Wednesday, February 1, 2012

Between Shades of Gray by Ruta Sepetys

This novel recreates the suffering of a family deported from Lithuania to Siberia during World War II. The Vilkas family has been arrested because the father is an educator and Lithuanian nationalist. Stalin targeted members of the intelligentsia because he wanted to destroy possible sources of protest in post-war Soviet society. The novel reads much like a book on the Holocaust. Indeed, millions of Eastern Europeans were subjected to slave labor, starvation and for some, summary execution. Only recently have their stories and the breadth of Stalin's purges come to light. Whether the persecution of national and ethnic groups rose to the level of the mass extermination of Jews is a subject of debate--as is the current view that Lithuanians and others were victims of the Soviets as opposed to collaborators with the Germans. Nonetheless, the struggles of Lina, her brother Jonas, their mother and other Lithuanians is a compelling one. The reader is reminded of the human capacity for courage and endurance as well as cruelty. Recommended.

Monday, January 30, 2012

Robopocalypse by Daniel H. Wilson

While the reader learns in the very beginning that humans survive the attempt at mass destruction of their species, as orchestrated by a secretive and technologically dominant artificial intelligence, the retelling of the crisis is fraught with suspense. The author creates characters and then puts them in life-threatening situations as they are confronted by a variety of robots (think Star Wars on steroids) who are deadly, unrelenting in pursuit of humans, and increasingly adaptable to terrain and counter-strategies. They can repair and redesign themselves, control communication centers and satellites, and surgically modify human prisoners to make them more useful and less free. The author, a specialist with a PhD in robotics, has described a world in which modern automobiles take over city streets by running over pedestrians and destroying their human occupants in horrific crashes, formerly passive "house" robots become killers, and military hardware with automated systems becomes, well, you can imagine. The book reads like a video game, with viewpoints shifting from former military and police to creative civilians--hackers, building demolition experts, and a young girl with heightened awareness of AI communications. The story isn't deep, but it's fun (and a little gory). Recommended.