Etc. III | Customers, Etc.
A brief overview of 3 books: Klara and the Sun; The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory; and The Escape Artist
I was describing to some friends the other day that the time between Christmas and New Year’s feels like a balance between rest and lethargy. On the one hand, the rest is needed and welcome, but on the other hand, you (re)discover that yes, somehow it is possible to overdo it on the relaxation. That’s about the time you’re grateful for a job and the opportunity to get back to work.
I’m just barely into the new year and settling back into work, so I don’t have have much on the “customers” front of this newsletter, so I thought I’d give an overview of three books that I’ve read recently:
Klara and the Sun
The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism
The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World
Klara and the Sun (2021)
Before Sophia and I took a trip to New York for her thirteenth birthday, we found ourselves meandering into a bookstore in downtown Decatur, GA. I almost never buy physical books anymore, but they had cute little handwritten notes scattered among the books and I came across a recommendation for the newest dystopian novel from Nobel laureate Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun.
The story is told from the perspective of Klara, an “Artificial Friend” (i.e. an AI robot), as she journeys from her place in a retail store to a young girl’s home. The first thing I noticed was that this book came an entire year and half before ChatGPT entered the world. Not that conversational AI tools haven’t existed previously, but the timing feels uncanny, if not prophetic.
Make no mistake: this is a dystopian novel, not in the “the world has suffered an apocalypse” sort of way, but rather in the sense that it peels back the darker sides of humanity and makes you worry about what kinds of decisions people will make when the power of AI and other technologies becomes more commonplace. The benign settings of the book—a store, a home, an apartment in the city, etc.—make it all the more jarring. Everyday people interact with Klara and you get her perspective on their humanity, or lack thereof.
Reading a book from the supposed perspective of a robot was a bit odd at first, but I eventually settled into it. While the idea of robotic “artificial friends” seems far off, with the advent of ChatGPT, we’re likely a lot closer to the kinds of interactions described in the book than we think, even if the AI’s not embodied in a robot.
The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory (2023)
This book just came out. Tim Alberta, the author, must have an incredible publicist because I think I came across him in my podcasts, on X-fomerly-known-as-Twitter, and in my Apple News feed all in the same week. When it seems I could no longer escape it, I picked up the Audible version of The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism to listen to over the break.
While I’m a Catholic Christian, I’ve always been pretty familiar with what’s going on evangelical Christianity in the U.S. When trying to describe my undergraduate alma mater, Franciscan University of Steubenville, I’ll sometimes label it an “evangelical Catholic” college, which usually produces a slightly raised eyebrow and also a quick nod of “I can see that”.
This book isn’t about telling you how to vote or what side to be on, but it does give a fairly detailed accounting of several ways in which Christianity and right-wing politics have become intertwined in the United States over the past several decades. It’s interesting to me how people with access to the same information can come to completely different conclusions.
Tim Alberta is himself a practicing Christian and that comes through clearly in the book. I especially appreciate how he elevates the voices of pastors who preach a message that gets outside of the contemporary political dialogue to call Christians to deeper interior conversion.
The Escape Artist (2023)
This book, which came via recommendation from my mother, was also published recently. The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World tells the story of how Rudolph Vrba and his companion Fred Wetzler became the first Jews to escape from the Nazi death camp of Auschwitz during World War II.
This is a hard book to stomach. Jonathan Freedland, the author, isn’t gratuitous in his descriptions of violence and human cruelty, but the cold reality is that what happened truly was horrific. It’s impossible to dumb down while also telling the complete story.
Because the story is focused on one person, the book is incredibly personal. Yes, it’s about Rudolph Vrba’s escape, but it’s also why he wanted to escape. The process of understanding the true depravity of Auschwitz—that it was a death camp with the express purpose of killing millions of Jews—wasn’t immediately clear to him, even though he was literally living there. Even as he became increasingly aware of what was happening inside the camp, he had to put the pieces together to truly convince himself. Once that became clear, he made it his mission to get out and tell people. If only people knew, he hoped, they could be saved from the dystopian end that awaited them. But having the information isn’t always enough, as the book makes clear.
Reading this book was a process of re-remembering. I’ve read Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl more than once. I’ve visited Auschwitz in person. I’m aware of the broad facts of what happened to the Jews of Europe during World War II. And yet I found myself surprised and horrified in a whole new way while reading this book. I’m glad I read it. These are stories that need to be continually remembered and re-remembered.
More reading
I have some more business-y books that I’ll be reading in 2024. Let me know if you liked this format and I’ll provide write-ups of those, too.