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Book cover of 'Engines of Liberty: Rebel Heart' featuring a young man in a leather jacket holding a mechanical device, with an eagle in the background and a dramatic sunset.

What if I told you there was a YA adventure book about a boy fighting evil wizards? You’d probably say, “meh, sounds like a Harry Potter clone.”

I see why you’d think that. But what if I told you it’s set in America? Or rather, an alternate retro-futuristic America, in which the revolution was defeated, and the rebel colonists remain under the thumb of the cruel mages, who keep the non-magical people in a state of constant poverty by restricting their technology.

This is the world in which Calvin Adler, the protagonist, has grown up, and against which he rages impotently, lashing out at the mages who oppress his family. This act of rebellion earns them all a harsh punishment, and also earns Calvin a place in the underground resistance forming to fight the magic-wielding oppressors. A group of “technomancers”, who have vowed to succeed where George Washington failed.

The story is fast-paced and fun. It has all the usual beats of a coming-of-age YA novel: evil villains, school where hero takes some hits and learns to get back up, arrogant bullies, budding romance, and all the other elements we expect are here. Also, some interesting retrofuturistic technology, especially the guns. That’s right, unlike the Potterverse, wands aren’t the only weapons folks have at their disposal!

Is it the most original, innovative, or inventive story I ever read? No, it’s not. But I had fun reading it, and I think that’s all that really matters. If you’re in the mood for a fun fantasy adventure for quick reading, then this is a good choice. 

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I am not generally in favor of content warnings. It’s not that I have any problem with them per se; it’s just that if you start doing them, you have to list everything that could possibly upset anyone. Which could really be anything. My mother knows a woman who is afraid of kittens. Kittens!

But this book should come with a warning. It is incredibly depressing. So depressing that, as I was reading it, the thought occurred to me that it could actually be in some sense dangerous. I am not prone to depression or melancholy, and yet even I was filled with a profound sense of gloom after reading this. I would say if you do read it, you should be sure you have someone you can talk to about it, because otherwise it might get just too damn bleak. For myself, I re-read a Zachary Shatzer book after finishing it, as a sort of satyr play.

What, you ask, is Stoner about? Not a drug enthusiast or the famous firearm designer, as you might have thought, but a man named William Stoner born on a small Missouri farm, back when the West was young… oh, wait, no; that’s Frank and Jesse James. Stoner is born on a small Missouri farm in 1891. Farm life is bleak and hard and miserable, and so, in 1910, Stoner’s father suggests he take classes at the University of Missouri, an institution set up to educate rural youths such as himself and mold them into productive citizens. (Their motto is salus populi suprema lex esto: “the health of the people shall be the supreme law.”)

Stoner enrolls at Mizzou, but finds the agricultural science classes boring. English literature catches his fancy, and he seeks a graduate degree in it, much to his parents’ disappointment. From there, he goes on to a career teaching at the same university. He meets a woman named Edith, whom he marries for no particular reason, and their marriage quickly proves to be an unhappy one. Despite this, they have a daughter, whom they name Grace. Stoner bonds with Grace when she is young and Edith is frequently absent, but then Edith begins manipulating her to keep her away from her father.

Meanwhile, Stoner’s professional life is the dreary, repetitive drudgery of teaching the same classes over and over, intermixed with the petty factional squabbles common to academia. Anyone who has ever been connected with a university for an extended period will recognize familiar types: the scheming faculty members with their intradepartmental political jockeying, and the malingering, dishonest students who put more effort into gaming the system than into studying their assignments.

All of it makes Stoner miserable, but only in a very detached sort of way. Frequently, we are told he views his problems as if he is watching them happening to somebody else. Some might call this stoicism or perseverance. But to me, it called to mind a line from a Monty Python skit: “He doesn’t know when he’s beaten, this boy! He doesn’t know when he’s winning either. He has no sort of sensory apparatus!”

Stoner is just a non-entity. A vaguely sad non-entity, but when it seems as if he himself can’t be bothered to care that his life sucks, well, why should I?

Stoner was more or less ignored when it was published in 1965, and only recently rediscovered in the age of the internet. This book has over 18,000 reviews on Amazon, most of them positive. It’s also tagged with something called “Best of #BookTok”, which means it’s popular on social media. Which amazes me, because it seems like exactly the sort of book that wouldn’t interest the TikTok crowd, what with its slow pace, historical setting, and lack of sparkling vampires. In a way, I view it as a good sign that a book like this can still find an audience today.

But not that good of a sign, because it’s still an unbelievably grim slog. A lot of reviews say that, basically, that’s the point. Stoner’s entire life is drab and uninteresting, like so many people’s lives, and yet the author was able to weave a narrative out of a completely dull non-story.

I have my own theory as to why the book is more popular now than it was upon its original publication. I suspect Stoner is most interesting to people who are familiar with the inner-workings of academia. In the 1960s, this was a smaller share of the population. But as access to college has increased, and especially as more students have sought post-graduate degrees, the percentage of people who can relate to Stoner has grown as well.

Which is a rather ominous message, given that the theme of the book seems to be that academic life is gloomy and wretched. Then again, it doesn’t suggest that Stoner’s agrarian parents were living the Life of Reilly, either. Basically, there are no happy endings here. All that was missing was a Barry Lyndon-esque epilogue in case we hadn’t gotten the point already: “It was in the reign of Franklin Roosevelt that the aforesaid personages lived and quarreled…”

So, the big question: should you read the damn thing? Well… it’s hard to say. It’s well-written, and given the aggressively tedious subject matter, I have to give the author credit for making it fairly readable. I kept going after all, with morbid curiosity, wanting to know what awful thing Stoner would have to deal with next, and what his new excuse would be for not making his own life better.

Probably any young person just going off to college should read this. Then they can decide for themselves if they want to risk ending up like Stoner. But I don’t think many college-age kids read this blog. So for my typical readers: if you love well-written and crushingly depressing literary fiction, sure, give it a shot. Otherwise, steer clear.

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Cover of the book 'Wit and Assurance' by Zachary Shatzer, featuring the subtitle 'Reviewing the Jests of 18th Century Humorist Joe Miller.' The design has a dark background with white text.

Whenever I’m on the lookout for books to read, and a new title by Zachary Shatzer comes to my notice, I pause, stroke my mustache, and say in the voice of an English bobby, “‘ere now, wot’s all this then?”

In this case, “all this” is an annotated review of an 18th century joke book allegedly by an actor named Joe Miller, although actually it seems to have been compiled by a man named John Mottley, writing under the pseudonym of Elijah Jenkins. Are you confused yet? Just wait.

18th century humor is not always like modern humor. Sometimes, of course, it is. There are patterns in the human experience which are universal, and some of the jests do indeed strike chords of hilarity which echo down all the ages.

But other times, it’s hard, to be quite blunt, to know what the hell Miller (or Mottley or Jenkins or whoever) is talking about. Sometimes, Mr. Shatzer’s commentary is able to shed light on the matter. Other times, he is as baffled as the rest of us.

Fortunately, Shatzer is one of the funniest writers currently going, and so his commentary on each of the 247 jests is enjoyable in its own right, even when the joke he is commenting on is incomprehensible. Maybe especially when the joke he is commenting on is incomprehensible.

And every now and again, one of the jests is actually relatable and funny, and suddenly, the gulf between us and the 18th century is bridged, and we understand the people of the past were people, not merely names in history books, and that they laughed at absurdities just as we do. There’s nothing like shared laughter for helping to relate to someone else.

If nothing else, this book is a good window into Shatzer’s process. When his future biographers are trying to describe what made this great 21st-century humorist tick, they will no doubt turn to this volume for insight into Shatzer’s philosophy of comedy. To paraphrase a film review I once read, “Joe Miller’s wit is almost enough, because Zachary Shatzer’s wit is more than enough.”

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I had never heard of Nelson DeMille until recently, but apparently he was quite popular in his time. His time, alas, is over, but his books live on, including this short story, which is about a bookstore owner crushed to death by a fallen bookcase. An accident? The protagonist of the story, detective John Corey, is not so sure, and sets about unraveling the tangled web of events surrounding the bookstore owner’s demise, complete with a running sarcastic commentary on the cast of characters who seem to be involved, from the youthful shop clerk to the bookstore owner’s wife.

It’s an amusing story, though fairly predictable, which, when you consider the length and limited number of characters, might be inevitable. There’s only so much of a mystery you can have when the possibilities are so limited. Still, that’s not a bad thing. It would be worse if he had dragged it out to full novel length by throwing in extraneous material. Nobody wants that.

At the same time… it’s also not ground-breaking. Not that it needs to be. It’s just that, I can think of plenty of indie authors who have written things that are just as good or better. Yet, DeMille could get traditionally published and they could not. It’s not DeMille’s fault. Nil nisi bonum, after all. It’s just one of those frustrating mysteries in the world of publishing. These are the kinds of mysteries that just can’t be resolved with snappy, sarcastic one-liners. Believe me, I’ve tried.

Forgive me if this all seems a bit negative. Perhaps it’s my own failing, as I ponder the future of writing and feel a sense of looming disaster. But all in all, it’s a decent story if you want a quick diversion and some funny lines.

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AI is inescapable. At least as a topic of discussion. Which, if you believe in the idea of AI super-intelligence as a memetic mind virus from the future, means it has already won. But I digress. The subject of today’s review is a short story by my friend and fellow author, Richard Pastore, which you can read for free in its entirety on his blog.

Of course, one of the difficulties of reviewing short stories is that it’s too easy to accidentally give away the whole thing by describing it. I find it’s best to instead give a general “flavor” of it rather than to describe specific plot points. For this one, that’s a pretty easy task: it’s like a modern-day Twilight Zone episode on the theme of AI. As I said to Richard in the comments, I heard the closing paragraph in the voice of Rod Serling.

The story balances Swiftian satirical humor and science-fiction quite well, and serves as a good cautionary tale for where society seems to be going. Of course, there have been no shortage of cautionary tales over the years, some of them by Mr. Serling himself. So far, they haven’t worked. It’s a classic Torment Nexus situation. Or a “Berlin Cabaret” situation, for the old-timers.

And yet, all the same, fiction is one of the ways we process the world we live in. If the world becomes dystopian, can we really help it if our fiction does as well? Which way does the causality run?

All these are interesting questions to ponder, and that’s exactly what this sort of experimental sci-fi story is designed to do. Set the gears turning, as they say. So, what are you waiting for? Go read it. No, don’t have AI summarize it for you; just read it.

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A spectre is haunting Europe. Actually, it’s probably a lot of spectres. Turns out, a ton of people have died there over the years, especially in wars. Here in the United States, we think of our Civil War as a horribly bloody struggle that rent the national fabric in ways that have yet to be mended. In Europe, it would hardly register as a blip on the radar. They had one of those every few decades

So when you hear the word “Prussia,” it’s natural you think of warfare. In our caricatured version of history, Prussians are basically coded as proto-Nazis.

As this book makes clear, that’s not entirely a fair view of the famous German state. Sure, they had a strong military tradition. But they also had a strong tradition of learning, enlightenment, and civic organization. Frederick the Great would probably get called “Frederick the Woke” today for as much as he talked about values like equality and justice.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Clark starts at the beginning, when “Prussia” was just a bunch of warring groups. In a process Clark analogizes to the English Civil War and Thomas Hobbes, the violence of the Thirty Years War made a philosopher named Samuel von Pufendorf realize the need for a strong sovereign to maintain peace.

Thus was born the conception of The State. And, in stereotypical German fashion, the Prussian project became an obsessive need to build this new civic instrument into the most powerful and efficient version of itself that anybody could imagine.

The famous quip, often attributed to Voltaire, that “where some states have an army, the Prussian Army has a state,” is, like so many Voltaire quotes, very funny but also misleading; the Prussians believed in having a good army simply because without one, the edicts of the state would be meaningless.

However, to some extent, the very mythology of le epic Prussian Army is just that; mythology. I think at least some of this is attributable to none other than good old Napoleon Bonaparte, who, having defeated the Prussians decisively, thought it would burnish his image to tell everyone how incredibly tough they were.

Not that they weren’t good, because they were. And indeed, in reaction to their defeat at Boney’s hands, the Prussians turned the Prussianism up to 11. They would be the Prussianest Prussians who ever Prussed. This is why the Germany vs. France series became so lopsided after 1813; you could argue that the entire Prussian philosophy was “always have a plan to beat France.”

This worked great in the Franco-Prussian War. It worked less great in World War I, when the plan to immediately invade France in response to a crisis sort of blew up in their faces. And the world’s face.

None of which is to suggest that the Prussian administrative class was unduly warlike or bloodthirsty. Indeed, part of their problem was their bureaucratic emphasis on rules, regulations and strict parliamentary procedures. A mode of operation which persisted into the Weimar Republic period, and which in turn could be exploited by non-Prussians entirely uninterested in rule-following.

Clark doesn’t appear to subscribe the “Great Man Theory,” but nevertheless, throughout the book there do emerge interesting pictures of some of the more vivid characters of Prussian history. The only thing that makes it a bit hard to follow is that almost all their rulers are named Wilhelm, Frederick, or Frederick-Wilhelm.

And then there’s Otto von Bismarck, the comically mis-nicknamed “Iron Chancellor”. “The Rubber Chancellor” would be more apt, because of his ability to bend as needed. Bismarck was the pragmatist to end all pragmatists. Whenever he would pretend to stand on principle, it was only as a ruse to get some practical goal advanced. Naturally, he is considered one of the greatest political figures of his era. (I watched the show Fall of Eagles concurrently with reading this book; and Curt Jürgens’ performance as Bismarck is one of the highlights.)

I picked up this book on a friend’s recommendation, mostly because I was interested in expanding my knowledge of the other players in the Napoleonic Wars. It delivers on that front. Clark’s treatment of the Battle of Leipzig alone is worth the read. And in addition to that, I got a meticulous analysis of 400 years’ worth of history, told in a very readable narrative.

But what’s the upshot, you may ask? What ultimately is to be learned from the rise and fall of the Prussian state? What, in short, is the moral of the story?

Naturally, always-online Gen Y-er that I am, my mind goes to a line from The Simpsons:

Lisa: Perhaps there is no moral to this story.

Homer: Exactly! It’s just a bunch of stuff that happened.

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Like Jango Fett, I’m just a simple man, trying to make my way in the universe. And because I’m a simple man, I have simple tastes: I don’t need every story to be a sprawling epic with thousands of characters, a massively complex world, and pages on pages of backstory. Just give me a handful of entertaining characters, and maybe a good MacGuffin for them to chase, and I’m satisfied.

This book is a perfect example: Sully, Hutch, and Jed are three college guys blokes on vacation holiday, which for them consists of drinking as much as they can in every European city connected by rail. But, as sometimes happens in Hitchcock films, a fateful encounter on a train, er, derails their plans.

Little do they realize that an alien spacecraft has crash-landed in Czech Republic, and the occupant is now trying to get home while traveling incognito among the Earthlings. Our beer-addled trio assumes the odd character sitting next to them on the train is just a bit awkward, although Jed’s penchant for internet conspiracy theories makes him more open to other possibilities.

And a good thing, too, because multiple clandestine X-Files-esque agencies are also on the trail of the extraterrestrial traveler, which means the three friends must stay one step ahead of the pursuing authorities as they try to help the lost traveler find the way home.

Is any of this breaking new ground? No, I suppose not. There are shades of E.T., Starman, and a hundred other such stories. But it’s how it’s told that makes it fun. The interactions between the three friends is fast-paced and funny, and becomes even more so when the alien is added to their dynamic. The characters felt real, and the way they develop over the story sneaks up on you gradually, until before you know it, you care about them.

This is what I mean about simplicity: there’s nothing wrong with a nice, simple story, the bare outlines of which you may have heard a thousand times before, but which, when told well, takes on a life of its own. The Wrong Stop doesn’t have any pretensions of being epic or sweeping; it’s just a good story about some interesting characters, and that’s what makes it such an enjoyable ride.

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Some people say I’m too prone to romanticizing the past. And they’re right; I am. I wasn’t always this way; I used to look at the past much more critically back in the good old days.

I was thinking about this because this is where I normally say something like, C. Litka writes books that are a throwback to a better era of literature. But maybe that’s not true. After all, he wrote them in this era, so they are, ipso facto, of this era. And if they are of this era, why not say so? Nothing could possibly be more satisfactory!

Still, if anyone else is writing stuff like this right now, I don’t know who it is. The Darval-Mers Dossier is actually a story-within-a-story; it is one of the Red Wine Agency detective stories, alluded to in Litka’s recent Chateau Clare and Glencrow Summer, in a world which is slowly losing the advanced technology on which it depends.

In this setting, we meet Redinal Hu, who is not really a detective yet, but only a messenger. A mysterious client gives him a message to deliver to a wealthy young-man-about-town, that states simply, “If you care for her, stop seeing her.” Redinal has no idea what this means or who the “her” in the case may be, but he delivers it all the same. And then, as always happens in stories, one thing leads to another.

Compared to some of Litka’s other books, the story is actually a bit darker and more hard-boiled. But these are relative terms; as is customarily the case in Litka’s books, people are (mostly) pleasant and any violence is threatened rather than overt. Nowhere is this more plainly shown than in Litka’s rendering of the traditional Big Scene of the mystery novel, where the detective has all the players gathered in the drawing room. The way he does it is quite clever, and I bet Agatha Christie fans in particular will get a kick out of it.

So, by Litka standards, this is a gritty, fast-paced thriller. By modern standards, it is a cozy mystery. But which is it really, in absolute terms?

Haha, trick question! There are no absolute terms when it comes to this sort of thing. If there were, that would imply rules of writing, and we all know where that discussion goes. No, the fact is Litka’s books are sui generis, and that’s what makes them so wonderful.  If they sometimes recall elements of writers like Wodehouse and the pulp mystery writers of yesteryear, well, they also have some themes which seem much more modern. I love Wodehouse, but I can’t recall any story of his that makes you think about the changing role of technology in our lives.

If you’ve already read some Litka books, I doubt you need me to convince you to try this one. But maybe you haven’t read any yet. If so, you might pick this one up, because it fits more easily into a familiar genre than some of his others do. If you’re in the mood for a pleasant mystery to read on a summer vacation, then this may be just the ticket.

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Chuck Litka recommends this book. And he’s a tough grader, so when he gives something an “A”, I pay attention. Not to mention that this series is compared to works by Wodehouse, Austen, and the like. So, even though it is more well known than what I normally read, I decided to give it a try.

The story is told in the form of diary entries by the young woman named in the title. She has moved to a cramped garret at a place called Lapis Lazuli House, which she technically owns, but which is managed by her guardian Mr. Archibald Flat. The mutual detestation between them forms the core conflict of the book, but there are other little subplots, like Ms. Lion’s attempts to read Paradise Lost, her aunt’s plans for her social future, a local vicar with a gift for oratory, and so on.

And then there is The Roman. Probably my favorite aspect of the story is the mysterious ghost of a Roman soldier who is rumored to appear from time. He is not seen much, but we hear reports of him occasionally. Why is he there? What does he want? Does he even really exist? It’s these kind of little mysteries that make a book fun for me. Chuck has talked about this at some length in this post, which I highly encourage you to read. It was actually this post that motivated me to give the Emma M. Lion books a try; I love the use of “negative space” like this. The best parts of a story are the ones the readers have to work out for themselves.

Which reminds me, I should talk about the setting of the story a bit. It appears to be Victorian England, but there are certain fantastic or magical elements to it that make it not quite straight-up historical fiction. For example, the neighborhood Ms. Lion lives in has a peculiar reputation for objects simply vanishing and reappearing somewhere else later. Why? We know not. Again, the empty space that we fill with our imaginations.

This is catnip to me. I don’t want to know everything about a setting. I don’t want to know everybody’s origin story. I like to have some unexplained things to ponder.

But what really makes it fun is the writing. It’s not quite Wodehouse, but what is? It is clever, witty, and, with a few minor exceptions, plausible as writing from the 19th century. (The exceptions are things like, I think she would probably refer to the famous scientist as “Mr. Darwin” rather than just “Darwin.” And I can’t recall ever seeing Victorians use the word “gifted” to mean giving someone a gift.)

In summary, Chuck was entirely right about this book, and I am glad I read it. Any fan of classic English literature should read it. And even if your tastes run more towards the modern, it’s still enjoyable. It manages to keep the stately pace of an older novel while still having enough going on that readers accustomed to the speed of modern books won’t lose interest. It’s a gem.

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Make yourself comfortable. This will not be quick.

Sometimes you’ll see people wringing their hands about why kids don’t read anymore. This is funny, because, as Leonard Cohen might say, “everybody knows” why kids don’t read anymore. It is because they are watching videos on their phones. Is anyone going to do anything about that? No, of course not! The level of political willpower that would require would make even Thomas Hobbes tremble with fear. So everyone goes on hand-wringing and watching videos on their phones and chaque jour vers l’Enfer nous descendons d’un pas.

But it was not always thus! Once upon a time, children read and delighted in reading. One of the most beloved children’s books of its time was this slender volume, a memoir by Sterling North about his 12th year of life, in 1918, in the state of Wisconsin. One day while playing in the woods, he and his friend startle a nest of raccoons, and recover one of the little masked creatures from their den. Sterling brings the cub home and names him “Rascal.”

What follows is a catalog of Sterling and Rascal’s adventures over the year, from Sterling discovering his little raccoon’s taste for strawberry soda to an amusing incident, unimaginable today, where he brings Rascal to school for show-and-tell.

Interwoven with this are other aspects of a childhood in early 20th-century America, such as Sterling’s ongoing project of building a canoe, town fairs, and similar slices of Americana. If it all sounds idyllic, well, there’s also a dark side which Sterling does not shy away from. Whether from his lingering grief over the death of his mother, which occurred when he was only seven years old, or his fear for his older brother Herschel, who is overseas fighting in World War I, the dangers of the world are in no way sugarcoated.

Yet for all that, it is indeed “a memoir of a better era.” How better of an era was it? The farmers of rural Wisconsin actually ate “second breakfast.” No kidding, down to that detail, it really is like reading an account of some vanished Tolkienesque shire, with the dark threats of mechanical death looming only as vague storm clouds on the horizon. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Now, this is a children’s book, so you can’t expect the prose to be too–

Somewhere it must all be recorded, as insects are captured in amber–that day on the river: transcribed in Brule’s water, written on the autumn air, safe at least in my memory.

Yeah, that’s right. It’s actually gorgeous. They used to write books for kids that didn’t condescend to them.

Also memorable are the other residents of Sterling’s town, like Garth Shadwick, the irascible but good-natured harness maker who makes a leash for Rascal. Mr. Shadwick sees his livelihood threatened by a new technology, which he describes thus:

“It’s these gol-danged automobiles, smelly, noisy, dirty things, scaring horses right off the road… ruin a man’s business.”

We’ve been trained to dismiss the destruction of whole professions by the rise of technology as a normal and even beneficial part of life. Joseph Schumpeter’s “creative destruction” at work. And it is that, of course, but well might we ask: “What is being destroyed? And what is being created?”

For example, when Sterling and Rascal listen to a record of “There’s a Long, Long Trail A-winding,” young Sterling asks his father if there are nightingales or other night-birds:

“‘Not nightingales,” he said, “but we do have whippoorwills, of course.”

‘I’ve never heard a whippoorwill.”

“Can that be possible? Why, when I was a boy…” 

And he was off on a pilgrimage into the past when Wisconsin was still half wilderness, when panthers sometimes looked in through the windows , and the whippoorwills called all night long.”

This is where the subtitle of the book really comes into focus. It has a melancholy tone, a wistfulness for an era before the nation was connected by highways and telephones, when it was still wild and natural.

And here is Sterling’s account of armistice day, a week after his 12th birthday:

On the morning of November 11, 1918, the real Armistice was signed in a railroad car in France. Although men were killed up to the final hour, the cease-fire came at last and a sudden silence fell over the batteries and trenches and graveyards of Europe. The world was now ‘safe for Democracy.’ Tyranny had been vanquished forever. ‘The war to end war’ had been won, and there would never be another conflict. Or so we believed in that far-off and innocent time…

During the afternoon, my elation slowly subsided, and I began oiling my muskrat traps for the season ahead. Rascal was always interested in whatever I was doing. But when he came to sniff and feel the traps, a terrible thought slowed my fingers. Putting my traps aside, I opened one of the catalogues sent to trappers by the St. Louis fur buyers. There, in full color, on the very first page was a handsome raccoon, his paw caught in a powerful trap.

How could anyone mutilate the sensitive, questing hands of an animal like Rascal? I picked up my raccoon and hugged him in a passion of remorse. 

I burned my fur catalogues in the furnace and hung my traps in the loft of the barn, never to use them again. 

Men had stopped killing other men in France that day; and on that day I signed a permanent peace treaty with the animals and the birds. It is perhaps the only peace treaty that was ever kept.

And you have to understand; this wasn’t just idle “virtue signaling” by Sterling. He actually made money from his muskrat trapping, so he was truly giving up something for his principles. A lost art, these days.

Maybe you think Sterling North is too much of a bleeding-heart environmentalist. Maybe you’d say the same thing about Tolkien. All I know is, the world they inhabited appears to have been full of earnest, hardworking, and resilient people. They were not angels—Sterling records multiple run-ins with bullies of all ages—but for the most part, they were people who appreciated what they had and helped their neighbors.

Reading this book, sharing in Sterling’s triumphs and tragedies, his gentle wit, his love for nature, and above all, his fond memories of his masked friend, makes you nostalgic for a time you never lived in. And more to the point, it makes you look around at the world of today and wonder what happened. True, we are materially vastly richer, our GDP infinitely higher. Quite literally, because GDP did not exist as a metric in 1918.

And yet, are we better off? Sure, you tell me over and over and over again, my friend, that all the statistics say so. Still…

Maybe I am just a cynical misanthrope, constantly longing for a mythical better time that doesn’t exist. Maybe everything is running smoothly. Maybe since at least the Enlightenment, humanity has been steadily progressing, with occasional interruptions but never true retrograde motion, towards a better future. Call this Theory A. “A” can stand for “Accepted by the majority of people,” which probably means it’s true. And again, our standard metrics support this view.

There is, however, another interpretation. Call it Theory Ω.

Theory Ω agrees that technology has certainly been improving over the last 400 years. So when the Theory A’ers make technological progress synonymous with happiness, they are assuredly correct. But if we posit that there is actually an inverse relationship between the quality of human spirit and technology, a different picture emerges. A picture of technology relentlessly eating the world.

Sterling North probably did not know how to build his brand through social media. He was not even proficient with the Microsoft Office suite. But he could make a canoe, scale a cliff, catch a fish, raise a raccoon, ride a bike, write a book, read a book, make a muskrat trap, build a fence, climb a tree, fight a bully, have his heart broken and recover from it. Don’t know if he could conn a ship or plan an invasion, but hey, he was only 11.

Compare this with the 11-year-old nephew of a friend of mine, who, I am told, cries when he receives minor scrapes, can barely read a paragraph, and spends all his free time watching something called skibidi videos.

Theory A has nothing to say about these facts whatsoever. But they are exactly in line with Theory Ω’s predictions.

Under Theory Ω, technology has been steadily improving the ease of life while simultaneously destroying the quality of human capital.

A proponent of Theory Ω might add that material wealth, GDP, ease and comfort are all forms of happiness defined using a Benthamite concept of utility. A certain controversial German philosopher had very unkind things to say about this mode of “English happiness,” believing that only through struggle and hardship could one truly achieve a meaningful form of joy.

In the end, everything has a cost which must be paid in order to get it. Our world of comfort, ease, and plenty must be paid for with a commensurate loss of resilience, nobility of spirit, and strength of character. Let me be quite clear: I am in no way as good a human being as Sterling North was. I am thoroughly a product of the techno-decadent fin de millénaire culture. Even when I went camping, which wasn’t often, I had my Game Boy.

But, to quote Tom Sharpe’s Porterhouse Blue: “A gentleman stood for something. It wasn’t what he was. It was what he knew he ought to be.” All my complaining, grousing, griping and rhetorical fruit-flinging comes to this: that people my age are unhappy because we know we ought to be something better than we are, but we were robbed of that chance. Robbed by the very labor-saving technology that was supposed to make the modern world such a wonderful place.

In this way, Sterling North’s memoir is more than just a picturesque tale of a beloved childhood pet, and more even than a heartwarming story of growing up and the necessary emotional pain that goes along with it. It is both a warning and symbol of hope; a warning of how much we can lose, and a symbol of what essential qualities of humanity we should fight to preserve.

I rant like this because, like Nietzsche, I believe that struggle builds character, and if you have to struggle to read my posts, it’s better for you in the long run. (A.I. assistant’s suggestions be damned.) But even if you think my ideas are misguided and wrong, I hope you will still give Rascal a try. It’s a beautiful story that has touched the hearts of generations and spans national and cultural divides: in the 1970s, it was the basis for a very popular animated series in Japan, the charming opening of which you can see here. (And here is a website dedicated to the history of Rascal in Japanese culture.)

I said at the outset of this post that it would take an unfathomable degree of political will to get people to put down the gol-danged cell phones and live their lives. But in my more optimistic moods, I wonder if all it takes is to recall the advice of the Duke of Urbino, when asked what was the essential quality of a great leader: “Essere umano,” he answered: “To be human.”

If so, it’s worth mentioning that Sterling North wrote another book, Raccoons are the Brightest People, wherein he says the following:

Those who play God in destroying any form of life are tampering with a master plan too intricate for any of us to understand. All that we can do is to aid that great plan and to keep part of our planet habitable.