Kate Shugak mysteries by Dana Stabenow

Hunter's Moon, Midnight Come Again, The Singing of the Dead, A Fine and Bitter Snow, A Grave Denied, A Taint in the Blood, A Deeper Sleep

Books nine through fifteen in the Kate Shugak mystery series. I've described the milieu before, so let's just shorthand to no-nonsense Alaska native private investigator living subsistance, awesome dog, murders.

I like this series because it manages slapstick commedy and painful tragedy in the same book, sometimes on the same page. There's something warm about these books, without being cloying. That all-too-rare authorial ability to deal with bloody reality without becoming uniformly, dully grim.

That continues here, as does the precise, high-relief characterization. Hunter's Moon is the most adept, to my eye -- Kate is leading a hunt for a corporate retreat that turns into a nightmare. It's compact, pithy, vividly Alaskan, funny, then frightening. The series since is still pretty good (and actually impressively developed, in some respects) but I would quibble with a number of Stabenow's choices. She totally took the coward's route in Midnight Come Again by opting to duck out of the difficult landscape of Kate's head; actually Kate doesn't even appear for the first fifty pages. And some of the crispness of the early storytelling is overcome with a less spare maturity that sprawls into sloppy structure -- the vaguely trudge-like quality of A Taint in the Blood comes to mind.

Still, I picked these books up again because I was desperately in need of stories with, you know, real people in them. And here they are, with extra color. And I still like this series to little tiny bits.

The Demon Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark by Carl Sagan

Hey, so, guess what? People who read the Weekly World News are stupid, but scientists are awesome! Did you know that?

I just put this book down, 175 pages in. It's not that I disagree with the thesis, because I actually don't at all. Sagan uses the widespread belief in alien abductions to talk about the need for more critical thinking in this world. And I'm totally there -- yes, for the love of God, teach people to distinguish between fact and what they want to be fact. But Sagan goes on -- and on and on -- about the evils of unexamined credulity, and how so much of what we believe is contextually determined and not logically deduced, and then he turns around and says 'therefore empiricism is the only truth.' And then completely fails to deal with the indeterminacy problem -- all the ways empiricism is also an ordinal choice, not some universal baseline against which to measure all intellectual thought. I mean, I'm as much a fan of the scientific method as the next well-educated dabbler, but I'm rendered irretrievably cranky by a guy touting the holy purity of his truth mechanisms when his argument basically boils down to, "the scientific method works! I've tested it! With the scientific method!" And never stops to wonder about his contextual determinants.

Actually, that would be more okay if I could discern a point. Sagan waxes on and on and on about why people come to believe they were abducted, why other people believe them, where such mass dilusions historically might come from. And it's written in this snotty, "now you see the error of your ways," tone when, you know, I sort of suspect the Weekly World News readership is not also snapping up this book. That, and Sagan was a much better astrochemist than a psychologist or historian.

Meh.