Book Review: Ring of Fire by David Mack

Ring of Fire by David Mack
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A research station situated close to a star that is slowly losing mass to a black hole is getting sabotaged and the closest Federation starship is the Enterprise. Ring of Fire by David Mack is the fourth book featuring the characters from Star Trek: Strange New Worlds in a novelization surrounding one of the latest Star Trek series.

Taking place between the third season episodes “The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail” and “What is Starfleet?”, the book follows the crew going to investigate sabotage and then murder on a suspicious Daystrom Institute research station whose research is “classified” by Starfleet. There are a lot of cliché elements introduced early on that the reader can easily figure out about how the overall narrative was going to progress; however, Mack’s writing made the “predictable” worth reading. As a fan of the show, I thought Mack wrote the characters well and nothing seemed strange. A highlight of the book was giving Erica Ortegas a prominent role as acting XO, which given that the show took nearly three seasons before giving her a dedicated episode is somewhat telling with the showrunners. There were some things that were annoying with the first being that unfortunately for Mack this was the second novel adaptation in a row that dealt with a temporal issue of some kind, the second was that Mack continually used the character’s last names which was very unlike the show for a lot of them. It was a good read, however it didn’t really “pop” for me.

Ring of Fire by David Mack is a good read and fits into the chronology of the third season when it’s set, though there were a few things that didn’t click for me.

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Book Review: Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville

Democracy in America: An Enduring Masterwork on American Life, Politics, and Morals by Alexis de Tocqueville
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Sent on a mission by the French government to examine the American prison system, two men studied American society instead with one of them writing a book about how that society and democracy interacted. Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville is a two-volume book that examines the democratic revolution and its effects over that past century with the United States his primary source of evidence.

Tocqueville argument throughout the book, though more in the first volume than over the second, is why republican representative democracy had succeeded in the United States. Focusing on the puritan tradition in New England that eventually found its way into the Federal Constitution, spreading over the nation even in some way the South whose economic model led to a different culture. Throughout the entire book, Tocqueville always came back to America’s founding when comparing it and the European democratic revolutions as the latter were transitioning from an aristocratic society on various subjects why they differ so much. While volume one is focused more describing how representative democracy in the United States is influenced by society along with influencing it, in my personal view Tocqueville in volume two focuses on how representative democracy affects civil society particularly when moved from an aristocratic government. Tocqueville’s analysis led him to some startling accurate predictions about the end of slavery in the United States and the eventual rise and rivalry of the U.S. and Russia in the form of the U.S.S.R. Upon competition of this book, it’s no wonder that universities and colleges across the West make it apart of political theory syllabuses.

Democracy in America by Alexis Tocqueville is probably the best book written about the political society of the United States.

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Book Review: Heaven's Command: An Imperial Progress by James Morris

Heaven's Command: An Imperial Progress by Jan Morris
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

When Victoria ascended to the throne, there was a question of if the empire was worth having by the time of her Diamond Jubilee that thinking had changed. Heaven’s Command: An Imperial Progress is the first volume, though the second published, of James Morris’ Pax Britannica trilogy that chronicles the rise of the British Empire from the East India Company’s first steps in India to its climax at Victoria’s Golden Jubilee.

Morris divided the first sixty years of Victoria’s reign into three segments in which British attitude towards the Empire changed and as it did, so did the policy and strategies that either led to reform movements, expansion, or the destruction of cultures and people. With only 540 pages of text, this isn’t a comprehensive detailing of the empire’s expansion and how it happened militarily, nor an outright political history though both are featured when Morris chooses. Besides the famous, or infamous depending on the telling, colonial wars written about and featured in documentaries there are the less well known such as the Red River Rebellion in Canada that Morris highlighted to show how different cultures viewed oncoming empire. The different peoples of the empire were covered like the Irish that included the native Gaelic, the Anglos with descent from the earlier Norman crossing, and the Ulster Protestants whose view of their place in the empire was “complicated”; or the sad fate of the Tasmanians who were hunted like animals, taken from their homeland, and then allowed to return to die out. And Morris gives some political background to how situations developed including how the rivalry between Disraeli and Gladstone shaped policy on the ground or vice versa. Though Morris covers sixty years through a variety of incidents both famous and obscure, the advance of the British is always at the forefront even if it seems they are defeated, if only temporarily.

Heaven’s Command reveals the various locations, wars, and reforms that brought the British Empire the pinnacle of global power at the end of the 19th Century. James Morris writes an engaging account of events from across the globe over the course of sixty years.

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