A New Look at Arithmetic (Adler)

A New Look at Arithmetic, by Irving Adler (1964)

(Not a review, just some notes to help me remember the things I've read. But written this way because it's the Internet, and some people will stumble across this page.)

This was another math book removed from the libary of William E. Grady High School, which would have been disposed of by the Math Dept had I not rescued it. (Said rescue will likely end when scifi conventions start again, at which point, I will attempt to "pass it on.")

It has diagrams by Ruth Adler. When I taught at Grady, the Math Coach was named Jill Adler. Had I read this book sooner, I might've inquired if she were related. You never know.

I found this book amusing to begin with because it was geared to folks who needed to learn the "new math" of the 60s, as opposed to the new math of the past decade. The one reason that I was aware that there was new math in the 60s was because of a Tom Lehrer song.

In any case, the first chapter goes into great detail about sets. What's funny is that I remember learning about sets in early years of grade school, but they sort of fell of the radar after a while. And when I began teaching, students weren't too sure about what a set was. They only knew Venn diagrams from English classes where there would compare and contrast texts.

There isn't much to see about this book because I've covered a lot of the same material with the prior math books. If I could say one thing, it's that I found myself skimming and skipping ahead not because it was becoming confusing and unreadable but because it was very familiar material and tended to plod on longer than I needed.

If I had to say something else, the negative would be the confusing things about naming sets after numbers (or vice versa?) and then summing 2 + 3 to get 5, when the examples until then should give you 3. The positive would be seeing the method for finding square roots by hand that I had to do way back when. Obviously, this got very tedious for more than 3 significant digits.

I acutally have a couple more math books, but I have regular books that need to be read, in print and ebook formats, including one I don't mind taking into the pool with me. Those are next.

Wolf's Empire: Gladiator (Christian and Buchanan)

Wolf's Empire: Gladiator, by Claudia Christian and Morgan Grant Buchanan (2016)

(Not a review, just some notes to help me remember the things I've read. But written this way because it's the Internet, and some people will stumble across this page.)

In the spring of 2019, I attended a science-fiction convention, Heliosphere NY. The announcement for 2020 stated that Claudia Christian of Babylon 5 fame was going to be one of the two Author Guests of Honor the following year. I was unaware that she cowrote a book, but I immediately signed up for 2020 and put the book on reserve at the library.

Fast forward a bunch of months, and the library deletes the request and says it doesn't have the book. A few months after that, Christian and Buchanan cancel because of a "scheduling conflict". Shortly after that, the con goes online because of the pandemic, and the library finds the book and sends it to my local branch.

And then the libraries closed, so I had plenty of time to read the hefty tome. I needed it. Especially because I put it down a few times.

The quick review, even though this isn't really a review, is that it's way too long. And I knew it would be a saga from the colon in the title.

The story is set in a future where the Roman Empire never fell. Instead, it grew and took over the galaxy, which got divided into the seven houses, like the seven hills of Rome, with each house still having a presence on Earth. Throughout all that time, it's still a patriarchal society, although women can pursue many occupations and be fighters and gladiators.

Accala Viridius is a noblewoman who becomes a gladiator, training with a semi-intelligent boomeranging super-discus, which also appears to be one of a kind, because nobody else uses one despite how amazingly useful it is. Her mother and brother are killed when the planet they were on was bombed by another house. Now she wants revenge against that house. Her father just wants her to not bring shame to the family. She tries to enter the Imperial Games where she confront and even kill her enemies. Her father prevents this from happening. In the end, the Sertorian house, which bombed that far-away planet and murdered her family, wants her to join their side. After some convincing from her uncle, a high muckety-muck in House Wolf, she becomes a mock-Hawk. As the action unfolds, you would think it was a Hawk's Empire, not the Wolf's. And that is what that house aspires to.

The Imperial Games, which are supposed to settle any civil war, are set to take place on that same planet Accala's family perished on. There's a long trip with training and proving herself, and then a gruelling race. The race makes absolutely no sense.

Each house sports a team with 8 players for the entire gladitoral combat. But first there's a gruelling trek across the hostile planet with combat between the houses. One wouldn't expect all the combatants to survive the trip to the arena in the first place. In fact, many don't, but more survive that you might expect. Granted, the Sertorian team is cheating through the use of ambrosia to make them superhuman, and it's still difficult.

Not even halfway through the book and you're screaming to get to the arena already, or just blow the whole thing up. Okay, so the latter happens.

If I have another problem with the basic story it'd be this: in many tales, the protagonist loses everything but then rises to become a hero in spite of it. In others, the hero has to lose everything before they can truly become great. This is the latter, where so much is lost, you have to stop and wonder -- "Wouldn't a real hero have been able to prevent some of this? Any of this?"

Many characters lose everything near and dear to them, friends, relatives, limbs, their lives ... but some of them get better. It gets to the point where they could literally be taken apart and put back together again. But are they still human?

I couldn't wait to get to the end of this, and I don't feel any need to run out and get the next book. Since the library didn't list another book, that would be another strike against it.

Note: over 500 pages.