) Croats. But in addition to these alignments, Huntington points out that the West preaches "universalism", yet fails to demonstrate it: "Democracy is promoted but not if it brings Islamic fundamentalists to power; nonproliferation is preached for Iran and Iraq but not for Israel; free trade is the elixir of economic growth but not for agriculture; human rights are an issue with China but not with Saudi Arabia; aggression against oil-owning Kuwaitis is massively repulsed but not against non-oil-owning Bosnians." This is a book worth reading even if you do not agree with Huntington's premise.
To order The Clash of Civilizations from amazon.com, click here.
BRAVE NEW WORLD by Aldous Huxley:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 12/02/2005]
I re-read BRAVE NEW WORLD by Aldous Huxley (ISBN 0-060-92987-1) because I was sure that a line from the film STUNT MAN ("a stick of gum will make you hum") was from it. It wasn't, though lines with similar rhythms do show up, and there is "sex gum" in the book as well. What struck me was that if you look at this and the only other science fiction considered respectable enough for school book reports when I was growing up, George Orwell's 1984, 1984 has overshadowed BRAVE NEW WORLD, but BRAVE NEW WORLD is the more topical, with its subliminal teaching and advertising, class structure, reproductive technology, and emphasis on sex as separate from love. People seem to re-read 1984 every once in a while, but BRAVE NEW WORLD is ignored. So next time, re-read that one.
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 08/15/2007]
Last month our science fiction book group read BRAVE NEW WORLD by Aldous Huxley (ISBN-10 0-060-77609-9, ISBN-13 978-0-060-77609-1). A lot has been said about this, so I will comment just on a few aspects. First are the names Huxley used. Most of the names he chose he took from prominent and famous at the time of his writing. The following is a list of all the names in the book, with sources for the ones (I think) I know: Ford and Freud are well-known and commented on, but we also find Bokanovsky, Podsnap (OUR MUTUAL FRIEND), Foster, Mustapha Mond, Lenina (Lenin-- a political philosopher), Fanny, Marx (a political philosopher), Pfitzner (a composer and anti-modernist), Kawaguchi, Edzel (Edsel-- an industrialist), Benito (a politician) Hoover (a politician), Helmholtz (a physician and physicist) Watson (a child psychologist), Stopes (a family planning advocate), Rothschild (a financier), Sarojini (a woman's emancipationist) Engels (a political philosopher), Bradlaugh (an atheist), Diesel (an inventor), Deterding (the chairman of Royal Dutch Petroleum in Huxley's time), Bakunin (a political philosopher), Tomakin, Dr. Shaw (socialist), Gaffney, Keate, Primo (a dictator) Mellon (a banker), Darwin (a scientist), Bonaparte (a politician). Some of those seem obscure but were not at the time the book was written (1932). For example, Miguel Primo de Rivera was the dictator of Spain from 1923 to 1930. (The few I have not annotated I could not find any well-known real-life person of the time with that name.)
The racism of the book is also worth noting, not just the entire portrayal of the Zuni as unhygienic fanatics, but also the comments about the fertility of different races, etc.
And finally, was Huxley being slyly sarcastic when he wrote, "[And] on khaki paper and in words exclusively of one syllable, 'The Delta Mirror'"
To order Brave New World from amazon.com, click here.