This book is one of many reflecting the anxiety resulting from the publication of The Origin of the Species. The underworld visited by the narrator is inhabited by a race further evolved than 19th century humans, and the narrator finds them pretty disturbing. If you want to get serious, you can read scholars on the misunderstanding of the theory of natural selection that precipitated draconian ideas about eugenics that permeate social and political philosophy up to this minute. This is just a yarn about an imaginary place. Incidentally this new edition has on the dust jacket an illustration painted by John Marten?? for a 19th century edition of Paradise Lost. See if it doesn't remind you of practically every sci fi setting including Avatar. Have fun.

I read this book when it was being considered as an Ann Arbor/Ypsilanti Reads. I think it was beaten out by Mountains Beyond Mountains, a better choice for that purpose. In the interim, events in the wider world and my own immediate community got me thinking that this was a good choice for a small discussion group. I have suggested it for that purpose at the senior apartments where we live. My idea is that each participant discuss a chapter of the book in terms of the kind of population that represented the community, the situation it addressed, and the reasons why it succeeded. We are so good at theorizing about community, often for other people, and so poor at applying it to our own interrelations. As I write this, I hear Secretary of State Hillary Clinton chiding various countries for their bad behavior, and I remember Condoleeza Rice in the same position, and I wonder--is it our role as the greatest democracy to provide the International Scold? We have this wonderful president after such a drought of good leadership. I will do what I can to try to support his efforts to shape the world into more of a community. This book is a good manual.

Ken Follett is an always engaging writer of thrillers with a lot of brain spent on background. This mammoth (973p.) historical novel is a fully filled-out picture of life in England a couple of generations after William the Conqueror. His village setting brings together an earnest, intelligent prior, a minimally pious mason who dreams of building a cathedral, a bishop who sees wealth and power as the fulfillment of his religious vows, and a hierarchy of rulers most of whom are unregulated brutes. This is a wonderful story of fully realized men and women living through a time of deep faith, chancy welfare, savage cruelty, houses where a private room is rare, and horsemen enter the common room without dismounting. If you read this, I'd guess that you won't be able to resist the sequel, just out and 20 years in the writing.

I participated in a book club discussion of the book. The presenter chose it because she has a Downs Syndrome granddaughter. From a literary point of view, it is disappointing, densely detailed and overlong. Also, it presents its story in terms of a crime and punishment philosophy that I would think others besides myself would find objectionable. There are human beings who find the mission of taking care of a child with an anomoly a reward in itself. There are others who can not handle the task. Are they bad or good people because of this? Is there a punishment rendered, presumably by one's God? I doubt it. As I remarked at the end of the meeting, Dickens might have advanced this idea without the blink of an eye in an age of Victorian sentimentality, and I love Dickens. In our own age, it's a faulty argument.

This book is well chosen for Ann Arbor/Ypsilanti Reads. In my book club, I heard repeatedly the reaction I had--this is a vivid account of much that I never knew about the culture that accompanied the Chinese who came to America to live. It is, further, a glimpse inside the constricted community life in San Francisco's Chinatown.
Told in terms of the members of Lee's family, it is sympathetic and convincing as it tells their story alternately in the voices of the son and his mother. She keeps her Eighth Promise to raise a Chinese family, even as she finds her American personality in Reno gambling casinos. Her American children give small nod to being Chinese as they respond to the politics of minority experience in the era of the sixties Civil Rights movement.