Guns for Kids, Child Gun-Casualties, & Brown's Hate List

From yesterday's Guardian article "Guns for kids: critics eye marketing practices after Kentucky shooting:"

The gun manufacturer Keystone Sporting Arms is in a defensive crouch this week. The Pennsylvania-based company has taken down a website for a popular product. When I called Keystone at noon on Friday I was immediately (and politely) referred to the company's lawyer.

Keystone is in retreat because one of the guns it makes for children, a lightweight, single-shot, .22-calibre rifle called the Crickett, was used Tuesday by a five-year-old boy in Kentucky to shoot and kill his two-year-old sister. The boy had been given the gun – full name Davey Crickett, a pun on the legendary American frontiersman – as a birthday gift. The siblings' mother was home but wasn't watching.

On the subject of children killing other children, a good young adult novel about a school shooting is Hate List by Jennifer Brown:

Five months ago, Valerie Leftman's boyfriend, Nick, opened fire on their school cafeteria. Shot trying to stop him, Valerie inadvertently saved the life of a classmate, but was implicated in the shootings because of the list she helped create. A list of people and things she and Nick hated. The list he used to pick his targets.

Now, after a summer of seclusion, Val is forced to confront her guilt as she returns to school to complete her senior year. Haunted by the memory of the boyfriend she still loves and navigating rocky relationships with her family, former friends and the girl whose life she saved, Val must come to grips with the tragedy that took place and her role in it, in order to make amends and move on with her life.

For a non-fiction book about a school shooting, try Columbine by Dave Cullen:

In this remarkable account of the April 20, 1999, Columbine High School shooting, journalist Cullen not only dispels several of the prevailing myths about the event but tackles the hardest question of all: why did it happen?

Drawing on extensive interviews, police reports and his own reporting, Cullen meticulously pieces together what happened when 18-year-old Eric Harris and 17-year-old Dylan Klebold killed 13 people before turning their guns on themselves.

The media spin was that specific students, namely jocks, were targeted and that Dylan and Eric were members of the Trench Coat Mafia. According to Cullen, they lived apparently normal lives, but under the surface lay an angry, erratic depressive (Klebold) and a sadistic psychopath (Harris), together forming a combustible pair. They planned the massacre for a year, outlining their intentions for massive carnage in extensive journals and video diaries.

Cullen expertly balances the psychological analysis—enhanced by several of the nation's leading experts on psychopathology—with an examination of the shooting's effects on survivors, victims' families and the Columbine community. Readers will come away from Cullen's unflinching account with a deeper understanding of what drove these boys to kill, even if the answers aren't easy to stomach.

Chess & Tevis' The Queen's Gambit

From yesterday's New York Times article "Shrewd Marketing Moves for Top-Ranked Chess Player:"

After 22-year-old Magnus Carlsen dispatched him in 36 deadly moves over three speedy hours in their first match at the 2013 Candidates’ Tournament here, the Russian grandmaster Peter Svidler spent a moment musing on why, to be blunt about it, Carlsen receives so much more attention than he does. He is not jealous, he said, of Carlsen’s high profile, No. 1 ranking and lucrative sponsorship deals (“Should I be?”). Svidler is 36, and ranked 14th, but has no companies clamoring to shower him with cash. “He’s exceptionally good, and so he gets extra opportunities,” Svidler said. “Somehow, I’m less marketable than Magnus. I’m somewhat less young, and somewhat more Soviet.” Chess has its superstars, but on a wider stage, there is no one like Carlsen, of Norway, who won the tournament and remains the first world No. 1 from a Western country since Bobby Fischer. Carlsen sits at the center of a campaign carefully constructed by him and his handlers to use his intelligence, looks and nimble news-media-charming skills to increase his profile outside the sport, as if he were a tennis or golf star.

For a novel that focuses on chess, try The Queen's Gambit by Walter Tevis:

Eight year-old orphan Beth Harmon is quiet, sullen, and by all appearances unremarkable. That is until she plays her first game of chess. Her senses grow sharper, her thinking clearer, and for the first time in her life she feels herself fully in control. By the age of sixteen, she’s competing for the U.S. Open championship. But as she hones her skills on the professional circuit, the stakes get higher, her isolation grows more frightening, and the thought of escape becomes all the more tempting.

If you prefer classic authors, you might like The Luzhin Defense by Vladimir Nabokov:

Nabokov's third novel, The Luzhin Defense, is a chilling story of obsession and madness. As a young boy, Luzhin was unattractive, distracted, withdrawn, sullen--an enigma to his parents and an object of ridicule to his classmates. He takes up chess as a refuge from the anxiety of his everyday life. His talent is prodigious and he rises to the rank of grandmaster--but at a cost: in Luzhin' s obsessive mind, the game of chess gradually supplants the world of reality. His own world falls apart during a crucial championship match, when the intricate defense he has devised withers under his opponent's unexpected and unpredictabke lines of assault.

Global Warming & Kingsolver vs Crichton

The papacy has been in the news a lot lately, what with the Papal election and questions about Pope Francis' role in Argentina's Dirty War. Now there are questions as to how focused the Pope will be on environmental issues. For example, here's an article on the issue from today's LA Times, "Irish priest says environment should be Pope Francis' No. 1 issue:"

As the shopkeepers in this capital city readied for St. Patrick’s Day under typically intermittent rainy skies, Father Sean McDonagh’s attention was on the new pope’s agenda. The Columban priest, whose order has a long tradition of missionary work, has been an outspoken critic of Vatican policies. With Pope Francis’ honeymoon period underway he, like many, is waiting to see what issues will be at the center of the new papal agenda. McDonagh, 69, believes Francis needs to go green, making environmentalism the No. 1 priority for the Catholic Church... While the Vatican has taken firm positions on social issues such as gay marriage and abortion, less attention is given to the church’s record on environmental work. Under Pope Benedict XVI, solar panels were installed on the Holy See's ancient buildings and the Vatican made plans to off-set carbon emissions with a yet-to-be planted forest in Hungary.

Will the papacy address global warming?  Who knows.  But global warming seems to be moving on regardless, as shown by a recent study highlighted in the UPI article "Study: Superstorm Sandy not a freak event:"

October's "Superstorm" Sandy was not a freak occurrence but a predictable consequence of loss of arctic sea ice because of global warming, U.S. researchers say. Scientists at Cornell University and Rutgers University said the severe loss of summertime arctic sea ice has increased the frequency of atmospheric blocking events like the one that steered Hurricane Sandy west into the densely populated New York City area. The decrease in sea ice appears to enhance Northern Hemisphere jet stream meandering and intensify arctic air mass invasions toward middle latitudes, leading to the increase in blocking, they said. Such a strong atmospheric, high-pressure blocking pattern over Greenland and the northwest Atlantic Ocean prevented Sandy from steering northeastward and out to sea like most October hurricanes and tropical storms from the Caribbean, the researchers said.

So what do we have for novels about global warming? Today we feature a bit of a cage match.  ARE YOU READY TO RUMBLE?

IN THIS CORNER we have Barbara Kingsolver's Flight Behavior:

In what may be the first novel to realistically imagine the near-term impact of “global weirding,” Barbara Kingsolver sets her latest story in rural Appalachia . In fictional Feathertown, Tennessee, Dellarobia Turnbow--on the run from her stifling life--charges up the mountain above her husband’s family farm and stumbles onto a “valley of fire” filled with millions of monarch butterflies. This vision is deemed miraculous by the town’s parishioners, then the international media. But when Ovid, a scientist who studies monarch behavior, sets up a lab on the Turnbow farm, he learns that the butterflies’ presence signals systemic disorder--and Dellarobia's in-laws’ logging plans won’t help. Readers who bristle at politics made personal may be turned off by the strength of Kingsolver’s convictions, but she never reduces her characters to mouthpieces, giving equal weight to climate science and human need.

AND IN THE OTHER CORNER we have one of my favorite authors, Michael Crichton. Unfortunately, Crichton's "climate change skeptic" novel State of Fear: was panned by climatologists as being largely devoid of facts. No matter! He's a great writer, which is why we featured his novel Airframe in a previous post here at Newsworthy Novels. Here's the rundown on State of Fear:

In Paris, a physicist dies after performing a laboratory experiment for a beautiful visitor. In the jungles of Malaysia, a mysterious buyer purchases deadly cavitation technology, built to his specifications. In Vancouver, a small research submarine is leased for use in the waters off New Guinea. And in Tokyo, an intelligence agent tries to understand what it all means. Thus begins Michael Crichton's exciting and provocative techno-thriller State of Fear. Only Crichton's unique ability to blend scientific fact with pulse-pounding fiction could bring such disparate elements to a heart-stopping conclusion. This is Crichton's most wide-ranging thriller. State of Fear takes the reader from the glaciers of Iceland to the volcanoes of Antarctica, from the Arizona desert to the deadly jungles of the Solomon Islands, from the streets of Paris to the beaches of Los Angeles.

UPDATE:  longer reviews of Flight Behavior can be found at the following ecology/conservation blogs:  Early Career Ecologists, Sustainable Kentucky, and Ann Littlewood Zoo Mysteries.

West Virginia Coal Mining, Mountaintop Removal, & Pancake's Strange as This Weather Has Been

From yesterday's Huffington Post editorial "Mountaintop Removal Coal Mining Poisons Appalachia's Waterways:"

I remember the first time I saw a mountaintop-removal coal mining site - Kayford Mountain in southern West Virginia. Those images have never left my mind - a barren landscape where there was once lush forest. And right around the destroyed site, homes where people were trying to live despite having the world blown up next door. Their lives are never the same when a mountaintop-removal coal mine starts blasting. One major loss for these families is clean water... Pollution from mountaintop-removal mining has poisoned many of our streams making them dangerous for certain fish and other aquatic life. 

Mountaintop-removal is the process by which companies use explosives to remove the peaks of Appalachian mountains in order to get at the coal underneath. They then dump millions of tons of rubble and toxic waste into the streams and valleys below the mining sites.

For a novel about West Virginia coal mining and mountaintop removal, read Ann Pancake's Strange as This Weather Has Been:

Set in present day West Virginia, Ann Pancake’s debut novel, Strange As This Weather Has Been, tells the story of a coal mining family -- —a couple and their four children -- —living through the latest mining boom and dealing with the mountaintop removal and strip mining that is ruining what is left of their mountain life. As the mine turns the mountains to slag and wastewater, workers struggle with layoffs and children find adventure in the blasted moonscape craters.

UPDATE:  a longer review can be found at the In This Light blog.