The Broken Kingdoms

N. K. Jemisin's The Broken Kingdoms is the sequel to The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms. The story takes place a few years after the events of the previous book. Oree is a blind artist in the city of Sky, the large tree where the ruling Arameri live in the top. Oree lives in the lower, poorer, section where she makes a living selling her artwork to the tourists who visit the area. While she is blind, she has the ability to see magic, an ability that she keeps secret.

Oree discovers the body of a dead god in a nearby alley one day. Since the change in Arameri leadership, the minor gods have been free to roam the city and the rest of the country. However there are factions that are not so happy with the new order of society. The formerly dominant religious order resents its loss of power.

Oree makes another discovery when she finds a strange man in her trash bin. When she sees him glowing in the sunlight she names in Shiny. Shiny is dark, quiet, and moody. She suspects he is more than he seems. Her suspicions are confirmed when he is killed but comes back to life. Oree and Shiny have come under the attention of some people in the guard force. Oree has also gained the attention of a secretive group who is against the current power structure. It turns out that Oree is special and may be quite valuable. This makes her quite vulnerable, since she is nearly powerless to escape when she is captured.

The story turns dark when Oree's lover, a lesser god, is murdered. She becomes familiar with the power structure of the city and learns Shiny's true identity, which she must keep a secret. Shiny's plight is tied to the events of the previous book and the history of the world. Oree's goal is not just to survive but to keep herself from being used as a weapon and stop the murders of the gods.

The author describes the story adroitly from Oree's point of view. The reader gets a sense of her vulnerability as a blind woman, yet she also has flashes of sight which are sometimes enjoyable and sometimes troubling. The events of the first book are the background to this book as the story is expanded. There are enough players to make the plot interesting and mysterious, and questions keep popping up. Oree's world is populated by many new godlings, some benevolent, some not, and some just mysterious. The story is fun and interesting, and a nice followup to the first book. A-

The Mind's Eye

Like his book Musicophilia, Oliver Sacks' latest book The Mind's Eye is a collection of case studies concerning the brain. In this case Sacks discusses the brain's perception of visual data and how it relates to the rest of the brain.

One of the most striking phenomena is when the visual cortex is deprived of all input from the eyes in cases of blindness. The brain is flexible enough that the visual cortex can take over other perceptual functions, such as hearing or touch. But Sacks shows that the experience of the blind can take many different forms. In some they go into a "deep blindness", where they remember nothing of the visual world, colors, faces, shapes. Others still have a strong perception of the visual, including having a mental map of the world and an ability to visualize the faces of those they have never seen. This is one of the strongest sections of the book, reading about the different ways of perceiving the world. It is amazing and eye-opening to learn that some blind people can "see" their hands as they play the piano or do other things with their hands.

Another interesting phenomena is the condition of alexia, the loss of the ability to read. Some patients with alexia can see perfectly well and recognize individual letters, but cannot build the letters into words. Many can even write, but can't read what they have written. Others cannot even recognize letters or other familiar symbols. Some who have lost the ability to read also lose their spacial sense, so they easily get lost in their own neighborhoods or homes. It is fascinating to learn about the different connections in the brain and how they can go wrong. Sacks is great at explaining the basic workings of the parts of the brain and also shows how little we understand.

One of the longest sections describes his experience of losing most of his sight in one eye due to a tumor. He explains how in many patients the loss of vision in one eye can lead to a loss of recognition of things on that side of the body. If there is brain damage on one side of the visual cortex then one's whole perception of that space (the opposite side of the body) can go away. Some patients don't even recognize their own arms.

Another section talks about stereoscopy, the ability to see with depth perception. This is something that most of us take for granted until we lose it, as the author did when he had the tumor. But some people live without it and don't see what the big deal is. In the case he describes, a woman was able to achieve stereoscopy after living most of her life without it and was astounded with the results. She would be surprised to see a dinosaur's head coming at her in a museum or the many depths of the leaves of a tree.

Sacks has created another wonderful look at the brain with this book. He excels at describing experiences of people from their point of view, explaining what goes wrong in the brain, and how the brain is generally understood to work when it is working normally. There is a lot we can learn about the brain from these case studies where something stops working properly. The brain's processing of vision as presented here ties to our perception of the world around us and how we relate to it. Vision is related to our inner maps of the world, though our maps can be created and maintained with different sensory inputs like in the blind subjects. A-