Books
Douglas Pike is no longer the murderous hustler he was in his youth, but reforming hasn’t made him much kinder. He’s just living out his life in his Appalachian hometown, working odd jobs with his partner, Rory, hemming in his demons the best he can. And his best seems just good enough until his estranged daughter overdoses and he takes in his twelve-year-old granddaughter, Wendy.
Just as the two are beginning to forge a relationship, Derrick Kreiger, a dirty Cincinnati cop, starts to take an unhealthy interest in the girl. Pike and Rory head to Cincinnati to learn what they can about Derrick and the death of Pike’s daughter, and the three men circle, evenly matched predators in a human wilderness of junkie squats, roadhouse bars and homeless Vietnam vet encampments.
Praise:
“Without so much as a sideways glance towards gentility, Pike is one righteous mutherfucker of a read. I move that we put Whitmer’s balls in a vise and keep slowly notching up the torque until he’s willing to divulge the secret of how he managed to hit such a perfect stride his first time out of the blocks.”
–Ward Churchill, author and activist
“Whitmer’s writing is swift, brutal, precise poetry, formed into the shape of people– breathing, hateful, murderous, vulnerable people that I care about deeply now. His characters are broken to begin with, and yet he breaks them open again and again, each time revealing a darker, thicker black sludge inside, and yet, this is also a story about innocence and trying to protect what tiny amount there is. There isn’t a trace of sentimentality in here, but whatever tiny embers of warmth that are to be found in this devastated landscape (a landscape so bleak it approaches, at time, allegory, and yet remains disturbingly visceral), those embers are completely earned and the meager heat thrown off by them all the more valuable because of it. I feel covered in blood.”
–Charles Yu, author of Third Class Superhero and How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe
“Benjamin Whitmer’s Pike captures the grime and the rage of my not-so fair city with disturbing precision. The words don’t just tell a story here, they scream, bleed, and burst into flames. Pike, like its eponymous main character, is a vicious punisher that doesn’t mince words or take prisoners, and no one walks away unscathed. This one’s going to haunt me for quite some time.”
–Nathan Singer, author of Prayer for Dawn and Chasing the Wolf
“This is what noir is, what it can be when it stops playing nice–blunt force drama stripped down to the bone, then made to dance across the page.”
–Stephen Graham Jones, author of Demon Theory and Ledfeather
Evoking Genocide compiles a wide selection of essays, all but two of them original to this book, written by leading scholars and activists in the field of genocide studies. These authors pay eloquent tribute to the works of art and media that influenced their engagement with genocide and crimes against humanity. The subjects include books and stories, films, songs, drawings, documents, monuments, sculptures, personal testimonies, and even a Lego set.
In an accessible and often deeply personal way, contributors explore their own relationships with the works in question. Edited by Adam Jones, recently selected one of “Fifty Key Thinkers” in Holocaust and genocide studies, Evoking Genocide makes an important contribution to the study of the art and culture of mass atrocity.
Praise:
“Evoking Genocide comprises sixty brief essays, fascinatingly diverse, each deploying a particular textual or visual touchstone in an effort to reveal the author’s struggle to confront the ultimate crime. The best of them bring us powerfully close to the singular agony that comes from taking genocide seriously, from refusing to turn away from evil even if it is unfathomable.”
–Mia Farrow, advocate and actor
“Those who spend their lives studying genocide in order to prevent its recurrence are by definition a curious breed. These very personal and often moving essays reveal the disparate sources that have motivated otherwise ‘normal’ women and men to immerse themselves in trying to fathom the most egregious examples of man’s inhumanity to man (and yes, it’s mostly men). Readers may be surprised to find themselves wanting to join the cause.”
– Gerald Caplan, author of The Betrayal of Africa
Guns
I’ve been around guns most of my life, but until recently only used them for plinking or keeping on the bedside table for home defense. However, as I’ve gotten older and started a family, I’ve been thinking more and more about the human right to self defense, and what that means.
As such, I’ve got a new goal: to become competent with firearms for self defense. Not an expert, not a gunfighter, just competent. I don’t have the thousands of dollars lying around to attend classes at Gunsite, but I do have a public library where I can request books on firearms and self defense. I have also lucked upon a fairly good archive of firearms videos. And I live near a free shooting area in a national forest.
To start, I’ll try to achieve my goal by:
- Shooting no less than once every other week, even if my budget only allows me to fire a hundred rounds.
- Performing dry-firing exercises, including the practice of drawing from my concealed carry holster, at least once every other day.
- Carrying everywhere that I’m legally allowed, or that will not lose me my day job.
- Doing all of the above with exact attention Jeff Cooper’s four rules of firearms safety and Xavier’s five rules of concealed carry.
- Studying everything I can get my hands on to expand my knowledge.
- Learning the 1911 platform.
That last one’s a little involved, if the least important of the items. I have a Springfield GI 1911-A1 that I’ve been tinkering with. I love shooting it, but it’s not as a reliable as my Glock or my Ruger GP100, and it suffers from some deficiencies. The Springfield will become my carry gun when I’m able to do the work necessary to make the improvements it needs, to maintain it, and to be able to detail strip and reassemble the goddamn thing without cursing.
These seem to me like pretty modest goals, but we’ll see. I assume they’ll evolve as I learn. I’m a fairly new to most of this stuff, so I hope that no one will take anything written here as anything but the jotting down of ideas.
Etc.