Donald Duck Sees South America by H. Marion Palmer

 

Title: Donald Duck Sees South America

Author: H. Marion Palmer

Genre: (Kids fiction) Geography

Rating: 4.5/5 stars 

I stumbled across this book when I was searching for Mickey Sees the USA, a book written around the same time. I remember reading that one as a kid and loving it. I was so surprised to see how old these books were - written in 1945! There don't appear to be any more like them (no Daisy sees Europe or Goofy sees Australia unfortunately). They were affordable for being antiques, so I got both. It worked out really well since we were just wrapping up a rather long study of South America (we'd gone slowly country by country.) 

Overall, this book was an enjoyable supplement, and I am glad we waited until we were finished with our studies, as the kids were familiar with most of the locations, and things made a lot more sense than if we would have just picked this up randomly. 

Donald starts out planning to get to Colombia on a plane, but his seat is taken by some important South American politician, so he has to take a ship instead. But this allows him to go through the Panama Canal, which is kind of a cool experience. When he finally arrives in South America, he wants to see simply everything, and he demonstrates classic Donald Duck impatience when dealing with everyone, at one point having a guide show him ALL of Lima in one day. (We didn't find it particularly irritating. We all thought it was pretty funny.) 

After arriving in Columbia he buys a honey bear and then loses it in the jungle a few chapters later. He goes to the market in Ecuador - and he gets into a rather humorous interaction with a vendor in which they both try to one-up each other with kind acts. He catches a condor in Peru with a lasso (rather, he tries to catch it but is actually yanked up into the air by it and ends up luring it back to the ground with some meat). He gets himself into trouble by posing as a guide in Chile, not knowing the lakes are all frozen in August. He spends some time with an indigenous shepherd family and their llamas, alpacas, and goats in Bolivia. He meets a beautiful Argentinian woman but can't speak to her in Spanish, then hires FIFTY tutors so he master the language, only to show up in Brazil and realize they don't actually speak Spanish but Portuguese.  Finally, he becomes a hero in the end when he rescues one of his snobby shipmates. 

The book touches on locations and customs in a pretty fun way. It's entertaining rather than overly dry/informative. There is one chapter I kind of thought was a waste of space ultimately. On the ship, he and the other passengers get "abducted" by something called the Order of Neptune, and they get dunked in the pool. It's just a silly thing they did on the ship, but it didn't seem to have anything to do with South America, and I would have preferred to have a chapter on Guyana, Suriname, and French Guiana instead.  

Speaking of which, the book is, of course, outdated in certain ways, but we didn't find it bothersome for the most part. Guyana is referred to on the map in this book as British Guiana. Suriname is Dutch Guiana, and French Guiana has the same name. I hadn't known about the former names since we only touched on those countries, so that was interesting. This book didn't cover them at all though, so that was disappointing. 

Some of the people are referred to as "negros," so I am sure someone somewhere would find that offensive. I'm not actually sure if it was referring to certain indigenous people or what. The natives were referred to as Indians throughout also, and I know that's not PC in 202o either. 

I don't actually know much about South American tourism, so I am sure there are plenty of other little things that are outdated (and the book certainly doesn't demonstrate how incredibly dangerous it is to go there now as a tourist. This was a completely different time in the world.) 

My family and I really did enjoy this book! 

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K. Dick

 

Title: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep 

Author: Phillip K. Dick

Genre: Sci-Fi

Rating: 3.5/5 stars

Rick Deckard is one of the few remaining humans who have not emigrated to Mars. He lives in a mostly abandoned apartment building with his wife Iran, and they (shamefully) own an electric/false sheep that lives on the roof of the apartment building, though Rick is pretty obsessed with obtaining a real animal at some point. He works as a bounty hunter - finding and killing androids who have killed their masters on colonies like Mars and fled to earth. When the book starts out, he is mostly concerned with how to get as many of them as possible so he can afford real animals. When the main bounty hunter in his jurisdiction gets hurt on the job, he gets his chance to go after 6 "andys." One of the challenges of his job is that the andys look and sound totally human, and they can only be caught using a special empathy test called the Voight-Kampff test. He prepares for his job by visiting the android manufacturers of the new Nexus-6 model so he can use the test on real androids and make sure it works properly. During this time he meets a Nexus-6 andy named Rachael who gets under his skin a little. When he begins going after the 6 andys, he discovers it's a little more challenging than he expected, in more ways than one. He has begun to care about the androids more than he should.

I've had this on my shelf for a while, and I didn't make the connection between this book and the movie Blade Runner until I read Ready Player One. 

Overall the book is really engaging, and it constantly keeps you guessing. You think it's going in one direction and it takes you in another. The android deaths are not long, drawn out battles (which I sincerely appreciate). The worldbuilding and sci-fi aspects, while bleak, are pretty interesting. The world is very dismal, full of radioactive dust and very few live animals. They have these devices that can alter their emotions - they enter a code, and it makes them feel the desired emotion. It appears they can set it for anything they want, even depression. They also have a religion of sorts called Mercerism, during which they all connect to a device and have shared experiences about a man named Mercer who is walking up a hill and being persecuted and assaulted by some unknown enemy. All the people who are connected share the experience and their emotions at the same time. 

Although I like a lot of aspects of this book, I can't give it five stars for a few reasons:

-It doesn't seem to really go anywhere. There is some character growth that happens with the main character. He does discover a lot about empathy and himself. He struggles with whether or not he should continue hunting robots, but he doesn't ever reach any kind of conclusion.

-While the main character feels empathy for the androids, I really didn't. The question of their humanity, which seems to be a common theme of sci-fi, didn't really come through for me in this book. I didn't really care about them at all. They were considered criminals because they killed their human masters, but this wasn't explored very much. It didn't seem like they suffered any particular cruelty, and they did come across as very cold and manipulative. 

-The Mercerism cult thing was vague and hard to understand. The technology that allowed them to have a shared experience with Mercer was one thing, but the main character starting having these (hallucinations?) about Mercer near the end that were just odd. 

-The characters kept doing drugs as a matter of course, and emotion altering machine came across as a sort of drug also. Then the main character <spoiler> randomly cheats on his wife and then goes back to life as if it never happened with no guilt whatsoever. That was kind of upsetting. </spoiler>

-Rachael Rosnen seemed like an almost completely superfluous character, and although she made the main character feel things and do things differently than he might have, she seemed almost pointless. <spoiler> And for goodness sake, why would she have killed the goat? Deckard didn't kill her, didn't do anything to her. It was a completely meaningless thing to do. I found it very confusing. </spoiler>

I keep thinking maybe I'm missing some larger message. Maybe it will come to me at some point. Not a bad book, but not a favorite either.